October 23, 2010

Afternoon speaker: Maya Reynolds

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly about the Publishing Industry

Maya's blog deals almost exclusively with the publishing industry. She'll be our morning speaker and will share the good, bad and ugly about self-publishing and vanity publishing, with a dash of truth about e-publishing and traditional print publishing to round things out.

Maya Reynolds has been a teacher, a stockbroker, a psychiatric social worker and a crisis team interventionist. Over the years, she sold short stories to romance magazines as well as non-fiction articles. She finished her first manuscript in 2003. By 2005 she began winning contests and getting requests for full manuscripts. In January 2006 she signed with her agent who later that year sold Maya's manuscript, "Bad Girl," to NAL Heat, a division of Penguin. Bad Girl debuted in 2007 and her follow-up novel, "Bad Boy" was released in 2009.

Afternoon speaker: Connie Flynn

Beginnings and Middles... & Satisfying Endings

Wow, that’s a whole book isn’t it? A lot to talk about in one hour. So we'’ll focus mainly on how they’re connected. In Aristotle’s Poetics, he states that a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. A radical concept back there in the B.C. days, when stories were most often vignettes that resembled a soap opera episode. Nowadays, the term story arc is freely tossed around, and it’s essentially modeled after Aristotle’s bold statement. In this program, we’ll focus on four major questions . . .
1. Beginnings — What does it have to do with the end?
2. The End — How does it resolve the beginning?
3. The Middle — How does it throw a monkey wrench into the whole deal?
4. Plotting — Where do I start?
. . . and how your answers to these questions can give you a solid framework for your story.

Connie Flynn is the author of ten published romance novels and is most known for her paranormal novels from Penguin Publishing. SHADOW ON THE MOON, SHADOW OF THE WOLF, THE FIRE OPAL and THE DRAGON HOUR (which won a coveted PRISM Award for best time-travel romance). Currently, Connie is working on several series in both the paranormal and the suspense genres. Over the last few years, she's tried her hand at short mystery stories and has had three published. Connie teaches creative writing at a local community college and has presented a workshop series for Arizona State University. In 2009, she co-founded Bootcamp for Novelists Online, a web based writing school focused on teaching novel writing. Her teaching philosophy is to inspire student to write what they love and to love the process of writing.

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