My Queendom for a Muse

I had a dream a while back in which I was allowed to marry two men, as long as they were both named Gary. Since I already had one of those, for my second Gary, I chose of the Oldman variety. So many fantastic roles over the years, both good and bad guys. My subconscious obviously felt Gary Oldman was a good choice to travel the rutted road me and GareBear were already stumbling down. As far as I know, it’s worked out well; neither I nor my subconscious has been served with divorce papers as of this writing.

So, yeah, I’m basically married to Sirius Black*.

This therefore means I’m married to a (Gare)bear and a dog. Figure THAT one out, therapist. Also maybe someone should tell Gary Oldman’s actual wife that she shouldn’t sue my subconscious, although it would be a landmark case. Truly.

Which leads into today’s rambling stream of detritus: During a recent Zoom session with my Thursday Writing Hobbits, I made mention of one of My Boyfriends™, to which a lovely young writer (unintentionally) named after a kick-ass video game heroine gasped and covered her mouth with her hand and proclaimed, “Wait—you’re married!”

“Yes. Yes, I am.” I’m a polygamist, actually. Two Garys, one Young, one Oldman. I didn’t include that part. I can’t afford to refund this kid’s course fee or pay for her therapy once our workshop has concluded.

“But you can’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend if you’re married.”

Tell that to my ex-husband. He seemed fine with having a girlfriend while we were married. “It’s not that kind of boyfriend.”

“Oh.” Young Ms. Croft thought about what I’d said. “But does your husband know that you have a boyfriend?”

“Boyfriends. Plural.”

Another gasp. More students covered their aghast mouths with tiny, ink-stained hands.

“And yes, GareBear knows.”

“But—doesn’t he mind?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve not packed my bags to go anywhere. He knows I married him.”

I’m honestly surprised no parents have called yet. However, in my defense, I DID explain what I meant, and I WILL explain again so that you too may benefit from this sage advice and also concurrently feed your own need for boyfriends, aka Muses. As Michael Scott would say, that’s called a win-WIN-win situation. (Office fans, I see you.)

Muses are not new. I did not invent them. The Greeks did—nine of them, in fact, imagined a super long time ago, way before Netflix and IMDB and a million different ways the internet allows us to stalk celebrities and movie stars. Muses in the olden days of Homer’s Greece had lyrical names like Calliope and Thalia, Clio and Ourania. These deified Muses each had a different specialty, but their one united goal was this:

INSPIRE THE ARTISTS.

So, like my boy Shakespeare borrowed from numerous sources whilst writing such hits as Romeo and Juliet, I borrow from Homer and set my stage with Muses. Lots of them. Also I use actors as my Muses because I very much wanted to be a movie star but that didn’t work out because I am in fact a terrible actor and though I worked extra jobs including as a cocktail waitress at a Mexican restaurant where this creepy chiropractor and his buddies used to grab my butt when I’d take their orders but I did it to save for the eventual move to Los Angeles where my new friend GareBear got me an audition for a bit part on a Power Rangers episode except I had to work that day at my new Los Angeles office job to pay the rent so I couldn’t go and also I don’t know anything about being a Power Ranger so the acting thing obviously did not work out and that was NOT great because back then I was still young and cute and gravity hadn’t settled in yet so yeah that was a total waste of a decade but I now have this recurring dream/nightmare that one day I will be on Jimmy Fallon or maybe Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, probably Kimmel because he’s in LA and that’s a way shorter plane ride than Fallon who is in NYC and I really, REALLY do not like flying because I have control issues and I am very much NOT in control of an airplane so anyway, I have this dream/nightmare that I’ll be on with one of the Jimmys and they’ll be like

OH YOUR LATEST BOOK IS A RAGING SUCCESS

and I’ll be like OH THANKS YEAH IT’S PRETTY GOOD I’M SUPER FAMOUS NOW

and they’ll be like WE HAVE A SURPRISE FOR YOU WE FOUND SOME LOST FOOTAGE FROM WHEN YOU WERE TRYING TO BE AN ACTOR

and I’ll try not to barf up the In-N-Out I inhaled during the limo ride over to the studio because that’s rude and gross when you’ve waited your entire life to be Someone Important™ and also a total waste of In-N-Out but yeah I’ll play it cool and be like

OH HA HA HA RUN THE FOOTAGE

and you guys will totally see why I didn’t make it as an actress and also my face looks shit on camera, no joke, this is not me being vain, I just don’t have that kind of face that the camera loves and instead the camera’s like YEAH MAYBE NO and the camera doesn’t even feel bad about making me feel bad because cameras aren’t sentient per se but they know what they want and I promise you it is not my face.

