Thursday, April 26, 2007

Pikes Peak Writers Conference

What a great conference! I had to do a lot of sleeping afterward to recover, but it was a good exhaustion. I sold 19 copies of A REAL BASKET CASE and 2 MAP OF MURDER anthologies, better than I expected. Whoo-hoo! Bill Reed, a reporter at the local Gazette newspaper, and I had a good discussion, so I hope he includes some of it in his article that he's writing about the conference. Thanks to an introduction by a good friend, Ronald Kovach at The Writer Magazine asked me to submit an article. And Eric Maisel, the creativity coach, was SO inspiring! Everything he said resonated with me. Folks seemed to like my workshop on "After the Call" and the "Niche Mysteries" panel I served on, because I received lots of compliments on them.

This was a milestone conference for me--getting to sign copies of my debut novel. Thanks to everyone who bought one! That's a feeling that I hope every aspiring author will have the pleasure of experiencing. As I was talking to Bill Reed, I told him how each PPWC was a different experience for me as I moved through the phases of my career, from my first one in 97, when I hadn't written any fiction yet and just came to learn, to my second in 99 when I entered the Paul Gillette writing contest, got lousy scores and realized I had so much more to learn, to my third in 2000 when I found my critique group buddies, to my fourth in 2001 when I placed third in the Paul Gillette, etc.

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