Tweeting at Willamette Writers Conference
Well, for starters, I don’t want to miss being in Portland the way I missed being in Seattle for PNWA. I don’t like being in a place and only being outside for the short jaunt from airport to hotel to airport. I get Setting Sickness. I could be anywhere. It’s horrible.
So I’m leaving a little early this time, heading for Powell’s first and then maybe The Chinese Garden or Voodoo Donuts or Music Millennium or. . . okay, yeah, I’m not going to see all my favorite places, but I do plan to start the conference knowing where I am. Hopefully I’ll get some photos tweeted so you know where I am too. I love Portland. I think you’ll love it too.
Thursday evening is early registration and pitch practice and that’s all, so look for a ten percent chance of wordy tweeting and a high concentration of travel-related twitpics.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday the fun really begins. I’ve written to speakers ahead of time and I’m live tweeting from workshops where I’ve asked for and received permission to tweet. There will be a smattering of descriptive tweets from panel discussions and other less-tweetable events, but workshop speakers will receive most of my attention because their workshops intrigued me and the speakers were cool with tweeting.
Be sure to visit the speaker websites, leave comments on blogs, and let them know (when appropriate) that you’re there because of live tweeting. Speakers need this feedback to make decisions about tweeting at future events. If you buy a book because of live tweeting, this is especially important feedback for them to have! When you go to your next event and ask someone about live tweeting, we want the response to continue to be as positive and enthusiastic as it’s been for me this season.
That said, how much I tweet depends both on the inherent tweetability of a workshop and whether one of my agent appointments cuts into that time slot. For those of you wanting to read tweets in real time, here’s the schedule of workshops I plan to attend. All times are Pacific Daylight Time. Complete workshop descriptions are available from this page of the Willamette Writers Conference site.
Friday:
10:30am-12pm: Penny Warner: “It was a Dark and Stormy Setting”
1:30pm-3pm: Jessica Morrell: “Beginnings, Endings, & Turning Points”
3:30pm-5pm: Andrea Brown: “The Hot YA Category”
Saturday:
8:30am-10am: Andrea Brown: “Demystifying The Children’s Book Market”
10:30am-12pm: Stephen Fraser: “Create The Perfect Elevator Pitch”
3:30-5pm: Melissa Hart: “Travel Writing for Newspapers and Magazines”
Sunday:
8:30am-10am: Eric Witchey: “Levers, Ratchets, and Buttons”
10:30am-12pm: Christine Fletcher: “Close to the Bone: Writing The YA Novel.”
1:15pm-2:30pm: Jessica Morrell: “Blood, Roses, & Mosquitos: Writing with Details”
3pm-4:15pm: Christina Katz: “The Prosperous Writer: Career Strategies for Staying Flush”
Expect a high wordiness/attribution quotient with a few splashes of twitpics (probably all in florescent lighting).
Please do reply while I’m tweeting! I know most of you don’t reply because you know I can’t really respond right then (and you’re right), but I do love knowing what you’re thinking and it influences the details I choose to report. And hey--you can always talk amongst yourselves about the ideas being presented. Backchannel discussion reminds me of the internet in its early days. (“You mean there’s a discussion going on underneath the reality?” Oh yeah--and now there’s a discussion of the discussion of the reality. Or is it a discussion of the discussion of the discussion? We’re certainly stretching the bounds of “A life unexamined. . .” and some of us are giggling.)
I hope you enjoy your twitter trip to Willamette. Almost time to go. In 3, 2, 1. . .
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