This month, I spoke to our 2025 alum, Pamela Pan, about her writing journey--from her newly published poetry to her novel currently out on submission!

I got a chance to speak to our 2019 alum, Joanne Morgyn White, who writes at J. Morgyn White, and was so impressed by how prolific and tenacious she is! We talked about the many books she’s written (17!) and how after signing with an agent and going out on submission, she decided to self-publish. Fans of Dungeons & Dragons as well as Magic: The Gathering, will be particularly interested in Joanne’s role in helping price the cards when the collectibles were first created!

​J. Morgyn White​ is the author of Too Cursed to Kiss and the forthcoming Demons for Breakfast. She is the award-winning founder of SCRYE Magazine and former editor of Fork & Bottle, where she specialized in artisan cheese and biodynamic wines—two passions that sometimes sneak into her fiction. Her stories have earned recognition from the Daphne du Maurier and Olive Woolley Burt Awards, multiple Claymore finals, and in 2023 she was named Best New Writer at Futurescapes. She’s a proud alumna of the Northern California Writers’ Retreat and a member of WFWA, HWA, ITW, and HNS. When she’s not plotting monsters or rewriting time, she can be found treasure-hunting vintage jewelry, nurturing heirloom vegetables, or testing obscure indie perfumes that smell like witch’s forest walks and forgotten libraries.

White lives in Northern California wine country with her game-designing husband, their son, and two mischievous Bengal cats. She’s always hunting dragons—and writing the kind of stories that kiss like curses and bite like fate.

About Too Cursed To Kiss: Harlan Madson just wanted a quick payday. Instead, the job ends with her ex dead, the murder weapon in her hands, and a poison searing through her veins. Enter Waldemar Forndaur: aggravatingly hot, suspiciously powerful, and unable to touch Harlan without setting off a death curse. He saves her life, then ruins it with a single truth. And now the hunters are coming. Chased by ruthless reality-warping monsters and haunted by secrets, Harlan and Wald must survive long enough to clear her name, reverse the curse, and maybe, finally, figure out what the hell is going on between them. Rewriting time doesn’t just change the future, it rewrites who you are. Dark, romantic, and twisted with shadow-soaked magic, packed with wicked humor, scorching chemistry, and a heroine who claws her way to power one mistake at a time.

​Buy Joanne’s debut on Etsy!​

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Many thanks for reading and listening,

Heather

founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat

Sometimes novels are twenty years in the making. For our 2025 alum Elizabeth Kemp, something she witnessed on a cruise decades ago needled in her memory and after years of scribbling ideas on receipts, she sat down to write her novel during the pandemic. Writing can be like that—the writer as observer, taking in the world and seeing the anomalies, wanting to explain them, or explore them!

I was lucky enough to meet Elizabeth at the San Francisco Writers Conference in February 2023, when she booked an 8-minute consultation with me. She followed up from our meeting with the first twenty pages of her manuscript and I was hooked, ready to read more—and help edit it toward publication. In October 2025, her debut novel, Tread Lightly, was published by Sibylline Press. Sibylline is a small press, publishing books exclusively by women over fifty. They take unsolicited manuscripts, so while Elizabeth had reached out to literary agents, she eventually tried this route on her own, and within weeks, Sibylline came back to her with an offer.

We talked about her path to publication in this Book Journey, including getting a blurb from a fellow NCWR alum, Carinn Jade! I hope you enjoy the listen!

Here’s a bit about Tread Lightly from the publisher:

A stay-at-home mom with a past navigates a murder in Silicon Valley...When a lifeguard’s body is found at the local pool where Tierney lap swims daily, she is pulled back into the life she thought she had left behind when she was a member of the Crisis Intervention Squad in Dublin, Ireland. A former hostage negotiator turned stay-at-home mom, her move to Silicon Valley for her husband’s job offered the contrast of a calm, domestic life. But this murder investigation disrupts all that, connecting to an event in her past, and threatening to overwhelm her.On the domestic front, the cliques at her kindergartener’s new private school aren’t making it easy for her to fit in either. This ‘fish out of water’ story is a domestic thriller set amid a backdrop of the tech industry’s 2007 stock-option backdating scandal.As Tierney struggles with survivor’s guilt from her previous employment and wrestles with the motherhood/career balancing act, there’s still a murder to be solved. And in helping solve it, Tierney discovers the assumptions we make about people can be completely incorrect—even when those people are ourselves.

