Writer’s Conference Fieldnotes
Allow me to recount the woes and wonders of Karis at Conference end of Aug 2023. My spin-off episode of cold fries, writer’s angst, stolen caffeine, and the occasional epiphany.
Lesson 1: Broke and from the Beyond
This lesson is just to set the scene.
The first thing I learned at this conference is that I am broke-er than the usual demographic. As in this conference threatened to put my bank account back into the triple digits—where the decimals of cents actually start to matter.
Woah, actually, I just checked my bank account. After the wedding gift I bought for a friend yesterday, I am in the triple digits. 2 bucks and 29 cents shy of 1,000 dollars.
I knew I was one of the few not staying at the hotel. But my 2 € coffee expectations… did not get me far, my friends.
The truth of my straits first dawned at the nearest espresso machine. The hotel Starbucks was too lofty for me. I found the hidden coffee stand instead, made friends by telling other lost caffeine addicts the secret location, and only realised on the last day that there was a big STAFF ONLY sign by the dispenser. Did I return for yet another hot cup heart burn, my conscience smarting as much as my tongue at the burnt hotel coffee aftertaste? Maybe. But the staff had Starbucks. And I needed something that tasted like dragon tears to soothe the eye twitch in my professional aura.
My tight budget hit again when I showed up for the gala (and I am talking floor-length cocktail sparkle dress gala) in a pretty little cotton piece I ironed in someone else’s room because Frontiers charges an arm and a leg for a carryon and I couldn’t fit chiffon in my purse.
Or when I ate out the first night, and the lovely woman next to me said she didn’t want to take her beautiful salad to go, I unashamedly asked if she’d feel weird if I took it instead. Bless her. Only 2 meals a day were covered by the conference fee—so you best believe it was my cold fries and my new friend’s lovely salad for breakfast the next morning. My other meals were supplemented by expired protein bars I got at an overstock store for 79 cents. And I really, truly, and honestly have no complaints.
Is it weird to open with my financial reflections? Maybe.
I tell you this not for pity. To be honest, the whole thing was rather thrilling. Cold fries and someone else’s hotel leftovers felt like an artist’s rite of passage. (Emerson Ford, please remember I ate your leftover salad when you’re famous!!).
And, three digit confessions aside, I could pay to go! While the conference fee and flight was 100% of my budget, I had the budget and found lovely new friends to bunk with. All the same, sparkly gala dresses and dozens of expensive hotel rooms was a culture shock I wasn’t braced for.
I learned writing is an expensive hobby, maybe an even more expensive career. But that lesson isn’t very funny, so I’ll keep it buried here rather than grant it a heading.
Back to setting the scene.
So I show up in my European heels and freshly curled hair with practically everything I own on that side of the country in a white backpack I’m toting around like a kindergartener.
They give us a cool name tag, and I say, “Oh, what’s the orange Beyond the Border sticker for?” For the international visitors, I am informed. “Oh. Right. Beyond that border.”
There are 7 of us from this Beyond, 5 of whom are from Canada. Tanja from Germany and I met in Starbucks—European solidarity is an immediate +100 friendship points. <3
No major cultural faux pas to report. Except that you are meant to wait until everyone has their food to dine (whoops!) and in recounting my tales of Hinge, one woman kept hearing me say I was ‘unhinged’ in my love life, not ‘ON Hinge’. She was very kind in her probably still necessary intervention.
Lesson 2: Come Armed with Business Cards
I am not kidding you, I returned with an arsenal of business cards. Like if I was an assassin, and I specialised in killing people with laminated cardstock Now You See Me II style—it’s these women’s fiction and romance authors I’d be schmoozing for ammo restock. When at home, I managed to empty all the cards from my pockets, backpack, Fanny pack and folders, the stack I had was four centimetres thick. FOUR!
Forget card-flinging assassinations. I could keep these in my purse and rely on the old swing-whack defence, old lady style.
Business cards were swapped at tables, in the hallway, and at seminars like stickers in middle school. Pretty ones, weird ones, uber professional ones that gave my imposter syndrome a twitch in the right eye (and back to the staff-only, mental health coffee IV drip I fled).
Over the course of the weekend, I found these cards stuffed all over my person like stripper money. Don’t even ask how many times I accidentally handed a new friend someone else’s laminated face from my over populated pockets. Then I’d have to squat in the hall, in my European heels, and dig through my poor, beleaguered backpack until I found my $20 pack of non-laminated, one-sided cards from Office Depot.
(I quite literally went to the Office Depot the morning of Conference Day 1. “Hello sir, I need 50 of these, please. And I know it says same-day delivery, but how about same hour? Because I have a flight in two.” *Insert big flirty grin, because he looked like a uni student with a hero complex, and twenty bucks with a slight dignity tax for playing the damsel in distress was SO worth the amount of these cards I handed out last weekend).
My last note on the business card phenomenon was WOW those cases that some people put their business cards in are beautiful. Like the old-school, snuff box for my cocaine sort of beautiful. I managed not to say this out loud to anyone (people are never quite sure if those from the Beyond are joking or on crack, and I didn’t want to add the confusion). But it lent new lofty heights to my career dreams.
Lord, let me one day be established enough to have 100 business cards ordered a month in advance, double-sided, laminated, and in a pretty snuff-box case. Amen.
Lesson 3: Agents are scary
I wrote this title and stared at a blinking cursor. So I think I need another week to set all this down in pixels.
