Category Archives: Ace Jordyn

When Words Collide is one of my favorite events. It’s a dynamic, cross genre (science fiction, fantasy, romance, crime, literary, young adult, horror, urban fantasy, horrors and more), readers and writers festival. There is a variety of panels ranging from homicide, criminal psychology, taxes, play writing, transhumanism, writing dirty scenes, adapting the novel to script, indie versus traditional publishing to name a few. Coffee clutches along with readings and key note addresses provide great opportunities to hear your favorite authors. Previous years have seen guests such as Patricia Briggs (fantasy and urban fantasy), Michael Cassutt (TV/Film Scriptwriter and Sci Fi), Barbara Fradkin (Mystery), David B. Coe/D.B. Jackson (Fantasy, historical fantasy), Adrienne Kerr (Editor Penguin Canada), Kevin J. Anderson (Science Fiction), Anthony Bidulka (Mystery) and Rachel Caine (Cross-genre). I spoke with festival Chair, Randy McCharles about the event.

WWC is billed as a festival for readers and writers, not a conference. Why is this?
Writers conferences provide content for writers, usually those still learning the basics of the business. More established authors as well as editors and agents are the speakers, and 100% of the content is structured to help new writers enter the game. Readers festivals are mostly opportunities for readers to purchase books and have them signed by the authors, as well as listen to a number of authors read and perhaps speak on discussion panels. When Words Collide is relatively unique in that it addresses both these demographics and provides content for more advanced writers as well. One of the most enjoyable things over all three years was meeting new and interesting people, many of whom I continue to associate with throughout the year. The festival is, after all, a social event where readers and writers gather to meet like-minded people and discuss their interests.

Why a readers and writers conference?What will readers get from it?
When we started When Words Collide, we had no idea who would be interested in attending, but desired to be as inclusive as possible. As it turned out. Everyone was interested. For the first 3 years we collected registration demographics, which indicate that 50% of attendees classify themselves as readers. When we put together each year’s program, we work to include quality content for beginning writers, established writers, and for readers. Some of the reader content includes readings by festival guests and attending authors, an autograph session, a merchants area for popular and hard to find books, and nonstop panels discussions by authors and avid readers on topics of interest to readers. Many readers are also interested in the writing process and attend presentations and discussion geared for writers, especially if authors they enjoy are speaking.

Who are the guest speakers for 2014?
Our editor guest is Mark Leslie, Director of Self-Publishing & Author Relations at Kobo Canada. Kobo is a major player in Canada’s publishing community and Mark has vast expertise in the area of how to be published both traditionally and through self-publishing. We also have four big name authors. Diana Gabaldon is an award-winning author of Historical Fiction whose Outlander series is currently being made into a TV series. Jacqueline Guest is an international award-winner of Young Adult and Historical Fiction. D. J. McIntosh is the author of the internationally bestselling Mesopotamian Trilogy mystery. Brandon Sanderson is a bestselling author of Epic Fantasy, for his own work as well as the final three books of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

Tell us about the pre-festival workshops you’ve added this year.
We have several workshops ranging from 3 hours to 1 day. The workshops offer a deeper look at the subject matter by masters in their fields and are a great compliment to the more relaxed, shorter events during the festival. More information can be found online.

Adrienne Kerr (Penguin Canada) is returning for her 3rd year and will teach 2 1-day workshops on manuscript critiques.
Mark Leslie (Kobo Canada) is offering 2 half-day presentations: one on how authors can promote themselves and the other is on the pros and cons of traditional and indie publishing.
D. J. McIntosh has a workshop on how to get published based on her own overnight sensation experience. Jacqueline Guest is also teaching a workshop on producing and promoting your book.
Jack Whyte is returning to conduct the popular SIWC (Surrey International Writers Conference) master class workshop, Manuscript Strengths & Weaknesses.
Alberta Romance Writers Association has a workshop: Monochrome or Tapestry – Engineering your stories for texture and depth.
Brandon Sanderson had hoped to provide a pre-festival workshop, but his schedule won’t permit, so he is giving a 2 hour presentation as part of the weekend festival instead.

