When planning the Creatures, Crimes and Creativity conference it was easy to decide what we wanted the content to be in
general. But the devil’s in the
details. The plan calls for a total of
13 hours of panel with three presentations happening at a time. That means we need 39 different presentations
that will be fun and interesting to readers and to writers of seven genres of fiction.
Filling two of those slots was
easy. Our local special guests, thriller
author John Gilstrap and suspense writer Trice Hickman each offered to give a
one-hour presentation. Both these best
sellers have had interesting writing journeys and I think their fans and fellow
authors will be jump at the chance to get up close and personal with them and
ask their own questions.
We’re saving one of those hour-long
slots for a special event I’ll tell you about later. That still leaves us with 36 spaces to
fill. Luckily we’ve all been to enough
cons to have seen dozens of panels, and we know which ones we liked and which
we didn’t. So the group got together and
started throwing out ideas.
In conversation we’ve learned that a lot
of people have heard of steampunk but don’t know what it really entails. So a “What is steampunk” panel seemed a
natural.
The team is pushing for me to do a one
hour class called “Let’s write a mystery” in which the audience will
collaborate, with my guidance, to build a story from scratch. I love the panel idea, but I’m looking for
another mystery author to take it over.
We’d also like to see a panel of new writers talking about how their
first book came about and what the experience of being a first-time author is
like.
Like
the previous idea, a panel discussing how to create a strong protagonist can
have writers of different genre. For mystery
and thriller fans we’d like a panel on real-life crime fighting and forensics. And we plan to mix the genre again for a
panel of writers discussing where their ideas come from.
Of course this only scratches the
surface – the ideas bubbled up out of control.
The real challenge will fall to romantic suspense author Deliah Lawrence who is our talent coordinator. As each author registers for the conference
she will contact them to learn about their genre and their talents. Then she will place them on a panel or two
with others who will provide the right balance of similarity and contrast.
Honestly, I can’t
wait to see some of these panels, and we haven’t even assigned any authors yet. And we’re still open to ideas so if there’s a
panel YOU’D like to see… or be on… let me know!
