Welcome to Episode 146 of Speculate! The Podcast for Writers, Readers and Fans.  In this episode we talk about conferences, conventions, and writing tracks with veteran authors and writing track leads Kelly Swails (the Origins Library) and Marc Tassin (the Gen Con Writers’ Symposium), looking at how face to face interactions and networking can be valuable for aspiring authors, especially in an age of online communication…to say nothing of the skills one learns in the process!  We also talk about Kelly’s new novel This May Go On Your Permanent Record and Marc’s world of Aetaltis.  We also make a very important (and awesome!) announcement concerning the future of Speculate, so make sure to stick around for that at the end of the show.  Marc and Kelly have a good deal of experience in the industry, and we enjoyed getting their take on the current situation for authors in the speculative fiction field–we hope you liked it as much as we did, and if so, don’t forget to check back soon for the first of two shows on Daniel Polansky‘s The Builders, recently out from Tor.com.  And don’t forget that our Good, Bad and Ugly segments (including one from Marc and Kelly from this very discussion) are only available to our Patreon supporters, so please head over there to hear more from our guests.  Thanks for supporting us here and via our Patreon page, and thanks as always for listening to and spreading the word about the show!