Conference Report from Lydia Gittens

Our final post on ROSACon2019 is from one of this year's scholarship recipients, Lydia Gittens. Thank you Lydia for sharing your experience with us!

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A mere two and a half weeks have passed since the Rosa conference and I am still on cloud nine. Ask my poor colleagues they will confirm this.

My personal highlight? Everything. Okay I know that’s a bit of a cop-out. So let’s start at the beginning. The venue was beautiful. I felt like a Cinderella stepping into the prince’s castle. The food and snacks were fantastic.

The goody bag ROSA gave us was like having Christmas in September. The books are great and the treats ... need I say more.

But in all honesty it was the people that made this conference the success that it was. I want to start with my fellow conference goers. You guys are great. As a newbie I learned so much just from our informal chats around tea-times and mealtimes. Being able to network and just getting the nitty gritty (the do’s and don’ts) from those that have walked the hard and often lonely road to publishing a novel. Thank you for your willingness to share your journey with me and for the encouragement and warnings you gave me.

Moving on to the presentations: I can’t single out any presenters they were all very professional, interesting and loads of fun. I learned about things I knew nothing about. Such as: The challenging world of self-publishing. What it means to have an agent and how to obtain one. How to use social media effectively? To name just a few. The presentations literally covered most of the topics I as a newbie wanted to learn about.

I want to give a BIG shout out and a big THANK YOU to everyone at ROSA for gifting me with the scholarship. Making it possible for me to attend a conference that I know has and will impact my writing career from now and into the future.

Lydia Gittens
7 October 2019
(PS Watch out for my name thanks to ROSA CON 2019 you just might see it in the print)