I just came from ACFW, the annual conference of
American Christian Fiction Writers. It's a large and terrific writers conference, with top notch writing courses and plenty of opportunity for networking. This year there were something like 540 writers attending, and 60 faculty and staff. Donald Maass gave an all-day seminar on opening day, and Debbie Macomber was the keynote speaker.
In case you've ever wondered what a conference is like for an agent, here are a few notes from my personal perspective:
* I generally enjoy writers' conferences because I love nothing more than, talking, eating and breathing "publishing" and there's no better place to do that!
* The hardest part for me is staying "on" for hours on end, sometimes 14 hours with nothing more than a couple of five-minute breaks. By the end of the first day, my face already hurts from smiling and my throat hurts from talking.
* I love teaching workshops but sometimes I need a break from teaching. I've taught a lot of local workshops lately, and I taught six sessions at my last big writers conference in June, so I decided not to teach at ACFW. Turned out to be a good decision - I was busy enough.
* It can be mentally exhausting to have back-to-back pitch meetings for several hours a day, but it's amazing how "present" I really am. I totally tune in to each writer, try hard to quickly grasp what they're pitching me, and offer my response trying to be as helpful as possible. I love interacting with writers - it's the reason I have this job.
* The hardest part about the pitch meetings is graciously ending the meeting in the cases where I don't want to request a partial or proposal. It's easier to end it by just saying, "Well, send me your sample chapters and I'll take a look" but I never use that line as a cop out, I only say it when I sincerely want to see the manuscript. So it can be awkward to have to simply say, "Thank you for coming." It's like a verbal rejection letter, and I always feel bad! But I always try to give them something to grab on to, something positive and perhaps a direction to take.
* Generally it seems writers are getting more savvy, being more prepared with their pitches, one sheets, etc. Most know not to pitch in the bathroom. I'm enjoying conferences more since there seems to be a higher level of professionalism. You're really reading agent blogs!
* Of course, sometimes people know all the "rules" but forget them in the excitement of the moment. Saturday I was in the middle of a 2-hour block of back-to-back pitch meetings, no time in between. Between meetings, I ran out to the hall to grab a glass of water and somebody started pitching me a long and detailed story. It was totally disconcerting... that's what the appointments are for! I couldn't find a gracious way out of it... I finally had to interrupt and say "I've really got to get back in, I have someone waiting who actually has an appointment to pitch me." I felt bad immediately but then again, it wasn't nice to try and pitch me during someone else's appointment time.
* I always learn new things at conferences, mostly from "the buzz" and talking to editors and agents. You can be sure I'll be blogging about some of the insights I had.
* I'm excited that I may end up with a couple of new clients from this conference, and I also began formulating a revised business plan for the next few months based on some new connections I made. You'll hear about that eventually on the blog, too.
* I have two favorite parts of conferences. The first is seeing my publishing friends from all over the country. I'm blessed to have such neat relationships with people I admire, even though we rarely see each other. My industry friends, including authors, editors and other agents, are so energizing and affirming to me. I love catching up with them, learning from them, and talking business. I met a bunch of new publishing people this time, too, which I loved. I can hardly overstate how much my industry networking lifts me up and motivates me to get back to my desk and work!
* The other favorite part is getting to spend time with my clients, most of whom I rarely see in person. This time I met three of my clients for the very first time - so cool. I have to say, I've gathered the most amazing and FUN group of people! We had an agency dinner on Friday night (there were 20 of us), and on Saturday most of us tried to sit together at the awards banquet. It was a blast and I always feel incredibly blessed to be surrounded by such cool people with so much talent. (For my clients who weren't there... you were missed, I promise. Catch you at another conference.)
I limit my conference attendance to two or three big ones a year, and I always to to ACFW because every single time, it has proven productive both personally and professionally. I highly recommend it to any Christian who is writing fiction (you don't have to be writing
Christian fiction). For all writers, I suggest you try to get to at least one conference each year or two, if you can. You'll be amazed at the inspiration, motivation, practical learning, and new friends that will result.
Been to ACFW or another conference lately? What did you think?
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By Jill Earl
I thoroughly enjoy your blog. So, I have passed along to you, The One Lovely Blog award. You can check out and pick up the award at: http://AnnaLWalls.blogspot.com
I don't know how long I walked around the airport before a man came up and whispered to me that the back of my skirt was caught in my underwear exposing my whole rear. But the most embarrassing part was when I realized there were lots and lots of people who had been grinning at me. I just thought they were being friendly. Guess the grin was on me.
