Pikes Peak Writers Conference 2025

Whether you’re writing modern murder mysteries, historical rom-coms, urban fantasies, or space operas, your characters exist in a world that includes mundane features like geography, transportation, and money (does your protagonist need a MetroCard to hop the NYC subway?) and deeper aspects such as religion, politics, magic, bureaucracies, pandemics, or natural disasters. Learn how to avoid info-dumping while still creating a believable world that your characters inhabit and your readers will love.

One of the most challenging goals in commercial fiction is knowing what to include and what to exclude in a first chapter. In this craft-oriented workshop we'll focus on examples that strike the right balance between exposition and action (in medias res).

Explore 5 areas of non-verbal communication, from physical interaction to how people inhabit the space around them, and how each can contribute to writing more realistic scenes and characters.

What is voice? It is often talked about but rarely clearly described. This presentation will break down what voice is and how it functions in prose. The tools taught will help you shift generic exposition and prose into character-driven voice with the use of language, metaphor, simile, and character point-of-view. It will cover how voice functions in first person vs. third person, and include exercises to help you discover your own unique voice for your writing.

Productivity gurus talk about time management, but we don’t often talk about ENERGY management, especially when it comes to the chaotic and unpredictable energy of creativity. Even if you’re a master of scheduling your life and have set aside plenty of time for writing, what happens when you find your creative well has run dry? How often do we hear writing advice about putting your butt in the chair, your hands on the keyboard, and making sure inspiration strikes from 9 to 5 every day? While that advice is well-intentioned, it treats writers like machines and can easily lead to burnout. Learning to manage your energy and refill your creative well is an essential skill for any writer who wants to make it in this New-York-hustle industry—without running themselves into the ground.

Use the tools, tips, tricks and formulas for movies and television series to engineer or reverse engineer your plot and perfect the points to address for a compelling synopsis.

If you’ve never caught this workshop at, say, MileHiCon, Bubonicon, FyreCon, or at COSine, the premise is absurdly simple:

Attendees bring an anonymized, 300-word story opening, either short story or novel, and drop it in front of Lou at the beginning of the workshop. He will peruse the audience and select INSTANT EDITORS from those gathered and bring them up front.

For each manuscript, in randomized order, he will read aloud until three of the Instant Editors raise their hands, signifying that they would not publish the story. If he completes the story with fewer than three hands raised, consider that a success!

Each Editor will then share what they liked about the story, and then Lou gives his own thoughts. The author, who is still anonymous at this point, is invited to reveal themselves. Sometimes, Lou reads a ringer, a manuscript from a previously-published work, by a noted author, just to keep the Instant Editors guessing.

If you find that you have the time and inclination to participate, please consider joining Lou and his INSTANT SLUSHPILE WORKSHOP with your anonymized manuscript in hand!