More Notes From the Front

Today was the last day of the 2007 RWA Convention. Another loonnnng day.

I spent three hours in Michael Hauge's workshops. He is a script consultant, producer and screenwriter who has done classes in conjunction with Christopher Vogler (If you are not familiar with Vogler's The Writer's Journey, you can't call yourself a writer).

Since I have always found Vogler's plotting structure helpful, I was delighted to sit in on Hauge's seminars. This was his encore presentation at RWA National. His workshops were so popular last year, they asked him back. If you visit his website here, you can see some of what he covered today.

The workshops I took included pieces from his following seminars:

The Ten Essential Elements of Story
Writing Romantic Comedies and Love Stories
The Hero's Two Journeys: Uniting Plot Structure & Character Arc

It was terrific. He pulled together concepts that I'd encountered before from other source material in a very user-friendly manner. Interestingly enough, he made exactly the same point that Blake Snyder made about needing to provide a shortcut way for your audience to immediately like your protagonist (the "save the cat" scene). It's part of Hauge's "Stage One" in his six-step structure (which mirrors the three-act play).

Hauge's seminar together with the following three books will probably make my future writing efforts much easier:

Syd Field's Screenplay (the bible of the screenwriting industry)
Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey (mythic structure)
Blake Snyder's Save The Cat

I also attended the Loose Id (pronounced "lucid") spotlight. They seemed to be in agreement with what I had heard at the Ellora's Cave spotlight yesterday. Acquiring editors from both publications said that the vampire market is close to saturated, the werewolf market is rapidly becoming overdone, demons are very in and m/m erotic romance is super-hot. While EC seemed to think the trend in m/m romance would die out in a year, L-Id thinks that it hasn't even peaked yet. L-Id is looking for all the m/m they can get.

Paranormal continues to be very hot, but the editors seemed to be saying that they want something different, not the same old/same old that's already been done a million times.

Loose Id said they'd only take historical if it included something special like multi-cultural or m/m. EC said that they are seeing a lot more submissions using Christian mythology.

I didn't attend the Samhain spotlight, but a writer who did told me that the imprint has decided to stop insisting on the Celtic pronunciation of their name. Instead of saying "sah-vin," they've decided it's more important for the client to be able to ask for their books in a bookstore. So, effective immediately, they're going to "sam-hane," the phonetic pronunciation of the name.

I could go home tonight, but will be staying at the hotel so I can drive my roommate back to the airport in the morning. It will feel good to get home again.