Conferences and Cons: A Few Tips and Tricks

I love networking. A lot of people are scared of the word, but I’m convinced they’re thinking about it the wrong way. Networking’s not about schmoozing and talking people up: it’s about making friends, forming connections and long-term relationships, the same sort of things we do in our daily lives.

A lot of this networking I do happens at conferences and conventions. I don’t go just to network. I also go to relax, socialize and have fun. Some people go to the theatre or ball games - I go to cons. But conventions and conferences are great places to be among fellow creatives and learn about the industry. If you’re thinking about attending a convention or conference soon, it helps to be prepared. Here are a few tips to help you make the most out of the experience.

1. Want to attend your very first conference ever? Try looking for one close to home first.

 Travel can be expensive. Gas, plane or train tickets, plus lodging? It adds up quickly, and can add unnecessary stress on a brand new experience. These days, there are plenty of conventions, conferences and festivals all over the country. You might be far away from higher profile events, but chances are there’s something close to home to get your feet wet. Take a look around, do a bit of research, see if there’s anything nearby that suits your needs. 

2. Get familiar with the schedule beforehand.

 Most cons have a ton of sessions and panels for you to choose from, and it’s good to go in with a game plan. Cons and conferences typically post the schedule online so you can get a sense of what they have to offer. These days, many also provide apps that you can download to your phone and keep track of your own personal schedule. Pack a bottle of water and a few snacks. Hopefully you’ll be able to get away and have a real meal, but if not, or if you get peckish during a session, a few light snacks can be a lifesaver. And also a money saver--hotel food often comes with high markups. Why spend $5 on a bottle of water when you can bring your own?

3. Business cards! HAVE THEM.

I recommend business cards for writers and artists both. You never know who you’re going to meet and fall in love with at a conference and desperately want to get in touch with afterward! Sure, you could write their info down in a notebook, but business cards are just so handy. They’re not hard to design (some printers provide easy-to-use templates) and they don’t have to cost a lot. My favorite vendors are GotPrint and Overnight Prints - both are cheap and produce decent quality cards.

A few thoughts:

• Make the back matte (not glossy) so that people can write on it if they need to.
• When you receive cards, jot down a little note of when and where you got it. Makes it easier to remember the person who gave it to you!
• KEEP THEM WITH YOU ALWAYS. I’m a networking veteran and I still make the mistake of leaving my business cards as I head to the restroom or to grab a quick bite to eat, because I’m on a mission, of course I’m not planning on talking to anybody! But inevitably I do (especially at writing confs, writers are chatty!) and I mentally kick myself for underestimating my social prowess. Don’t be like me, just keep your business cards with you! Keep them in your purse, your pocket, your badge holder, wherever’s convenient, but keep them close at all times!

4. Artist? Yes, you should take your portfolio.

 I mean, it’s not a requirement, but it’s not a bad idea, either. Like with business cards, you never know who you’re going to run into. You never know who’s going to be curious and ask to see your work.

Now, I wouldn’t carry your portfolio with the intent of shoving it under the nose of every person you’d see--go with your own comfort level on this one. But hey, maybe someone will want to see it. Maybe someone would be willing to give you feedback. Now, portfolios can be heavy to carry around. Keep them small: 8.5”x11” is a good, portable size. It’s cool to go smaller too. I found little 5”x7” portfolios once and bought a few as leave-behinds (to give to recruiters at a conference). I thought they’d be put off by the size, but everyone I showed them to thought they were really cute!

5. If not a portfolio, then a postcard!

Postcards are a standard promotional item for illustrators, so a lot of us take them with us to conferences. They’re just like business cards, only bigger - great for showing off artwork! 4”x6” or 5”x7” are standard sizes.

6. You don't have to take notes.

I actually got this tip from author Jennifer Bosworth. I was a champion note-taker until I saw her advise against it in a blog post. Keeping your head up and eyes on the speaker shows them that you're paying attention, and sometimes that can be reassuring for a nervous speaker. I still take notes at panels, but not with the same frequency. As it happens, an author recently commented to me after his talk that he appreciated looking out at the audience and seeing attentive faces looking back at him, so it does help!

7. Most importantly, have fun! 

Conventions, especially the larger ones, can be overwhelming. Keep a reasonable schedule for yourself, take breaks when you need, and socialize at your own pace and comfort level.

Now go forth my intrepid friends!

