Report from UK Meet 2011

Warning: This post contains gratuitous name dropping!

As many of you know I was away this weekend at UK Meet which is a mini-conference/meet up for British lovers of GLBTQ romance and fiction.  It took place at Milton Keynes in a very clean and comfortable Holiday Inn Express - thanks to RJ Scott who booked the venue.  Prior to the event I was feeling a bit nervous. I knew that most of the people there were authors and not readers or reviewers and I was worried that the talks wouldn't be particularly relevant to me or that I would be too overawed by meeting people whose writing I admire.  Fortunately that proved not to be the case because there was a small contingent of readers as well as myself, plus all the authors were so lovely and welcoming I soon forgot my nerves.

Friday Evening

I arrived at the hotel at about 8pm and soon found a small group of people in the bar including Sam Leonhard and Zahra Owens, who had travelled from Germany and Belgium to come to the meet, Mara Ismine, Clare London and Becky Black.  Later we were joined by Stuart Wakefield, who was one of only 5 men who attended the meet, and Jo Myles.  Great fun, and much drinking of wine, beer and cola (not all in the same glass) was had by all as we discussed various topics around m/m romance and cleared the whole room with our shameful talk about sex :).

Saturday

I may not have been at my best over breakfast having imbibed too much wine the night before, but I was still looking forward to the day.  After making myself useful in helping to set up the room and being general dogsbody for Clare London (OK, I did offer!), the room soon started to fill up with people arriving from all over the country.  In the end there were about 40-45 people attending with the majority of people being m/m romance authors but there were some f/f and trans romance authors there too.

11am-12pm
This session was chaired by the very lovely Charlie Cochrane.
We all introduced ourselves and I put out a plea that no-one hit me if I'd written them a bad review!  We then had a general discussion about why women write and read m/m romance which garnered a range of different responses from: these were the stories that came to the authors to the wish to break away from the restrictive conventions of m/f romance.

12-1pm
A pot lunch.  We all brought something to eat and there was a massive amount of food!  There was also an opportunity to talk to people and look at the bookstall.  There was a stall from Total E-Bound as well as lots of freebie promotional material from the authors.  I picked up several pens and a bath bomb which had been hand made by Victoria Blisse.  It was at this point that I received my paperback copy of Tea and Crumpet and spent a bit of time getting all the contributing authors to sign my copy.

1-1.30pm
Victoria Blisse did a very entertaining talk about how to combat writers block with interesting visual aids :).  Then she opened it up to the floor and several (20 in fact) suggestions from other authors were added to the list.  Even though this talk wasn't really aimed at me as a reader I still enjoyed this talk because it was fun and also helpful for many of the authors in the room.  Victoria has placed the whole talk on her website which you can find here if you are interested.

1.30pm - ?
It was at this point that the timings went a little awry!
The next session was a very informative presentation by Total E-Bound publishers who talked about the ebook industry and their place in it as a British publisher.  They also had some fascinating facts about the explosion in ebook sales, mostly due to the popularity of the Amazon Kindle and talked about other subjects such as publisher/author relations, cover art and how they make their website attractive for readers and authors.  Afterwards there was a question and answer session where the tricky topic of age of consent was discussed and how far publishers were willing to push the boundaries in romance.

Um, no idea about the time now!
This session, on the topic of writing historical romance, was chaired by Charlie Cochrane, Alex Beecroft and Erastes.

Each author took one or two points each about writing historicals and then provided examples either from their own work or another author.  For me this was the most anticipated session of the day because I love reading historicals and respect these authors immensely.  I was looking forward to hearing their insights into how they approach their writing.

Alex Beecroft advised authors to focus on character as well as setting and make them act like they are from that time, giving the example that what we would find disgusting (over-ripe cheese covered in cheese mites, anyone?) would be considered delicious or the norm by our historical counterparts and therefore we need to make sure that our modern thoughts and ideals are not put into our historical characters.

Erastes talked about getting a balance between being historically accurate and dumping all the information that you have researched into your novel.  She cited Dan Brown as an author who often has paragraphs of information dumped into his books which neither add to the setting, nor further the plot.  She also gave some good advice to write your what your historical character sees in the same style as you would a contemporary, so just as a modern man would not enter his house and start telling the reader who made his furnishings, neither would our regency hero tell the reader that his chairs were Chippendale.

Charlie Cochrane advised authors not to fall into the big cliché trap.  She cited the recent series Downton Abbey which had the servants discussing the sinking of the Titanic as a way of telling the readers what year the story is set, or the newspaper boy calling out a famous event in history.  It's better just to put the year and maybe the location at the beginning of the first chapter and then just get into the story without having to place a really obvious clue to the time period in the first page.  She also urged authors to check facts as even the smallest detail could be an anachronism which could have easily been caught by a quick Google check.  However, the past can be surprising and things that you may think were relatively  modern inventions were in fact around much earlier in history.

Me and Clare London

Around 4pm ish?
Our final talk of the day was from Clare London who gave a very lively talk on marketing and promotion for authors.  She stressed that it was up to the individual authors to choose how much or how little they put themselves 'out there' but to choose to focus their energies on things that they are comfortable with and, most importantly, can keep up with.  She gave examples of a range of social media including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Good Reads, Yahoo and Google groups, but stressed that the most important place for an author on the web was their website which must be kept up to date and relevant for the reader.  Throughout the talk Clare stressed how all marketing must provide a trail which led back to the author, so always make sure that your website address is visible on communication so that people can easily find you.  Whilst this wasn't exactly relevant for me, I still found it interesting and, from some of the chat I had later, I got the impression that many of the authors came away feeling that this was something they needed to address.

The final hour of the day was kicked off by a question and answer session chaired by Charlie Cochrane and covered a diverse number of topics like how to market the genre to a more mainstream audience, the value or not of getting an agent and the influence of fan fiction verses traditional romance on the m/m romance genre.  Then the day was concluded by Jo Myles who thanked everyone who had contributed in any way to the organisation of the event and the two anthologies.  The remaining time was spent chatting, saying our goodbyes and signing copies of Tea and Crumpet - a very odd experience for me to sign my author name for the first time!

Looking back to what I've written above, it seems that the day was pretty full on.  What I haven't mentioned are the number of decent sized breaks where we could grab a drink and one of the delicious number of home made cakes and biscuits and just chill out chatting to each other.  I enjoyed catching up with some of the readers, especially RachelT whose name I recognised from around the blogs.  For me those were the times of greatest value as I found the freedom to talk about a genre I love without fear of censureship or ridicule.

My day ended with a couple of glasses of Pimms and meal at the local harvester which I shared with Mara Ismine, Stevie Carroll, Clare London, Becky Black and Charlie Cochrane, followed by drinks at the hotel bar with a large group of attendees.  I have to admit, I pleaded tiredness just before 11pm and left them all merrily chatting away.

Me and Jo Myles

Sunday
After breakfast, photos and a quick chat with RJ Scott, Sue Brown, Chris Quinton and another lady whose name I've forgotten but who had come all the way from the USA, I left for Milton Keynes train station feeling really happy with the way the weekend had gone and looking forward to next year's event.

If you are British, or from somewhere else in Europe, I'd urge you to consider coming to the meet next year. The organisers want it to be bigger than this years and are already making plans for locations.  Keep your eyes open for posts from me about the dates and location for next year and hopefully I'll see you there!