Off to Utah

I leave tomorrow for a week teaching a class on writing middle-grade fiction at the wonderful Workshop on Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers, held this year in Sandy, Utah, organized by the brilliant and hilariously funny Carol Lynch Williams, one of my most favorite authors in the whole wide world.

Each day I'll teach a four-hour class in the morning. It sounds harder than it is, because all of my fourteen students already have novels-in-progress, and the bulk of class time will be spend in a supportive critique group session on the manuscripts submitted. In the afternoon, the various authors on the faculty will give breakout session talks; mine is a reprise of a talk I gave for a local SCBWI conference a couple of years ago. Here's the blurb I'm using to advertise it.

Most of us hear a chorus of hideous voices in our heads trying to shout down the voices of the characters in our stories: “I should be cleaning my house instead”; “This idea has already been done before a thousand times”; “It’s impossible to get published”; “My mother will die if she reads this”; “Kids today don’t ready, anyway.” Claudia Mills promises to offer snappy comebacks and brilliant refutations to silence these devious, disillusioning, deafening voices forever.

There will also be time to hang out with the other faculty members, talk shop, sign books, hug old friends, meet new ones. I'm ready!