As six of the Dark Fiction Writers gathered in Calgary for the When Words Collide Writer’s Festival, I was filled with excitement and just a pinch of uncertainty. We had only ever met online for meetings and this marked the first time we ever met in person. Turns out that I like them all even more in the flesh. In a small way, it’ll be difficult to go back to Zoom.
Aside from enjoying morning coffee together, evening beers after a long day at the festival, and laughs over the Horrorbox game (basically a horror version of Cards Against Humanity), we were there for our panel Full Circle–How to Thrive in a Writing Circle. I feel as if we went in well-prepared and I think it well very smoothly. A sign of success was the mingling of self-proclaimed introverts during an activity. They were so involved in meeting one another that I had a hard time pulling them back to us. A good problem, really.
We represented the Dark Fiction Writers on the very first night by all attending the presenter mixer in our Woman in Black costumes. Then, for the remainder of the weekend, we donned our spider brooches, a nod to one of our recurring characters in our anthology.
We loved the experience so much that we are already plotting our 2027 adventure back to Calgary for next year’s festival.
