Past Meetings l San Francisco/Peninsula Writers Club

January 28, 2012
Ezra Berany

Ellen Sussman

Award-winning bestselling author, Ezra Barany has been fascinated by codes and puzzles ever since he was a little tot. He started writing suspense and thriller stories in college and got seriously interested in the Bible Codes while attending a seminar in Jerusalem.

Ezra is a writer, a teacher and a songwriter. In his free time, he writes mushy love songs inspired by his wife and book coach Beth Barany. Ezra now lives in the Bay Area, where he is working on his next book. Please visit his website at thetorahcodes.com

November 12, 2011

Clare Mullin

Use Feedback in Your Creative Writing

10:00 AM at the Belmont Library

Begin with the end in mind. Set goals to personally and professionally develop your career as an author by presenting your topics to audiences before your book is finished. By involving an audience in your presentations, their feedback and ideas can help you in the creative process. An audience can also motivate and stimulate to complete a project. Those story enhancements can be used for audience connections. At the same time, develop speaking skills to later enable an author to more professionally market their book.

Clare Mullin is a TV Producer, Host, Trainer, Speaker and Consultant. Clare began her public speaking training over twenty years ago and is the originator of The ColorWheeling™ Life Planning Program. In 2005 she created “Colorful Journey of Success” a community TV talk show. Guests share their story of success and how they help others succeed. Clare also produces and hosts “Visions Unlimited”. Clare will present techniques to help writers move ahead in their writing career.

October 15, 2011

Brooke Warner

Much has been said about the disparities between male and female writers, especially in magazines, and especially where literary fiction is concerned. The playing field is not yet equal, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding PW’s Top 10 Best Books of 2010 being all male authors. As an editor at a women’s press that exclusively publishes female writers, Brooke Warner has witnessed what women can achieve when they don’t sit idly by. This workshop will be about getting your voice heard, and how you can parlay that into a book deal if you know what you’re doing.

Brooke Warner is a Senior Editor at Seal Press and a coach who specializes supporting writers through the completion of their book proposals and manuscripts and helping them get published. Brooke has been working as an editor for over ten years, and has guided hundreds of authors through the completion of their projects. She currently works with novelists, memoirists, screenplay writers, poets, and artists. Find her online at warnercoaching.com.

September 17th, 2011

Jump-Start Your Novel

Ellen Sussman’s new novel, French Lessons, will be published by Ballantine in July, 2011. She is the author of the novel, On a Night Like This, a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller. It has been translated into six languages. She is also the editor of two anthologies, Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia Of Sex and Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, which was a New York Times Editors Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller. She has taught at Pepperdine, UCLA and Rutgers University. She now teaches through Stanford Continuing Studies and in private classes. Her website is www.ellensussman.com.

This workshop is for writers who are ready to begin writing a novel, or for those who have already begun but hit a roadblock along the way.

It would also benefit the student who has a fledgling idea for a novel but doesn’t know how to develop it. We will tackle essential novel-writing questions including: Is a novel idea big enough? Is it interesting enough? How much do we need to plan before beginning to write? How much plot should we know beforehand? What point of view should we use? Are characters well developed? And finally, how do we approach the writing itself? Pre-writing can help bring novel ideas into focus and prepare writers for first draft writing.

June 19th, 2011

Brady Catherine

Even after you’ve identified what might not work in a first draft, how do you bridge the gap between critical insight and creative reworking of the material? It’s hard to move forward unless you understand revision as a process of invention, not just fault finding. This talk will focus on asking the right questions about how a first draft is working, tricks for “defamiliarizing” the material so you can take a new run at it, and exercises that spur inventive solutions for trouble spots in a manuscript.

Catherine Brady is the author of three short story collections, including Curled in the Bed of Love, winner of the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Mechanics of Falling, winner of the 2010 Northern California Book Award for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 2004. Her craft book Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan, and she’s also the author of a biography of a Nobel laureate, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco and is currently at work on a novel.

May 21st, 2011

Scott James

There seem to be game-changing headlines about writing every day: ebooks, blogels, print-on-demand, pay walls, DIY. How do you sort it all out? Scott James has worked with both mainstream publishers and the latest technologies that allow writers to reach readers directly. James will share his experiences in both realms, plus offer a frank discussion about the opportunities and challenges in this time of transition in the publishing world.