On the Art of Writing

I often lament—mostly to myself because I would not subject my friends and colleagues to my lamentations—the sad fate of having become an artist as well as a writer. True, this seems like the best marriage of talents. I get to write and draw! I do not need to seek out a collaborator to bring my fictional worlds to life, I can do it all on my own (though, I still enjoy working with a collaborator now and then, but that’s a blog post for another day)! They are perfectly complementary skillsets. One supports the other. But I do find that they can sometimes conflict just as well as they work together.

For one thing, it takes so bloody long to get anything done. Writers, you know what a challenge developing a story can be. The first conception, the research and world-building, the character development and plotting, and then the execution of the thing! The eloquent marriage of exposition and dialogue in a well-paced, harmonic arrangement. It can take a long time to get a story just right.

Yes, well, let’s add art to that. Novels, of course, don’t always require art, but consider visual stories like children’s books or comics (I do both). Art and words do not simply support each other, they need each other. To remove one would be to change how the audience interprets the story, to change the medium altogether. Writing can take a while, but in my experience, art takes much, much longer.

I sometimes find it difficult to find the right balance between the two. I love doing both and wouldn’t ever give up either, but now and then I think of how much more I could accomplish if I just focused on one. Think of it: if I were to commit myself entirely to art, then I could use the time I take for writing to further develop my craft and draw more, faster. The same with writing—who knows how many more worlds I could have created by now. Doing both means you must split up your time between the two, and not always equally. It’s very rare that I manage to do both in one day. More often, I will spend long blocks of time—days, weeks even—focused on one or the other. I’ll work on the art for a while, then switch gears, put art on the back burner, and focus on writing.

Why do I work this way? In the recent blog post The Immersion Factor: Comics + Novels, comic writer and novelist Marjorie Liu talks about a similar gear switch in writing comics versus novels. I think it’s the same thing for me in terms of writing versus art: these are activities that occupy slightly different parts of my brain. I need to keep them separate because I think about them differently. In fact, when I’m in the middle of writing a novel, I refuse to draw any part of it. For some creators this is an excellent exercise—but for me, I fear locking down the visual look of my story will stifle my prose. Why work to describe a setting or a character in just the right way when I have a drawing of them? So while the story is in progress, I focus solely on the words.

It’s nearly the same with my visual stories. I will write the script first without worrying about art—for the most part. This is never a completely clean divide because with comics and picture books, the words and art are intricately linked. At times, I cannot plot and write notes without also sketching. And once I have a script completed, I print it out so I can draw thumbnails all over it. As I’m drawing and figuring out the staging and acting, I might make changes to dialogue. It’s a more fluid process. One cannot work without the other.

And can I draw without writing at all? Certainly, and I do all the time. But weirdly enough, I have trouble coming up with stories for those pieces, and they end up existing solely as works of art.

How about you guys? Do you find yourself struggling to balance two skills, and if so, how do you deal with it? 

~Nilah

Adventures in NaNoWriMo

Something happened this past month that I thought I was safe from. I took every precaution. I’d fallen victim to it in the past, I’d been weak, but I wouldn’t fall for it again. That’s what I told myself, but sadly, I couldn’t hold firm to my convictions.

That’s right, friends. I let myself get talked into doing NaNoWriMo.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The premise is simple: write a 50,000-word novel from November 1 to November 30. At a steady pace, that means roughly 1,667 words a day.

I did it in 2013 and won; it was my first win, and such a rush! I was so ecstatic that I planned to do it this year as well, but of course life got in the way. November’s a truly horrible month to schedule anything that requires more than half-hearted dedication. As November approached, I saw my free time dwindling, and I made the decision to bow out this year.

From elementary school, we all learn the dangers of peer pressure. You’d think I’d know better by now. But my friend was sneaky, you see. Take note, dear readers: friends can be sneaky, but writer friends are the sneakiest. This friend reminded me that when we became Writing Buddies on the NaNo site, we had never met and lived 2,700 miles from one another. Then I moved across the country, and when I glanced at my Buddies list in 2013, I was shocked to notice the name of my coworker! That's right, folks: my virtual Writing Buddy serendipitously became my real life Office Buddy.

This year, she persuaded me to join her in the NaNo madness. “We started as strangers, we end as friends!” she declared. How could anyone say no to that?

And so, I embarked on 30 days of heeeeeeell!

Actually, it wasn’t so bad. Keeping up in NaNoWriMo is all about pacing. You’ve got to start strong and maintain a manageable pace throughout the month. Missing a day here and there is fine, but dangerous: your necessary word count goes nowhere as the days tick on. It becomes a mountain, and the higher it gets, the more discouraging it can become to press on.

