Hello CWG Members!

On behalf of the entire Catholic Writers Guild Board, I’d like to wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas and a Blessed New Year!

I’d also like to take this opportunity to formally welcome Jennifer Fitz to our board as Vice President. I had the pleasure of meeting Jen at the past CWG Conference in August in Dallas. She’s already become an asset to the Board. Ann Lewis, CWG’s devoted and conscientious past president, is now our Treasurer so if you have any questions for her, she can be reached at treasurer(at)catholicwritersguild.com. Other long-time board members are Karina Fabian (past president) as Committee Coordinator and Dave Law as Secretary.

The Catholic Writers Guild has been busy during the month of December recruiting members to volunteer in various positions. Karl Erickson is our new blog news coordinator. If you have any new and exciting book news or information you’d like to share, please send it to erickson1990(at)comcast.net Other new volunteers are Larry Peterson and Nancy Carabio Belanger. Again, many thanks for stepping forward to help!

It’s been an exciting year for the Guild. A well-attended online conference took place in March and a live conference in Dallas in August were two of the highlights. We received a large grant towards our conferences and retreat next year. Several of our members were featured in the June/July Catholic Digest article and more will be featured in the January issue. Some of our members appeared on EWTN’s Bookmark show. More and more people are becoming acquainted with the Guild, so our membership is increasing!

Don’t forget about our online conference which takes place March 4-15, 2013! We’ll be sending out special notices on that event soon. For those of you who can’t travel, this free conference is for you! Please consider attending. We’ll have hour-long chats and week-long workshops, plus opportunities to pitch to Catholic and secular publishers and (hopefully) agents. In addition, we’re trying to schedule some critique sessions.

If you have a novel that was released in 2012 or 2013, please consider entering it in the CALA’s awards. For more information, check out the link here.

And, as always, if there’s anything I can do for you, please feel free to contact me: president(at)catholicwritersguild.com

Ellen Gable Hrkach is an award-winning, Amazon bestselling author. Her five books have been downloaded over 620,000 times on Kindle. Currently, she works as the Marketing Director for Live the Fast, a non-profit Roman Catholic apostolate based in Boston. She does freelance writing and editing for a variety of other websites, she blogs at "Plot Line & Sinker" http://ellengable.wordpress.com and is also self-publishing book consultant and a publisher. She and her husband are the parents of five sons ages 16 to 28 and live in Pakenham, Ontario. In her spare time, Ellen enjoys playing board games with her family, watching classic movies on TCM and reading on her Kindle.