Why? It’s the most important question in writing; the one I hear most during the run-up to a conference. Usually it’s about material going to advance submission readers. “Why can I only submit the first 10 or 15 pages of my manuscript?” I’m asked. “Why not more?” Fair questions. Warra[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...]

[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...]

“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...]

Note: Originally published in my “Prognosis of a Movie Unmade” series, this article specifically addresses writing synopses for screenplays. Over the years, however, I’ve been told that it has served of value to novelists faced with the daunting task of distilling th[Click For The Rest...]

[Today’s guest blogger is Jean Jenkins, a co-founder of the SCWC, consultant to writers and freelance editor with over 20 years of editorial expertise placing clients with major publishers in both the U.S. and abroad.] I’ve always been of the mind that classes and conferen[Click For The Rest...]

The SCWC has grown a lot since its founding in 1986, expanding to sometimes three events a year and enlisting a constantly growing roster of accomplished authors, agents, editors and publishers to address the needs of emerging writers intent on getting into print. Some of our success [Click For The Rest...]