GCLS conference and writing hours in July 2015
If you follow me on Facebook, you know that July has been an exciting month for me—how could it not be in a city like New Orleans? After a week of sightseeing, I attended the GCLS con—the annual lesbian literature conference of the Golden Crown Literary Society.
I can’t put into words the experience of spending five days surrounded by 350 readers and writers of lesbian fiction and attending so many great panels and workshops. The conference just gets bigger and more professional every year! There were so many different writing workshops, panels, chats, and readings that it often was difficult to choose which ones to attend.
As far as I know, the keynote speech and some of the panels and sessions will be available for viewing on the GCLS’s shiny new website—the one with the menu structure (don’t ask; it’s an inside joke), but what the videos won’t be able to show is what it’s like to be among so many other people who are just as passionate about lesbian fiction as I am.
It was wonderful to meet some of the friends I’d made last year, at the GCLS conference in Portland, or online, and to talk to fellow authors and readers I hadn’t met before.
The videos also won’t tell you anything about the 31-hour-long shower & coffee abstinence. There was a water boil advisory going on in our part of New Orleans right before the awards ceremony. I’m still waiting to see if that adventure will make it into the book of one of my fellow sufferers.
Speaking of the awards ceremony… That was definitely one of the highlights of the conference. Ylva Publishing won awards for Emma Weimann’s erotic romance Heart’s Surrender and the paranormal anthology Wicked Things, which I co-edited with Astrid Ohletz, as well as the holiday anthology Unwrap These Presents.
With all that excitement, I’m amazed that I got any writing done while I was in New Orleans, but I’m proud to say that I even met and exceeded my goal of writing about 15,000 words while I was gone. Now I’m 83,000 words into my work-in-progress, Just Physical.
Let’s take a look at my numbers for July:
Fiction Writing EditingResearchNonfiction WritingMarketing & AdministrationTOTAL
2015 - TOTAL854 hours569 hours83 hours89 hours214 hours1,809 hours
January175 hours88 hours---5 hours29 hours297 hours
February155 hours53 hours4 hours9 hours36 hours257 hours
March116 hours120 hours32 hours1 hours25 hours294 hours
April79 hours86 hours6 hours18 hours48 hours237 hours
May97 hours100 hours19 hours54 hours32 hours302 hours
June143 hours80 hours21 hours2 hours25 hours271 hours
July89 hours42 hours1 hours0 hours19 hours151 hours
Please check back next month to see if I made my goals for August–wrapping up Just Physical and selecting the stories for the holiday anthology I’m co-editing with Fletcher DeLancey for Ylva Publishing.
Have a great week, everyone!
Jae
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