I attended OryCon 33, a regional science fiction / fantasy con in Portland, Oregon. This is my second time attending OryCon. As a writer, it’s a great opportunity to get questions answered about professional writing and the publishing industry, learn writing craft, and to meet authors, editors, and fans.

Like most conferences I go to, I take a lot of notes. Here’s what I took during OryCon. The links take you to a full post on my line by line notes from the panel.

• Author Influences: Who most influenced the panelists? Answers ranged from Ray Bradbury to Kelly Link. I’ve already bought a dozen books based on what I heard here. 
• Self-Publishing: The New Vanity Press? This controversial sounding panel actually turned into a great discussion about how an author can be professionally successful self-publishing. Annie Bellet is great, and even surprised the other panelists with the success she’s had, and the counter-intuitive discoveries (such as finding that author platform had no impact on sales).
• Getting Your First Professional Sale: Tips, tricks, and personal experiences from five published panelists including E.E. Knight and Mary Robinette Kowal. 
• How To Promote Yourself as a Writer Without Being Obnoxious: This panel discussion promoting the writer vs. the book, how to use social media, and when to push back against the publisher. 
• Self-Publish Write Note: Hands on panel by Robert Plamondon on the mechanics of self-publishing, including print books.
• Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: This panel included Robopocalypse author Daniel H. Wilson. The discussion including our ethical responsibility towards A.I. (is it OK to kill them?), our responsibility to ensure that A.I. behave ethically (how do we keep them from killing us?), lovebots, and robot nursing aides.
• Using Social Media to Get Published: The use of social media, author platform, and self publishing to help achieve getting traditionally published.
• Writing Formidable Women: By the end of this panel I learned how to spell formidable. Great discussion about what makes women formidable. Victoria Blake (editor, Underland Press) said “wanting to do something other than please someone else.” Also discussed how a formidable woman is inherently more complex than a formidable man because of social, physical limitations. There’s a broader palette of tools for a woman to be formidable.
• Structure of Writing: A writing craft discussion of structure as a tool.
• Playing God: Apocalyptic Storytelling: Another panel where I learned how to spell a word through repetition. 
• Gender and Writing: Discussion about male and female characters, different styles of problem-solving, and how the Buffy effect (kick-ass female characters) causes a lack of other, more feminine stylings of addressing conflict.
• Internal and External Change in Writing: The important and effect of internal character change in additional to external (action) change. It’s not a story unless a character learns something or changes in some way.
• Use of Description in Writing: self-description, adverbs, the view paragraph – what works and what doesn’t. 
• Ken Scholes Evolution of a Writing Career: Published author Ken Scholes gave an overview of his twenty year career in writing, and how what appears to be sudden success is actually the outcome of many years of practice and networking. Then he addressed audience questions about writing and publishing.  

• Annie Bellet: Got first professional sale on August 2010, sold 9 stories so far. Short fiction to magazines.
• E.E. Knight: novels, 15 or so. First professional sale of fiction was 1991. First time I cashed a check was for non-fiction for bridal magazine. To this day, that was the best money I made per word.
• Edward Morris: Sold 85 short stories globally, six books in a small press. First professional sale was in 2000 to Interzone. A lucky break: on duotrope.com trying to figure out where to sell my fiction.
• Jess Hartley: writing for RPG industry for the last 10 years. First sale was a novel for a RPG tie-in.
• Mary Robinette Kowal: First professional sale to New Horizon in 2006. Just won the Hugo for short story. About 65 short stories published.
• Bloody Pitfalls
• Mary: I went to research cover letters. Completely different for non-fiction than for short stories. Made sure you have the right one. 
• Short stories: cover letter is very minimal.
• Novels: Just enough to know that it is the type of material they publish.
• A publishing house that says “We will not take unsolicited manuscripts” will take an unsolicited query letter. It’s exactly the same as a cover letter, with a “May I send you a manuscript?”
• Lots of times you may get a positive response.
• Q: I’m working on something that may best be a graphic novel.
• Morris: Look for graphic novel scripts. Frank Miller’s batman scripts are available out there. That’s the format you want to submit.
• Q: How long should my cover letter be?
• Only a single page.
• Tell them what it is about, not what happens.
• Think about it as the back cover copy on a book.