Thankfully, there are OTHER faces the camera DOES love, and these fine specimens are, in fact, My Boyfriends™.

And before you get twisted and scream at me for being sexist, I also have a list of My Girlfriends™. I am an Equal Opportunity Muse Enthusiast, an EOME, if you will. (You can borrow that if you want.)

Flip to the Dedication page of my latest book—called Scheme in the US and The Undoing in Canada (although you can’t flip to a real page in the Canadian edition because my publisher informed me two months before release date that they would not be releasing a hardcover edition since the first book sold for crap and—let’s say it together—PUBLISHING IS A BUSINESS—and sure, I have a great big, gnarly, snarly chip on my shoulder about All Things Publishing but I was basically born with that chip so that’s a topic for another conversation and also THANK YOU to the 12 people who bought my latest book. You guys rock).

ANYWAY: My Dedication page in Scheme looks like this:

These are my darling Muses. All movie stars. Every book I write has its own very cool, English-style pub full of Muses, sitting around, sipping a nice lager or an elegant cosmo or a steaming cup of their favourite tea or, in Dwayne’s case, probably a nip of his new tequila, and they’re all having a lively chat about my Very Amazing Books, probably with an English accent because I have a thing for those British sounds, although, from this list, I would gladly listen to non-Brit Oscar read from the phone book, or to Dwayne as he talked about his muscles**, or to Irish-American Saoirse as she told me about her childhood in Dublin, or to Jessica as she said just about anything***.

Muses. Better than cookies.

And then there’s Mark Strong. How much time have you got?

Muse No. 1.

Just to note RE: Muse No. 2, Henry Cavill, not pictured here, but DUH, he’s SUPERMAN. Need I say more? Also, he WAS envisioned as Ryan Fielding in Must Love Otters (under my Eliza Gordon pen name), as was Taylor Kitsch, and the original Muse for that story, not a movie star at all, but former Canucks hockey player, number 17, the darling Ryan Kesler. See my Pinterest board for more. Also for otters, which are AWWWESOME.

Then there’s Love Just Clicks (another Eliza Gordon) written with Sam Heughan (Outlander) as Head Muse and I wasn’t even bloody subtle about it—the main love interest is named SAM. Dear Dwayne, With Love, another Eliza Gordon title—yup, Dwayne, for sure (and YES, the publisher’s legal team got permission from Dwayne’s legal team so don’t go writing books about famous people without legal counsel or you will get your writerly buns sued), but also the book features Aidan Turner (Kili from The Hobbit, probably more familiar to you as Ross Poldark). Muses. Pretty, pretty, pretty Muses.

Gratuitous ab shot of Aidan Turner on Poldark via IMDb. You’re welcome.

But why, Jenn? What is wrong with your brain, other than everything? Muses make the characters in my stories come alive on the page. Not just come alive but literally MOVE through the story. (I think I used literally correctly there. Maybe. I’m sure you’ll tell me if I didn’t.) Mark Strong has lived in my head as my Very Favourite Good Bad Guy, Lucian Dagan Dmitri, since 2009, when I first saw him as Hani in the 2008 Leo DeCaprio/Russell Crowe CIA/terrorism flick, Body of Lies, and I was like

OH MY GOD HOLD MY POPCORN BUT DON’T EAT IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE YOUR OWN AND I DON’T WANT YOUR GERMS ON MY KERNELS BUT WHO IS THAT DELIGHTFUL PHENOM FLOATING IN FRONT OF MINE EYES ON THE SCREEN HE IS A WONDER AND A SCHOLAR AND I MUST KNOW HIM.

Mr. Strong has lived in my head, given full breath and shape and voice to Lucian, not because I’m a creepy stalker chick (I’m not, actually) but because LUCIAN, my character, IS REAL TO ME. I don’t want to meet Mark Strong; it’s enough that I have Lucian whispering dastardly thoughts in my ear. (Which he still does. A sign his story is indeed not over.)

(Also that is a lie. If Mark Strong were in town working on a film and was like HEY JENN DO YOU WANT TO HANG OUT AND TALK ABOUT SHAKESPEARE OR SUPERMAN, I’d be like SURE MARK HANG ON LET ME GET A FACE-LIFT AND A PERSONALITY TRANSPLANT SO I DON’T SCARE YOU BUT HERE TALK TO MY HUSBANDS, GAREBEAR AND GARY OLDMAN, THE LATTER OF WHOM YOU KNOW FROM TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY SO YEAH I’LL BE RIGHT BACK.)

