Book Festival and other updates

So last Friday, there was a book fair at the Provo Library.  I only heard about it the night before from Facebook, but there were almost twenty authors on the guest list, so I figured it would be a good place to go to meet other writers.  I wasn’t mistaken!

I biked up to the library just as Brandon Sanderson was walking in.  We chatted for a while, caught up on stuff since the last time I took his class.  I almost got to walk into the author’s only lounge with him, but one of the staff stopped me.  One of these days, though…one of these days!

I also ran into Dan Wells, who remembered me from World Fantasy and gave me a very nice compliment: he said I was very good at approaching people, especially at conventions.  Talked about the different cons this year; according to Dan,  Dragoncon is going to be huge this year, since Worldcon is in Australia and World Fantasy is in Ohio.  I have a friend in Atlanta–I’ll have to look into attending that.

Brandon Sanderson, Clint Johnson, Mette Ivie Harrison, and J. Scott Savage did a panel on writing fantasy.  Fortunately, I had my mp3 player on me and was able to record it.  If you would like to listen to it, you can find it here:

Fantasy Panel, Provo Children’s Book Festival (15 May 2010)

Clint had some interesting advice for me after the panel; he asked about the books I’ve written and said I should submit them to YA agents/editors as well as mainstream adult agents/editors.  Apparently, Genesis Earth and Mercenary Savior could work as YA, since 1) they’re about (relatively) young protagonists having coming-of-age experiences and learning how they want to live their lives, and 2) they don’t have the sense of nostalgia that adults often have when they think about their childhood.

So that was the Provo Children’s Book Festival.  Let me just say, this is one of the reasons why I love Utah: the writing scene for fantasy/sf/YA is HUGE.  Tons of writers, tons of readers, local writing events all the time–it’s great.

In other updates, I got a personalized rejection from Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show! It was a pretty long one, too.  The assistant editor said the writing was pretty good, but it felt too much like a novel.  Hehe…confession, it was part of a novel.  But that’s awesome that he thought the writing was good!

Besides that, he gave a lot of suggestions as to formatting, referring me to this site for detailed ms instructions.  I didn’t think most editors would mind Times New Roman, but if it’s an issue even for a few of them, I should probably just switch to Courier–no editor is going to fault me for using Courier.

Besides all that, I’m well on my way to finishing Mercenary Savior 3.0 before CONduit.  My goal right now is to finish it next Tuesday and spend Wednesday and Thursday sending it out.  After CONduit, I plan on starting Hero in Exile (except the name will change), and I have a TON of great ideas for it.  Funny how sometimes in order to finish a book, you need to write another one first.