Conference Hacks if You Want to be a Better Writer
For all of you who are asking, “what makes a good writer?” “Can I become a better writer” or “Can I be a better writer?” Yes you can – just like any business or skill, it takes dedication, hard work, some training, practice and study. And lots of reading and writing. I highly recommend, as one of your first steps (especially if you’re asking, “I want to be a writer, where do I start”), to join local writers groups and attend a good writer’s conference every year. You may have to try several writer’s groups until you find just the right fit. There are major writer’s conferences all over the country, and the Pikes Peak Writer’s Conference in Colorado Springs is considered one of the best writers conferences.
Here’s several hacks to help you become a better writer and attend writers conferences.
Originally, I felt I shouldn’t go to the big writer’s conference, held every Spring in Colorado Springs, until my first novel was completely
finished (something the conference lists as a requirement for pitching).
So I missed several years and kept putting it off, thinking “next year
I’ll be able to afford it and hopefully my story will be done.”
Then a writer friend urged me to go, even if my novel wasn’t finished.
Because going to conference will grow your training in the craft so
much, it’s important to start going, every year if possible, as soon as
possible. It will help you be a better writer.
Well, she gave me the bug and I wanted to go. But that year, 2017, the conference was already a month away and I couldn’t come up with the money on time. So my writing friends gave me this vital advice (and here are other conference hacks, too):
- If you can’t afford to attend the conference, at least show up to Barcon. Barcon is when everyone hangs out around the bar Friday and Saturday evenings, networking and having a good time. I had friends who were attending, so I showed up Saturday night, met up with my friends, then started circling the room, meeting and networking with writers, published authors and agents. I prayed and utilized the Law of Attraction before entering, asking God to direct me to meet exactly who I should. First, I met a published author who told me he wasn’t able to get published until he read and applied the principles in My Story Can Beat Up Your Story. So I put that on my list to read and apply to my revision process (I wasn’t quite finished with my novel yet). Then the magic moment happened. My friend from my
first writer’s group, who knew my story well, introduced me to the agent he thought would be interested in my story. I spoke with her
briefly, got to pitch my story, and she immediately asked me to send her the full manuscript! This was a miracle in itself. She was the first agent I ever pitched to, she was the only one to immediately catch the vision of my unusual book (an idea that’s never been done before), and eventually Natalie Lakosil became my agent. At the moment, though, I told her nervously that I would get the story finished as quickly as I could. “Take your time,” she told me. In other words, don’t rush it, do it right, and send it when it’s done. I had no idea it would take me another year and a quarter to get through the revision process, after finishing the first draft. (You know how it is, you have to spend time earning money and work on your writing when you can.) But in the end, after pitching and querying my story to quite a few agents and receiving several rejections, Natalie became my agent. I sent her the full manuscript, just as she asked, with an email: remember me? She did. - Apply for Scholarships. For the 2018 Pikes Peak Writer’s Conference, I was able to apply for scholarship and received a partial one, covering two-thirds of the cost. My extended family helped provide the rest of the money, and I was able to attend the conference, including the Thursday Prequel (which I highly recommend). For receiving the partial scholarship, I wrote a blog post for their website and volunteered at the conference, which was fun.
- Speaking of Volunteering… One of my writer friends signs up as a volunteer every year for conference, reducing her costs by about half!
- Budget and Plan to Attend Conference every year. And while you’re at it, attend as many of the monthly workshops and
classes as you can. I had tried to become a freelance writer on Upwork, with no success, until I attended a workshop on being a freelance writer. The tips and tricks I learned there got me my first contract the following month and I’m now working as a freelance writer – ghost-writing, to be exact. I LOVE it and am earning a decent income as a novelist before my own novel is even published. - At Conference, stay at the hotel if possible. In 2018, I was there on scholarship and couldn’t afford any extras. At the 2019 conference, I was able to plan and budget and work it out to not only attend extra activities (like the Write Drunk, Edit Sober session to raise scholarship money and also got my author head shots photographed at a discount), I was able to, last minute, book the hotel to stay on site. This was so worth it – it allowed me to keep my extra stuff in my room (like Saturday night’s dress-up clothes for the banquet), take quiet rest breaks when needed (between the end of classes and dinner), and, most importantly, stay up as late as I wanted at Barcon, networking.
It was so great to be able to have a drink or two and not worry about
driving or having to get a ride home on someone else’s schedule. - At Barcon, branch out and meet as many people as you can.
Don’t fall into the trap of just hanging out with your current set of
writer friends. Get a drink, be bold, join clusters and groups, meet new members of your growing tribe, ask published authors lots of questions, rub shoulders with New York Times Best-Setlling authors. I did, it was easy and fun, and they love it too.
