Willamette Writers, Assemble!

Howdy y'all! If you are here at the Willamette Writers Conference this weekend, this post is for you!

Three Useful Things:

1. If you are attending the Conquering the Freshman Fifteen intensive on Sunday afternoon (and you should!), make sure to download, print, and read through both of these first chapters: The Nightingale (first 15) and The Martian (first 15). Please bring them both with you on Sunday!

2. If you would like the slide decks from my weekend presentations (No Mustard on Your Shirt: Spill-Proofing Your Grammar and Style, or Juice Box Hero: Squeezing Plot From Character), sign up here by Sunday and I will send them to you!

 

3. If you would like a whole-manuscript review of your work in progress, please let me know! You can email me - tex at thetexfiles.com - by Friday, August 9th. (You can send your actual manuscript later on, but I need to save your place before my calendar fills up completely!)

Good? Great! See you conference-side, and remember: this weekend, it's kickass-thirty, and the big hand is on you!

WORDfest Cometh!

I haven't said much about it lately - but man, I am SO proud of everything WORD - Writers Organizations 'Round Dallas is doing and becoming.

We're up past 30 member organizations now (including the brand-new fantastic writers group at The Published Page Bookshop in Cleburne!), WORDfest is about to smash 400 registrations, and Dana Austin and Michelle ONeal have kindly volunteered to help us bury the bodies for our forensic science / crime scene investigation demo at Writers in the Field: Chapter Two :)
 
And if you're going to WORDfest - go check out our updated schedule and exhibitors list right over here. Next weekend is coming up fast, and you do NOT want to miss out!

Houston, We Have a Conference

Just now home from the Houston Writers Guild Conference. Tired enough to sleep in lead boots, but I feel like I just ditched a glass slipper. Andrea Barbosa and Fernanda Brady and Mike Brady and Alicia Richardson and their whole entire posse just knocked it out of the park. I made about 70 new writer-buddies, and I think we collectively blew three weeks' worth of serotonin in about four hours. Getting to share a man-pizza with Liz Larson and a redneck truck-date with Jennie Goloboy on top of all that was just the cream gravy on the chicken-fried steak. Counting the hours until I can go back.

NB: this adorable duo were not the two most important people at the event.
Tragically, they are the only ones I took a picture of.

I tell you what, y'all. You work and you wonder and you sweat and you cry, and then almost out of the blue, somebody who doesn't owe you a single blessed thing hands you a room key and a pretty purple gift baggie and a kindness you'll remember forever, and all of a sudden you could do a thousand more miles right there on the spot. Please remind me of this next time I turn into a mopey doughnut: no quest succeeds without a dose of elvish hospitality, and I-45 runs clean through Rivendell.

Stealing Fire: An Ask, and an Offer

EDIT: The DFW Writers Workshop is currently reviewing funding for its programs. The Writers Bloc will continue uninterrupted, but this Patreon drive is on hold for now. (I'm leaving the post up, because I'm proud of it.)

Earning My Clownshoes

I shouldn't be writing this. I'm so tired, and I have ten thousand things to do.

But there was a convention two years ago that had me crying for days on the back end, because I knew even then that it was a singular, amazing, never-to-be-repeated event. I tripped over another one this weekend, and it has knocked my emotional teeth out.

On the face of it, it was a pretty straightforward exercise. Fly up to Portland, stay with my legendary lifemate Jennie, and together she and I would go to the Willamette Writers Conference. They set me up to teach one two-part class on Sunday, and the rest of the time was free. So Jennie and I decided to do some volunteering. It was all set up to be a fun, productive time.

This part was decidedly more fun than productive.

It started out pretty ordinary. We did the volunteer orientation on Wednesday night, and then I got to help with pitch desk setup on Thursday while she was at work. We were supposed to work in the bookstore together for most of the weekend.

Then they needed an emcee for one of the "Pitch for the Prize" events on Thursday night, so I signed up for that. (It was a blast - gave me an excuse to reprise the 'world's worst pitch' from DFWcon 2015.) Then on Friday morning they asked if I would work the pitch corral. You know how every flight you take requires a flight attendant to first give the schpiel about how to buckle your seat belt and where the emergency exits are?  This was that, but for a roomful of writers waiting to go in and pitch to an agent. The main difference is that instead of being ignored by people on their smartphones, you're talking to thirty desperate creatives on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

And somehow that became my entire weekend. Every ten minutes on the dot, we started the pep rally all over again.

Welcome to the Hunger Games, career introvert edition! Who's here to pitch to a film or TV agent? Excellent - District 1, head to the right. Who's here for a literary agent? District 2, to the left! You will enter here, through the Door of Destiny. When your time is up, you will exit to the left, through the Portal of Glory, smeared with the blood of your enemies and the last burning shreds of your self-doubt. Take a moment to prepare yourself: fly-check, cry-check, phone-on-silent-check. Good? Good. Now rise up to meet your destiny, word-warriors - your time begins as soon as this door opens. No shame, no surrender, and may the odds be ever in your favor!
 

It was fun in the moment - fun to talk to people about their story or listen to their Texas jokes or see pictures of the dogs or kids waiting for them back home. We joked about turning this whole pitch thing into a drinking game and shared horror stories about the wild speed-dating scrums from other conferences. And when someone came back waving a business card and vibrating with giddy disbelief, they wafted their good luck all over the people still waiting to go in. It was an incredible rush - the kind of wire-tight camaraderie you get among people who are all waiting to parachute out of an airplane. As the weekend wore on, the hugs and thank-yous piled up.