The bio ----Scott James straddles the worlds of both fact and fiction as a writer.

He’s a three-time Emmy winning journalist who currently writes a weekly column about the San Francisco Bay Area for The New York Times and The Bay Citizen. His reports often receive extensive media coverage, ranging from The New Yorker magazine, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” and E! channel’s “Chelsea Lately” to Fox News.

Scott is also a novelist. Under the pen name Kemble Scott he’s the author of two books, SoMa and The Sower, both San Francisco Chronicle bestsellers. SoMa, a national Lambda Literary Award finalist for debut fiction, was the first novel launched using YouTube. The Sower, initially released as a ebook, was the first novel sold by Scribd.com, and was later published in hardcover by Numina Press, with foreign rights sold for both Spanish and Russian translations.

April 16th, 2011

Camille Minichino

Camille Minichino will discuss how to take your work to the next level. She'll provide tools for crafting a publishable piece and strategies for presenting a manuscript to an agent or editor.

Bio: Camille Minichino has published short stories, articles, and thirteen mystery novels in two series. As Ada Madison, Camille will launch a third series in July 2011, academic mysteries featuring Professor Sophie Knowles, puzzler and college math teacher. The first chapter of "The Square Root of Murder" is on her website. Camille teaches writing workshops in and around the Bay Area. Find her at www.minichino.com, and on Facebook.

March 19th, 2011

Betty Auchard

Author of Two Award Winning Memoirs, "Dancing in my Nightgown" and "The Home for the Friendless"

Her talk will be about writing memoirs. Auchard says the challenges of a page-turning memoir require the same tools used for fiction, so a memoir should read like a novel. Point of view, internal thoughts, feelings, dialogue and dramatic scenes must be addressed.

Skill develops with repeatedly reading your work aloud, listening, revising, and letting it rest for a while. The joy of memoir writing comes when you pick it up later, read it and laugh or cry because your own words have moved you. That’s when you know you’ve captured it. Showing and not telling always applies.

--------------------------------
About Betty Auchard: She is the author of the IPPY Award winning Dancing in my Nightgown: The Rhythms of Widowhood, endorsed by celebrity widows Jayne Meadows and Rosemarie Stack. In addition to writing, she enjoys presenting to audiences and narrating her own audio books. Her stories and essays have been published in the San Jose Mercury News, Today’s Senior, and Chocolate for a Woman’s Soul series. Betty lives and writes in Los Gatos, California. www.bettyauchard.com

Charlotte Cook, MFA, was president and story editor for KOMENAR Publishing and now is a partner in Adapting Sideways, the team working to migrate screenwriters to novelists as well as novelists to writers with publishable books. As an acquisition and story editor, Charlotte has brought to publication numerous books, articles and stories, including six award-winning novels for KOMENAR. www.komenarpublishing.com

Jon James Miller is an award-winning screenwriter who has now completed his first novel and is at work on #2. He earned a B.S.C. from Ithaca College, NY, starting his film career working on cable documentaries for The History Channel, Lifetime and A&E.

Together Charlotte and Jon wrote Adapting Sideways: How to Turn Your Screenplay into a Publishable Book, featured in the Sept./Oct. issue of of Creative Screenwriting Magazine and highly praised by the staff at The Writers Store in Burbank, CA.

Is a completed manuscript really the same as a publishable book? What are the differences and who do you turn to for the best advice after completing the manuscript? With their combined experience in the publishing and film industry, Charlotte Cook and Jon James Miller will share their experience and advice on how to best proceed with a completed manuscript to publication.

They have tips and even a magic trick to demonstrate what best prepares a writer to be successful with agents and publishers. Discover what films can teach you about being more effective on the page. Delve into the real differences between developing a manuscript to completion and polishing your manuscript for an audience of agents and publishers.

January 15th, 2011

Robert Balmanno

Robert Balmanno will present a talk about writing, publishing, promoting and marketing his two recently published, futuristic/dystopian science fiction novels. (September Snow and The Runes of Iona). Balmanno has made $10,000 on September Snow, but he's put all those earnings into the writing and promotion of Runes.

He had a 22-city book signing tour, which he arranged himself. He has a lot to share about doing your own promotion and actually making money on your book. Don't miss this amazing engagement from a writer who did it all himself and is a success.