Do you know some hacks to become a better writer? Have you attended a writer’s conference or local writers groups? Do you have tips on what makes a good writer? I’d love to hear them – let’s collaborate – and leave your comments below. 
Make Money Online Easy – the Wealthy Affiliate University Review
Nowadays we have more opportunities than ever to build various sources of income, especially with the internet and a global market. This also means that there are more scams out there than ever – how does one know which program to trust and which to not? In this post I’ll talk about what everyone’s searching for – can you make money online easy? Well, that depends on how you define easy. Here I’ll give my Wealthy Affiliate Review.
PLEASE NOTE: There is a new scam out there calling themselves “Wealthy Affiliates.” Note they have an “s” at the end. I’ve looked at them, and from what I and my friend can tell, they are totally a scam. The legit one is the Wealthy Affiliate University, also known simply as Wealthy Affiliate. Please note the logo for Wealthy Affiliate. This one is legit, whether you sign up primarily to take advantage of the Wealthy Affiliate University online training, or want to use their awesome SEO tools to build any kind of website you want.
For myself, I started with Wealthy Affiliate in order to learn affiliate marketing as a blogger, since I’m building my career as a writer. But then, I decided to also use their SEO and website building tools and training to launch my own author website and blog, since I’m already a member there, and my first novel is being pitched by my agent as I write this in 2019.
Is Wealthy Affiliate University a Scam?
Please note again – if the company has an “s” at the end, as in “Wealthy Affiliates,” then yes, they are a scam as far as I can tell.
But Wealthy Affiliate University, aka Wealthy Affiliate (in the singular), is legit. I’m writing about this right now because they’re about to have their annual Black Friday sale, and this is the time to go premium with them.
One of the things I love about Wealthy Affiliate is that you can actually try them out for free. You can even launch some actual websites for free with their platform. They provide all the training you’ll need to build a successful affiliate marketing business through their Wealthy Affiliate University. The platform keeps track of your training and there are step-by-step tasks to help anyone become successful.
If you like the program, you can become a member for $49/month. This includes all of the training – and there are many various types and levels of training – as well as hosting up to fifty websites with them. They provide everything to easily buy your own domain name for any of your sites, if you wish (or use their free tool instead), and host your sites with them. I’ve now followed their instructions and have set up three different websites. They include all sorts of valuable extras with your websites with them, too, to help optimize your sites and keep them protected. Their tech support is unparalleled.
The best thing is the community – you will meet, follow and be followed by all sorts of wonderful people all over the world doing this along with you. Everyone is so friendly and supportive, it’s so awesome. My own mentor recently spent a month or more in Thailand while doing his laptop work from there – so cool.
So now with the Black Friday deal, it’s the time to purchase an annual membership – instead of the $49/month or the $359 a year, during the Black Friday sale you can get an annual premium membership for only $299 for the entire year. Once you get it on this price, you get to keep this low price from then on. Now this is a deal worth taking!
Make Money Online Easy
Is it easy? No, not really. For anyone who is serious about building a legit business, it takes lots of time, energy, focus and hard work. Will it pay off? Absolutely. There are so many successful marketers in the Wealthy Affiliate community to help and encourage us along the way – some of them are consistently making well over $2,000/month, some are at three figures a year. But this is from consistent, ongoing effort – going through all the training and spending at least a couple of hours a day consistently. Keep in mind, when you first start any business, you quite often have to put in a year or more of free work as the owner. It’s the same with affiliate marketing. You may start making some residual income in less than a year, or it may take more – it depends on you, how hard you work, how consistent you are, how focused you stay on the goal, how many articles you publish each week, etc.
You don’t have to be an experienced writer to do this successfully, the Wealthy Affiliate University gives you all the practical training you need to be successful. It just all depends on you.
Review of Wealthy Affiliate University
This is my review of Wealthy Affiliate University. I’ve been with them for over a year and just started making a tiny amount of money on my affiliate niche website. The reason I haven’t yet made more is because I’m simultaneously building my career as a freelance and novel writer. I need immediate income, so most of my focus and efforts have been on that. I finished my first novel, queried it out, and got an agent three months later. Then I spent time with agent, sending it back and forth as we honed and polished and edited my manuscript until it was perfect. Now she’s pitching it to publishers.
In the meantime, I got the idea to use Wealthy Affiliate to also build my author website. So I’ve started that and have been building up that site, not so much as an affiliate site (though I do recommend books found on Amazon once in a while on the craft of writing, etc.), but as my main author site. I’ve been using the SEO, research and training at the Wealthy Affiliate University to help me with my author site.
