Winchester Calling!

The programme for this year's Writers' Conference at the University of Winchester has now been posted online. This year, incredibly, will be the 30th year of the conference, and it has been organised from the start by Barbara Large who deserves all credit for such a herculean task! She's genuinely passionate about helping new writers and very good at arm-twisting (with extreme charm!) writers, editors and agents into appearing at the conference to dispense invaluable advice. It's not just a conference about advice on how to write, though - it's about opportunities. Here you get the chance to hear what's hot, what publishers are looking for, how best to pitch to them - and you get the chance to pitch direct at the One-to-One appointments, where, in a crowded and noisy room, you get fifteen minutes with a writer, an editor or an agent, to make your mark. So no stress involved, then! Less formally, you get the chance to network at the lunches and dinners, at the bar, in the queue for coffee, while strolling around the Book Fair. You never know who you'll meet, you never know what will come of it. There are quite a number of writers who are published as a result of meeting someone at the Conference.

If you do plan to come, don't wait for the printed conference programme, which tends to be slow to arrive: get online now and start booking, especially for the One-to-Ones which are so popular, they book up very quickly.

I've been teaching at the conference now for over a decade. This year I'll be teaching a mini-course on Friday 25th, 'The Right Perspective and the Telling Voice', and on Saturday 26th I'll be giving a lecture on 'Sensory Perceptions', looking at how you can use imagery and detail to give texture and depth to your writing. I'm always delighted to meet old friends there - and to meet any of my blog readers or fictionfire clients! By the way, I hope that you're popping across to fictionfire often to read my Quote of the Week section under Writing Inspiration. To be honest, I'm not quite managing a literary quote every week, but I'm proud of how this section is shaping up. I don't just give you a quotation; I write a little mini-essay - a riff about what that quote means to me or how it can help you. I'm hoping it provides you with the mixture of inspiration and practical guidance which is my aim with fictionfire as a whole. Enjoy!