50 Shades Beyond Gray: Color Your Writing, Infuse Your Future, is the theme for the Houston Writers Guild 2014 Conference. The event will be held on Saturday April 12th. Fee is $100 for members and $125 for nonmembers. A pre-conference session with Jane Friedman, and post-conference session with Meghan Pinson are also scheduled.

Agent/editor pitch sessions (Eddie Schneider of JABberwocky, Jennifer Udden of Donald Maass, Poomba Menon of Kimberley Cameron, and more) are ten-minutes long and are $10 each for members and $15 each for nonmembers.

Entry into the Writing Contest is $20 for members and $25 for nonmembers. Parking is free, and meals are on your own.

The Guild will feature concurrent sessions tracks with sessions such as 1) Honing Your Craft (writing practice for the undisciplined, grammar & punctuation for grownups, story and scene structure, how not to mess up POV, the writer’s notebook [especially good for memoir/narrative nonfiction], REALLY great writing groups) 2) Publishing and Promotion (“state and future of the industry” expert panel featuring Jane Friedman and Christine Munroe, pitches and proposals, the first five pages, writer web and social media savvy, e-books in bookstores and their pricing) and 3) Revving Up Your Writing (dialect in dialogue, how poetry can make you a better writer, tension and bad guys, effective description, nonfiction research, creating alternate worlds).

Presenters are still being added to the conference. The current roster includes authors Rodney Walther, Nikki Loftin, Pamela Fagan Hutchins, Melanie Bragg, and Fern Brady, Kobo Writing Life US Manager Christine Munroe, and editor Meghan Pinson.