Then during Sunday's lunch, Jennie texted to say that they needed me in the ballroom ASAP. I thought something had gone seriously pear-shaped. In hindsight, I should have known better.

As usual, the only pear-shape was me.

The thing I want to emphasize here is that there was no awards presentation going on. This was not part of some kind of pre-planned ceremony. There were the usual lunch announcements - room changes, deadline reminders - and then I was up on stage, being named "sheriff" of the Willamette Writers Conference, and getting my badge pinned with a Portland flag.

I'm siting here groping for a way to keep this post from becoming an exercise in self-congratulation. That's really not what I'm trying to say. I keep thinking about what a fantastically fun, well-organized event this was, and how warmly the conference committee bent the rules and folded Jennie and I into the tribe (technically only WW members can volunteer), and how glad we both are that they took a risk on us. This conference has catapulted both of us forward in our respective life-goals.

Chief among them: finding hot sauce in barrel-mounted spigot-pail form.

But like... I do a lot of conferences and conventions. I'm used to teaching classes and moderating panels and getting compliments on my work. I think what makes this feel so revolutionary is that it's the first time I've gotten to be with someone during a potentially pivotal moment in their life and say with the voice of experience,"don't worry - you got this." I know it's small compared to what a delivery nurse or a crisis hotline operator does, but right now, today, it's the biggest thing in my world. Who would have thought that being the rodeo clown could be more fun than actually riding the bull?

And what REALLY gets me is that it almost didn't happen. I almost said, "I can't afford to give away 40 hours for the fun of it - I'll just sit in a corner and catch up on work." (Makes you think about how many insanely talented people aren't getting heard because they really, literally can't afford that time... but that's a separate rant.)

And to think: I nearly missed out on meeting Benedict Cumberbatch!

So I'm going to take this as a sign that I'm moving in the right direction - that if I keep dumping passion out into the world and looking for the places where it's reciprocated, good things will keep happening - that "audacious generosity" really can be a valid career strategy. (And if you're sitting there thinking "How could you have any doubt about any of that?", all I can say is, it's easy to beat up on yourself when you're four months out from a book launch and still haven't gotten around to planning for it.)

So... thank you for everything, Willamette friends - for an incredible conference, a fantastic initiation rite, and a sorely-needed spiritual affirmation. You've wrecked me in all the best ways, and since there's no riding off into the sunset when you're already out on the west coast, you better believe I'll be back.

Remember, y'all - it's a trash CAN, not a trash CAN'T.

Preaching in the Dark - a DFWcon Epiphany

Ah, you guys. What can I say about DFWcon that I haven't already said?  It's the highlight of my year, the filling of my well, the thing that convinces me that yes, I can and should do all those other, scarier things.

But here is a thought that might be relevant to you, whether or not you went to the conference, whether or not you're even a writer.

See, I did a great class with Laura Maisano on Saturday, called Prose P90X.  It went swimmingly - we filled up the whole room, and got loads of compliments. We were a great team!

Look at all those shining faces!

But then I had to rush off to do a solo class, The Comma Sutra, in a different part of the building.  It was on the main stage of the theater - big lights, black curtains, the whole nine yards.  I was flattered they booked me there - obviously the Powers That Be expected that I could fill a significant chunk of the seats.

Here's the thing, though: because the class started exactly when extra pitch sessions went on sale, I didn't get nearly that kind of turnout.  When it came time to start, there were only maybe twenty people scattered through that huge, cavernous room.  More than that, the bright stage lights meant I couldn't see them, and the distance meant that unless they hollered right at me, I couldn't hear them either.  It felt like teaching a class at the bottom of an empty swimming pool at midnight.

Meanwhile, photographic evidence suggests that it LOOKED
like some kind of xenopornographic TED talk.
(Big thanks to Amber Draeger for the photos!)

That was a really hard thing.  My entire schtick relies on being able to see people's faces, to hear when they laugh and notice when they're confused or annoyed or distracted.  (This is one reason I'm comparatively crap at social media - my super-empathy powers don't work when there's an Internet between your face and mine.)  And let me tell you - it is SUPER awkward telling grammatically-instructive alien sex jokes when all you hear is silence.

But I kept at it, and kept soliciting questions, and started getting substantial answers, so I knew there were at least a few people who were out there and wanted to talk to me. By the time we finished, it had stopped being a sermon and become a true discussion, which is what I love best.

Well, imagine my surprise when I finished and stepped aside, and saw that the room had filled up.  People must have been trickling in during that hour, coming in ones and twos as they finished buying their extra pitch sessions and headed up to catch the class.  I don't know how many were there at the end, but I got over sixty names on my email sheets - and that's just the ones who cared enough to stand in line and sign up to get the PDF slides.

Image blurred to protect their identities.

And of course, the happy denouement: I got some great compliments on the class, and found wonderful mentions of it on Twitter. I even got this amazing email, which has been lighting up my life for three days straight now:

I'm sorry, but this morning I didn't know who you were.

Then you showed up on a panel and made some great comments.

Then I saw you at lunch and you were having SUCH a great time.

