Last weekend, I attended the 2018 Japan Writers Conference in Otaru, a beautiful town in Hokkaidō on the Sea of Japan.  My thanks go out to John Gribble and Karen McGee, the conference coordinators, and Shawn Clankie, our host at Otaru University of Commerce.

It was not a large conference.  There were about forty sessions on three tracks.  So it was big enough to get an interesting mix of topics, but intimate enough to see the same faces repeatedly, so that soon they were no longer strangers.  I got to see Jacinta Plucinski and Chris Akiba Wang from Hackerfarm, reconnect with an old friend, Gregory Dunne, and make new friends like Warren Decker, David Gregory, Min Ku, Kai Raine, and Eric Selland.  I met and talked with so many interesting people, and all were passionate like me, trying to become better writers, welcoming dialogue and feedback.

The sessions were excellent, but the one that may have the most lasting effect was Charles Kowalski’s on creating suspense.  It so inspired me that I am now increasing the suspense, ratcheting up the tension, in my second novel, Neyuki.  I think that is what the novel has been missing.

I look forward to having something published by the time the 2019 Japan Writers Conference rolls around.  Perhaps I can make a presentation about the whole experience.