I've been slushed at the SCWW writers' conference - WOW

As most of you know, I'm a member of the SCWW Greenville chapter and have been very thankful for them and the feedback I get from them. The group is very good to me and to everyone it seems but sometimes folks come one time, get their feelings hurt and never return (I did cry after my first critique but then got a good jolt of reality - I went to the group to get their feedback and they gave it to me and I needed to sit back and think without letting my tender heart get in the way and so because of them, I've grown as a writer in that I can take the criticism much better now, not that I always agree with what is said but I do not have to come home and cry because they didn't like a story or whatever it is I'm reading at the time). I also did a while back link to them as being the best conference in the state or some such wording.

Well this year's conference was great. I'm glad I volunteered and was there for the activities. I'm thankful for the opportunity to meet such great presenters and attendees. My favorite session was the slushfest - which from my busy schedule was the only workshop I attended of my choice - not that I didn't enjoy being a proctor or room monitor for the other things. A slushfest is fun - you bring in two pages of a story on transparencies and the faculty put them on the overhead projector and give some general feedback on what is there - I was in the short story/flash fiction session - we had about nine to twelve people in the room and about eight of us brought transparencies to get slushed - I was slushed and loved it. Time wsa of the essence and after the first five, Anne realized we needed to speed things up, so we ended up only doing one page of the last three - which was fine - we all got read - I got a one page reading but Anne (editor and publisher of the moonshine review, based in Charlotte, NC) did read my second page (she had my hard copy) while Beth, her co-editor, was giving comments on another story. After the session when I was picking up my copies, Anne said she wanted to read the rest of the story. So I got slushed in a postive way - I am going to submit my story to her and also think about submitting "The Cellar" to her in the future. I may have been reverted from ebook publishing but Anne does not consider "ebooks" as being published and since she only takes original, unpublished works for consideration, she said she still wanted to read the story - being that I was published but not print published and the stories are all back to me, then I may have found a home for "The Tulip Kiss".

I had a critique session with Andrea Brown (big time children's/YA agent) but my copies of my story were messed up - so the critique wasn't really necessary. What I emailed to the coordinator of the critiques and snail mailed was identical but didn't get sent that way to Andrea - Andrea received Page 1 (no header on any of my pages as was sent to Katie though) - and then pages 2 through 8 as duplicates - in other words - this is what I got back with Andrea's comments - page 1 with her comments, page 2, page 2, page 3, page 3, and all the way down to page 8 - so there were 17 pages in the packet and it should have been 16 total for the story since it was a short story anyway - and I had only signed up for the standard critique session (10 pages) - but still my title and name and the page numbers should have been on the pages and there should not have been any duplicate pages. I'm not sure what happened from me sending the story to get critiqued and the printing off from the email but since that was a story that had previously been published, I wasn't too worried about the critique. I really wanted to pitch my mystery state stories idea to Andrea and get some feedback on whether or not this is a doable thing.

I got home Sunday evening and was chilling out and got to thinking of what one of the attendees said about her critique and she had signed up for an extended (30 pages) and had sent in 24 pages and only got 12 pages back - so not sure what happened to the email versions of the stories we sent or the snail mailed ones either - because I sent mine with a cover page/synopsis between the two hard copies we were to send and I checked and the emailed version and the printed version were the same and had the header as directed on the website for the critiques - Needless to say, the critiques were good for some and not good for others. I don't really know what to make of that.

Eventually, I will find homes for all my stories and maybe something will snap like it should for the state stories -

I met some fun people this past weekend at the conference and I'll definitely be there next year - but for now - see you all in the postings - E :)