So when I checked my after-lunch class selections and saw your name, I altered my initial choice to take in P90X.

Wow... Great information, delivered fast and entertainingly.

So here I am in the balcony, listening to Comma Sutra. (Excellent!) But mostly I'm wondering: who the Hell are you and where did you come from? You're a freak of nature, and we need more.

Thanks for sharing yourself. You make it a better - and smarter - world.

And thanks for making my conference!

And maybe this doesn't make for a riveting anecdote, but like... that hour summed up my entire year to date.  I've spent so much time out and about over the past few months, striving like the dickens to be seen and get known. It's fun and I genuinely love doing it - being out in the real world with real people lights me up like nothing else! - but there are so many nights when I flop into a Motel 6 bed, utterly spent, and stare up into the darkness wondering what the hell I'm playing at. When you're promoting yourself, you're not really helping other people, and not really creating anything new, either - you're just trying to shine a spotlight on something you've already done, which people may or may not even notice, let alone care about. And most of the time, you can't tell if it's working.

And I know that's not just me, and not just book-promotion. Every facet of writing is like that sometimes. Shoot, LIFE is like that sometimes.  My mom said that about raising kids - you know, how you spend your whole entire day exhausting yourself, and at the end of it, you can't see that you've accomplished anything, because the house and the kids and your life look exactly like they did when you got up that morning.  My dad would say the same thing about his job, too: how he was so happy to mow the lawn on the weekend, because it was a measurable thing with a definable, visible, guaranteed result - not at all like the nebulous phone calls and vague paper-pushing that made up the rest of the week.

The red days are my out-of-town days - which are usually interspersed with oh-god-I'm-wasting-my-life nights.

So I guess what I'm saying, to myself as much as to you-all, is that at some point, we're all just preaching in the dark. It's a hard thing to do - to stick to your guns, to resist the urge to stop and check for approval, to trust that what you're doing is noticed and needed (or will be), even when nobody is there to tell you so.  It requires you to be truly self-sustaining, which is so, so much harder than it sounds.

But I hope you'll keep at it, whatever 'it' may be - and I believe that if you do it well enough, for long enough, you will eventually start getting those pingbacks, seeing the fruits of your labor.  Maybe you'll fill up the metaphorical room, and maybe you won't - but statistically speaking, there is almost-certainly somebody out there who's waiting to hear EXACTLY what you have to say... and you can't know that until and unless you have the courage to stay the course and say it.

All right - sermon over.  Go forth and preach, y'all - and if you have time, holler some encouragement to the people in your life who are doing likewise. Yours might be the only voice they can hear.

Five Hot Tips For Rocking DFWcon

It's almost here!  Christmas-Hogwarts-Burning-Man-Woodstock-carnival-prom is almost upon us!  (We call it the DFW Writers Conference for short.)  And this year, I've suckered not one but TWO amazing writers into dropping out of the con circuit to join us - and you better believe I'm out to show them a good time.

Heck, I'm out to show EVERYbody a good time - because let's face it, writing conferences are tough.  You don't want to just sit in the back and be all

But at the same time, you can't exactly roll up and holler

(Well, you can, but you REALLY have to play it just right.)

So let's talk about how to win the weekend! Here for your edification are five hot tips for rocking DFWcon.

Great!, I hear you say. But why should we listen to you? 

So glad you asked!

1. Got my agent, Jennie Goloboy, at DFWcon 2012
2. Joined the conference committee for DFWcon 2013
3. Became editor / arch-machinator for DFWcon 2014
4. Now a super-cool published author and sort-of-professional con-goer
5. Natural 20 charisma

Got it?  Good.  Now here's how to have a phenomenal weekend.

...but we can fix that!

1. Do your homework.

Did you look at the genre matrix?  Good!  Did you go to the agent's website and read up on them? Great! But don't stop there. That's basic stuff. You're not here to be basic. Make this a movie-montage-Googling session. Go find some recent interviews they've done. Check out their Twitter. See if they have any clients whose work you know. If you want that agent to be interested in you, start by being interested in them! 

INTERESTED, dammit!

2. Perfect your pitch.

Think of it like trying to convince a friend to go see this really cool movie. Are you going to talk for ten minutes straight? No. Are you going to dump in a whole load of names and places? No. You're going to keep it short, sweet, and awesome - aim for about a minute, max, before you come up for air. 

"It's about this doctor guy who comes home one day to find that someone's broken into the house and killed his wife - and now the cops think HE did it.  So he's on the run from the authorities and simultaneously looking for the killer... and then he finds out that the hit was meant for HIM. He was the one who first blew the whistle on a lucrative new drug that actually turned out to cause liver damage. Now big pharma wants him dead, and if he doesn't stop them, they're going to push the drug through and potentially kill thousands of people.  It's a little bit Count of Monte Cristo and a whole lot of Bourne Identity, with less amnesia and more prosthetic arms. You're gonna love it."

The box office certainly did.

(Bonus points if you start with something personalized that you learned in step #1, and end with a question that isn't "do you want it, huh, do ya, do ya?"  "Thanks so much for meeting with me, Mr. Spielberg - I know you're really on the lookout for a new take on the whole alien-invasion thing, and since you're also into middle-grade fiction, I think I have something that would be right up your alley. It's called 'E.T.', and...")

