MONDAY MEDIA / LATE NOTICE TO BUDDING FICTIONISTAS

Think Big!

E. Hemingway 1899-1961

LINE FORMS ON THE LEFT—Ah, the dream of many if not all writers conference attendees is to become a famous author—someday.  For me being the next Ernest Hemingway was a college goal.  But, let’s skip the part where he becomes the paranoid, alcoholic who blew his brains out with a shotgun.  Not that Ernest.  I wanted to be the cool Ernie.  The one who won a Nobel Prize for Literature and attended bullfights, researched saloons from here to Havana and penned The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bells Tolled...among others.  Writing like that EH would be just fine.

When I turned pro as a magazine writer my yearn to be a paid fictionista hit a wall.  Peeling myself off the bricks, I have tinkered with a novel.  I’m still tinkering with my opus.  I even have a title: The Sun Never Rises (on my fiction career).

Many think I’ve steeled myself against rejection by never finishing the damn thing.  My reply is hope springs eternal.

Between career stops and writing assignments, I found time to attend writers’ conferences, mainly in San Diego.  As a career magazine editor I’ve also been asked to speak at conferences on how to get published in magazines.

I vouch for writers conferences for one big reason.  It fires you up and puts you in a frame of mind to come home from the conference and write. Writers’ conferences and an aging Nike shoe slogan have one commandment in common: Just do it!

In San Diego the next big writers confab is gthe 31^st annual San Diego State Writers Conference beginning Jan. 23, 2014.  Hurry, as the early bird entry fee deadline has already slipped by.

Register at the following link: http://www.ces.sdsu.edu/wc