Conventions, Epiphanies and a Sale!

 I just got back from When Words Collide, a fabulous writer/reader convention in Calgary, where I was a Special Guest. (Because this was the Final Chapter under current management they had not only a slate of Guests of Honor but a second slate of Special Guests, including some like me who would have been Guests of Honor during the Covid years.) I had a lovely time. I gave two readings, taught two workshops, participated in two panels and signed autographs. I met lots of writers, both published and unpublished, at all stages of their writing journey.

The highlight for me was getting to meet and talk to Tanya Huff, whose books I have been a fan of for years. She is funny, wise and an entertaining speaker. I bought her new fantasy book Into the Broken Lands and am halfway through rereading it already.  It's terrific! Buy it. Seriously.

I also had an Aha! moment about one of my own projects. Ironically, it came about because of the workshop I was teaching. I told the participants that during revision it was important to look critically at every scene to see if it advanced plot and character or if it could be cut. "Sometimes," I said, "when we're writing the first draft, we write the next thing that the character does, instead of the next thing that is relevant to the book's plot." I even had a little example that I showed.

Hours later, in my hotel room, it hit me that I had done this EXACT THING in one of my works in progress. The novel has gone through five rounds of revision and every time when I hit this scene I thought, "There's something wrong here," and I added more action, more dialogue in an attempt to make it work INSTEAD OF JUST CUTTING THE DARN THING. This particular novel is currently running about 25 k too long, so now I'm going to be looking to see if there are other chapters I can cut as well. I'm betting there will be.

So that's what I'm working on this week. I hope everyone else who was at the convention is feeling similarly energized and ready to dive into writing!

Oh, and before I go... My publisher, Great Plains, has done a 25% price drop on the the ebook version of my teen werewolf novel, Feral.  If you like Girl Alphas, try it!

17-year-old Chloe fears she's a Dud, a child born to two werewolves who can't change into a wolf. If she's still a Dud by the time she reaches adulthood, she'll be exiled. In the meantime, she's at the bottom of the pack hierarchy and the other teens in her small town make her life miserable.

Then she encounters a feral werewolf with the opposite problem: he's trapped in wolf form. Chloe suspects the feral is her old classmate, Marcus, who everyone believes died along with the rest of his family in a mysterious plane crash. Chloe vows to help Marcus regain his human self because giving up on him would mean admitting possible failure for herself, too. But she must act quickly. Pack law mandates killing ferals.

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