Some of you may not know that I am branching out into writing middle-grade fiction, which is entirely new territory for me. While it is vastly different than the health writing I’ve based my career on thus far, there is some overlap: using carefully chosen words to convey your meaning, making sure readers can follow your logic, and spending long hours in front of a computer. Still, most of the time that I’m writing my novel, I feel entirely out of my depth. I’ve been blessed to find a fabulous critique group, without whom I would have given up a long time ago, but I’m still plagued by self-doubt—and not just because I know this is a tough market to break into, but because I genuinely don’t know what to do when I reach a tough spot in my manuscript. Enter the NESCBWI conference.
NESCBWIis a horrible acronym for a wonderful organization—the New England Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators—and I just got back from its annual conference on Sunday night. My head is still buzzing with all of the incredible information I took in, and the energy of being around so many enthusiastic fellow authors. It was a double-shot of exactly what I needed: encouragement and practical tips on how to solve the problems I’m encountering as I write. I’m so excited to put some of these tools into action, and to share them with the other members of my group. In fact, we’ve devoted our next meeting entirely to debriefing the sessions that we attended (surprisingly, there was not a lot of overlap in what we each chose to go to), so I’m hoping to pick up a few new tricks from them as well.
And, because this is mostly a blog about health, if I had to pick out the two biggest benefits of this weekend from that perspective, I would say they are 1) challenging my brain by trying something new and meeting new people, and 2) strengthening friendships/sense of community. Here’s hoping those outweigh the drawbacks of eating conference food and sitting all weekend…
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