Sunday 29 June 2008

Back from Winchester

Just been to the Winchester Writers' Conference for the first time in 10 years. It was great to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. Made some good contacts, spoke to the lovely Carolyn Caughey (senior editor at Hodder), who I met at my very first writers' conference back in - ooh - 1991 and who changed my life in that she encouraged a whole group of us back then who wrote genre fiction - some of whom are now among my closest friends. Had a great meeting with a literary agent, who liked my submission and wanted to read the rest of it and also got to speak with the editor of Ebury Press' new list. Now I'd been a bit cheeky and sent something to her in advance of the conference - knowing full well that she'd be deluged with submissions afterwards and as I'd hoped, she'd spotted the word "Winchester" in my covering letter and taken my sub out of the mountainous slush pile! That's what I call pro-active, so I just hope she reads it and likes it now.

What else did we do? Succeeded in being in the first 5 of every queue for meals, despite just about every event over-running. Oh and managed to sneak out of the big dinner before the speakers started - not that I didn't want to listen, but the room was so hot and we'd already been sitting there for 2 1/4 hours.

And the best bit was going to the talk by the Authonomy crew and finding that Kate not only recognised me from the site, but had just added my book to her bookshelf. The system works!

So I have a busy few weeks ahead. Contacts to follow up and subs to prepare. Plus I have to make a load of gemstone jewellery for the village fair, help do the admin for the village fair, process 60+ orders for new Telos books, sort out all my daughter's end-of-term trips, concerts & what-have-you and I guess I'd better squeeze work in somewhere too. And the pile of washing since the machine was out of action for a week ... But I'm getting boring now.

1 comment:

Anne Brooke said...

Fabulous!! Glad the w/e was so good for you. Go, Debbie, go!!!!

:))

A
xxx