FYI, dear scribes? Your characters should be this real to you too. If they are not, start over.

As soon as the character Xavier Darrow walked onto the page during the approximately one million years I spent rewriting Sleight, it was Oscar Isaac. He breezed in like he owned the joint, those darling black curls getting in his eyes as he argued with Delia, Genevieve’s mother. It was nothing short of magical. MAGICAL, I tell you.

And Genevieve, who started out as Gemma in the 2011 self-pubbed version of Sleight until I realized a few years into rewrites that, like, five other books had the main character named Gemma, including a series from Libba Bray and she is WAY more famous than me so I changed my MC’s name in honor of my first real editor, Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, who is *awesome* and no, you can’t have her because she’s mine so BACK OFF—Sleight’s Genevieve has been Saoirse Ronan since day one.

Yeah, now Saoirse’s a grown-up and was just super awesome as my lifelong idol Josephine March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (which you MUST SEE), but that’s the great thing about Muses: they don’t age. Teenage Saoirse lived in my head while I wrote the scenes where Gen’s hanging upside from her ankle, playing her violin (which, BTW, is a thing circus performers can actually do), when she rushes into the dirt and begs her dying mom to not actually die (spoiler: she dies), when she’s caring for the circus matriarch Gertrude and Gert’s feisty baby Houdini who eats everything his trunk can reach, when she first meets the intimidating Lucian Dmitri and his handsome young son, Henry, who eventually becomes Genevieve’s love interest … It was Saoirse who breathed life into those scenes.

When I killed a darling from the 2011 version, a character named Irwin, the manuscript had a mentor-shaped hole in it, and all of a sudden, this hulking mountain of a man named Baby walked in—and it was Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I can’t help it. It just happens. My subconscious wants what it wants. And it wants talent, beauty, pain, happiness, passion, fire, terror … it wants everything.

Because a good character is a REAL PERSON. Again, if your characters are interesting like soggy cardboard is interesting, start over.

The Muse bit doesn’t even stop at faces. My characters often have names that are reflections of people I admire. Genevieve Flannery? Beyond being named after my first real editor, her last name is a hat tip to Flannery O’Connor, one of my favourite writers. Like I said above, sometimes I’m not even subtle about it. In Dear Dwayne, With Love, the love interest’s name is Marco Turner. Piece that one together. A current WIP? Main character is named after Shakespeare’s perceived rival, Christopher Marlowe; another character in another story is named after my favourite TV show persona, the badass Carrie Mathison (thank you, Homeland, for eight incredible seasons!).

Muses are everywhere. You just have to let them walk onto your stage and listen to what they have to say. Yeah, I’m probably crazy as hell, but this is a good kind of crazy. It seemed to work out okay for Homer.

So next time you’re talking to me or you see in my social media that I’ve mentioned one of My Boyfriends™, don’t freak out and text my long-suffering husbands that I am packing a bag and buying a ticket to run off and stalk Mark or Oscar or Henry or Dwayne or Aidan or Jessica across the continents. They know … which is why they hid my passport.

Not me. I wish. This is genevieve … or at least how she lives in my head when she’s not saving the world. <3

*And Sid Vicious. And Commissioner Gordon. And Winston Churchill (ewww).

**Yeah, I wrote him a whole book. I JUST NEEDED ONE TWEET, DWAYNE. ONE. LITTLE. LIFE-CHANGING. TWEET.

***Binge the following Jessica films: Zero Dark Thirty, Miss Sloane, Molly’s Game, The Martian. NO ONE does brilliant and beautiful like she does. No one. Thanks, Delia. I mean, Jessica.

MIDNIGHT SUN Haters, This One's For You

Super-selling YA author Stephenie Meyer announced a new book this morning, the long-awaited story of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen’s initial meeting and early romance told from Edward the Sparkly Vampire’s perspective. Midnight Sun has a freckled history—Meyer allegedly wrote some of it over a decade ago and shared it with a friend, who then leaked it, and then there was some other drama with EL James writing her Twilight-inspired series that included a book from the perspective of the hot rich dude who likes whips and rooms painted red or something, and so Midnight Sun has remained in the dark. Until today.

People are saying this announcement “broke the internet,” which is one of those head-scratching expressions that was cute for a while but now just sounds weird because I think it’s impossible to break the internet, unless you have Shaw as your internet service provider because those turds break my internet every single day, and often while I’m on Zoom teaching my creative writing kids in the hopes that they’ll become literary geniuses and then pool their Pulitzer money to buy me a cottage in the Scottish Highlands as a thank-you.

