This entry is part journal entry, part note to myself, part notes for friends—just a general mishmash of things I learned and deemed worth writing down. Feel free to skip around, I just wanted to keep in one place.
This was my first Decatur Book Festival. It was the first year I’d heard about it, but I was planning well in advance. I made my RSVP’s, forced my sister to come with me and generally over prepared.
My festival experience started Friday with the writing workshop at Agnes Scott College, a private women’s college in Atlanta.
Eccentric enough?
My first festival worry was (profoundly enough): what do I wear to a writer’s workshop? I took the day off work so I decided against professional dress and decided that I should go for the eccentric writer look. For me that turned out to be ripped Vera Wang capri’s, a floral print sleeveless empire waist top and a long silver necklace. I set all that off with bright teal Chaco’s. I was set.
The drive
Google directions said 1 hour, 38 minutes so I budgeted two hours and left at 1 p.m. to make a 3 p.m. lecture. The directions were fine, at first: 316 to 85. There was congestion around the Mall of Georgia, but they redid the 316-85 merge so it’s no longer a move over 9-lane death match. The merge isn’t into the fastest lane of traffic any more, it’s just a normal merge. Go figure!?! Then came the normal driving in Atlanta perils. Getting on 285 caused some mild anxiety, but once I got off 285 and onto the exit….things didn’t go as smoothly. The directions were telling me to turn where there weren’t turns, the road names were matching up, etc. I kept driving as close to I could the directions, but when I started driving through projects in an area I was almost certain I was going to be carjacked in….I started to freak out just a little bit. I found my way over to a trendy looking boutique, puled in the parking lot and took f a few breaths. I’ve brought Matt’s Tom-Tom just in case, now I had to figure out how to use it. Only when I turned it on, I realized I wasn’t even in Decatur anymore. I was in Avondale Estates, which I have never heard of. I got directions, and with only one wrong turn (wrong on the GPS) I was at my destination within 5 minutes. I parked in the deck and was only 30 minutes late to the lecture. Great. A 1:38 trip took me 2.5 hours.
The location
Agnes Scott is a beautiful little campus. All the buildings look like intricate brick dollhouses—gingerbread houses, someone said. It’s a breath of fresh air in such an urban environment. Presser Hall, the main stage for Friday, had a distinctly Southern feel with buttery yellow walls, round white columns in the middle of the room and the contrasting combination of chandeliers and metal folding chairs. The classes were held nearby. Our classroom had tiny individual desks (I’m used to the big lecture halls with amphitheater seating), a chalkboard (no white boards) and a world map from 1966 (the teacher checked the copyright year) that featured the United Soviet Socialist Republics.
Keynote
I walk into the lecture and Nora McFarland, a cute little 30-something author, was speaking about the publishing process. Specifically she was addressing persistence. She spoke about the 4 years it took her from writing a book to querying to the 30-minute phone call that led to a 3-book deal.
To me, the most interesting thing she said was that batch queries are okay now. She does them in batches on 10 and sends out monthly.(Maybe it’s just magazines that want exclusive stories these days? I was told not to batch query in my magazines classes.) She said to have the manuscript done and edited before the querying process even begins. If an agent is interested in your work, they might want to see a partial (the first 3 chapters), then the whole thing, if they like it. She said that feedback she gets from submitting partials is particularly helpful. She said you’re first query won’t be your best, so query, improve, and if you have a friend that can recommend you to their agent, do that—but not first. She said that having a network for feedback is a must. She recommended agentquery.com to match agents to genres and said to always use agent guidelines. She talked about rejection, joking that her record was 30 minutes for fastest rejection and slowest was 6 months after querying.
