It’s been three years since the release of my first book, Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Along Side Your Kids from Writer’s Digest Books. And it seems the “place” where writing and motherhood intersect is more popular than ever. I hope when you are considering what to give to mom this Sunday, you will consider a writer-mama-related gift for any mom who is writing-minded. (Read more here.)
I’m very proud to be a hard-working member of the writer mama community in real life and online. Over the past many years, I’ve been writing for publication, teaching other writers, speaking to writers at literary events, publishing high-quality content through my e-zines and blogs, offering scholarships, coaching and training advanced students, hosting book giveaways and live literary events, and befriending writers and authors far and wide.
Today, I work full time, but I started out unpublished and unknown just like all writers do. I worked my way up, clip after clip, book after book, one day at a time. And this is why I never get tired of receiving e-mails from my students saying that they just got their first clip, or they just broke into a market they’d been trying to crack for months, or they just got the book deal, or they heard from a reader that what they’d written really made a difference to them.
No matter how many e-mails like these I get, I still get a huge, “YES!” feeling from every single one. I still feel like what I do is important and worthwhile, and helps women to discover or recover their unique “voice.” I still say to my husband when he gets home from work, “Guess what?” and then I share the news.
My next round of classes for mom writers who want to get published begins on May 12th. Some students get published before the six weeks are up. Others get published and continue to publish after the class wraps up. Some go on to build a career that can support a nonfiction book deal. If you are interested in joining our ranks, please sign up now for classes I’m offering for beginning and intermediate students. I also host an extremely high quality essay-writing class with Abigail Green, whose students positively rave about how good her class is.
Writing & Publishing the Short Stuff: Finally, a writing workshop that fits into the busy lives of moms! This class focuses on getting you into print sooner, rather than later, and without pulling all-nighters or paying a fortune in babysitter fees. You will learn how to create short, easy-to-write articles—a skill that will make it easier to work your way up to longer, more time-consuming articles (like features and profiles) when you’re ready. You will try your pen at tips, fillers, short interviews, list articles, how-tos, and the short personal essays—all within six weeks. And you will learn to submit your work with a basic cover letter. More here…
Personal Essays That Get Published: It pays to get personal these days. Given the popularity of reality shows, blogs, and tell-all books, interest in everyday individuals’ experiences is at an all-time high. Writers are often told, “Write what you know.” What subject can you possibly know better than your own life? Whether you want to pen an introspective essay about your struggle with infertility, a first-person article about your travels in India, or a short humor piece about parenting, your life is a goldmine of rich material that all kinds of publications are pining for. More here…
Pitching Practice, Write Six Queries in Six Weeks: In this writing class, pitching is all you do. Over the course of six weeks, you crank out six queries, which is exactly the kind of practice you need if you want to get into the habit of landing better-paying assignments. After you write and send six queries, you will never again ask, “What makes a strong query?” You will have developed your own style into prototypes that you can use over and over to obtain future assignments. And finding your own rhythm, not someone else’s, is what effective query writing is about. More here…
Writer Mamas, Come and Celebrate Your Proudest Moments! I’ll be hosting the Writer Mama/Author Mama Proudest Moments Celebration on May 14th. If you still haven’t sent your proudest moment in, you still can, I’ll extend the deadline through Friday, May 7th at midnight. Details: Submit the proudest moment of your writing career thus far to me by May 7, 2010 at midnight April 30, 2010. I will then compile them and post them on the party date, which is Friday, May 14, 2010. Keep your “moment” to 200-400 words, single-spaced, put it in a Microsoft Word document, and e-mail it to my new e-mail address (“katzchristina at comcast dot net”), which you should add to your address book, if you haven’t already because I have a new address. More here…
Join the Conversation: If you have not yet signed up for The Prosperous Writer, I encourage you to join the conversation. Each week I write about one of the 52 qualities of prosperous writers and encourage readers to respond with their own thoughts in their blogs. We have explored some compelling topics already but past issues are not archived, so you must subscribe to receive them. Just add your e-mail address to the “subscribe” field in the upper-right hand corner of this page to join us!
Thank you so much, moms, for all of your support over the past many years. I hope to continue to help moms work their way up to the status of “writing professional” for a long, long time to come.
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I'm always so impressed by writers who are also mothers – how you all multi-task like that is beyond me! Hats off!