Deep Edits and Black Bean Soup

For the last several months, I’ve been looking forward to the first week in September. I hosted an immersion master class with the incomparable Margie Lawson and eight of my NEORWA friends. We followed the immersion with Margie presenting at NEORWA’s Cleveland Rocks Romance Conference. I learned how to use power words, have memorized rhetorical Read More

Tips for Attending RWA’s National Conference

So I’m a wee bit embarrassed at how long it’s been since I posted on the blog.  I’ve been buried in a novella–you wouldn’t think a 30,000 word book would take me so long to write, but alas. I am easily distracted. Lately, I have been distracted by anticipation. I have been getting ready for Read More

Conquering Fear

Yesterday I spent the day with writer friends from the Northeast Ohio chapter of RWA, participating in a workshop presented by Bob Mayer. He spoke about many things in his six-hour talk, including turning ideas into stories, recognizing and developing conflict (my biggest problem, perhaps), outlining and plotting, characters’ needs and flaws, and story arcs. But for some Read More

My First RWA Nationals

I’m a day late with this post because I spent the last week in New York at the RWA National Conference. My very first RWA National Conference. I have been to at least a dozen national lawyer conferences, even a national librarian conference or two, and none of them quite prepared me for RWA. Here are a few Read More

Five Reasons to Go to a Writers’ Conference

I spent this weekend at my RWA chapter’s Cleveland Rocks Romance Conference, which was wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, I thought I’d share with you some reasons why, if you’re a writer, you should attend a writers’ conference too. 1. You meet other writers. Writing is a solitary occupation. We spend a lot of time in Read More