• Eric: Networking is another path to an editor. I know a number of authors who went to World Fantasy and hooked up with editors in the bar, and they chat, and they get invited to send a manuscript to them. 
• They want to know you’re not crazy. They want to know they could buy 12 manuscripts from you, not just one.
• Jim Butcher was having trouble selling the Dresdon Files, and met an editor at the bar at World Fantasy, and got the editor to pick it up off the slush pile and read it.
• Mary: The traditional wisdom is to do short stories and to go to conventions. But Jim Hine did a survey and found that there is no commonality: as many people got their first sale that way as that didn’t.
• Jess: Did it the way you are most comfortable. If you are an extrovert, so to 
• Mary: I teach a class called Schmoozing 101. 
• Have your elevator pitch ready. But DO NOT be the first person to bring up business. Just have a conversation. At some point they will ask what you are working on. Then it’s time for your pitch.
• Have an exit strategy. 
• Q: How long to wait before OK to submit elsewhere?
• Mary: I knew the editor, had just won the Campbell, and had an agent, and it still took a year to hear back on a novel.
• If it’s been more than their standard period of time, send a query letter. Just three lines: I sent this manuscript. I just want to make sure you have received it. Thank you.
• You can send queries to lots of people. It’s only when they have the manuscript that you have to wait.
• Duotrope.com 
• Ralan.com
• Submitting to the black hole: http://critters.org/blackholes/index.ht
• Q: How long before you give up on a short story:
• Annie: never
• Mary: never, but…
• Edward: five years, but then new markets are always opening up
• Mary: But before you sell anything, you have to be writing something good. 
• Mary: I just critiqued someone who didn’t know what a contraction was.
• Q: Are there editors more open to new writers?
• Mary: All of them. They want to find the next big thing.
• Knight: You shouldn’t be afraid just because you don’t have publishing credits. Just go to the top.
• For short fiction sales, if you can write short stories that are around 4,000 words, you are more likely to make a sale. Editors have a fixed word count, and they cannot go over this count. They are more likely to take a chance on a new writer if it is short. Too much shorter than 4,000 words, and it gets harder to craft a enriching story. As soon as you start getting longer, you are taking up words from other stories.
• Q: How do you keep track of where you’ve submitted?
• Mary: Duotrope.com
• Annie: Excel file. The most stories I had out at one time was 37.
• It’s really important to keep good records of where stuff is out. 
• WritersPlanner is another good one, just for tracking submissions.
• It’s important to track not just who has accepted, but who has paid you.
• If you have 20 stories out, it’s hard to keep track of who has paid.
• Shop for publishers and agents at the same time.
• A bad agent is worse than no agent. There is no criteria you have to pass to call yourself a literary agent. There’s no oversight.
• Take the decision of selecting an agent as seriously as you would getting married.
• Consider not just the single agent but the agencies: if it is a single agent, and they drop dead…
• Q: Markets going to electronic submissions vs. paper. How does that affect things?
• Mary: the only difference is that it’s faster to submit things, so now they get a lot more crap. But for you, as a writer, it’s makes no difference in the process.
• Q: Are the electronic markets as effective as the paper ones?
• Mary: More so now, because the electronic markets do not have a shelf life. if I publish in a paper market, it’s but now, but it’s gone in a few months. If it is online, I can always point people to it.

• Alma: Publishers want you to be out there everywhere. Facebook, Twitter, Blogging.
• Lizzy: Make the mistake of dressing as a Klingon to promote her first book. Big flop.
• Jess Hartley
• Hobson: Since I write historical fiction of a given period, costuming helps, because there is a common interest
• When it comes to promotion, how much does what you write or what you do, drive what you do or don’t do in terms of promotion?
• There is a different between promoting yourself as a writer as opposed to a book. Promoting yourself is good. You want people to remember your name. 
• Alma: I am a shy person who would crawl under a table at parties, but if you put me in a position where I can talk about words and writing, that I can do. I can put myself in a discussion or at a talk.
• Making yourself memorable, but not in a bad way.
• A careless word or an off day.
• We all have off days, but if you alienate someone who could have been a great fan by being rude, you can ruin that relationship – turn them against you.
• On the other hand, sometimes you need to seperate the person from the book. You don’t have to agree with everything about an author to enjoy their book.
