The Cool Kid’s Table
If you attend any sort of writer’s conference or workshop, you can consider yourself wildly successful if you walk away with one or two new friends. These fellow writers can become cherished critique partners, a sounding board, a cheerleader or a best friend over time, as you share works in progress.
When I attended the Midwest Writer’s Workshop in July of 2011 at Ball State, I hit the jackpot. I already brought my fabulous local critique partner, Jeanne Estridge, with me. We made networking one of our top goals, along with our agent pitches and full roster of classes. Within a few hours of the first day, we had assembled a nice size group of quirky friends to go out for drinks.
(Twitter was instrumental in finding other tech-savvy writers in a crowded conference. Check out #mww11 for our witty running commentary of the conference.)
As we proceeded through the weekend, we added a few other oddball friends and a few fell away. In the end, we pushed two tables together for the ending banquet and immediately created a private Facebook group of about 12 of us called the Cool Kids Table.
A free-writing exercise Jeanne wrote spurred the name and we all agreed we felt lucky to have found so many simpatico writers in a mass of strangers. Our personalities and writing styles were varied, as were our locations. One writes steam punk, another surreal short stories. One won a poetry contest while most of us got manuscript requests.
Since leaving the conference, we have all logged onto our Facebook group, for critique swaps, writing advice and pep talks. We console each other when the agent passes on the manuscript and light a fire under the butt of the stragglers. But mainly, we keep writing.
I look forward to sitting at the Cool Kid’s Table as long as they’ll have me. And if you ever attend the Midwest Writer’s Workshop, you should see us there. We’ll be the ones getting rowdy and practicing our autographs.
I’m a big fan of private groups on Facebook and belong to quite a few. Do you use Facebook groups for anything interesting?