I'm so excited to go to this years PPW Conference. This is my fifth year of attending, and the first year I will be participating as a faculty member. The experience is always amazing, often inspirational, and sometimes heartbreaking. But worth every minute. I learn so much, but even better, I get to hang out with fellow commercial fiction writers.
Trust me on this, literary writers are a different breed. In my time at Naropa hanging out with wonderful writers, we never break into a discussion on the merits of using naughty words in a sex scene. Just doesn't happen. For commercial fiction writers, any craft talk is open and accepted.
Meeting new people is a breeze. You sit down next to them, and say, 'So what do you write?' and you have an instant new friend. At Naropa, you sit down, wave away the pot smoke and body odor, and say, 'How about that hybrid, cyborg, transgendered piece in the latest edition of the New Yorker?' Not that you've read it, nor it even exists.
I love both worlds for different reasons. Commercial writers want to entertain me. The literary ones I know, want to save the world with words. Both have equal importance.
So if you're not doing anything next weekend and you're a writer in the Colorado area, consider coming down to the Pikes Peak Writers Conference.
