Writers in the Storm

by Jenny Hansen

Romance Writers of America®
32nd Annual Conference
Anaheim Marriott®
July 25-28, 2012

All of us at Writers In The Storm live right here in Southern California, which makes this year's RWA conference a bit more exciting than most for us. For once, we're locals.

This means we know where everything is, and if we have to, we can run home to get that thing-gadget-whatchamajig that we forgot. This week's posts are about sharing the wealth with all of you.

Whether you're coming to the conference, traveling to Orange County or are just plain curious, we hope you'll tune in for the next few posts.

To start with a bit of background, it's conference season in the writing world. Romance Writers of America is about to do their yearly event in "The Happiest Place on Earth": Anaheim...home of Disneyland.

Some of us are going to the RWA-Women's Fiction Chapter Mini-Conference on Wednesday, July 25th. Some of us are going to RWA's National Conference that runs from July 25-28th. As the president of the Women's Fiction chapter, our own Laura Drake is going to both.

Recommended "to do" list before you leave for Conference:

• Review Kate Noble's kickass packing list from last year's conference. She did a great job! Plus, anything you'd need in New York last July, you'll need in Anaheim, along with more sunscreen.
• If you haven't found the #RWA12 hashtag on Twitter, go set up your TweetDeck/Hootsuite column now, or save it into your phone. Laura tuned into the hashtag last week and found this great link on all the local sit-down restaurants in walking distance from the conference hotel.
• Note: Without the above hashtag and Google, how else would we have known to hit the local Trader Joe's/Fresh & Easy/Mother's Market for snacks on the way (because there is almost no inexpensive food around the hotel)?
• Although RWA is serving gluten free options  for their meals, I highly recommend you bring snacks if you have any food issues. I have house guests for this conference and we'll be hitting the stores I've linked to above for gluten free and dairy free options.
• I Googled the conference hotel myself just to make sure and there are  coffee locations nearby. There's a Starbucks inside the lobby of both the Hilton and the Marriott  (they both close by 7:30-8 pm). However, because I have experience with the lines at these in-hotel coffee locations, I'll be bringing my own electric kettle and Starbucks VIA packets for the peak periods. I'll also be bringing my own gluten free oatmeal for an easy breakfast.
• Inexpensive food alert: Inside the Hilton complex at 777 Convention way is a Baja Fresh. (We're staying at this Hilton, which sits across the driveway from the Marriott.) That Baja Fresh was a big deal to me since they have lots of GF items and aren't a pricy sit-down meal. Here's a link to the Baja Fresh Online Ordering for those of you who have iPads and Smartphones and are short on time.

Last but not least, I recommend that you save some room in your suitcase for books and cool stuff. There's always a lot of extras  that make their way home with you from a conference. Why deny yourself these things, especially if you don't get to conferences often? Those goody rooms are like crack.

Speaking of all that extra stuff...

The hotels often have outrageous shipping prices during these events so, if you simply can't pack an extra bag inside your suitcase, you will want to have a "shipping plan." There is a UPS store in the lobby of the Hilton at 777 Convention Way. It's only open from 9 am to 5 pm over the weekend, so plan accordingly.

Note: The next closest option is Postal Planet a mile and a half from the conference hotel. Their hours don't compare to the UPS store (closed Sunday, 10 am-3 pm on Saturday). If it were me, I'd use UPS.

The next post in this series will address "Where the Locals Go." You might want to look around or rent a car for a few days while you're in Southern California so we've made a list of our favorite hang-outs.

Did I leave out anything important? Do you have other questions, or conference tips to share? Do any of the Anaheim residents have specific recommendations? We'd love to hear about it!

Jenny

About Jenny Hansen

Jenny fills her nights with humor: writing memoir, women’s fiction, chick lit, short stories (and chasing after her toddler Baby Girl). By day, she provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. After 15 years as a corporate software trainer, she’s digging this sit down and write thing.

When she’s not at her blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter at jhansenwrites or here at Writers In The Storm. Every Saturday, she writes the Risky Baby Business posts at More Cowbell, a series that focuses on babies, new parents and high-risk pregnancy.

