I left the Hill Country yesterday, traveling north to Grapevine, Texas where I am attending the American Christian Fiction Writer’s annual conference. The facility here at the Gaylord Convention center is huge. I keep getting lost. Maybe my next book will be about a writer who gets lost at a writer’s convention and finds that he has been tricked by a demented muse, and thereby must write himself out of the danger with sharp, crisp prose.
This is not my first writer’s conference, but it is my first ACFW conference. The people here are so friendly that it is hard not to like everyone. Seriously. Writers must be the friendliest people in the world. No lie.
People keep asking me, “What do you write,” to which I reply something like, “Christian supernatural stories where people die gruesome deaths” or something like that. This is the moment they turn their head sideways and take a step back and wonder if I am at the right place. Most of the people here write historical fiction, contemporary fiction, or women’s fiction.
Indeed, men are an endangered species here. I would say the ratio is something like one man for every fifteen or sixteen women. At a panel discussion last night someone asked, “Is there a market for books directed toward men,” and the consensus was no. This does not fill me with hope, because I feel my books are targeted mostly toward men. I’m gonna plunge ahead anyway. I think I can be the trendsetter with theologically rich supernatural books about fascinating characters.
Regardless, writing is cheaper than therapy.
Here is what I have learned so far.
- Randy Alcorn knows a lot about heaven. He brought the keynote yesterday and it was a sermon–a Sunday morning go to meeting sermon–on heaven complete with a quote from Victor Hugo. I would love to buy him a cup of coffee and talk about the hermeneutics of Revelation 21.
- I probably don’t have much of a chance with my pitches here, because I am only 75k words into my work in progress (WIP) and I really should be finished if I want any kind of success. That’s okay. Perhaps my goal is simply that when they get that query letter from me, they remember something.
- Tyndale house has nice representatives.
- I need to work on my hook. Probably after lunch I will devote some time to polishing it a bit.
- YA (young adult fiction) is not as big of a deal here as I thought it would. It surprises me that YA is not a hot commodity in Christian circles, given that everyone has children and grandchildren. It feels as if it should be a target for faith-based audiences. As a person concerned about culture, this troubles me. It’s almost like we’ve surrendered the literary mind of the next generation to nothing but dystopian nightmares.
Gotta run now. The next workshop starts in a few minutes.
