I returned from my sabbatical some time ago but lost the first six weeks after my return to a series of family and personal crises, and have needed a few more weeks after that to get things rolling again here at Wordsmith Writing Coaches. Sorry about that!
But we are rolling again indeed. Thanks to our Director of Operations Shannon Zirnhelt, our website has continued to function smoothly during the past year (have I been away so long??), and the Wordsmith Associates have been handling all the editing and coaching work in my absence. Special thanks to Beth Kilpatrick, Mike Robinson, and Mike Rumley-Wells who have carried most of that load, and to Alycia Crane, Don Campbell, Marni Sullivan, and Marc Goldstein who have done a great job of keeping our writers' groups PRESS and SLAKE humming along, welcoming and helpful.
As the weather cools and leaves fall this autumn, we'll begin cooking up a lot of new things for you.
Either Alycia, Mike Robinson, Sara Anne Fox, Deanna Brady, or I will be present at the free monthly GLAWS Special Speaker Events if you'd like to meet us in person and chat informally about anything at all— or, you know, that manuscript or screenplay you've been working on... 😉 The next one is actually THIS SATURDAY, September 23, from 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm. These Special Speaker Events will happen every third Saturday of every month, usually at the Venice Public Library. Reach out to interim GLAWS president Neil Citrin to be added to their mailing list to make sure you get all the info.
As usual, I will be speaking or participating somehow at various writers' conferences and festivals across the US over the next year, and some online conferences as well. But other Wordsmith Associates will be doing so as well, and we'll keep you informed about all those events in our monthly updates. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so at this website's home page!
We have our own live-stream events and interviews in the pipeline right now— those will appear on our YouTube channel, and maybe the Wordsmith Writing Coaches Facebook page (remember Facebook?). Have any particular topics you'd like us to cover, experts you'd like us to interview, authors you'd love to hear more about? Email me or leave a comment here, and we'll see what we can do.
We hope to develop helpful online courses for you, both live workshops like we've done in the past, and hybrid live+recorded video courses, which we haven't tried yet. We have half a dozen of them at various stages of production, but if there's a specific strategic skill you must learn, or a particularly difficult challenge you'd like us to unpack, by all means let us know. We might move your idea to the front of the queue.
PRESS, our twice-weekly writers' productivity and writing-sprint group, will soon add a third weekly meeting time. But when? Email me or leave a comment and let me know a day and time that would work best for you.
Membership in PRESS is just $11 per month: it includes access to our Discord server, co-membership in SLAKE, occasional Wordsmith swag (free!), discounts for Wordsmith editing and coaching, and more... the "more" is also in the brainstorming stage, and we welcome your suggestions!
SLAKE, our monthly critique group, will be adding new features too. But what? We are open to suggestions! For one, I'm thinking of semi-monthly Office Hours, an open Zoom meeting or Discord video chat, during which SLAKE members can drop in and bring up anything at all during that time. Of course, I may need to limit the time I spend with each individual so that I have the opportunity to speak with everyone, and if there's a group it won't be private, but if no one else shows up, you'll have me (or Alycia, or Mike, or Heather, or even Deanna) all to yourself! It could happen...
So many things could happen! We are bursting with ideas. We welcome your help to winnow through them and make the best ones happen, the ones that will benefit you the most. Because you're the reason we are doing all this.
We want to help you achieve your writing goals, whatever they happen to be, and whatever challenges you happen to face.
Let us help you to tell your story well and publish wisely!
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