Dammit! Cons Really Work.

I just spent a huge amount of time, stress, and money attending a spec. fic. writing convention, Conflux 9. It was a bugger to get to (ten hours travelling each way), hugely expensive (about $2,000 all found) and most of the panels I attended were either boring or frustrating (I need a placard that I can raise whenever a publishing professional speaks that says, “Do you have anything other than anecdotal evidence for that assertion?”) What’s worse, I’m a chronic introvert for whom being in a crowd feels like poison darts are being showered on me from all directions. It was hell.

Yet, I have to admit, if you want to be a professional writer, there is little else that can be as beneficial to your career as mixing it with your peers at events like this.

I met a lot of writers I had only previously met on social media. In every single case, it was great to meet them. They’re even better in real life. I met a lot of writers I didn’t know at all (even one world-famous guest of honour, whom I’d never even heard of, which was momentarily embarrassing) and they were all great too. I also renewed my acquaintance with people I’d met at earlier conventions – some of whom I still regularly tweet with. This was all good but, in itself, probably not worth the various costs and torments of being in Canberra that week.

What did make the whole thing worthwhile were:

1. Two very important publishers – one of them from a Big 6 publishing house – asked me to send them manuscripts.

2. Several people came up to me after I did a brief reading from Timesplash and said how much they’d enjoyed it, and several more got in touch via Twitter in the following days, to say the same thing.

Number 1 won’t seem much of a big deal to you unless you have already spent decades, as I have, longing for this kind of attention from big-name publishers. In terms of career development for a writer, it just doesn’t get better than this.

Number 2 may not seem like a big deal either, except, it is! Writing fiction is one of the very few fields of entertainment in which it is quite possible that a practitioner might never meet their audience. To have it happen and to see such a positive reaction, was just pure magic.

So, would I do it again? Well, I’ve no doubt I should…