Writing Conferences

Hello once again my blog-buddies!

I haven't really been on a whole lot to talk, but I did switch the site design up a little bit as you can see. One day this site is going to look professional, but I'm still a newbie when it comes to site designing, so this will have to do for right now. :)

I wanted to talk about writing conferences in this post, because I was a part of a writing conference last March.

I have applied to two different writing conferences this year; The Pen in Hand Writing Conference that is held in Little Falls, New York and the Breadloaf Writing Conference that is being held in Middlebury, Vermont.





Last year I attended the Little Falls Pen in Hand Conference and it opened my eyes to the world of writing. I really think that--if the opportunity ever presents itself--that you should apply to at least one writing Conference in your life, if you love to write! In the conference that I went to back in March  there were about sixty different students from all different schools in upstate New York. There are four to six different groups that the sixty students were split up into, and all the groups would go to author workshops. There were three different small-town authors that attended and they would talk to the groups about writing, publishing, and the whole nine-yards of becoming author. They really helped me out and allowed me to better understand what it takes to be an author.

During the two-day conference, we would stay in hotel rooms with roommates from different schools to share common interests. (Most of the people I met were into non-fiction short story writing, or poems. I'm more of a fiction-writing kind of girl, but my roommates were fun nonetheless.) Anyways, we'd go to group readings (no, not the readings of a psychic) and listen to different pieces of work that the authors wrote to 'stretch our common comfort zones' and let new work into our lives. Even though I didn't exactly take the authors advice and stretch my comfort zone, it was still fun to listen to them read what they wrote and published as something new.

The second writing conference I applied for I did not get accepted into last year, but I am hoping to be accepted in this year. It doesn't hurt to wish, right? ;)

What I do know about the Breadloaf Conference is that it's held on the Middlebury College Campus sometime in late Spring. It's similar to the Pen in Hand Conference, except there are two separate groups; The Fiction writers and the Non-fiction Writers. One author comes in and holds two separate workshops where the people accepted into the conference can read, share, and talk about their interests in writing. Honestly, that's all I know about that one.

I'm hoping to be accepted into the Pen in Hand Conference again this year, because now I'm an actual published author and it's only forty-five minutes away from where I live. Vermont will be a stretch for me (if I do get accepted) but I'd be happy if I was accepted nonetheless.

Anyways, that's all I really wanted to say for this post. If you ever get an opportunity to apply to a writing conference, then do it! It really helped me grasp the life of authors and how it works to get published. Just look at me! I went to the Conference in March, and found the motivation to actually get published in November of the same year! So give it a try if you love writing, okay? Don't do it because I said so, do it because you want to do it.

That's all!

--B.C. Doyle

P.S. Keep writing! ;)