All About Author Platforms and Social Media
Building a platform and becoming familiar with social media is an important part of an author’s career. This workshop will cover: (1) what is an author platform and do you need one anyway? (2) online components of a platform: website, newsletter, blogs, and social media presence; (3) main social media sites useful to authors, with…
Read MoreTheir Ancient Glittering Eyes
Welcoming poets at any level, and writers of any medium, this course focuses on poetry as a healing sorceress. Not a quick-fix diet, nor a quagmire of tedium, the poets and poems we will consider engage forms of wisdom, some of which may be hiding in plain sight. In five sessions we will look at…
Read MorePerfecting Your Poem: A Workshop to Take You Higher
What’s to be done with those poems stuffed in folders or buried in a stack, unfinished and abandoned? If you’re like me, those poems contain gems of words and insight, maybe a few well-wrought lines, but you can’t seem to keep the energy going or capture the concept. This four-session workshop offers proven revision strategies…
Read MoreWriting from the World Before, Toward A World We Don’t Yet Know About
There has been a profound sense of shift from the ways in which we thought about and experienced life before this global period of pandemic and uncertainty. As we try to find balance in this in-between place that is no longer the world we knew but that isn’t clearly yet the world we’ll emerge into,…
Read MorePractical Starship Design
Whether your characters are sunjamming the solar wind or sleeping for centuries between the stars, how you present their spacecraft lends authenticity to your fictional world. In this Research for Writers seminar, we will explore the real-life physics of interstellar travel—-the hazards, the distances, and some of the solutions proposed to overcome them. We will…
Read MoreHow to Edit Your Own Writing
You’re done writing, but before you present your work to your publisher or readers–print or online–you want to polish. How do you switch from writer to editor? How do assess your work from 10,000 feet and sentence by sentence? How do you hunt down and eliminate inaccuracies, tighten flabby prose, and correct common mistakes in…
Read MoreThe Nuts and Bolts of Scrivener
Scrivener is a streamlined and user friendly word processor that offers more to the writer than Microsoft Word or Mac Pages ever could. It’s designed for writing projects. You can organize your books, chapters, short stories, scenes, character sheets, setting descriptions, outlines, and anything else you can think of all in one easy-to-access document, which…
Read MorePatience and Publishing: A Guide to Getting Published
Most writers dream of publishing a book with a hard cover, amazing cover art, and their photo on the dust jacket. But how do we get there? In this seminar, we will discuss various paths to publishing–the successes, the failures, and even more of the failures. We will learn strategies for presenting our stories to…
Read MoreWhere Do I Begin?
So, if you’re like me, you have twenty different ideas about a hundred different stories that have been told a million times. That said, whether in a long piece of fiction or a short personal essay, there are specific tools writers use to begin a story. Likewise, the reader needs to follow you, and they,…
Read MoreSensitivity Reader Training: How to Become a Sensitivity Reader
Misrepresentation in media is rampant, but what if you could help authors write characters in an accurate and respectful way? If you belong to a marginalized group (People of Color/LGBTQ+/Disability/etc.) or have worked in an occupation that is often misrepresented in media (Military/Police/etc.) you could become a new type of editor called a Sensitivity Reader.…
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