I announced at Sunday dinner last week that I was going to a writer’s conference. My father and one of my sons looked appropriately interested. My husband rolled his eyes. He informed them that this “writer’s conference” meant I was having lunch with Jessica. Jessica, who writes fantasy as J.M. Ney-Grimm, was my college roommate. We lost touch over the years, but I found her again at The Passive Voice and we’ve been in contact ever since–if only by email for the most part.
We do have phone calls after we’ve beta read something for each other. These telecons, if I may fall back on old FAA parlance, will last an hour or two.
I had meant my grandiose announcement as a small joke, but as I considered it I realized we were having a writer’s conference, albeit a very small one. We met in February at a barbecue restaurant on Route 29 in Virginia, and as we left after talking shop for four hours we agreed that maybe next time we’d talk about our kids. Yep, we were having a writers conference. I sent her an agenda. She added to it. The night before our conference I gave it a proposed name, which was adopted by universal consensus: the Midway Writer’s Conference. We had planned to meet in a park halfway between where I live in Maryland and where she lives in Virginia, but it rained. So we met in Culpeper. It took us each a little over an hour to get there. I’ve driven longer to get home from the FAA on a bad commuting night.
We talked a lot about marketing. We went over book funnels and magnets, BookBub ads, swaps, AMS advertising, promo sites, and issues of craft. We got through the agenda and found ourselves with lists of tasks. I was so inspired that I came home and put Far Flung wide, a task I’ve been neglecting for months. It’s now available at all sites that sell ebooks, and even through some library sites. Funnels and magnets come next.
We tried to figure out if her book The Tally Master was epic fantasy or not. I was arguing it was. The troll wars rage across the Northlands. Weapons are forged. Our cursed main characters live in a troll tower of monumental proportions. It all seems pretty epic to me. Jessica demurred. The hero is a bronze-age accountant. She was telling a small tale. It was a mystery about missing tin, a matter of seemingly little moment. But, said I, it has large consequences, it’s part of a grand, epic sweep. A light bulb went off in my own mind. Her tales are like mine: what I call ground-based.
As I’ve probably mentioned before, I love reading epic space tales. But I always wonder how the people back on Earth address the repercussions of all that epic derring-do. Don’t they have bureaucratic turf wars before they respond to the threat of alien invasion? The human race I know sure would. I know I’ve got nothing on a bronze-age accountant (fine, “tally master”), but I, too, like to focus on the smaller detailed story. Sure, the first interstellar starship has just discovered another Earth, but let’s have a patent fight about the starship’s engines. And, in the next book, let’s charge the captain with mutiny for leaving a colony behind.
The tally master’s missing tin affects the progress of the war, the tally master himself, his apprentice, and the lives of many others in the troll tower. It leads to second and third order mysteries and surprises. Consequences happen when one person relentlessly pursues his duties and seeks answers, whether they are all welcome or not. It is every bit as gripping to see one person’s role as to see a cast of thousands.
I like checking out the foundations of all that epic sweeping back and forth. So does Jessica.
We beamed at each other. It was a good writer’s conference. We even talked about our children.
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