The Life Writers Community is organized around a repeating monthly schedule. All activities are optional, but I strongly suggest that you try everything at least once and decide for yourself if the session supports your writing needs.

Each session includes a weekly number of live-on-Zoom activities designed to help you learn more about your fellow Life Writers Community members and improve your writing. All sessions are on Tuesdays at 6:00 p.m. ET.

Members are placed into buddy groups of two or three members for three months. Groups change in March, June, September, and December. This group is an important source of support, encouragement, and insight on shared writings. Buddy groups are a core part of Life Writers Community’s mission to cultivate a thriving writing community.

Every Wednesday from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. ET, Life Writers Community members meet to write in silence and draw on the group’s creative energy. There’s a brief check at the start, after the first hour, and at the end of the session to commit to what you want to work on, be it writing, editing, organizing, and report on your progress.

As a Life Writers Community member, you have a wealth of instruction right at your fingertips. A library of hundreds of hours of recorded videos of workshops, book studies, master classes, courses, minicourses, writing prompts and challenges, and more is available for you at any time.

Life Writers Community members gather on the fourth Tuesday of every month for live feedback sessions. In private breakout rooms, members join other members to give and receive feedback on text prepared and shared in prior weeks.

Monthly, we follow this schedule.

• • First Tuesday Write & Read: Join us for an optional First Tuesday Write and Read session where you’ll be given a prompt designed to trigger memories and time to write a response. Afterward, you’ll be placed with one or two participants. Each person will read his/her story and receive first-impression feedback.

• • Second Tuesdays: Meet with your buddies and swap stories, chat, discuss your writing projects, or anything else you’d like to do. This time is set aside for you to meet with your buddies and use the time as needed.

• • Third Tuesdays: This is where the fun really begins! Each third Tuesday of the month features a different member-led activity designed to strengthen the community. Some months, it may be Five Questions asked to each member; Share What You Know (or Want to Know); Book Share, where each person brings a favored (or hated) book and tells the group about it; Write to a Prompt Night, where a member brings a prompt, and everyone writes responses; and more.

• • Fourth Tuesdays: I sign on early, at 5:30 p.m. ET, to answer your writing-related questions. Then, at 6:00 p.m. ET, we review and discuss one member’s story for thirty to forty-five minutes in the Member Story Review. Upload your stories each month for possible review. Replays of the story notes I share before the actual review are stored under Member Story Review in the dropdown dashboard menu. But wait, there’s more. Participate in our monthly feedback session on the fourth Tuesday of every month at 6:00 p.m. ET. Stories are submitted one week in advance, and members are grouped with one or two partners who also have stories to review. In the week leading up to the Monthly Feedback Session, you review your partners’ stories and provide feedback that night.

• • Fifth Tuesdays – Open Mic Night: These fun events occur when there’s a fifth Tuesday of the month at 6:00 p.m. ET. Members read stories they’ve written, and we cheer them on.

• • Every Wednesday – Wednesday Write-In: Need a little dedicated writing time? Then, join our weekly Wednesday Write-In from 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. ET, where you’ll work on your projects with fellow Life Writers Community members. Say what you plan to work on, and then get busy. When time’s up, tell us how you fared with your writing intention.

Each member decides how much or how little he/she wishes to participate. We see some members every week, and we see other members only on feedback nights. You decide the level of participation in the Life Writers Community. All that is offered is given with an open hand for members to pick and choose what works best for them.