Howdy! We had a great session last week picking potential topics for this year's workshops. I've broken them down below into polls with larger descriptions below to get a sense of what we'd cover in the given workshop. We updated the group as well to include all counties in the South Sound area, so if you've been lurking and wanting to join but didn't live in Thurston County, please join us this year! We're open to Thurston, Kitsap, Lewis, Mason, and Pierce counties! For newcomers, our workshops always have a deliberate practice portion and a resource portion to create a full learning experience alongside our discussions. 2023 Suggested Workshops Descriptions 1. Knowing When a Story is Done: determining when a story is done and ready for submitting, querying, and publishing. We'll examine our own practices and those of editors and published authors. 2. Food You Can Taste: writing effective food and taste descriptions to make our dishes come to life for our readers. We'll use examples from published work and resources to develop a style and practice that suits each of us. 3. Revision Techniques to Strengthen Your Story's Heart: how to make a story (of any length) the best version of itself by identifying the heart/story's intention and making everything work to support it. We'll examine our own processes and those of editors to find techniques and tools we can use to reach our story's intent. 4. Writing Processes: pantser, plotters, plantsers, chefs, architects, and all the fun jargoned nicknames we give ourselves for how we write. By using the definitions of the various writing styles/processes, we'll search for ones that truly speak to us and hone our own practices. 5. World Building with Food: food is a strong indicator of a world's cultures and can serve as a beneficial world-building tool to show not only food access but trade routes, romantic practices, and more. Using resources, we'll examine how we can use food to build our worlds and captivate our readers. 6. Evocative Writing: bringing out the hidden emotion of your text on the line level. We'll look at drafting techniques along with line editing or revision techniques to help bring out evocativeness in our prose. 7. Writing Friendship: building and showcasing platonic relationships on the page using scenes and plot moments that will make our readers fall in love with our characters. Using resources, we'll examine tools and techniques we can use to build friendships in our stories in ways that feel natural. 8. Creating Prose You Can Hear: this is less about writing prose with a cadence or rhythm and more about writing sounds in our prose our readers can hear. We'll examine the practice of using imaginative imagery and choosing the right words to correctly create the sound in the reader's mind. 9. Designing a Religion: how can we create a religion in a world that doesn't exist, or maybe in a world that does? We'll use examples and resources for how real religions began and how fantastical religions have been created in the past to help us learn how to build a religion ourselves. 10. Integrating Religion into Your Speculative Fiction: how to write about religion in our stories in a way that shows our world's cultures and diversity to enrich our stories. Using examples from published works and resources, we'll discover tools to write religion in our stories in a natural way. 11. Natural Resources in a Made-Up World: how to build our world's natural resources such as water, trees, animal life, vegetation, climate, etc., and ways to research and strengthen our stories worlds. We'll look at both writing resources and nonfiction resources to understand how the natural order of our worlds determines our story's economies and, potentially, the direction of your story. 12. City and Town Designing for Fantastical Worlds: learn how to world-build townships, cities, and other community structures to help diversify your world and create realistic places for your characters to inhabit. Using both writing resources and nonfiction city planning resources, we'll learn how to create functioning towns and cities for our stories. 13. Speculative Finances and Funding Your World: building a currency for your fantastical world. We'll use writing and nonfiction resources to learn how to create a world economic system that works and showcases our world in entertaining and informative ways. 14. Creating a Government: learn how to craft a fictitious government for your speculative fiction story, whether it be fantasy, scifi, etc. We'll use both writing and nonfiction resources to learn how to create a believable government that's interesting and intriguing. 15. Speculative World Economics: a catchall workshop in crafting world economies for our speculative fiction. We'll use both writing and nonfiction resources to learn what it takes to create a believable world economy for our fantastical worlds. 16. Social Media Pitch Contests: how to find and participate in a pitch contest online. We'll examine winning pitches, rules of contests, and tips from agents and editors to learn how to stand out in the crowd and condense our story idea into a single pitch. 17. Submitting Tools: a roundup and tutorial of various submitting tools like Duotropes, Submission Grinder, and Submittable. We'll also look at tools we can create and ones that we can use for tracking our submissions and finding new places to submit to. 18. Querying Tools: a roundup and tutorial of various querying tools like r/PubTips, QueryManager, Publisher's Marketplace, and QueryShark. We'll also look at tools we can create and ones that we can use for tracking our queries and finding new agents to query. 19. Comp Titles: how to find books that easily describe or compare to our own books and using them to sell or give a sense of our own work. We'll look at resources from editors, agents, and writers to help us pinpoint and understand the elusive art of picking comp titles and using them correctly in a query. 20. Finding an Agent: beyond sending a query, let's examine what aspects of an agent we want to look at to determine if they are right for our current book and future ones. We'll use querying resources and advice from authors and agents on how to find agents to query. 21. Finding a Publisher: how to find publishers that accept unagented submissions and the proper submitting procedures, along with what to do if you get a yes without an agent. We'll use resources from publishers, agents, and writers on how to work with publishers without an agent and how to submit to them directly in a professional manner. 22. Picking and Using Masterworks: masterworks, like comp titles, are similar works to our own either by being in the same genre, world, or era and giving us inspiration for how our stories can flow and what conventions we should include. We'll use resources and examples to help us understand the concept and pick works that can help us write our stories better. There are 12 Friday workshops we need to fill. So the top 12 workshops from this poll will be what we learn this year!