After the Alumni Retreat

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Well, this blog post certainly took longer than I wanted to write it. But this is what happens when you keep putting things off “until later”. The “until laters” will get you and then you’ll find yourself months afterward thinking “What the hell just happened?”.

Putting aside my lapse in posts, I wanted to talk about the Alumni Retreat. I had a great time with friends as well as meeting new ones there. Probably the most surprising thing for me was finding out the retreat had people attending that weren’t alumni from Seton Hill’s WPF program. This little tidbit begs the question why was it called an alumni retreat if not everyone was from the program? I think I’ll bring it up during the planning sessions for next year’s retreat.

One of my goals of going up to the retreat was to meet the agents there. And as mentioned in previous posts, I hadn’t met an agent in the flesh yet so for me this was a novel experience.

The first pitch session I had was with Bob Mecoy of Creative Book Services. What was interesting was I wasn’t planning on pitching to him, but at the last minute I decided to pitch the graphic novel Calling Home to see what his reaction was. Overall it was a great session, buoyed by a longer discussion I had with him during lunch where I learned he was very interested writers who could finish a story to work with artists. After speaking with him, I determined going the self-pubbed route with Calling Home would be best since it’s already being serialized on the Internet and that it was better to use it as an exposure tool. It was an enlightening session for me.

The second was with Diana Fox of the Fox Literary Agency. This one felt a little more rocky. Well at least to me. Diana was very nice, but I was unprepared for the questions she asked about my work. The worst part of it was I felt like I had been caught unawares. I couldn’t articulate thoughts about my own novel! I was channeling my inner ten year old when an adult asked something and you didn’t know the answer because you were paying attention to the interesting knot in the wood floor instead of what they’d been saying. Even more icing on the embarrassment cake was when she suggested there might be some negative connotations to some of the ideas I had for the other books in the series. On a side note, it was great she knew something about the mythology of the city I was using in the novel since not many people knew about the Breton/Christian mythology of the City of Ys. I was sure I’d blown the pitch but she did want to see my pages so that was great news. I’m also grateful I didn’t sound like a moron, so at the end of the day I was happy with the results.

All in all, the experiences and face time I had with the agents and interaction with the other WPF’s definitely made the trip for me and I look forward to next year’s jaunt to Greensburg and would recommend it to any other writer who’s looking for a great, small conference that won’t break the bank.