{"id":9745,"date":"2010-03-19T16:28:40","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T23:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9745"},"modified":"2010-03-19T16:28:40","modified_gmt":"2010-03-19T23:28:40","slug":"alpha-workshop-for-young-writers-fund-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9745","title":{"rendered":"Alpha Workshop for Young Writers Fund Drive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nedandjane.com\/\">The Alpha Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Workshop for Young Writers<\/a> provides a ten-day crash course in speculative fiction writing for students aged 14-19. The students write and revise a short story, receive critiques, and work with four professional authors&#8211;which have included big names like Tamora Pierce and Charles Coleman Finlay.<\/p>\n<p>For the past few years, I&#8217;ve been peripherally involved by providing extra critiques of student submission stories. My first year, I critiqued Rachel Sobel&#8217;s submission story, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/clarkesworldmagazine.com\/sobel_03_09\/\">The Loyalty of Birds<\/a>,&#8221; which she revised and sold to Clarkesworld Magazine as an impressive debut. She&#8217;s an exceptional case, but not the only Alpha student to go on and publish&#8211;the Alpha website <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nedandjane.com\/alpha.php\">includes a list<\/a> of alumni achievements, including publications in Lady Churchill&#8217;s, Aberrant Dreams, Fantasy Magazine, and multiple Dell Award placements.<\/p>\n<p>Professional workshops like the Clarions are well known for helping emerging writers, but Alpha goes back a stage further than that. Not every writer starts working as a teenager, but I know that when I was a kid, I was hungry for feedback and eager to meet other writers and be taken seriously&#8211;the chance to get together with other writers and receive feedback from real, live authors would have sounded like a dream.<\/p>\n<p>Like any workshop that wants to get the best students, Alpha provides need-based scholarships. And like any workshop in this economy, Alpha is struggling to provide for all of its students. They&#8217;ve recently put up <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nedandjane.com\/alpha.php\">a website<\/a> requesting donations to help them send teenagers to writer-camp.<\/p>\n<p>They are offering a bit of bait, too&#8211;donations of five dollars and over will be rewarded with a copy of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nedandjane.com\/nj1.php\">Ned and Jane<\/a>, a collaborative girl-meets-zombie story written by the Alpha class of 2009.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nedandjane.com\/\">Check out their website and consider donating<\/a>, whether to get the zombie story or just show support for young writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Alpha Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Workshop for Young Writers provides a ten-day crash course in speculative fiction writing for students aged 14-19. The students write and revise a short story, receive critiques, and work with four professional authors&#8211;which &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9745\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}