Recap of Willamette Writer’s Conference 2007

[Back story]

First off, when I moved to Organ, I looked up the local writer’s group. This stemmed from the fact that I had done that a few years too late right before I left Ohio. The only Ohio writers meeting I went to was a discussion of “Bird by bird,” a book on writing that a lot of people had read. The moderator was completely taken over by the crazy published author in the room who spent the whole time trying to “blow our minds” with his offhand comments and observations. The other lady in the room just wanted to talk about the book she was writing and I; I was just geeked up to be among people who agreed that everyone has an idea for a story – it’s the putting it down on paper that’s the hard part.

But I digress…

The 38^th Annual Willamette Writer’s Conference was held Aug 3-5 this year. I registered for just one day at the second tier of pricing (not the most expensive and not the least) and it was $225. I do think it was a good investment.

Things started off with me picking up my badge on Thursday. Little did I realize some of the best stuff was offered for free this night! I had looked through the nice brochure they had made and picked out three editors / agents to pitch stories to. That is one of the main purposes of this conference – to learn about and practice your pitching. I had chose to pitch in a group setting and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I just knew I wasn’t sure enough of myself or my stories to be locked in a room for 10 minutes and asked to sell my book to some stranger from the industry!

I had looked up a few resources online to find out what pitching was and how to do it. Mostly you break your story down into tiny parts and expand. Start with explaining your story in two sentences. Note the genre, main character, world, goal and flaw. Then mention he hook. It’s okay to say “its ____ meets ___” – “its Gladiator set on Mars.” Don’t say you’re the next Harry Potter, but you can compare your character to him. The next step is to expand and tell the “trailer” – 5 minutes as if you were telling your friend about a great story.

Back to Thursday night – so, I got my badge. On he back they write who your pitches are with and when. You just hope that they are opposite from the sessions you want to attend (sessions being panels put on by authors – I attended one about Fantasy After Harry Potter and another on Breaking Into the Children’s Magazine Market.) Then, there was an “authors fair” – where all the panelists and guests sit in the room wanting to sell their books and awkwardly make small-talk until you ask them to sign the sheet you have in your hand that you turn in at the end to try to win a laptop. That was probably the most cumbersome part of the whole experience, but it did force me to talk to people, and I meet a lady very early on who gave me some good tips on how to learn to speak your pitch (she asked me if I was a writer, I said yes, she asked me what I was pitching and after I stumbled my way through an explanations, she told me I should get it down to 2 sentences.)

Then I went into the “Pitch to the Pros” session. The room was packed and three editors and agents sat on a stage at the front. People would throw them pitches and they would rip them apart. It was great! They gave tips like “why should I care?” “why are you the right person to write this?” (in other words, stuff you would put in a press release.) “Convince me your story is one people will spend money on.” “I want to feel your passion and love for your story.”

One poor sop got up and started with “My story doesn’t have a genre.” And the pros shot back, “is it fiction, non-fiction, comic, drama?” You have a genre – you have to tell the people where to put it in the bookstore! They are not making a new shelf just for your book!

There were two really good pitches (out of 25+!) One was “It’s’Left Behind’ in reverse. The Rapture happens, but it’s all a government creation.” Another lady who was a rocket scientist and engineer told about her lady detective who has to solve a computer crime that will cause all cars with antilock-breaks to crash if she doesn’t figure it out.

The rest of the conference was good. The Life After Harry Potter panel was okay – just fun to be among other children’s fantasy writers. Also, a point was made that because of HP, not people understand what young adult books are. The magazine panel was good too – told me most of what I already knew which was it’s a lot of damn work for not a lot of money.

