The Roundtable
Starting Thursday, December 6, I will begin hosting a monthly Author’s Roundtable at East West Bookshop in Seattle’s Ravenna district. The idea was partly inspired by Stephanie Kallos who described to me her tentative first forays into the world of novel-writing. Being such a long and untraveled journey, she enlisted a companion with whom she would meet regularly. Initially, the idea was to do what writers usually do when they gather regularly – critique each other’s work. Which they did. But just as often they would simply confer with one another, find out how often they had written, if it had gone well of if it had gone poorly. They were keeping each other honest, you could say, but more than that they were providing each other with a comfortable forum to unload all the bizarre and useless thinking that can accumulate during this lonely trek.
Do not believe for a moment that the decision to write and to share what we have written does not immediately impact the rest of our non-writing lives. Perhaps, like many of the writers I have interviewed, you have lived your life uncertain if you have a voice valuable enough to be heard. Perhaps you doubt that anyone would want to pay money for something that came bubbling up from your imagination. Perhaps you wonder if you are smart enough to be a writer.
These are questions that rush to the fore of your consciousness when you sit down to write. Once they have come forward, they do not go away. You have awakened them, these monstrous thoughts, these hobgoblins growing slowly in all likelihood since childhood. Which is why I’m beginning the Author’s Roundtable. Hobgoblins are my specialty. If you have the time and the interest, stop by the roundtable, and we’ll see if we can scare these boogiemen and women out the door.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
