Sputnik Prose

My 2024 literary highlight was getting accepted into and then participating in the Master Class in Novel Writing through UCLA Extension. I’ve spent years writing and editing my own novels, not to mention writing and editing professionally, but turns out I still had so much to learn. To apply for the class, writers had to submit a completed manuscript, and then eight of us were accepted and spent the next nine months workshopping each others’ novels and learning about the craft of writing and editing, as well as publishing. It was truly a rich experience. Somehow, between reading my classmates’ novels and the assigned books, I also read 43 other books. And participated, for the second year in a row, in the Overeducated Women with Cats 2024 Reading Challenge . In 2024, I also volunteered at the National Book Festival for the first time. Before my shift, I attended one event on time travel novels with Edan Lepucki and Peng Shepherd, and another on romance novels with Abby Jimenez and Ca...