Writer's Workshops and Other Conventions

Since Samantha posted earlier in the week about conferences, I thought I'd chime in with some other opportunities to learn more about the craft of writing.

I've gone to many useful panels and connected with other writers at the World Science Fiction convention. Last year's WorldCon, in Montreal, got me some feedback from professional writers and got me involved in a great on-line critique group. This year's WorldCon is in Australia, so I won't be able to attend, but next year's is in Reno, and I'm already signed up to go.

On the local level, my area has a couple of good literary science fiction conventions every year. COSine is already over for this year, but it's an intimate convention with focused programming, and I always come away with valuable insights. MileHiCon is a bit larger, and usually features many of the local authors, such as Connie Willis and Carrie Vaughn. Listening to people like these and like the many well-known guests of honor that have come to MHC is an education in itself.

Of course, the workshop that really has me drooling and wishing I could attend is the Taos Toolbox -- a two-week, intensive workshop led by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress, with Carrie Vaughn as a guest instructor. Although I'm not sure I'm quite ready for something of that caliber, it sounds like it would be a great experience. Unfortunately, the price tag, while quite reasonable for what you get, is a little out of my price range this year. Perhaps if I start saving my pennies...

Do other folks have a "dream workshop" or convention they'd like to attend?

The Prompt that wasn't...er...prompt

Well, you know what they say, right? Don't Wait: Postpone Now. That seems to be my MO lately. Lately, ha! I mean my MO in general. Baby steps, though...yes? Here is my response to Samantha's prompt of last week: Late into the night, the snow fell and fell.

----------

My parents are dead, I say to anyone who asks. No, I have no siblings…my brother died with them. Shock usually keeps them from pressing for more details, but I just mutter the words “stuck on the train tracks, no time to get out” and that tends to shut even the nosier ones up.

After a while, no one asks anything else. I’m okay with that. After many tellings, the lie becomes its own truth and I start to believe it myself. I have to: the truth is worse than any story I can come up with and no one, least of all me, wants to hear the real tale. It’s only in my nightmares that I can’t lie, can’t forget about the night the snow fell and fell and the monsters that came with it.

----------

The thing I love about these prompts and the little bits of inspired writing that come of them is that I let myself write without restraint and without wondering what I’m doing. I just let the words present themselves, even if they don’t make much sense. In my snippet above, even I don’t know what the real story is but now the wheels are turning in my head and I’m curious to see if there is anything more I can make of this. Maybe there isn’t anything else, but now my creative juices are flowing a little more; maybe I can take this exercise and go back to my current novel in progress and make some headway.

Conferences, conferences, conferences

It's that time again, conferences season. Oh yes, there are conferences earlier in the year. But RT Booklovers conference always feels like the start of the gauntlet. For those not familiar with RT, it's a HUGE conference put on every year by RT Magazine. This year's is in Columbus, OH. It typically begins on Wednesday, so authors and readers have been flooding into the city today. They also have both Begineer and Advanced Writer Bootcamps that run on Monday and Tuesday.

A quick review of the workshop listings this year had me wishing I could attend:
- GET OVER YOURSELF- AND GET WRITING
- FROM REGENCY TO RIGEV V: WORLDBUILDING ACROSS THE GENRES
- SF FOR FEMMES: WRITING CHARACTER-DRIVEN STORIES WOMEN WILL DEVOUR
- URBAN FANTASY: ALPHA MALES AND THE KICK-ASS HEROINES WHO LOVE THEM
- PARANORMAL: INFUSING PARANORMALS WITH A CAST OF UNIQUE CHARACTERS
- CRAFT: SERENDIPITY’S NO SECRET: VISION BOARDS AND GOAL-SETTING
FANTASY: FANTASY UNPLUGGED
- PARANORMAL: MOVE OVER VAMPIRES AND WEREWOLVES, THERE ARE NEW CREATURES STALKING THE NIGHT
- CRAFT: PREPARING A PARTIAL/EDITING TO AVOID REJECTION
- CRAFT: PITCHES AND BLURBS AND TAG LINES, OH MY!
- SCI-FI/FANTASY: FANTASY & ROMANCE: TWO FLAVORS THAT TASTE GREAT TOGETHER

And that doesn't even touch all the sessions on marketing, business, or other aspects of craft. Next year's conference is in LA, that might make it doable.

Then in a couple of months, the big one happens... RWA Nationals. This year is in Nashville. This is definitely a conference geared for writers and not for readers. It's all workshops and networking. I really long to hit this one someday.