• Internet things never go away. 
• If you argue with someone, even in a small discussion forum somewhere, the next thing you know it could be on reddit.
• Anne Rice alienated many of her readers when she responded to one online saying that person was too dumb to understand it when they complained about it.
• Sometimes you get an author who bullies you into buying a book. But that doesn’t create a fan who is going to be excited about blogging about the author.
• The camera is always on. 
• If there’s a community of interest, don’t go there to promote your book. Go there to participate. Be part of the conversation. 
• Devil’s Advocate: There’s an author, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of their self-published ebook. He promotes shamelessly, all the time, everytime he talks to anyone. “have you read my latest book?” So what does this say about the “not being obnoxious” principle?
• My goal is to build a readership and to give value to the community and build a lifetime career. I want to build something that will sustain. If he stops promoting, is there a community that will still push his sales forward? Maybe not.
• Hobson: I’m concerned that I’ve created a certain kind of persona geared toward my genre fiction. Is it going to be a problem moving into a new genre?
• Lizzy: I have several things in different genre, but they all have a common Irish theme.
• Alma: I don’t like being typecast. I don’t want to get jaded and bored, and find that it’s a chore to churn out something new. So I am not going to write the same kind of book again.
• Jess: I’ve seen authors who are writing erotica and who have highly sexual branding, and it becomes a limiting factor that makes it hard for them to move outside that.
• What is the most helpful thing you’ve ever done, and what’s been the biggest bust?
• Alma: I had a bunch of tiny little postit notes that promote my book. They are really popular. I give them away at cons. They are wildly successful. By lunch they are all gone.
• Lizzy: A book launch party or a party at your house to promote your book. People come in and they buy the book. 
• Jess: Making myself be outgoing, introducing myself to people. Asking people questions. Being interested in what they have to say.
• What seems good but isn’t it: I’ve seen people putting their books on flash drives. But there’s no way I am going to put an unknown flash drive on my computer. It’s a wonderful theoretical idea, but in practice, no way.
• Audience comment: bring coupon codes for your books. It’s easy to Smashwords.
• Hobson: 
• Bust
• Sticky notes and things like that don’t work for me. I lose them or forget to deploy them.
• I hate talking about my own work.
• Don’t ever include food items. Chocolates that melt, things that rot.
• Never, ever put glitter in an envelope of any kind. Glitter goes everywhere and they are going to hate you forever.
• Q: How do you measure if something in successful?
• Alma: Stickynotes are not just a little card. They are a whole block of cards with the book staring at you. 
• Hobson: Something you can measure and get metrics on. Coupon codes are something you can track. You can calculate an ROI. But most writers don’t have the time or energy to go to that depth. But it’s a good thing to do.
• Jess: Use Google analytics to track hits. I can see things get retweeted, reblogged, etc. 
• Hobson: Finding places where you can be involved but it’s not directly about writing. Stuff you are really interested in. 
• Jess: If you can get someone else to talk about your work, that has 10x the impact of you talking about it yourself. Maybe that can be cross promotion. Maybe thats who you meet at conventions. 

• What do we call formidable? How do we apply that to fiction? How are women different than men in skirts?
• Blake: My single criteria is if the woman wants something other than to please someone else.
• Scott: Mike […] writes his female characters pretty much the same way he writes his male characters. They are just doing their jobs.
• With one of the characters, recently did a story about their childhood, in that treated them somewhat differently.
• In Buffy, it’s more that we wrote the men to be more like women.
• Hobson: depends on genre. In military fiction, we are writing female characters to be masculine. There isn’t room in that genre to explore the other sides of the character.
• So as a writer, we can make room for the character to do that. To explore their conflict over fitting into that world. To explore what they are giving up to do it. Not necessarily to show them baking a cake.
• Azinger: I consider anything that a woman does to gain, keep, and wield power, they have a broad palette of ways to do it: by swords, by sexuality, by guile, etc.
• Perry: There is a physicality that you have to take into account. If you have a 5’2’ woman wade into a room of bikers, she’d not going to fight them all and win. If she goes up against another martial artist, he will have a height, weight, and strength advantage over her. This stuff has to be taken into account.
• Hobson: Does the woman have a discussion with another woman in the book that doesn’t revolve around a guy?