Writers in the Storm welcomes James R. Preston, mystery writer, for our Friday the 13th blog. Could be scary stuff, but personally, I think James is part comedy writer, and we couldn't be luckier to have his help with a question we've all wrestled with.

Slicing the Salami
Or, "When is It Done?"

by James R. Preston

Warning! Problems with this essay!  SPOILER ALERT!  (Okay the last part isn't really true, but it got your attention, didn't it?)

Today I come to you with more questions than answers.  My hope is that together we can kick around some issues I consider important.

First, I want to say thanks for having me back.  I have been immersed in the last draft of my new mystery and have done very little else for the last few weeks (Months?  Can that be right? Novels are a lot of work.)  Fortunately for me it's work I love -- as it is for you.

And there's the problem.

At some point we all have to say goodbye to characters we care about.  One more rewrite will make Kandi (heroine in my mysteries) funnier, smarter, tougher, and so on.

That's true -- but I have people who are kind enough to write me weekly asking when the next book will be out.  (Warning for when you find yourself in this position: as time passes the emails become less friendly and more uh, insistent.). So you have to finish.  But the question is -- when is it really done?

For most of my career I led teams of writers developing books and electronic media about fascinating things like the Tactical Computer Terminal.  It never failed that when a deadline rolled around one of my writers would come to me and ask for more time, usually to resolve a technical issue.  That way lies madness in the technical world.  In the world of fiction it leads not only to madness, but also to no book, and as we all know, that's worse.  More often than not I told those eager young writers, "It's time to slice the salami.  It's good enough."

But for your stories you won't have me babbling to you about sausages, so you will have to decide. The approaches to making the decision divide pretty neatly into  three categories.  External -- you have a contract and an editor and a delivery date that drives your work.  Internal -- you just know it's over.  And finally, internal number two -- you're just sick of it.

Hopefully, you will avoid the last one.

My advice for Option Two is to keep track of changes.  When you wake up at 2:00 in the morning and think, "Wow I should . . ." first look back at your notes.  If that "wow" is something you have thought of before and rejected, it's time to stick that proverbial fork in it.

Ah, but now we are in the electronic age, and now the game has changed.  A work doesn't ever have to be done.  There is a story that Spielberg edited out the FBI's guns in one scene of ET, replacing the weapons with walkie-talkies so the kids would not be threatened.  The original Star Wars has been altered so that it's Greedo who shoots first, making Han Solo a nicer guy.  The list goes on, and it's not just films.

Most of us, myself included, think of a piece of writing as first an idea, then a project, and then a product.  Something frozen in amber, like the first moment you heard a Beatles song.  It's not like that anymore.

Lately writers have begun to refer to novels as "living, breathing documents."  Whoa, what a concept!  Harlan Ellison revises stories when they are reprinted.  F. Paul Wilson has said that he is "heavily revising" Nightworld, one of his Adversary Cycle books.  Wilson wrote Nightworld  years ago and the rest of the series was written out of chronological  order; the changes will blend it with the rest of the series.

So, Gentle Writer, you find yourself at Door Number Three (sick of it).  Publish the nasty thing, and a month or a year later you can come back and change the end.  ET doesn't phone home;  he moves to Vegas and gets a job as a Chippendale's dancer.  The question is, of course, should you?  Is it fair to your readers?

For me this is not a rhetorical question.  I have been asked to post some of my early science fiction stories on my website.  Do I revise them, based on decades of life experience and writing?  Truthfully I haven't decided.

Enough with the questions; here are some answers.   Here's what I think about these interrelated issues.

First, you really do have to finish.  Now, however, you must also define "finish" even if that definition only exists in your own mind.  That definition can range from, "Good enough for now," to "Let's see what the response is."  It may be, "Done.  Forever."

Second, if you decide to make edits you will have to decide what kind of edits, and when (how often) you will make them.  Will you make major plot changes?  If you do, and your email shows everybody hates it, will you change it back?  If memory serves, there was once a novel called Naked Came the Stranger that was written by committee.  If memory serves, it sucked.

Finally, is a revised novel fair to readers who invested the time to read the first version?  I say yes, if the book the first time around was as good as you could make it and if you carefully label the revised version.  Stephen King handled this problem well when he brought out the revised version of The Stand.

