San Diego’s “Mother Superior” of the writing community has died. Let me share a little how she lived. Betty Abell Jurus–B.Abell–had been a writer long before opening the Writers’ Bookstore & Haven. A claustrophobic, deep, dark closet of a space located in u[Click For The Rest...]

Publishing is personal. A stark woman with a swift, purposeful gait, a writer, reminded me so some years back. She and her husband drove from British Columbia to San Diego in a Winnebago to attend her first-ever writers’ conference, the SCWC. They parked on the street and slumbe[Click For The Rest...]

Busy couple of months for SCWC authors. Those with new titles released, or due out shortly, include Darlene Quinn, whose fifth installment of her routinely award-winning “Webs” series, Conflicting Webs, just won the Beverly Hills International Book Awards for General Fiction. Judy Ree[Click For The Rest...]

Though not out until next month, Aline Ohanesian’s debut novel, Orhan’s Inheritance, is already dropping large. A Barnes & Noble 2015 Discover Great New Writers Pick, an American Booksellers Association’s no. 1 choice for its April 2015 Indie Next Great Reads List, and Libra[Click For The Rest...]

With San Diego 29 a mere two weekends past, we turn attention to September’s Irvine event. Our first Special Guest Speaker to announce is literary nonfictionalist Roseanne Montillo. The follow-up to her sensational The Lady and Her Monsters, which tells the lurid tale of how Mary Shel[Click For The Rest...]

Winter in San Diego. The Santa Ana winds were blowing; the writers rocking; and the SCWC rolling. With yet another terrific conference weekend behind us, where both emerging and veteran authors could shed their slacks, roll up their sleeves and collectively focus on the most important[Click For The Rest...]

For our 13th annual “LA” event we’ll actually remain in The O.C., but with one major change: we’re going back to where we once belonged—Irvine! Specifically, the newly refurbished, excellent hotel that fit the SCWC so well so many years back, before the move to Newport Beach. The prop[Click For The Rest...]

[Today’s guest blogger is Jennifer Silva Redmond, freelance and acquisitions editor, and former editor in chief of Sunbelt Publications.] Here’s the thing—I can’t figure out what all of you supposedly “social media savvy” authors are up to on Twitter. I get the thing about tryin[Click For The Rest...]

Ahh, winter in SoCal and we’re less than a month away from our San Diego conference. That means the weather is fine and, as evidenced by the quality of material received thus far, the writing is hot. From rip-snortin’ adventure to deeply moving memoirs and fantastical coming-of-age jo[Click For The Rest...]

Perhaps the most vexing question any writer must answer (other than, “Have I read anything you’ve written?”) is: How good is good enough? So often working in isolation, bereft of empirically qualified feedback on what they’ve written, writers must summon the gumption to conclude—unequ[Click For The Rest...]