What I did on my weekend…

GenreCon 2013: The Aftermath

PETERMBALL Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx , ,

gc-2013-web-banner

So I’ve been organising a con for the last few months, and now it’s over. GenreCon 2013 has been laid to rest, the attendees have all departed and flown back to their home cities, and my twitter feed is filled with people either thanking me for putting the con on or congratulating me on its success. Which means my life returns, more or less, to what passes for normal around these parts. A least until October 24th, when I fly to the UK to attend World Fantasy and get to experience the whole con thing from the attendee’s side.

The internet is slowly starting to fill with people posting con reports. Some of the ones that have crossed my path are here, here, and here. This is my report, which isn’t really a report, ’cause when you convene a conference, you don’t really get to see much.

Perhaps a more accurate thing to say is this is a series of vaguely coherent thoughts and feels I’ve had since the conference ended.

One

Holy fucking Jesus, that thing ate my life. I mean, there are many projects that are all-consuming, whether they’re work-related or writing-related, but this was like inviting Godzilla into your house to snack on all the available free time.

I am seriously fucking tired right now. But it’s a good kind of tired. I’m building up to some epic napping in the very near future.

Two

In a lot of ways, I’m one of the most visibly faces of GenreCon online, which means I get a lot of thanks and gratitude sent my way when the social medias start firing up (also, this year, an ungodly number of free drinks when I hit the bar; this caught me off guard).

All this gratitude is great for my ego and all, but it’s really not fair – for ten month of the year GenreCon is a conversation between me and my boss, Meg Vann, and for the most part those ten months are the fun part. Once the conference date draws near, however, a whole gang of people come on board to make things happen, and their jobs are actually a lot harder (and way less fun) than mine.

This means there’s a series of people who are getting nowhere near the love they deserve from the attendees, despite the fact they worked their fucking asses off to make the con happen. I spend a lot of time thanking these people for their work, but it never feels like enough, so I’ll do it once again:

To Meg, who helps keep the good ship GenreCon running and helps me steer the mighty beast;

To Aimee, who fucking rocks the on-the-ground admin and masters the logistics that would take me hours to untangle;

To Simon, who refuses to be flapped by anything and remains a quiet centre of calm amid the chaos;

To Sophie, who promoted the hell out of things and worked through a wicked flu to keep things running;

To Megan, who worked booze-free at all the events that had free booze, and thus made the ultimate sacrifice;

To Stacey, who wrangled transport and stepped up to fill the empty spots in the schedule whenever they needed filling (seriously, *have a lunch break*);

To Emily, who switched gears over and over on the weekend, and managed to line up an epic series of interviews amid all the backstage stuff.

To Lizz M., who stepped into the breach more times than I can count, thus earning the gratitude of me and the entire QWC contingent;

and to Lizz G., who walked into the chaos at the eleventh hour, and held her own admirably.

Seriously, all of you, thank you.

You seriously fucking rock, and none of you get the gratitude you deserve for your efforts through the GenreCon weekend.

Three

I said this last year, and I’ll stand by it: when you’re planning a con, the quality of your talent matters.

For the second year in a row, we were blessed with a truly outstanding list of guests. I can whole-heartedly recommend Chuck Wendig and John Connolly as potential guests to anyone planning a writing conference – they were both erudite, thoroughly engaging, and exceedingly fucking smart presenters who brought a great deal of knowledge to the table, and I think almost all the writers who engaged with them came away inspired and ready to double-down on their writing careers.

The same can be said of our Australian guests. We already knew Anne Gracie was going to be phenomenal (I’ve been a huge fan of her advice articles in the RWA newsletter, and pretty much anyone involved in the Romance Writers of Australia is a safe bet when it comes to being a con guest), and the same is true of both Alex Adsett (one of the rising stars among Australian literary agents) and Harlequin Escape editor Kate Cuthbert (we met her at GenreCon 2012 and immediately thought, yep, we’re definitely bringing her back).

Kathryn Fox was someone we’d tried to bring to the first GenreCon as a guest (we were thwarted by email problems), so it was great to see here in the thick of things this year, enjoying herself amid the other guests. John Birmingham remained a laconic, entertaining presence at the con and delivered an image I’ll be hard-pressed to forget during the final debate.

