I was asked to give a talk about Pitch Wars and approaching traditional publication at the University of South Florida as part of one of their camps for young writers. I spoke to a group of 16- to 25-year-olds for about an hour in an informal presentation about the whys, hows, and whethers of agents and publishing. This was in association with the youth writing workshop WIND.

The group was small and attentive and someone brought their cat. 🙂

There weren’t too many questions and I didn’t get into any real dialogues with them or anything, but I felt like the presentation was probably useful for some of them. (I saw a few taking some notes.) I mostly went over how to make choices regarding traditional versus self-publishing, small publishers versus big ones, agents versus no agents, and then some nuts and bolts about how and why to write a query letter and approach agents, with some other info on what happens next and what to expect. It was fun to talk about this stuff again as I’ve not been involved in Pitch Wars for some time and my own writing-related stuff has really gotten buried under other life stuff.

I was able to go out to dinner afterwards with the organizer, Eric, and we had some nice Thai food and great conversation about short stories, publishing, science fiction, and being authors. Great time, I’d do it again.