My embarrassing writers conference moments are too many to count at this point. So I'll share a moment that happened in my personal life---and I'm talkin' SO personal, that I had to see these people again the very next morning after my mortification. You should know that no actual adultery resulted from this incident! I wrote about it on my blog here:
http://www.fallible.com/index.php/fallible/comments/saturday-night-fever/
Really? I never have those moments. Ahem.
Okay so I do. Case in point, just yesterday as a matter of fact; I believe this can be filed under, "You know you're tired when..." you get off the plane, lug your extremely overweight suitcase off the belt, flounder for a moment searching for a way out of this airport you've never seen before, haul the ten ton bag to the nearest escalator, see that I need to go UP and try to get on the DOWN one. And yes, it took a few moments of extreme confusion to figure out why I couldn't get the darn suitcase onto the first step.
Yep. I did that. Aren't you proud? I won't take it personally if you ignore me for the next four days. :0)
Your blog photo, toilet paper stuck to shoes, brings it all flooding back...
I'd been to the restroom on the airplane and had walked back to my seat over the wing. As I was about to sit down, I realized that a flight attendant had been chasing me.
It' ain't toilet paper on the shoe.
I've been walking down the aisle with a LONG train of toilet paper coming up out of the back of my pants. (like, WEDDING TRAIN long)
After the flight attendant is SO KIND to rip it off, we both kind of look at eachother in shock. I ask her, "Is there more?" She says yes.
Dropping to my seat, I carefully rip off the exposed TP & try to decide if I dig down to hunt for more. I don't.
But I do spend the rest of the flight replaying the scene in my mind. I feel traumatized, right now, thinking about it.
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Last day of senior year of high school, June 1991. I'd had a crush on a classmate that never turned into anything. As our last class of the day and year ended, I thought she had left the room after she mentioned something about her then-boyfriend (who did not attend our school).
I announced to the class that I thought her boyfriend was one of the biggest idiots I'd ever met.
Hey, guess who hadn't left the room?
She absolutely shredded me to pieces in front of the other students. After the demolition was complete, even the teacher turned to me and said, "yeah, you pretty much deserved that."
That's how high school ended for me.
Have you seen the picture of a woman driver driving with the nozzle of the gas pump dragging from her gas tank that is on the other side of her car? That picture could be me.
Oh dear way to many to think of. Most recently I was speaking to an individual and at the end of our conversation i told him it was nice to meet him..... apparantly we had already met woops.
Oh and how about this one, the other day at the grocery store someone told my best friend how well behaved her daughter was.... me. ugh the trials and tribulations and being cute and little lol
I was sitting on the loo but didn't bother closing the door as no one was at home except my mom. Looked up to see a guy I had a crush on standing there. I got such a fright I jumped up off the loo and into the bath, which had dirty washing in. I want to die just thinking about it all again. The view he must have had of my lily white butt. Poor guy. Then again, poor ME!
Not that I don't have plenty of my own, but one of the funniest oh-no moments came years ago when I was on a first date.
As we drove out of the parking lot, he turned the wrong way onto a one-way street - right into a police car. I saw the sign, but was too shy to speak up. Of course, I'm sure it would have been better if he heard it from me than from the cop.
I worked for a large volunteer organization doing community organizing. One day, after a luncheon meeting, I drove back from Springfield, Illinois to Chicago. My passenger was our head volunteer. In his working life, he'd been the head of the Minnesota Dept. of Aging.
I started to feel really woozy as I drove so I decided I'd better pull off. I was going to be sick!
I drove as safely and as quickly as I could off the next exit ramp and pulled into a gas station parking lot where I flung open my car door and threw up.
"Are you okay?" My passenger asked.
I hesitated. "Yes. I'm sorry." I waited. This was not going to be easy. "Except, it came out both ends at the same time."
First, a look of horror on his face, then he laughed. Thank goodness.
Of course I'd chosen to wear khaki pants that day.
My Fiancé (now husband) and I were travelling through Europe, and I was riding the metro for the first time in my life (don't judge me). It was incredibly crowded, with standing room only. There were about 20 people holding onto each of the center poles.
Since I was newly engaged, I was impulsively lovesy and decided to kiss my Fiancé's hand that was holding onto the pole.
Ummm, the only problem was that it wasn't his hand that I kissed. Instead, I had kissed some old guy's hand who looked like he was 80. Then the man said to me, "Don't worry honey, it happens all the time." (In French, which made it somehow worse.)
