Should You? When to Con

Do you have a completed manuscript? Go to an RWA sponsored convention. It need not be National, though if you're a member of the organization, you should do that at least once in your life. The point is to put yourself in the same room as the editors buying books and into the same room as the agents who might represent the type of book you wrote. Several RWA chapters put up conventions. Check to find out whether there might be one close by. Then avail yourself of every workshop and learning opportunity you can. Also, there may be costume parties.

It was at RWA conferences that I learned the difference between internal and external conflict. It's where I learned I wasn't a plotter and that there was no faster way to take the joy out of writing than to attempt to be a plotter. I found mentors. Above all, and best of all, I made great friends at conferences. My sharpest critique group is made up of women I met at conferences. The first request I ever had for a partial happened at a local conference. An editor asked for the first three chapters. And when she rejected them, she kindly gave me some insight as to why. The first person to request a full manuscript was an agent I'd met at a conference. (She rejected the book and also gave me some feedback - something she wasn't obligated at all to do and which I appreciated enormously.) So, yes. Cons. 100% worth the time, effort and introvert dread - IF when someone requests pages, you actually SEND them.

However, all that said, I didn't find an agent at a conference. I did that by spamming every agent on the RWA agent list who even intimated he or she might read science fiction. There were nine. One of them read my sample pages, requested the full, read it over Easter weekend, and called me Monday morning. When my first book sold, it sold to an editor I'd never met. (Though later I did get to meet her in person - at a con.) Point being that if you cannot get to a convention, don't stress it. Makes no difference to the people who'll rep and/or buy your book. Do I think I got my work into shape faster because of cons and the workshops? Yes. But if you're taking workshops, trying new things in your writing, getting feedback on your work, and doing your damnedest to incorporate the feedback that makes sense to you? You're in good shape, don't sweat the conference.

Is there a time I'll urge you to pull every stop and get your butt to a conference come hell or high water?

There is. Once you're published, if you final in the RITA, go to National. Don't care what it takes. When I was lucky enough to final, it was the summer my husband and I were sailing the Inside Passage for five months. We were headed north into unbroken wilderness. I say unbroken wilderness and I mean 'no airport for hundreds and hundreds of miles'. To get me to the conference that year, we turned around so I could fly to NYC. Where I won absolutely nothing. But where I had the time of my life. If you final in the major contest for your genre, you are a princess (or a prince) for the duration of the conference where the winners are announced. People will see your finalist pin and ribbon and whether they know you or not, will ask for the story of how the book got published and what happened when you found out it was a finalist. Your editor and your agent, if you have one, will likely be at that conference. You'll sit with them at the finalists table at the awards banquet. You get nifty little 'finalist' flags for your spot at the great big book signing. Just for the number of people I got to meet and talk to - I will never regret interrupting the trip of a lifetime for the conference of a lifetime. Maybe my husband, who was trapped in Victoria Harbor for Canada Day and fireworks regrets it a tiny little bit, but he was also three blocks from his favorite chocolate store in the whole wide world. He doesn't seem to hold much of a grudge. :D

Tainting Sci Fi and Fantasy with Girl Cooties

I've just dragged myself home from the RWA National Convention, where I participated in the gigantic literacy signing benefit for the first time.

Yes, it was fabulous.

And, yes, I'm exhausted.

But RWA - Romance Writers of America - is my home territory. This was my fifth year going and I've been heavily involved in my special interest and local chapters. Plus, it's pretty much all girls. There's a few guys here and there, but functionally it's 2,000 women involved in some branch of romance writing and publishing.

It's really the only thing I do that's like this. Maybe it's akin to the old sorority days, but this is better because it's so profession and career-focused. They are my tribe.

In November, I plan to go to World Fantasy Con, which will not be like this. In fact, my smart friend advised me not to go. "They're not your audience," she told me. And then she told me several stories about female authors being harassed at the more hard core science fiction and fantasy conventions. I thought about this and decided that they won't be my audience if they never meet me.

I'm a little nervous though.

It reminds me of the old Dennis the Menace joke - the clubhouse with the "No Girls Allowed" sign. My feelings date back to my own childhood. That awful phase we all went through, when the boys decided that all girls had cooties (an indefinable, icky, yet dreadfully contagious thing) and that we were something to be disdained.

