With Award-Winning Indie Author & Editor Gini Grossenbacher, M.Ed.

Write High-Impact Scenes:
Novel and Memoir

Tuesday evenings, 6 – 8 p.m.
March 23 – May 25, 2021 on Zoom

Learn the Art of Scene Building

Your compelling scenes await!  Craft satisfying, beautifully written scenes for today’s readers and markets.  Our course will help you craft different scene types in your novel or memoir, filled with rich characters, compelling hooks, and resonant themes.  Features author Shelley Buck, MFA, as speaker-guest.

First class is free for new and returning members.  Please order the following text, Making a Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld. (The latest and expanded edition – there are many versions out there.)
$25 per class. Pay – as – you – go.

For sign-ups or inquiries, you can reach Gini at (916) 684-6077 or email her at ginis.writers1@gmail.com

Open For Submissions

Dec 15, 2020 to April 15, 2021

CWC Members Only

We have a submissions manager, a managing editor, a starting acquisition team, and an art director/production manager. All volunteers! Our state webmaster has updated and posted the submission rules and forms. So, we’re ready to go. The submission window opens Dec 15, 2020 and CWC members have until April 15, 2021 to send in their very best work for consideration for the 2021 Literary Review!

To quote a Literary Review luminary: “We have no particular theme, most content is acceptable. We do look at the technical stuff. When assessing fiction and memoir, we chew over story and character development, realism, pacing, grammar, and reader engagement. With essay we add information, persuasion, and factual interrelationships. For poetry we want to be moved with an emotional experience.”

And we add to the genres above: non-fiction which needs character, scene, truth, and perhaps some story. Note this year’s addition of humor. We all need it after this year. Let’s have somethings to giggle or belly-laugh over.

If any of your branch members would like to be part of the acquisition team, please have them contact the managing editor at elisabethtuck@yahoo.com. This year it is perfectly fine to judge and to submit. We managed it in 2018 and all the years before that. Submissions are not sent to judges in the branch from which they originated. Pieces are read and ranked by at least 3 readers then results calculated blind. We rely on everyone’s honest effort. Judges can read as much or as little as they like in whatever genre they are comfortable in. They will not need to confer with each other. Join us!

https://calwriters.org/publications

Revise with Magical Words

Tuesday evenings, 6 – 8 p.m.
January 12 – March 9, 2021

All classes on Zoom

Spend cold winter evenings learning new tricks and reexamining old ways to enliven your sentences, tickle your readers, and add vibrant writing to your toolbox.

This fascinating, word-loving class shows you how to boost the success potential of your writing project, whether an article, speech, poem, story, book, play, or advertising, by energizing the language in which it is written. Craft beginnings that hook readers, middles that compel them to stay on the hook, dialogue and descriptions that sizzle and enchant, and endings that leave them eager to read more of your work. Apply techniques that are joyful, exuberant, witty, and wise. Our course will manage to be many things at once: a celebration of language, an examination of its mysteries, and an invitation for you to pick up your pen and  join the party. Featuring a literary luminary as a guest speaker.

First class is free to returning members. $25 each class, pay-as-you-go. Textbook Word Magic for Writers by Cindy Rogers (Amazon books). Enroll with Gini Grossenbacher: email giniswriters1@gmail.com

Thin Air Magazine

Thin Air, an MFA-run literary journal, invites all writers, emerging and established alike, to submit to our Spring 2021 issue. We accept fiction and creative nonfiction up to 3,000 words, up to five poems, and up to five pieces of visual art. Our editors are also interested in pieces that defy categorization. Regardless of form, we want material that feels fresh. The pieces we accept tend to surprise us and remind us why we fell in love with reading in the first place.  We continually strive to publish authentic work from a multiplicity of perspectives.  

We publish and circulate our journal annually. Alongside our print journal, we also offer the opportunity for publication through our online Web Features with no submission fee, as well as a submission fee-less day on the 15th of every month for submissions from Black and Indigenous writers of color.

We are also hosting an inaugural free-to-submit contest that celebrates, centers, and pays BIPOC writers for their outstanding work. We are seeking submissions in any genre under 500 words. The winner will receive $500, be interviewed for Thin Air Online, and be published in Thin Air Magazine. Entries are free, limited to BIPOC writers, and will be accepted from October 15 to December 1 on Submittable. This year’s judge is American Book Award-winner Jake Skeets.

Is the landscape of your piece one which we’ve never seen before? Send us your most resilient work, something that will survive above 7,000 feet. We’re excited to read it.

Please submit via the Thin Air Magazine Submittable Page.

Sincerely,
Thin Air Staff

Our membership year runs from July 1 through June 30 of each year.  Renewals were due as of July 1, 2020.  Members who did not renew by October 1, 2020 have now been dropped from the active member roster on the central database.