The Howard County Chapter of the Maryland Writers’ Association will meet at the Bon Fresco Coffee Shop, 6945 Oakland Mills Road, Columbia, MD (directions below) on Thursday, January 21, 7-9 pm. As usual, all are welcome, but please note there is a $5 fee if you have attended one of our meetings previously but have not yet joined MWA. (Join online via PayPal or mail in your downloadable application: http://www.marylandwriters.org/application.html.)

Our speaker this month is self-described “chick-lit” writer K. L. (Karla) Brady, author of “The Bum Magnet.” Karla is an engaging speaker who has an M.B.A. and a day job as a government contractor and is also a real estate agent. She’ll tell us how she got The Bum Magnet written, edited, proofread, printed, blurbed, distributed, reviewed, promoted, placed with retailers like Barnes & Noble and Books A Million, and also sold on Amazon and via Espresso Book Machine. She’ll share her challenges and successes as a self-published author. Karla lives just outside of D.C. with her son, William.

Coming up in February is a craft session and Q&A with local literary novelist, poet, Raymond Carver Prize winner and CCBC Associate Professor Kim Jensen (February 18). Our March speaker will be the hilarious Shirl Hayes, a professional freelance writer who, among other things, has adapted 30 novels into scripts for audio theater and writes articles for NASA (March 18).

Directions