Absolutely loved this class. Allison was engaging, open, thoughtful, insightful. It was a relief to be in (virtual) community with other mother writers even just for a few hours on a Saturday morning.

As a writer of fantasy fiction, I’ve attended quite a few world-building workshops and seminars - there’s always something new to learn. Allison’s world-building workshop was, by far, the most instructive and useful one. The workshop was a mix of lecture, discussion, and writing exercises. The writing exercise was extremely insightful and introduced easy techniques to apply to anyone’s writing. I left the workshop with lessons that are easy to remember and integrate into my own writing practice, and I highly recommend Allison’s World-building class (and anything she teaches, frankly!).

Allison's workshop on building a successful bookstore event astonished me — it was so densely packed with real-world insight and ideas I could actually use. And she is incredibly helpful one-on-one too. I'd highly recommend her services to any author looking for help maximizing the impact of their marketing and publicity efforts.

From start to finish, Allison was engaging, highly informative, and funny. The 3 hour [event seminar] flew by, packed with her wise advice. She used her teaching skills to keep things both flowing smoothly and allowing for specific questions, collaboration, and networking. I would happily take future courses by Allison!

I loved this class. It's always been a topic that interests me, and Allison did a wonderful job guiding our discussions and responding to student questions as they came up. I thought her perspective on the marketing side of genre was an incredibly valuable one and important to this kind of discussion, and I loved the exercise where we examined our favorite books as objects to see how nuanced the packaging of a literary speculative book can be.

Allison taught very relevant and meaningful marketing strategies and answered our questions thoroughly. She is very knowledgeable with the marketing process and is a valuable resource. Please take a course, participate in an event, or call on her for help with your writing if you can!

Allison gives a bang-up [marketing] workshop! She is thorough but concise, informative but not overwhelming. She really knows her material and delivers it in a knowledgeable, approachable way. I left her presentation with many new ideas and resources. Highly recommended!

Allison was incredibly friendly and warm and facilitated a thought-provoking discussion, taking us through several excerpts from YA novels and challenging us to identify the ways the characters and their worlds intersected. “You can’t have worldbuilding without characters,” she explained, “and you can’t have characters without worldbuilding.”

We talked about the dangers of lumping worldbuilding details into long exposition that keeps the story from moving, and how to strike a balance. We also discussed the different things first and third person narrators — as well as multiple points of view — can bring to the table when it comes to worldbuilding and character development. Allison also took us through a few different writing exercises that underscored how much one’s personal perspective can play into worldbuilding, and vice versa. The course was productive and fun and gave me new ideas for editing my novel-in-progress!