We have a very active, very successful local writers group that I've never joined. Not because I don't like them-- I know several people who are in it and they are great. But their monthly meeting is on a night that I have a conflict, and there's the whole social panic aspect of it, and also-- well, I've never really considered myself to be a writer, even though I write blog posts and emails and Goodreads reviews all the time.
Anyway. This past weekend was their annual writers conference, and it was great. I think I've attended two or three times over the nearly three decades we've lived here, and it is always good. I don't know how they manage to attract such great speakers and keep the cost so low (under $100 for the weekend, including food).
I don't have any writing projects I'm working on right now, or even any plans to start one in the immediate future, but I signed up as soon as I saw the list of speakers because I saw that Bob Mayer was going to be there. He and Jennifer Crusie wrote the romantic suspense novels Don't Look Down (2006) and Agnes and the Hitman (2007), which were the books that convinced me that rom-coms weren't dead and could still be funny and smart and entertaining.
It seemed like a good idea when I signed up, but then I had to actually walk into a room full of strangers and I almost didn't go. I function relatively normally in a social situation where I know people, but throw me into a room with 125 strangers and I turn into my seventh-grade self, immediately heading for the back corner of the lunchroom in a minor panic because I don't know what else to do. But I ran into half a dozen people that I know over the weekend, and it got better. If it had gone on for another day, I might have actually felt brave enough to participate.
The only problem was that this conference is a very practical, how-to-be-successful conference, no woo-woo creativity exercises allowed. There was information about how to find an agent, how to work with an editor, how to use social media to your advantage. So pretty much everybody there was seriously working on a novel or a memoir or some major project.
All weekend every time the person next to me politely asked, "What's your current project?" I had to admit sheepishly, well, nothing, I just came to hang out with the writer people and hear Bob Mayer. I can always sit and listen to smart, interesting people talk, and there were a lot of them there this weekend. I had a good time, even though I didn't need to create a one-sentence pitch, which is what almost everyone in the room was working on.
I gave up on writing fiction years ago, since I have been so spectacularly unsuccessful at it every time I've tried, but over the course of the weekend, a couple of ideas came up that I thought I might try. I'm quite sure it won't result in a novel, maybe it won't even be fiction, but it might be fun to try something new. I'll let you know if it turns out.
Have a great day. I'm off to re-read Agnes and the Hitman, which I haven't read in at least eight or ten years.
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