Romance Writers’ Conference in Darwin

Anne here and today I’m talking about the recent Romance Writers of Australia annual conference, which this year was held in Darwin. Darwin is the most northern city in Australia, and is part of what is known colloquially as “the top end.”

It was an unusual location for a national conference—the population of the Northern Territory is sparse, and distance alone made travel there expensive. As a result there was a much smaller-than-usual audience. I briefly considered traveling there by train, specifically on The Ghan, which is one of Australia’s Great Train Trips, but decided my bad back wouldn’t cope with several days of sitting, even though you can walk around on a train.

These days The Ghan is a luxury passenger train that travels nearly 3,000 kilometers (1,880 miles) bisecting the red center of Australia between Adelaide and Darwin, but the route was forged in the 1800’s by Afghan Cameleers. They helped open up the harsh outback to European settlement, carrying goods and helping build major projects like the Overland Telegraph Line, and the Transcontinental Railway — which was named after them,  Ghan being short for Afghan. Without their contribution, outback communities would not have been able to survive.

My friend, dark urban fantasy author Keri Arthur, did take The Ghan trip and has very generously allowed me to share some of her stunning outback photos. There are many more excellent photos on her FaceBook page.

Author AM Stuart (whose books I know many of you enjoy) drove with her husband across country from Melbourne to Darwin (about the same distance as from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco) camping part of the way. She shared some photos on her FaceBook page.

But I flew (4.5 hours) and arrived on the Thursday afternoon before the conference (which goes from 8am Friday morning to Sunday at 5pm). At dinner I joined Sarah Younger (my agent’s colleague) and Amy Barry, an Adelaide author whose books I have often recommended (here and here)  and who is represented by Sarah.

Over a collection of delicious small plates to share — Darwin has a large Asian population and the food reflects that — we talked and talked, a mix of professional and personal chat. Even though my US publisher (Berkley) dropped me (and many other historical romance writers) my US agent has continued to support me and in fact has contracted my self-published novels and novellas to Tantor, the audio company, which is wonderful.

On Friday I did a one-day workshop with Jane Friedman, whose newsletters and posts I’ve been getting for years. It was brilliant. She prepared in advance by surveying people enrolled in the class and examining their websites and giving direct helpful feedback. Probably the main message of the day is that we have to be increasingly aware that AI is everywhere, and that we need to provide it with the kinds of things WE want it to report. For instance, a website now needs to have one page for every book so that AI searches can use them effectively.

There was much more, of course, but too much to include in this post.

Cocktail party — our Friday Night cocktail party is a costume affair, with a different theme each year. This year it was “Queens of the Desert” — kind of a strange theme for a conference in a tropical city surrounded by water, but hey. The venue was a 5+ minute walk away, so I arranged to meet a few people in the hotel lobby so we could walk to the venue as a group of strangely dressed people.  (I’m in the middle, dressed as an Afghan Queen Cameleer — sort of. <g>) (There are more conference photos on my own little blog.)

And in case you assume it’s a drink-fest, we all get one token for a free wine or beer or soda, and then have to pay for anything else. But there was plenty of delicious food being passed around, mostly Asian style, and enough that we didn’t need dinner.

The program was pretty comprehensive — unfortunately I can’t find an on-line link to it, so I can’t share it. Jane Friedman and James Blatch were great for experienced authors — James Blatch shared this very scary graph showing the number of books published by Amazon in a month — AI written (dark red) compared with human-written (brown).

There were several workshops that looked useful for new writers. Alyssa Cole gave an inspiring speech that gave me hope for historicals in the future, and best of all, I came away with a head full of inspiration. I also caught up with friends I hadn’t seen in over a year, and made some new ones as well.

So over to you, wenchly readers. If you could design a writing conference, who would you like to see speak? And where would you choose to have it?