Friday:
9:30-10 AM: Registration and meet & greet with tea & coffee! Conference Room
10 AM-11:50 AM: Critique group meeting 1:
Carl Engle-Laird: Board Room
Diana Pho: Hospitality Suite
Wendy Wagner & David Levine: Conference Room (or Patio if weather cooperates)
Curtis Chen & Cat Rambo: Breakfast Area
Jennie Goloboy: Conference Room
12 PM -12:30 PM: Welcome & Itinerary for the Week with Cascade board, president & VP – Conference Room
Come hear our schedule, our plans, our mission statement and our code of conduct.
12:30-1:50 PM: Lunch on your own or
12:30-1:50 PM: Lunch with the Novel Doctor, Axe & Arrow Restaurant, Randy Henderson
If you’re hungry both for novel advice & food, have some lunch with Randy Henderson, author of the Finn Fancy series and fully credentialed Novel Doctor, who is happy to offer support & a listening ear to discuss any story issues you’re having.
2:00-2:50 PM: Integrating Character, Plot, and Worldbuilding, David Levine, Board Room
Many writers are naturals with characters or worldbuilding, but struggle with plot; others have no difficulty plotting but find their characters flat. Hugo-winning writer David D. Levine shows you his process for developing characters, plot, and world simultaneously and cohesively.
2 PM-2:50 PM: Editing & Being Edited, Wendy Wagner, Carl Engle-Laird, Diana Pho Conference Room
What does an editor do? What’s editing like at a big publishing house, a short story magazine, the game industry, and as a freelance editor? What do “dev edit,” “line edit” and “copyedit” mean? Our panelists explain editing from all sides.
3 PM-4:50 PM: Critique group meeting 2
Carl Engle-Laird: Board Room
Diana Pho: Hospitality Suite
Wendy Wagner & David Levine: Conference Room (or Patio if weather cooperates)
Curtis Chen & Cat Rambo: Breakfast Area
Jennie Goloboy: Conference Room
5-7 PM: Dinner on your own
7 PM-7:50 PM: Writing Humor w/ Randy Henderson & Curtis Chen, Board Room
When is a door not a door? When it’s Randy Henderson and Curtis Chen, teaching you how to write humor. Why did the chicken cross the road? To learn from our guests how to use humor to reveal character, accent dialogue, and keep the reader guessing. What is love? Baby don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. No more.
7 PM-7:50 PM: Pitches, Query Letters & Standing Out In The Slush Pile, Spencer Ellsworth, Wendy Wagner, Conference Room
Test-drive your pitches! Our panelists explain what gets through that infamous slush pile, from first reader to agent to editor, and will help attendees develop their pitches before pitching or sending queries.
8 PM- 8:50 PM: Getting To The Finish Line, Cat Rambo, Conference Room
Do you have trouble saying goodbye–or getting through the middle? Cat Rambo will show you strategies to get from a kernel of an idea, a stalled beginning, a soggy middle, or a dead-at-three-quarters to the end.
8 PM – 8:50 PM: – Writing A (Mostly) Painless Synopsis, Wendy Wagner & Spencer Ellsworth, Board Room
If you’ve ever been told to write a synopsis, you’ve also likely torn your hair out. Wendy Wagner and Spencer Ellsworth will show you how to build up a synopsis by understanding your own drafting and revision process.
9 PM-Midnight: Night Owl Writing Time! – Conference Room
Saturday:
9 AM-10 AM: Meet & greet with tea & coffee! – Oak room
10 AM-11:50 AM: Critique group meeting 3:
Carl Engle-Laird: Board Room
Diana Pho: Hospitality Suite
Wendy Wagner & David Levine: Conference Room (or Patio if weather cooperates)
Curtis Chen & Cat Rambo: Breakfast Area
Jennie Goloboy: Conference Room
12 PM-1:50 PM: Lunch on your own
2 PM-2:50 PM: Q&A With Carl Engle-Laird, Diana Pho and Jennie Goloboy
Join Tor/ Tor.com editors Carl Engle-Laird and Diana Pho, and agent Jennie Goloboy, editors and agents to many Hugo, Nebula, Lambda, Aurora and Arthur C. Clarke award-winning and nominated authors, and pick their brains about all of those questions you’ve been dying to ask about working in publishing, their thoughts on writing, and quippy comments on all things geeky. Attendance may or may not cause existential brain explosions!
3 PM-3:50 PM: Respect The Hustle, Spencer Ellsworth, Cat Rambo & Jaym Gates, Conference Room
Selling a short story, a book or an article will net you a paycheck–but how do you turn that into income? How do you take freelancing seriously, and combine fiction writing with other ventures to make your writing and editing skills bankable? In other words, how do you get the hustle, keep that hustle, and respect that hustle?
3 PM-3:50 PM: Jennie Goloboy Pitch Sessions – Board room
4 PM-4:50 PM: The Long Game, John Pitts, Curtis Chen, Jaym Gates, Conference Room
So you want to write a series, or work on some kind of serial fiction, or shared universe? Let our seasoned veterans tell you about the process of planning out multiple books, selling those books, and generally thinking about long-form fiction, whether it be as a big shared universe or a long-running series.
4 PM-4:50 PM: Jennie Goloboy Pitch Sessions – Board room
5-5:50 PM: Good Mental Health For Writers (And Characters), Mindi Welton-Mitchell, Liz Coleman, Board Room
How can a profession like writing–with its attendant worries, isolation, and unstable income–actually help your mental health? And in turn, how can it help you write about characters who grow from a bad state of mind to a better one, especially while you’re working on yourself?
5-5:50 PM: Characters You Care About, John Pitts, Conference Room
What makes readers care about a character? What brings a character into your heart as a living, breathing person, and how do you keep characters from being too passive, too off-putting or too white-bread? John Pitts, author of the Sarah Beauhall series, takes you through the creation of a complex character who pull you into the story.
7:30 PM-11 PM: PUB NIGHT! Lovecraft Brewing, 275 5th St, Ste 101, Bremerton, WA 98337
Come across the street to Lovecraft Brewing to drink, eat, buy books from the Liberty Bay Books table, and hear our panelists read from their work! Come early for dinner if you want!
Sunday:
9 AM-10 AM: Meet & greet with tea & coffee! – Conference room
10 AM-10:50 AM: Critique group one-on-one meetings:
Carl Engle-Laird: Board Room
Diana Pho: Hospitality Suite
Wendy Wagner & David Levine: Conference Room (or Patio if weather cooperates)
Curtis Chen & Cat Rambo: Breakfast Area
Jennie Goloboy: Conference Room
11 AM – 11:50 AM: Decolonizing, Representation, And Telling Better Stories – Diana Pho, Curtis Chen, Carl Engle-Laird
Strongly recommended for all attendees! We often hear about “diversity” and see panels on “diversity 101,” but that’s only the beginning of tackling the problems with under-representation in fiction. How can we decolonize and deal with some of the more toxic ideas that have been folded into fiction? How can we get rid of myths like “the frontier,” “the Great Game,” “the noble savage” and others? How does a “woke” person confront the aspects of their work that may be harmful?
12 PM-1:50 PM: Lunch on your own
2 PM-2:50 PM: Workshop wrap-up, board meeting & feedback! – Conference room
