{"id":11373,"date":"2025-03-13T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11373"},"modified":"2025-03-12T12:46:54","modified_gmt":"2025-03-12T16:46:54","slug":"meetings-meetings-which-to-choose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11373","title":{"rendered":"Meetings, Meetings, Which to Choose?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

So many enticing meetings for crime and mystery writers of every stripe in this season. Some national, some regional, some hyper-local! It\u2019s hard to know where an author should lay their travel budget bets. In the past few years, I\u2019ve put my money toward the Public Safety Writers Association\u2019s annual July conference<\/a> in Las Vegas. (The hotels are cheap at that time of year, and since the temperature outside is 115, I\u2019m not tempted to wander away from the excellent sessions. And I don\u2019t want to miss the fun prize-drawings!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The attendees are current and former public safety professionals\u2014police, FBI, CIA, EMTs, fire fighters, military\u2014and people like me <\/em>who write about them. I can\u2019t tell you how much extra confidence it gives me about my writing, when I\u2019ve been able to check some tricky bit of action with someone who knows what they\u2019re talking about (i.e., not what I see on tv). Many of the friends I\u2019ve made through the group are happy to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoy the conference presentations too. Most important, they\u2019re interesting and informative, especially when presenters talk about their experiences, scary or funny or sad. What I\u2019ve learned from those is not only how a particular individual responded to a particular situation, but much more helpfully, how they think<\/em>. So, when I put my character into a situation, I can extrapolate. None of us can experience first-hand all the things we subject our characters to (and thank goodness for that!), and we have to extrapolate their reactions from our own experiences and from what we know about how others have reacted in parallel encounters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I consider this a tough crowd of expert authors, so I\u2019m pleased to say that two of my short stories have won prizes in the PSWA\u2019s annual competition, and my novel came in second one year (beaten out by the estimable James L\u2019Etoile, who any crime writer would not mind being bested by). When this audience respects my work, I know I\u2019m doing something right! My cousin once asked me, suspicion in her voice, \u201cHow do you know so much about crime?\u201d I, of course, refused to answer and just gave her a sly look. But now, I suppose, my secret\u2019s out!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So many enticing meetings for crime and mystery writers of every stripe in this season. Some national, some regional, some hyper-local! It\u2019s hard to know where an author should lay their travel budget bets. In the past few years, I\u2019ve … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[52,54,174,632],"tags":[1684],"class_list":["post-11373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-first-draft-blog","category-police","tag-public-safety-writers-association"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Xr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11375,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11373\/revisions\/11375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}