This Saturday, I am going to be reading a short story for the BANG OUT Reading Series in San Francisco. The theme is HEAT. I will be reading with 6 other people, and I believe it is free. Bargain!
The reading will be at Amnesia Bar, 853 Valencia Street, from 7-9 p.m. I hope you can come.
I’m writing a book about cocktails! The working title is DIY Cocktails, so it will be a very hands-on book about how to create your own cocktails using fresh and homemade ingredients. Adams Media is the publisher. Look for it in stores and through online booksellers in May! In the mean time, I still have a little bit of drinking and writing to do. I see a Word Pirates cocktail party in our future.
Photo by wickenden
Besides learning and inspiration, another thing I gained at AWP was the worldwide beard game championship title. (At least, I think I was the winner of the beard game.) If you think yelling beard in a public place is strange, you haven’t attended a dance for writers. Now that is strange. When we saw this on the agenda, we didn’t think anyone would show up. But the place was hoppin’, and writers actually had some pretty sweet dance moves. Most of them also had social skills. A few of them did not … to the point of creepiness. Giving socially maladjusted people free alcohol may not be a good idea.
Speaking of ideas, one thing Michael Chabon said in his keynote that I really liked: Why would you try to be a writer if you weren’t full of ideas? The panels sparked so many ideas for me, but one of the reasons is that they weren’t trying to. The panelists all seemed to assume we were full of ideas and wanted to hear more about how to get those ideas out and arrange, share, and perfect them.
I had never been to an AWP Conference before. It was a great experience. It was held in the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, which has a statue of a giant blue bear trying to get inside the building:
Roughly 9,000 people attended AWP this year. Even factoring in that many of those people are academics or wannabes, that’s a lot of writers. The conference did a kickass job accommodating everyone. While some panels were standing-room-only, I was able to see everything I wanted to see.
There’s something for every type of writer at AWP–panels on fiction, poetry, nonfiction, publishing, teaching creative writing, playwriting, young adult writing, literary readings, etc. In my typical gung-ho style, I went to lots and lots of panels, pretty much non-stop panel hopped every day. The first day, we went to seven panels and the keynote speech, plus we found time to tramp all over downtown Denver. I later learned that many people only go to one or two panels a day. One woman said that she would be exhausted if she went to as many panels as we did. This baffled me. Why is sitting in a room listening to people talk exhausting, exactly?
There were a lot of men with beards at this conference. Lots of pretty girls and glasses too, but for reals, there were so many beards. Marcia and I started playing a game where we said the word “beard” every time we saw one. Whoever said “beard” last was winning. A typical conversation went like this:
“I liked that panel–beard–especially the second speaker–beard. Did you catch his name? Beard.”
I can’t remember who won the game overall. I think it was Marcia?
Across the board, the panels were run by intelligent folks who knew what they were talking about. I got a lot out of them. It’s not so much that I learned that much–although I did learn some things, like how to put together a poetry book or the benefits of the 10 minute play form–as that the conference generated a lot of inspiration. I came away with a notebook full of ideas for short stories, articles, poem, Word Pirates prompts, and so on. That alone was worth the trip.
At the end of each panel, there was the Question and Answer period, which are always painful to sit through. Does anyone like Q&As? Here is Marcia’s breakdown of a typical question people tended to ask:
I was relieved that Michael Chabon, who gave the keynote speech, did not hold a Q&A because of the size of the audience. I don’t know how many people were packed into the ballroom at the Hilton, but it looked like hundreds, maybe even a thousand people. To appease those who love asking questions, Michael Chabon wrote the speech in Q&A form, where he asked questions of himself and then answered them. It was pretty funny.
Michael Chabon is so charming.
End of Part I. Over and out.
For some reason, our AWP posts wouldn’t go up when we were at the conference, so blogging was impossible. However we will remedy this by putting up a summary post later this week. I even have pictures. Stay tuned.
We are off to the AWP writer’s conference tomorrow. Hurrah! I have never been to Denver before!
We will be blogging about our experience at the conference. Stay tuned to follow along.
We’re shutting things down around here for the rest of 2009 due to the holidays. But don’t worry, there will be lots more Word Pirates in 2010!
In the meantime, here is a free present, not from us but from Audiofiles Magazine. From now until December 29, you can download three free Sherlock Holmes mysteries from their website. The books are: Silver Blaze, The Adventure of the Stock-Broker’s Clerk, and The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.
I am getting them right now. I haven’t read any Sherlock Holmes since I was in junior high, so this should be fun.
Merry Christmas!
What? Word Pirates are blogging again? That can’t be! But it is. I figure since Jose Saramago has retired his blog to concentrate on his novel, it was time for me to ignore my novel and concentrate on this blog again. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is, after a long hiatus, I am feeling the Word Pirates blog love. Hurrah!
Word Pirates is looking for a new member. The Petaluma-based writing group meets on the third Tuesday of each month to focus on
creative non-fiction and short fiction. Our goal is to inspire and support each other as we get our work ready for publication. A typical
meeting is split between reading our work to each other and starting new work through writing prompts.
We are looking for members who are professional writers/editors and/or hold a degree in writing. The group doesn’t focus on genre fiction, screenplays, or poetry. If you’re interested, please e-mail us a brief bio and sample of your writing and tell us what you are looking for in a writing group.
Contact: wordpirates @ gmail.com
The book “Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please” asserts that the British invented baseball, and cites the opening pages of Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” as proof.
On the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert did a great riff on what Austen baseball would be like. Here is an excerpt: (The video is also below, with the Austen bit as the second segment)
“Austen wasn’t writing about American baseball. It was a Jane Austen version, where the ball is not hurled about rudely, but introduced to the bat through proper channels at a society function. And one does not steal bases like a commoner; one sends word ahead to the next base by messenger, requesting permission to approach at the base’s leisure. Of course, what the bat cannot reveal is that though he loves the ball desperately, he has sworn an oath of loyalty to the glove to whom the ball was promised. So the bat must pretend he hates the ball, swatting at it, though he wishes nothing more than to profess his undying affection, but he can’t, he mustn’t, he shan’t! And so, the bat must retreat to the gardens of his estate and… pine.”