The pitchings were interesting (my new favorite word, by the way. As descriptive as “unique”.) The first was with the fantasy editor from TOR. I pitched my Ambrosia story -and she sounded interested (in my two-sentence explanation which went something like “Fifteen-year-old Emma wants nothing more than to escape reality for many of the same reasons other lonely, awkward teenagers do. When one night she confronts a demon in a cow pasture and ends up riding a giant dog up a beam of moonlight, she finds she is completely and utterly unprepared for her trip to the other side of the rainbow. Emma possesses an oracle sacred to the people of Ambrosia, and must find who is stealing magic from the land. When she finally finds the thief, she is horrified to find she actually sides with the villain.” The editor said that she would point me towards the YA editor if I wanted to send something.

Mermaid Money was pitched to the Andrea Brown Agency, to Ms. Brown herself. I was told to remove all poetry and cut it down to around 1000 words (1,300 words is too long for a traditional picture book.) Also, word to the wise, no agent or editor buys illustrated books,. They buy manuscripts and hire an illustrator. The book I have is already illustrated so my best option is a small press (which doesn’t usually do picture books since they are too expensive) or self publishing. My pitch went something like, “Pippin Peck, the young heroine of Mermaid Money, uses a little pluck and a lot of luck to escape a seemingly endless series of life threatening events. After fleeing a ghost and stowing away aboard a pirate ship, Pippin finds herself about to be turned into a jellyfish unless she can convince a merman of her worth.”

Finally, I realized that there is a huge call for “chick lit” – fun quick reads that are usually romantic and mystery oriented. I have the idea for a series of books about a lady zoo detective which just might get to see the light of day.

Kumoricon 2007!

Kumoricon (http://kumoricon.org) is Oregon's only Japanese animation convention. This year, oddly enough, it was held in Washington state (due to a snafu with the Portland hotel).

What is a "Japanese animation convention"? It's sort of a festival put on by fans for fans of anime (a term for animated movies and shows coming out of Japan) . Kumoricon (Kumori meaning "cloudy" in Japanese) celebrated it's 5th year in existence this year with three days filled with events, contests, panels, anime showings, video game tournements, a vendor's room and of course cosplay (short for "costume play" or dressing up as your fav character)!


A new element this year was the manga reading room (manga = Japanese comics)

This year the Kumoricon staff (all volunteer) numbered around 100 with about 30 more volunteers not signed up as staff. The festivities drew around 3,000 attendees, most between the ages of 12 - 30 (median age of attendees this year was 22) to the Hilton Convention Center and Hotel in Vancouver, WA. I personally participated as staff, my second year volunteering to run the Live Charity Auction as well as lead the publicity outreach program known as Street Team. Due to our Relations Director stepping down late in the game, I also was called upon to get industry donations and permissions from the likes of Tokyopop, VIZ, Bandai and many other companies.

Dark Horse comics editors presented a panel about upcoming projects.

As you can imagine, setting up a three-day party that runs from 10 a.m. - 2 a.m. Saturday and Sunday and until around 7 p.m. on Labor Day Monday is a huge undertaking, one that takes a full year of planning (with meetings held each month.) Like any convention, conference or trade show, Kumoricon has a board of directors, an oversight committee and many people donating hundreds of hours to get the word out about the convention, register people, convey information, set up contests, assemble convention gift bags for the attendees etc.


The video game room.

This year, I am happy to say, was one of the most successful ever. First off, our attendance was up by over 700, despite being held in a different state (OR conventions have the added bonus of being in a state that doesn't charge sales tax). Second, our charity auction raised $2,772, over $500 more than last year. All donations go directly to P:EAR (http://pearmentor.org), a homeless youth outreach program that uses art to benefit those it helps.

Besides all that, I think it's important to have things like anime conventions to give tweens, teens and young adults something interesting, crazy, and social to do. I know how hard it is to be in that awkward age and be a nerd who likes things outside the norm of what's popular, so its fun to see people come together and really take something like this and run with it.

