OCW Third Day
I should have kept a list—with pictures.
I mentioned earlier that one of my goals for this conference is to meet people and network. I’ve continued my practice of sitting at different tables for lunch and dinner. For today’s lunch, I sat with Jeff Gerke at a table of speculative fiction writers, including a teen working on his first novel.
Randy Ingermanson and Jeff Gerke discuss business trends
Jeff is an editor, author, graphic designer and the founder of Marcher Lord Press, now Enclave Publishing, which is the premier publisher of Christian speculative fiction. Since I write speculative fiction, this seemed a great place to eat lunch. However, it got even better when, moments later, Randy Ingermanson sat across from me. Eating occurred between talk of what those around the table were writing and trends in the genre.
Unfortunately, I’m meeting so many people, I can’t remember many of the names or most of the interesting books they’ve told me about. I should have taken notes.
Barbara Blakey receives the Cascade Writers Award for unpublished historical fiction.
As fun and interesting as lunch was, the real excitement for me came later, at the Cascade Awards Banquet. This award, given by Oregon Christian Writers, has ten categories for both published and unpublished works. These include contemporary, historical and speculative fiction, young adult, poetry and more. I had known for a couple of weeks that my good friend and fellow author Barbara Blakey was a finalist. That meant her book was among the top three in her category.
I sat beside Barbara as the hosts, Jeff Gerke and author Susan May Warren, presented the first ten awards. Then it was Barbara’s category. Jeff read the first line of the winning book and I recognized the main characters name. Then he announced that in the category of unpublished historical fiction the winner was, “The Secret of Clara Rose, by Barbara Tifft Blakey.”
I look forward to reading in print soon.