First Conference: Part 0
Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash
Feelings going to my first writer's workshop tomorrow.
Biggest feeling right now: Excitement. Tomorrow I'm attending the workshop day of LTUE. LTUE is short for "Life, the Universe and Everything" and is a refernce to a novel of the same name by Douglas Adams (see also).
I've really gotten into this whole writing thing and now I'm spending real money on improving my skills as a writer. I really feel like it's a skill that I can and want to develop. Just like in my journey with coding, I want to be the best that I possibly can be.
So tomorrow I'm going to the workshop day. I'll be workshopping with David Farland.
Going to my first workshop tomorrow by @davidfarland at @LTUESymposium! Can't wait!#LTUE
— Kent C. Dodds 📚 (@kent_writes) February 13, 2019
I've heard really great things about his workshops from people in LDS Beta Readers on facebook, so I'm eager to see what it's like. The workshop is titled "Master Plotting with David Farland." Here's the description of the workshop:
In David Farland's Amazon #1 best-selling writing book MILLION DOLLAR OUTLINES, Dave teaches how to outline a major novel, one that has the capacity to become a bestseller in its genre. In this course, Dave will be teaching advanced techniques to overcoming some of the challenges to plotting. His techniques will incorporate those found in Million Dollar Outlines (which will be provided to each student electronically before the class), and the workshop will also bring in other techniques, including the Snowflake method, the Hollywood Method, the 3, 2, 1 method, and others. The goal here is to show you how to plot even the most complex novels with greater ease and effort. This workshop will be from 9 am to 5 pm on Wednesday February 13th at the Provo Marriott Hotel and Conference Center.
I've adopted the Story Grid 15 Most Important Scenes as my primary method for outlining my novel and I've been really happy with it. I'm excited to see what I can learn from David in this workshop.
The following three days are conference days. I've found it's interesting that this conference is very "panel-heavy." Conferences that I attend and speak at in the software community are much more focused on talks by one speaker (sometimes two or three), so this is going to be an interesting change for me.
I'm eager to try to meet as many people as possible. I read this blogpost from a fellow writer who wrote about her experience at this conference for her first time last year and learned a few really helpful things. I've been to many conferences in my life, but the writing community is new for me so I want to make sure that I do things correctly. One thing that I learned from that blog post is that business cards are pretty important in the writing community so I got 500 of these printed:
I think they turned out great and I'm excited to hand them out to folks that I meet and make connections with people at the conference. I'm especially eager to meet some of the people I've been learning from all these months as I've started writing. Definitely some people in the LDS Beta Readers community on facebook, but I'm mostly excited about meeting people who host the Writing Excuses podcast:
In the last few months since I started writing, I've listened to countless hours of @WritingExcuses and learned a ton.
— Kent C. Dodds 📚 (@kent_writes) February 9, 2019
Excited to meet @BrandSanderson, @MaryRobinette, @TheDanWells, and @howardtayler at @LTUESymposium next week and thank you each in person! #WritingCommunity 🧡
So we'll see how things go! I'll definitely be taking notes and plan to share the things that I learn as I go. Wish me luck!
This is multi-part of a series of posts about LTUE 2019:
