By the popular vote of our members, our meeting on Sunday June 24th will be craft and business working groups! PLEASE bring your pages to be critiqued, your query letters to be workshopped, your marketing plans for your upcoming book launch, your newsletter and FB ad questions, and of course all of your knowledge to help your fellow writers. Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

This fascinating session uses basic negotiation theory and dispute resolution principles to create a framework for intensifying your novel’s conflict. We’ll start off with an explanation of the six archetypal approaches to negotiation. Then we’ll consider the characters and situations where we can most effectively and realistically deploy each of these approaches. Last, we’ll use specific examples from popular fiction to illustrate how certain negotiating styles and combinations can prolong and heighten conflicts between your characters, while others can help bring about a satisfying resolution.

BIO:

An insightful, detail-oriented lawyer with a passion for creative problem-solving, Alisha Bloom is the founder and principal attorney of Versant Legal, a boutique law firm that provides outside general counsel services to companies of all sizes. Drawing on more than fifteen years of in-house and law firm experience, Alisha specializes in contracts, software licensing, dispute resolution, and HIPAA and healthcare compliance. She also provides literary attorney services, assisting creatives and literary agencies with licensing and protecting intellectual property. In addition, she teaches mediation as an adjunct professor at New England Law and is a trained community mediator.

In her previous career as an economic consultant, Alisha analyzed intellectual property damages and the impacts of mergers on competition. She received Columbia Law School’s highest academic honor and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University, also graduating with honors. When she’s not lawyering, she writes award-winning contemporary romance under a pen name and reads three books a week.

Do you constantly feel like you don’t know what to post on your Instagram? Do you sit in front of a stock site with no direction on the image to choose? Do you find yourself trying to set up a shot with your phone, only to have a weird shadow or a blurry subject matter?

In this presentation, Katana Collins will teach you how to plan out a month’s worth of social media content. You’ll see detailed outlines of how Katana strategizes her posts to match her ideal reader. You’ll learn how to weave in stock photography to your posts, how to create engaging captions to increase your engagement on Instagram and Facebook. And you’ll get a hands-on demonstration of how to be a better photographer with easy tips and tricks to style and take professional-looking photos on your PHONE (not a professional photographer? No problem!). You’ll leave the workshop with a printed outline of steps for the month and photographs in your phone, ready to post (Yep… if you feel up for it, we’ll be setting up photographs for everyone to take! Katana encourages you to bring copies of your own paperbacks to photograph in the flatlays!).

But most importantly? You’ll learn how to do schedule all these images and posts in only ONE day of work. One day of work for an entire month’s worth of social media. It frees you up to write. It frees you up to live.

BIO:

For as long as she can remember, Katana Collins always had one of two things in hand—a pen or a camera. And now, after twenty-nine years, she is lucky enough to have two of the best jobs ever—writing sexy romances, and also photographing sexy boudoir portraits. After writing for years, Katana finally found her niche with hot paranormal and sexy contemporary romances. When not writing, reading or photographing, you can find Katana in Brooklyn with her husband and two dogs where she drinks copious amounts of coffee and red wine and actively volunteers her time and photography expertise to local animal shelters.