As Susie's blog really served only to say over and over just how great the con was, I thought I'd do as was requested and do my own post con blog to fill in the gaps. Not that there's necessarily anyone reading this (I can't imagine it's the most interesting blog in the universe) but for our own records in the future it may be helpful.
After the intros and whatnot in the food nook, it wasn't long before our first seminar which was
flash edits by Ray Rahmey. We saw some interesting editing techniques including death to adverbs, and "finally", "theese", "that" and "of" to slim down and tighten. "Tighten" is a new writing word in our vocab and means exactly what it sounds like - tightening the plot and story so it is all told with as few superfluous words as possible. He also showed us some really nifty tricks on microsoft word: the comment function, and bookmarking.
Next was the infamous
Query, Synopsis, Pitch which was probably one of the most practically useful ones we saw. It was by Alisa McKnight of Loose Id. She advised us to think of a pitch like a powerpoint show and even provided somewhat of a formula to do them as succinctly as possible. Another new vocab word was gained in this one: "High Concept" is a fancy word for hook. It's when you say something like your story is "Pretty Woman meets Harry Potter". It gives someone the gist of the story and intrigues them. There was so much we got out of this one which was written down copiously in our notes. Then we went to bed.
...No we didn't. That's a lie. We then spent more than two hours in a swimming pool developing our pitch...
After breakfast the next morning we slipped into
Size Matters a couple mins late and had to sit at the very back near loud traffic. We didn't hear it all. It turned out to be about large and small market press. What we got out of that one was mostly about credentials and how to use them to your advantage... it didn't have a lot to do with the panal, but it was good to know anyway.
Then was
Who's Talking Now: Point of View which was very interesting. It was a panal consisting of Harold Gross, Debra Doyle, and Sherilyn Kenyon which is notable because these were three of the people who's contribution to the weekend meant the most to us. I took from that one a huge list of books to read that are written using interesting points of view. We didn't learn a huge amount, but it was facinating none the less.
Keeping them on the Edge of Their Seats was a halarious panal with Ken Rand, Ron Malfi, and Jim Macdonald. It was about plot. Some interesting things from that was the "tension on every page" rule, and the "page 117 test" where you flip to page 117 and see if it makes you want to read page 118. These three guys had great personality, making it one of the most entertaining of all the panals we saw.
Then we had a very interesting lunch with Melissa Singer, an editor at
TOR. We dream of being published at Tor. She told us all kinds of interesting things, including why we need to consider what name we use to publish with, and how living in Canada will effect our getting published.
The Art of Construction/The Construction of Art (AKA Make the Monkies stop Screaming) was a great panal of Debra Doyle and Jim MacDonald who are a married couple who write sci fi together. I enjoyed watching them interact, and watching Jim talk about how he puts together a story. They talked about the Ch. 9 rift, where many an author gets stuck, and perserverance in writing. They were talking about how to get past writers block. They suggested that if it ever affect you, insert in the next line "And then a naked woman screamed" or "Four years later..." to make the story keep going. We saw a beautiful novel outline written on the back of a Chinese Food restaurant, and were generally amused.
Next was the
CSI workshop from a retired cop. It talked about the mistakes that people make when writing anything that involves crimianal investigations/arrests. It was fairly interesting.
Then was a panal specifically for
Young Writers from Anna Genoese, Eve Gordon, and Wolfgang Baur. They basically gave a pep talk, but a very nice pep talk.
Next was a research panal called
Needle in a Haystack was really interesting. One of the panalists was Lisa Gold who is a professional researcher who will research stuff by the hour. They shared hints and keys to research which I found kinda nifty. They said the WD books are good intros but not good for specifics (which is often what a writer needs) and they suggested utilizing librarians and universities. They also said interesting things about copywrite laws and how to not break them. Which is always good to know. The magic year is 1923... anything before that and you're
probably okay.
We skipped the next panal to eat our pizza dinner in our room and talk about our own writing for a bit. It was then that we came across (formally) the idea of spitting our baby into more than one volume. Alas we had another panal,
Selling Your First Novel, and had to leave the discussion hanging. It was interesting, but didn't really tell us much of anything we hadn't heard yet at other panals and both of our minds were in Ishalia. They did mention that it is important that you take contracts to literary lawyers to get the legal stuff checked out, not normal lawyers. The reitteratre what we'd heard eariler about it being hard to cross genres, it's like starting over again.
Then we went back to the room and chatted for a long long time about our book and how we're splitting into three parts. It is really quite exciting, and something that really could be talked about in its own post so I won't here. Let's just say that we are really psyched to get going on it, and it solves the issue of length which was really becoming quite the problem.
Next was Saturday. We decided to take our time at breakfast and skip the first seminar. We went next to
Idea to Story in 90 seconds with Ken Rand who did turn out to be one of our favourite people there. He talked alot about left and right hemisphereology - it was very interesting but I thought a little bit stretched and harped upon. It had some good fundamentals about getting in the right mindset, and allowing yourself to be creative and not worry about the logical, critical parts of yourself that won't allow you to go on until it's perfect. He also worked us through some idea generating exercises.
Then we went to
Crossing the Line, Combining Genres in Fiction. I dont' actually remember any details from this one, other than we met a very nice agent named Nadia Cornier that we are considering persuing. The only note I took was that you should market yourself like babyfood... are you romantic fantasy or are you fantasy with a romantic element?
Then was an uneventful lunch. After that we went to a reading from Gordon Gross which was phenomenol. He used to be into professional acting, and his reading showed that. The work was great, the reading was too. I was very much impressed. We also listened to Matt Ruff reading, where he read from his book Set This House In Order which was interesting to hear as it was meant by the author to be read. We then proceeded to the Booksigning and sale where we each got a couple of books, got them signed, and had a general good time. It was at this time that Jim MacDonald promised to buy our book when it comes out 'cause we had decided to use one of his tricks.
We then attended a really boring seminar from
Dragon Magazine editor McArtor. The seminar itself wasn't actually boring, and we had known much of anything about D&D we probably would have gotten quite a bit out of it. We do not though, so the chances of us writing for them are slim to none.
We listened to the very beginning of
Longshot but left 'cause it sounded boring and we had a banquet to get ready for. We got ready for the banquet and both looked exceptionally spiffy... if Susie wants she can go into what we looked like, that isn't exactly my thing. The
banquet was great, especially the eccentric erotic writers and the keynote speech by Sherrilyn Kenyon which was very much inspiring.
The next morning we went to
Tapping the creative Process, much of which was repeat from earlier seminars, and
How to Give Great Critique which was actually quite useful and informative, I learned a lot there and Suse may be turning the writers club into a critique group next year so that will help.
Then there was much drama involving a bingo hall which I refuse to go into. That's our weekend folks. The Con was amazing!
