Ordinary Day

Writer's Weekend deserves a whole separate shoutout post for contributing to the care and feeding of Faerie Blood. Here now is that post.

More than anything short of actually sitting my ass down and writing, the Writer's Weekend conference in the years that I attended it (2004 through 2007) helped give me what I needed to get a novel not only finished but also ready to send to editors and agents. Attending a conference where I could see actual industry professionals face to face, hear them speak, and even pitch my projects to them made the entire process of submitting a book for publication way less scary and way more real.

Folks, I cannot stress enough the value of going to a writer's conference if you're lucky enough to have one near you and can spare the necessary money to attend. Even aside from the chance to put faces to industry names and to learn from them, even aside from getting to hear and in some cases meet favorite authors, the opportunity to network with fellow writers is amazingly invigorating. I still very fondly remember spending most of the 2004 conference plowing at top speed through editing Faerie Blood, even as I pitched it to Evan Fogelman and Nadia Cornier. It's not like I had to edit the book right then; it's just that I was so inspired by being surrounded by a crowd of people who were trying to do the exact same thing I wanted to that I couldn't help it.

So many kudos and thanks go out to karenjunker for all the work she put into running that conference, and dr_pretentious as well for being one of her main assistants. Shoutouts as well to those who I've met through it, and who are listening in here still. Love you all. <3

Writer's Weekend is a somewhat leaner and meaner conference this year, taking place only today and tomorrow at the Roosevelt in downtown Seattle. This is kind of cool for me personally, since I walk past this place every single day on my way home from work; in fact, it's a very short walk away from my usual bus stop. So I was able to zip downtown on the 522 this morning and come back the same way, in comfortable time for dinner. I saw a few familiar faces and some new ones as well.

Many of the items on the schedule this year were familiar to me, and so I volunteered to help awritersweekend out as I could; she put me on timekeeping duty, to be the person who pops in, taps her watch, and goes "ten minutes!" to the folks giving the panels. This was very, very easy, given that we only had four rooms to work with and Karen asked me to keep tabs on only two of them. And since the schedule was reduced anyway, I only had to do this six times.

So I had some time leftover in between all of these little timekeeping jaunts. I wrote a couple hundred words on Queen of Souls finally, and got in on pitch sessions to Mary Louise Schwartz, and sat in on a few of the panels I was timekeeping for anyway.

( Pitching to Film and TV, with Mary Louise Schwartz )

( Breaking Boundaries: The Pitfalls & Pleasures of Writing Cross-Genre Fiction, with Louise Marley and Kate Austin )

( Criminals & the Law, with Kevin Trombold )

And that's that for Day 1. More tomorrow! I'm on tap to timekeep for more panels, but hopefully I'll get to attend at least some of several more.

Oh, and for the benefit of locals: the Daily Grill, recently opened on 7th downtown, has a damned tasty tuna melt sandwich and excellent key lime pie. Highly recommended. Yum. :9

Real fast one now that I'm back from Writer's Weekend--since I'm about to head out to food and a movie in honor of mamishka's birthday. But just for the sake of getting this big fun news out of the conference out to you all:

I have finished Lament of the Dove AT LAST! And, and, AND, Anne Groell, editor at Bantam, wants to see partials from me on both Faerie Blood and Lament!

Wish me luck, folks!

This post is of course severely late--but this is what I get for huge sudden alterations in my duties at work. But hey. I may be slow, but I eventually get there. This therefore is the writeup for Day 3 of this year's Writer's Weekend!

( Pitch with Evan Fogelman... )

( Crossing the Line: Combining Genres in Fiction... )

( Keynote Speech: Alma Deckert/Alexander... )

( Booksigning... )

( Pitch with Nadia Cornier... )

( Anna Dishes the Dirt: The Call to Action/Talk to the Hand... )

Aside from the panels and other things mentioned above, Saturday night for me was pretty quiet at the conference. I skipped the banquet, though I did wind up scarfing a chocolate-covered strawberry off one of the tables when all the fun was over and done. Mostly, Jaime and I hung out in the food nook and chatted with folks, and in general had a lovely conclusion to the day.

More to come on the fourth and final post!

As promised to cats_haven, here's the first of my blow-by-blow writeups for all the days of this year's Writer's Weekend! I haven't had the time yet to do this before now, so apologies for the delay on this, folks.

( Arrival, and meeting Jaime, Kit, and Sarah... )

( Fanfic: How It Can Affect Your Writing... )

( Query, Synopsis, Pitch... )

( Five Minute Slam... )

More to come!