Preview: I met with 3 agents and 1 editor. During a panel before my sweaty-palmed pitches to these titans of the industry, they shared the statistic that out of everyone they ask for a full manuscript at conferences, only 60% actually turn it in. I leaned over to a new conference bestie and whispered (in that great dramatic irony of foreshadowing), “What idiot wouldn’t turn in their manuscript when asked for it?”
2 proposals and 2 full-manuscript requests later: Me. I am that idiot. Name signed on the ID papers in blood.
Because when they pass you their business card at the end of your pitch, they say with a small smile meant to calm you, “Whenever you feel it’s ready, just send it here.”
‘Whenever’ + ‘you feel’ + ‘it’s ready’ *!?*
Please.
My imposter syndrome’s new favourite hobby is to excavate said business card from the mountain of others I lugged home, trace the sweat-smeared ink I scribbled under their name with their request, and write a symphony in their honour.
I shall spare you the violin solos until next week.
Lesson 4: Writers are easy to fool
My two truths and a lie in a game:
It was two weeks before my wedding when I learned my husband was in the CIA.
I was in 7 schools in 8 years.
I broke a kid’s arm in a school fight.
Now, I should have skimmed back through this table’s previously collected business cards for genre, because it turns out a good deal were military / special ops suspense novelists. So I sat through a whole convo on the ethics of confidentiality in the CIA, anxiously twisting the too-tight pinky ring I’d sausaged onto my ring finger in case anyone checked. In the end, they decided the CIA would have had to look into me before the wedding, even if I wasn’t bright enough to look into him. (They said it much nicer than this. Suspense novelists… a lot of big boom and bang to cover pearl-clutching softies. They were my favourites).
They are wrong, internet. I have no CIA husband.
My sister has since corrected me that it was 7 schools in 9 years. I hereby apologise to my group for my unintentional 2 lies and 1 truth, but I plead the case of every mid-twenty something: the ratio of lie:truth in rehashing childhood remains thus stilted a few years yet. As siblings refuse to let us forget.
I still stand by some CIA husband in an alternate universe. Alas, in my current timeline, the government did look into me, interviewed the kid whose arm I broke, and prohibited my Mr AgentSir from reaching out. So, to the Grandma who always asks, my lack of propagation isn’t strictly my fault. It’s the government. And these suspense writers would agree.
For posterity sake and definitely not my love life, I have included some outfit pics, and one end-of-a-long-day curls shot. It’s the horizontal curl at my neck that does it for me. CIA couldn’t take this Whoville energy.
Lesson 5: Weird Needs Weird to Survive
If I can patch up the sails of my budget and spring for a Starbucks gift card, I’m getting myself back to these conference things once a year.
Most of these writers had decades of experience on me. Some of them literally HUNDREDS of books on me. And, yes, I was the only werewolf novelist there (I think. Let me double check those business cards), but it didn’t matter. You meet so many people who know you. Without knowing you at all.
I always thought writers’ community involved smoking some Tolkien pipes and waxing eloquent about your genre-changing hobbit idea. But it’s a lot more laughter in the elevator about killing a side character to fix the sagging middle. It’s tears in a panel about death and family and how to hold space when you can’t write.
It’s about celebrating unique perspectives because I never would have considered telling Cinderella that way.
It’s people who share their fries (I reference a different meal; hot french fries this time) because they remember what it was like to start off.
Weird google search stories, families questioning a writer’s sanity, a writer questioning their own sanity, marvelling at a turn of phrase.
So if I could sum up the wins from this conference in three words, it would be:
Clarity. Momentum. Courage.
All of which are scarce resources in my writer’s brain. ;)
Clarity
You use that elevator pitch all the time. Compare your ideas, tone, genre to others. Hear their ideas, not just for plot or style, but for marketing and career and trajectory. Articulating yourself to an audience with ideas… 10/10 worth the money.
Momentum
I’ve always said that the artist journey is a rollercoaster ride with threadbare seatbelts. You love it, you hate it, it’s a masterpiece, it deserves to be torn to shreds, doused in petrol and left to firing squad. You know, the usual.
But there is something about community that speeds up your experience of these highs and lows. That creative slump or blinding high that can take me weeks to recover from, in a group of other artists might last a day. Because they are everywhere too, and hold space for your everywhere with a dose of reality. So you ride the waves, sit back at your desk, and crack on.
It’s the power of witness, I suppose. People on the sidelines to keep you at it.
Courage
These are other people in it for the long haul. The Long, Long Haul. And they know it’s hard. That the voices in your head aren’t just characters. That real estate is co-leased with doubt, fear, confusion, and inadequacy. They know it’s a sacrifice of time and passion and maybe sanity. But they do it because they love it. And I think that’s why I do it, too.
Courage, Karis, I learned. Keep moving. Eye on the horizon.
Best medicine for that imposter syndrome there ever could be.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Emerson Ford for her salad, Jennifer Major for her fries, Carol Muncado for her heart-felt welcome, Elizabeth Jacobson for the lovely time celebrating her book at the gala, Kirsten for her Cinderella solidarity, Bianca and Rebecca for the ironing board and girl’s night, Kristine Delano for her pitch advice, Betsy St Amant for looking over my one-sheet in the book store line. And so many others for their listening ear, affirmations, and the courage to put their own stories out there. We got this, guys.
And lastly, Staff, I am so sorry I stole your coffee. It was only with true intent of disobedience on the last day. I promise it went to a good cause and will buy you all Starbucks when I’m rich.
Sincerely,
Karis G.