When I do NaNo, my goal is always 2,000 words a day—a few hundred over the recommended number. That way I’m building up a buffer, and if I do have to miss a day, there’s little damage. But I knew going in that this was going to be a crazy month. Not only was I getting started on upcoming end-of-year projects, but I was exhibiting at an art event the weekend before Thanksgiving. Writing 2k words a day AND keeping up with my art was no easy task.

In fact, the week of the event, I slid. I really slid. By the time I was ready to look at NaNo again, I was 12,000 words behind with only three days left! I really had to book it. When I got home on November 28, I sat my butt in my computer chair and began writing.

And I reeeeeally didn’t want to. I was so tired! But I was so close, and my friend was just 5k away from the end! Man oh man, if she hadn’t gotten me into this mess..!

But, she was the very thing that kept me going. The reason I like NaNoWriMo is that it fosters community. There’s something about knowing you’re struggling alongside like-minded individuals that keeps you motivated… and also a little too scared of failure to give into it. You want everyone else to get to the finish line, but you want to be right there with them. It’s not so much competitiveness as it is camaraderie.

So when I saw my friend cross the finish line, I sucked it up and dug in. By Saturday, I had less than 8,000 words to go. I stayed inside all day and kept my fingers over the keyboard.

How did I do? Well...

Pretty good, I think.

Though my NaNo adventure was a little (well, very) unexpected, I'm glad I did it. I was hoping to get rolling on a rewrite of this manuscript before the end of the year, but the way things were going, I was pretty sure I wouldn't make my goal. Now the manuscript is over halfway done! It's a grueling pace, but I've found NaNo to be a great way to make progress on early drafts.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm still catching up on my beauty sleep.

~Nilah

A Little Mood Music

Hi gang, I'm Nilah, and it looks like it's my turn to post! So, I’ve been falling back into working on a manuscript that’s been haunting me for the past four years. Writing, and plotting, and revising, and round and round I go, but there’s been something nagging me, and two weeks ago I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I banged my fist on the desk, stopped what I was doing right then and opened up a new web browser. It was time.

I needed a playlist.

And not just any playlist; one comprised entirely of piano arrangements. I’d been building it slowly but surely already, picking out a tune here and there and making a note of it for later. Now was finally the time.

I know working to music isn’t for everyone, but for me, it’s something I rarely do without. Maybe because I spent the better part of my childhood in front of the music stand, my fingers plucking away on a violin or a piano or a flute. Maybe it’s simply that I need something to drown out the traffic, barking dogs, and yelling neighbors that normally serve as my life’s soundtrack. In any case, when I sit down to work, selecting the right music is part of my preparations.

For general work, I use the normal sources, like Pandora; I’ve got a few stations set up to cull specific genres of music, and I keep it on shuffle throughout the day when I’m at work. At home I have the option of pulling out my iTunes library and its four days’ worth of tracks. If I’m in a particular mood, I’ll put on a specific album—film soundtracks are great to work to. When I’m illustrating, anything will do, though I tend toward upbeat, energetic music—anything that will keep me awake. When I’m writing, my selections tend to be instrumental or in languages I don’t speak. Music that will set a mood, get my head in the right zone and keep it there.

This manuscript needed its own playlist. Somehow I’ve gone four full years without one, but then it’s only recently hit me what this particular story needs. The main character is a talented pianist, and her music is an ever-present part of her character. 

I’d created a dedicated playlist already for my webcomic. In that case I knew exactly what songs I wanted to include. I used 8tracks.com to compile a list of fast, fun, epic music, perfect for an action-adventure narrative. And hey, 8tracks even let me create an album cover for it!

For this project, I started a playlist on YouTube with the random piano songs I’d collected, but it wasn’t enough. I needed a steady stream of music, and I’m not familiar enough with the classical music scene to make my own choices. I turned to Pandora to do what it does best. I gave it a starting point—Michele McLaughlin, whose piece Finn McCool I’d come to think of as the theme of my manuscript—and with a thumbs up or thumbs down here and there, guided it to play only piano music.

And boy, the world of difference it has made! The first time I sat down to write with the gentle drumming of piano keys filling my ears, I knew I’d made the right call. Many of the selections are from contemporary artists, like Jennifer Thomas, David Lanz, Yanni, and Secret Garden, with compositions that are a blend of classic and modern. Their music relaxed me. It’s much easier to zone out, to let distractions drift into the background so that I can immerse myself in the world of my manuscript. I can pretend the music is the soundtrack and play the story like a movie in my head.

This new playlist isn’t just a fun addition to my writing process, but it’s also introduced me to a lot of composers I wasn’t familiar with before, and that’s pretty cool. So, does anyone else like to listen to music as they work?