ANYWAY.

The chorus of folks out there singing about Stephenie* Meyer going all in for a cash grab are woefully out of tune and should probably hire a proper choir director or maybe Adam Levine because some people like the way he sings. (Many of these same singers are yodeling about Suzanne Collins, who releases The Hunger Games prequel THIS MONTH, called The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Which I cannot wait for.) But dear singers, publishing is a BUSINESS. Let’s all sing it together:

PUBLISHING IS A BUSINESS.

How about every time Nike releases another pair of overpriced, throwback-style runners, we scream “cash grab”? No, you dummies, we don’t do this. We get excited about buying a pair of those dumb shoes we BEGGED our dad for when we went to that dodgy shoe store up in North Portland where there was a huge poster of Farah Fawcett on the wall and we were like WHOA SHE’S PRETTY HOW DOES SHE GET HER HAIR TO DO THAT but then we were also like Whoa that girl is in a red bathing suit and I can almost see her boobs maybe someone should give her a T-shirt. Also we were nine and more interested in roller skating on the neighbor’s newly asphalted driveway and building sweet bike jumps with our sister’s old wheelchair ramp and some broken bricks, and SURE, we wanted those awesome white Nikes with the rounded nose and the red Swoosh and the blue stripe in the foamy bottom but we had no idea, at that moment, how important boobs would become to the boys around us in the subsequent fifty years and also we were too busy being mad that our dad would NOT buy us the rad Nikes but some other stupid blue runners that we would proceed to wear out in about two months from all that sweet bike jumping.

I DIGRESS.

The point is: It’s not a cash grab, Steph. I got your back on this. In fact, it’s bloody GENIUS.

I teach creative writing to middle schoolers and have, off and on, for the last five years. I regularly teach from The Hunger Games and request parents to allow their young writers to either read the book or see the movie. Structurally, it’s near perfect. Suzanne Collins was a TV writer for years. She knows how to build a story.

And The Hunger Games has weird tics that make the book easy to teach from—first person present tense (don’t @ me—I love 1PPP and so do millions of other readers, based on the huge success of these novels, so maybe it’s your brain that’s weird and not the rest of us); Katniss is often unlikable, seen as cold, fickle, and even a tease with the way she toys with Peeta and Gale, which makes her an interesting character to teach because she’s not all hearts and flowers and is ANYTHING but predictable but she has a very clear goal in mind—save Primrose, her sister; and we have a villain whose motivations are foggy at best (good bad guys always have a reason for being jerks—they think what they’re doing is The Right Thing. We don’t know where this anger and villainy comes from with President Coriolanus Snow, and being power hungry isn’t enough. Which is why Songbirds and Snakes will be awesooooome because it will tell us everything we need to know about Donald Sutherland***—er, I mean, President Snow).

FOCUS, JENN: Sorry. OK, so, yeah, I teach kids and I always ask what they’re reading, have they heard of This Book or That Book, etc., and when I ask if they’ve ever read Twilight, MANY of them say, “No, never heard of it.”

Which is why releasing Midnight Sun right now, fifteen years after the first book came out and eight years after the last Twilight Saga movie, is freaking SMART. (Remember? Breaking Dawn, Part 2, with that terrible CGI baby—Hollywood, COME ON—you made me believe a T. rex was going to eat Hot Jeff Goldblum and those kids trapped in that gaudy, upside-down Ford Explorer. Could you not have given us a CGI Renesmee that looked even sort of baby-shaped?)

The young women who inhaled the Twilight Saga like it was air are now in their 20s. I know, because I have one of those young women. She and her friends discovered Twilight when they were around 14. They read and reread and gave each other copies of the books for birthdays and then I had to see what the hubbub was about and BAM! I got sucked in and read the entire series in a week and did basically nothing else except sit on the couch with Blankie and read and no, I did not feed the children whilst enraptured in the world of clumsy Bella and hunky, sparkly, 104-year-old Edward because my children are little scavengers who know where I keep the Goldfish and fruit snacks. Also they have a dad who is a way better cook than me so yes, they ate. Don’t freak out.