I’m exceedingly sorry I missed Peter Armstrong’s presentation about serial publication, which my boss has been raving about for several months (and the implementation of his Lean Pub platform seemed to impress our digital team at work).

Four

If the quality of our invited talent wasn’t enough, GenreCon really thrived on the backs of over ninety writers, editors, and agents who volunteered their time to participate in this year’s program. In the end we could use only half that number (limited time, limited space), but it meant we could represent a great deal of diversity in terms of the genres and experience levels presented.

A whole bunch of people came to GenreCon and rocked it, for no other reason than because they wanted to contribute to the development of emerging Australian writers and help forge the kind of community that makes exists to help everyone.

Seriously, all of you, you fucking rock.

Five

The statistical odds of me attempting to write a romance novel is significantly higher than it was this time last year.

Six

It probably won’t be a good romance novel, but I want to make the attempt.

Seven

When you work a project like GenreCon, you get to see a whole lot of genre-snobbery up close. It happened a few times in the lead-up, whether it was in the abstract (people posting me articles about the difference between genre and lit-fic) or the specific (people making disparaging marks about genre writing in general). That shit, it royally pisses me off, to the point where my blood pressure spikes. In my world, if you want to write, you’ve earned all the respect you need to earn for your ambitions to respected. What you want to write doesn’t factor into things.

The reverse of this – genre writers getting snarky at the lit crowd – doesn’t happen in quite the same way, but it does happen, and it’s a thing I generally try to avoid programming stuff that’ll provoke that kind of snark when we put together the con program. For one thing, I like big L literature as much as I like genre fiction. For another thing, a whole bunch of the peeps I mentioned up in point two? Lit writers. REALLY FUCKING GOOD lit writers. I don’t want them to feel disrespected when they’re giving up sixteen hours of their life to make something run.

Mostly, we get that right.

This year, on occasions, we got that wrong, and it made me a little sad. I get where a lot of the anger towards literature comes from (I’ve felt it myself, in the past, and will no doubt feel it again), but the truth is writers are writers, and the vast majority of writers will find common ground if given half the opportunity to do so.

Eight

The next big GenreCon isn’t until 2015 and I’ve got a whole lot of complex feelings about that. Mostly, though, I’m happy we’re taking a break next year.

Don’t get me wrong, I love running the con, but if I’m being really honest with myself, I have to admit that this year has damn-near wiped me out when it comes to work stuff. I don’t have a good filter when it comes to doing things I’m passionate about, and that means it’s extraordinarily hard for me to come home and switch off when running a con. I may be employed four days a week, but I think about it twenty-four seven (and largely work that often well).

But it isn’t just the all-consuming nature of the work that makes me happy about the every-two-years plan.

It’s the fact that it’ll give us the time to do things better. It’ll let us plan the next conference and give it some more shape, rather than just resting on the things that have let us get to this point. GenreCon grew fast – we had about 70% more attendees this year than the first time we ran things – and sticking with that kind of roller-coaster doesn’t leave a lot of time for thinking things out.

24 months may seem like a long wait, but I’m already looking at ways that the extra time allows us to try some things that are completely kick-ass. We can take a look at all the things we’re doing right, all the things that are going wrong, and really take the time to deliver a quality experience.

And honestly, for me, 2015 will be here before I know it, and I’m already sweating the details of what the conference is going to look like…

The Anatomy of a Blog Post in 1200 words or Less

PETERMBALL News & Upcoming Events, Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life , , , , ,

This blog post is written to support a piece of my Year of the Author Platform workshop that’s running for Queensland Writers Centre today, breaking down the anatomy of an individual blog post for the participants. However, since I’m a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I’m sharing it here in case anyone else gets some use out of it.

Since my readership consists of folks who are enormously smart about this sort of thing, I’m also going to use this as an opportunity to grab some feedback. Is there anything I should be telling these folks that I didn’t? Any resources you’d recommend? We’ve got a team of hungry aspiring writers who are eager to siphon your brainjuices, folks, so feel free to throw your two cents in once we hit the comments.

Alright, here we go. Strap yourselves in folks, ’cause we’re going to get meta.