(Much later in life I discovered that "cooties" actually referred to head lice, but we never knew this as children. Nobody could ever tell me what a cootie was.)

I know there's lots of psychology behind this. The boys were distancing themselves from their mothers and moving into the world of men. They needed to create distance to cement their developing masculinity. But I also recall my teachers telling us about studies showing that, while girls could see themselves as boys, boys could not see themselves as girls.

The message was quite clear that being a girl just wasn't as good.

But hey - we all grew up, right? The boys rediscovered the girls and all the lovely thrill and magic of blending ourselves. And it turned out that some of the boys wanted to be girls enough to have operations to get there. Nothing was so black and white.

Still, there remains a contingent of boys who seem to be guarding the ever more rickety clubhouse. They don't want girls writing SFF and getting all that sticky, kissy shit in it. Except for maybe the Ginas, who don't act like real girls anyway. It's more okay if a girl author writes kick-ass stuff. But if we're the Margarets, starry eyed over love and romance? We are emphatically sent home, with ridicule chasing us down the street.

It's significant, I think, that I'm using an analogy that dates back to 1952. The world has changed a great deal since then. Change, however, happens in fits and starts, with little backwater stagnant pools that get left behind. Eventually those pools dry up. Or get washed into the fast-moving water of the greater flow.

Last night, a Carina Press book won RWA's RITA award. This is RWA's version of the Oscars and this marks the first time a digital press has won the award. (Another epress, Avon Impulse, also had an award winner.)

The world turns and times change.

I first read that line in Anne McCaffrey's book Dragonflight, one of the seminal SFF books, series and authors out. The line is a recurring theme and it became part of my frame of reference.

We aren't kids on the playground anymore. No one has cooties.

And the clubhouse is big enough for everyone.

Pantser or Plotter or...

My post it a little late this morning because the calls for Golden Heart and Rita finalists went out this morning. After the butterflies and angst over whether Enemy Within was good enough or not good enough, the phone rang once at 8:02 and then again at 8:09. :)  The book finaled in Best First book and in Paranormal. I'm still shaking. Now, however, I'm supposed to think clearly and work.

My answer to the panster or plotter question is: yes. I do an odd amalgamation of the two. There's another question that I have to ask in order to explain what I do. Are you a character driven or plot driven writer? If you're plot driven, what happens in your story defines who your characters are. If you're a character driven writer, who your characters are defines what happens in your story. I totally made those definitions up. But it really is how I think about story. I'm distinctly a character driven writer and up until the start of Enemy Within, I was 100% pantser. Which is to say, I had no clue where a book was going or why. I knew where it began and I know vaguely how I wanted it to end, but everything in the middle was a mystery. The result was a series of events that happened to my characters simply because I said so, or because I thought 'hey, this would be cool'.

Not a one of those books is publishable, much less published. By coincidence, just as I began Enemy Within, I took a Break Into Fiction workshop given by Mary Buckham. That's where I realized how very character driven I am and how desperately my storylines need to come from the strengths and failings of my characters.

So. I'm a plotter in that there's a huge set of templates (directly from Break Into Fiction) I work through for both hero and heroine before I can start writing. This puts me directly into their conflict and dilemma set. I have a good grasp of their emotional start points and of the arc necessary for each of them if they are to achieve their HEA. That, then, leads to situations and scenes that must occur to challenge the pair. But you'll note there's no actual plotting happening. That's because like several of my fellow Word Whores have already said, if I know too much about what happens, why should I write the book?

On the other hand, I can't know too much about the characters. The more I know, the better the book becomes. The more I know my hero and heroine, the better the chances that they'll start running scenes in my head without any input from me. Usually at night. As I'm trying to get to sleep. That's when I know a book has taken on a life of it's own. When it begins spontaneously generating, the characters and their story have begun living and breathing in spite of me. But I still don't know what's going to happen. I do sometimes wish I could be a plotter. I'd like to be a faster writer. This driving off into the fog thing isn't the most productive method around and I have a twisted desire to be insanely prolific.

So there you go. Panster? Yep. Plotter? Kinda - from a character arc standpoint. But now, to accommodate my wish to be prolific, it's time to go to work.