Over the New Year, I heard that Anthocon would not be held this year and I was deeply disappointed. I attended it last year, my first writer’s convention, and until I had, I didn’t understand just how rich and important the convention experience would be. Here are the reasons it was important to me and why it might be one of the best investments you can make in your writing.
People.
It is easy to sit and scribble away for hours every morning, submit your work to a gazillion magazines through automated feeds, and perhaps sharing your work with a small local group of fellow travelers, without fully coming to terms with how much this whole business of writing is about people.
At a convention, you can’t miss it. You converse with other writers – screenwriters, poets, writers of mysteries, horror, fantasy, children’s books, with publishers, with agents, with illustrators. You get to be a fly on the wall listening to stories told by people with a lot of experience, and, most importantly, you get to observe people who’ve been in the game for a long time interacting with each other. It will immediately become clear to you that the publishing world is a community. That epiphany changed everything for me.
Lesson: Participate in community
Attitude
What’s your attitude toward your writing? Toward other writers in your medium? Toward writers in other media? Publishers? Agents? You’re a storyteller. What stories have you told yourself? There’s nothing like meeting living, breathing people in those jobs to rewrite those stories, especially when it turns out they’re mostly like you, trying to figure out how to capture a piece of the public attention with some really cool ideas.
It was truly encouraging to see how much most of everybody wants most of everybody to succeed, even when submitting to the same places. The “most of” comes from what happens if someone starts shafting people. Some of the most interesting stories you hear are about creative people applying karma. 🙂
Lesson: Be generous, be kind, and don’t be a d*ck.
Contacts
I met some individuals at the convention that I have kept connection to since, either through Twitter or email.
I had to tweet E.J. Stevens after I’d picked up a couple of her books at the vendors room – and then proceeded over the next several months to devour the Nook versions of everything she’s ever written. Her talk at the panel discussion on writers platform was really helpful, too, when I started on mine.
Other writers I read a bunch of as a result were M.R. Tighe, Jeff O’Brien, and E. Catherine Tobler. I suspect that most of the people I kept contact with I was able to do so because I bought their book, which had their name on it. 🙂
Lesson: Remember people’s names
Information
There are a lot of people out there that have learned a lot, some of it the hard way. You will learn something from every session, whether it is a panel, a presentation, or a set of readings. You will learn a lot that you can use from the right sessions.
Lesson: Go, sit, listen, remember
Yes, go!
Unfortunately, I won’t be at Anthocon this year. Fortunately, there is a writer’s side to most genre readers conferences. Based on my experience at Anthocon, I’ll make it a point to attend one or two conferences every year, now.
See you all at Boscone in February. 🙂
