. . . Sorry, couldn’t resist! 🙂

This was my first year at the Killer Nashville conference. Back in the spring, I warmed up with SleuthFest in Your PJs, but I’d never been to a real in-person writers’ conference before! I volunteered to help out, thinking that it’d help me feel at home more quickly.

So what happened? Well, to put it succinctly . . .

  • Thursday: arrival, registration, scoping out the hotel, generally geeking out about finally being at the conference!
  • Friday: volunteering — specifically, discovering a hidden talent for reading others’ works aloud! High school me would have melted on the spot if asked to read aloud, but I really enjoyed reading sample pages for agents.
  • Saturday: more volunteering, an informational session or two, and getting lost in the bookstore 🙂
  • Sunday: an awesome session on fantasy settings, and another on memorable characters, before heading home.

I think, overall, I learned the most from sitting in on the agent roundtable sessions on Friday and Saturday. These put about half a dozen writers in a room with an agent, and one by one the writers shared the first two pages of their novel to get feedback from everyone present. (As a volunteer, I read each set of two pages aloud and believe me, I ended up saying some crazy stuff.) It felt like a mix between writing club and peeking behind the scenes on an agent’s day job. It also convinced me to consider having someone else read my work aloud for me when I’m editing, because many writers said that alone was helpful.

I’m also excited to dive into some of the new books I discovered! 🙂 All sorts of mysteries were represented, including a neat steampunk mystery series that has me very curious. Like most conferences, Killer Nashville was full of energy — people meeting, people exchanging ideas. Though I spent months thinking about the conference and planning things like how to get there or where to stay, I think the biggest takeaway for me was that this is just the beginning. A career in writing takes work just like anything else, and part of that work is showing up. Good thing the folks at Killer Nashville make that so fun!

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