Mingling with Authors at CONFLUX 12

I attended my first CONFLUX over the long weekend. Conflux is all about speculative fiction and it's focussed very much on authors. It's conducted each year by the Canberra Speculative Fiction Group (CSFG). I only joined the CSFG a month ago and attended my first monthly meeting at the Canberra Writing Centre. It was great to share some time with other authors and aspiring writers.

This year it was conducted at the Novotel on Northbourne Ave in the centre of the city. It was a good venue for the size of the Convention, which I estimate was around 200+ participants.

The program was very full. With three different streams running, I found it impossible to participate in every session I wanted to. But that's a good thing. I attended the following sessions:
Politics in Spec Fic – panel discussionWriting for a Large Audience – Dave WolvertonSteampunk and Science – panel discussionPitch Wars – Sharon JohnstonSpec Fic Romance – panel discussionGuest of Honour Talk – Dave FarlandBreaking the US/UK markets – panel discussionSpec Fic Erotica – panel discussionGuest of Honour Talk – Alan BaxterWriters of the Future – Dave WolvertonSelf Publishing Markets – panel discussionWriting Enchantered Prose In addition, I took the opportunity to pitch my work to a number of publishers who attended the Con. These included Odyssey Books, Harper Collins and Satalyte. Pitching can be a nerve wracking process but practice does help. So despite the added stress I found it beneficial and would recommend it to other aspiring authors. I found the time allocated to be short but with an average of 7 to 10 minutes it was significantly more than the three minutes available at the pitch wars session I attended in Sydney last year.

For me the highlights were the Q&A sessions during the talks and panel discussions. It was then that myself and my fellow authors got to engage with the presenters.  I would like to single out Dave Wolverton who gave of himself very generously throughout all the sessions he was involved with. I particularly enjoyed his last session on writing enchanted prose. It was chock full of gems on how to improve one’s writing style.

Overall I found CONFLUX to be a good investment of my time and energy. I met a lot of very nice people. I’ll be pencilling in the dates for next year.

PS Thanks to the CSFG members for organising CONFLUX.