When she was only nine, Dayani Baldelomar left her Nicaraguan village with nothing more than a change of clothes. Her neighbor, Yadira Castellón, also migrated from the mountains. Driven by hope for a better future for their children, Dayani and Yadira invent jobs in Managua’s spreading markets and dumps. But a swelling tide of family crises and environmental calamities threaten to break their toehold in the city.

Ginny’s voice came to me in a mysterious way, one that I’m still trying to comprehend.  In this talk we’ll explore the nature of voice, narration, and the quiet but calculating moves of the subconscious.

Characters are the beating heart of a story. Learn how to add character development through dialogue, action, and description so that your characters jump right off the page and pull your readers into the story.

Authors often have an ethereal, tricky to explain vision for their dream book project and book designers are tasked with managing those expectations. Learn to communicate realistic goals by balancing marketing demands with editor requests, and editor revisions. Actually illustrating a captivating, fun book cover might be the easy part!

In my stories, there are no epic wars or fate-of-the-universe events; instead, they're tales of family and friendship and humor that just happen to have some time travel or an apocalypse. -Mike Chen