Remember: your pitch session is not a 60-second monologue. It's a 12-minute conversation. Your pitch is only the beginning of that conversation - so make it a good one!

3. Cultivate your expertise

This is especially true if you don't know many people at the con.  Are you commuting there?  Maybe clean out your car so you can offer your new out-of-town friends a lift to dinner. Are you a black-belt Googler?  Consider printing out extra info on all the agents in your genre, so you can help other con-goers who don't know who to talk to. Foodie? Look up all the best restaurants nearby and be ready to recommend. Heck, you can make friends just by offering to let people practice their pitch on you and giving them good feedback!  Bottom line: think about what kind of problem-solver you want to be, and then get out there and get known.

NB: If you are an actual black belt, you may need to diversify your skill-set.

4. Collect touchpoints, not targets

In other words, don't pitch to anything that moves. Really. Yes, you have a limited amount of face-time, and yes, you want to get the most bang for your buck out of the weekend, but con-going is like dating - hustling people into the sack rarely works. This a game of multiple touches. Go to the agent's class. Say hi in the hallway. Chat at the cocktail party. Talk up somebody else's work. If the weekend's over and you never got to pitch to them?  GREAT. 

No, really.  That is great - because ANY interaction you have with an agent this weekend is query-letter gold.  Picture opening your email thusly: "Ms. Maisano - I so enjoyed taking your Prose P90X class at DFWcon last month. It was hugely helpful, and now that I've had a chance to sit down and apply those ideas, I wanted to query you about my novel. It's a 70,000-word YA sci-fi adventure called Bacne to the Future, and..." 

You ARE coming to class, right...?

RIGHT AWAY, you shoot to the top of her inbox. RIGHT AWAY, you are flagged as a person who made a serious investment in your writing career (and who wanted to query her, specifically - not just blanket the Internet with a form letter.)

5. Make friends

Cheesy, but true. Rachel Swirsky said something at CONvergence earlier this month, which I thought was so wise:  "Cultivate lateral and downward connections, not just upward ones. You never know where someone will end up, and people have vastly different resources."  Which was followed by this keeper from Lee Harris:  "Publishing, like any business, is all about relationships... and you can't fabricate relationships."

So if you end up sitting next to Rachael Acks, say hi - she's a fabulous writer and a geologist by trade, and who better to talk to for that big-oil thriller you keep meaning to write?  If you see Mark Finn in the hall, tighten your sphincters before you bend his ear - he will make you laugh 'til you leak, and he knows more about Robert E. Howard, indie-publishing, and master-class party-schmoozing than anyone should. Larry Enmon is retired Secret Service. Taylor Koleber is an LDS missionary who speaks Haitian Creole. Michelle O'Neal works as a forensic chemist at the local medical examiner's office (she can tell you where ALL the bodies were buried, and when and for how long.)  I could go on, but you get the idea: there are going to be 300+ phenomenal people there this weekend, at every stage of their writing careers. Don't be so fixated on the agents that you forget to look around and notice the social gold mine all around you!

It's actually 37% gold and 63% sweaty, unfettered enthusiasm - you're gonna love it!

Anyway, last thought, lovelies: if you're nervous, that's okay. It's a big deal. But no matter what you do, you're going to come out of this weekend a winner: you will know more going out than you did coming in, and have shown to everyone who claps eyes on you that you are NOT a person who wears your pants on your head, but a dedicated writer making a commitment to your career.  And if you need any reassurance on that point, come find me - I'll see you there!

Prose, Panties, and DFWcon Schedule!

Hey, Internetizens - this one's going to be quick and dirty, because I'm sitting in a departure lounge awaiting a midnight flight back to DFW, and absolutely will not have a brain left to post with by the time I get home.

But post I must, because the DFW Writers Conference cometh - and I am SO STOKED to go!

I'll spare you the whole schpiel, but if you're just now tuning in, DFWcon is where I met my agent, lo these many moons ago (not to mention my whole writers workshop), and where my home and heart will always be.  This year, I can only be there for Saturday, but the organizers have very-kindly obliged my request to take it to the limit all day long.  Look at this line-up!  LOOK AT IT.

Secrets of Success
9:45 to 10:45AM, Saturday
Session 1: Kevin J. Anderson, Rosemary Clement Moore, Charlaine Harris, Jenny Martin, Julie Murphy, Me Ra Koh, Tex Thompson

What’s their secret? How did these traditionally published authors achieve their objectives, cross that threshold and get their writing career started? And what have they done since to build on that success? The authors will share their experiences and helpful tips and field questions from the audience.

Prose P90X
1:00-2:00PM, Saturday
Laura Maisano, Anaiah Press
with Tex Thompson
NOTE: this class was previously listed as 'Intro to Style'
Do your sentences sag? Does your description drag? Or is your manuscript simply struggling to lose those last 5,000 words? Never fear! Veteran editor Laura Maisano and relentless red-pen-thusiast Tex Thompson are teaming up to help you trim and tone your prose in a fearless, fun session that’s guaranteed to leave your work leaner, cleaner, and meaner than ever before. Come learn how to take your writing style from flab to fab!

