First Place: Reach for the Heights with Your Pikes Peak Writers Fiction Contest Entry

Tuesday, September 21, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

PPW Contest Coordinator Chris Scena will talk about contests in general, the rules and guidelines of the PPW contest, how to make this a successful contest experience, and judging your judges.

About Chris:
Chris Scena writes fantasy short stories and novels when not taking care of his three boys, three cats, dog and loving wife.  He lives in Littleton and works as a Technical Analyst by day.

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)

Finding Your Own Unique Voice

Tuesday, August 17, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Sometimes you just have to break the rules. That’s what former Colorado resident and first-time author Deborah Coonts discovered on the way to becoming an “overnight success.” Join us for our August Write Brain as Deb tells us how she used her own strengths—her wicked humor and off-beat view of the world--to create Lucky O’Toole, the in-charge but vulnerable heroine in her first Las Vegas adventure, Wanna Get Lucky?  She’ll also show us how to find our own unique voices, and once we’ve found them, how to position our novels in the marketplace.

About Deborah:
Deborah Coonts is proof positive that sex sells and persistence pays off. A Texas girl, she spent years being someone else—an accountant, a business owner, a lawyer and a pilot. But through it all she wrote. After two practice novels and a humor column, she wrote Wanna Get Lucky?, the first in a series published by Forge Books--think Sex in the City meets Elmore Leonard in Vegas. Sexy, wry, romantic and slightly naughty, mixed with a little mayhem, Lucky is taking the publishing world by storm. Watch out, Janet Evanovich!

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

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 .