I took a 6-week online writing workshop, Writing the Other, from K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl last year. For me, the class was helpful, supportive, and challenging.
- I improved my writing
- I started considering aspects of storytelling that I hadn’t looked at before
- I learned more about the roles of sensitivity readers
- I met a bunch of interesting people
- I became even more frustrated with the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” crowd. Do the work. Make your choices. Accept the consequences. Do more work.
- I wrote a story that became my first short story sale!
You get the idea. I strongly recommend that workshop, but I’d also like to draw your attention to the Master Classes. These are focused, live, online workshops of just a few hours–not a six-week commitment–that go more deeply into specific topics. These include writing Native American characters, writing comics/graphic novels, writing asexual characters, writing deaf and blind characters, and other topics. They all look excellent to me! (And the cost is less than one night at a typical convention hotel.)
If the workshops are impossible for you right now, consider signing up for updates and checking out their extremely useful Resources page. There are some excellent book recommendations, including Writing the Other and Invisible, and there are also lots of links at the bottom to go through. In addition, there’s a scholarship available for each workshop–but hurry, the deadline to apply for the scholarship is August 13th.
Registration opened just a couple of days ago. The earliest workshop is on August 24th, and the latest one is on September 23rd. If you’re looking to level up, this is a great way to do it.