Since then, I became a Norwex consultant, mainly to get the awesome products at a discount, so then, I started a life hack website to specifically blog about all the great Norwex products as well as general life hacks.
I also started working as a freelance writer and have been ghost-writing novels for my first client. I’m no building my portfolio and getting some new ghost-writing clients for nonfiction as well.
So my focus and energies and time have been a bit scattered, and I’m working on three websites instead of one. I was getting a little discouraged that I’d fallen behind on the training and progress at Wealthy Affiliate, but one of the community members there (did I mention how great the community is?) encouraged me, reminding me that my novel writing is very important and that I’ve made much progress in that area.
Oh, I’ve also started my YouTube channel to eventually help promote my novel. In it, I play an inept magical school substitute teacher at Burrowgroves School of Magic. So that’s taken a bit of my time recently, too.
Wealthy Affiliate University Reviews
If you do any research online at all, you will quickly see that Wealthy Affiliate University, aka Wealthy Affiliate, is absolutely legit and a wonderful deal which you can even try for free. And don’t forget the Black Friday deal, to get their annual premium membership – now is the time to get that.
And remember that the online company calling themselves “Wealthy Affiliates” is a scam, from what I and my friend were able to tell (she accidentally signed up and was getting all sorts of email spam), so stay away from that one.
Make Money Online Easy?
It’s easy in the sense that you can work on your own time and from any location that has internet. It’s easy in that anyone can follow the step-by-step program and succeed at it. It’s not easy in that it takes consistent focus and hard work, and you can never give up even when you get discouraged. You have to be in it for the long haul.
Would I recommend it? Absolutely. For me, even though the passive income has been slow in coming (and my work very on-again, off-again as I do other career-building projects), everything I’ve learned and continue to learn has been very valuable. I’m building my author website in anticipation of my book series getting published, using the best SEO and website tools in the industry.
And did I mentioned the community on Wealthy Affiliate? They’re awesome!
Burrowgroves School of Magic presents: Magical Mayhem Ep1 “Not Trelawney!”
For all of us looking for harry potter schools magic, or any school of magic, or magic crafts for kids, magic themed crafts such as a magic wand craft (and many other unusual ideas), I have launched my new YouTube series called Magical Mayhem from Burrowgroves School of Magic. Check it out:
Be sure to Like, Share, Subscribe and Click the Bell so you can get enrolled and receive these magical school classes every Friday. And please comment if you have any questions or classes you’re dying to see.
Happy Crafting!
Jerilyn Winstead, author of Encyclopedeia Magica: Volume 1 – Alchemy
Best Places to Visit in Ireland, Part 2
Top Places to Visit in Ireland – Castles to Visit in Ireland
Castles are my favorite things and we were able to explore and tour
several, but wherever you drive in western Ireland there’s almost always
a castle ruin on the horizon somewhere, it’s amazing. Most of these are
locked away on private property. There are also ruins of 17th century
stone cottages everywhere, too, and they are also unique.
After we left Limerick our hostess pointed us to Adare,
one of the most picturesque villages in Ireland. There’s a whole row of
thatched-roof huts-turned-shops the town has restored, and the entire
village is beautiful with colorful houses adorned with windows boxes
lush with flowers, and there’s a gorgeous wooded park with a creek in
the center of town. Here we toured one of our favorite castles for a
small fee – the ones with a fee are the best well-kept ruins and the
most interesting to see. This Norman castle, Desmond Castle, is
huge compared to the keeps, Napoleon watchtowers and ruined medieval pigeon towers and manor houses we’d seen around Ireland.
Dunguire Castle near Galway City was also a
favorite, and the most intact, as it’s been restored several times over
the centuries. They even host a medieval banquet in the Great Hall on a regular basis – try to go if you can.
Visit Ireland on a Budget
This is how we did it:
- First, we signed up for Next Vacay, watching our daily email flight deal alerts until we snagged our round-trip flights from Denver to London for $420 each (closer to $600 with luggage and seats). We enjoyed London for four days, then flew cheaply on Ryanair to Shannon Airport from Stansted Airport, in Essex outside of
London – you can take a train there from London. I am not an affiliate
of Next Vacay, but you can try their email subscription for free and if
you like it, it’s only $25/year to get daily flight deal alerts – with
them you can travel almost anywhere in the world for around $400-$500 round trip. - We planned our trip eight months in advance, having all that time to plan, save and prepare for the trip.
