Brad Torgersen will be in Provo

David Farland will be there also. He will have panels and do a reading.

/em moves to Utah...

Keynote Address. Wulf Moon has asked me to report on the keynote address by Brad Torgersen. LTUE will be posting the panels and speeches on You Tube. Their web address is: LTUE.net If I don't get all the details correct, please forgive me. I didn't take notes.

Brad's hero is Larry Niven. He wanted to write like Larry Niven. He wrote and submitted. Wrote and submitted. Wrote and submitted, on paper for about 11 years of getting rejections (I can't remember exact). Then his wife (she is a very beautiful African American with blue braided hair) sat him down for a heart-to-heart asking if this is what he really wants and what they would need to do to help him succeed. He decided to attend LTUE. While there, a friend suggested he enter WoTF. He exclaimed over the beauty of the HM certificates. Then said that Joni (he pointed to her in the audience) called and informed him he was a finalist. Then she called again saying he didn't make it. He was crushed! But he wrote fresh stories and entered. The next time Joni called, he was in line at Carls Jr; he recognized her voice. This time he won and made it into volume 26. He held it up proudly. (It's a small paperback book; not as large as the current volumes are.) When he was up for a Dragon award, he told his wife he wouldn't win, his competition was TV writers. His wife disagreed and insisted that he would win. (On a personal note, he told me that his wife only reads his published work.) When Larry NIven, his idol, read his name off the card he couldn't believe it! He stood up and looked around for this Brad Torgersen guy who won. His wife hissed at him to get on up the stage to accept his award. He accepted the Dragon from his idol, Larry Niven. (Lovely story that)

All-in-all, it was a lot like other stories we hear. Enter WoTF, attend conferences, write fresh stories.

Another good point he made was, just because he is now successful, he still gets rejection letters!

Oh yes, I told him about this forum. Brad said that he had been in charge of it after he won. I told him about the KYD exercise that Wulf Moon gives us each week and he said that it sounded like a wonderful exercise.

Sounds like it was a great forum ... thanks for the notes

Oh yes, I told him about this forum. Brad said that he had been in charge of it after he won. I told him about the KYD exercise that Wulf Moon gives us each week and he said that it sounded like a wonderful exercise.

Very nice report, Candice! I've heard some of that story in his Writers of the Future Podcast, but it was nice getting the extra details you shared with us from LTUE! So cool that Joni was there to point to! And that you got to meet them all. Sounds like a great con!

Cheers!

Wulf Moon