This well-timed release of Midnight Sun (August in the Year of Pandemia) will lead these younger readers right to the bookstores in search of the rest of the tale: “Wait, if this is Edward’s side of the story, what about Bella?” And on and on it goes. Can you hear the gold? Because I can. And if Steph is smart, she will write the stories of EVERYONE ELSE who isn’t Bree Tanner because young Bree was a throwaway character who gets killed anyway and really does nothing in the story, so yeah, that novella release was a cash grab for sure. (We bought it. Not gonna lie.)

Though I wasn’t able to find recent stats (and I didn’t spend an hour looking because I have Actual Work To Do), in 2011, the Twilight Saga series had sold over 120 million copies worldwide and had been translated into nearly 40 languages. It won some big awards and even more vitriol. It was a phenomenon that spun itself into entire sub-industries of merchandise, fandoms, conventions, documentaries, and literary analyses, most of which harped on how weak and ineffectual Bella Swan is as a main character. Hey, even the tattoo parlors benefited. Google “Twilight tattoos” at your peril.

Most of Twilight was filmed in St. Helens, Oregon, two streets away from where I lived in another life and where my daughter was born. We now live in Vancouver, BC, where New Moon and the other movies were filmed. My daughter was an extra in New Moon. She was in the hallway when Bella and Edward walked by in an early scene. It was a highlight of her teenage life. The ramshackle cabin used as Jacob Black’s house is a five-minute drive from where we live—I have a photo in the family room of my daughter grinning like she’s just won the lottery, taken at a park we now call Jacob’s Park because we went there just after discovering the location of Jacob’s house … that was a really fun day.

We shouldn’t be starstruck. My husband is a 30-year veteran of the film industry, both in LA and Vancouver. He’s worked on some of the biggest films ever produced. And yet, we were starstruck. My daughter floated for a week after her day on the New Moon set. The photo in the family room is testament to the love she had for that damn book series, for those characters, warts and all.

These books mean a lot, to a lot of people.

Releasing Midnight Sun in August is a power move. And people who hate Edward Cullen and Bella Swan will have a field day tearing it all down. I know, because I was one of those people who saw the Catherine Hardwicke-directed movie five times in the theater but then would scoff at the “quality of the writing” when talking amongst people I wanted to impress.

Which is, in itself, total nonsense. I’m an insecure jerk who was (is) wildly envious of Stephenie Meyer’s success that really did seem to come out of nowhere. I wanted her story—I had a dream, wrote this book, sent it off to Writers House in NYC (lit agency, not a publisher), got discovered in the slush pile (ironically, I got to work with the woman who discovered Twilight and she is one of the most incredible people and most talented editors ever), and then Mrs. Meyer’s dream turned book fast-tracked into a big, juicy, six-figure, multibook deal. Come on, writers—especially writers of YA paranormal romance. We all wanted to be Stephenie back in 2010. She’s the reason a lot of us finished our first novels at all. She’s the reason so many of my friends have careers as novelists now.

It’s true for me too. I finished Sleight because my daughter’s best friend finished her first novel at 15 (!!!) and I thought, Hey, if Alysha can do it, so can I†, and also because Stephenie Meyer, a mom of three, had the courage to sit down and write a book from first page to last and then send it off to some people who might feed it to their voracious shredder. (They did not feed it to their voracious shredder.)

No, dear friend, they did not feed it to their voracious shredder and instead fed it to a bevy of readers raised on Harry Potter who were now thirsty for something dripping with romance. And then their moms read it. I’m just sayin’ that whatever Stephenie soaked her pages in while writing, let’s agree it was better than the pillow of Oreo icing in Double Stufs. Addictive, and effective. I’d use a reference to cocaine or something here, but I’ve never tried cocaine, even though I lived in a wealthy Portland suburb in the 80s and all kinds of kids were doing cocaine on lunch break and IN FACT, I used to get a nosebleed every single day at the same time, just after lunch, so Mr. Hoss, my social studies teacher and a former tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles so you can just IMAGINE how big he was, stood over my desk after the bell rang one day and said HEY WHY IS YOUR NOSE BLEEDING EVERY DAY ARE YOU DOING COCAINE and I said WHAT WHAT WHAT OMIGOD NO and he said ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN TALK TO ME and I said NO DUDE SERIOUSLY I HARDLY EVER HAVE MONEY BECAUSE I HATE BABYSITTING AND IF I DID HAVE MONEY I WOULD USE IT TO BUY CANDY AT THE SNACK BAR BECAUSE MOMMIE DEAREST BUYS THE BIG COSTCO BAGS OF M&Ms BUT SHE HIDES THEM BECAUSE SHE’S THE DEVIL SO DEFINITELY NO and that was that. Also there might be kids reading this and I don’t want their parents emailing to slap my hand so we will not talk about cocaine anymore, thank you very much.

