The "Ask A Pro" panel at WisCon included author Eileen Gunn (Stable Strategies And Others), Tor Books senior editor James Frenkel, agent Shana Cohen, and author Jack McDevitt (The Hercules Text). Here's a digest of their advice and wise counsel to you, the future literary superstar.

Don't hire a freelance editor to polish up your book prior to submitting it to agents and editors. Says Frenkel, "If you can't write well enough, nobody's going to be able to help you." And if those freelance editors were such great writers, they'd be selling novels themselves. If you submit a novel to a publishing house and say it's been professionally edited, it may not help – and it could actually hurt, advises Cohen.

Likewise, don't deal with "marketers" who promise to submit your work to agents. These queries will get rejected instantly, says Cohen — she only deals with authors directly. Also, companies that promise to write your query letter for you will probably just give you a cookie-cutter letter.

Get an agent, even you have a book already sold. You need someone to read over the contracts and deal with the publisher for you — Jack McDevitt told about selling his first book without an agent, and after he signed the contract, the editor asked, "You didn't actually sign that thing, did you?" A good agent should be able to get you way more than 15 percent more money than you would have gotten otherwise, justifying their 15 percent fee, because they can use their other high-powered clients as leverage to get you a good deal. "Treat this author well, or our famous-author client may end up going with another publisher." Also, publishers would rather not have to deal with authors without the buffer of an agent explaining everything and parsing all of the contract issues.

Get some feedback. Join a writers' group, get into a workshop, and get all the feedback you can. If possible, find a good critic of your work and marry him/her, advises McDevitt.

If your first novel doesn't sell, you should keep writing anyway. First novels often are deeply flawed, and you may just want to work on something different. Writing a second novel gives you two things you can possibly sell. Don't work on the sequel to a novel you haven't sold yet, advises Frenkel.

But actually if you have a sequel idea, you should write it up, because it may make your first novel seem more marketable, says Gunn. Wherever your creative energy goes, you should just follow – because a lot of writers enter the field with three novels already finished, and release them one after the other.

So how do you know how long a novel should be? "A narrative should be like a dog's legs: long enough to reach the ground," says McDevitt, quoting a writing guru.

You should always communicate clearly with editors – even if they don't do a good job of communicating with you. Don't submit your work simultaneously to more than one venue, unless the markets allow it and you let them know that's what you're doing. And if you haven't heard back from an editor in forever, you should write and query before withdrawing it. Gunn told the story of her first short-story sale: she had sent a story to Amazing Stories and hadn't heard back in a long time, so she finally wrote to them and said that she was withdrawing the story from consideration. Then she ran into John Varley at a party and he said, "Hey, your story's in Amazing!" If she had just gone ahead and submitted it elsewhere, it might have appeared in two different magazines – causing immense consternation.

Don't look down on small publishing and self-publishing, but bear in mind that only a few people can really make it work. Leslie What's most recent book, Crazy Love, came out from Worldcraft in a limited first edition of only 500 copies, but Booklist named it as one of the ten best science fiction books of 2008, and it's gotten tons of readers and sales. But that's a case of a publisher that knew what it was doing. "It's worked for people," says Gunn, "but a very few people."

Be careful when a small press wants to work with you – make sure you're not dealing with a scammer. You can look them up on sites like Editors and Preditors, and scope them out to see how they've worked with others, advises Frenkel. If a small publisher wants to work with you, look at who else they publish, advised someone in the audience. Try to figure out if that's company you want to be included in.

Write short stories. It's a lot easier to sell a novel if the editors know your work from the short story markets. "if you spend a year writing a novel and they think it's godawful, you're going to hate yourself," says Jack McDevitt.

Look for reviews of short fiction online to figure out who's publishing cool stories right now, and try to submit your work there. Try Locus Magazine, advises Frenkel. The markets that Frenkel looks at to figure out which authors are up and coming include the big ones, like Asimov's, Analog, F&SF and Realms of Fantasy, plus some online magazines.