Happy listening, reading, and writing,

Heather

founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat

The publishing world is small and in the same way that writers rely on word-of-mouth for their book recommendations to pass from one reader to the next, so does our retreat. So I’m going to tell you a little story about that.

Alissa Lee attended Northern California Writers’ Retreat in 2023, the first time we were back in person after a nearly-three-year-pandemic-induced hiatus. Alissa heard about the retreat from her writing friend, 2017 alum Carinn Jade (author of The Astrology House) and I’m so grateful Carinn put us on Alissa’s radar. When I read the twenty pages Alissa submitted for the retreat I knew right away I wanted to put her in Literary Agent Michelle Brower’s (Trellis Literary Management) workshop group. It was a perfect match—after the retreat, Michelle emailed Alissa asking to read her manuscript. Shortly thereafter, Michelle offered representation, co-agenting with another NCWR Guest Agent, Danya Kukafka.

Alissa had queried forty agents by the time she was at the retreat, and she was ready to give up, ready to go back to practicing law. But because Carinn told her to keep going, to apply to the retreat—she did, and everything fell into place. Two years later, her debut novel is out in the world. I’m so happy for how everything worked out!

I’m curious, where are you in your writing journey? At the beginning? Querying trenches? Feeling so close yet so far away (cue Hall & Oates stuck in your head for the rest of the day)? Alissa has found so much resilience in having a writing community around her and I hope wherever you are in your work, you have that support, too—and you can come find it at the retreat! We’re open for submissions until midnight Pacific Time this Friday, November 7th.

Select praise for With Friends Like These:

“I loved this deliciously twisty tale of friendships unmoored and a game gone way too far for comfort. A heady mix of dark academia, spiraling stakes, and tangled loyalties.”– Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author of THE WOMAN IN SUITE 11

“WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE hooked me with its stunning prose and kept me up late with its simmering tension. . . . Smart and satisfying, I flew through this debut and can’t wait to read more from this breakout author!” -- Carinn Jade, author of The Astrology House“Fast paced and tightly plotted, Lee’s novel explores the complexities of female friendships against a quietly unsettling backdrop of privilege and ambition. An immersive novel that delivers suspense with style and intelligence.” ― Kirkus Reviews“Readers will be clawing their way through this story to find out who is doing the blackmail and how it all ties together. Mystery is abundant and the characters’ paranoia will leak into readers’ psyches.” ― Library Journal

About With Friends Like These:

A group of Harvard alums have played a secret game for decades but as the stakes rise, deadly consequences emerge from old lies. An unputdownable debut thriller for readers of the suspenseful novels of Julia Bartz and Katy Hays. Harvard promised them everything.Ambitious futures, peers who pushed each other toward their absolute best, and an education that would open doors for the rest of their lives. And though they started out as roommates, Sara, Bee, Dina, Allie, Wesley, and Claudine soon became family. They had their whole bright lives ahead of them—until their senior year, when a shocking tragedy changed everything.Twenty years later, five of the roommates still indulge in a secret tradition they’ve kept alive since their campus days: the Circus, a harmless elimination-style “killing” game played across the private rooms and hidden alleys of New York City. The game is a nod to their younger selves and a tribute to the sixth roommate they lost too young. But this year, Sara wants out of the game—until she discovers there is a small fortune awaiting the winner of this final round.As the Circus unfolds, Sara begins to suspect that the others aren’t playing by the rules, and as the danger turns real and the old friends start pointing fingers, she discovers that even those closest to her harbor secrets of their own…secrets that could kill.

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I hope you all will enjoy the conversation Alissa and I had about her journey to getting her debut novel published.

Happy listening, reading, and writing,

Heather

Northern California Writers’ Retreat founder + director

In 2019, we were so lucky to have Aja Gabel join us for Northern California Writers’ Retreat! Pre-pandemic, we were located in the Santa Cruz mountains, and Aja and her Literary Agent, Andrea Morrison from Writers House, were both able to join us for four nights and five days in the redwoods.

Aja’s debut novel, The Ensemble, had published the previous year and I’d gotten to go to her reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz!