Yeah, I'm sure that happens all the time.
Hilarious! Now I feel much better about my own embarassing moments--or should I say "bare ass"? LOL
You guys are awfully brave to use your real names--or are they?
OK, here's a different one: In college, we went on a jock raid at the men's dorms, similar to the old-fashioned panty raid. I was screaming for jock straps with all my dorm friends when a head pops out from an upstairs floor and the ex-pres of our Student Council (I was a rep for 3 years) recongnizes me, then throws down his (tiny) jock strap. Let's just say it was embarassing every time I ran into him at our high-school reunions...Sign me...Anonymous
Years ago I was doing this exercise at Tae kwon do where you had to bend over and the instructor was walking behind me...you can guess the rest.
I have yet to (be able to afford to) go to a real writers' conference, but I did base one of my comics on an experience a friend had.
Find it here:
http://thefridaychallenge.blogspot.com/2009/11/fitz-of-distraction_14.html
I had taken my three children to the zoo and we were having a great time playing in the water at the splash pad. After visiting the washroom, we came outside and I fed the kids lunch on the lawn. I had lost a few pounds and was feeling proud of the looks the people around us were giving me. I must look really great!
Yeah. No.
Two women came up to me and said "You have toilet paper hanging out the back of your jeans."
I turned to look and it was not a mere square of TP but rather a piece about three feet long trailing along behind me.
As I removed it and thanked the ladies for letting me know, I noticed the looks I'd been getting were not glances of admiration, they were looks of embarrassment and amusement.
Very embarrassing. :)
I love to sing. Growing up we would sing in the car, my mom and I, and my brother would sit in the back and brood. One day (in my puberty years) i was singing loud. My brother got mad and yelled. "You can't sing, you're off key, and you're flat!" I cried, "I am not flat! Have you seen me lately?! I am not flat!" He laughed so hard it took him ten minutes to tell me my singing was flat, not my chest. Welcome to puberty.
not a writer's conference moment, but i ended up devoting my op-ed column to it:
i took my son to get his first hair cut earlier this year at the oldest barber in our town--the same barber who had cut my dad's hair when he was young. as i squatted to pick up a kleenex box that the barber had dropped between two of his barber chairs, i heard the loudest ripping sound you can imagine.
it was my khaki's splitting from the bottom of the zipper all the way up to the back waistband.
can something be "hysterically mortifying"? because that's how i felt, mortified to the point that all i could do was laugh out loud. i carried my son out of the barbershop filled with 70+ year old men, my bright coral-colored panties free for all of them to see.
my son's hair hasn't been cut since.
have a blast, Rachelle!
I'm thinking about the time I was at a faith conference in St. Paul. Anne Lamott was the keynote speaker. Afterwards I waited in line with a copy of Traveling Mercies for her to sign, but when I got up to the table, I handed her the wrong book. I gave her the book of the other author who was also reading/speaking at the conference. She opened it to the title page, readied her pen, and then stopped, looked up, and said, "This isn't my book."
I wanted to crawl under the table. It was my big moment with Anne Lamott, whom I admire so much, and I humiliated myself. She was gracious...but you could tell she was a little irritated, too. If you know Anne Lamott, you can probably guess that my mix-up didn't go over too well! Maybe I'll end up a character in one of her books someday!
Have fun at the conference...
Oh, and then there was the time I accidently wrote "donations to Open Panty" instead of "Open Pantry" when I was an obit copywriter. That did not go over well with the family...or the funeral home...or my editor.
My mom was a World history teacher and once she had a typo on a major test that read, instead of King Tut, King TIT. I know cuz I caught it, but after it was distributed to all the students!
(Hope this isn't too R-rated?)
Back in high school I went shopping for a winter formal gown at the mall with a friend. We had until noon before we had to meet my friend’s mom in the parking lot, and she was going to kill us if we were one minute late.
Well wouldn’t you know it? I found the perfect dress right at 12 o’ clock on the button! I tried it on as quick as I could, and hurried to the register and waited laboriously in line while my friend reminded me of how tortuously cruel her mother was going to be now that we were already twenty minutes behind… Finally, I PAID. The cashier began to wrap my dress in plastic, but I snatched it off the counter and told her I’d take it just as it was.
