Brian Talley - Memoir Through A Cookbook

In this workshop Brian will tell you how he gathered family stories along with family recipes to put together a book that was part memoir and parts cookbook. He will also explore the areas of hiring a photographer, cover design and getting permission from family members to tell their stories.

Natalie Obando-Desai - Build Your Online Platform

You don’t need to be an established author to have an online platform. In fact, if you are looking to get published, an established online platforms appeals to agents and publishers because it means potential sales. In this workshop, you will learn the key places to establish your platform as well as how to make it flourish. It doesn’t have to cost you a lot to have a professional looking platform and social media accounts. And you can also get paid once you establish your online platform. This workshop will show you how!

Kim Addonizio - Sexy Poems

We’ll talk about the usual pitfalls (sapping out over your lover, naming body parts) and look at some poems that get down without getting too dirty—and then see what we come up with after some steamy freewriting! Bring your laptop or notebook.

Raymond Mullikin -Layout And Design For Children's Books

So you have a story, and maybe some character studies and sketched drawings. This workshop involves the important next stage of planning out the book. In this workshop, you will learn about the importance of planning out how the text fills the page, what fonts/styles to use, art layout against the text (Boxed, Vignette, Spot, Full Bleed), etc. You will learn how to properly convey to an illustrator what you would like them to create for your books.

Mary C. Moore - Platform For Fiction Writers: What Is It And Do You Need One?

A discussion of platform for fiction writers, and what you should and can do to establish enough of an online presence.  

Jenna Elizabeth Johnson - Self Publishing Secrets

In the class Self Publishing Secrets, local author Jenna Elizabeth Johnson will share with you her journey as an independent author over the past several years. With nearly a decade of self publishing experience under her belt, Miss Johnson will touch upon the basics, as well as cover many of the other fine details that have helped her find success in the world of publishing. Miss Johnson’s goal is to equip those aspiring authors taking her class with the tools to cultivate and grow their own passion for writing.

Doug Richardson - How Screenwriting Helped Me Write Better Novels

Screenwriters! There’s a novelist inside of you. Blockbuster screenwriter-turned-novelist Doug Richardson will not only show you how and why you’re not just a one trick pony, but give you powerful reasoning for screenwriters to seriously consider turning their film writing tradecraft into penning marketable novels.

Jay Asher- The Novelist Journey to Netflix

The novel Thirteen Reasons Why came out 10 years ago. The Netflix series was released 7 months ago. In between were a lot of false starts, but it all came together as the author's dream adaptation. Here's how it happened...

Greg Fields - There’s No Such Thing As Fiction – Harnessing The Personal VoiceIn Creative Writing

Every piece of fiction, no matter its genre or theme, is built from imagination filtered through experience and observation. Because fiction writing is intensely personal, pieces of the writer invariably come through, and so each fiction writer must at some point meet the challenge of translating the personal into something more universal. Part of the creative process is transforming the autobiographical - direct and indirect experiences – into the fictional. Every writer does it, some more obviously than others. We can explore the implications of creating fiction from a personal voice, how to mask that voice where necessary, and where writers tend to draw the line between the two.