The Comma Sutra : A Better-Punctuation Guide to Spicing Up Your Text Life
2:15-3:30PM, Saturday
Tex Thompson

Does your writing lack a certain… variety?  Does your manuscript suffer from premature exclamations, heavy or abnormally frequent periods, or have difficulty maintaining even a semi-colon?   Don’t suffer in silence!   You too can enjoy the satisfaction and self-confidence that comes with knowing how to please your critique partner.   In this class, we’ll practice the ins and outs of good punctuation (and yes, it WILL be raunchy.)  Join us, won’t you, as we embark on a journey of true textual healing.

Read and Critique, DFW Writers Workshop Style - pre-registration required
4:15-5:45PM, Saturday
Tex Thompson, David Goodner

One great way to hone your craft is to read your work in front of a critique group. The DFW Writers Workshop has been doing just that since 1977, and has perfected its system over the years. Bring your current work in progress, read it in front of a group and receive critique from published authors.


Seriously, guys.  I know over-the-top excitement is kind of my jam, but I am unbelievably stoked to get to collaborate on a presentation with bitextual author/editor wonder-wizard Laura Maisano, and get to co-workshop with future bigger-than-Jesus picture-book rock-star David Goodner, and get to exchange oxygen within breathing-distance of Charlaine Harris AND Kevin J Anderson.  Binaca, don't fail me now!

So if you're going - set your schedule!  If you're not going - console yourself as best you can! And if you're on the fence - boy, you better hustle up and get yourself a ticket tout-de-suite, cuz we've only got a few left, and this year's conference is going to be off ALL of the chains.  See you there!

Campbell Recap and ApolloCon Schedule

Okay, y'all know the drill by now. I tell you how rocking-awesome the thing I just did was, and then how eyeball-explodingly excited I am about the thing I'm fixing to do, and follow it up with some generalized warm fuzzies.  Then we smoke a cigarette, roll over, and go to sleep.

Well, I hope it was good for you, cuz there is going to be a pantload more of all of the above over the next few weeks.  And the reason I'm three days late in writing this is because a weekend of relentless academical edutainment at the Campbell Conference (bookended by 500-mile drives from Texas to Kansas) has absolutely knocked me out.

See, a few months back, I successfully creeped on this fine gentleman here:

It's a good thing I didn't know he was the Eleventeenth Doctor,
or I'd never have had the guts to try it.

That's Dr. Robert Maslen, professor of literature and director of the new post-graduate fantasy program at the University of Glasgow.  He read my first book and liked it (and said so on Facebook!), and when I mailed him the second one, he liked that too - well enough to invite me to speak at the U of G this November (how rad is that?!) and to ask whether I would be at the Campbell Conference in June.

"Will I?!" I scoffed, while furtively googling "Campbell Conference."

Well, Google told me that it's where the Campbell Award is given every year.  But now that I've been, let me assure you: it is way, way more than that.

This year, it's where professors from universities all over the country (and beyond!) gather to present on what their institutions are doing to promote the study of science fiction, and to apply it for all kinds of cross-disciplinary purposes.  Video games, linguistics, neurocognition, climate science, you name it. (And I'm talking serious real-world stuff, too. For example, Arizona State has environmental science students in its Phoenix 2050 program write science fiction stories to present their ideas for how their city could solve its water and sustainability problems.  How rad is that?)

It's where everyone (from college students to elite grandmasters) is deeply excited to be there, and people take eager, copious notes on all of the above.

Look at all those notepads!

It's where you go to hear authors whose work you never knew you desperately needed to devour.

This is a terrible picture of the human splendor that is Cat Webb, but it beautifully illustrates the subtle yet pervasive stranglehold of coffee in writer culture

It's where you can get a personalized library tour of all manner of one-of-a-kind historical treasures – 

including this vintage rejection letter - click to embiggen!

 - and enjoy a private screening of the world's most amazing $5,000 movie, with personal commentary and salad-bowl space-helmet demonstrations from the executive producer himself –

- and be caught in compromising positions with an 8-foot-tall silver-age robot –

I'm not telling you who that is, but suffice to say that she is my new everything

- and enjoy a Sunday-afternoon salon with fifty of your new favorite people (and one phenomenal smorgasbord) -

This is like, half of the dessert spread.  HALF.

- and sit out on the porch all afternoon and long into the night, eating pizza and watching the fireflies come out.  

This is Steven Gould, who is currently novelizing the Avatar movies,
and Laura J. Mixon, who is currently provoking raging, barely-controlled shoe-lust

And that's not even the half of it, but I'll stop there, because telling the rest would take as long as living it.  Here's the relevant part: this genre of ours is fun, but it's not JUST for fun.  It's vital and important in ways I never imagined, and there is no greater way to internalize that than to surround yourself with people who have spent their lives studying, advocating, and celebrating it.  They're living my dream, and even though I feel like the smallest puppy in the pile, I can't tell you what a thrill it was to get to run with the big dogs.

The biggest dog of them all: Chris McKitterick, Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction,
nominations director for the Sturgeon Award, Campbell juror, and buttoned-down stick-in-the-mud.

And I'm still running, too – all the way down to Houston for ApolloCon.  Super excited about this one, and super nervous – it's my first time actually running a writers' workshop (though I have, of course, recruited a veritable justice league of wonderful people to help me out), and I'm really looking forward to it.  The con organizers have been tremendously generous in scheduling me, too – just look at this fabulous lineup!

