RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Macro-Editing: Fixing the Big Picture with Terri Main - Macro editing the big stuff

The first stage in editing is to make broad changes in the basic elements of the story. These generally include addressing problems with the story line, characterization, and world building or setting.

This course helps the writer learn what to look for during this macro-editing stage.

This course includes:

• Creating a Plan of Action
• Examining Story Structure
• Fleshing Out Characters
• Making the World of your Story Believable
• Addressing Consistency
• Fixing Plot...

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Creating GREAT Villains & Villainesses with Pamela Jaye Smit - Craft villains and villainesses that you hate to love!

A great Villain may kill your heroine - but nothing kills a story faster than a weak antagonist.
In this course we will explore different types of Antagonists: anti-heroines, seducers, pirate queens and rebels, bumblers, psychos, vampires, ghosts and aliens, and more.
Learn to use back-story, world view, and the Lure of the Dark Side to create rich, compelling opposition for your heroines.
Examine ways to Confront the Dark Side and learn how to select the most appropriate ways for...

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Adding Value to E-Newsletters to Grow Your List and Strengthen Readership Loyalty with Jessie Clever - Learn the ins and outs of growing your e-newsletter

Stumbling along the ever changing landscape of social media? Frustrated with posts that only reach 25% of your followers? Drive traffic to a source you control: your e-newsletter. In this workshop, Jessie will share strategies for growing your list by offering value adds to your e-newsletter subscribers.

1. Look at tools for measuring the responsiveness of your list,
2. What attracts readers,
3. What doesn’t work,
4. Build an e-newsletter that works for YOU.

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Vlogging for Authors Mini-Course: YouTube & Video Foundations with Lisa London - Join the video revolution!

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[bcolor=#ffffff][bcolor=transparent]Did you know that....[/bcolor][/bcolor]

• [bcolor=transparent][bcolor=#ffffff]Posts with videos attract 3X more links than text-only posts.[/bcolor][/bcolor]
• [bcolor=transparent][bcolor=#ffffff][bcolor=#ffffff]4X as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a...

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Writing the YA Paranormal with June Diehl - Craft a awesome YA paranormal!

What makes YA paranormal different than adult paranormal? What makes YA different than other fiction? What do YA readers expect from your story? We’ll explore the differences from your story idea, story opening, middle, and end. In this workshop, we’ll discover how character, plots, and setting can be used to enhance your YA paranormal story. As a bonus we’ll take a look at markets, marketing yourself, and the submission process. I will be providing feedback.
...

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Creating Marketing Materials - a DIY Guide with Terri - Master the three Ms of Marketing: Market, Media, and Message

Today, whether one is an indie author or published traditionally, the author must be actively involved in marketing their books. That means, in part, creating marketing materials. In this course, we will provide you with the skills to prepare many of your own promotional items.

This course covers:

• The three Ms of Marketing: Market, Media, and Message
• Understanding your audience
• Selling the Sizzle
• Writing a News Release
• Creating a basic Social Media Post
• Creating a...

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Master the Three-Act Structure with Stephen D. Rogers - Learn and apply a more solid foundation to your story structure

During the length of this course, you'll learn the fundamentals
of three-act structure and how to use this structure to write
better books.

Lesson 1 - Introduction to the three-act structure
Lesson 2 - The inciting incident
Lesson 3 - Act I and the Act I climax
Lesson 4 - Act II and the Act II climax
Lesson 5 - Act II and the midpoint
Lesson 6 - Act III and the Act III climax
Lesson 7 - Tuning your plot points
Lesson 8 - Creating an ending that sells your next book

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Marketing and Branding for Authors with Cassandra Carr - Learn tips on how to market your book, your brand, and yourself!

In this course you will learn what branding is, what your platform is and how to develop it, plus tips for book launches and signings, all about social media and where you should concentrate your time, what should be on your website, how to put together author pages on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, information about Street Teams and much more!

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Writing the Thriller with Steve Shrott - Learn how to write one of the hottest genres!