There were some problems - the vendor and artist's area, which was much larger this year, was also in an uncarpeted subteranean parking garage, the entrance to which was not accesible from the main convention space (you had to exit the hotel and walk down the parking ramp.) Lighting was brought in, as was pipe and drape, and while some attendees enjoyed the dungeon-like appearance of a room filled with treasures, many vendors complained that by 4 p.m. (two hours before the room was to close), crowds were sparse due to the heat.

The vendor vault.

We did get some really good press coverage, and the TV crew of KOIN came out and even played a few seconds of us on their 5:00 newscast!

-Freakish Fun from the Far East
http://www.columbian.com/news/localNews/09032007news191821.cfm
Okay, except for the title, this is a pretty good piece by someone from outside the fandom.

- Where East Meets Northwest - Asian Reporter
http://asianreporter.com/stories/local/2007/37-kumoricon.htm
Good article by a reporter more immersed in the culture.

- Kumoricon Article - Mecha Mecha Media, Yuuyake Shimbun.
http://mechamechamedia.blogspot.com/2007/09/kumoricon-first-pics-i-spent-most-of.html
This is sort of a placeholder for the article due to appear in October in Portland's Japanese paper, Yuuyake Shimbun.

- Slanted & Enchanted - Willamette Week
http://www.wweek.com/editorial/3345/9562/
This isn't directly about us, it's about The Slants, a band that played at the convention, but it does say: "...the Slants' Kumoricon success has led to offers from conventions in New York, Texas, Kentucky, Budapest, even Australia—all before the proper release of its first album." Which I think is pretty cool!

Goat Stuffs

Recap of Goat Day

8/25/2007

Goat Day was held in Wilsonville OR (the town I work in) on August 25th. Every year, Metro, the park system, brings in around 400 goats of various types to eat invasive plants. This year they decided to let people come and watch! They chose a semi-wetland area (kinda squishy ground) that had lots of overgrown English ivy and blackberries, fenced it in, and let the goats out. Here are some photos:


Donnie finds the goats.


The goats spy us.


Ooooh. Sneaky goat!

My Christmas Vacation - a Sheep Story
By GoatMaiden
1/10/2007

When I went to Wisconsin for Christmas, I got to tour a sheep farm. It was fun. It was very cold but there was no snow. My aunt Jean and I met Brenda and she showed us around. I don't think Brenda likes sheep. She likes sheep cheese though. And I think she likes the money she makes from sheep cheese - it is $23 / lb. We stood in the cheese cellar. It was neat.

So that was my trip to the sheep farm. I was dissapointed that I dind't get to pet a sheep.

tha end.

Stardust

Before I went to see Stardust the movie, I had read the illustrated book by Neil Gaiman. I didn't really care about the characters all that much (the main character was too much of a doofus, and the star was too bitchy), but I will admit to liking the story and some of the magical twists - such as the main character finding his way out of a forest by flying from one spot of light to the next using a magic candle.. It was somewhat convoluted, but not a total waste of time.

The movie struck me in almost the exact same way. It was fun, but it wasn't great, and I didn't expect it to be. I had read one newspaper review before going to see the film and the reviewer had been strangely perplexed by the film. He thought it was weird that a star was a woman, that a witch rode in a cart pulled by goats, etc. Why he thought a goat chariot was strange I'm not sure (because, they aren't horses??) but after I saw the film, I read a lot more reviews and realized that a lot of other people had similarly strange critiques: bad special effects, convoluted characters (most were turned off by Robert DeNiro's mincy pirate) and a bad score (??).

I can only think many of the reviewers were not fantasy fans, or that they were looking for the next "Lord of the Rings." It was a fine movie. I guess I give a lot of slack to fantasy films as far as special effects go - so the green smoke coming out of the witches finger looks like ectoplasm slime from Ghostbusters - so what? You get the point that it's magic. I will say that there ere were far too many sweeping "look at what we can do now that we are not tied to cranes and dollies to move the camera" shots - where a CGI view starts in space and ends up focused on a tiny spot on Earth. I remember in college learning about tracking shots and how Hitchcock was a master of the long take, but this is getting a bit ridiculous. I didn't find anything not to like about the score (I don't remember anything except the cheese ball song at the end credits), and I thought the pirates were a good addition, as was the fast-talking trader (some critics called DeNiro a "scenery muncher" and criticized the trader, played by comic Ricky Gervais, as "putting on his own show".)

