(June 2005) I just got back from the 2005 Bear River Writers Conference, held in a beautiful setting on Michigan's Walloon Lake (the same lake where the young Ernest Hemingway once summered). Here I am at the conference with Becky Adams, a talented poet and fiction writer, and a student in the University of Michigan's Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program (photo: Amy Higgins). Bear River attracts poets, fiction writers, memoirists and essayists from thoughout North America, and it is the only writers' conference I'll attend this year as a participant, rather than a presenter.

Why attend a conference as a participant at this stage in the game? For two reasons, really. First of all, there are only two kinds of writers: those who are still learning and those who are kidding themselves. And secondly, my principal reason for going to Bear River was to write, and when you present or moderate at a writers' conference, you are simply too busy to do much of anything else.

I went to Bear River specifically to gain new traction on In High Places (more on that later), a short novel that I will (God willing) complete this summer, and one in which the emphasis is more on the language than it is on the concept.

And it worked; I got literally thousands of new words written on this project, made scores of new friends and came away rejuvenated. Never underestimate the power of immersing yourself in the presence of people who love story and language.

Many thanks to Bear River for sponsoring me during my stay there. Thanks, too, to fiction writer Peter Ho Davies (director of the University of Michigan's MFA Program in Creative Writing) and poet Amy Rust Higgins for their encouragement, their willingness to read, and most of all for their finely attuned ears. I'm still roaring forward on the momentum that they supplied.

(NOTE: THIS WAS POSTED IN JUNE OF 2005, AND IS JUST HERE FOR ARCHIVE PURPOSES -- DARK FATHOM IS ON SALE EVERYWHERE RIGHT NOW -- T.M.) I'm also hard at work marking the preliminary galleys for DARK FATHOM, the next Beck Easton novel. This novel has so far gone through first draft, editorial comment from Karen Ball (Zondervan executive editor of fiction), comment and line editing by Dave Lambert (project editor), one complete revision from yours truly, and copy editing by Bob Hudson (a very experienced Zondervan editor who is kind enough to volunteer to read my work). I'm also drawing the maps for DARK FATHOM right now (I do all my own maps for my books), and I will have hands-on contact with this book at least two more times before it sees print. This is standard operating procedure for a novel. Whenever I see a movie in which the novelist types "The End" (which, by the way, you never do) and then waltzes on with his or her life, I want to hurl soft drinks and popcorn at the screen. After all, once you've finished the first draft, the novel is usually only about one-sixth of the way done. There's a lot of work between the time when you finish a manuscript and the time when the book comes out between covers. And the list of extremely talented and creative people involved goes far, far beyond the single schmo who gets his name on the spine.