Prose and DFWcons

All right, you guys.  Real talk.  These last few months have been the most stressful, challenging, miserable months since... pretty much ever.  And now that I'm finally out from under it, I can tell you the tale.

See, I was going like gangbusters trying to get my second book written, and teach a night course, and help with DFWcon, and get two classes prepped for the aforesaid con.   Everything came to a head last week: book was due on Monday, programs/schedules had to be finalized by Tuesday, the last conference meeting and bag-stuffing was Wednesday, night course finished on Thursday, and Friday found me crying discreetly at the pre-con mixer because I was supposed to teach a class the next day and wasn't even half ready for it.  At one point, I was up for 36 hours straight.  It was ruinous, absolutely insane, and I never, ever want to be that crunched ever again.

HOWEVER.

Let me tell you what the victory lap looked like.  Let me tell you how completely worth it all that agony was.  Let me tell you what a fantastic time I had, and how many super-awesome people I met, and how many (now former) total strangers came up to me and said, "Oh my God. Your class was amazing.  My mind – you blew it.  I seriously can't even deal with your realness."  

(And if any of y'all from the "Punching Up Your Prose" class are reading this, look at that last paragraph again.  Yeah, it's one of those!)

This was me.  This was what I did.

So let me write this real quick and sloppily, before the glitter wears off and I start second-guessing it.  Are you ready, world?  Here it is:  this what I just did is without question what I was put on this earth to do.  I want to write awesome books, and I want to help other people write awesome books.  That's it.  That is my talent.  That is the goal.

So here's how it's going to happen.

1.  Going to send the two class presentations to all the awesome folks who signed up for them.  That's job #1.

2.  Going to resurrect this blog here, do more fun cool stuff.  I definitely want to do more GrammatiCats (the posts take so much longer to write than you would think, but maybe we can run them once or twice a month).  I also want to start showcasing other authors – because man, I know so many truly first-rate fictioneers, and the world desperately needs to pick up what they're throwing down.

3.  Going to work on doing more classes.  Maybe online, maybe in person, probably both.  (Y'all holler at me if you have any genius ideas or secret leads on this front.)  Not sure yet how that will shake out, but I'll tell you this right now: I am not waiting for DFWcon 2015 to do this again. 

And whether I blew your mind in the last 3 days or have been sporadically ignoring you for the last 3 months: if you're reading this right now, please know that I am so, so grateful to know you and have you in my posse.  I will never know how I got lucky enough to have this life, but I intend to make really damn sure the world is better off because of it.

People are all like, "oh, it's okay, don't cry."  No.  This is DFWcon.  If you're not crying, you're not trying.

Conferences and Conventions and Human Contact, Oh Boy!

Merry Monday, Internetizens!  The world is an especially bright and lovely place today (as it tends to be when you are backed by industrial-strength doses of ibuprofen and a healthy rage to live.) 

Three con-ish things:

1.  I've just now uploaded the preliminary schedule and class descriptions for DFWcon 2014 (scroll down there on the main page - you'll see three links).  If you are a writer who might be able to make it out to our neck of the woods in May, please check it out - this conference is my first love, and the literal foundation of all my success to date, and I can't recommend it highly enough.  You will hear me gushing more about it soon.

2.  A quick word to my fellow white people - more specifically, my fellow con-going, SFF-loving white people.  You know how at conventions, there tends to be a whole lot of ... you know, us?  Does it ever make you feel kinda weird to live in a city that is fully 50% non-white (as I do here in Dallas), and yet walking into the local convention hall is like entering a melanin clean-room? 

"Maybe", you might say, "but this isn't the first time I've heard about it, and I'm kind of tired of having to feel bad because I happen to turn pink in the bathtub."

 Well, *I* would submit that there is no need to feel anything but powerful, enthusiastic, and motivated - because we-the-converted are the carriers of the torch, the keepers of the faith.  We veteran con-goers KNOW how fun and cool and awesome a good con can be - and so we are uniquely equipped to help bring that joy to people who might otherwise miss out.  And (here's the part that's got me jazzed this morning): you can help diversify the con-going world just by doing what you normally would anyway.

"What?" you may ask.  "Which part?  Curating my collection of autographed Timothy Zahn novels?  Filling my life-sized TARDIS with handcrafted plush tribbles for my Dr. Who / Star Trek fanfic re-enaction group?"

Basically, yes!  Con or Bust is an organization dedicated to helping fans of color attend conventions - and all you have to do to support them is to buy from their auctions.  They have some amazing primo stuff, too - books, crafts, jewelry - autographed, limited-edition, out-of-print - and writers, sit up and pay attention!  They're auctioning off critiques from Tor editors, Hugo winners, serious heavy-hitting industry pros.  So if you want to score some amazing goods AND help bring new fans into the fold, get over there and shop your heart out.  (But do it fast - it's ending this Sunday the 23rd!)

3.  Okay, I guess that second thing was not as quick as I thought.  I'll make this third one brief:  I'm going to ConDFW this weekend, and it would be my life's delight to see you there!


We have many different beliefs, but today we must put them aside and unite. Gryffindor and Slytherin! Jedi and Sith! Jack Nicholson Joker and Heath Ledger Joker! This is our time to take what's ours... for tonight we dine in hell!

