There is a version of me, not so many years ago, who would not have believed this post. This past weekend, my mom and I packed up the car and drove three and a half hours to Prescott, Arizona, for the Dahlia Faire, hosted by the wildly talented Mandy Brown and her team at Black Dahlia Tattoo Studio & Bookstore. I went as an author and sponsor. I came home having sold out of every single Amberlight Valley book I brought with me… For the first time ever.

A particular kind of vulnerability comes with sitting behind a table full of your own books. Not the vulnerability of writing them… that happens alone, in the quiet, where no one is watching, and you can rewrite a sentence eleven times before anyone knows it existed in any other form. I mean the other kind. The kind that shows up the moment you're sitting in a folding chair, in front of strangers, next to a stack of you — your imagination, your late nights, your whole unguarded heart, bound and printed and priced at ten or twenty dollars a copy.

There is a particular kind of magic that happens when you put a room full of writers together. Not the polished, performance kind of magic. The real kind. The kind where someone says something from the front of the room, and it lands in your chest like it was aimed directly at you. Where you end up in a conversation with a stranger during the break and walk away with a new friend, a new perspective, or a sentence that changes the way you think about your work. Where you leave the building at the end of the day, somehow both exhausted and more alive than you were when you walked in. That is a writers conference. And if you have never been to one or if you have been on the fence about going, I want to make the case for why you should.