Thanks to all who attended the 2007 conference and to all the volunteers who made it such an outstanding success!

The 17th Jack London Writers Conference was sold-out. 

If you missed it, you missed a good one.

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Check out the highlights from the 2005 Jack London Writers Conference

A Few Notes On The Jack London Conference by Frank Thornburgh

The conference sold out to the maximum capacity of 300 this year and the organizers hope to grow into a larger space next year. Such growth is a result of many volunteers working six months on publicity, organization, and an efficient website service that made registration easy.

The two co-chair ladies Elliotte Mao and Tory Hartmann walked a lot of brisk miles during one day Saturday in a space of one lobby, a large ballroom, five meeting rooms and an office.

All of the conference volunteers were called “Conference Angels.” They wore nice nametags with bright red ribbons. Angels plus a great map and schedule in the registration package facilitated timely movement between events. Wonderful additions I saw for the first time at any conference were time proctors. A volunteer was assigned to each workshop, guest speaker, and lobby to introduce workshop leaders, then stay to indicate when time was running out or ring a little bell out in the lobby to tell the crowd schmoozing time was over. It worked. 

Ballroom gatherings were a bit cramped with ten chairs to a table and tables a little close together. The wireless sound system was good as it allowed audience members to ask questions from the floor. The Crown Plaza Hotel food service team was great. Table settings were a work of art. A feature everyone liked were the writer’s genre signs on each table attracting birds-of-a-feather. If folks didn’t get their money’s worth out of networking, it was their own fault.

Keynote speaker Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) gave the crowd a nice personal background story not only about the writing life but the book-to-movie life. Forty nine million books in print are impressive numbers.

Christopher Moore, author of nine horror/humor novels, gave a hilarious personal story about his first success as a writer while working as a food server, living in a friend’s basement room, and writing in a noisy coffee shop.

Mystery writer and closing keynote speaker Steven Hockensmith gave a personal story all writers relate to, that of distractions and conflicts.

It was the best run conference I have ever attended.

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