Instructor: Barbara Plum. Fictional characters don’t exist in a vacuum.

Where we live—or where we grew up—shapes almost everything about us:  what we eat, our accent, our political views, our religious beliefs, our expectations.  (Sometimes we’re the opposite of everyone we know.  Chances are, our setting influenced that difference).  The same idea applies to our characters.

Explore ways to make your humans more dimensional by using setting as a character.  As a character, setting can move the story forward, set the mood of the story, create and sustain a sense of time and place in the story.

The challenge emerges:  how to carry off narrative descriptive to do the setting justice without boring the reader.  This 5-day workshop will offer tips and techniques for making setting more than wallpaper and unchanging landscape.

The workshop offers 2 opportunities to win a read by me of your first five pages.

Barbara Plum lives near the fast lane in that exotic place called Silicon Valley.  It’s the land of eternal sunshine, gridlock, eternal sunshine, high taxes, eternal sunshine, and exorbitant housing costs.  She writes in her small, messy office flooded with sunshine and overflowing with cat toys, cat litter, cat memories and cats snoozing in that damned eternal sunshine.  

Silicon Valley is the setting for her two romantic comedies:  Prince of Frogs (Kensington/Zebra  - 2004) and Queen of the Universe (Kensington/Zebra -  2005).

Her October 2011 release from The Wild Rose Press, Presumed Guilty, a romantic suspense, is set in Kansas City.  For this book, she chose a new setting, a new genre and a new name—Allie Hawkins.

www.presumedguilty-novel.com/ 
www.presumedguilty-novel.com/blog/