The Aftermath of Gateway Con
I have a lot and nothing at all going on at the same time.
I got five agents that requested material while I was at Gateway Con. I didn't like one of them because he sounded like he came from a vanity publisher, and another one told me to submit it via their website but their website isn't accepting submissions? So I sent varying requested lengths of The Un-Life to the remaining three and so far I've only gotten a brief response from one that didn't say yes or no. So I'm not sure what's going on there. I suppose I'll see what the others say before I start digging in too deep.
Gateway Con was amazing. I recommend it or any other writing conference if you are an aspiring author. I met several authors that have become acquaintance-friends. Made some connections, I hope, with editors and agents. Learned some. The hotel was pretty and expensive but amazing. I bought some signed books. Conventions are a great way to boost confidence, meet people, and broaden your horizons in general. The friend that I went with got two full manuscript requests and got an offer from an agent not even a week later! Miracles do happen.
I want to get involved more next year. I'm hoping to have a published book under my belt by then, so that maybe I'll have a little more authority and experience than someone who doesn't so that maybe, just maybe, I could be a speaker or hold a workshop. I'm that theater nerd that actually loved taking speech classes whereas most people hated them. I kind of have this idea that maybe people don't actually hate speech class or have stage fright, they just think they do because everyone is supposed to according to society. Anyways. I'm a little bit over-prepared to do a workshop already in case I get the opportunity and wrote an outline of what I'd like to talk about: pen names. There's so much to know about them, even more than the post I did discussing my own. It has five parts: why to use a pen name, why not to use one, how to pick one, what to do once you got one, and then an interactive part where I'd give listeners examples and they get to figure out what is an isn't a good pen name based on what they learned. And even if I don't get to speak at Gateway Con next year, my local guild leader said I could probably do it for our guild. So I'll let you know when I know.
Speaking of my own guild, I've been secretly volunteering to build it up a bit. Earlier this week I was bored and just sort of started designing a website for the guild since we don't have an official website yet. I have it mostly done, other than needing some candids and information that I can get during our next meeting. I showed what I had going on to the guild founder (we're so small we don't actually have officers yet and he doesn't want to be called "president" even though he basically runs it at this time), and he liked what I had. Now all we really need to do is maybe start collecting member dues so we can get a custom domain before I go public with the website.
But I will share with you a small part of what I've done because it's already public. Have you seen the guild facebook page? That's my image right there. I designed it based on some other images of steamboats and tweaked it a ton and wham bam, I came up with a guild logo. Founder put it on the facebook page so he probably likes it. Whether it will be official or not, we'll see what the rest of the guild thinks.
And that's all my mind can vomit right now. Until next time,
-Dana Lockhart
I got five agents that requested material while I was at Gateway Con. I didn't like one of them because he sounded like he came from a vanity publisher, and another one told me to submit it via their website but their website isn't accepting submissions? So I sent varying requested lengths of The Un-Life to the remaining three and so far I've only gotten a brief response from one that didn't say yes or no. So I'm not sure what's going on there. I suppose I'll see what the others say before I start digging in too deep.
Gateway Con was amazing. I recommend it or any other writing conference if you are an aspiring author. I met several authors that have become acquaintance-friends. Made some connections, I hope, with editors and agents. Learned some. The hotel was pretty and expensive but amazing. I bought some signed books. Conventions are a great way to boost confidence, meet people, and broaden your horizons in general. The friend that I went with got two full manuscript requests and got an offer from an agent not even a week later! Miracles do happen.
I want to get involved more next year. I'm hoping to have a published book under my belt by then, so that maybe I'll have a little more authority and experience than someone who doesn't so that maybe, just maybe, I could be a speaker or hold a workshop. I'm that theater nerd that actually loved taking speech classes whereas most people hated them. I kind of have this idea that maybe people don't actually hate speech class or have stage fright, they just think they do because everyone is supposed to according to society. Anyways. I'm a little bit over-prepared to do a workshop already in case I get the opportunity and wrote an outline of what I'd like to talk about: pen names. There's so much to know about them, even more than the post I did discussing my own. It has five parts: why to use a pen name, why not to use one, how to pick one, what to do once you got one, and then an interactive part where I'd give listeners examples and they get to figure out what is an isn't a good pen name based on what they learned. And even if I don't get to speak at Gateway Con next year, my local guild leader said I could probably do it for our guild. So I'll let you know when I know.
Speaking of my own guild, I've been secretly volunteering to build it up a bit. Earlier this week I was bored and just sort of started designing a website for the guild since we don't have an official website yet. I have it mostly done, other than needing some candids and information that I can get during our next meeting. I showed what I had going on to the guild founder (we're so small we don't actually have officers yet and he doesn't want to be called "president" even though he basically runs it at this time), and he liked what I had. Now all we really need to do is maybe start collecting member dues so we can get a custom domain before I go public with the website.
But I will share with you a small part of what I've done because it's already public. Have you seen the guild facebook page? That's my image right there. I designed it based on some other images of steamboats and tweaked it a ton and wham bam, I came up with a guild logo. Founder put it on the facebook page so he probably likes it. Whether it will be official or not, we'll see what the rest of the guild thinks.
And that's all my mind can vomit right now. Until next time,
-Dana Lockhart
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