Lowcountry RWA Programs
All meetings are held on the fourth Saturday of each month at Coosaw Country Club, Blue Room unless otherwise stated. All programs, unless otherwise stated begin at 1:00 pm. All interested and aspiring writers are welcome and encouraged attend!
Members only General Meeting: 11:30 am – 12:00 pm
Lunch/Networking: 12:00 – 12:45
Program Workshop: 1:00 pm
4110 Club Course Dr
North Charleston, SC 29420
Phone: 843 767 – 9000
Directions
2010 Program Schedule: Click for month: APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC
April
April 24, 2010
Speakers: Tonya Kappes and Misa Ramirez
Workshop: “Hero & Villain Archetypes”
Location: Coosaw Creek Country Club, Blue Room
Time: 1:00 pm
Workshop Blurb:
Speaker Bios:
Tonya Kappes, the queen, princess, and jester in her family of 4 boys, 2 dogs, and best friend super tiger husband, writes contemporary women’s fiction with quirky characters and quirkier situations. She is also currently working on a cozy mystery called Splitsville.com or The Break-Up Game, depending on who you talk to. Her paying job, the one she is forced to go to every day until she signs with her dream agent and hits the big time, is as a developmental intervention therapist working with kids from birth to three. Being the gun-totin’, Gucci-packin’ high class hillbilly she is, she prefers vodka to beer, can hold her own against anyone on the west side, and most importantly is co-founder of the web site The Naked Hero. www.tonyakappes.com
Misa Ramirez is the author of the Lola Cruz mystery series: Living the Vida Lola (January ’09) and Hasta la Vista, Lola! (2010) from St. Martin’s Press Minotaur. A former middle and high school teacher, and current CEO and CFO for La Familia Ramirez, this blonde-haired, green-eyed, proud to be Latina-by-Marriage girl loves following Lola on her many adventures. Whether it’s contemplating belly button piercings or visiting nudist resorts, she’s always up for the challenge. Misa is hard at work on a new women’s fiction novel, is published in Woman’s World Magazine and Romance Writers Report, and has a children’s book published. www.misaramirez.com
May
May 22, 2010
Speaker: Alex Sokoloff
Workshop: Screenwriting Techniques
Location: Coosaw Creek Country Club, Blue Room
Time: 1:00 pm
Workshop Blurb:
Speaker Bio:
Alexandra Sokoloff is a California native who grew up in both Northern and Southern California as the daughter of scientist and educator parents, which drove her into musical theater at an early age. She acted, sang, danced and played classical piano through the turbulent tween years, and started directing plays at age sixteen, a year she also lived in Istanbul as an AFS exchange student and began college.
After college she moved to Los Angeles, where she has made an interesting living writing novel adaptations and original suspense and horror scripts for numerous Hollywood studios (Sony, Fox, Disney, Miramax), for producers such as Michael Bay, David Heyman, Laura Ziskin and Neal Moritz.
Her adaptation of Sabine Deitmer’s psychological thriller Cold Kisses, co-written with Kimball Greenough and Thomas Reuter, was filmed in Germany by director Carl Schenkel. The Harrowing, her debut ghost story, was nominated for both a Bram Stoker award (horror) and an Anthony award (mystery), for Best First Novel. The book is based on real experiences from her high school and college years. The psychological undercurrents of the story are drawn from her experience teaching emotionally disturbed and incarcerated teenagers in the Los Angeles County prison system.
Her second novel of dark suspense, The Price, explores troubling questions of what people will do for love, or personal survival, in the eerie setting of a labyrinthine Boston hospital. Her new supernatural thriller, The Unseen, centers on a team of psychology researchers who decide to replicate a long-buried poltergeist investigation, and is based on the real-life ESP experiments and poltergeist studies conducted in the Rhine parapsychology department at Duke University.
In her fourth supernatural thriller for St. Martin’s (June 2010), Book of Shadows, a Boston homicide detective teams up with a beautiful, mysterious witch from Salem to solve a Satanic killing.
Alex is also currently writing a paranormal thriller for Harlequin Nocturne, part The Keepers trilogy with Heather Graham and Deborah LeBlanc, out in October 2010.