- We stayed at AirBnb places everywhere we went. With AirBnb you can find accommodations to fit any budget, even nice hostels with private rooms. We stuck to a budget of around $50-$80 a night, and all the homes in Ireland included breakfast. The spacious flat in London was within walking distance of all the places we wanted to see, like St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Tower, The Museum of London, the Museum District with The British Museum, Southbank with the Globe, etc. So we used public transit and our feet in England, and all the museums are free. We bought the London Pass and used it for three days to visit the non-free places, and it was well worth it.
- We rented a car in Ireland and drove to the places we
specifically wanted to go. We mainly stayed in a smallish area around
Shannon Airport in western Ireland. From Limerick or Adare it’s only a forty-five drive to the airport. - In both London and Ireland, my husband and I shared almost all of our meals, and we ate mostly at pubs. The food was amazing and delicious and we ate well. The portions were generally big enough for us to share, as we both eat smaller portions now. Sometimes we got our own entrees. The prices of meals were about the same as in America, we found, and they often included lots of sides.
We also only ate out 1-2 times a day, mostly for lunch and supper. - We visited a lot of amazing places for free, like almost all the
museums, many ruins, walking the island and the Dromore woods, etc. Even the castle tours didn’t cost much.
Reflections on Finally Visiting Ireland
After twenty-five years of dreaming of going to Ireland, we got to go
at last! I almost expected to hear an opera high note when disembarking
from the plane. Instead I found myself just soaking everything in – it didn’t feel like magic, it was mostly cold and rainy, I was just seeing and experiencing everything. It wasn’t till later, after the trip, when I got to process it in my mind and memories and be amazed at the
incredible photos we got of the all the top places we visited in
Ireland. Here are some of my reflections:
-
- Ireland is incredibly ancient, its history goes back a long way,
over six thousand years. One Irishwoman mentioned that the Potato Famine happened in recent history, and there was still hurt from that towards the English (many English overlords took away all their tenants’ livestock for rent in the middle of the famine, leaving the Irish with nothing to eat when they were already starving). My Irish ancestors left during the potato famine, made it to Canada, then eventually into the U.S. To me the potato famine feels like ancient history. But her attitude helped me to understand how it is we’re still dealing with racist issues in America, as slavery is also only about 200 years ago – recent history with hurt feelings and racist attitudes and actions still going on. - In fact, with all their violent history and complications between the
Irish and the English, and with Brexit posing a potential problem of renewed violence, the Irish in general seemed to be struggling
emotionally. Keep in mind I was only there for eight days and only in western Ireland. But I noticed an undercurrent of sadness in the many locals we talked to, not readily apparent at first, for the Irish are friendly and tough and know how to roll with the punches and know how to drink. Maybe it has something to do with the constant rain, but I think it’s the hundreds of years of bad history with their neighbors. It really made me glad that my Irish ancestors were able to leave and start fresh in a new world, leaving all that behind. I’m so grateful that in young America we are filled with a youthful optimism and a knowing that we can accomplish anything. - Both my husband and I had a hard time understanding many of the locals, especially in the rural areas. It seemed like every person had their own version of the Irish accent, and most of them spoke fast in a quiet, murmuring way, so it was unexpectedly challenging at times.
- Ireland is incredibly ancient, its history goes back a long way,
There is so much to see and explore in Ireland, I want to go back every year. Would I want to live there? No, I’d be too far away from family and friends and the weather is not nearly as nice as sunny Colorado, or even England. But it’s an amazing, gorgeous, mysterious land with so much to discover in every nook and cranny. No, I didn’t hear an opera voice in my head when I arrived. Yes, I loved Ireland and every part of our trip and I want to go back often.
Please comment below any of your stories of the tops places to visit in Ireland, or castles to visit in Ireland, or how to visit Ireland on a budget. Let’s find our way back again!
Ep 4 – Making Buoyant Brooms, a First-Year Project
Professor Fintail substitute-teaches Astounding Arts & Crafty Crafts. This week is a First-Year Project: Buoyant Brooms. Perfect for hanging on the Christmas tree or as a Halloween decoration. But do NOT place one next to your potted mandrakes!
Magical Mayhem, Ep3 – What is She Doing with Those Bones?
What is Prof Fintail doing with all those bones? Learn how to seal bones using a simple method, but DO NOT emulate the professor on how she acquired the bones!
Burrowgroves Magical Mayhem Ep2 – Student Session
Professor Fintail answers student’s questions about Burrowgroves School of Magic and the classes she may have a chance to substitute teach. Here’s your chance to input your ideas and desires for magic school classes and magic craft ideas – check it out.
As always be sure to Like, Comment, Share, and Subscribe to be enrolled in all upcoming classes.