Merely two weeks after a sensational LA13 (Irvine) and we’re full-on into prepping February’s San Diego event, which will make for our 48th conference in 30 years. Wes and I and many long-term staffers reflected on that fact recently. “Whoa,” is about all we could collectively muster.[Click For The Rest...]

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...]

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...]

[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...]

“The end,” I intoned at length, laying bare the pages of story before me. Having devoted the previous six years to almost exclusively writing screenplays and TV scripts only a rarefied few ever actually read, I’d begun fretting over whether I still had the chops to write prose for pub[Click For The Rest...]

Very little is more gratifying than celebrating the launch of another SCWCer’s book. This month, as seems appropriate in the immediate afterglow of NaNoWriMo fever–with so many writers now finding themselves both buoyed by a new work in progress and the promise of publication th[Click For The Rest...]

Our fourth SD29 Special Guest Speaker to be announced is Kathy Aarons, yet another former conferee who got her game and gone on to great acclaim (it rhymes–spare me the grammar). Her debut novel, Death is Like a Box of Chocolates, released by Berkely Prime Crime this past Septem[Click For The Rest...]

Passion, perseverance, and an unyielding belief that a great story well told will one day find a home is what sustained our third Special Guest Speaker to be announced for SD29. Winner of the SCWC Outstanding Fiction Award at SD14, for the manuscript that he would ultimately non-novel[Click For The Rest...]