Yesterday I finally escaped the acid flashback that was Disneyland and California’s hints that it might want to tremble into the sea, and I am now watching the lights of the Vegas strip come on like a neon sunrise.
Looking back from here the SCBWI conference looks like it was a moment of delightful sanity. This is clearly a viewpoint painted with fond nostalgia because I was practically vibrating with the urge to run in six different directions at the time.
This is partly due to the fact that, in what is clearly a bid to encourage imagination, the program isn’t particularly good at explaining what the hell is going on. They toss you a title and a teeny bio on the presenter and you have to figure out what the session might be on from there. With some days running from 0730 to 2130, maybe eight things going on at any one times and fifteen hundred people infesting the conference area a certain live wire freneticism is expected. And that’s without throwing in the borderline insanity that comes with manuscript critiques and portfolio showcases.
I became quite fond of what had originally seemed like an excessive series of keynote addresses. They were beautiful moments were you only had one place to be. And they were awesome. You give a writer some warning and an hour with a microphone and odds on they’ll come up with something entertaining. That’s one of the charms of this kind of conference. But a couple of them really knocked it out of the park. Informative, unexpected, hilarious.
Also, if you ever get the urge to make faces at me for the lengths I go to for my writing or the weird experiments I want to do allow me to direct you to the lady who had herself locked in an ex-Stalinist gulag (prison) in abandoned Latvia where they beat the crap out of her so she’d have an idea of what being imprisoned there had been like. Seriously. I think it’d be interesting to be shot, but I’m not about to pay someone to do it.
I really love the SCBWI community. Not just because they put my own personal insanity in perspective, although that is nice. But for people who most of the time work alone it’s lovely to feel like a part of something. I went to a panel one evening which turned into this giant round table discussion with everyone sharing what they were working on and what questions they had. And they refer to unpublished people are ‘pre-published’. Which is kind of hilarious. But also lovely.
Arkem
10/08/2012
The term pre-published bothers me, as it seems to imply that becoming published is inevitable (at least for SCBWI attendees). If I was described as pre-published I would feel coddled at best and mocked at worst.
I guess it’s fine if you’re focusing on being inclusive but I’d rather call them aspiring authors instead or even just aspirants.
Kandace Mavrick
10/08/2012
Read pre-published as pre-law and it IS aspirational. It mostly makes me giggle. Btw, I am about to poke you. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Arkem
10/08/2012
Pre-law is the name of a course of study, so while Pre-law students are often aspiring lawyers I would not say that it is accurate to compare Pre-published to Pre-law.
Also, look out you’re about to be attacked.
Kandace Mavrick
10/08/2012
I declare this conversation and poke attack adequately dealt with.
Arkem
10/08/2012
Pics or it didn’t happen.
Claire
10/08/2012
What he said ^^
ManicSpider
11/08/2012
Funny thing, ‘aspiration’ is also a medical term for removing unwanted fluid from the body using a hollow needle. True story. I’d rather be pre-published, it implies a goal and the drive and work ethic to get there. Aspiring writer seems more airy-fairy. Like how you aspire to world peace knowing it’s never going to happen, but it’s pre-op when you are *really* about to go in and get something removed.
Kandace Mavrick
12/08/2012
Yeah, I like ‘pre-published’ because it’s suggests you’re not just dreaming about it, you’re taking serious action toward it. Which is I think why SCBWI uses it. Because the idea is that by being a part of the organisation and attending the conference and so on you are taking some of those steps. Hence my comparison with pre-law. It’s not ‘I want to be a lawyer’, it’s ‘I am taking these steps in that direction’. It doesn’t mean you WILL become a lawyer but it puts you closer than dreaming about it.