FBR 101: The Conversation . . .

Two booky events draw near. At the annual meeting of the New England chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (NE-SCBWI), to be held at the Courtyard Marriott in Fitchburg, Mass., May 13 - 15 is a panel my colleagues Nora Raleigh Baskin and Elise Broach and I are giving on surviving in book publishing over the long haul.

The panel is titled "Turning Millstones Into Milestones" and runs Sunday, May 15, from 2:05-3:00 PM. It's advertised as "a discussion . . . about how to maintain and nourish your writing career beyond the first, second, tenth, or fiftieth book. . . . Specific topics include: choosing the right editor/agent, capitalizing on your specific writing talents in an increasingly trend-oriented industry, 'brand identity' and adaptability from book to book and publisher to publisher, the tension between writing books you love vs. books that sell, publisher promotion and/or self promotion, recognizing and nurturing the unexpected turn in your career, and how to build a career that is true to yourself yet also economically sustainable."

That's a lot of meat to chew and digest in less than an hour, but we'll each be taking a part of the discussion and moderator duties, with open questions at the end. These issues, if not always conscious, at least run through our sleeps, I think, the deeper you get into a career.

At 10 AM, that morning I'm presenting a workshop on "The Changing Shape of Series Fiction," which, after some 85 series books, I've had some trench experience in, and, so they tell me, survived to tell the tale.

Later in the month I'm serving on a panel at the Connecticut Book Festival, held May 21 - 22 on the Greater Hartford Campus of the University of Connecticut. My session — "Marked & Purged: Writing the Truth for Teens through Realistic Fiction and Fantasy" — will be on Sunday at 3:30 PM. Nikki Mutch is moderating. The other writers include Sarah Darer Littman, author of Confessions of a Closet Catholic, Life, After, and Purge, and Caragh M. O' Brien, author of the Birthmarked Trilogy, a dystopian saga whose second volume, Prized, appears this fall. I'll be talking both about my fantasy work and my novels.

Public convocations are a welcome part of the writer's business, nearly always conducted in solitude. Reading, of course, is the deepest form of conversation one writer has with another, but a gathering of workers — of all levels — and the spirit that arises, forms, lingers, from an episode of face-to-face communication, and the combination of literary talk and real life, feed us like little else. I look forward to this stuff.