Things to Pay Attention To Above This Text

1) CATEGORY

There’s a handful of things to pay attention to above the first paragraph of this post. The title is the obvious one, but it’s also worth paying attention to the category that appears just above the title, “Blatant Self Promotion.” Categories are a way of sorting web content on an individual site and tend to be very broad – I’ve used this one ’cause I’m also being a bit cheeky and using one Platform building activity (running a workshop) to direct people towards another platform building activity (checking out my website). (Note for people visiting later: Categories may change as I overhaul my site in a couple of months.)

Category may not appear above the post in your individual site – its a function of the site design I picked for Petermball.com – but it’s definitely an option on most wordpress builds and it’s a surprisingly powerful tool (which, admittedly, I’ve mishandled on this site for the most part).

2) BY AUTHOR

Another thing that’s worth checking is the “By Author” section. This is a little thing, but its worth checking that you’ve created an account that syncs with your author name, rather than using the default names that blogging platforms tend to create. There’s nothing weirder than going to an author site and seeing everything being posted by “admin.”

Of course, if you’re reading this after the weekend of the 25-26th, the above paragraph will make less sense as I tend to keep “by Author turned off on my website. This is because I’m usually the only person whose writing and posting things to this blog.

3) WEB ADDRESS

This will only work if you’ve logged directly into the post, so if you’re reading this from my home page, click on the title of the post and come on over to the permalink.Once you’ve done that, note that the web address attached to the post uses the title as part of the direct link: https://petermball.com/2013/05/25/the-anatomy-of-a-blog-post

WordPress doesn’t do this as a default, it’s an option you have to set. If you don’t, then your blog posts tend to be identified by a number, which is far less sexy. This is one of those little things its worth double-checking, just like the Author, because it makes your site look a little cleaner.

4) POST TIME

All going well, this has gone live at 11:45 on Saturday morning, the 25th of May. I haven’t gone near the computer in order to make this happen, since we’ve been discussing blogging styles for the last two hours, which I’m calling out here ’cause I really want to highlight the power of scheduling posts in advance.

Things to Pay Attention To in the Body of the Post

5) THE HEADERS

See how I’ve broken things down with sub-headings through the post? These are a function of using the Heading HTML Code, which tells a computer that certain things should be be displayed differently (for the human readers)  and read differently (if you’re a robot scanning the web for content). Header’s become your key words and phrases when it comes to telling places like Google what your post is about. This is a really nice breakdown of how it works.

You’ll need to figure out how to set up headers on your blogging software of choice, but it’s generally in the dropdown options under “Paragraph” when you’re drafting.

6) THE LINKS

I tend to throw a whole bunch of links into a post, pretty much any time there’s something relevant or worth following up on. There’s a bunch of reasons this is a good idea, based on the discussions we’ve had about in the workshop about blogging authority and being a useful internet citizen.

7) THE REQUEST

Scroll back to the second paragraph of this post and you’ll notice that I’ve put a request for comments in there. This is because I like comments, ’cause comments have the potential to be useful as an added resource in a blog post like this, and because it gives people an incentive to keep reading.

8) THE SUMMARY

So one of the second-last things that’ll occur at the end of this post is a summary of what people have just read, reminding them why this sort of thing is useful.

Things to Pay Attention To at the End of the Post

9) THE REQUEST, REDUX

So that request I made for comments at the top of this blog post? I’m going to reiterate it down in the bottom, just to make it clear that I’m really, really happy to hear people’s feedback on this topic.

10) SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS

There’s a whole range of options for linking this post, quick and easy. I’m favouring facebook, twitter, and email, but the other options are there in the Share This section of the link salad at the end.

These aren’t a standard for every blog yet, but dear god, they totally should be. Part of my day-job for the Australian Writer’s Marketplace involves curating a bunch of writing and publishing links for our twitter stream, which gets a fair amount of click through. It’s a job that needs to be done fast, which means that posts I’m on the fence about including get dropped off if they don’t have the easy social media links to work with.

11) USING THE ARCHIVE

It’s a pretty basic thing, but when you hit the bottom of this post it’ll give you a link to the post that occurred before it and the one that’ll come after it. Basically, it’s there to encourage the reader to keep exploring and to make it easy for them to do so.

12) TAGS

The young sibling of Categories. Basically a chance to really break down some of the key components/ideas in your post and make it easier to see. I tend to have a bit of fun with my tags, but if you click on What I Did With My Weekend you’ll see how it works.