My girlfriend and I ran screaming through the mall trying to get to the parking lot at lightening speed with visions of getting our heads lopped off the second we got to the car. It wasn’t until I hit the exit that I felt a hand land securely over my shoulder. It was the cashier from the store, clearly out of breath. Apparently she had forgotten to take the security tag off. As we walked all the way back to the store people were admonishing me, and applauding the cashier for catching “the shoplifter”.
I wanted to die.
Winter formal was not a blast. The dress had a mind of its own. It was constantly twisting itself around my body—as was my date.
Total disaster.
Ooh -- I have a writer's conference one! At Mt. Hermon, you can send in two submissions to be reviewed by editors, agents or writers. They were ready to pick up after lunch on the second day. I decided to exercise some self-control and avoid the huge crush of people heading down to retrieve them, instead waiting until almost dinnertime. There was no line at all by then, so I was feeling pretty proud of myself. Then I read the note on the front: "Interested -- let's meet at 2 pm." Looked down at my watch: 5 pm. Oops. Thankfully, she thought it was funny and didn't hold it against me.
When we were still at the boyfriend/girlfriend stage, my husband-to-be had dropped in to see me at my parent's house. We were sitting on the couch and I got up to get us something from the kitchen. He grabbed the hem of my skirt and gave it a playful tug. The zipper let go and the skirt fell to the floor. That was a moment when I wished I could drop through the floor!
It was June 1992, and I was at Indiana University to cram my 3rd year Russian courses into 8 weeks. After our first group orientation in Eigenmann Hall, I walked out of the meeting room and, seeing the restroom door open, decided that I needed to use the facility. I turned and walked in about seven or eight steps before I suddenly thought, "Wait! Wasn't the tile in here green and instead of pink earlier?!" Just then a bunch of girls gathered in the doorway behind me burst into laughter as they observed my mistake! I beat a hasty retreat and let them enter instead!
*laughing* - I have tears rolling - omg! I feel ever so much better about my thousands of embarrassing moments.
Professionally one of the embarrassing things I've done is when I worked in an office, and was in an elevator. I was showing my friend how I could do the "Curly" from Three Stooges "wooo wooo wooo wooop wooop" dance where he does that thing with his leg and makes the funny face and yodels the woo woo woop thing.....
Right when I did that, the elevator doors opened and there stood my then boss, my boss's boss, and some big wig muckity muck senator or representative or gov's office whomever . . .
My friend was trying to stop her laughter, and just turned her back, meanwhile, I just straitened my suit and said, "Hello . . ." then stood there mortified during the rest of the elevator ride.
lawd.
I have a VERY good one. But it's too long to put in a blog comment. About a year ago, I made it an official short story, and it 's on my site, passinglovenotes.
I don't want to steal readers from Rachelle's fantastic blog, so finish reading all the good tidbits from her blog before you google passing love notes. It's in my "books and more" link. You'll ROFL.
My most embarrassing moment was a few weeks before my wedding. My fiance and I were attending my college girlfriend's wedding. While waiting with her family, I needed to use the ladies room. I excused myself, walked across the small room and right into the men's bathroom. Thankfully no one was in there! I immediately turned around and left, only to find all of my girlfriend's younger siblings laughing their tushes off - and her parents & my fiance had grins on their faces too. I was so embarrassed!
I attended my first writer's conference last May. Knowing that I was going to be meeting authors, publishers, agents and the like, I studied the list of presenters and hoped I'd remember who's who once I arrived.
I also joined a group of new attendees and read several times about elevator pitches beforehand. Knowing that I had no material to pitch (I am focusing on articles and devotions to get started), I told someone so when I recognized his face from the list of presenters. He and I were the only one in the elevator at the time and I was trying to make small talk. I'm typically shy when alone with a stranger in an elevator.
I was embarrassed when said author informed me that he was not a publisher or agent, so I need not worry about my lack of a pitch. (I really should have known who he was. I had studied, you know?)
Oh yep, this would have to be the time in biology where I stuck my hand up, actually KNOWING the answer for once, and almost screamed in my excitement: "It's a living orgasm, sir!"
The shame ...
Oh there are soooo many. Too many. One of my recurring ones, however, is that I'll be speaking to someone who for one reason or another makes me flustered, and I'll start putting two different words together accidentally. It drives me crazy and I sound like such an idiot.
A month ago I was exactly feeling how you are feeling now, in pain, crying, heart broken, and then I found this site saveabreakup.com and I followed their instructions, I had my girlfriend come back to me in no time so fast !! I was so so happy and I'm still very happy, don't give up! I suggest you view the free videos that tell you what to do on saveabreakup.com