The wonderful world of conventions

I’m not one of nature’s extroverts. I became a writer, for heaven’s sake. My daily routine involves plenty of human interaction; it’s just that the humans with whom I’m interacting are people that I’ve made up and they tend to behave in ways that I, at least, find predictable. (Not always, but that’s another story.) I’m much more comfortable with the written word than I am with the spoken, and I tend to bravely run away from large-scale gatherings where I’m going to be expected to interact with other people. Not conventions, though. I make an exception for conventions. Conventions are great.

They’re also a fantastic resource for emerging science fiction authors. Quite apart from the fact that you’re surrounded by your target readership, you also have access — albeit slightly limited — to some of the folks whose careers you’d dearly love to emulate. Okay, you’re not going to be bumping into Stephen King in the queue for coffee, but you’re going to have the chance to listen to successful SFF authors speak about speculative fiction and the things that matter to speculative fiction, and you’re going to get to ask them questions when they’re finished. My first SFF convention was TitanCon in Belfast — which will forever hold a special place in my heart — and I sat in on a panel in which the then-debut author Leigh Bardugo talked about her novel Shadow And Bone. Her agent was with her, a woman whose name I didn’t know at the time, but you’d best believe I know it now: Joanna Volpe, an extremely high-powered literary agent who has basically sold all the books and whose authors tend to go stratospheric. I got to ask these two women questions about their process. Where else would I get a chance like that?

At OctoCon 2018 with my friend and long-time CinePunked collaborator Robert JE Simpson. 

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