• Blake says that if the only function of someone is to take care of the kids, taking care of a sick parent, or be pleasing (even in a way that isn’t sexual or sexualized), that’s not going to make a formidable character.
• Scott: If you put a lot of T&A in there, it’s going to turn off women readers, regardless of.
• when D.C. comics recently relaunched – 52 #1 issues in the month of september. They oversexualized Catwoman and Redhood, and there was a huge reaction from the overgrowing woman readership, and they freaked out when they saw these woman characters.
• What do you considered a formidable woman character?
• Blake: I am not looking for a woman to kick ass. I am looking for someone who is in pursuit of their goals.
• Hobson: I think you can still be in service and be formidable. The whole core of Buddhism is that you are supposed to be in service to others. To me, it is somebody who has integrity and courage. They are true to themselves. They are not subsuming themselves to anyone else.
• Scott: I write action adventure. So the nature of it is to have people who kick ass.
• Blake: I am talking about an active character vs a passive character.
• Azinger: Someone who has a goal and progresses to the goal or makes a difference in the world.
• A protagonist overcomes obstacles to reach goals. This is the core of any story.
• Comment from audience: the pleasing thing is an adaptive behavior of woman across cultures and history that they needed to do that in order to survive.
• A strong woman today in Afghanistan will be murdered.
• Writing formidable woman is more complex than writing formidable men because of these limitations.
• A 5’2” woman will find a way to overcome the situation other than direct action. 
• Azinger: It pisses me off when a woman starts out formidable, and then she turns into a wimp. This happens in Lord of the Rings. How can the writers create a great female character and then flip a switch and turn her into a wimp. It is so disappointing to me.
• Hobson: Let’s talk about T&A and sexuality. 
• I think there’s a difference between female characters that are sexual and ones that are over-sexualized.
• There are men who want to see that and there are women who want to present themselves in that way.
• Scott:
• Someday i want to figure out how to do a Vampirella character that has integrity.
• If you write men one way and women another way, then you have a problem. If the women are there only for the sexuality you have a problem.
• Azinger: To me it’s all part of the palette that’s available, and you can use it all. You can use it badly or well. You can’t look at how woman gain, keep, and wield power without doing it.
• But to me, what’s missing is the gray-haired characters.
• Scott: It’s great when you can mess with expectations.
• Blake: [To the panel] Do you feel a responsibility to write formidable female characters?
• Hobson: I have a 13 year old daughter, of course.
• Azinger: Absolutely. I write to overcome stereotypes and prejudices. 
• Scott: I feel a responsibility to donate to charities. I feel like writing formidable female characters is a responsibility to tell the truth.
• Perry: I am writing for my readership. I want to sell books. The first and only sin in writing books is if it isn’t entertaining. So anything in there has to be snuck in in such a way that it’s not a lesson, it’s part of the entertainment. 
• It’s all part of who we are. Short, fat, young, old, – it has to represent everywhere.
• Discussion of Sarah Conner in Terminator 2:
• Perry: She’s cartoonish.
• Scott: She was a defining moment in genre fiction. There was nothing like her before. I believe female fans and male fans ate that up.
• Hobson: It’s a trope to put a woman in a man’s world, and make her pass for a man. It would be an interesting thought exercise to put a man in a woman’s world.
• Scott: And not just to treat it as a comedy, which is the first thing that comes to mind:
• Perry: I was a male nurse, and that is a case where you have a man in a women’s world.

• Panel
• Victoria: Love structure.
• Jason: editor and filmmaker. like playing with structure. you can do a lot with it. mix it up, not just flashbacks, but other ways to tell the stories.
• Devon Monk: several series. had to learn and internalize structure quickly as she had to write several novels very fast.
• Richard Lovett: been accused of being too structure. just had his 100th story accepted by analog.
• S.A. Bolich
• What do you look for? 
• Victoria: Your structure can serve as a proposal for the story that is separate from plot. Structure changes timeline, or scene, or point of view character that creates a whiplash effect. It’s like a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter. It’s not a release of new information (like the plot), it’s how and when the information is released.
• Richard: His first story accepted by Analog has 14 point of view characters in 6,000 words using a strict rhyming scheme. A/B/A/B/A/B/A/B/C, then new scene.
