Challenge,  On Writing,  workshops

Announcing New Advanced In-Person Craft Workshops

Workshops Are Here In Las Vegas…

All these workshops are advanced craft focused. You will be doing a lot of writing while here. And each workshop, similar to this year, will be two-genre focused.

And each will have a Study-Along class going on at the same time online on Teachable.

And each will be followed by a novella challenge class to do a novella in two weeks on the workshop topic. (You must have taken either the in-person or the study-along to take the novella.)

DETAILS…

Workshops always start Monday morning and end Thursday by noon. So you fly in on Sunday and out on Thursday or Friday.

Workshops are all held in a conference center at a major hotel/casino here in Vegas. There are no special room rates with the hotels. Hotels will be announced ahead of time for each workshop.

Kris is teaching four of the seven listed below, Dean is teaching three.

$1,000 fee covers the workshop and the study-along workshop for your review later. Writers pay for their own travel and hotel rooms and food.

(These are never included in the regular online workshop sales.)

SIGNING UP…

If you would like to sign up and have already taken an in-person class at some point in the past, or have a lifetime subscription to In-Person workshops, just write me and tell me which one (or ones… yes you can sign up for more than one) you would like to sign up for. We are limiting these to 15 writers each, so they will fill this coming year.

(REMEMBER to use my workshops email, not the old one. Correct one is under contact me above.)

If you have not done an in-person workshop with us before, write me with  some information about your writing and such. These are advanced workshops and we want to make sure they fit and will help you.

New this year!!!  You must pay with your sign-up.

Before we always let people sign up and hold a spot and pay later. That backfired big time on us this year, so no more. Pay when you sign up. (I will tell you how through a couple of options when you write me.)

If you sign up and pay before the end of this month (August), the cost is the old cost of $750. After the end of this month, the cost goes to $1,000. (A raise we should have done six years ago.) So paying quickly saves you $250.

Also, no credit on Teachable transfers to these. I already asked. (grin)

All money paid in is fully refundable or transferable if you can not make the workshop for any reason. But you must pay to hold a spot. Again, only 15 writers per class.

SCHEDULE…

Fantasy/Caper... January 9-12, 2023. (Only 3 spots left.). Kris is teaching.

Time Travel/Romance... March 6-9, 2023. Dean is teaching.

Romantic Suspense... May 15-18, 2023. Kris is teaching. (Week before Licensing Expo)

Fantasy/Thriller... July 17-20, 2023. Kris is teaching.

Romance/Ghosts... September18-21, 2023. Dean is teaching.

Time Travel/Mystery... November 6-9, 2023. Dean is teaching.

Science Fiction/Mystery... January 8-11, 2024. Kris is teaching.

Kris and I are both looking forward to all of these workshops. They all sound like great fun to us to be honest. Reading lists on most will go out two months ahead of the class through the Study Along portal.

(Note, it will take me another day to get all the Study Along classes in place.)

Questions, just write me. These are going to be so much fun.

6 Comments

  • topaz

    Hi Dean,

    somehow I missed how that novella challenge works and how it is linked to the study-along class.

    Could you please explain
    – what the novella challenge includes and
    – what requirements have to be met to join?

    Thanks a lot.
    Best wishes,
    Topaz

    • dwsmith

      Just got to take either the in-person class or the study along class. Then it is just basically a chance to write a novella on the topic of the class to a two week deadline and have me or Kris (Mostly Kris) read it. That’s it. Just an add-on assignment for the most part. If there are things that make a novella different from the regular stuff in the class, we will talk about that. One class we did, one class there was no difference besides the length.

  • Barb

    Any chance the Anthology Workshops will resume at some point?
    Also, double challenge to write the novella in one week after Romantic Suspense if one wants to attend also the Licensing Expo… *grin*

    • dwsmith

      Never going to say never on the anthology workshop. We all loved it. But Vegas makes it tough and it was costing us a ton of money.

      • Mary Jo Rabe

        I don’t know when I’ll be able to come to the U.S. next (my husband’s health issues are a recurring life roll), but I thought I’d ask anyway: Could WMG consider publishing Fiction River as a royalty share project, with PubShare or something similar? This is no longer unusual for anthologies. Writers still get money for their stories, just not right away. My guess is that an anthology workshop on a royalty share basis would result in just as many good stories for Fiction River as before.

        • dwsmith

          It’s not the cost of Fiction River and the other projects that was the problem. It was the cost of putting on the conference itself. In Lincoln City we had cheap lodgings and no real fees for the meeting rooms. Vegas is expensive. Everywhere, for meetings. And that was the problem.

          And we would never do royalty share for a big project. We are writers and we believe in paying writers ahead for their work. However, on some smaller projects that would not exist otherwise, that’s a great way to go.