National Year of Reading: Three Paths to Print Event

 Today I participated in a wonderful group event at the Toronto Library with other local authors Jaye Ford and Wendy James.  The session was titled Three Paths to Print and we did indeed talk about our paths to print, our publishing and writing experiences, and the whole notion of what's in involved in having a novel published.  Thanks to the promotional efforts of Macleans Bookshop and Lake Macquarie Library, the session was well-attended with a lively, interested audience that asked us some terrific questions, took notes, and generally kept us talking past our allotted hour.  We talked about such things as the need for and role of agents, on editing and keeping track of timelines over a full novel, writers conferences, critique groups, rejection and tenacity, what our average writing day/schedule was like, and a lot more. One of the things that really struck me was, not so much the differences in the paths that we 'took' to becoming published authors, although of course our experiences did differ in many respects, but the similarities in terms of our interests, our writing processes, and our senses of what it means to be a professional writer.