August 20, 2026
Time: 2:00 pm Eastern
Webinar: Hooking Ideal Readers with Special Abilities, Magic, and Superpowers
with Robin Pool, NAIWE’s Science Fiction & Fantasy Expert
Cost: $30
How do authors create characters with special abilities that readers can’t get enough of? Ever wondered why Latin incantations and super strength produce perennial best-sellers?
Learn to design compelling character abilities by using a simple 3-step process and avoiding a few basic pitfalls. For any Speculative Fiction genre (from Paranormal Romance to High Fantasy to Steampunk Sci-Fi, even Vampire Littles) this class will help you:
- maximize your writing gold for your ideal audience
- integrate abilities into genre expectations, character growth, world-building, and reader aspirations
- avoid “puncturing the mystery balloon” and “pasting postage-stamps”
- prevent abilities from feeling overpowered or overused
- craft inclusive language and avoid sensitivity “hot spots”
This hands-on training includes workshopping case studies and editing real-life examples. Takeaways include a 3-page PDF with Do’s and Don’t’s, a 5-Step Design Framework, and a Compelling Characters Checklist to help you create from scratch or troubleshoot during revisions.
Learn to write special abilities that get your readers to finish a book, start the next one in the series, and recommend it to their friends. Make your words work like magic…or super strength! No Latin needed.
January 7 – February 25, 2027
Time: 2:00 pm Eastern
Course: Macros 101
with April Michelle Davis, NAIWE’s Executive Director
Cost: $199
Do you often perform the same tasks in Microsoft Word? How much time do you waste doing repetitive tasks at the beginning of each project? At the end? How about just in general throughout the editing process?
In this 8-week course, you will learn how to maximize your time by putting those repetitive tasks in a macro, allowing you to push one button and they are all done!
Some of the tasks that can be put into macros to speed up your process are auto formatting documents (font, size, color, margins, spacing between paragraphs, and double or single spacing documents), find and replace, adding comments, deleting comments, exporting comments, and other advanced concepts.
In addition, you will learn more than one way to create macros so you can create them in the way that is easiest for you!
Class Overview
- Macro Basics
- Find and Replace
- Introduction to Visual Basic
- Formatting a Word Document
- Find and Replace Macros
- Comments
- Combining Macros
- Advanced Macros