Conference Recap

Wow, I sure love writer’s conferences. This was a big deal for me because I was pitching my novel for the first time. It was a great experience (I may blog about my thoughts on pitching later on).

Why do I go to conferences?

I go to learn, but really most of the information can be found on-line or from wise critique partners.

Yet it is different. A conference is the one place where things are explained clearly and all in one place. It is interactive, meaning you can go up to the presenter after the class and ask questions, get clarification.

Plus, there are other writers at conferences.

Writers are my most favorite type of people. I love their imaginations and how much they adore books. I love the jokes writers make because they know words. I love the hushed awe that overcomes them over a well-worded sentence.

Writer’s conferences are the best place to meet other writers and we need other writers.

They are the critique partners that help your books be better. They are the shoulders to cry on when rejections come. You can bounce ideas off them without them thinking you are totally insane. They are the people who allow you to critique their books (even if you secretly just want to critique their stuff to read an awesome story before anyone else). Fellow writers are the ones who follow your blog. The friends you make at writer’s conferences are the ones who buy your books even though they’ve already read it because they remember when you were struggling through the first draft and have seen how awesome story has grown. They’re the ones who tweet about your book and share it with their friends. They’re the ones who write awesome books that you are dying share with the world.

A writer would be nothing without friends and a writer’s conference is the perfect place to find them.

C: Children

My nephew is a wonderful child. He just turned five and has such an adorable imagination. He certainly gets his creativity from his writer aunt! A few months ago, he called his mom while she was at work. As you can imagine, my sister nearly had a heart attack, thinking it was an emergency.

It wasn’t. He just wished to let her know that she forgot her book at home. (He is always that helpful and he knows a girl without her book is lost).

So that led to a long conversation when she got home about only calling in a real emergency—if the house was on fire or someone was bleeding, things like that.

My nephew thought about it for a moment and then asked, “So if aliens landed on our roof, would that be an emergency?”

Yep, that’s a budding young author if there ever was one.

Note: Check out the other bloggers doing the A-Z blog challenge. 

http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/p/2012-to-z-challenge-sign-up-list.html