To the Readers - October 21, 2025

Last weekend, I attended a writers conference hosted by the Johnson County Library in Overland Park, Kansas, along with several hundred other writers or aspiring creatives, members of the local editorial or publishing community, and other groups and organizations getting involved in their communities through reading and/or writing. I did so as a volunteer with the Kansas-Missouri Writers Collective, or "KanMoWriCo" for short. I thought I'd use this platform as an opportunity to sort of collect my thoughts and, perhaps, spread the word about these groups and initiatives in the chance that there may be a keenly interested pair of eyes reading this.

This was my first time attending such a conference, and one of rather impressive scale for two days and an evening with several hundred attendees. There were workshops and seminars from a wide variety of experts, industry pros, and others with work in writing and the arts to help educate and encourage, as well as foster a stronger sense of community among us typically rather shut-in and socially-awkward folks who are much better at typing words than we are speaking them. For a playlist of recorded sessions from the conference, click here.

I also had the opportunity to attend my first ever event organized by The Moth and KCUR at the historic Folly Theater in downtown KC, which was a very encouraging event supporting local public media in the face of government funding cuts. The Moth produces live events nationwide where a handful of people share true stories from their lives with the audience. They also produce their radio show and podcast, which can be found anywhere you get your podcasts from.

All of this, plus what might've been the best Chiefs game I've seen since 2023! (find me on TikTok for more unqualified and amateurish sports content) All of that adds up to quite the weekend! I have much to look back on and new insights to mix into my big metaphorical gumbo pot of perspective, and am looking forward to diving my nose straight into the grindstone on these current projects.

On that note, the YA novella expansion is coming along. It won't be long before I finish this early drafting phase and start gathering some feedback on it before figuring out what to do with it next. It's a tricky position, being a young writer trying to get their career started. On the one hand, I have this platform right here, where I can post and share all the content I want! However, there's not exactly a ton of professional prestige that comes with that. Not unless your blog regularly gets thousands and thousands of readers, at least. Which means I'd have to submit these smaller works to literary magazines and websites and other publishers of such pieces, the catch there being that many will not take submissions that have been posted via a personal blog. Therefor, I can't post them here! Not for the time being, anyway.

So, where does that leave you, dear reader? Well, the truth is, I can't say, for certain, at this moment... But I can assure you that I do not wish to leave you in the dust! I do think there may be a work-around to this dilemma. Or, at the very least, something else I can serve up for the blog that isn't more of me writing into the cavernous void of the Internet.

There IS a community out there for whatever weird, niche, ultra-narrowly-specific thing you love to do. Other people who share in the same passions, hobbies, and pastimes. Both online and face-to-face. You've just got to find them. I hope you do.