GDRWA meets the third Tuesday of every month except for July and December.

7:00 - 10:00 p.m.
Royal Oak Senior Center
3500 Marais Road
Royal Oak, Michigan 48073

 

January 2010

What to Expect When You're Expecting ... Your First Release

You made your first sale! Now what? Join Berkley author Evangeline Collins and Pocket author Starr Ambrose as they discuss what they learned after getting "the call." Follow their journey from sale to publication and learn about what surprised them and what they wished they'd known.

 

February 2010

Looking Through the Past: An Historic Costume Overview

Costume Designer Leslie Littell will speak on how clothing serves as a visual metaphor for period, class, gender, and even ethnicity. Through visuals we will look at clothing of the past and talk about how clothing is used to send messages.

Speaker Leslie Littell teaches for the Music, Theater, and Dance Department at Oakland University, and previously at Wayne State University and Montclair State University in a similar capacity. She is the owner of Ashbridge Costumes, a private studio offering full costume design services, and she has presented at national conferences on the history of costumes.

 

March 2010

Query Building

Is your query leaving you without requests? Does your pitch leave an editor bored? Then you need a lesson on query building. Berkley author and 2008 Golden Heart winner of the regency historical category, Susan Gee Heino, will present the building blocks of a winning query. This is an interactive workshop, so make sure you have paper and a pen.

 

April 2010

Outwitting a Muse Who Won't Behave

Jennifer Greene, 2009 recipient of the Nora Roberts lifetime achievement award and six-time RWA RITA award winner, will offer ideas and exercises to jump-start a story that's stalled out.

 

May 2010

Better Beginnings: Hook on the First Page and Stay Out of the Rejection Pile - Members only; closed to guests

Join Kevan Lyon of the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency in an interactive meeting on how to hook a reader on page one. Ms. Lyon will critique the openings of members' manuscripts and speak candidly on if she's hooked or the beginning falls flat.

 

June 2010

World Building

No matter what genre you write, you want the world you create to jump off the page and grab the reader. But how do you do it? Joss Ware, author of post-apocalyptic romances from Avon and The Gardella Vampire Chronicles from Signet (writing as Colleen Gleason), will speak on building a world that comes alive, and the characters who inhabit that world.

 

July 2010

No meeting - National RWA Conference

 

August 2010

High Concept

With over one and a half million copies of her books sold worldwide, author Holly Jacobs knows what readers - and editors - want. Join Holly as she clues us in on how to incorporate high concept into writing.

 

 

September 2010

Deep Point of View

Join six-time RWA RITA finalist and USA Today bestselling author Virginia Kantra in a program designed to get under your characters' skin. Discover the tricks to make your third person POV as revealing as first person, and how you can effectively incorporate deep POV in description, narrative, and dialogue.

 

October 2010

Genre Critique Night

Does your manuscript need a little polish? Bring 8-10 pages of your work in progress and get feedback from published authors on how to make your manuscript submission ready.

 

November 2010

Do I Know You? Getting in Touch with Your Characters

Are you struggling to understand your characters, or staring at a blank page one? Step away from your computer and jumpstart your muse with an interactive workshop, presented by New York Times bestselling author Erin McCarthy, that illustrates how visual and auditory aids can bring your hero and heroine to life.

 

December 2010

Holiday Party - Members only; closed to guests.

This event occurs on the second Tuesday of the month.