New Classes, and Conference Time

I'm happy to report I'll be starting a new session of Continuing Ed classes on Monday nights, in addition to my faithful Saturday Continuing Ed class. Everybody's happily working away on novels of various genres. It's an exciting time, new novelists everywhere!

Also, it's the season when writing conferences (at least on the East coast), begin busting out all over. I'm heading to Delaware tomorrow for the Writers at the Beach Conference, and am planning to hit Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace in Boston at the end of April, as well as the Connecticut Authors and Publishers conference in Hartford in May. You might be thinking, sheesh, when does this woman ever get any writing in, between teaching writing and going to conferences? The answer is, usually in hours, or half hours, or even fifteen minuteses of time between other stuff. Really, I do have scheduled writing time every day, often luxuriating in hours of it, but, like most people, I sometimes end up just fitting it in. That seems to be inevitable, and I'm here to say, that's OK. It works. As I am fond of saying in classes, if you only write a page a day, at the end of a year you'll have 365 pages. That's a book. So, strive for a page a day, and you'll get somewhere.

As to the importance of conferences:they are great places to network with other writers, as well as agents and publishers. You can learn about your craft, and the increasingly important subject of marketing. Pitching your book after it's written arguably requires just as many skills as writing the damn thing in the first place, and they are very different skills. So it behooves us all to learn about them. And conferences are also places just to get recharged and excited about writing again. So if you have an opportunity to go to one (or two or three), just do it!