Ten Things I Learned From DFWcon 2013

1.  There are more terrific people in the world than you can handle knowing.  

2.  David Corbett can bring new meaning to your life, and Michael Capuzzo has friends who can end it.

3. Quality floats.  Quality makes heads turn.  Your audience can smell laziness, ignorance, and slapdashery like sun-ripened mayonnaise.

4.  Entropy has a net positive effect on tres leches cake.

5.  Until we can be in literally seven places at once, there will never be enough time to do everything we want to do. 

6. Heaven is other people.  Hell is figuring out how to talk to them.

7. On Loop 820, as in life, the road to success is choked with traffic and permanently under construction, and it takes f***ing forever to get somewhere.  Perseverance is essential.

8. High school never ends.

9. Being complimented is good, but being helpful is GREAT.

10.  Anonymous friends are everywhere. Even in the toilet.

And actually, if I can loop the Blogging A to Z Challenge in here for a second, just one more:

11.  It's not all about you.  And that is indisputably a good thing.

That's the big one for me personally.  My own headspace is full of insecurities and inadequacies and the nasty nibbling brain-hamsters of doubt.  I freaking know this (I've lived in it for three decades now!)  And yet I'm always surprised at how fun and interesting and and alive and powerful I feel when I link up with other people - especially ones who are all pulling in the same general direction I am - and take the time to say, "gosh, you sure are neat - what's big in your world right now?"

To recap: I spent the entire month of April beating myself into the ground to produce daily blog content, and the first week of May punching myself in the face to get ready for a writing conference.  There are plenty of things I did poorly or not at all.  There is a veritable pantload of things I want to do differently next time.  But I've never had less sleep or more fun, and I am so, so excited to set my sights on the next round of self-inflicted accomplishments.

In the meantime: bed, chores, friends.  I got old ones to catch up with and new ones to study up on, and that is a GREAT problem to have.


I got 99 problems, but a pitch ain't one.

From Blogging to Hot-Dogging

What a month, you guys.  I can't believe I ate blogged the whole thing.  And next week, I'm gonna sit down and write a really good navelgazing post about the merciless month-long thrill that was the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

Right now, though, the DFW Writers Conference is happening this very weekend, and I am 100% booked until then!  I'm doing this class, see, and I am so freakin' stoked about it:

It's going to be educatastrophic!  You know, in a good way.

Anyway, I'm all nostalgic just now, because at this time last year, I was busy barfing on my shoes just thinking about going to my first-ever conference and pitching to actual agents.  If you're going to this or some other great literary event and feel your penny loafers are likewise in imminent danger of meeting your lunch, take solace and learn from my mistakes!  Here are a select few of my bloggy baby pictures posts from DFWcon 2012:

Cue Training Montage - in which the reality of the upcoming event sinks in, and "Eye of the Tiger" starts playing in the background.

DFWcon 1: New Neighbors - or, how writers' conferences are basically Hogwarts Disneyland Woodstock carnival-prom (for book nerds), and why that is so important.

DFWcon 2: Lessons - the do's and don'ts and remember-for-next-times

The Dry Heaves of Destiny - in which, almost three months after the conference, I finally send my manuscript to the Agent of My Dreams

By the Power of the Crimson Couch... - the climactic moment, almost four months after I had originally pitched to her at DFWcon 2012

So there you have it, happy people: do your homework, eat your Wheaties, and remember that Mr. Rogers likes you just the way you are.  It's going to be a grand time!

I feel good.  I feel great.  I feel wonderful.  I feel good.  I feel great.  I feel wonderful.

Who Wants To Be An Armadillionaire?

This is late, and that's largely because I got back home to an apartment with no A/C.  Did I mention it's 108 degrees all this week?

But that is not the point.  The point is: PEOPLE ARE AMAZING.  I will fast-forward through my hollering and squealing about how fantastic ArmadilloCon was in order to reiterate that.  The guy I choffed cheese-balls with in the con suite?  Yeah, he's an insanely good comic book artist.  The lady who chatted with me about community college courses?  Is the same supreme maven of horse how-tos who brought her stallion to DFWcon for a hands-on class experience.  I met black-belt seamstresses, master marksmen, confectioners, con-founders, costumers, historians, and musicians who play instruments I've never HEARD of.  And these were the ordinary con-going plebes!

What I mean to say is, it's easy to be cynical about People These Days - to watch Sex and the Sixth-Grade Reading Level fly off the shelves, to see the ratings for America's Shortest Attention Span, and to think "my God, we're doomed."  But it was nothing less than Neosporin for the soul to put myself in the company of so many people who take a profound delight in learning everything there is to know about something, no matter how strange or obscure or ridiculous it might seem to the muggles, and who know the real secret of superheroes everywhere: if you aren't born with amazing mutant powers, you'd goddamn well better grow some.

Anyway, so here in celebration of the joyful and learnedly strange are a select few of the self-made heroes in my life, who have graciously agreed to put a piece of themselves on public display:

• Cynthia McGean, with the one great truth for writers everywhere: You Can't Win if You Don't Play
• Tanya G (T!), with a top-notch photo essay on Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller's Frankenstein  (Two screenings, in which the gents switch roles between Victor and the Creature, with phenomenally different results.  Take heed, fellow scribblers: your plot is a given; it's your characters that sell it!)
• The lovely Lunaryss keeps her blogging cards close to her chest, but we will here mark February 29th, 2012 as the day she KO'd cancer.  FLAWLESS VICTORY.
• And Frank, the light of my dark, the Phoenix Wright to my Miles Edgeworth, who is much too modest to point to a blog entry, left me a comment which I would here immortalize as golden advice to middle-beginning creative types everywhere: Put Down the Doritos and Love Your Larval Stage.

