The WWS Submission Conference is a one day, online event on Saturday, August 8, 2020, beginning at 10 am PT. I'll be appearing on the panel entitled "Empowering your Community: A Talk with WWS Chapter Leads" at 2:15 pm.

This is a topic near and dear to me, as I'm a strong supporter in the importance of writer communities for keeping up motivation and perseverance in a writer's career. To that end, I have been a chapter lead with Women Who Submit (WWS) for the past few years, running one of their Bay Area chapters.

What's WWS? Well, they are the hosts of this conference and a national organization devoted to empowering women and nonbinary writers by creating physical and virtual spaces for sharing information, supporting and encouraging submissions to literary journals, and clarifying the submission and publication process.

If you fit those criteria: a writer who identifies as a woman and/or nonbinary, you are welcome to attend this free conference! Tickets will be limited to 100 participants, and registration closes on Thursday. You can register by completing this Google form. Here's the schedule for the conference!

• 10am-11am: New Member Orientation with WWS Director, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
• 11:15am-12:15pm: Demystifying Top Tier Submissions with Cynthia Guardado, Anita Gill, Hazel Kight Witham, moderated by Lituo Huang
• 12:15pm-1pm: Zoom Lunch
• 1pm-2pm: Magazine and Journal Editors Share Best Practices with Cassandra Lane, Raina León, Muriel Leung, moderated by Ramona Pilar
• 2:15-3:15: Empowering your Community: A Talk with WWS Chapter Leads Desiree Kannel, Rebecca Gomez Farrell, and moderated by Ashaki M. Jackson

I am so excited for this conference! I love watching WWS expand its outreach, as it has done over the last several years. The more of us getting our worked published, the better! And supporting each other through the often disheartening submission process is one way to do that.

Tomorrow afternoon, at 3:30pm PDT, I'll be moderating and participating in the "Forming and Sustaining a Successful Writing or Critique Group" panel at the 2020 SFWA Nebula Conference, which of course, is taking place online.

The panel topic is one that's dear to my heart, both in terms of becoming a better writer and in terms of building writer communities that can support us through this often challenging career:

Writing is often a solitary endeavor–and with the current pandemic, it has become even more so. Writing and critique groups don’t eliminate the aspects of writing that can only be done solo, but a good group can serve as both a social support net as well as providing trusted feedback. Panelists will discuss the factors that go into building a successful group, both online and in-person, and what they’ve learned about keeping one going.

My fellow panelists include A. T. Greenblatt, A.C. Wise, Vylar Kaftan, and Curtis C. Chen, which makes the majority of them finalists for this year's Nebula Awards, the ceremony for which takes place tonight at 5pm PDT. Regardless of whether they win or lose, they are sure to contribute valuable insight to this topic.

If you are an attendee of #Nebulas2020, you can join us at the link below tomorrow. The panel will only be available to attendees of the conference at this time.

https://events.sfwa.org/events/forming-and-sustaining-a-successful-writing-or-critique-group/

I hope to "see" you there!