One of the biggest reasons I come back to our SCBWI-Carolinas Fall Conference year after year is for the conversations. The presentations are always wonderful, but what can I say? I’m a yacker. I love getting together with all you creative types and hearing about new projects, talking about issues of craft and publishing, and swapping stories.
For the past several years, the PAL (published and listed) members of SCBWI-Carolinas have held an authors’ roundtable to offer insights and answer questions. In addition, we’re going to have a conversation with those PAL members who were in the first Mentor Program.
So I hope you’ll come out Saturday night at 8 pm after the Autograph Party to ask questions and to hear our authors and illustrators discuss their journeys, place to be announced in the conference schedule in your conference packets. I’m certain it will be insightful and interesting!
While we’ll try to answer all questions, it’s been my experience that the PAL members who attend our fall conference are very happy to answer questions you might have any time. A wonderful part of the structure of the conference weekend is that there are so many opportunities for socializing. Lots of yakking! So if you have something you want to ask, catch one of us at the conference and ask. I feel I speak for our PAL members in saying, we enjoy supporting up-and-comers on their journeys. Others did it for us. We’re glad to give back.
I’m looking forward to our Authors’ Roundtable, and I look forward to seeing you all at what I know will be another inspiring SCBWI-Carolinas Fall Conference.
John Claude Bemis is the award-winning author of The Prince Who Feel from the Sky and the Clockwork Dark trilogy, which includes The Nine Pound Hammer, The Wolf Tree and The White City. John is serving as the 2013 Piedmont Laureate for Children’s Literature. He lives in Hillsborough, NC. www.johnclaudebemis.com