Canada's freelance editors sing their anthem at the national convention

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My Schedule at When Words Collide Festival, Calgary, August 11-14, 2016

As mentioned previously, I am one of the Guests of Honour at When Words Collide Festival this year. In contrast to my limited participation at Limestone Genre Convention in Kingston (see previous post) I'm pretty booked at WWC, so thought I'd post my schedule in case any of the topics are of interest, and also to show typical workday of a GoH at writers' conventions.

Note that the Friday AM Masterclass is a 3 hour workshop that requires prior registration and a small fee in addition to membership in the WWC convention; the Five Rivers pitch sessions are free to convention members but require signup for a time slot on first come, first served basis; Festival Guest readings, Book Launches, the autograph session (8-10 Saturday), and the merchant's room are open to the public; all other events are restricted to registered WWC attendees.

1. Thursday Aug 11 Guest Dinner [Private Function for Convention Committee]
2. Thursday 7-9 PM Fish Creek Public Library GoH Readings - Open to Public (2 hours)
3. Friday 9-Noon  How to Work with an Editor (3 hours) [Master Class workshop - requires prior registration & small fee]
4. Friday 1-3 PM Festival Guest Readings (2 Hours) Open to the Public
5. Friday 4 PM   Five Rivers Pitch Session (requires signup)
6. Friday 5 PM    Common Manuscript Problems (panel)
7. Friday 7-9 PM Festival  Guest of Honour Keynotes (2 hours)



8. Saturday 10 AM How to Write a Good Pitch & Query (panel)
9. Saturday 11 AM Five Rivers Pitch Session (requires signup)
10. Saturday 12 PM Live Action Slush - Science Fiction (panel) 
11. Saturday 2 PM  Five Rivers Publishing Presents (Double Book Launch; open to the public)
12. Saturday 3 PM  An Hour with Robert Runté (presentation)
13. Saturday 5 -6:30 PM  Steampunk Banquet (90 minutes)
14. Saturday 6:30-7:30 evening Aurora Awards Ceremony (
15. Saturday 8-10 PM  Private meeting with Essential Edits client (2 hours) [not part of WWC, just part of personal schedule!]
16. Sunday 11 AM   What Makes for Good Non-Fiction (panel)
17. Sunday 12 PM   Five Rivers Pitch Session (requires signup)
18. Sunday 1 PM   Publisher's Panel: Novels (panel)
19. Sunday 2 PM   Live Action Slush - High Fantasy (panel) 
20. Sunday 3 PM   Five Rivers Pitch Session(requires signup)
21. Sunday 4-5 PM  Laksa Media Book Launch (open to the public)

 

So I make that out to be 21 scheduled events for 28 hours over three and a half days. So toss in putting in an appearance at the after hours parties and the usual convention socializing, and that's pretty much full on for the whole convention. Which is as it should be, and pretty much what I would be doing anyway if I were not a GoH, because I love all this stuff.

Limestone Genre Convention (Kingston)

Because I'm based in Ontario for the next six months or so, I was able to attend Limestone Genre Convention in Kingston this year. A newer, smaller convention, it was quite the change for me because I was only on a single program item (a pitch session for Five Rivers) and I only knew half a dozen people there. Which turned out to be great because it forced me to meet new people and to listen to people I hadn't heard before on panels, rather than me being the one who was pontificating. (Well, okay, I couldn't totally resist pontificating anyway, so 'contributed' from the audience whenever they asked for questions from the floor, but mostly the structure and moderators were able to restrain me.) So as a consequence, I learned a lot! Listening will do that!

As is often the case, smaller convention translated out to 'more intimate' and I was able to actually meet and talk at length with a number of people I had never encountered before or only corresponded with through email. This was great, because I discovered a number of self-published Canadian authors I hadn't know existed, and who turned out to be fabulous. For example, I was totally impressed by Jen Frankel who in turn insisted I go hear Kit Daven's reading, whose books I had bought on Kindle before she even finished her reading. I've met Suzanne Church before, but always a pleasure to see her in action, and Marie Bilodeau did a great performance, and Derek Kunsken was fabulous moderator on his panel and Derek Newman-Stille was as insightful as ever, and on and on with so many great people. Brandon Crilly and Ira Nayman were people I knew but never met. So many great conversations, and new authors for me to read.

