Pikes Peak Writers Sizzling Summer Series

Putting on the Moves: A Writer's Guide to Body Language & Styles

Tuesday, July 20, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Learn all about body language with sociologist and writer Morgen Leigh Thomas. If you’re tired of your characters doing nothing but grinning, grimacing and raising their eyebrows, give them something new to do! Join us to uncover a more complete repertoire of human gestures and expressions.

NEW INFO:  Participants should bring about 5 pages of a work in progress, preferably with dialogue in their sample.

Morgen Leigh began fabricating stories when she was three-years-old. At the age of six she began putting her dark flights of fancy down on paper. A voracious reader as a youngster, Morgen spent entirely too much time with her nose stuck in a book and playing with the wood elves in her expansive backyard. She also enjoyed scaring the hell out of friends and family with her unsettling, dark tales. At the impressionable age of 11 she read Sybil and promptly struck out on a quest to learn more about the human psyche and the darker aspects of human behavior. This quest led her to pursue a double major in psychology and sociology at the University of Colorado, where she obtained a masters degree in sociology with an emphasis in social psychology and deviance. Morgen's fiction and creative non-fiction stories have appeared in Twilight  Times, Apollo’s Lyre, The S’Peaker, Lorelei Signal, and Mystic Signals. She is currently finishing a second novel and watching her teenage son eat everything in sight.

Nonmembers may attend one Write Brain session for free. Subsequent sessions are $10.

Write Brain Sessions are held at Cottonwood Center for the Arts, 427 E. Colorado Avenue, Studio A. Visitor’s  parking is in the large lot on the east side of the Cottonwood building.

Get map.  

If you would like to participate in any Write Brain session, PLEASE RSVP AND INCLUDE YOUR DAYTIME CONTACT INFORMATION. This does not commit you to attending, but enables us to prepare enough materials for expected attendees, and importantly, it gives us a way to contact you if we have an emergency change to the Write Brain session, such as a postponement due to weather. We will make every attempt to post changes to the PPW Yahoo loop and our Web site, but to be ensured of notification you must RSVP to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

RSVP Today (Event policies)

Pikes Peak Writers Sizzling Summer Series

Physical Fitness for Flabby Fiction

Tuesday, June 15, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

In June’s Write Brain we’ll join author Linda Berry as she shows us how to energize our prose. We’ll eliminate sloppy and redundant language, develop weight-bearing metaphors and strong similes, improve overall tone, and pack power into every word. (Muscle takes up less space than fat, after all, and carries more weight.) Using guidelines in the handout, “Flee Flabby Formulations,” we’ll edit and improve a sample of really bad writing. Attendees are encouraged to bring two pages or more of their own writing to work on during the workshop.

Linda Berry’s first published fiction was a children’s story in a Sunday school handout magazine, for which she was paid a half cent per word. Since then she’s published more short fiction for children and adults, plays, poetry, preschool curricula, craft articles, a newspaper entertainment column, and six Trudy Roundtree Mysteries. She’s a member of Colorado Dramatists, the Denver Woman’s Press Club, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and Sisters in Crime. She lives in Aurora with her husband, Jerry, and describes herself as an arts activist who tries to organize her life around theatre tickets. Check her Web site at www.ogeechee.avigne.org (or Google her).

Nonmembers may attend one Write Brain session for free. Subsequent sessions are $10.

Write Brain Sessions are held at Cottonwood Center for the Arts, 427 E. Colorado Avenue, Studio A.

Visitor’s parking is in the large lot on the east side of the Cottonwood building.

Get map.

RSVP Today (Event policies)

If you would like to participate in any Write Brain session, PLEASE RSVP AND INCLUDE YOUR DAYTIME CONTACT INFORMATION. This does not commit you to attending, but enables us to prepare enough materials for expected attendees, and importantly, it gives us a way to contact you if we have an emergency change to the Write Brain session, such as a postponement due to weather. We will make every attempt to post changes to the PPW Yahoo loop and our Web site, but to be ensured of notification you must RSVP to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Don't Forget!

May PPW Fundraiser Book Signing May 29 - 30 2:00 - 4:00 (both days)

Barnes & Noble, 1565 Briargate Blvd. Colorado Springs (get map)

Please come and help us raise money for the 2011 PPW Conference Scholarship Fund at the book signing at the Briargate Barnes and Noble store on May 29 and 30 at 2 p.m.

Here's what we'll have:

May 29:

Book signings by Kirk Farber, with Postcards a Dead Girl, and Nancy Williams (Wisgirda), with Hawkmoon (from 2-4)

Plus a Workshop by Ron Heimbecher, on Social Media: Connecting Authors and Audiences (from 2-3)

May 30:

Book signing by Carol Hightshoe with Chaos Challenged and other books (from 2-4)

Plus a Workshop by Carol on Suspending Disbelief (from 2-3)

When you purchase anything from the Briargate Barnes & Noble store in Colorado springs from May 29 to June 2 (Wednesday), let them know that you're participating in the PPW Fundraiser OR show them our voucher (download vouchers). If you don't have a voucher, the clerks at the registers should have the codes at their registers regardless.

Depending on how much money we raise (with more money getting a better percentage), PPW gets at least 10% of the total.

Consider buying a mocha at the cafe--that counts, too.

Thank you so much, and our scholarship recipients thank you, too :)

DeAnna Knippling, PPW Published Author Connection

May Open Meeting

This event is 100% free and 100% open to the public.

Join us at Cottonwood Center for the Arts (get map) on Saturday, May 22, from 1:00 to 4:00 pm.
Bonnie Ramthun will be presenting her workshop, Dismembering the Best-Seller, from 1:00 to 3:00 pm, and a social hour will follow.

In fact, don't just join us. Bring friends and family along, whether they are PPW members or not.

Dismembering the Best-seller:

How do best selling novelists construct their stories?  Discover how a best-selling novel is put together by taking it apart.  Best-sellers such as The Silence of the Lambs and The DaVinci Code will be dismembered and their secrets revealed.  You will learn how to critically examine novels and understand the strategies that are common to best-sellers, and how to use their strategies in your own writing to create a more powerful novel.  Fast-paced, humorous and informative, this workshop will give you some delightfully sharp instruments for your writer's toolbox.

To help with our planning, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it