I had a really good time at the 32nd Annual Surrey International Writers' Conference October 25th to 27th 2024.
Friday I pitched to an agent who asked for the first one hundred pages of my fantasy novel and a synposis. That's very exiciting!
Later on Friday I had a very good conversation with Darren Groth. I really liked one particular scene in his novel Are You Seeing Me?. I'm very thankful he signed my copy.
I had a great time visiting with friends and making new friends in the seminars, over meals in the banquet halls, and even waiting in lines to register for Pitch Sessions or Blue Pencil Cafe sessions. While there's a stereotype that a lot of writers are shy introverts, I found I had no problem asking, "What do you like to write?" then listening to the answer and taking the conversation from there. Some of the new friends I made include Penelope Rose who has already published Deviant Desires and Magnus Skallagrimsson who runs Noir At The Bar in Victoria and Vancouver.
The agent Laura Bradford helped answer a question for me about finding beta readers. I'm thankful for that chance meeting over lunch Saturday in the banquet hall.
Prior to the conference, the thought of taking a novel of 91K words and boiling it down to a 750 word synopsis would be impossible and frustrating. I now see it as another piece of writing, thanks in no small part to Mira Landry's seminar Saturday.
One of my favourite parts of the conference, and one I hope inspires me and you for a long time, came about because I took a chance. Sunday morning at 08:05 I started standing in line to get a second Pitch Session and a second Blue Pencil session. By 08:45 I had both. For the second Pitch Session I pitched a trilogy; I kept it to myself that the trilogy has only gone through two drafts and is not ready to be sent out. I learned a number of things. The first is to not pitch an entire trilogy; pitch the first book as stand-alone. Since the title is a play on words with a homophone, I asked the agent to read my query letter. She did, which meant I could watch her face as she moved her pen across and under the sentences.
At one point while she was reading, she smiled.
I listened to her feedback. I then asked her, "At one point when you were reading, you smiled. What made you smile?" She indicated one specific turn of phrase, and I said, "Oh, I was worried about that, because it uses profanity and I wasn't sure about including that in a query letter."
"No, it's not a problem here. For one, you are using it to good effect. For another, your query letter is not full of needless profanity. And for a third point, all sorts of query letters get written but you've made yours stand out."
When I am down and when I am lonely, I'm going to come back to this memory, when my writing made another person, an agent, smile. Not a family member, not a sympathetic friend, not an aspiring writer newer to this than myself. An experienced successful literary agent from a named agency in the USA.
If it happened once, I can make it happen again.
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