The pitch session for Five Rivers went well, introducing me to many local authors who were not normally in my catchment area. A couple of promising things there.

I really enjoyed the panels and learned a lot, again because I was hearing opinions from people I don't usually hear at conventions out West and a lot of what they were saying was new to me. After going to some of the same conventions for 40 years, I've heard a lot of the same people over and over and pretty much know what they are going to say before they say it, but that was definitely not the case for me here. And sitting in the audience instead of on the panels, I interacted a lot more with my fellow attendees and particularly with younger writers. I got to ask these youngens a lot of questions about their writing and publishing and --that whole listening instead of pontificating thing--learned a lot. I like to think I'm on top of trends, but um, instead of following what is happening, I think I got a glimpse into what is coming down the road for the future as I heard very different attitudes from a lot of these kids than I'm used to with the people I usually work with. Brave new world / exciting times if half of what I was hearing reflects widespread attitudes among the next generation of writers.

Of particular revelation was the panel on fanfiction. Look, I have my copy of Mirror Mirror (probably the first piece of modern fan fiction) and my daughter is big into Victor Hugo fan fiction, and I've been working on a paper on Lynda Williams and her encouragement of fan fiction in her universe, so I thought I knew a little about the topic, but oh my god was I out of touch with current trends. So exciting! So hopeful about the future of writing. (Hey listen, my day job teaching in the Education Faculty to students who no longer read has been incredibly depressing--I mean, if your kid's English teacher doesn't read for pleasure, let alone write or publish, what the hell hope do we have? So re-discovering the world of fanfic on the scale it now exists, hell yes, I'm excited!)

So hat off to Liz Stranger and her crew for organizing a great convention. Well worth attending for anyone within range next year.

Editor Guest of Honour at When Words Collide / Canvention 36

I am deeply honoured to have been chosen as the Editor Guest of Honour for the When Words Collide Festival (Calgary), August 12-14, 2016; which is also that year's Canvention, the Canadian national SF&F convention at which the Aurora Awards are presented. Previous Editor GoHs at WWC have included Adrien Kerr (Editor of Commercial Fiction at Penguin Canada) and super literary agent, Sally Harding, so I feel I am in very distinguished company.

I have been Fan GoH at various conventions back in the 1980s and 90s, culminating in Fan Guest of Honour at the Worldcon, but this is the first time I've been invited as a pro Guest, so that's pretty special to me. I had always dreamed of being a pro GoH, though back in the 80s I assumed that it would be as a writer, not an editor. (But apparently, you have to actually finish your novel to qualify as an author guest.... as I have admitted many times, editing a novel is a lot easier than writing one.)

I find it fascinating how many of the fans I did zines with back in the 80s have subsequently gone on to become pros. We were just kind of goofing around, but I can count four with published novels, two who became editors, and one who became a prominent book designer. I can't help wondering if Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr will produce the same % of next generation authors....

Anyway, excited but a little intimidated by the opportunity--Sally Harding's GoH speech at this year's WWC was wonderful: funny, insightful, and uplifting. Tough act to follow!

I'll do my best.

The Life of An Editor

So...my 11 year-old is having trouble getting to sleep one night, so I offer to sit with her until she is asleep. I bring my computer so I won't be bored and so she can't talk to me when she should be trying to get to sleep. And I'm doing my email, because that's the sort of not-having-to-concentrate work you do when you're in a dark room waiting for your 11 year-old to finally fall asleep, when I get an email from horror writer JW Schnarr...which I open to see this:

...which not something you want your 11 year-old to see last thing before she goes to sleep, particularly since you're there because of the potential monsters under the bed. I yank the computer screen to face the other way before she sees it, and of course that motion causes her to sit up and ask what is wrong and etc., and I'm trying to think of how to explain why there is a man eating a leg on my computer screen, when I realize she has a sleep mask on and couldn't have seen anything anyway.

Phew.