In her free time (!) Alex enjoys adventure travel and all kinds of dance, which she has also taught, and performs in the all-author Killer Thriller Band, and with Heather Graham’s Slush Pile Players. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, west, and is the founder of WriterAction.com, a large and unruly online community of over 2000 professional screenwriters. She can be found blogging at Murderati.com and teaching her popular workshop on Screenwriting Tricks for Authors on her own blog, The Dark Salon. Sceenwriting Tricks for Authors is now available as a workbook on Kindle. www.alexandrasokloff.com
June
June 26, 2010
Speaker: Claudia Dain
Workshop: Writing Series
Location: Coosaw Creek Country Club, Blue Room
Time: 1:00 pm
Workshop Blurb:
Speaker Bio:
It was while writing a descriptive essay in seventh grade English (that was the assignment, to write a ‘descriptive essay’) that Claudia first fell in love. With descriptive essays. Boys being what they are in seventh grade, there was hardly much choice.
By her ninth grade year, Claudia was spending hours each week in her bedroom writing descriptive essays that heavily featured older boys (eleventh grade). She also practiced her kissing technique on a pole lamp next to her bed. It was less than satisfactory, but the writing was fun.
She attended the University of Southern California as an English major. She’d mastered kissing by this time and writing, strangely enough, was still fun. ‘Strangely’ because while it had become obvious to her that almost everyone enjoyed kissing, it was equally obvious that very few people enjoyed writing. This was as peculiar to her as, well, not enjoying kissing. Clearly, something had to be done.
The idea of combining kissing and writing seemed the obvious course of action. While Claudia does not claim to have invented the romance novel, she certainly has a lot of fun describing kisses and inventing men to bestow them upon. And not a one of her heroes looks remotely like a pole lamp. (And don’t act like one either.)
Claudia was first published in 2000, is a two-time Rita finalist, and a USA Today Bestselling author. Which just goes to prove that you can make a career out of kissing and writing about it. Visit her at www.claudiadain.com
July
July 24, 2010
Speaker: Terry Tucker Ward
Workshop: Setting and Voice
Location: Coosaw Creek Country Club
Time: 1:00 pm
Workshop Blurb:
Speaker Bio:
Terry Ward Tucker lives in Charleston and writes novels about the South, the only landscape of heart she knows. Her latest work, Charleston Kisses (Capulet Publishing), delivers a one-two punch disguised as a French kiss. Its plot confirms a Southern suspicion that “family” and “dysfunction” in the same phrase is redundant. Set in downtown Charleston, Terry has included the city itself in her cast of characters, with love as the tie that binds.
Although she holds a PhD. in reading education with a cognate in English from the University of South Carolina, Terry describes herself these days as “a recovering academic now paddling around in the sweet waters of literary art.”
Her undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is in music with piano and choral emphases, which means fine arts have intermingled in Terry’s life since she wrote her first poem at age eight, and played her first Bach Invention at age eleven.
Her first novel, Elegant Sinners (published by Summerhouse Press) is also a Charleston story. Moonlight and Mill Whistles, her second novel, is set in Lancaster, South Carolina. It received the ForeWord Magazine Silver Book of the Year Award.
Terry’s style of writing reflects her interest in film. Look for short chapters, vivid scenes, fast pace, surprise-by-action, quirky characters, and, in Charleston Kisses, humor on the run. As Winston Groom (author of Forrest Gump) wrote, “Charleston Kisses is a fast-paced romp with a heart of gold. Buy it before the Yankees get there first!” What’s next for Terry? Just wait and see! Visit her at www.terrywardtucker.com
August
August 28, 2010
Speakers: Marcie Jacobs
Workshop: Brainstorming Ideas/ Story Club Game
Location: Coosaw Creek Country Club
Time: 1:00 pm
Workshop Blurb:
Speaker Bio:
StoryClub games™ started with a dream that Marcie Jacobs had one summer night in 2008. “My book club couldn’t agree on what to read. So instead, we decided to write our own story.” That dream turned into a vision of actual story clubs where groups of friends write stories together.
After a lot of research, Marcie and friend, KC Kiner, outlined the process of how-to-play. “We knew a storybook had to be included, as well as, some sort of ’starter’ cards, character cards, and wildcards,” said KC. Eventually the cards were separated into four decks and deemed Story Starters, People, Places, and Things.
