Great workshops coming soon: How to Build Your Story & Plot Your Novel in Georgetown and Toronto and How to Get Published in Kitchener and Brampton

How to Build Your Story

Plotting novels and Writing short stories

Offered in two locales:

Saturday, January 16, 2016

1:00 – 4:30 p.m.
St. Alban's Church, 537 Main Street, Georgetown, Ontario (In the village of Glen Williams (Map here.)

Fee:  39 paid in advance or 42 if you wait to pay at the door

And

Saturday, January 30, 2016

10:15 a.m. – 3:45 p.m.

Glenview Presbyterian Church, 1 Glenview Ave, Toronto (At Yonge St and Glengrove Ave W, 3 blocks from the Lawrence Ave subway stop. Map here)

Fee:  46 paid in advance by mail or Interac or 49 if you wait to pay at the door

This workshop will show you how writers plot a novel and will give you the best tips on writing short stories. We’ll also look at where to get your stories published and how to win contests. Best yet, you’ll see how to apply the story-building techniques you’ve learned to your own writing,

To reserve a spot now, email: brianhenry@sympatico.ca

How to Get Published

An editor & an agent tell all

Offered in two locales:

Saturday, February 20, 2016

10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Forest Heights Public Library, 251 Fischer-Hallman Road, Kitchener (Map here)

And

Saturday, February 27, 2016

10:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Cyril Clark Branch, Brampton Library, 20 Loafer’s Lake Lane, Brampton, Ontario (Map here)

If you've ever dreamed of becoming a published author, this workshop is for you. We’ll cover everything from getting started to getting an agent, from getting your short pieces published to finding a book publisher, from writing a query letter to writing what the publishers want. Bring your questions. Come and get ready to be published!

Special Option: Participants are invited to bring a draft of a query letter you might use to interest an agent or publisher in your book. You don’t need to bring anything, but if you do, three copies could be helpful.

On February 20 in Kitchener, our guest speaker will be Olga Filina. Olga is an associate literary agent with The Rights Factory, a boutique literary agency that deals in intellectual property rights for entertainment products, including books, comics & graphic novels, film, television, and video games. TRF works directly with publishers, producers, studios, game developers and other rights-buyers in all territories, occasionally in conjunction with local representatives. 

The Rights Factory has an esteemed roster of both fiction and non-fiction writers including Jennifer Close, debut author of the must-read short story collection, Girls In White Dresses; Margot Berwin, author of Hot House Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire (optioned by Julia Roberts in conjunction with Columbia Pictures for film rights), and the forthcoming paranormal romance, Aromata.

Before joining TRF, Olga spent over a decade as a sales manager and book buyer for both national and book store chains and two years as a literary assistant at The Cooke Agency. While Olga will read anything that may set her book clubs on fire, she gravitates towards commercial and historical fiction, great genre fiction in the area of romance and mystery, nonfiction in the field of business, wellness, lifestyle and memoir and young adult and middle grade novels with memorable characters. In her spare time, Olga sits on library boards, organizes literary festivals and runs more book clubs than she can count. For more on The Rights Factory, see here.

To reserve a spot now, email: brianhenry@sympatico.ca

On February 27 in Brampton, our guest speaker will be Martha Magor Webb, a literary agent, director and full partner at Anne McDermid and Associates. The McDermid agency represents literary novelists and commercial novelists of high quality and writers of nonfiction in the areas of memoir, biography, history, literary travel, popular science, investigative journalism and true crime. 

The agency also represents a certain number of children's and YA writers and writers in the fields of science fiction and fantasy.

Martha represents a growing list of writers, focusing on literary fiction, narrative nonfiction (including memoir and true crime) and ideas-driven nonfiction.

Her clients include Michael Crummey (multiple award-winning author of Sweetland), Alison Pick (long-listed for the Booker Prize), Robyn Doolittle (Bestselling author of Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story) Pasha Malla (long-listed for the Giller, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, winner of the Danuta Gleed and the Trillium awards), Damian Tarnopolsky (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Amazon.ca award), Russell Smith, Jessica Grant, (winner of the Amazon.ca First Novel and the Winterset awards), Grace O'Connell, Matt Lennox, Andrew Westoll, and Karen Le Billon, whose first book French Kids Eat Everything sold into thirteen countries and translated into ten languages.

To reserve a spot now, email: brianhenry@sympatico.ca

Workshop leader Brian Henry has been a book editor and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He publishes Quick Brown Fox, Canada’s most popular blog for writers, teaches creative writing at Ryerson University and has led workshops everywhere from Boston to Buffalo and from Sarnia to Saint John. But his proudest boast is that he has helped many of his students get their first book published and launch their careers as authors.

See Brian’s full schedule here, including writing workshops and creative writing courses in Algonquin Park, Alton, Barrie, Bracebridge, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Georgetown, Guelph, Hamilton, Ingersoll, Kingston, Kitchener, London, Midland, Mississauga, Newmarket, Orillia, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, St. John, NB, Sudbury, Thessalon, Toronto, Windsor, Halton, Ingersoll, Kitchener-Waterloo, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.