I calm her down again, and then turn to replying to Schnarr's email. My problem is, I had asked Schnarr to send me a photo for a poster I was doing for Five Rivers Publishing featuring a number of authors, Schnarr included, because he had objected to my using this photo:

Now, I had assumed he vetoed this one because it was too aggressive, particularly in a poster featuring the smiling, approachable head-and-shoulder photos of the other authors. But apparently I was completely wrong, and he had objected because it was too tame. I forgot that horror writers do not see the world quite like you or I.

So, I wrote back saying that he had perhaps misunderstood the purpose of the poster, which was to help attendees at the When Words Collide Festival recognize Five River authors to make them more approachable, and not, as he apparently believed, a wanted poster to scare people away. I further explained that sending me such photos as I sat with my afraid-of-the-dark 11 year-old was counter-productive, vis-a-vis getting her to sleep. To which he replied:

Definitely not "calm down and go to sleep, there are no monsters" material.

My daughter was brought up on a slightly different strategy. The "Yes there are monsters, and they are hiding under your bed waiting for you to get up or make some noise, so they can drag you away into the darkness..." strategy.

Worked like a charm! My kid NEVER got out of bed!

Did I mention horror writers see things very differently?

I should clarify that Schnarr is in reality one of the nicest guys I ever met, and I've met his daughter who seems a well-adjusted, creative teenager.

JW Schnarr will be at When Words Collide Festival, Calgary, August 14-16, 2015, along with six other Five Rivers Publishing authors and two 5R staff.

When Words Collide Festival, 2014

Once again, I really enjoyed When Words Collide writers/readers convention. I always love the convention itself, but this year I also took in the pre-conference workshops. The first day-long workshop was presented by Adrienne Kerr (Senior Editor at Penguin Canada) followed the next day by two half-day workshops by Mark Leslie Lefebvre (Director of Self-Publishing and Author Relations at Kobo). Both sets of workshops were insider looks at the publishing industry. What I absolutely could not believe was that the workshops were only $40 a day, for speakers that could easily command ten times that much. Randy McCharles and the WWC Board are committed to keeping things affordable for writers, so only charged enough to cover the costs of the conference space for the workshops and the hotel expenses for the speakers; both speakers donated their workshops for free. Hats off to everyone concerned!

At a break in Adrienne Kerr's (Senior Acquisition Editor, Commercial Fiction, Penguin Canada) day-long workshop at When Words Collide Festival, Calgary, Aug, 2014. L to R: Ron Freidman, Calgary SF author; Connie Penner, Lethbridge author who recently signed with Five Rivers; editor and author Elizabeth McLachlan; Robert Runté; Five Rivers author Susan Forest; Canadian SF author Robert Sawyer; and WWC convention chair, Randy McCharles.

The actual convention was similarly affordable and wonderful. I was on a bunch of panels, ran a blue pencil workshop, a Five Rivers pitch session (the convention is one of the few places we look at submissions outside our Feb reading period), was one of four judges for the Robyn Herrington Memorial Short Story Contest; and Five Rivers held a seven-book launch Sunday afternoon. So a full working weekend for me, but a very rewarding one.

One sign of how productive WWC has been for me over the years is that one of the books launched at the Five Rivers launch session this year was "My Life as a Troll", first pitched to me at the very first WWC.

I also enjoyed the keynote speakers and their various presentations. Most impressive was Brandon Sanderson. I frankly had no idea who he was prior to WWC, but I sat with him on the first panel of the convention and I thought, "Hey, this guy is really good! I'm going to have to look up this guy's books." Well, he just seemed like a regular guy; if anything, a bit nicer than usual, the sort of guy you'd really like as a neighbour. No pretensions at all. And then I heard him talk, and well, he'd be a totally awesome neighbour. Am definitely going to have to pay more attention to his books, if his public speaking is any indication of his talent.

I also had opportunity to hang with some of the Five River authors, author/editor friends from across the West, and so on. What makes WWC better than most other similar conventions is the cross-genre nature of the programming. I met so many other interesting writers, including for example, Sarah Kades, a romance writer who I would never have encountered in my normal work week since Romance is one of the genres neither Five Rivers nor I take on. What a positive, upbeat person: she actually convinced me to take a copy of her novel. And similarly, I connected with a bunch of mystery writers (great for Five Rivers new mystery line) and a couple of CanLit people...just marvelous networking opportunities at every turn.

