Con in Review — Dragon Con 2019

Labor Day weekend means Dragon Con!

I don’t generally do Dragon Con like other folks do. It’s a working con for me, and I’m on staff of the Writers Track, so it’s really rare that you’ll ever find me at any of the panels for the big stars, like David Tennant or John Barrowman. I spend most of my time in the track room and schmoozing with writers, published authors, and industry pros. I like it, so I guess that’s all that matters! 🙂

Thursday

The Writers Track didn’t have any Thursday programming, so this was my day to goof off! Well, after getting checked into my room, unpacked, and hoofing it over to the Sheraton to pick up the track folder, track volunteer badges, lanyards, and T-shirts, anyway. Work first. Play later.

In what’s become a tradition for Dragon Con, I met with my friend Steve Saffel for a drink in the afternoon. Steve is a Senior Acquisitions Editor at Titan Books, and I’ve known him for years — since my Seton Hill days. I always look forward to getting together with him. It starts my Dragon Con off right, with a mix of both work and fun.

And for Steve, Dragon Con is a working con as well. As a matter of fact, while we were chatting, he’d excuse himself every little while to send a text. He and one of his authors — who was also at Dragon Con — were working through a round of edits via text. The cutting edge of editorial work, doing them over texts!

During my conversation with Steve, I talked about being stuck in my current WIP (which is the second novel in the Soul Cavern series, after with Jivaja). He asked if I’d be interested in meeting later in the weekend to brainstorm and see if we could break through the issues. And, of course, I jumped on that! We made plans to meet in the Westin bar at 9 on Saturday night.

The rest of the evening, since it’s my party and socialness night, was a mix of goofing around in groups, hitting some dance parties, and hanging out with individuals. I ended up getting to my room about 12:30 and falling sleep around 1:30. It would prove to be my earliest bedtime of the weekend!

Friday

I do a good deal of moderating of panels (in addition to being on a few here and there) and one of the panels I moderated on Friday was called To Market, To Market. It was about different way to publish your manuscript once it’s complete, whether that’s the traditional route with a big publisher or a smaller one, or indie publishing yourself.

I mention this panel not really because of the topic, but because of something that came up during the Q&A I found to be really worth remembering. A brave audience member stood and shared with us that he has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His question had to do with the “best practice” that so many people espouse: you must write every day.

His issue was that because of his condition, on some days it’s a win to just get out of bed. Writing is not an option. John G. Hartness of Falstaff Books fielded the question the best. To paraphrase, he said that you must fit your writing in based on your life, not the lives of others, and if there’s a point where you can’t write, then don’t write. And when the manic part kicks in, write and write and write. And he ended with:

“Don’t let other other people’s arbitrary BS rules dictate your life and career.”

And he got a ton of applause. Rightly so. There’s no One True Way to be a writer. You do it whichever way works best for you.

I had a very late night panel about writing… adult content, so I didn’t leave the track room until almost 1:00 am. I headed over to a party, hung out for awhile and then went back to my room around 3:00. A late night, indeed.

Saturday

Saturday, there were a number of cool panels on the track, including one on creating characters and another on editing. I really loved the Writers Track sessions this year especially. I felt like we had very strong programming.

One of my favorite panels is the NYT Bestselling Authors Tell All. It’s held in a ballroom because we have greater turnout than our usual small room can handle. This year, we had Kevin J. Anderson, Jim Butcher, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Larry Niven, and John Ringo. These panels are a lot of fun, because these folks have known each other for ages, and so they play off each other and tell really funny stories.

And then sometimes there are the accidental funny stories. John Ringo, whose main genre is military science fiction, was telling a story about how one of his off-genre books sold incredibly well among female readers. He and his publisher were happy for that because, he said, “I have trouble penetrating the female market.” And he legit had no idea what he’d said until 300 people started cracking up!

I moderated a great panel on pacing, where the pros shared why pacing is important and how to speed things up and slow things down as needed. An interesting comment during the panel was about how storytelling is about manipulating your reader into feeling the things you want them to feel when you want them to feel those things (and I agree with this statement). And so pacing is important because it is the mechanism by which an author achieves said manipulation.

I kicked off early from the track (if you call 8:00 pm early!) and spent my dinner time chatting with a newer author and helping him work on a pitch. Then I took him with me to the Westin bar (you know that’s where the authors hang out during Dragon Con, right?), introduced him to a publisher friend of mine and threw him right under the pitching bus. Because that’s what I do. 🙂

Steve had a bit of a fire to put out at the time that we were supposed to meet, so we got a late start. But it was totally worth the wait. He helped me identify something that was missing from the ending of the Work in Progress and opened up some idea avenues as well. So brainstorming with him about the story I’d gotten stuck on helped so much!

