The Sioux Falls Festival of Books is a South Dakota festival held every year in either Sioux Falls, SD or in Deadwood, SD. The Festival brings in several local and out of state authors for book sales, signings, and workshops that are held for these four days. The festival has several workshops that cater to different topics of writing. A sample of workshops for today catered to writing for the screen, writing for children, creating a writing group, and how to get organized to write. One of the halls was filled with booths for many different authors mostly from South Dakota who were selling and sighing their books to people. The website for events is located here at http://www.sdbookfestival.com/. Their are still events going on for Saturday and Sunday.
Now for my specific experience at the festival. I picked the Ten Days to Organized Writing workshop. Which showed me some techniques and ideas for making it easier for me to sit down and write. Instead of procrastinating with the internet, homework, choirs etc... A few things are a rehash of what you can find just about anywhere. But their were several techniques and ideas that I find to be quite intriguing and useful that I plan to use for my own writing. The major technique I want to use is writing down ideas, characters, chapter ideas, etc... down on index cards. Then after you have written down those ideas, organize the cards into piles that you feel relate to each other. Once the cards are in the pile then you will organize that pile, write up a intro and conclusion to it and now you have an outline for your book, poem, short story etc... To me this was a new technique that I want to try out for my own writings. Other ideas and techniques were to push everything aside for a certain time slot that you reserve for writing, sitting down fully prepared to work, exit out of desktop distractions like your internet browser, and set reasonable goals for your writing like one page per day.
Next I went to a literary lunch called Hollywood and the Novel with Diane Johnson and Matthew Specktor. I was able to eat and then listen to Diane and Matthew talk about books and Hollywood. They first introduced themselves and gave a rap sheet of what they worked on. Diane Johnson helped write for the movie version of The Shinning by Stephen King. She also had one of her own books adapted to movie, Le Divorce. Matthew Specktor has worked in the industry for several years now and is having one of his books, American Dream Machine adapted to TV for Showtime. They went on to talk about the difficulties of having your book adapted to movie. The major things I picked up was that it takes a lot of time and effort to get your book considered for adaption, then have the movie never be made, the movie most of the time will be different from the book, and that once you sign the contract, the author signs over all the characters and rights and probably only get money for selling the rights. It sounds like the author usually only gets one payment and that's for selling the rights of the book, authors usually don't get money from the movie showings.
After that I went to the book hall. I got a few books with the author's signature and was able to help out a author named Sandra Brannan who was looking for help on video game design and talking with people with some knowledge on it. Jesse Woodward and I helped to give a introduction to video games to her and we gave her contact information for the video game design professors at DSU. She was thrilled and loved talking to the other English for New Media majors there that she bought all of us a copy of one of her books in her book series Liv Bergen Mystery. Also she bought us The Monster who ate the State by Chris Browne the cartoonist for Hager the Horrible. He was also at the Festival and he signed our books. both Sandra and Chris posed with us for a group picture that will be posted on Facebook here soon.
Well that's an account of what I did at the Festival, a great and wonderful time that I wish I could continue tomorrow if I didn't have drill this weekend. But I recommend everyone who is interested in books and writing to go to the Festival at least once.
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