Shall we dance?

Going to the fab Willamette Writers Conference, by any chance? If so, please look me up. For the next three days, from 8:30 am till noon, I’ll be holding down the Manuscript ER there — a fun gig where you can simply show up, writing sample in hand, and get my refreshing and perhaps even bracingly frank response to it.

Bring your actual prose, or one of its exponents, such as query letter or a book proposal. Or simply bring your questions. Wondering why anyone would want to read your new memoir about your family, Lives of the Obscure? I'll be honest) Is the supernatural thriller past its prime? Depends. What exactly is a writer’s platform? E-Z! All will be revealed.

Plus -- special for you! -- it’s free free free, as a perk of being a conferencee. Though if you brought me a latte, I wouldn’t hold it against you. No sugar, but a sprinkle of nutmeg on the top if you have it.

Vanishing Act

It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness….takes control.

No, it’s not another midnight showing of Rocky Horror at the Clinton St Theatre. I'm gearing up for the 2009 edition of the Willamette Writers Conference. Just so you know, that’s what I'm disappearing into for the next four days. And therefore blog postings may be, um, intermittent. Or nonexistent.

I’m managing the volunteers for just the Programs side of Conference (workshops, classes, special programs like Manuscript ER and the like) – a task that has been a preoccupation since May, and come close to being a full-time job for the past few weeks. And as with any conference or festival I’ve ever worked on, the hard part really is the planning. Once the event’s actually underway, your first task is just to jump on that roller coaster as it’s leaving its docket. That much accomplished, you can always ride the thing to its conclusion.

But what is the Conference, you ax. It’s three and a half nutty days and nights of discussing writing, critiquing writing, and writing writing. With 800+ participants attending workshops, getting agent and editor responses, attending special events like Gigi Rosenberg’s Actors Lab etcetcetc, the Conference is a crazy quilt of information and fraternity, where you can find out everything from how you pitch your screenplay to a producer to turning social media to your professional purposes.

But wait! as the Scarecrow once said. Here’s someone who can help you! This video made after last year’s Conference, featuring the fab Marc Acito, clues you in to what’s generally up at the Conference. Thank you Paper Fort for alerting me to this.

My Big Trip

You’ve noticed it, haven’t you. The spotty posting. The distracted tone. The slack facial muscles, the drooling. Okay, not that so much. But the rest. Just admit it, it’s okay.

The photo below at right might lead you to believe I’ve been working out quite a lot. And meditating big time! Actually, true to tell, some of both has indeed been going on (and let me tell you, meditation is all it’s cracked up to be – I highly recommend it -- not the huffing and puffing), but the startling image you see before you is – but of course – the handiwork of Rose Riordan, Photostop terrorist par excellence. Some people take up crocheting, or raising ferrets, or Adam Lambert, but Rose, well…there was a time when she had quite the moonlighting thing going on with morphing my mug into all manner of amusing contexts.

This was all very affectionate, mind you, but invariably such things fall into the wrong hands sooner or later. Apparently the image resurfaced recently at a former place of employment, with a sarcastic caption appended to it: “the angel of the community.”

Ouch.

I’ll spare you my theories about reverse Stockholm Syndrome and just move on. Because things have been so busy lately as to make me think of my previous gig as a kind of vacation. Two major endeavors are taking up a lot of psychic energy these days, one for Willamette Writers, the other for the fabled Wordstock Festival , two organizations I’ve admired for a long time, but the all day/all night life of the theater obviated doing much with them.

WW has its mega-conference coming – August 6-9, thanks for asking – and I’m organizing the volunteers for the workshop side of the event. And I’ll be spending my birthday this year at Wordstock (October 8-11); presently I’m helping to make contact with the authors who are participating this year and inveigling them into allied activities such as panels and interviews. Activities we’re currently inventing – fun!

Neither of these are paying gigs, but they’re both open doors into communities I only glimpsed through barred windows in the past – communities that will form the predicate for an expanded sense of participation in the infinite universe of scribblers like me.

Wish me luck. I’m going in.

There’s more, too, but I can’t post about it, for reasons you might be able to guess. In the fullness of time, however, all will be revealed…