The Thing You Can’t See

13) META-DATA/SEO

And finally, there’s the invisible part of this blog post: meta-data and SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. Your site generates a fair amount of this automatically for you these days, but it’s worth being aware that they exist and have the potential to impact on the way search engines find data.

And that’s it….the anatomy of a blog post

One of the key things I’m stressing in today’s workshop is that blogging is both a publishing tool and an unfamiliar form for most writers, and when you’re setting out to learn how to write blog posts it’s rather like learning the form of a short story or a poem. You learn how to write these things by learning how to read them – looking at the way people have utilized narrative and form.

Blogging is just like that. Certain traits have built up over time because they work, but they also become invisible once you’ve learned them. This is an attempt to highlight some of the thing we don’t always think about, so the YoAPpers (as they’re known around the office) have a list of things to start paying attention to when they find blogs they like. It’s a checklist for figuring out why things that work may be working, or why the posts that don’t work are failing. 

It’s not the whole story, but it’s a baseline. If I’ve missed anything, let me know.

More importantly, if you’ve got some hard-won advice you’d like to pass on to new bloggers, add it into the commentary and I’ll pass it along.

PETERMBALL Journal, Works in Progress , , , , ,

So yesterday there was dayjobbery and tutoring and writing, oh my, with a side of doing the page proofs for Say Zucchini, and Mean It so I can mail them back to the folks at Daily SF and fix the various muddle-headed things I’ve done in the story.

Usually there’s something painful about the proofing process, mixing, as it does,   a multitude of how-could-I-be-so-stupid typos and syntax errors with the larger, more consuming fear that the story itself isn’t any good because so-much-time-has-passed-since-you-submitted-it-and-you’ve-become-a-better-writer-than-you-were-and-would-do-things-so-very-differently-now.

The latter part didn’t really happen this time around. I’m still fond the story and think it does all the things I wanted it to do, and the bits I’d do differently I probably wouldn’t do that much better, so they don’t bother me quite so much.

I’m not sure whether this bodes ill for the story or not, once it’s out in the world, but I guess we’ll see next week when it’s sent out to Daily SF’s subscribers.

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Last night’s writing? The skeleton for the first half of Chapter Three for Black Candy – I know how the scenes begin and end, I just have to write the middles – and some more work on Waiting for the Steamer on the Docks of V—, which is heading off in its own little direction and getting longer every time I work on it. About 1,500 words of writing all up, which is less than I wanted by more than I expected given I didn’t get home from work until 8-ish.

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This morning I woke up an hour or so before my alarm, and it was cold and dark and I wasn’t all that sleepy anymore, so I stayed up and idled away the time for a bit, just enjoying the warmth of my bed and the slow shift of light on the curtains and the occasional checking of email on my phone.

Eventually the world woke up around me, so I climbed out of bed and went into the routine. I danced around the bedroom to the Sisters of Mercy’s Temple of Love. I showered and I shaved. I ate breakfast and ironed a shirt to wear to the dayjob. And since I was up early, and more awake than I generally am, I finished all those things much earlier than expected, so by seven thirty I was standing around my living room trying to work out what I’d do to fill the next three quarters of an hour before I drove to work.

So I started reading The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales, since it’s one of the things that was handy on my living room shelves  that I haven’t also read in its entirety, largely because I’ve read a large majority of the stories in other locations.

I’d forgotten just how good Angela Slatter actually is. I mean, obviously I’d remembered that she’s a very, very good writer and I’ve recommended her to people constantly, but I’d forgotten that moment where, say, you read Bluebeard for  and go “oh, sodding hell, this is  brilliant” and go give up on writing for a while because there’s no chance you’ll ever manage something that precise and intricate and resonant. I know this because, the first time I read this, just after Angela and I met and before we were actually friends, I wandered off and tried very hard to do what she did in that story and ended up somewhere very different and nowhere near as good.

But that’s one of the ways writing works, I think. You just keep having conversations with writers who are better than you, except you do it through  fiction because telephones are scary and you’re too damn lazy to email people you don’t really know.

And now I go to talk about writing with undergraduates, whereupon I will try to explain writing in a far less esoteric – but potentially more useful – manner.