Hanging with Kansas Authors

I spent my weekend at the Kansas Authors Club convention in Wichita. As usual, it left me itching to hurry home and write, write, write!

I find myself wishing there was a way to bottle up this energy. There will be days in the coming year, I am sure, where I will ask myself where I am going with all this writing and wonder what the point is anyway. Maybe if I record some highlights here, I'll be better able to recall them when the muse is elusive.

Mike Klaassen's talk on Scene & Sequel was a timely one for my own novel journey, I believe. I'm sure these are things I've read again and again, but I think at this time I am at a point in my writing where the concepts are applicable. I've always found it difficult to pick apart the process of creating a story, but being knee deep in one, I think it helped me see the patterns that are developing in my own story and to understand a little better why some parts work and others don't.

Roxie Olmstead has always been one of my favorite Kansas Author personalities. She's full of incredible energy and great ideas. I always walk away from Roxie with at least a dozen ideas bubbling in my head for ways to record family history or turn my interests into marketable articles. Here's a gem she shared with us this round called The Mini-Book of Family Trivia.

Deb Seeley writes books for young adults. I enjoyed listening to her presentation at the youth contest awards and her session on life as story, as well.

Our keynote speaker, Stan Nelson, was wonderful on so many levels. I guess I kind of have a thing for printing myself. I've never had the experience of working with type in the "traditional" way but I've often read about it and I have long had this fantasy of putting together booklets and, at the very least, binding them myself. I got started in high school journalism just as computers were coming into the classroom. The first year I worked on the yearbook we went to the local community college to enter our text into the computer and we printed them in columns on special paper that we could layout on our blue graph board with rubber cement.

What Stan does is SO much cooler than that. His father showed us a National Geographic magazine from the 1970s where Stan is pictured in the Smithsonian print shop in an article about Ben Franklin. He gave us a demonstration on making movable type. It was fascinating, I only wish we'd had more time to view the process. The best story, however, was how Stan's interest in printing got started. As a child he received a small toy press for his birthday. His father, a member of KAC, commented on the numerous 2" x 3" newspapers he created. His parents later bought him an actual printing press for Christmas. His hobby soon grew out of the basement and into the garage where he went on printing things like community newsletters and church bulletins.

After a short stint teaching school, Stan visited the Smithsonian in the early 1970s and learned that they were creating a living history display where they would run an actual press such as the one Benjamin Franklin used. Stan took a job at the museum a year later. Stan is now a Museum Specialist Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History. I'm always fascinated by people who find their life's work so specifically in childhood interests and pursuits.

A good weekend overall. I was able to catch up with friends/KAC members from western Kansas as well as those from the Topeka area. I love hanging out with other writers. They are some of the most interesting people I know.