Instructor: Ben H Winters
Date: Tuesday, May 20
Time: 7-9:30 p.m.
Location: Marian University/Marian Hall-# 205
Cost: $48 Nonmembers, $33 members, $28 student/teacher/senior members

“Time is what we want most and use worst.” — William Penn

So true, and especially for writers! We who wander around moaning how we can’t find any time to write, how life is constantly intruding on our writing time. And then who, when at last we find that precious hour, spend it checking email and shopping on the Internet. In this practical and inspiring evening, the prolific novelist Ben Winters shares some of his secrets for organizing one’s life in the service of one’s writing: How not only to “find time to write” but also how to use that time well; how to quiet the “monkey mind,” start strong, end smart, and steer through the twin traps of distraction and procrastination.

Ben H. Winters is the author of five novels, including the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the middle-grade novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, an Edgar Award nominee and a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of 2011. Winters’ other books include the science-fiction Tolstoy parody Android Karenina, the Finkleman sequel The Mystery of the Missing Everything, and the supernatural thriller Bedbugs, which has been optioned for the screen by Warner Brothers. Winters also wrote the book and lyrics for three musicals for young audiences: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, A (Tooth) Fairy Tale, and Uncle Pirate, based on the award-winning children’s book by Douglas Rees. Ben’s new novel, The Last Policeman, is forthcoming from Quirk Books in July of 2012; he is at work on a book of scary poems for kids, to be published by Price Stern Sloan in spring, 2013.