Fun Workshop Poll Results

July Workshop Schedule

All July workshops have room. All are limited to five writers max.

Class #1… July 5th … Author Voice
Class #2… July 5th … How to Write Thrillers
Class #3… July 5th … Adding Suspense to Your Writing
Class #4… July 5th … Plotting With Depth
Class #5… July 5th … Character Development
Class #6… July 6th … Depth in Writing
Class #7… July 6th … Advanced Character and Dialog
Class #8… July 6th … Cliffhangers
Class #9… July 6th … Pacing Your Novel
Class #10… July 6th … Teams in Fiction

Classic Workshops and Lectures are also available at any time.

————-

Nifty New Bundle 

My Seeders Universe novel, Morning Song is in a new science fiction adventure bundle. Morning Song is about a massive ghost space ship inward bound to cause destruction in a galaxy. Massive science fiction adventure on a very large scale. If you haven’t read any of my Seeders Universe novels, this would be a good one to start with.

————-

Topic of the Night: The Workshop Poll 

Again, thank you everyone who either wrote in the comments or directly by letter what workshops you liked better and had more possible interest in. Kris and I both thank you.

It’s clear that the Expectations (writing on the rails) workshop had the most interest, followed closely by Writing Mystery. And a number of people asked for more business focused workshops, which we will do later this fall or winter.

One writer asked if what I mean by writing on the rails was similar to making sure you fulfill promises to the readers that you have given them.

That’s exactly it. That’s why the workshop is going to be called Expectations. Meaning reader expectations, but it could be called Fulfilling Promises just as easily.

What do I mean by “Fulfilling promises to your readers?” This takes all sorts of forms, and why learning about this is going to take a six week workshop.

The most basic forms of this: If you put a spaceship on the cover of your book, you better give your readers science fiction. Very simple, huh?

But yet, so difficult. All of us have read books, or attempted to read books that we put down and said, “That wasn’t what I expected.”

Somewhere along the way, the author promised you, the reader, a certain type of book and then didn’t deliver on that promise. And more often than not, the promise is subtle, from how a book opens to a form of blurb.

And 100% of the time, the author didn’t know the promise they were making or even how to fulfill the promise. (A reason why the Sales Copy workshop is so critical to so many.)

And from there expectations of readers gets really complex,

Let’s say you are writing a mystery. Fine. But you don’t understand what readers expect in a mystery. And when they expect it and what to do with that expectation.

Chances are when you miss, you are forcing your story down a road because of some outline or something instead of letting your creative voice play. The creative voice, when given the awareness, knows the rails, knows the structures.

Again, that is why this is a six week workshop to even get the awareness going in many of the genres on this issue so your creative voice can then run with it and make your readers happy.

This workshop will also be about how to balance paying attention to the readers too much and allowing them into your writing process (thus critical voice in) vs writing with only creative voice and staying on the rails of a book enough to make it satisfying and not dull and predictable at the same time.

So again, thanks everyone. Kris and I will announce the new workshops at some point here. Both expectations and mystery workshops. They should both be fun.

————-