Black Gate

I had never attended a major speculative fiction convention until this year. And the World Fantasy Convention is a huge one for a first-timer to go diving into. It’s an especially scary dive if you’re someone like me, who is only starting to emerge from the years of amateur writing into some level of the professional. I’ve won a major writing award, have some stories that will soon be published, and even have an agent and a novel making the rounds at publishing houses, but I felt like a Lilliputian among Brobdingnagians when I entered the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Columbus, OH on 29 October 2010 with the Thirty-Sixth World Fantasy Convention already in motion. There I was, lugging my heavy suitcases from the taxi from the airport, and already around me was a throng of people with their convention badges swinging from their necks and deep in the business of “convening.”

The main reason I had never gone to conventions before (aside from some swing dancing confabs — a different world entirely) was because I didn’t have any people to go with or meet there; most of my close Los Angeles friends are not involved in SF fandom to any degree. I didn’t want to go solo and feel lost in the huge ocean of a major convention. I know my personality — I’d likely leave the convention in a few hours in a sort of junior-high-school-dance-wallflower fear.

But this time, I had the best network and support team possible, the Black Gate folks. This was not only a chance to go to a huge convention, but a chance to meet the people who had formed an important part of life during the past four years, and who until then were known to me as emails and voices on the phone. I finally got to meet John O’Neill, Bill Ward, John Fultz, Jason M. Waltz, and the man responsible for getting me involved in all this in the first place, Howard Andrew Jones, but for whom . . . well, you know the rest. Without Howard’s encouragement, I don’t think I would have pushed myself to be a better writer the way I have over the last few years.

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As I write this, I am just now sitting down at my computer in my apartment after coming back home from the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, OH. I’ve literally tossed down my suitcases on the bed moments ago. My lips are chapped. I am tired.

I will have a lot to say about the con in my post next week, where I’ll give my impressions as a first-time convention goer. There’s no way I could get anything coherent out now with the experience so close to me—there’s a lot to sort through. But I do have one story from World Fantasy that contains a good piece of writing advice. I had mentioned this story to John O’Neill while we were sitting at the Black Gate booth in the Vendor Room (yes, I got to meet the Black Gate fellows for the first time in the flesh!), and he told me I should write a blog about it. He’s right, and it’s a good enough convention story to hold you and me over until next Tuesday.

This is the story about the best piece of writing advice that I ever received. It came from science-fiction and fantasy author David Drake, and because of it I was able to complete my first novel ten years ago. This weekend, I got to meet Mr. Drake in person and tell him what that means to me. He signed a copy of the book that I like to use as “evidence” of my learning curve. It was a great moment for me, and David Drake was about the coolest, nicest guy I could have imagined, and I think he was flattered that I felt so indebted to him.

What was this piece of advice? Well, appropriately enough, it involves Robert E. Howard. It also involves Drake’s first novel, The Dragon Lord (1979).

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