For the safety and general well-being of all, during the course of conference weekend, we’ll be requiring that masks be worn by conferees inside all ground floor level areas–SCWC meeting spaces, lobby, bar, restaurant–as well as inside elevators. I’m told the Marriott Mission Valley s[Click For The Rest...]

Taken longer than ever before, but we finally have a new home for our annual San Diego event: Marriott Mission Valley, located roughly three miles from where we’ve dug in for so many years. Given the number of workshops debuting in February, it’s only fitting a fresh environment was w[Click For The Rest...]

Joe Ide returns to the SCWC for San Diego 36 with his sixth novel, a departure from his critically–lauded, award-winning series tracking the life of private investigator Isaiah Quintabe, which includes IQ (New York Times Critics’ Best of the Year and winner of the Anthony, Macav[Click For The Rest...]

What a weekend. Fully one year since our 2020 ground conference we transitioned to a cloud event and got to see so many invaluable members of our community, it was a bit overwhelming. By all accounts exceeding expectations that we could emulate our traditional events so successfully o[Click For The Rest...]

Chronicling time during COVID-19 is a muddle without minutes, absent hours, smearing days and months into an unfathomable fog of baleful recollection. That is to say, what I’m certain occurred months ago, actually took place only weeks past, if not last Tuesday. The timeline skewed in[Click For The Rest...]

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...]

“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...]