Once the first draft was written and handmade cards and a storybook put together, an email was sent inviting friends to a new kind of Girls’ Night. “Deceit, murder, romance and hilarity. There’s no telling where a StoryClub story will go!” The concept not only worked, but it was great fun. Soon after that first StoryClub, graphic designer, Elyse Salamon, joined the team and began making StoryClub games™ look fun, fresh and pretty.
Meanwhile, Marcie and KC researched U.S. manufacturers and negotiated with vendors to get the game produced. Girls’ Night, the inaugural edition of StoryClub games™, debuted in August, 2009. The company has many plans for future editions. “Our hope is to be able to offer something for everyone because it’s not only fun, but StoryClub is a terrific way to connect with others.” twitter.com_jacobs
September
September 25, 2010
Speaker: Cynthia Cooke
Workshop: “Plotting 101”
Location: Coosaw Creek Country Club
Time: 1:00 pm
Workshop Blurb:
Speaker Bio:
Cynthia Cooke is a multi-published, award-winning author. Her Romantic Suspense novels for Intrigue and Love Inspired have been Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice nominees and have won the Inspirational Reader’s Choice Award.
Currently, she is working on paranormals for Silhouette Nocturne. Her Bite, His Magic Touch will be released in December of this year, followed by Black Magic Lover in September of 2010. Visit her at www.cynthiacooke.com
October
October 23, 2010
Speaker: Tracy Montoya
Workshop: TBD
Location: Master Class/Retreat – 622 Ocean Blvd, Isle of Palms, SC 29451
Directions
Time: TBD
Workshop Blurb:
Speaker Bio:
By day, Tracy Montoya telecommutes from Florida as Editor for a crunchy nonprofit in Washington, DC. Her books have won the Daphne du Maurier award, the Beacon Award, and the Golden Quill award for romantic suspense A member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Society of Environmental Journalists, Tracy has written about everything from Booker Prize-winning poet Martín Espada to socially responsible mutual funds to soap opera summits.
Her articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including Hope, Martha Stewart’s Body + Soul, Utne Reader, Satya, YES!, Audubon, and the National Green Pages. Prior to launching her journalism career, she taught in an underresourced school in Louisiana through the AmeriCorps Teach for America program.
Tracy holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Boston College and a B.A. in the same from St. Mary’s University. When she’s not writing, she likes to scuba dive, forget to go to kickboxing class, wallow in bed with a good book, or get out her guitar with a group of friends and pretend she’s Suzanne Vega. Visit her at http://www.tracymontoya.com
November
November 20, 2010
Speaker: Florina Craven
Workshop: Book Trailers and Creating a Web Presence
Location: Coosaw Creek Country Club
Time: 1:00 pm
Workshop Blurb:
Speaker Bio:
Florina Craven has been writing long before she realized it could be turned into a career. Born in Bucharest, Romania, she moved auspiciously to the United States on October 31, 1984. Ms.Craven has been heavily influenced by her Romanian heritage and has traveled extensively throughout Europe. She has also studied in Germany in both High School and College, which has helped add creative fuel to her imagination. Fluent in both Romanian and German, she has been called the “diplomat” of her family. Through her writing, she intends to show the world there is more to Romania than vampire stories and includes bits of folklore into all her work.
She was first published in second grade when a collection of her poems were selected and featured in the Bayridge Courier, a local New York City newspaper. Her love of writing blossomed and her work has since been featured in numerous publications including, most recently, The Jasmine. Her novel, The Keeper, earned first place in the Connecticut chapter of Romance Writer’s of America, Connections Contest for best Paranormal.
A Bachelor’s degree in History and German from Dickinson College has helped Ms. Craven acquire the perfect skill set to research her novels thoroughly. Ms. Craven has held numerous jobs from archive assistant, web designer, and muralist, to working as a staff member for a U.S. Senator in Washington D.C. and even teaching high school students. She is a member of several chapters of Romance Writers of America and for the time being calls South Carolina home. When she is not writing, Ms. Craven is a military wife, mom, and runs her own sculpture business. Visit her at www.florinacraven.com
December
December 18, 2010
Speakers: Amy King and Sharon Lyons
Workshop: “Year in Review”
Location: Coosaw Creek Country Club
Time: 1:00 pm
Workshop blurb:Our Program Directors will review everyone’s goals for 2011.
For more information, please contact the Programs Director.