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...]

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...]

So excited to share this quick heads-up: Game of Thrones co-executive producer and writer Bryan Cogman calls Nathan Makaryk’s epic debut novel, Nottingham, “The most pleasurable reading experience I’ve had since first discovering George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice an[Click For The Rest...]