We're very excited about the
writing workshops and writing-related panels that we'll be offering this fall. We've been expanding our workshops every year for the past several years, and our 2008 schedule includes 11 workshops on writing flash fiction, creating solid plots, creating and writing comic book series, creating characters and believable dialog, world-building, writing openings, and writing interactive narrative and designing video games. We've even got a workshop on effective blogging, and we've got professional novelist/writing professor Tim Waggoner and book editor/literary agent Paula Guran lined up to critique your novel packages, novel excerpts, and short stories.
In addition to the workshops, we also plan to offer panels on writing paranormal romance and romantic fantasy, writing horror, writing genre poetry, writing series novels, and co-authoring fiction. We've also got panels of interest to more advanced writers, such as "Book Promotion 101", "Finding An Agent", "Self-Editing", and "Survival Skills for Writers".
Our writing programming is intended for short story writers, poets, and novelists who write high fantasy, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, paranormal fiction, horror, science fiction, slipstream, and cross-genre work. Our programming should also be helpful to artists who create their own independent comic books, mangas, and webcomics and who want to improve the quality of their dialog, plotting and storytelling. We've tried to include a mix of topics that will interest both novice writers and those who have begun to publish.
Aside from the chance to spend a weekend working on your writing, Context 21 is an ideal place to network with other writers and editors and enjoy yourself at parties. It's also a good place to connect with writers who may introduce you to ongoing writers' critique groups or who may want to start a writers' group with you.
We're hoping more college students participate in the conference, particularly students from Ohio State University, Ohio University, Capital University, Ohio Dominican, and Columbus State Community College. While several area universities offer creative writing programs -- the Antioch Writer's Workshop and OSU's MFA program are particularly well-respected -- university creative writing classes often fail to serve the needs of genre writers. A student may take several creative writing classes without ever getting any real sense of how to take a story, poem, or novel to market and actually get it published.
We're also hoping to attract more writers from outside Central Ohio. We're ideally located for travel from Ohio cities like Cleveland and Dayton but we're also a fairly easy drive for horror, fantasy, and scifi writers from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, and Kentucky -- writers who may find it too expensive to travel outside the Midwest to writing workshops on the East Coast or West Coast.
The workshops at Context are intended to give intensive, practical advice to genre writers who want to publish their work in magazines and anthologies that pay professional rates or to book publishers that pay professional advances.
Beginning genre writers often attend workshops such as the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy workshop or the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop or the Borderlands Press Boot Camp. While these are excellent programs, they are often too expensive for some writers, and they're far from Ohio.
We ultimately hope to make the Context Writing Workshops a viable alternative to other genre workshops and to establish it as the premiere workshop weekend in the Midwest.
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