What are some of the features which set WWC apart from other conferences?
We have brought together several events:

The Blue Pencil is a short sit down with and editor or author (who does a lot of editing) to receive some feedback on a piece of your manuscript. The Pitch Session is where you pitch your novel idea to agents and editors. Alberta is not overflowing with agents, so we often have authors stand in who can still give excellent feedback on your pitch and possibly refer you to appropriate agents. We do have several acquisition editors at WWC and they do request manuscripts.
The Live Action Slush has grown very popular in recent years. It may have started at SIWC (Surrey International Writers Conference) as Writer Idol, but we changed the name to be more reflective of what it actually is. Essentially, members of the audience submit anonymous first pages to be read and listened to by a panel of editors. Editors raise their hand when they would have stopped reading and rejected the manuscript. The editors then comment on why they stopped. This is a great experience, not just for those who submit pages, but for the entire audience as a great insight into how books are rejected or selected by publishers. Many readers also enjoy these session. It is so popular that WWC holds several sessions focused on different genres.
The 50 Minute Workshops are also very popular. In 2014 we will run more than 40 of them. Essentially an instructor gives a presentation or hands-on workshop to a smaller audience (less than 30 people). These may be on any topic of interest to readers or writers.
Our Friday Keynotes are also unique. Most conferences have sessions with 1 keynote speaker, as do we. But we also have a 2 hour session where all of the festival guests speak for 15-20 minutes on any subject. The range and mix of profoundness is my favorite part of the festival.
One of the most enjoyable things is meeting new and interesting people, many of whom I continue to associate with throughout the year. The festival is, after all, a social event where readers and writers gather to meet like-minded people and discuss their interests.

Where and when is WWC happening?
When Words Collide is always on the second week of August. This year it’ll be held from August 8-10 at The Carriage House Inn in Calgary, Alberta.

How can you make all this happen with a registration fee of $60 at the door or $45 if people register before April 1st?
Attending 3 days at When Words Collide costs $40-$60 (depending on when memberships are purchased), making it a bargain for writers and affordable for readers. We limit invited speakers to 5 or 6, usually 1 editor and 4 or 5 authors working in a range of genres for whom we cover travel expenses and provide an honorarium. Last year we had 150 volunteer presenters (professionals, writers and readers). All organizers and staff are also volunteers some of whom work tirelessly on grant requests, which greatly subsidize our costs. The festival is very much a labor of love. We are always on the lookout for new presenters we may be unaware of, and encourage people to contact us. Unlike most events, we publish our schedule online as it is being developed so that attendees can see our progress throughout the year.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know?
If you are interested in reading or writing, be it literary or genre fiction, poetry, or even non-fiction, When Words Collide is the one event in Canada that you want to attend. We expect over 500 attendees in 2014 from across Canada and from the US. Each hour of the day has 10 different activities to choose from. You will meet authors, make new friends, and learn as much about literature in Canada as you like. You can even watch our schedule develop online through the year as invited guests and attending presenters confirm their activities. Links to information about previous years are also available.

Randy McCharles is active in Calgary, Alberta’s writing community with a focus on speculative fiction, usually of the dark and humorous variety. In 2009 he received Canada’s most prestigious award for speculative fiction, the Aurora Award, for the novella Ringing in the Changes in Okotoks, Alberta which appeared in Tesseracts 12 (Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing) and was also reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy 9 (David Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer, ed). When not making up tall tales, Randy organizes literary events, including chairing the When Words Collide festival for Readers and Writers. Information on Randy’s published works can be found on his website.

Solitude – A Lonely Gift

December 19, 2013

Ace Jordyn

Imagine being alone in a cabin, writing without being disturbed by anyone and without a cell phone or internet. The basics are there – plumbing, electricity and a land-line phone for emergencies. The cabin is as cozy warm as the ability to remember to stoke the old wood stove. Sitting in the comfiest recliner, laptop propped on the lap, flying fingers blurt out vivid scenes. You write, you sleep, you go for the occasional walk to clear your head or to work out a problem and then you begin again. Word count rises and spirit soars.

This was the greatest gift I ever gave myself – a whole month of writing, thinking and sleeping. Beyond the accomplishment of a story told, it transformed my understanding of what I need to be a writer.

We try to balance our writing life with our everyday lives which includes work, family, friends and fun in our marvelous technological society. These things are important yet equally important is the need for time to think, create and write. So we plan and eek out snippets of writing time – an hour here, an hour there, a workshop here and a two day retreat there – and we write. Yet, as important as those snippets of time are, they are not solitude for solitude is immersion without expectation of interruption or immediate cessation.

Solitude provides the luxury to explore, think and integrate. Sometimes it isn’t the word count that’s required but the ability to think, brainstorm and plot without distraction. The balance now is that I create opportunities for solitude (even if it’s half a day) and the results of being centered, free-flowing creativity and the calm from problems solved spill into those precious snippets of writing time.

On that month-long journey of solitude, I discovered that in order to achieve solitude I must walk down the path of desperate loneliness where there are no people, no events, no media – nothing exists but me and my thoughts. Junk-noise and junk-thought withdrawal can be a painful albeit rewarding experience. Now I make a conscientious effort to shut out the junk-noise and junk-thought. Yes, people aren’t happy when I don’t respond to texts or phone calls for hours but they aren’t writing my stories and the unplanned interactions dissolve the state of mind I need to be in.

