STAR 2013 Online Workshops
STAR is thrilled to offer Online Workshops from highly-respected, successful authors willing to share their time and skills with other writers. Workshops last four (4) weeks, consist of a mix of lectures, exercises and discussions, and are conducted via a private Yahoo Groups listserv. The cost of participating in a STAR Online Workshop is $20 for RWA members and $25 for non-members.
All writers are welcome. If you know how to send e-mail, then you’ve mastered all of the technical skills you need to participate in our workshops. You will automatically receive an invitation to join the workshop’s listserv prior to the start of the class. Click to join, and you’re in! All of the messages posted by the instructor and other students will be delivered directly to your inbox, although you may also view them from the Yahoo website.
To register for any of the classes listed below, please complete the Registration Form.
Payment may be made either by check or Money Order in US Dollars, made out to STAR Online Workshop, and mailed to:
STAR Online Workshop Coordinator, PO Box 6, Willseyville, NY 13864.
If you have a PayPal account and would like to pay via PayPal, go to http://www.PayPal.com Select the “send money” button, then enter the amount due, and STAR’s email address for payment: starpay@gmail.com
WORKSHOP: CONFLICT AND THE CATEGORY ROMANCE
DATE: June 5 – 30, 2013
INSTRUCTOR: Susan Meier
FEE: $25.00; RWA Members $20.00
DESCRIPTION: Is there a difference between the conflicts of a single title romance and a category romance? Is there a difference between the conflicts of a long category and a short category? What purposes do conflicts serve in a category romance? Is there a way to use your conflict for more than a stumbling block for the romance? Can it also push your story forward?
Join multi-published category romance author and Entangled editor Susan Meier as she answers these questions and more in her workshop CONFLICT AND THE CATEGORY ROMANCE. See how to use banter, why we use a ‘format’ not a formula, how mining your characters’ pasts creates the richest conflicts, and learn tricks for getting emotion and “layering” into your story.
ABOUT SUSAN MEIER: Susan Meier is the author of 50 books for Harlequin and Silhouette and one of Guideposts’ Grace Chapel Inn series books, The Kindness of Strangers. Her books have been finalists in many RWA Chapter contests and National Reader’s Choice Awards and have been nominated for Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice awards, including her December 2011 release KISSES ON HER CHRISTMAS LIST. She is a recipient of several Cataromance.com Reviewer’s Choice Awards. Her 2012 releases are THE TYCOON’S SECRET DAUGHTER and NANNY FOR THE MILLIONAIRE’S TWINS.
Susan loves to teach as much as she loves to write and is a popular speaker at RWA chapter conferences. Can This Manuscript Be Saved? and Journey Steps, No Frills Guide to Plotting! are her most requested workshops. Her article “How to Write a Category Romance” appeared in 2003 Writer’s Digest Novel and Short Story Markets. Susan also gives online workshops for various groups and her articles regularly appear in RWA chapter newsletters. In 2012 she will be presenting four new online workshops, Let Conflict Tell Your Story for You, Conflict and the Category Romance, Sweet Romances: Moving the Relationship Forward Without Sex and Self-Editing.
Her popular Monday morning blog, Dear Writers, http://susanmeier.blogspot.com/ features weekly writing lessons taken from her experiences with submissions, revisions and successes.
Online Workshop Registration Form
Online Workshop Payment Instructions
WORKSHOP: MAKING SENSE OF THE WORDY ENGLISH LANGUAGE
DATE: August 1 – 28, 2013
INSTRUCTOR: MM Pollard, editor, Black Velvet Seductions
FEE: $25.00; RWA Members $20.00
DESCRIPTION: With a Million Words to Choose from, How Does a Writer Get the Words Right? As you sit at your desk wracking your brain for that perfect word, do you ever wonder how English gained so many words—one million and counting? How it continues to add words? How you find that perfect word? Is that even possible? It’s enough to make you pull your hair out! Hemingway told interviewer George Plimpton for his Paris Review that he revised the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. When Plimpton asked him what stumped him, Hemingway said, “Getting the words right.” (Theodore A Rees Cheney, Getting the Words Right, p. 10)
MM advises writers to get the words right, not to strive for the perfect word. She promises you’ll have more hair if you switch your thinking just a little. Getting the words right is enough of a challenge for any writer. Having a large vocabulary helps, but it’s not just about having lots of words in your brain. You must decide the connotation as well as the denotation of a word you want your reader to grasp. Give her a word with the wrong connotation, and you paint a confusing word picture in her mind.
In this four-week workshop, MM will devote the first three lessons to words, why English has so many of them, how English adds them, and what the levels of meaning are.
In the remaining nine lessons, she covers confusing word groups, like anxious and eager; your and you’re; accept and except; and affect and effect, and gives you easy ways to remember how to use each word. Of course, there will be homework. MM was an English teacher for fifteen years. If you complete all the assignments on time, she will edit 1,000 words of your writing free. MM’s goal is that her students, at the end of the workshop, will feel more confident about “getting the words right” with new skills to help them do just that.
ABOUT MM POLLARD: As a copy editor for Black Velvet Seductions for three years and now acquisitions editor, MM Pollard reads many entertaining and thought-provoking stories. She also finds common mistakes in the fundamental skills of writing.
With fifteen years of experience teaching English serving as a resource of knowledge and a life-time love of teaching and of language, MM began presenting workshops in February, 2011, for many RWA chapters, Savvy Authors, Writers Online Classes, and in her own virtual classroom. She has helped many writers improve their language and writing skills through her fun workshops. MM is sure she can help you, too, master the fundamentals of English.
MM Pollard, editor, Black Velvet Seductions
http://queenofenglish.wordpress.com
http://www.blackvelvetseductions.com/MM_Editor