Writers, Attack!

Writers, Attack!

This weekend, I attended the 23rd Annual SDSU Writers' Conference. The event was staged at the Double Tree Hotel in Mission Valley, from Friday night through Sunday afternoon.

All I accomplished Friday night was to arrive at the hotel, pick up my registration packet, and check on my scheduled appointment time for my meeting with a New York editor of the genre of fiction that I like to write.

I was really excited about the event. My first-ever consultation appointment! Hooray for me! The conference management had scheduled the appointment for 10:42 AM Saturday morning. And, it's not the kind of appointment you can skip or be late to. For those of you who don't know, a consultation appointment is what is referred to in the biz as a "pitch session." Upon entering the huge conference room, with tables lined up in neat rows, I met my editor and had 10 minutes to impress him with my novel synopsis.

I won't go into detail here, to protect the parties involved. But, to summarize, the meeting was a severe disappointment. It turned out that "my" editor doesn't do pitch sessions, so after that small detail was laid to rest, we spent the remaining five minutes discussing the banalities of the publishing game. No longer qualifying as a "newbie," there wasn't much I could take away from my meeting, except the disappointing feeling that either I was a fool, or the conference organizers had misled me. Neither conclusion was a happy one.

On the bright side, I had a lot of fun yesterday. First, I attended a seminar by Judy Reeves on flash fiction. What is flash fiction, and why should I care? Hahaha! Actually, given the public's short attention span these days, flash fiction is a genre worth exploring, for writers and readers.

After lunch, I attended a session by Scott Farrell on medieval arms and armor. It was such fun, Scott kept talking well over his 50-minute schedule and the conference allowed us to continue. He obviously loves talking about weapons and chivalric codes of valor. Harold brought his two boys, six and 10, and they had a great time too. Scott let them handle the weapons and put on some of the armor, which was more than I would have permitted if I had been holding the lecture.

A couple of other interesting sessions I attended were one by an agent, discussing the 10 criteria for a successful screenplay (successful being defined as one that sells). Another screenplay-related talk, by a woman whose name I can't recall, gave a brief overview of screenwriting essentials. One interesting tidbit: it used to be you would put your "inciting incident" at about page 30 of your manuscript. Now, it's down to page 15. What's next? Inciting incident in the opening credits? The prologue? The pre-release trailer?