• Devon: 
• We look for things in three.
• Beginning, middle, end.
• It’s getting bad, it’s getting worse, it’s as bad as it’s going to be. 
• Christopher Vogel’s The Writer’s Journey. It’s based on the Hero’s Journey.
• Hero’s Journey Overview (wikipedia)
• Heroes are introduced in the ORDINARY WORLD
• they receive the CALL TO ADVENTURE
• They are RELUCTANT at first or REFUSE THE CALL, but
• are encouraged by a MENTOR to
• CROSS THE THRESHOLD and enter the Special World, where
• they encounter TEST, ALLIES, AND ENEMIES.
• They APPROACH THE IN-MOST CAVE, cross a second threshold
• where they endure the ORDEAL
• They take possession of their REWARD and
• are pursued on THE ROAD BACK to the Ordinary World.
• They cross the third threshold, experience a RESURRECTION, and are transformed by the experience.
• They RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR, a boon or treasure to benefit the ORDINARY WORLD.
• Save The Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need
• Blake:
• Write first.
• Then ask your story for its structure.
• How intellectual do I want this to be?
• What is the timeframe of the story?
• It’ll tell you what it wants to be.
• Then do the hard work of mapping the story to that structure.
• Ask yourself why events occur when they do.
• If he becomes telekenetic on page 30 – why does it happen on page 30? Why not on page 35, or 28.
• There’s microstructure and macrostructure.
• Structure had better drive your story.
• Bolich: I ask each scene: Did the character get what they want?
• It should be “Yes, but…” or “No, and…”
• They both create tension and keep the story going. Any other action is insufficient to propel the story forward. 
• If the answer is simply yes, or simply no, that’s not enough.
• A linear story is by nature episodic. Which gets repetitive. But you can fix this by modulating what you say.
• The novel mixed exposition and narrative to achieve this.
• The Road is a good example of this. 
• Lovett: Readers have been told so much that you are supposed to start in the middle of the action — that it becomes hard to give them a strictly linear story. 
• Monk: Depends on the genre. Different standards for different genre.
• For me, the best opening is about people and conflicts.
• Bolich: You can experiment, but not everything will work. 
• Blake: Is there a fiction book that teaches you something about structure
• Brock: Faulkner was really good at this. The Sound and The Fury.
• Lovett: anything by Connie Willis
• Bolich spoke about writing in five act structure.
• Lovett: It’s fun, especially in short form, to experiment with things that especially limit you. I did one story that was done entirely in the form of a discussion board discussion.
• TV has really changed things. They have a four act structure with a prefix. It’s not the same as five act structure.
• Blake: Another way to think about it is chronic tension vs. acute tension.
• chronic tension is what your characters are built of. this is your character story.
• acute tension is your plot. this is your action story. the acute tension dips down into the chronic tension. 
• Monk: this is your internal change and external change.
• Blake: I use an excel document and track the characters and tension in scene by scene, color coding things.
• Brock: 
• I write the first draft
• I wait a few days
• I print it out, and I read the whole thing on the printed page.
• I go through the whole thing with a red pen. I’m spotting grammatically mistakes and also look for structural things.
• Then I revised it and embellish it.
• then I print it out, and go over it again.
• I’ll rearrange paper pages to change structure.
• Lovett: I do something similar. I’m looking for a sense of balance. I’m doing it intuitively. Also, I do it in print.
• Q: Explain the excel thing again
• Blake: 
• If I have five main characters, I color code them.
• On the left hand side I put the chapters
• Then I’ll have a color coded block for each point of view character that shows up in that scene.
• Blake: As an editor, when I review something, I do a 5-7 page review letter. Plus I also send along excel documents and supporting documentation.
• I’m expecting that the author can defend their decisions.
• Q: How do I know where chapters start and end?
• Bolich: My rule is that it’s the action that goes together.
• Lovett: One rule of thumb is not to intimidate the reader with large blocks of text. This effects paragraph structure and chapters. This usually comes up around 3,000 to 5,000 words. Now look for the natural breakpoints.
• Blake: the chapters can tell a story. Let’s say your book is about a woman and a killer. 
• You might expect something like W / W / W / K / W / W / W / K / W / W / K / W / W / K / K.
• That tells you something right there about the story.