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to construct a thriller from beginning to end. Some of the topics covered are:

• What is a thriller and why are they so popular?
• The many different categories of thrillers
• Secrets of creating commercial story ideas
• Developing a ‘hot’ plot
• How to start your story with a bang and keep up the momentum
• Techniques that help us write high octane scenes and chapters that keep readers turning pages
• Designing heroes that your readers care...

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Worldbuilding Wizardry—Adding dearth and depth to your story with Pat Hauldren - Jumpstart your world building!

Worldbuilding Wizardry will get authors jumpstarted on wonderful world building with wowza! All genres have their tropes, trips, and traps. In building worlds for paranormal and fantastical fiction, we learn the foundations of world building, what every world must have in order to exist and then to thrive, and how we can use those elements to their best advantage to elevate our writing and our story to the best level of writing possible. Avoid those trips and traps and grab your readers with...

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lesliedow submitted a new resource:

7th Annual SavvyAuthors WriterCon - The totally free online writer’s conference brought to you by SavvyAuthors!

Join us for workshops, webinars, chats, contests, and online pitch opportunities while you improve your writing skills!

check out the full description on the SavvyWriterCon information pages.

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Polish, compete, and complete multiple first drafts.

It's been many years since I've been afforded the luxury of being able to sit and write til I'm tired of sitting. I'm taking advantage of it now.

Have one completed manuscript that is editing now. First three chapters and synopsis are being submitted in competition and have to be submitted by the 25th of this month. My crit partner is going over the chapters and today I'll write the synopsis.

Have a few more things to complete for that same competition with the August 25th deadline. After that, I have 2 or 3 manuscripts that need to be completed. Will save one for Nano.

I think that is enough to get me started. We won't bring up the elephant in the middle of the room. heh heh heh

lesliedow submitted a new resource:

Pls ignore me, we are testing a new version of software. :) - a tag line

CL-xxx

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When I first joined, I saw a list of tags that could be used but now I can't find them. I remember 3 or 4. Can someone direct me? They were on the right sidebar. Thanks!

I know there are a few who write or are interested in writing BDSM. I'm currently taking the BDSM class with Sascha, but I wanted to step outside that and get feed back and comments from others.

I spent all day yesterday, or the better part of it, editing the first three chapters of what I've always called erotica, but it's heavily BDSM. Last night and this morning, I read through the remaining 14 chapters and it's a pretty good story. I wrote it so many years ago in a chatroom on AOL, because I was the sunday morning storyteller, and it was a BDSM chatroom. But I don't think I ever went back re-read the whole thing until now. Every Sunday, the room got one chapter.

So what are your thoughts, what are you working on, and what is your take on writing outside the romance box?

Hi everyone! Not sure what familiar faces I'll come across but if you think you know me, or want to get to know me, contact me (however one does that). Looking forward to learning my way around the site and join some classes. Never too old to learn a thing or two right?

Patricia Rickrode
w/a Jansen Schmidt

So, I posted about me yesterday under someone else's thread and it was suggested I start my own with a lil about me.

In acuality, I've been writing since I was about 12 or 13, but created stories in my head a lot earlier. (NOT to be confused with my fantasies.) In my teens, my stories were a mix of third and first person, with POV all over the place. But they were all about me, my boyfriend, my best friend and her boyfriend. Hand written, page after page after page. I don't know if my Daddy got a hold of it and read it, or just knew what I was doing and told me to throw that crap away. Some of it went, but not all of it and I continued to write. I took a creative writing class in high school and my teacher told me my writing was trite and I'd never sell anything. If she is still alive, which I doubt, I hope she knows the market share romance holds today.

I've sold some poetry, won some small awards with poetry, placed as a semi finalist in RWA's Golden Heart, and won some small awards with short stories and first chapters. It's not the size of the award so much as it is the validation that someone thinks your work is that good. Though, I have to admit, the critique I had on my first completed manuscript sent to bed with a brandy bottle and tears. I put it away and haven't touched it since. And, now, it will all have to be retyped because it was put on a disk long enough ago that the newer computers can't read it. Perfect time to edit, right?