I've already registered for next year, though the dates may conflict with a family obligation that would take priority. Well, the $45 advance membership is worth the risk because the convention sold out well ahead this year, and is likely to again next year in spite of its again moving to a larger venue. I will certainly go if I have any opportunity to do so.

Next up: I'm planning on going to V-Con (Vancouver) in October, the gods willing.

When Words Collide, Aug 8-10, 2014

I will be going to When Words Collide in Calgary again this August. I'll post my schedule at the convention closer to the dates when times have been confirmed, but it looks like I'll be doing close to 10 sessions. Key among those will be the Book Social for Five Rivers Publishing (in my other hat as 5R Senior Editor) where we will be launching all six of Five River's spring releases.

I will also be doing a 'pitch' session where people can pitch their books to Five Rivers, and I'll provide feedback on how to improve their pitch, in addition to screening for manuscripts 5R might be interested in. Interestingly, one of the books being launched at WWC this year is indeed a book that was pitched to me three years ago at the first WWC.

I highly recommend When Words Collide to any writer (or serious readers) who can get there -- I consider it the finest writers convention in Western Canada, certainly the best for anyone working in commercial genres of SF/Fantasy, Romance, Mystery, etc., but even poetry, canlit and screen plays have been well represented in the past.

Canadian Unity Fan Fund

Canvention is the annual Canadian national SF conference at which the Aurora Awards are presented. It rotates between Eastern and Western Canada. This year, Canvention is in Calgary as part of the When Words Collide convention.

Each year the Canadian Unity Fan Fund helps fund a Canadian fan from the East attend Canventions in the West, or a fan from the West attend a Canvention in the East. The idea is to allow prominent fans from one side of the country to meet their counterparts on the other. Nominations are now open. For details, see https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=325990394106217.

I haven't been actively involved in years, having turned pro, but I think I will take an interest this year as I intend to be at Canvention/When Words Collide this year. I have a few ideas about who I'd like to nominate....fans active in promoting Canadian SF.

When Worlds Collide

The When Worlds Collide Festival in Calgary this past weekend was a magnificent success, the best SF convention since Context'91. I participated on seven panels/readings/workshops, to apparently positive reviews. I found three new Alberta small presses I hadn't been aware of before; got to meet half a dozen authors (most notably Krista Ball, Susan Forest and Michell Plested) with whom I have corresponded but not previously met in person; got to rave at Minister Faust who've I met before but haven't seen since he turned professional writer; made a couple of deals for SFeditor.ca freelance work; spent an evening with a Five River's author I am currently editing -- very productive working supper!; raised the possibility of Five River publishing their work with a couple of promising authors; had another half dozen authors pitch their work to Five Rivers, one of whom I actually said yes to her sending a submission. Got to hear dozens of readings by top authors-- again, highlights were Susan Forest's brilliant comedic short story, Bob Stallworthy's poetry and Susan MacGregor's novel excerpt. (I would love to get my hands on MacGregor's novel, but she is already in the process of signing elsewhere.) Was able to take in a couple of other panels on topics I was actually interested in -- in contrast to most other conventions where panels are either on topics that don't interest me, or topics I've been speaking on for last 30 years, so kind of bored with. Writer/editor/publisher- oriented topics here of actual relevance.

My only regret was that I didn't get a chance to really sit down with Robert Sawyer, our paths always crossing as one or other of us was on a way to do a talk; and some other authors I see in various facebook references were apparently there but I didn't run into or perhaps didn't recognize. But then there is always next year...

If this year's event was any indication, I highly recommend next year's WWC Festival to any writers (or serious minded readers) as a great venue to meet/do deals with editors and publishers, to find out what is happening in the field, and to take in some great workshops/panels etc.

When Words Collide

I'm planning on attending the When Words Collide convention in Calgary next weekend.(August 12-14) Still recovering from surgery last week, but pretty sure I'll be able to get around in another week. It's a new convention, but it is being mounted by a reputable team, and the concept -- a con for genre writers and editors -- is deeply appealing. If anyone else is going, hope to see you there.

When Words Collide - A Calgary Reader Con

Looks like a new reader/writer oriented SF convention is being organized in Calgary. Might be worth checking out: When Words Collide".