Clarissa Willis:
Treating Your Writing as a Business.
Treating your writing as a business is essential in today's competitive literary landscape. Many authors approach writing as a passion project, but to succeed, whether in indie publishing or traditional publishing, it is crucial to adopt a professional mindset. This means understanding that writing is not just about creativity; it also involves strategy, marketing, and financial management. By viewing your writing as a business, you can better navigate the complexities of a rapidly evolving industry and position yourself for long-term success.

Clarissa (Chrissy ) Willis is the product of a minister and a drama teacher. She has always had an active imagination and enjoys speaking and writing. She lived in nine states. She was a major corporation's senior vice president of publishing and has been an educator for over 40 years. As a child growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, she wrote stories and got into trouble for a variety of mishaps, from the attempted murder of her brother, a crime she swears wasn't her fault, to robbing the collection plate at church.

She earned a PhD in early childhood special education from the University of Southern Mississippi. In her professional life, Dr. Willis has provided workshops and keynote addresses in all 50 states and three foreign countries. She is a professor Emeritus from the University of Southern Indiana. Clarissa has written curricula for Frog Street Press, Kaplan Early Learning Company, and Scholastic. She is the author of nineteen teacher resource books, including the award-winning Teaching Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In addition, she has written four children's books and is working on a memoir. She owns Solander Press, a service company that helps independent authors publish professionally. In her spare time, she serves on the board for Ozark Creative Writers, Between the Pages Writer's Conference, and the Missouri Writer's Guild. She lives with her dogs, George Maurice and Sophie Grace, in the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas.

Mary Coley:
Building Suspense in Fiction
At the bottom of every story ever told, whether romance, mystery, adventure, horror, humor, dystopian, science fiction, fantasy or any other, is a mystery, and suspense is what carries every mystery. Suspense keeps your reader reading. In this session, Mary will provide tips that will help you build suspense throughout your novel.

Mary Coley believes every story contains an element of mystery - that's what keeps us reading. In her books, expect a body to turn up and suspense to be rampant.

A devoted reader and nature lover, Mary began writing at age 7. Over twenty years ago, after working for years in the communications/education field, she focused on learning the craft of writing fiction. Since then, she has written nine mystery suspense novels, mostly set in Oklahoma and featuring women amateur sleuths, as well as numerous short stories. She has been nominated for the Oklahoma Book Award for Fiction three times, and won the award in 2024. She won the Tony HIllerman Award from New Mexico/Arizona Books in 2018. Coley now lives in Edmond, OK with her husband, Daryl, and the 14th dog in her lifelong list of canine companions, Trixie.

You can find her at www.marycoley.com

Max McCoy:
Follow the Wild Trail.
Award-winning author Max McCoy will show you how to find your own way to your true writing self as you explore the natural world. Writing about nature isn't just about capturing in words beautiful landscapes; done mindfully, it's a journey of self-discovery in which you can weave a cultural and personal history together to create something uniquely yours. McCoy is the author of more than 20 books, including Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River, published by the University Press of Kansas.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. A native Kansan, he started his career at the Pittsburg Morning Sun and was soon writing for national magazines. His investigative stories on unsolved murders, serial killers and hate groups have earned him first-place awards, mostly for his work as a writer for the Joplin (Missouri) Globe. His commentary has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Asahi Shimbun, the Kansas City Star, the Kansas City Pitch, the Kansas Reflector and other outlets. His novels include three original Indiana Jones adventures for Bantam/Lucasfilm and the novelization of the Steven Spielberg epic miniseries, Into the West. A nonfiction book, Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River, was named a Kansas Notable Book by the state library. Elevations also won the National Outdoor Book Award, in the history/biography category. His weekly opinion essays for the Kansas Reflector news site, kansasreflector.com, have gathered first-place awards from the National Society of Newspapers Editors and the Kansas Press Association. Max lives at Emporia, in east central Kansas.

His website: maxmccoy.com

Terry McDermid:
What Does Writing Success Look Like to You?
An interactive talk about finding each person's writing path. While comparing to others has some value, we each need our own definition of success. We'll look at where we've been, where we are now, and where we might want to go.

According to her mom, Terry McDermid started telling stories before she could talk. She discovered the writing life in fourth grade when her teacher said she could one day have a book in the library and made her first submission of a short story at age 11. Since then, she's published books, which did end up in libraries; articles; lessons; and blogs. She enjoys teaching classes on writing skills and has created a "Writing Your Life Story" program. In another time, she imagines she would have been a patron of the arts, since she delights in encouraging others to follow their dreams and talents.