Individualized writing workshops

I’m offering the opportunity to take private, individualized writing workshops with me, online or in person if you live in Los Angeles. This is separate from my manuscript critique offer.

I’ve taught writing privately, at writing workshops, and to college and high school students. The media I’ve taught include memoir, narrative nonfiction, fiction, TV writing, screenwriting, playwriting, and comic book writing. I’m familiar with and comfortable teaching almost all genres: fantasy, science fiction, romance, mystery, mainstream, YA, etc.

My students have been extremely happy with my classes, and several have gone on to make first sales (details of the latter in post linked above) and place in contests. I’m honest but not mean. Some students have done extremely extensive rewrites after consulting with me, but no one has ever left in tears.

My approach is to help you make your work the best possible example of the story you want to write, regardless of whether that’s to my personal taste. I’ll tell you if I think you’ve written something that’s offensive in a way you didn’t intend, but I’m not going to hassle you over political or other views I disagree with. For instance, I’m a pro-choice Jewish atheist, but I once helped a woman with a memoir about how becoming born again saved her from the sin of having had an abortion.

Noted fantasy and YA author Sherwood Smith (disclosure: she is also my writing partner) wrote: "She has an excellent eye, is easy to work with, yet professional."

One of my workshop students wrote: “Terrific presentation, great writing exercise, funny and bright. So informative and helpful.”

Here’s how my individualized workshops will work:

You tell me what genre and media you want to write, what your goals are, and if there’s a particular project you want to finish or begin. I will also need a short writing sample.

I will design an individually tailored curriculum for you, broken into regularly scheduled classes. If you live in LA, these will be hour-long meetings plus some emailing; otherwise, it will be conducted over email and possibly some phone calls. The content of each session will depend on what you need, but may include writing exercises, rewrite assignments, reading assignments, and my critiques of your work.

Each class will be $50. (Low recession prices!) Please give me at least an idea of your total budget, so I know whether we’re looking at two classes, ten classes, etc.

Please comment if you’re interested. Comments will be screened, so only I will read them.

The Vampire Queen’s Servant, by Joey Hill

Lady Elyssa Amaterasu Yamato Wentworth is a half-Japanese, half-elf, half-uncle thousand-year-old vampire queen who takes on Jacob, a bad-ass ex-vampire hunter, as her bodyguard/boy toy. (Her Japanese and elf heritage is mentioned but doesn’t really come up beyond that, which is probably just as well.)

Like many things sexual, this is completely ridiculous but also pretty hot if you’re into it, and solely ridiculous if you’re not. I like reading about sexually dominant women having creative sex with men who are personally assertive but sexually submissive, which, at least within professionally written erotica, seems to be very much a minority taste. In fact Joey Hill is the only writer I’ve found who writes that. However, I don’t actually read that much erotica, so there may be much more out there that I’m not aware of. (If so, please rec it. I plan to buy oracne's The Duke & the Pirate Queen and/or The Moonlight Mistress
on my next Amazon run - will those suit?)

While the cracktastic A Witch’s Beauty, the one with the male angel with two-colored blood, the tentacled demon mermaid whose trauma was being eaten by fish, and the zombie dinosaur apocalypse, was readable as a novel apart from the sex, this one is pretty much wall-to-wall sex: bondage, telekinetic masturbation, CBT (the kind that isn’t cognitive-behavioral therapy – I was squicked by that and skimmed madly), “you must have sex with my vampire pals’ female servants on top of the dining room table while we all watch,” three-second refractory periods, in a mall fountain, on a sofa, on the forest floor, onna stick, etc.

I wasn’t that into Jacob, though I did like Lyssa – but then I was much more into the mermaid than the angel in the other Hill book I read, so Hill may just be better at female characters. And while I can’t say that the prose would win any prizes, Hill at least did not write here that “desire festered in his balls,” which puts the prose a huge cut above that other book of hers, which did have that line on page three, and which forever prevented me from reading any further.

What can I say? This is porn, porn, and nothing but porn. But if you’re in the mood for porn, and this is the sort of porn you like, you could do a whole lot worse.

The Vampire Queen's Servant (Vampire Queen, Book 1)

Happy Hanukkah!

To all those celebrating, may the lights shine ever bright.