Hello everyone in Internet land! I will be running a workshop at the Virginia Writer's Symposium on "How to Write Horror."

I will be delving into fear, writing, and publishing horror.

I want to invite everyone to join, as there will be a lot of great workshops there! Come see me and others who can help you in your writing careers!

The theme this year is From Pondering to Publishing to Promoting. Invite anyone and everyone that needs help with any of these in their writing career.

See you on Saturday.

You can sign up at:
www.virginiawritersclub.org/Workshop-Information

You can look up the workshops at:
www.facebook.com/VirginiaWritersClub/

I just returned from the AWC writer's conference in Birmingham and I have to say it was very enjoyable. Not only did I meet several new and known awesome authors, but I learned a lot.

I attended several classes such as: Editing, The "me" in Memoir, Blogging, Creative Non-Fiction, and Taking the Mystery out of Mystery. First I have to say that the editing class was very well done, although I wish it was a little less about poetry and expanded a little more on how to work on prose. There were several poets there so I am assuming they found this more helpful than I did, even though I found it very helpful.

The Memoir class was great for all writers, not just memoir writers. It had a lot of information on how to strengthen a scene and how to put yourself into a scene (which in turn will put your readers in the scene and make the scene more powerful.

Creative Non-Fiction wasn't as helpful as I would have liked. The man teaching the class talked more about his own career in journalism and the Pulitzer prizes he won rather than what made creative non-fiction and how to write creative non-fiction. It was not he best class and I felt like I learned very little since I walked away still wondering what the heck creative non-fiction is.

Taking the mystery out of mystery was very interesting. I didn't realize there were as many subgenres of the mystery genre as there was. And I will be honest I had no idea what the hell "cozy" mysteries were, nor did I realize that they even existed. It was a very informative class and I think I may look more into the mystery genre.

All in all I really enjoyed this conference and I hope to be free to go next year. I met some of the most awesome people. I learned a lot. And right now I am working on several stories including the last zombie book.
 
And in the zombie arena I will have a free story at the end of this month, it goes between books three and four and involves a very minor character from book 3 ZOMBIE WASTELAND.

I will be out of touch for a few days because I am off to a writer's conference. I have decided not to take my computer, instead I am going old school and am going to take notebooks to work on my book in. One of the reasons I am not taking my computer is because I don't plan on worrying about plugging it in and taking care of it, plus it isn't a small one and weights a little bit. Realistically, I don't want to carry the damn thing around. I will update things when I get back.

I will continue to keep track of my playlist, and I will tell anyone interested what the conference was like, and what I learned.

This is just a little update. Why? Because you, out there in internet land, might be interested in some of the things a writer does.