And then come October, the one I'm most familiar with.. Emerald City Writer's Conference. This is the one put on by my local RWA chapter. We're the largest romance writer's conference on the west coast. Because we're a smaller conference (max out at about 250 attendees), you have a better chance of chatting with the agents and editors that attend. Last year at lunch, my fellow Melt-Ink Potter Colleen, and I randomly picked a table. Guess who joined our table... the fabulous bestselling author, Cherry Adair. We got to chat with her and the editor who wanted to come sit by Cherry. You can't get that kind of face time at some of the bigger conferences.

But these aren't the only ones out there. A good number of the RWA chapters put on regional conferences throughout the year. And even if you're not writing romance, they tend to have some great speakers who can give you great insight into the craft of writing and publishing.

My Response To The Prompt

So this week, as you've probably noticed, we're doing something a little different here on The Melt-Ink Pot. Earlier in the week, we posted a prompt: "Late into the night, the snow fell and fell." We're posting our various responses to that prompt, just so we can see how many different directions one prompt can take us.

I have to confess that my response is a little longer than I expected. But the prompt seems to have landed in a part of my brain that grabbed it and ran, and so ... 7,500 words or so later, a story fell out.

Rather than cluttering up space here, I've posted it on one of my other blogs. But here's a teaser:

Christmas Wishes
by Sheila McClune

Late into the night, the snow fell and fell. Risa's aching hands clenched the steering wheel in a death grip. This is stupid, the nagging voice in her head told her for the thousandth time. Turn around. Go back. The voice got louder, grew strident as she approached another in-the-middle-of-nowhere exit. She turned up the iPod, patched into the radio with a makeshift cable, to try to drown it out.

That, too, was a bad choice. Bohemian Rhapsody ended, and the next song began. Three notes were all that had a chance to play before Risa mashed the skip button, but it was too late. The three notes had already stabbed their way into her heart. Their song. Her eyes flooded with tears...

A mile marker – 420, some idiotic portion of her mind noted – loomed in her headlights, straight ahead. Risa yelled a few words she'd never repeat in front of her mother and fought the urge to yank the steering wheel sharply to the left. Instead, she eased it to the left as gently as she could while still having a chance of not biffing the signpost.

The car almost-but-not-quite scraped the signpost and headed back toward the center of the northbound lanes of the interstate, but then the back end started to skid. She knew she was supposed to steer into the skid, but that would head her straight into the median, so she yanked the wheel back the other direction. The car fishtailed, then described a graceful three hundred and sixty degree turn...

(Read the rest here)

Response to prompt

Here is my response to the prompt:

Late into the night, the snow fell and fell. The main room of the inn was filled with travelers trapped by the early snow. All the rooms were full but the inn keeper was allowing the overflow to sleep on main floor. Tarn and Alia had arrived too late for a room but managed to capture places on the floor near the large fireplace. Alia cupped her hands around the bowl of stew hoping the heat from the bowl would dry her gloves. It would be much simpler to take them off and lay them by the fire. However, she couldn't risk anyone seeing her hands. Most of the mountain peoples had strange superstitions about mages and even more so about anyone that could wield death magic.


Now this was just a rough draft idea so there's not a lot of detail in it. On a second run through I would have included more details of the room, the other people inside, etc. And since my writing lately tends to run toward either Fantasy or Sci-Fi, that was the way I went. The characters are from an idea I've been playing with off and on in little snippets. Alia is a mage who can wield death magic and is feared for it. Tarn is a healer who has sort of attached himself to her.

Experimentation this week...

As you can all see, the Melt-Ink Pot ladies have updated the look of our blog. We decided it was time for a little change.

Also, this week we're doing things a little differently. A prompt has been posted on our private critique group and we'll each take a shot at writing something inspired by that prompt. The prompt might be the first line of the piece or the last or maybe not even appear in the piece. Now, what we post will not likely be anything complete, not even a complete scene. It's just an exericse to get the juices going and to see where each of us goes when presented with the same idea. We'll each also give you an idea of why we wrote what we did.

We'll probably be undertaking this fun challenge once a month.

The prompt this time is -- Late into the night, the snow fell and fell.

Procrastination; or, Why Do Today What You Can Put Off Until Tomorrow

Short entry tonight, because I'm about to fall asleep...

Okay, I admit it. At 11:38 pm on 4/15, I was in my car, in line, at the post office, waiting to mail an envelope. No, not my tax return. An extension. Yes, I'm a procrastinator.

Although to be fair, I probably would have gotten it done during one of the weekends between the middle of March and now, if I hadn't been sick enough to sleep through all of those weekends.

When it comes to writing deadlines, I procrastinate on those, too. I was late with an article for work recently, but after two weeks of staring at the data, inspiration failed to strike. I finally stared long and hard enough that I found my story, but it was a challenge.

On the other hand, I have had good luck with "speed editing." Seems like the longer I take to think about it, the harder editing is. So in that case, procrastination actually helps.

How do others deal with writing and procrastination? Do deadlines help or hinder you?