FWA Conference and The Alvarium Experiment

Another October, another FWA Conference over! This is the fifth year in a row I've attended and I always walk away...well, exhausted was the first word that came to mind. But also filled with new ideas, inspired by all the amazing people I've met or reconnected with, and better informed about this business called writing.

A few highlights:

• The food. Always absolutely fabulous.

• Ben Hale led a couple of phenomenal sessions, one about world-building and one about making a two-year plan. Both helpful for me in terms of Livinity, my epic fantasy novel.

• Bobbie Christmas spoke about the second draft and beyond. She's a well-respected Book Doctor with wonderful editing tips. That session was quite timely for me and extremely helpful.

• A session called Understanding Disabilities and Mental Disorders For Character Creation was very interesting and helpful for me in my editing process for Little Angel Helper, a novella with a mentally disabled character with mental disabilities.

• Kathryn J. Bain spoke about Keeping It Clean: Writing Inspiration Fiction. As a Christian writer who writes clean for the most part, although I've had violence in a couple of stories, I took away a lot from that session.

• Jennie Jarvis, conference chairperson, had everyone tweeting under #FWA2014 where I could scan the other posts from fellow attendees to see what they were taking away from all the different sessions. And all those who tweeted with that hashtag were entered to win a free mini-conference for 2015! I thought that was awesome.

Now onto the mysterious Alvarium Experiment.

A few things I get to share:

• This is an author consortium that I was invited to participate in, and I'm ecstatic about it
• I met the brilliant minds behind this experiment at the FWA Conference
• The experiment revolves around a defined central character
• Each of the authors will have a great deal of freedom when working with this central character
• This author collaboration is a unique idea, unlike anything else I've heard of or seen before
• One of the goals is to re-invent readers' experience with short stories
  
  

For now, I'm going to leave you with those nuggets to spark ideas and raise questions. More information will be forthcoming. Stay tuned.