You are in charge.  As a writer it is your job to decide what happens in your story.  Once it's out there, leave it alone.

You are in charge.  As a writer it is your job to make the story the best you can.  If you get an email saying, "Your heroine was blonde in Chapter One and a redhead in Chapter 23," and you have the opportunity to fix it, you should.

You are the writer.  You are in charge.  The knife is in your hand, nobody else's.  Only you know when to make that cut.

Spoiler Alert (fooled you, didn't I? There really is a spoiler.). Here's what I might talk about next.

***If I get the chance, next up is Little Nell is Dead!  Or, Why What We Do is Important.

 I hope this has helped you a bit with these questions and I look forward to hearing what you have to say.  I know writing this has helped me to articulate issues.  I know that because I must say, "Goodbye, Kandi."

How do you know when your Work in Progress is ready to send off?

James R. Preston is the award-winning author of the Surf City Mysteries, the most recent of which is Pennies For Her Eyes.  It will be available in October.  James promises that if you don't like this essay on the mutability of modern documents, he will change it until you do.

By Sharla Rae

Just my opinion but The old gray RWA Conference ain’t what she used to be. And I hope she keeps up the good work!

At first glance the 2012 RWA Conference may look pretty much as it has in the past. It is and it isn’t. And no, I’m not touting something I had a hand in. I am merely making an observation as an RWA member.

I’m not just talking about workshops that never would have happened a few years ago. I’m also seeing a new attitude.  

As late as two years ago we were still hearing nasty remarks from traditional publishers, agents, and authors that referred to self-published and indie authors as hacks who lacked the talent to publish with a legitimate publisher. OUCH!

E-book workshops barely existed at the national conference and in fact, among the powers that be, many predicted that e-readers (Kindle etc.) were a fad and that readers would lose interest in the badly written and horribly edited books.

A cautious mama, RWA was reluctant to credit authors not published with traditional publishing. I don’t doubt everyone was talking about e-publishing at the conferences the past few years, but, there seemed a sad shortage of workshops on the subject. Cautious Mama doesn’t give approval easily and in fact seemed to remain caught in the claws of the old ways.

But in the end, cautious mama did what all good mothers do. She rolled her eyes, heaved a sigh, then stood back and observed with the eye of a hawk. Never mind that some of us were gnashing our teeth with impatience. Finally, mama jumped on the E-train -- with caveats, of course.

And there was more teeth gnashing.

This year’s conference, however, already promises great strides for writers. For the first time in years, I’m excited! It won’t be the same ol’ same ol’. I’m seeinglots of how-to workshops on indie publishing and author media marketing. Of course, the online media how-tos can be just as effective for traditionally published books so either way it’s a win.

I especially like the idea that these workshops are happening in a Mama-sanctioned setting because, while I’m often impatient with her, I do trust her.

As a result of these changes of attitude, I think we’ll see at least a “slight change” from the Traditional publishers attending conference. No, I don’t expect to be wowed. Don’t get me wrong, my books were published by traditional publishers.

But!

Traditionals went into e-publishing kicking and screaming with the almighty dollar winning out. Perhaps it’s like the old saying, if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em.

Right now, they seem to be scrambling to figure out how to maintain their title of King Of The Hill. What can I say? It’s business.

Still, I relish hearing what they have to say at conference this year! Maybe I’ll like it. Maybe I won’t. But I think they have to discuss the elephant in the room.  After all, we’ve got choices we didn’t have before. While traditionals still teeter on the mountain top they are no longer the be all, end all. That’s got to bring on some change.

And what about literary agents? Some are scrambling to reinvent themselves. Mega blogs have discussed the ethicality and now that RWA has embraced e-publishing, I'm sure we’ll hear more – the good side and the bad.  Juicy stuff!

E-publishing news that used to be ignored by RWA is now headlining news in a very good way!

And because our cautious mama has accepted that e-publishing is here to stay and that writers need and want these career choices, she’s making sure we do it right by offering workshops and opportunities that will make smarter decisions easier.

So how about you? Are you excited? What do you expect to take home from the RWA Conference this year?