Writer's are a breed of their own. We write for many reasons, one of which to quiet the voices in our head, demanding their story be told first. I was seeing a psycologist when we live in Italy. The conversation went something like this, actually verbatim:

"Do you hear voices in your head?"
"Of course I do, I'm a writer!"
"I don't mean the make believe ones."
"Neither do I."

He never saw me again.I'm looking forward to being here and learning as much as I can. My genre's currently are historical romance, fantasy, horror/Sy-Fy and Poetry. I also have around 100 erotica short stories and two complete manuscripts. The count is one completed manuscript, three half done manuscripts and a couple of first chapters I'm really excited about. I participate in NANOWRMO (sp) and sometimes JANO.

I look forward to chatting with as many of you as I can.

My goal is to do another edit/revision of last year's NaNo novel in preparation to finish it during 2017 NaNoWriMo. Yup, that's right, I won last year with only about half the novel finished. And, I need to get back in the grove of the story and clean up some stuff in the first half so I'm ready to go in November.

I'm hoping you can all help keep me working on this goal.

I joined for the upcoming BDSM for Writers class. But am finding more here than I expected

While I belong to a local critique group, no one reads or writes erotica, so only my short stories are usually reviewed. Would love to find a beta, critique partner or a critique group!

I do have a published short story in an anthology and am preparing a submissions for two others. Have also begun blogging on my new author website.

I have created a goal of release dates for my Erotica and Futuristic Romance. I believe this site and classes will help me reach those goals.

I have just started writing again after many months. (Broke my ankle!) That said, I was sporadic at best, prior to that.

I am now working on a new book, and the plan is for it to be the first in a series. (I've never written a series before, so that could be interesting.)

My goal is 1,000 words per days. Most days I've written around 1,300 to 1,600 so pretty happy with that. I've only had one day where I've not reached my goal, and that was 737 words.

The aim is to write a novella of around 25,000 to 30,000 words every three months maximum.

Hello there! My name is Lexie Hancock, I am a university student from Ontario, and I am a newly published author. I write fiction, fantasy, and the like. I joined this page, because I am very familiar with NaNoWriMo and thought this site could present more of a challenge than the standard 50k words that I can easily surpass. Does anyone have any good pointers how to get started and involved?

By December 31, 2017 I will have:

1. submitted 2 manuscripts. Specifically, two category-length contemporary romances.
2. I will research agents and develop a list of at least three that I would consider submitting to.
3. Become active in my local RWA chapters by attending at least 1/2 of the meetings for both of the local chapters for the rest of the year. I may choose at that point to continue with both or pick one.

I will update this with progress by adding a comment at the beginning of every month.

RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Copyright Issues for Authors with L.C. Hayden - Don't find yourself in legal hot water! Learn the copyright laws.

If you want to use a song lyric as part of your novel, can you do it without getting into trouble? How about if you found a picture on the Internet and it’s perfect? It illustrates exactly the points you’re making on your novel. Should you use it? What about using brand names? Are they safe to use?
These and many more questions will be answered in my upcoming Copyright Rights workshop. I will also address how you can apply for copyrights or even if you should.

As an added bonus, I will...

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Romancing the Holidays! with Rebekah R. Ganiere - Craft a holiday romance and move your writing career forward!

What is the hype with Holiday Romances? Have you ever wondered why so many people do Holiday Romances? Or why there are so many people that read them? Ever wondered what it takes to write a Holiday Romance? Or when to publish it? Or when Publishers even send out calls for them? Well now you can.

Join the thousands of writers who are publishing Holiday Romance short stories, novellas, and novels and helping them to move their careers forward. Learn what you need to incorporate into your...

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RJ Garside submitted a new resource:

Romance in Sci-fi, Fantasy, and Horror with Rebekah R. Ganiere - Learn to meld romance with horror and sci-fi!

Have you ever wanted to write in the sci-fi, fantasy, or horror genre but you just aren’t sure how to meld romance and the other elements necessary to satisfy the readers of those speculative genres?

In this class, you will learn how to do just that. Learn what people are looking for in speculative genres. How to balance horror and technology with love scenes and romance. Find out the tropes necessary to write Gothic Horror, Horror, Sci-fi and Fantasy. What to avoid and what works.

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