(For more on my New England Crime Bake experience, I'll be giving my highlight(s) on my writetime.wordpress.com blog. Read "Writing the Character Right" here.)
John asked me at Wallabee's after the last meeting what had me so jazzed about attending my first New England Crime Bake conference last weekend.
First, it confirmed that the mystery genre is where I want to be. It's where I want to practice, fall down and get hurt, pull myself back up and get farther until I finish something. Then get back in there and do it again until I get published.
To this point in my life, I've been searching for a focus for my writing. I've tried a lot of things. Journalism. PR. Speculative fiction. Mainstream fiction. I've never felt like I belonged to any of these "tribes."
I found writing love once before: Writing my column in the '90s gave me a major warm fuzzy every time, with a kick of very minor local fame. I still want to write essays. I have several great titles and outlines for uplifting essay collections. Imagining my novel on the shelf in the mystery section of Crandall Library gives a much bigger tickle to imagine.
Getting back to Crime Bake, I liked the overall atmosphere there. Not yet sure if this is an anomaly or if all mystery-oriented gatherings are this way. Right now, I'm going with the theory that everyone assumes that the person next to them knows how to kill in at least one way--probably more--so it promotes politeness and conviviality.
While this is mostly in jest, I did feel very at home at the conference. Maybe, again, it's me and my attitude of feeling like I belonged to the tribe. Still, the overall vibe was that off support, and "we're all in this together." Perhaps the unique combination of authors and fans promotes this. I don't know. I just like it and want more of it.
Finally, the conference was mix of writing (e.g. character development), marketing (e.g. pitching agents) and support knowledge (e.g. forensics, ballistics) so that I didn't feel overloaded with information in any one area of my brain.
The most unique event of the weekend was the murder mystery dinner theatre held during the Saturday night banquet. Each table had several tasks: solve the double murder, write a table song (we were the Mary Higgins Clark "house" of the Poe School for the Mysterious Arts) and complete a quiz about the guest of honor's books (Sue Grafton). Our table didn't win, but I met new people and added "songwriter" to my resume. Sort of.
You won't get that at any other writing conference.
I'm ready to put Crime Bake 2010 on my calendar for next year, once they officially announce the dates. Warning: Crime Bake appears to be addictive.
1 comment:
Glad to see you had such a good time at Crime Bake. Most important, above all the fun, I hope the writing tips prove useful, whether in developing a story, creating believable main characters and necessary supporting ones, and in the neatly compiled details that make murder mysteries so compelling.
And now, suddenly reallizing that you, Zack, and Jim all know at least one way to kill a person, I'm going to be a lot nicer in my comments!
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