After, I wandered over to the Spectrum party, which is the LGBTQ+ dance party hosted in the big Westin ballroom. It was hopping, with beautiful people in all sorts of groups and pairings getting hot and sweaty on the dance floor. I stayed for a bit and boogied down, but then realized I’m old and my knees decided that I needed to start walking back to the Hyatt while I could still walk back to the Hyatt!

Finally hit the bed about 3:30 am.

Sunday

I was excited for Sunday morning. I’d invited a couple people over for coffee in my room. One was a women in my Tribe (The Writing Tribe) who I only get to see at Dragon Con. The other is another pro editor, Trisha Wooldridge, who I’d finally connected with last year (after years of seeing each other at Dragon Con) and really wanted to spend more time with this year. We three spent about an hour and a half talking about writing, publishing, and where we each are on our journeys. We may have spent a decent portion of time debating about whether semi-colons have a place in fiction!

I made it down to the track room in time to head to the Regency Ballroom for Iconic Women Writers of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I love this panel, because I draw such inspiration from these women. This year we had Sherrilyn Kenyon, Katherine Kurtz, Jody Lynn Nye, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (who has been a favorite author of mine since I was about fourteen years old!).

Then it was back to the track room for the bad crush of people. You see, the next panel was Stirring the Creativity Pot and included Jim Butcher. When Jim Butcher (and certain other authors) are on a panel in the Writers Track, managing the crowd becomes very important. People line up and monitoring entry is necessary, because more people will want to attend than can fit in the room.

This can be frustrating, because many of the attendees aren’t writers. They’re just there to see Jim. So people who are writers who want to attend the session because they hope to get something out of it for their own writing may be turned away because there isn’t enough space. I hate doing this; it’s because some folks can’t bother going to see the bigger names when they’re in the ballrooms and feel like they need to come to a craft panel when they have no use for the information which is to be shared. (I may have strong feelings about this).

Right after that, I was modding a panel called Another Opinion, which was about using critique partners and beta readers. An interesting question that was asked was about whether authors should use sensitivity readers (which is actually a really bad term for them). There was a very good discussion on why sensitivity readers are good people to engage when writing about cultures, people, and demographics that aren’t a part of your own experiences. It’s similar to if you have genetics or rocketry or law in your story. You’d want to have it looked over by someone in those fields to make sure you got it right. People and characters are the same way. Get someone who is of that demographic to read your character to make sure you got it right.

Later that night, I was back at the Westin to join the writers at the bar. I mostly hung out with Trisha again, along with another friend, Kim, and Erin Michelle Sky, who with her hubby is the author of The Wendy. We talked about a cool anthology that Trisha is trying to pull together and we gushed about each others’ books.

Then, when Trisha went off to see the Cruxshadows, Erin and I headed back to the Hyatt. On the way there, we talked a lot about my upcoming projects. Since we weren’t really done talking once we arrived at our hotel, we headed up to the con suite, grabbed some chips and hummus, and sat in the corridor outside to finish our conversation. She agreed that my next project after Soul Cavern would likely work well at one of the big NY publishers, and we talked about what things might be missing from the first book of that new project. She was very insightful, and I really enjoyed having that conversation with her.

I ended up heading back to my room about 3:30. I did some preliminary packing and fell into bed at 4:15.

Monday

Rolling out of bed was so hard Monday morning. I am not a spry young thing anymore! But I managed. I did a bit of packing, then headed downstairs for a couple end-of-the-con panels. I’d secured a late checkout at 3pm, which is ideal for me, since I finish up panels at about 2.

I walked into the room, said hi to some folks, chatted, and then five minutes before the Podcasting for Authors panel began, I was drafted into surprise moderating! Wheee! It went pretty well. I’d moderated a similar panel earlier in the year at a different convention, so I simply modeled this one after that. We talked about why an author might want to be a guest on a podcast and how to go about applying for guest spots. Toward the end of the hour, we shifted into how to create and run your own podcast. We talked a bit about equipment and a lot about consistency.

And it was over! I managed to move out of my tiny room, and then I said goodbye to Dragon Con 2019.

But I already have my hotel reservation for Dragon Con 2020!

Were you at Dragon Con this year?

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All photos, except the Dragon Con logo, were taken by me!