I never wrote so much so quickly and I never slept as much before! The experience made me aware how exhausting the creative process is. After writing for hours, I’d inhale some food and collapse into a stone-dead nine hour sleep and then do it all over again. So sometimes when I’m reluctant to write it’s because I know I don’t have the energy it takes to be fully engaged nor do I have the time to allow the grey cells to warm up to enough to integrate ideas before creating a coherent symphony of words. Now, I’m a little more forgiving of myself in those moments and I work hard to make sure the time and the energy I need are there.

Solitude allows the brain to become more sensitive to the emotional tenor of words, to the rhythms of not only speech but of story pacing – it’s the crescendo and denouement of action and reaction, heightened and relaxed emotion, the interaction of protagonist and antagonist, the prose of world building mingling with characters experiencing the dynamics of the world. Having an extended experience of the rhythm of words, images and scenes, and having done it long enough to integrate it, I go back into that state when I write. For me, it’s meditation through writing.

I always thought that solitude was the ideal writing state and had dreamed of being sequestered in a cabin writing forever. Not anymore. Surrounding ourselves with family and friends, experiencing life, those are the things that are fodder for our creative selves. We are creatures of the pack and loneliness in the extreme can as easily erode our ability to write as can the distractions. Balancing solitude and writing with family and friends – that’s what I need. I’ll take my month of solitude again and I’ll keep finding small blocks of it in the meantime. But, I’ll also cherish my time with family and friends for solitude works best when we have something to leave and go back to again!

Happy writing!

Mean Salvation

December 12, 2013

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Character Conflict Craft & Skills 3 Comments

Every new author’s challenge is to learn to tell a story well and to do so with a passionate heart. There are reams of advice on the internet, in how-to-write books, from writers groups and at conventions, workshops and seminars. Knowing basic plot structure is quick to learn but how does one navigate character depth and writing with a passionate heart?

When I was starting out, I went to my first writers group meeting with a completed 100,000 word novel. Someone offered to read it for me. I was ecstatic. The reader had some valuable insights: 1) don’t let your characters be stupid. It sounds harsh but it wasn’t. Given the incident she was referring to it made perfect sense and it was an easy fix; 2) characters need to be consistent and logical; and 3) you must be mean, even cruel to your characters.

Permission to be mean??? I was both ecstatic and mortified. How could I embrace this? I don’t like conflict. Reading fairy tales as a kid, I was so relieved when the happy endings came – I wanted the conflict to be over so I could relish those sweet but short utopias. Yet, those words of permission filled me with relief – I no longer had to be nice, the peacemaker, making everyone happy somehow through their struggle. I was never so nice to my characters that they were wimpy and the story was without conflict but I hadn’t gone far enough.

Permission to be mean was permission to delve deep into a character’s psyche, to understand their deepest fears, anxieties and painful back story. It was about not feeling guilty because the characters I loved had to experience trouble and pain.

Understanding that it was my responsibility to look into a character’s deepest fears and to throw them into the pits of emotional hell and physical danger made me a better writer. When I now read the how-to books and columns, I understand they are challenging us to search for those emotional pits of hell within ourselves, to be honest enough so we can make our characters sweat through them. For example, this spring I took a one day workshop with Donald Maass based on his book Writing 21^st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling. That workshop was like being in therapy. We were asked questions similar to ‘What is the most painful secret you have? Where can you make your character feel what you are feeling right now?’

It’s a mean salvation for a writer – as we dig deeper and challenge our characters and are mean to them emotionally and physically, we are challenging our inner selves and are digging deeper into our own psyches.

The advice I was given when I started out makes sense now – if I dig deep within myself to understand emotional truth, dig deep within my character (my character isn’t me and her emotional truth isn’t necessarily mine), if I dig deep into the emotional realities of life (and they can be cruel), if I let my characters experience what they need, then I will be true (and logical) to my characters and my readers will experience a satisfying emotional journey. The added bonus was that I could now more easily ramp up conflict and tension.

Mean salvation – that’s the best way I can describe that first advice. We all live it, we write it and in our hearts, we know it. My favorite books make me live through those dark, awkward and painful moments with a character and in the end I embrace their journey although not all endings are sweet. Their catharsis is my catharsis. Their pain is my pain. Their salvation is my salvation.

It’s not like the song lyrics “you’ve got to be cruel to be kind” it’s that we’ve got to be cruel to be real, to dig down deep and face what makes us and our characters emotionally real. It’s mean salvation.

