Anhinga: The Second Day

Great second day to the workshop. Listened to Rick Campbell, who heads up Anhinga Press, which publishes poetry, analyze some poems. He shied away from having us write anything, which disappointed me. But I learned a lot from what he showed us in his analysis (of his and others' poetry). Plus his sense of humor was fantastic.

I then attended Roxanne St. Claire's class on plotting and pacing. That was enjoyable and she brough along a 'plot board' to demonstrate how she works on her books. This reminded me of Julie Czerneda at Necronomicon last year, who uses a similar technique. She reviewed things that killed pacing, plus several standard plot outlines.

The big event for the day was the conversation with Charlaine Harris, which attracted a crowd of almost 200 (about double the number of workshop attendees). Once the fans started asking about their favorite characters I decided to leave, as I don't have cable tv and so am not familiar with her stories.

I'll take some pictures tomorrow and post them. I think this is more a conference than a workshop, unless you were in one specific fiction track, but I've learned a lot from some of the people here, and have met some good people, too. Peter Meinke, the poet laureate of St. Pete, is a warm and wonderful person. I'll hear more from him tomorrow, and am looking forward to that. The editors panel was insightful, even with some very rookie questions being thrown at the four editors/publishers on stage. Three of the four were literary; I'll bring back information on the fourth, a small independent publisher in High Springs who is expanding from Romance into all genres, and was publishing about 25 books a year but is hoping to double that this year (or go higher).

Later,
John