• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

News Something really positive in a tough old world

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.

Andrew Okey

Basic
Joined
Aug 8, 2017
Location
England
LitBits
0
Litopians (UK-based Litopians, at least),

Something I posted about recently got hardly any views and I think I radically mis-sold it! So:

Last Friday I attended the 4th annual Graduate Creative Writing Fair in Manchester. This was totally brilliant for reasons I'll summarise below, and also wasn't disastrously expensive (£45) and, despite the title, you don't have to be any sort of graduate to attend (I've never done a creative writing course in my life and I chatted to delegates who had never studied in HE).

The day included a plenary, choices of two informative sessions (the one on how to get noticed by publishers - panellists included Julia Silk from MBA, and Sarah Hunt from the Saraband imprint - was especially valuable for me). There was also a choice of skills sessions [me and some other delegates got the chance to do voice-led writing exercises with the brilliant Clare Fisher] and then guaranteed pitch slots with two agents who have been carefully matched to your chosen genre(s). All the agents involved were utterly charming and lovely and provided great feedback on both the quality of our pitches and our writing/ideas - hey, I (almost) lost my fear of them! And, of course, I made lots of random network-y connections with people inside (or just hoping to be inside) the industry.

So, if you ever get the chance, I can really recommend attending this. It's an annual event - always early in November - and is run in association with Comma Press, so there are lots of chances to get know their staff, too. Website is - The National Creative Writing Graduate Fair

A.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest Articles By Litopians

  • Advertising and Social Media
    There has been much discussion in writing circles about how much a writer has to self-promote these ...
  • Future Abstract: Fights at Night
    SATIRE ALERT: The following abstract is entirely fictional and does not represent actual events or s ...
  • Great Novel Openings Quiz
    As writers, we all know how important it is to grip the reader from the very start. Intriguing, surp ...
  • In The Summertime
    In the early seventies, I had a semi-Afro hairstyle and a shaggy beard. . I thought I looked like th ...
  • Working with a Literary Agent
    The Querying In a previous post I mentioned that I was back in the query trenches. To recap, my earl ...
  • Danger! Danger!
    What is perhaps the most feared creature of the Borneo rainforest, I hear you ask? Who is the King o ...
  • The World Has Missed You
         May 2021… COVID lockdown restrictions had eased, so Mrs Treaclechops and I headed to the I ...
Back
Top