Need to re-energize? Attend a writing conference.

This weekend was the annual Nebraska Writers Guild Spring Conference. I’ve been a member of the NWG for about five years and have attended every Spring and Fall conference since joining. And I must say the quality of the conferences gets better every year. This one was the best they have put on so far. We had sessions on everything from the psychology of serial killers to the basics of starting your own publishing company, as well as several general sessions on the craft, marketing, and public speaking.

This conference came at a great time for me. I haven’t been writing much at all lately. A lot of that had to do with the time I’ve been spending on 52 Dragons and everything else I have going on, but there’s more to it than that. And I hate to admit it, but I really realized it at the conference.

I had writer’s burnout.

I often say that I don’t completely believe in writer’s block; that it’s more of a situation or motivation thing. That if you really want to write, you will. But writer’s burnout? That’s a better way to look at it for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write in the last several months, but that I just wanted to procrastinate more.

How much? Well, enough to create a fantasy card game from scratch. (Hey, at least I was productive with the time off!)

But back to the NWG Conference…. One of the things that made this conference really awesome was there were a ton of new faces there. And not only new members to the NWG, either. The Writing Gals were running a workshop as part of the conference, and this brought in romance writers from all over the country. And while I may be as bad at fictional romance as I am at real life romance, it was really cool to chat with all these other writers about their writing, their successes and their failures.

Just spending two days surrounded by people that share the same writing dreams as me (or the plenty of people who have already got there) was all I needed to rekindle that passion that I haven’t felt in well over a year.

So I came home after this conference ready. Ready to do what needs to be done. And, yes, the card game is still my top priority. I learned exactly what I needed to learn about getting the business end of that finished and was able to playtest with some really cool people. But I also learned that I don’t have to stop working on my writing while I finish this.

So after I got home Saturday night and we got the kids in bed, I opened up Scrivener and pulled out that crusty old WIP that hadn’t been updated since October of last year and started looking things over.

And you know what? It looks good. And no matter what else I learned at the conference, the most important thing I learned was to stop being afraid and to never quit.