Business Plans for Writers

November 19, 2013

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Business Marketing Motivation 3 Comments

A business plan for writers – what an absurd idea! That may be your first reaction, but chances are that you already know how you want to your writing career to evolve. A business plan is the road map to launching and growing your career in a strategic, efficient manner. Everything you’re doing now – networking, writing, learning craft, blogging – it’s all part of a plan but let’s face it, we’re writers first and the less time we spend floundering or making mistakes with the business part of our career, the more time we’ll have for writing.

Here are the key elements for a writer’s business plan:

1. Company Description
Yup, you’re a company with accompanying tax write offs but let’s be more specific than that. Does your business include writing, editing, holding workshops, attending trade fairs, or other activities related to writing and promotion? As a writer, do you write short stories, novellas, novels, magazine articles, or some combination? What is your genre? Who is the target audience?

2. Operations Plan
This is a one person company, right? Wrong. For tax purposes you may be a sole proprietor or an incorporated entity but your company is bigger than one person. For example, who are your support groups – writers’ groups, critique groups, book clubs, blog group? Do you belong to interest groups locally or on-line such as science, knitting, bird watching, Sherlock Holmes fan club? These are important to note because they not only inspire you and provide valuable input they may also be part of your readership. Who are your mentors, critiquers and editors?

Bestselling authors have an organization. Take a look at the Acknowledgements page of their books. Most Acknowledgement pages list editors, research contacts, readers – anyone who helped them. For ease of organization, you can divide your support network into four categories: craft, business (contracts, taxes, editors, finances, etc), networking (conferences, on-line, writers groups, readers groups), and market access. Note any deficiencies you have in these areas and develop a strategic plan to deal with that aspect. For example, I need to know more about marketing strategies and so I’ve chosen to attend a seminar on marketing rather than a critique workshop to fill this gap. Finding the experts I need fills a gap in my organization and allows me to use my use my limited budget wisely.

Remember – it takes one person to have the idea and write the story, but it takes a community to support a writer and make the work available to the reader. Who is in your community?

3. Products and Services
We touched briefly on this in the Company Description, but now we need to get specific. You may be writing in one genre or several writing poetry, short stories or novels and writing for the children’s, young adult or adult markets. In the market you’re writing for, who exactly is the audience? For example, not all people who read mysteries love the same type of mystery or the same degree of graphic language. Those loving cozy mysteries (think Stephanie Plum series) may not like Ian Rankin’s gritty detective or James Patterson’s thrillers. What type of mystery/fantasy/romance do you write? Who will it appeal to? What are the sensibilities of the genre and does your writing reflect that? Where will your work be placed on the bookshelf?

If you’re editing or involved in some other aspect of writing (volunteer or paid), note that too. Depending on the level of your involvement, you may need to create separate business plans. However, having them listed in one spot will help you manage your time better when setting goals.

4. Marketing
It’s so easy to want to stay at home and only write or at most, to go to a writing meeting where we chat with like minded people. Marketing means getting out of our comfort zone and reaching out. The easiest way to do this is to have a plan and to follow it. A haphazard approach erodes confidence and the ability to present things in a comfortable confident manner.

For every product you need to have your elevator pitch, synopsis, chapter by chapter plot line, a great manuscript before you promote. Having these will help you understand your product so you can differentiate it and create a unique selling proposition. In other words, what distinguishes your story from others it the market? Why will your target market (children, young adults, mystery/romance/horror fans) like it?

Describe how your stories will be sold – book stores (which ones?), on-line, book clubs, and how you intend to get the books there. Even if you have a traditional publisher, you still have to market and sell, so be prepared to do that.

What are your promotional tactics? In other words, how will you reach your audience? Some examples are: tradeshows, school appearances, readings, book tour, social media marketing (Twitter, Facebook, etc,), reading clubs (local, Goodreads, etc), on-line advertising, conventions, local advertising and book trailers. Your website should appeal to the book buyer. One writer I know designed her site for teachers because they’re the ones who will be buying her books and will be allowing her to make school presentations. Who is your website designed for – readers, teachers, technical users (how to books), other writers?

There have been many good posts on marketing at Fictorians so just click on the Marketing category and you’ll receive a ton of information. Just remember to choose a few things to do (for example you can’t belong to every book club and effectively utilize all social media) and do them well.

5. Finances
Having a budget will focus your marketing strategy and allow you to develop and manage your business more effectively by allowing you to prioritize. Which convention/workshop can I afford to go to? Do I purchase business cards or have a professional design my website? What can I do for free?

After all the work we do to write our wonderful books, we can’t afford to fail now because we failed to plan the business part of our passion.