And as soon as I kidnap somebody with blast-chilling superpowers, I will be off to do exactly that!

This story is about the Baudelaires. And they are the sort of people who know that there's always something. Something to invent, something to read, something to bite, and something to do, to make a sanctuary, no matter how small.

DFWCON 3: The Alliance

You know, I can distinctly remember reading about film and TV writers being forced to work through committee and even sometimes getting kicked off of their own projects, and thinking, "Man, I'm so glad I'm only doing books - everything belongs to me and I can do it all by myself."

Isn't ignorance adorable?  It's like looking at embarrassing naked baby pictures of your brain.

I mean, I always knew that there were agents and publishers and marketing gurus, all of whom you have to play ball with if you want to see your hardback on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, but I thought that the actual writing, the content of the book, was all me.  And a conference is cake by comparison, right?

So you might be able to imagine my slowly-mushrooming surprise as I realized that I'd had help from a veritable Justice League of awesome people *just to go to writer-prom*.  The list of superheroes included:

Ensemble, whose supernatural powers of wardrobe selection transformed me into a decent-looking human being

Photo-Finish, who wields business cards like shuriken and designs them too

Frankly Speaking and the Betazoids, who tirelessly heard, read, and critiqued not only my proto-pitch (often multiple times), but the manuscript from whence it came

and the Light of My Life, who heroically held the fort at home all weekend so that I could go off gallivanting.

And it was magical, marvelous, fantastic and enlightening, but having all those people behind me for this new and decidedly extroverted experience kinda made me realize how much I've already been relying on them for the long slog leading up to it: somebody to read my stuff and give me deep feedback on it, somebody to harass me about when the next chapter will be done, somebody who lets me harass *them* about arcane research questions, somebody who helped me through life and school and unemployment so that I could stay fixated on the dream.  Someday I aim to be somebody, but I would be NOBODY without my posse.

So the third and final Great Revelation from this weekend is this: if you're doing it all by yourself, you're probably doing it wrong.

Completely bulletproof - and machine washable, darling. That's a new feature.

DFWCON 2: Lessons

I wussed out of the workshop meet tonight.  I feel dirty, like skipping class to go write the paper.

Anyway, so the marvelous Ms. Vickie Motter has already written a great series about what to do for writers' conferences, the first entry of which is --> here <--  I couldn't top that if I tried, but here while it's still fresh in mind are a few things that I learned this weekend.

Smart Moves

1.  Brutal, unrelenting cheerfulness.  It was easier than I'd expected (cuz I was genuinely having a blast), but it was amazing what a people-magnet the rainbowsparkle attitude turned out to be.

2.  Commentable features.  For me it was my name on the tag (I swear I got a thrill every time somebody hollered "TEX!!!")  For this one fellow I met, it was his immaculate formal suit-jacket, tie, and BRIGHT neon yellow pants.  My hypothesis is that people are more willing to take the plunge and strike up a conversation if you offer them an easy open (such as "good GOD man, your britches are showing up on Google Earth!")  This is probably also good for jogging an agent's memory when you shoot out an e-mail months later.  "Remember me?  I was the one cosplaying Boba Fett..."

3.  Business cards.  You probably already knew that, so bonus tip: if they're just for your writer-life, maybe have a little thumbnail photo of yourself on there, so people can whip it out weeks or months later and say "oh, right!  He's the one writing an 800-page memoir from his cat's point of view."

4.  Agent homework.  No lie, I got insane mileage out of whipping out my shoddily-printed papers and making battle-strategies with other writers who didn't know who they should pitch to.  What really clinched this was having pulled and printed information not found on the agents' websites - such as, for example, this fantastic list of things Agent Sarah LaPolla absolutely does NOT want to hear about even one more time.  When you save somebody $39 and brutal disappointment, you've basically just minted a new friend.

Pointers for Next Time

1.  More agent homework, for exactly the above reason - I only had coverage for the ones in my genre, and really wish I'd taken the time for all of them.  Plus, you never know who knows whom, or who you might end up stuck in an elevator with.

2.  More pitch practice.  Not so much with my core schpiel, but with integrating it with that particular agent's interests.  I fell absolutely flat on my face with one of them, and could have prevented that if I'd really prepped the whole thing instead of trying to hamfistedly mash the two parts together.

3.  Notes RIGHT after I talk to a fabulous new person.  I collected all these super-rad business cards and scribbled contact info, but neglected to write down what we'd talked about.  Now I can't remember which of these two ladies is the Mad Men fan who writes Don/Roger slash-fic, and that's not a thing you want to get mixed up about.

4.  Questions prepared ahead of time!  I did have a couple of generic good ones stashed up my sleeve, but it sucked to walk out of a truly awesome class and only think of a first-rate mission-critical question 20 minutes after the fact.

So there you go, future-me: take these lessons to heart and go forth to ArmadilloCon armed with experience, wisdom, and a surplus of breath mints.  Godspeed.

--So that's the secret?  Hickeys and bananas?
--No, I said she'll GO bananas.