January SBW dinner speaker Alice LaPlante has generated quite a buzz these past eight months with her mystery novel narrated by an Alzheimer’s disease-stricken protagonist.

Newspaper reporters are increasingly required to wield cameras and video equipment these days. Creative writers should be no more camera-shy, maintains writer editor Susanne Lakin, who will speak at the South Bay Writers dinner meeting on November 8.

But the camera Lakin has in mind is less like a telescope housed on Mount Hamilton and more like a laparoscope lodged in your subject’s cerebrum. “As a writer you can get into a character’s head and use camera techniques to capture what the character thinks,”

If your novel has a protagonist--it does, doesn’t it?--you ought to be aware of the concept of the hero’s journey. That’s pretty much where Valerie Estelle Frankel, our September 13 dinner speaker, will be taking us, and it just might change our conceptions about character arc.

Tina Glasner is an interior designer of books. A fetching cover or book jacket may add curb appeal, but the contents and appearance inside are the vital elements of artistic success.

She wants us to internalize the notion “that a book is a visual thing as well as an intellectual concept.” Thus, our August 9 dinner speaker may well influence your own design choices if you’re about to publish your own book.

Allegations and mistakes you make in your memoir or novel can come back to haunt you -- and probably will if you’re not wary enough going in.

Zoe Carter’s memoir, Imperfect Endings, is about the painful decisions that she, her sisters, and others were compelled to make when her ailing mother sought assistance to commit suicide. Imagine all the repercussions Carter could have set off writing about that, from the family room to the courtroom.

David Rosch

 “Why Am I Writing?” was our South Bay Writers catchphrase last year at this time. This month, though, we focus on “Why Am I NOT Writing.”

We declare that we intend to write when we join SBW, don’t we? Yet there are so many obstacles. They range from “this &*%$$ club is taking up too much of my time” to “sometimes I just can’t.”

The latter is what David Rasch will address as guest speaker for our April 12 dinner meeting. He is a psychologist and writer (president of California Writers Club’s Central Coast chapter) who has become increasingly interested in writer’s block and the reasons would-be writers procrastinate or avoid writing altogether.