Dear Fellow Writers -- 

I spent the weekend of Oct. 23-25 at the Surrey International Writers Conference.  What an event!  Hundreds of attendees: published authors, speakers, agents, managers, and ambitious writers looking for publication.  It was a surprisingly friendly and supportive group of people.  Somehow, the swords of competition were left behind and nearly everyone I spoke with was concerning themselves with nothing besides great writing, how to achieve it, and how to market the work when it is done.  Having spent much of my life dreaming of having colleagues such as these, I am proud and very grateful to be here now.  Aside from speaking on a panel of crime writers about the craft of that genre, my job there was to spend several hours a day doing "blue pencil sessions" working one-on-one with hopeful writers on the ins and outs of completing their books and finding the right representative. I love this process and the time seems to fly. What a fine thing it is to at last have the platform and forum to connect with people who are smart, creative, ambitious, talented, and most of all, who are dedicated to turning out the most polished work that they possibly can.  Back during my acting days, I was often unhappy and occasionally disgusted by the lack of concern for quality and the "just get it done and move on" attitude that pollutes the world's second oldest profession.  It always seemed amazing to me that people whose instruments are their own faces and bodies are so often willing to use them in service of the most trivial of projects, usually based upon selling crap to a bloated public, either through commercials or the drek shown between commercials.  Many of the book authors here have immigrated from Hollywood writing or acting professions because they got tired of scrambling to get jobs that they could not really be proud of beyond waving the paycheck. Back during my acting life, I had such a hard time getting along with some of the actors I worked with that after awhile I began to wonder if I was losing my ability to get along with co-workers at all.  Turns out my fears were misguided and that the trick is to seek out the company of writers who take great pride in the care with which they work.  The ego may be involved in both professions, but as a rule, the people I meet in the writing field (especially the writing of books) are thoughtful, caring, dedicated, and contemptuous of half-baked efforts.  What a blessing to be among them and even to count some as my friends.  In the past, i had to work with a number of actors whom I would never want to be seen with in public, but I've yet to meet a working book author whose company was not interesting and whose love of quality effort was not right there, plain to see.