Meeting other writers is one of the pleasures of attending writing conferences. The pleasure is increased when those meetings, whether in-person or on-line, continue long after the conference ends. One of the first writing workshops I attended was the Napa Valley Writers Conference in 2000. Participants are advised to have a car since lodging is…

A man in a pet store asks, “How much for the Chihuahua?” The next line is It whines in the shoebox-sized carrier under his arm as he returns to the Volvo. I think this is beautifully efficient writing by Alma Garcia, one of the members of my writing group. We don’t need to see the…

I met Alma Johnson in a fiction workshop in the early 90s. She was the star of the class – not just because of her writing talent or her ability to examine a story and make insightful and precise observations on the plausibility of its premise and structure, on whether the thing had muscle. She…