Well, another Conversations & Connections has come and gone. Here’s the scene in the Speed Dating With Editors room . . . Looks all calm and peaceful huh? What you don’t see is the line of writers out the door waiting for their chance to sit down with a random editor for 10 minutes.
My panel, Scene-by-Scene, turned out to be the top choice of attendees, and I know we had at least 70 people in the room. I was joined by three other novelists, Catherine Bell, Lauren Foss Goodman, and the always amazing Jen Michalski. I talked about structure nuts & bolts, Catherine talked about putting your reader in the picture, Lauren talked about organizational strategies/tools, and Jen discussed types and elements of successful scenes. I think it was really useful–at least people told us it was.
I also met up with a woman who attended my flash novella panel from last year’s conference, and she reported that the project she wrote in response to that panel–and that I read and critiqued later in the summer–was accepted for publication in a very well respected anthology series. That made me very happy.
One final highlight I want to share. At last year’s conference, two of my best friends–poet Danny Collier and fiction writer Tara Laskowski–holed up in the lounge to begin plans to redesign Smokelong Quarterly. The redesign was just launched this month, so here they are at this year’s convo in that same lounge, toasting their success with a drop of black cherry Jim Beam:
Wish Tank 