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The wonderful world of conventions

1/10/2021

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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The Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022

9/9/2021

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Once upon a time there was a writer who hated editing. (It's me. The writer is me. Bear with me; this story does have a point.) This writer had a completed novel manuscript that was sorely in need of an edit, and had roped in two excellent friends to provide feedback. Their feedback was insightful, considered, and incredibly helpful, and now that writer faced a new problem: she was going to have to put the feedback into effect. She was going to have to edit the manuscript.

So, she did what anyone would do and procrastinated. The house got very clean, put it that way. And when this writer was finally forced to confront the fact that the novel would not, in fact, edit itself, she decided to game her resistance: she entered the novel, partially edited, into the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair. The competition only required the first 10,000 words, which were complete, and the organisers would ask for the complete MS only if it was selected as a winner. But selection wasn't until December - three full months away. That was ages. Surely, the writer reasoned, surely she would have completed the edits by then?

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The wonderful world of conventions

The Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022

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