HNS2025 Blue Pencil Café

The 2025 Historical Novel Society Conference will again offer our popular Blue Pencil Café to in-person registrants—at no charge. Sign up to meet with an author of historical fiction who will critique 10 pages of your project.

What: Private 20-minute one-on-one mentoring sessions between established, published authors and aspiring writers.

The Blue Pencil Café Coordinator for HNS2025 is Sandy Frykholm.

• What she does: matches mentees with mentors in their area of interest and expertise; schedules mentor/mentee meetings; and informs mentors and mentees of their meeting times. Blue Pencil Mentors will have no more than three mentees assigned to them.

Blue Pencil Café Mentors are established, working, published authors.

• What they do:
  • Prior to the conference, read and mark up the first 10 pages of a manuscript that has been submitted to them before the conference. Mentors should critique the pages submitted, guiding the mentee toward the strongest work the mentee can produce and resist the temptation to compare the mentee’s pages (favorably or unfavorably) to those of any other author.
  • Arrive at the conference having marked the pages and/or having made notes about them.
  • During the conference mentoring session, tactfully but honestly review, critique, and offer editorial suggestions to their mentees during the one-on-one meetings scheduled during the conference.
  • Reminder for Mentors. While a mentee’s style, voice, or choice of material may not be an individual mentor’s cup of tea, it is the mentor’s role to help the mentee brew the finest cup of “mentee tea” possible, offering guidance on how the mentee can shape his/her own voice, narrative structure, characters, etc., in the pages provided. To that end, mentors will be given the chance to note their preferences and areas of expertise to help create an optimal pairing for the mentee and an enjoyable experience for the mentor.

 Blue Pencil Café Mentees are authors new to the craft of historical fiction, whether they come to it from another form of writing (nonfiction, journalism, etc.) or are exploring the craft for the first time.

• What they do:
  • Prior to the conference, submit the first 10 pages of a manuscript to the BPC coordinator who forwards them to the designated mentor.
    • Manuscripts must follow industry-standard formatting:
      • 12-point Times New Roman font
      • Double-spaced
      • 1” margins on all sides
      • .5” Indentation for new paragraphs
      • 8.5”x11” Standard Letter paper settings
      • Any manuscript that does not meet the formatting criteria will be declined and the participant will not be paired with a mentor.

• During the conference, attend their one-on-one mentoring session and gracefully accept feedback.

• • Be respectful of the time before and during the conference that their mentor has taken to review the submitted work;
  • Understand that their time with their mentor at the conference is limited to their 20-minute BPC critique session.
  • Refrain from buttonholing their mentors during other conference events.

Guidelines for Mentors and Mentees:

• Mentors and mentees sign up to participate in the Blue Pencil Café when they register for the conference. Their names will be forwarded to the BPC Coordinator who will subsequently contact them about providing details to facilitate mentor/mentee matching.
• Mentors and mentees should arrive on time for their appointments and be mindful of professional courtesy.