Elizabeth Cobbe

This past weekend, I attended ArmadilloCon as both a panelist and an instructor. What a wonderful time. Every year, I am thrilled to engage in fascinating conversations with smart, interesting people. This was my first year as an instructor in the writing workshop, and I am so proud of the workshop participants who trusted my co-instructor Clayton Hackett and me with their work.

I appeared on three panels, and true to form, at each panel, I referred to a work or opportunity but couldn’t recall the exact title. It’s like my brand.

Therefore, let me mention them here. I hope those who attended the Con and others will find them useful!

Early Career Panel

Someone in the audience at the panel for early career writers asked what to do if every time they finished a manuscript, they felt like it wasn’t fit to query, and how to know when something is “ready.” Everyone on the panel had good and supportive advice. I also wanted to mention The Manuscript Academy. This is a site where you can pay a fee for an online consultation – everything from $49 for 10 minutes of a professional agent’s time to $249 for a full-on query consult and rewrite.

Of course, pay-to-play is a constant issue in publishing, as in all creative fields. Having said that, $49 is a whole lot less than flying across the country and staying in a hotel so you can sit across the table from an agent who’s seen 75 other people before you.

I enjoyed a 10-minute Manuscript Academy consult with an agent months before signing with my own. At that time, I wasn’t sure whether my then work-in-progress fit better as women’s fiction, contemporary fiction, or something else. The agent I spoke with sounded so-so on the concept, but she provided useful advice for how to approach the book and its query. I know several other agented writers who paid for Manuscript Academy consults. Of course, the value depends on a lot: what are you trying to get out of it, which agent did you consult, what were your expectations, and so on.

Note that I am not receiving any kind of sponsorship deal from Manuscript Academy or anyone else mentioned in this post.

Textiles in Worldbuilding

On Saturday afternoon, I had a blast on a panel with four others talking about textiles and clothing in worldbuilding. Honestly, it was 50 minutes of us getting super excited about how much you can learn about people and the world from textiles. Much of it relates to geography, and I mean that in the broadest sense, not just in a locational, “this place is in the Northern Hemisphere” kind of way.

To that end, N. K. Jemisin offers a PDF online that accompanies, or has accompanied, the workshops that she has led on geography-oriented worldbuilding. I first encountered her method in the interview she did with Ezra Klein back before he moved his podcast to the NYTimes. It’s great stuff!

Author Readings: Are They Broken?

In the course of a panel discussion on author readings, I bemoaned the requirements that we make brands of ourselves. (Yes, I recall my own joke at the top of this post. I’m complicated, okay?)

Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is a thought-provoking book about resisting the pressure to keep posting at all times, to keep displaying and performing, even if nobody else is interested enough to watch us. It’s a good read if you’re looking to articulate exactly why 2024 is making your brain into mush.

It was great to see everyone at the Con, and I look forward to when next we meet!