Gen Con Writer's Symposium 2024
WOW! After many thoughts, anticipation, and late-night regrets - my first blog post is here! As a frequent writer and thinker, much more than I am a do-er and a talker, I’ve thought often about creating a blog to share my life in another way than the routine once every 6 months social media post. Sometimes I think my life is not interesting enough to blog about. Other times I think maybe I’m starting too late, and if I had started 10 years ago, my blog would be full of interesting subjects and the ups and downs of a 20 something year old American girl, and all of that would have been way better than starting now! However, I know, tried and true, that the next best time to start anything is right now, and that my life, even when mundane, is far from ordinary.
What prompted me here today was two things: a board game convention and COVID-19. If you’ve attended any conference recently, you know those two things go hand-in-hand. Even when you try your best (like I swear I did even though I didn’t wear a mask or social distance) sometimes you still get sick, and I got COVID for the first time ever in 2024. Since I am contagious and cannot leave my house, I am writing a blog post, and I wanted my first post to be about the event that gave me COVID. Not in a spiteful way, of course, there’s much more to it (but maybe still a little bit of spite, despite it all).
<- The Gen Con entrance of the Indianapolis Convention Center
At the beginning of August, I attended Gen Con in Indianapolis, Indiana. The convention is the largest tabletop game convention in North America and hosts nearly 50,000 attendees who share an interest in traditional board and card games. I know what you’re thinking. “Tiffany, I didn’t know you loved board games so much!” WRONG! I love my partner so much, so I go even if it’s not my interest. What makes Gen Con special for me, though, is the inclusion of a specific event: The Writer’s Symposium.
The Writer’s Symposium is a haven for writers, published authors, editors, agents, and publishers to come together while offering hundreds of panels discussing the craft and business of writing. The Symposium also focuses on storytelling beyond books, since we are at Gen Con after all, and provides support to those interested in writing for video games, tabletop games, and role-playing games. In between my visits to the Exhibition Hall (which I believe was the real source of my COVID), my frequent coffee shop detours, and being a gym rat in my hotel gym, I spent the majority of my time at the Writer’s Symposium for 4 days of publishing and storytelling panels, workshops, and community.
I attended every panel related to editorial, working with agents, and writing for art. It felt off-brand to not do so. I wanted to squeeze in some narrative workshops, but time is limited and there’s always next year. The best part of having gone to college for television and film, and to continue working professionally in it, is that storytelling is at the heart of everything we do, so I knew I would survive if I missed those workshops, and that no matter what, I was going to learn a lot. And I did!
From learning how to hack my habitat to create a better writing space and embracing my weirdness, to learning about the current state of genre markets and working with an agent and an editor, I felt the range of topics all inspiring me to sit down and write. Of all the panels I attended, my favorite was a Saturday morning panel called, “How To Become An Editor.” I had never thought about becoming an editor. I know I like to read a lot, write a lot, and know a lot. Do developmental edits, technical edits, proofread constantly, adjust what I write to be easily understood no matter who’s reading. All while simultaneously running successful projects from start to finish and being a rock for my creative team. But there’s always so much more needed than that, right? Right? Maybe. Maybe one day I’ll look back on this and laugh. Or cry. Who knows!
My Gen Con exhibitor badge, courtesy of AMIGO Games ->
I think my biggest takeaway of it all, though, is I need to keep reading and I need to keep writing. Most of all, I need to keep trying. Life is a marathon, not a sprint!
I feel like I should write something more profound here, but I still have COVID, so this concludes my first blog post. In a way, this was kinda therapeutic, and most importantly, I really enjoyed doing it.