Instructor: Beth Daniels
Start Date: Monday, April 7, 2025
End Date: Friday, May 2, 2025
Type:  Group.io
Duration: 4 Weeks
USD Fee: FF&P Member – $20; Non-Member – $25

What with Global Warming threatening to remodel our world in the rather near future, the interest in Dystopian settings for fantasy stories shouldn’t surprise us at all. Several YA series have played out in such worlds already and there are likely to be more already being dreamed to life on the page, on the screen.

In this 4-week workshop we’ll get a handle on how to create our own really messed up worlds. Not only will we look at the spins other writers have put on the dystopian novel, we’ll look at what history has provided for us to use as seeds to grow our own.

There will be overseers though they may go by other titles. There will be the forces to keep everyone in line. The lives of those in power and of those who appear powerless—until a hero comes along to fight for changes. It’s a world gone mad for the majority who are kept under the thumb of the minority, though that minority has the wealth and power and no intention of sharing.

While many of us suffered through Orwell’s 1984 (which fortunately 1984 was nowhere near), picked up Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 on our own, dived into Katniss Everdeen’s trials and tribulations or those of Tris from Divergent, isn’t it time to destroy a world’s society on our own?

The 2024 update at The Candid Cover’s website gave me titles for 72 YA dystopian novels, many of them books in trilogies, though a dystopian tale doesn’t need to be in the YA category. History gives us dystopian circumstances left and right to use and also to model our own worlds on. Worlds that can be in the past, in the future, in different dimensions, parallel universes, on other planets or in other galaxies.

Join me to build a setting that readers will chew their nails over as they turn the pages, wondering how the characters will survive and, better still, overcome the forces that keep those characters as the under trodden. And in many cases, the cannon fodder.

About the Instructor:

Beth Daniels currently writes standalone historical romantic suspense but also pens urban fantasy/mystery/comedy series as J.B. Dane and is completing a Weird West Steampunk trilogy as Nied Darnell. When she dived into writing sagas that continued past a single title, she felt for a bit like she’d stepped into quicksand. Fortunately, there was solid footing (her 29 previously published standalone books—though she’s up to 39 now with 40 out the Fall of 2025) to keep her head above the muck as she worked out what needed to be done a bit differently with a series. Now with her urban fantasy series poised to be five books into a six-book set plus numerous prequel novellas running ahead of the novels, and an Indied paranormal lite romantic mystery comedy four-book set launched back in 2021, she’s become a firm believer in tied together title runs.

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