If anything, I would say Clair Danes was sort of a drippy star, and the way her hair glowed at certain parts was sort of annoying. I would also say that I didn't find this movie any more gruesome than the one most critics have been comparing it to, The Princess Bride, which I watched as a kid, and so I'm not sure why Stardust is continually referred to as a "Fairy Tale for ADULTS." One critic explained that moments of violence (the death of a number of princes) were immediately quashed by a moment of humor (the prince's ghosts remain in the scene after dying.) Well I really enjoyed those parts - what's wrong with laughing at a bathtub death scene?

The things that got to me were continuity (sometimes the witch looked old sometimes not, then oh look she's young again, oh look, she used magic but it didn't make her old... When you create a rule of magic, it must be consistent.) And --- the love story. I didn't buy it. I understood it, but I didn't believe it. But still, I didn't buy it in the book either.

Stardust gets 3 stars in my book. Which is three stars more than Mirror Mask :-P

Mirrormask - a trite idea badly executed

The movie Mirrormask is a rather flashy but overall pretty lame attempt at storytelling. The main character, a girl named Helena, is unsympathetic as a circus girl who is sick of her circus life. First off, if you are going to switcher-o a stereotype like that, I ask that there be more of a reason she doesn't like the circus, beyond just general teenage angst. The plot ploy of "sick mother / guilty child" is executed in a very confusing way (I would have found it more interesting if Helena really had done something to her mother), and the ending seemed like a hurried attempt to bring closure to a rambling narrative (spoiler: it was all a dream!).

Helena is never quite sure of her quest, which, while realistic, makes for an uneven movie. Though I struggle with these very same problems in my own writing, it also makes me more sensitive to them in other people's works. She stumbles into another world and onto a slightly-creepy (but slightly more annoying) dualistic helper / hinderer named Valentine. The lack of a clear path makes it hard for there to be any "ah ha!" moments of realization. To me, there ended up being more "so what?" moments. The world itself was hard for me to get to know and care about, as were the characters in that world, so why should I care that the main character (who I also don't have that much emotional tie to since she is pretty whiny and flighty) decided to help the people? At one point there is a connection between Helena and Valentine, that was supposed to be a big deal (friendship breaking an evil spell) but I was like, why are these two friends? Eventually, after a convoluted series of hints and puzzles, Helena gets back to the real world, and I guess, saves her mother and the fantasy world.

I know I was slightly biased in watching this movie, since it was compared to "The Labyrinth" - which also had contrived plot twists and a bitchy MC (and David Bowie, but that's beside the point). But the story of the Labyrinth had a goal - get the child. I found Mirrormask, with the threat of encroaching shadows, to be much more akin to "The Neverending Story" and it's creeping "Nothing" - but again, that shouldn't really color one towards a movie. As has been pointed out to me, all movies need to be taken in their own right and not compared to one another. But I can look at The Neverending Story and see the characters of Atreyu crying out as his horse gets sucked down into the swamp and feel a real connection to him. I can see a real threat as the possibility of failure is ever-present, whereas peril seemed to be missing, or watered down, in Mirrormask.

Finally, I must also admit that I watched the extras on the DVD which also probably effected my opinion. They stated quite clearly that the studio wanted a movie that would sell like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. Which leads me to believe that Mirrormask was rushed (further research shows that it may have been written in about 3 days) and too crammed with "fan service" elements (like those disturbing cats with human faces and characters I am sure they hoped would make collectable figurines) to be taken seriously. It is a pretty movie, but the characters and story get in the way of that.