Historical Fiction talk at Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace 2014
May 1, 2014 § 2 Comments
Very excited to be heading down to Boston tomorrow morning for Grub Street’s annual Muse & The Marketplace conference. I don’t attend many writing conferences, but I’ve been lucky enough to have participated in this one for the last two years and it’s very, very good. Grub Street is somehow able to attract such a smart and friendly crowd of writers, agents, editors, and various others associated with this business of putting words on paper to enrich and enliven our world.
Also exciting: this year will be my first as a presenter, or “Special Guest,” in the official parlance. I’ll be giving a talk called “Narrative as Time Machine: The Art of World-Building in Historical Fiction.” The talk will feature excerpts from some of my favorite works of historical fiction, including Edith Wharton’s classic The Age of Innocence, Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, James Welch’s Fool’s Crow, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Very much looking forward to it!
While there, I’ll have a chance to run a couple of works-in-progress by a few agents and editors, and, perhaps most exciting of all, I’ll be bringing along (and giving away) several advance readers’ copies of my new novel, Will Poole’s Island, which has an official release date of August 15, 2014, and which, ahem, can now be pre-ordered on Amazon. Wish me luck!
Tim Weed 
Will you be posting about your thoughts on Edith Wharton and world-building?
Just finished Age of Innocence about a week ago – one of the finest novels I’ve ever read, and I don’t think there’s a bad sentence in the entire work.
Thanks for your comment, Dwayne. I agree that Age of Innocence is the gold standard. I’m working on adapting my Grub Street lecture into a craft article in which Wharton’s work will figure prominently. I’ll post something here when/if that gets published. Happy writing!