Thursday, March 22, 2012

MIDWEST FICTION WRITERS FALL HARVEST 2011

Every year Midwest Fiction Writers group, a chapter of Romance Writers of America, offers a Fall Harvest Workshop at the end of September. This year the conference presented Margie Lawson’s Deep Editing Master Class. Margie Lawson has a Master’s of Science in Psychiatric Counseling and is a world-wide lecturer. On Friday night for MFW’s 35th anniversary, they offered a formal dinner with guest speaker, Mary Janice Davidson, who is from the Twin Cities and is the New York Times Bestseller author of the Undead Vampire series. She was as hilarious in person as she is in her writing. On Saturday, the workshop consisted of Margie Lawson’s intense, hands-on, deep editing class complete with multi-colored magic markers to highlight different sections of our manuscripts. Sunday was a half day class with some final pointers from Margie and included a delicious breakfast brunch. Fall Harvest is promoted to all writers in the Twin Cities area and to all RWA chapters across the country, although most of the participants are Midwest Fiction Writers members. This year again it was tough to get people to sign up, probably due to the conference being held at a location on the North side of the Twin Cities making it a long drive for those of us who live out in the far southern suburbs and requiring a car rental for out of town people. Also the cost was high considering there weren’t editor or agent appointments included in the conference and considering the state of the economy it was hard for many people to justify the cost without having an opportunity to pitch their stories to editors and agents. I guess most writers are just more willing to put out money to go to an out of state conference if there are multiple classes taught by more than one speaker and definitely more enticing if there are editors and agents attending. It may be time for MFW to take a serious look at making some changes in their current conference offerings and going back to the types of workshops offered in past years. It was certainly a pleasure to meet Margie and hear her ideas regarding deep editing, but of course with editing, it is just one of those things that requires sitting down and trying it on your own manuscript. So we’ll have to see if after working through the deep editing process, my manuscript becomes a keeper for a publishing house!

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