PPWC 2013 - Amber Benson

Amber Benson

Amber Benson is one of our keynote speakers at the 2013 Pikes Peak Writers Conference, and an all around talent. Not only is she an author, but she's also an actress, singer, producer and director. 

Some may know her best as an actress, especially in her role as Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but she's done much more before and since. She has directed and produced two films, and co-directed one additional. In addition, she has acted in numerous films and television shows, including Supernatural, Cold Case, Grey's Anatomy, and Private Practice. 

However, the reason she's coming out to visit us is her impressive writing resume. She co-wrote and directed Ghosts of Albion, an animated web-series for the BBC, with Christopher Golden, which they then turned into a series of novels. In 2010, she put out the middle grade novel, Among the Ghosts. Her ongoing Calliope Reaper-Jones urban fantasy series is about a girl who must take on the position of CEO from her father, Death, after he's kidnapped during a coup attempt by the Devil's protege. 

Her novels tend to have a supernatural bent, much like her popular acting roles, so it's safe to say she has a feel for the genre. 

You can find Amber all over the interwebs:

Her personal blog: Amber Benson's Official Blog

Facebook: Amber Wrote This

Twitter: @amber_benson

Amazon Author Page: Amber Benson

IMDB: Amber Benson

YouTube: Amber Benson

About the Author:  Shannon Lawrence is a mom of two, a freelance writer and aspiring novelist.  She lives in Colorado Springs and is inspired by the beauty of Pikes Peak and the Rockies.  After years of letting her writing fall by the wayside, she has recently thrown herself back into it.  Her main focus is fantasy and horror and she has just finished a Young Adult Fantasy novel.  She has a flash fiction piece featured in the anthology Sunday Snaps: The Stories, due out in 2013.  She has also discovered a love of photography and enjoys photographing the breathtaking Colorado scenery and wildlife, as well as her children.  She blogs about reading, writing and photography at www.thewarriormuse.com.

Rocking the 2013 Pikes Peak Writers Conference

By MB Partlow

Who is going to rock it, April 19-21, 2013?

Everyone who attends.

Our keynotes? Oh, yeah. We've got Libba Bray, Barry Eisler, David Liss and Amber Benson. Rock stars in their fields, one and all.

Editors? Only the best, from the likes of Del Ray, Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins, Sourcebooks and Bell Bridge Books. These are the people who know the industry inside and out.

What about agents? We've got half a dozen coming. You know what they want? They want pitches! When do they want them? At our Conference!

This year's theme is Writing From the Ashes: Never Lose Sight of Your Dreams. Everybody hits a bump in the road. Or two. Or twelve. Every. Body. Some bumps are the size of pebbles, and some look more like a mountain range, but we all hit them. We want our conference to inspire you to pick yourself up after one of these bumps and keep on writing.

You can pitch your completed manuscript to an agent or editor at no additional cost! This is one-on-one face time, and we fill the slots on a first-come, first-served basis. This means that the earlier you register, the better your chance of getting one of the agents or editors you want.

You can participate in one of our Read and Critique sessions. Unfamiliar with R&C? No problem. With R&C Author, you get a small setting, where you read your first page to a published author. With R&C X, you read your first page to an agent or editor. In R&C 123, our designated reader will read your first page to a panel consisting of one agent, one editor and one published author. Every single one is an opportunity for immediate feedback.

Back by popular demand is Thursday Add-on Programming. The topics this year cover writing personal nonfiction, writing historical fiction, pitching, the query letter lab, publicity and more. You'll get two 3-hour workshops, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, plus a box lunch. That is a bargain!

Have I mentioned that registration is now officially open?  It is!  For all the juicy details, updates and a link to the registration page, please visit http://pikespeakwriters.com/html/ppwc.html.

And don't forget to stay tuned to this space. We'll have a Conference Countdown every third Friday of the month, plus in-depth interviews with as many of the faculty as we can fit in!

Make plans now to join us for the 2013 PPW Conference. We'll have something for writers at every stage of their career, and you get to spend an entire weekend rubbing elbows with the best kind of people we know--other writers.

(And could someone please loan me an exclamation point or two? I've used up at least three months' allotment here.)

MB Partlow

2013 PPWC Programming Director

Programming@pikespeakwriters.com