After all the excitement of Saturday evening, the final day of the conference (Sunday the 25th) was almost anticlimactic--but then, it was the same sort of feeling you get on the last day of a good science fiction too, so this wasn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. It was just that it was the last day.

There were a few panels. I skipped them, mostly due to it being difficult to get me out of bed for anything short of nuclear attack, riots, or Alan Doyle offering me naked bouzouki lessons. There was also that I had to get my stuff packed so we could check out of the room.

What I did wind up attending, though, was the Farewell Speech (given by Karen Junker, which was short and sweet and basically amounted to 'thank you for coming and making this a hell of a conference, please attend next year in North Carolina!') and the discussion about organizing for the conference next year. I didn't say much, but I definitely heard a lot of enthusiasm out of a lot of folks--so it seems this conference really went over well with everybody, and there is a big drive to see it continue. I am not sure yet if I will go to next year's Writer's Weekend since it will be on the other side of the country--but then again, we're talking about a conference that could continue to help me develop a writing career, and hey. Olivia Gates came all the way here from Cairo for this year's conference--a hop across the U.S. seems almost tame by comparison.

When that was done I called solarbird to ask her to come and get me. I had to hang out and wait for a while as she not only had to get a new tire for the car, she had to stop and get the bare-bones replacement machine for our server that had been hacked. While I waited for her to show, I hung out in the hotel lobby, edited Faerie Blood some more, and chatted with other folks who happened to sit down nearby.

And that was fun, and a fitting end to the conference--since it was, after all, all about the meeting of people.

mizkit and shadowhwk, thank you for encouraging me to go!

Much more of a belated post than I thought this would be--but this is what I get for being up to my neck in moving! At any rate, this is the account of what happened for me at Writer's Weekend on the third day of general activities, which was Saturday the 24th. This, of course, was the day that I found out that lodestone, the former primary server of murkworks.net, had gotten hacked. So that kind of put a damper on some things for me--but only to a degree. Some pretty cool things happened during the course of this particular day, regardless!

I wanted to get up for Rebecca York's "39 Steps to Suspense" panel--but neither jesshartley nor I pulled it off. Both of us were up too late the night before--she hanging out with folks, I with editing Faerie Blood. I felt vaguely guilty for not showing up--but then, it occurred to me, it was ALL RIGHT to miss a few things. I did come in on the very tail end of the panel, though, just in time to get Ms. York's handout with 24 of the aforementioned 39 steps. I still don't know why the handout had only 24 steps--perhaps that's part of the suspense. ;) (That said, I recognized several of the pointers, and giggled at others that were new.)

( Jessica Faust: Making Sense of Rejection )

( The Fogelman Literary Agency Workshop )

( Anna Genoese: Presenting Yourself )

More tomorrow as I can, to cover the rest of Day 3 of the conference... it's getting late, and I'm tired from a long day of moving!

It has been a very productive, fruitful day, and although the programming is not yet done, I am exhausted. So here I am documenting today in an LJ post that'll probably not get online until Sunday, but hey. I came in kind of expecting the whole flavor of a science fiction convention--partly, I suppose, because of just being so physically near the Norwescon hotel, but also because of knowing that several fannish types would be here to as writers wanting to break into those genres. But unlike with Norwescon, where my experience has to date been that the panels they have are much more geared towards folks with the Newbie sorts of questions, the programming thus far has been much more focused and much more presented with the expectation that the audience is composed of people who actively wish to make writing their career.

Accordingly, it's been that much more useful. I've already come out of today with a couple of really useful pieces of advice that have altered my game plan about what I want to work on for the next few months--and what, specifically, to do with Faerie Blood. The biggest thing I've learned today has been that with that rejection letter I got, the next good step will be to revise the submission and send it back, and more importantly, how to craft the query letter to reflect that I have taken their advice into account and would appreciate a second look at my chapters. And the second biggest thing has been how to prepare a query for The Dove, the Rook, and the Hawk--one big story that requires three books to tell and which are not standalone volumes--vs. Faerie Blood, which is a standalone book with two probable sequels in a story arc of three related but independent novels.

Scattered throughout the rest of the day, though, have been any number of little gems of wisdom as well as delightful quotes.

( Michael Chiu of the Bellevue Police )

( Professor John Junker, U of W Law )

( We interrupt this conference summary with a job update )

( Russell Davis and Tips for the Almost Published )