Unpacking DFWcon 2025

Every writers' convention is different every year. This one was grand.

Madeline, Estee, Joe, and Yours Truly (these people make me look fat)

Some friends (and clients 🤫) and I attended DFWcon last weekend. Everyone who pitched to agents got requests for pages or their full manuscript! 🙌 Congratzi!

However, it’s taken me all week to unpack…because everything happens at once. Because, of course, it does. My book launched on 01 October then I drove to Dallas to spend all weekend being overwhelmed with great content (and supporting other overwhelmed people) then drove back to Austin to juggle the day job, my Story Grid students, my private book coaching clients, and then attend Oliver Burkeman’s book signing for Meditations for Mortals with my lovely and gracious bride.

Sleep is for the weak (or, in my case, the tired). So, here I am days late and dollars short. But I’m here.

What’s special about DFWcon?

I’ve been to several dozen different writers’ conventions in the past decade. Most writers conferences either cater primarily to newbies or primarily to veterans. Many conferences focus on one very specific niche.

DFWcon is a conference that does a grand job of providing content for authors at every career level and across all genres, and is welcoming to diehard indies, traditionally published authors, hybrid authors, authors who have never published damn a thing, and people who haven’t even written anything yet!

One thing that DFWcon does that’s different from most is to support authors on the business of writing, regardless of how you choose to take your book to market. You are welcomed and taken seriously, regardless where you are in your writing journey: beginning to end. (Yes, there were sessions on what The End means for authors.)

Every attendee gets a pitch session to a literary agent of their choosing who’s actively seeking clients. Even the indiest of indies can benefit from honing their pitch and testing it on veterans of the industry—even if you never intend to publish the “old-fashioned way.” It’s good practice and a good way to do market research.

If you’ve never attended a writers’ convention before, DFWcon would be a great one to start with. It’s small enough to be less overwhelming than the thousands of people at AuthorNation or a national Romance Writers of America convention. You don’t have to be a successful author already making lots of money to be invited. (I’m looking at you NINC.) Everyone who is even writing-curious is welcome.

My Two Favorite Sessions

Every time slot all weekend had four or five different options. Sometimes, it was hard to choose which one to go to. Some of them weren’t great. We won’t talk about those. There were two that I absolutely adored! 🥰

The Anatomy of an Insult

Dina Havranek did a great job of dissecting insults and providing examples from literature ranging from Shakespeare to contemporary YA novels. There are as many different ways to land (or not land on purpose) insults in your novel as there are reasons to include them (or omit them). Dina's conversational presentation was a masterclass in snark and innuendo. I loved it. Her new book Rank Chasers will be out in Spring 2027 and I can’t wait!

Love Me, Love Me Not

The full title for this one was a monster (Love Me, Love Me Not: How to Write Roller Coaster Relationships Using Attachment Theory) and Duygu Balan delivered. A practicing trauma psychotherapist, she brought the reality of relational psychology to bear on the problem of writing consistent, believable characters AND the necessity of writing consistent, believable relationships in every genre.

She inspected and interpreted human relationships of all four attachment styles with examples (both romantic and not-romantic) from all sorts of stories that you know and love (sometimes, love to hate). Her fiction and nonfiction are now on my must-read list. And not just because I had a long conversation with my mother about my (dysfunctional) attachment style on my drive back to Austin. #truestory

Join Me Next Year

If you’re shy (like me) and would feel more comfortable attending a “big scary writers’ convention” with someone trustworthy who loves you no matter what, ask your mom to go with you. 😈

If you want to go to a great convention with somebody’s who’s going to kick your ass and encourage you to pitch your amazing book to as many agents as you can, drop me a note and we can plan to go together in 2026.

I’ll be there. Will you?