Oh man, you can tell I haven’t talked to anyone outside these four walls for seven weeks. And I have eaten a lot of pillows of Oreo Double Stuf icing. Sans cocaine.

In conclusion, my dudes, Stephenie Meyer and Suzanne Collins are freaking geniuses who are grabbing the wheel of this publishing Zeppelin and sailing into a nice, warm draft over Cash Sea. Which sparkles just as much as Edward Cullen does while standing in the sun talking about what a (delicious) monster he is. They know what readers want—millions and millions of readers worldwide have shown them the inside of their wallets—and I for one will stand in line with my wallet open too. Happily, I shall carry my copies home and revisit a time in our shared lives when my daughter and her friends piled into my minivan to spend two hours watching an old vampire and a young, pasty girl with balance issues fall in love on the big screen.

Suck it, haters.

Also, I’m listening to Alexandre Desplat’s GORGEOUS score for New Moon as I write this and no one sings crappy duets about cash grabs, which is very pleasing.

*Hey, Publishers Weekly—in your daily newsletter that hit my inbox as I was pouring almond milk** on my Honeycomb, you spelled her name wrong. StephEnie, not StephAnie. Mrs. Meyer is a titan in the YA realm and one of the reasons other lesser-known authors get to publish their books at all (money in, money out). Tell your interns who they’re dealing with. It’s almost like that time a certain very young YA writer got all crazy and attacked Nora Roberts for stealing her book title even though Dame Nora Roberts is one of the reasons we women have been able to punch our way into the publishing industry at all. Respect.

**Almond milk is not real milk. I understand this. I also understand that the almond industry is killing bees due to overworking their sweet little bee buns. I am so very sorry, bees. I love you. You’re the best bees ever. Let me know what I can do to help, except I can’t drink regular milk because my tummy doesn’t like it and my butt’s too big already and also if I drink regular milk, someone will shame me for being mean to cows.

***President Snow is also Daddy Bennet in the 2005 Joe Wright version of Pride and Prejudice, which is MY choice for P&P because it’s the one I saw first, and after watching Matthew Macfadyen walk through that misty field with his shirt askew, nothing Colin Firth could do in the Other Version offered any titillation what.so.ever. Fight me.

†This amazing human I speak of is now on her way to finishing her PhD, so if you please, it is Doctor Alysha to you.

P.S. Moms who are Team Jacob: Ladies, he is SIXTEEN. Gross. Stop it. No. Do the math. If you’re not sure what math you should be doing, google “how do I calculate cougar age” and switch teams before someone calls Child Services. Team Edward is nice. We have wine.

CALLING YOUNG (LOCAL) WRITERS! Novel Workshop Opportunity!

Is your budding novelist looking for a more immersive creative writing experience?

How about writing a novel in a month?

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I am currently building the class list for a 10-week course for students ages 12+.

The tentative schedule includes:

• Course taught by me, Jenn Sommersby, a working novelist with books from HarperCollins Canada, Sky Pony (US), Lake Union Publishing, Inked Entertainment, and more

• Instruction and worksheets covering all aspects of the craft of creative writing, including POV, structure, goal/motivation/conflict, plot, characterization, dialogue, setting, show vs. tell, self-editing/revision practices

• Participation in the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Young Writers Program. Course fee would include NaNoWriMo official workbook. Students will be asked to sign up with NaNoWriMo YWP (no charge for this). More info about NaNo can be found here: https://ywp.nanowrimo.org/.

• Introduction to the world of self-publishing for those students looking to publish their own books! Topics will include editing, cover design, and potential retail outlets.

• In-class free writing time every session

• Feedback provided from instructor in person and via email

• Final Night Reading Event (Family invited! Refreshments served!) where the students present their polished work before an audience, just like in the big leagues

• Course fee of $225 CAD will include facility rental and supplies (composition book, NaNoWriMo workbook, handouts/worksheets, refreshments for Reading Event).

Please note that this course is intended to provide advanced instruction for students interested in writing fiction and will focus on novels specifically.

We will not cover nonfiction, poetry, essays, vocabulary, or college-prep writing.

This course is limited to ten students. To express interest and/or reserve your spot, please message me through my Contact page.

I can’t wait to help your young writer put words on the page!

~jenn

An all new website for 2019!

But until I have time to write and update you with all the things happening, I will leave you with this VERY ADORABLE picture of Rosie Cotton: