The Value of Writer’s Conferences

By A.J. McCarthy

I attended my first writer’s conference recently, and I came home with one big regret. Why didn’t I do this sooner?

It wasn’t my intention to attend, having used up my travel budget to go to two book festivals in California in April, but an extraordinary event prompted an extraordinary trip.

I regularly enter writing contests, and sometime last spring, I came across the Killer Nashville Claymore Award competition for an unpublished manuscript. I dusted off an old one and submitted it, never imagining anything would come of it but, what the heck, I’m allowed to be optimistic.