Things I Learned at the Women In Publishing Summit

This week’s Women In Publishing Summit 2021 re-energized me as an author. It left me invigorated and ready to take on my current writing projects with a new passion. Plus, information sessions and conversations with fellow editing professionals armed me with new perspectives and vital tools for my editing arsenal.

But I think the most important thing I learned this week is never to underestimate a group of women with a common goal.

As a natural introvert, I customarily shrink into corners and try to avoid being noticed. But the small-group settings in the Zoom chats made me push myself beyond my comfort zone, to actually interact with other live human beings. And the women in these coffee chat groups made it easy to want to engage. Every woman was welcome; each woman was drawn into the conversation. And each woman’s experiences were acknowledged and validated.

And the sessions! Oh, my goodness… the sessions! Individual tracks for fiction, nonfiction and children’s authors, plus a separate “general” category for info that spanned multiple tracks. I still need to finish watching the videos for days three through five of the conference. So glad I’ve got six months to watch and re-watch all these fantastic presentations!

So what did I learn this week? The first thing I learned is projectile vomiting is no way to start a Monday. And when you feel miserable and your internet cuts out for ten minutes in the middle of a live session (the joys of rural living) and you only survive the hour because of that glass of ginger ale in your sweaty little hand, sometimes the best thing is to scrap everything on your schedule and indulge in a bit of self care. I shut down my computer and went to bed. When I woke up four hours later, I felt almost human again and was able to watch a few video presentations. And, boy golly, did I ever learn a lot! Two of my favorite sessions so far were Showing vs. Telling with Eileen Cook and Shayla Raquel‘s Finding Your Antagonist’s Saving Grace.

One of the main things I learned this week is there’s so much more I still need to learn! I need to get my author website functional. I need to build an email list. And I need to amp up my marketing skills in a big way. Whew! And that’s just for starters.

I even learned you can find out some of the most amazing things if you just think to ask.

This afternoon, we had a post-session happy hour. Dozens of attendees from different parts of the globe (the ones who were still awake, at any rate) convened in a Zoom meeting and divided up into small breakout rooms to chat. Many of us had lovely adult beverages to enjoy – which, come to think of it, probably made the conversation flow a little more easily.

After an hour-long chat with one group of participants, I mingled a bit and wandered into another room, where I soon learned one of the women was a medical doctor. When presented the opportunity, I asked whether she could provide some information about my giving a character a brain tumor.

After cheerfully agreeing, Cristy’s initial question/comment to me was an alarmingly enthusiastic, “Do you want her to die? Give her a frontal-lobe tumor.”

That struck my new pal Kate as so hilarious, she felt inspired to post this. And for the record, no, I don’t want her to die. I just needed something that could explain her increasingly erratic and unsettling behavior over a period of several months.

The conference wraps up Monday (International Women’s Day) with the closing keynote address, Why Supporting Women Matters, presented by Desiree Peterkin Bell. But since no event is over until the conclusion of happy hour (another important thing I learned this week), Alexa Bigwarfe and the rest of the organizers have kindly scheduled a wrap-up happy hour event Tuesday evening.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go investigate email-list platforms, figure out how to register a domain name and decide what kind of lovely adult beverage I’m going to whip up for happy hour (can’t leave these things ’til the last minute, you know).

Writing through the pain… er, I mean, the drugs

It’s such a shame to let good drugs go to waste.

There. I thought I’d get that out right up front.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way… “Let me explain. No, there is too much; let me sum up” (quoting Mandy Patinkin in his role as Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride).

February 4th, I underwent abdominal surgery; I’d learned three weeks earlier that I had stage-one uterine cancer. The surgery was more extensive than they’d anticipated, but it went well and they released me early Sunday evening with some phenomenal pharmaceuticals and a caution not to do too much too soon.

The other day, in a Percocet-hazed spate of helpfulness, I volunteered to help my darling hubby with a writing project for his job. It seemed like the ideal offer: I write prose for a living, he’s one of those techie types who spends his days writing code. This should be a breeze. Well, sort of.

So I came up with a splendid idea and ran with it… the piece I wrote was filled with vivid imagery,  excellent comparisons – and some really stunning adjectives, if I do say so myself. It likened the various components of the topic to the individual ingredients in a lovely pot of soup. I told him all he had to do was plug in items about the subject matter to fit the analogies I’d used; then we could work on it a bit further, let it simmer overnight and serve it up with some crusty bread.

Alas, it was not to be.

He took one look at it and said it wasn’t going to fly. Well, of course it wasn’t! Have you ever seen a flying soup (which, you understand, is nothing like having a fly in your soup – but that’s another thing altogether)? At any rate, the bottom line was all those lovely ideas and images had gone completely to waste!

Well, the exercise did serve one purpose: Last night, hubby was IMing with a co-worker who had asked how I was feeling; he told her I certainly seemed to be enjoying the drugs. She mentioned that Percocet can do odd things. His reply: “I know. She’s helping me work on this project and came up with something about soup and executive chefs. Trouble is, I’m supposed to be doing a white paper about database architecture.” Apparently, Amy got quite a chuckle out of that.

Well, I guess I’ll wait for the drugs to kick in again and then check in with a few of the characters in my novel to see if they’re up to anything interesting. On second thought, maybe it’s time for a nap.