Today’s guest blogger is Rick Ochocki, longtime associate, now associate director, of the SCWC. 450,000 people started a novel for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 2018, and 53,000 entered the Winner’s Circle, writing at least 50,000 new words of an original work of fiction[Click For The Rest...]

And we’re off! Off-site, that is. Given there’s zero evidence to suggest we can safely gather physically come February, our 35th annual San Diego event will be conducted online. We’ve researched our options and the consensus among staff is that we can emulate the best of our in-person[Click For The Rest...]

Christine Ann Barnett died early on a Friday evening, June of 2020, in the thick of a plague from which she was mercifully spared. Co-director of the Southern California Writers’ Conference, she was petrified of dying. Her word, petrified. When she told me over the phone, from a hospi[Click For The Rest...]

These are hard times for too many, hemmed in, strung out. Anxious. Chrissie, Wes, Rick, Linda and I had tried to glom onto some hope that our fall conference could take place as usual. Given the current phased opening failures in regaining some semblance of normalcy, we cannot in good[Click For The Rest...]

To call our current surreality unnerving is an understatement. Seems people in every walk of life are petrified. Friends. Family. Familiar strangers we’ve never taken time to learn about. Those we glance past. All face an existential threat not of our making, and largely beyond [Click For The Rest...]

With furious hope we turn from our most recent San Diego event—where an unprecedented number of conferees were recognized and awarded for their outstanding work—to the SCWC’s annual Fall conference, which takes place again in Irvine, September 18-20, 2020. Friends familiar and new wil[Click For The Rest...]

“It is important,” the man in the grey suit interrupts. “Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsing souchong, someone needs to tell their[Click For The Rest...]

Of her latest release New York Times bestseller Caroline Mitchell raves, “Lost Girl is a compulsive thrill-ride that reads as if it’s been pulled straight from the headlines. Kammier’s journalism background brings undeniable authenticity to a novel that has it all—a [Click For The Rest...]

One of the most highly anticipated young adult releases of 2020, of All the Stars and Teeth Entertainment Weekly declares, “This epic fantasy, which subverts gender stereotypes and expectations, has the potential to break out in the mold of [Tomi] Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone,[Click For The Rest...]

International bestselling author Kristin Harmel (The Room on Rue Amelie) declares, “I was utterly moved and transfixed by The Light After the War, a beautiful novel that spans a decade across four continents in the wake of World War II. You’ll be swept away by this fast-pa[Click For The Rest...]