Are You Looking for a Mentor and Writing Coach?
Together we will make your writing compelling to read. Let’s develop and hone your individual voice and style, build characters and landscapes, play with tension and release, add elements and expand your vocabulary (not just the words but the craft and skills), and consider the range of options for structure within novels and hybrid memoirs.
But it’s not just the actual writing that’s at stake here, we want to build a place for you in the literary world. We do that by expanding your resources, sharing book suggestions and websites, and we’ll find ways to develop a literary career as you see fit. Let’s find publications of all kinds that are suited to your own goals and writing projects. We’ll find the right communities to join in person and online, create a working list of presses and journals to approach, brainstorm how to keep going. Results are less clear-cut than working simply with an editor and tend to be more incremental with your confidence in your own writing skills building over time.
In short, you will build a creative lifestyle that feeds your writing and comes from your own core values and goals.
When I was finding my own writing path, I didn’t have role models offering validation or permission to tell stories in my own way. Now I can offer you just that. In-depth, one on one collaborative development of your work, I’d like to help you. We’ll make it affordable for you so think more about what you are looking for in a mentor, coach and editor.
- An organic conversation with your questions and needs comes first.
- Brainstorming together with your goals in mind.
- Practical advice.
- Reading suggestions
- Literary communities to join
- Residencies, classes, courses, retreats, we’ll find ones you are drawn to
- Global (overarching) feedback as well as local (specifics of word choice, grammar etc) feedback
- Performance-driven, a sense of accountability.
- Developmental editorial work on a specific manuscript.
- Craft and technique articles. We’ll develop skills and discover new ones for you.
- Productive and positive suggestions for specific projects, letters, pitches, etc.
- Resources/ websites/ information sharing.
- Focused on your self-development as a writer and in life.
- Discuss your personal situation, challenges, and strengths.
- Conversations shaped to your changing needs and goals.
- Sharing my professional and life experiences and resources.
- Brainstorming your weekly/monthly goals and tasks.
- Fee $75-95 p/hr (Via PayPal) sliding scale as you feel fit.
WHY ME?
I have a Bachelors in Literature and Languages, a Masters degree in Writing and Publishing, as well as years working as a freelance writer, editor, and publisher. I am the author of Stay, G’Dog, Hidden, When No One’s Looking, Lucky Shot, and Lucky Find, as well as the award winning travelogue, Van Life. Various micro-essays/prose poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies over the years, most recently with Los Angeles Review, Immigrant Report, Passenger Journal, Dunes Review, Z Press Best Emerging Poets of New Mexico (2019), Devils Party Press (2019) as well as The People’s Apocalypse (2014). I also write book reviews and author interviews, found on Hunger Mountain, National Book Critics Circle, and Santa Fe Writer’s Project Quarterly. International publications include https://issuu.com/adaltabjl/docs/ad_alta_2020-21Ad Alta Journal in England, 2021.
Awards include winning the NM/AZ Book Awards for her fiction, Honorable Mention for the Quill Prize (Red Hen Press) and more recently long-listed with the Santa Fe Writers Project. Lucky Shot (2012) and When No One’s Looking (2016) won Best Gay Fiction in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Lucky Find was a finalist for the same award in 2014. Van Life won Best Non-fiction/ Grand Winner Award in the Great Northwest Book Contest of 2017 and was a finalist in the NM/AZ Book Awards 2018. Finishing Line Press is publishing Hidden, a chapbook in the form of a queer narrative prose poem in March 2021.
Okay, enough of the credentials. I hope there’s enough that shows you how serious and committed I am to a writing and creative life. It’s one I want to share with you.
I recommend that you search my name online and read my writing. Ask yourself if my focus, tone, topics, style all appeal to you. If they do, we are more likely to work well together. For non-fiction, I document my experiences of people and places, of dogs and dirt roads. In fiction, I tend to write from a woman’s perspective, more along the lines of the outsider roles, the unconventional lifestyles and a more queer point of view. That said, my skills transfer into helping you find your own voice and style.
Sounds good? Well, please reach out with any questions. Thank you.
CONTACT FORM
Thank you.
