California Crime Writers Conference

We spent the past two days at the California Crime Writers Conference.

This one is held every two years, and we always enjoy it. We have attended several in the past. Why do we attend? Because we always learn something, and we get to see old friends we don’t see anywhere else.

For each Panel/Workshop session, several options are offered. It’s a regular smorgasbord of choices.

Since we write historical fiction, we chose “Bringing the Past to Life” for the first one. All of the panelists write in different eras, so the discussion was most interesting. Someone suggested looking for old maps as a resource. We’d never really thought about it, although we saw some doing the research for The Memory Keeper, and the book itself contains one. 

We already knew a couple of the panelists, but we met Rosemary Lord. She writes about the history of Hollywood, and did some voice-overs for one of my favorite movies, The Holiday. We’re now Facebook friends.

The next panel I attended was called “Killer Dialogue.” Anne Cleeland moderated a great group of authors. I so enjoyed some of their suggestions of how to make dialogue authentic and interesting, including using humor.

At lunch, Tess Gerritsen delivered the keynote speech on writing with emotion. We had heard her in 2005 at the Maui Writers Conference and enjoyed her both then and now. She talked about finding the thing you felt compelled to write about, but making sure you included the character(s) emotions. Since I have a short attention span, I keep finding different things I want to write, and some of the others move to the back burner. I know I do my best writing when I am fully engaged in the subject. And when Larry and I write together, I'm the one who writes most of the emotional scenes.

The panel on “Hallmark Mysteries” was fascinating. They had a producer, writer, and show runner for the channel. No surprises here. Their stories are formulaic (a single woman amateur sleuth—played by an actress too old for the part). How do you get your story made into a Hallmark movie? It’s really all a matter of luck and who you know. Sorry about that. However, they also pointed out that with so many places now producing content (Hulu, Amazon, Lifetime, Netflix, etc) the chances of your book or series being selected are much better than they were in the past.

On Saturday afternoon, they lined up quite a few “experts.” We then played a form of “speed dating.” The attendees sat at tables, and the “experts” moved from table to table. We each got to hear three different people, and their assignments were random. The first at our table was Scott Williams, the executive producer for writing on NCIS. He shared some terrific stories.

Next, we got to chat with Valerie Woods, who is a writer on the Queen Sugar series. She was fascinating. She is clearly someone who loves writing.

Last, was Cindi Parent CFO of Tule Publishing, a relative newcomer to the world of publishing.

The last event of the day was another keynote from Catroina McPherson. She was a delight. Born in Scotland, she has a terrific sense of humor. She titled her talk “Deep in a Bowl of Porridge.” She spoke about clues and how and when to insert them.

And this was only on Saturday!

My next blog will be on Sunday of the conference.