Carly Watters

So that's what I've been up to volunteering this week.

There was also the Ottawa Writers Festival.

over the weekend.

And I'm on the board of the Ottawa Writers Festival now, which is awesome.

And so I attended so many events.

And you know, it was really great to bring so many authors to town and just like, again, see everybody excited about books.

One of my rants that I wanted to go on today, which segues right into this is, I think sometimes as publishing people, we get really in our little like work business silos.

And I've been guilty of this.

And I think COVID obviously played into this as well, where we just don't go out and interact with like real readers that much, you know, where it's like we go to conferences, often as agents, we are presenting at the conference, or we're taking pitches at the conference.

And so I just, you know, I think it's so important for everybody in publishing, but especially agents to like go out and be consumers of events, as opposed to just speaking at events.

you know, I think it's just incredibly important.

I have a couple of things coming up.

Well, number one, I just, you know, as I said, did the Ottawa writers festival as a patron, as a consumer, which was incredible.

I wasn't on any panels, which was great.

And it's really interesting to see in the audience, like how, again, how people react to things because oftentimes like on the show, even when we're interviewing people,

Yes, we are steering conversations and kind of leading the conversation the way we want to go.

But it was so interesting just to be consuming panels about books and seeing what people laughed at and seeing the questions from the audience and like the ways that people were engaged with the different books.

Anyway, I just thought it was so fascinating and a reminder to me to get out there and consume in a different way.

august i want to say i do know because it's my sister's birthday august 14th yes i do yeah yeah so we'll be there we've heard from the organizers of the when words collide event in calgary that some of you are flying from very far to come see us i heard that somebody one of our listeners in austria is coming to calgary to be at the conference to see us live so wherever you guys are coming from we're going to be so excited to see you

I'm also presenting at the Surrey International Writers Conference, which is the one in Vancouver.