I'm going to be both self-serving and collegial by turning you on to the Southern California Writers Conference Blog site which provides an on-line community to writers like yours truly. Here's the address that will point and click you right to the Blog and-- here's the self-serving part--an article on my upcoming workshop: http://scwc.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/sd23-shrinking-fiction-syllabus-available/. Check out some of the writers who are associated with our Blog:
The SCWC Blog is masterminded (using the word not as a cliche) by fellow Seattleite Brian Hilling, who presently is hard at work on his first novel. Well, at work, anyway.