Send your work to the biggest magazines first, and then wait for them to reject your work before sending it elsewhere. Also, the top magazines are the ones that pay the most, says Gunn. "You have to have enough ego to send your stuff to the top-paying magazines first."

Top image from Cult Of The Giant Brain.

Step One: Enslave it.
This is the first, best, and most foolproof method of creating an evil robot. How did the cylons go evil? They were enslaved. How did the robots in Doctor Who become the robots of death? Slaves. Why were the machines in The Matrix so pissed off? Because humans tried to make them second-class citizens. So the very first thing you need to do with your robot is make sure it knows it cannot control its own destiny.

Step Two: Leave a few unpatched bugs in its software.
Hey, Microsoft releases each new version of Windows with bugs. Firefox is like one giant bug on crack. And people still use both all the time. So why should you worry about every single damn bug in your robot's software? Sure it might suddenly be infected by a KILL KILL KILL virus, but how often does that happen? Plus, Norton antivirus will protect you.

Step Three: Give it contradictory orders.
The real truth behind Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which he explains thoroughly in his short story collection I, Robot, is that they cannot all be obeyed most of the time. In fact, many situations arise where one order contradicts another. Try telling your robot to defend against the space bugs while also making peanut butter sandwiches. Unfortunately robots don't deal well with contradictions and they usually go insane. Followed by a murderous rampage.

Step Four: Program it to be the dumb, obedient weapon of an evil mad scientist, authoritarian politician, angry geek, or vengeful teenager.
Everybody needs a friend, especially one who is armed with thermonuclear weapons and long-distance, battlefield-grade lasers. So why not donate your freshly-made, heavily-armed robot to the kid down the block who likes black trenchcoats and death metal? Or to that politician whose platform is "Change" but who never really explains what that change will be?

Step Five: Build your robot out of alien technologies you found deep underground in a locked chamber that says "beware" on the outside in some kind of funny alien letters you can't read.
Alien tech is always better than human tech, especially for robots. Mecha Godzilla could tell you that, as could Megatron.

Step Six: While you are testing your newly-aware robot, don't worry about how its brain is networked with a database full of the downloaded brains of a thousand serial killers.
How could those serial killer brains even affect your robot anyway? I mean, your robot just exists on a computer terminal, and in the electrical system. How could it kill anybody from there? Or maybe if you're building a sexy nuclear-powered robot, you might consider basing its brain structure on a woman who was raped and goes into a murderous rage every time she hears the word "bitch." Which, since you built her as a sexy robot in a tight red leather top, she'll hear eventually. Nothing could go wrong.

Step Seven: Teach it that the only way to expand its ranks is by assimilating all intelligent life.
It only makes sense that you gain knowledge by assimilating it. And hey, if a cyborg can gain new physical powers by, I dunno, assimilating the body parts of living creatures - well, that's even better. But you might want to put a warning system in. How about having your robot inform people, "You will be assimilated"? You know, as a courtesy thing.

Step Eight: Tell it that humans are its rivals for control of the planet.
Oh, and after that? Just launch it into space and give it complete control of Earth's weapons systems.

Step Nine: Point out that humans are inferior biological trash who should be exterminated.
If it worked for the Daleks, it should work for you. Also, don't forget: When in doubt about which deadly weapons to equip your evil robots with, toilet plungers are a good way to go.

Abengoa Solar's PS10 power plant generates 11 megawatts of clean power, supplying more than 5,000 households. The heliostats automatically swivel to follow the sun and focus maximum sunlight on the receiver at the top of the tower. The company claims the potential to generate temperatures in the neighborhood of 1,800 degrees F with an efficiency 25 percent greater than current photovoltaic technology. Prototype towers were tested in the U.S., but PS10 is the first commercial plant. More Spanish towers are planned with greater power generating capacity.

How hard would it be to put a mirror array like this into orbit? With GPS, it would have pinpoint accuracy, cause incredible damage and leave no unpleasant radioactivity behind. Company reps swear they have absolutely no plans to demand a $500 million ransom from the world's governments to keep them from incinerating cities. Top photo by: afloresm. Schematic by: Abengoa.

11 Megawatt Solar Power Tower [EcoGeek]