For Book Journey this month, Aja and I talked about what it was like for her to write her first novel (she wrote a lot of short stories first), to find an agent (and then break up with that agent and find a new agent!), and to go out on submission and land with an amazing publisher (Riverhead). When it came to writing her second novel, Lightbreakers, Aja started notes to herself in 2016 and that book is being published next month! I hope you’ll want to pick up a copy and read! Here’s a bit about it:

What would you sacrifice for more time with the people you love? A physicist, Noah, and his artist wife, Maya, get caught up in a clandestine project aiming to unravel the secrets of time and consciousness, but find themselves torn between past entanglements and the promise of the future. A heart-achingly moving novel, Lightbreakers explores how to love in a world where time is both a healer and a thief. This luminous story of love, loss, science, and art asks if the past can ever be truly revisited, and at what cost?

And here are the events Aja will be doing, and some nice words about the book.

* Los Angeles, CA — November 4thLightbreakers launch event at Skylight Books, 7pmIn conversation with Alissa Nutting

* Austin, TX — November 9thPanel with Austin Taylor, 1:15pmTexas Book Festival

* New York, NY — November 11thAt Yu & Me Books, 7pmIn conversation with Angela Flournoy

* Placentia, CA — November 15thSoroptimist International of Brea/La Habra Authors Brunch

* Los Angeles, CA — December 12thSilver Lake Reading Club Author Event at 6pm

“Exists in a category all its own: a novel about grief, ambition, and love that is somehow both gripping and deeply felt, as breath-taking as it is mind-bending. Aja Gabel’s prose is like music, vivid with wisdom, curiosity, and emotion.” –Rachel Khong, New York Times bestselling author of Real Americans“Compassionate and prismatic, an intellectual adventure as well as a deeply human meditation on memory, family, and reinvention. Aja Gabel’s second novel is my favorite kind: soulful science fiction that speaks to the mind as well as the heart.” –Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists“A magisterial and moving novel about love and grief that is somehow unsentimental and yet extraordinarily tender…Lightbreakers is complex, startling, and impossibly alive.” –Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here“A marriage story that twists into a sci-fi thriller, posing questions about the elusiveness of the past and the time-jumping nature of grief. Like walking down a hall of mirrors, mesmerized by its reflections and refractions, reading Lightbreakers made me see things anew.” –Ling Ma, author of Severance“Audaciously tackles life’s most formative experiences: love and loss.” –Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Entitlement“You will love this genre-busting book. . . A cross of literary fiction and sci-fi, it’s also a beautiful meditation of grief, time, and love.” –Samin Nosrat, author of Salt Fat Acid Heat

“Satisfying…Gabel hits a winning combination in this tale of modern love and time travel.” –Publishers Weekly“A phenomenal portrait of profound grief.” –Booklist, starred review“Gabel beautifully explores the ways the past echoes endlessly in the present and into the future—and the unimaginable lure of being with the ones we love no matter the cost. A poignant and sharp novel about love, loss, and finding light in the darkness.” –Kirkus Reviews

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Thanks, as always, for your interest in Book Journey! I hope you enjoy the podcast!

Happy reading and writing,

Heather

I really like knowing my neighbors, and this particular neighbor I met in 2016. Alka and I share a fence line, and in May, I can pick the most delicious plums from her tree, which overhangs into our garden.

I’ve been fortunate to watch Alka Joshi go from writer to published author—four times over! Alka’s debut novel The Henna Artist was published in a bleak moment: March 2020. But she made the most of her virtual book tour, and has gone on to speak to over 1000 book clubs in the past five years! It’s such a joy to meet writers early in their careers and be on the ground floor of their transformation—it’s something I especially love about running the retreat.

In this podcast, Alka and I talk about her journey to publish The Henna Artist (hint: there were a LOT of drafts), the original title (reveal: Alka is bad at titles!), and how AI can never create a backstory as authentic as your own (thank goodness). We also discussed Alka’s marketing background and how that has been instrumental to her understanding the importance of saying yes and how word of mouth moves far more copies than any advertising campaign ever could.

I hope you enjoy listening to Alka’s inspiring story!

Thanks for your interest!

Heather

Northern California Writers’ Retreat, founder + director

Enjoy the conversation with our 2020 Author-in-Residence, Jasmine Guillory! Jasmine is a New York Times bestselling author of nine novels including The Wedding Date, the Reese's Book Club selection The Proposal, and Flirting Lessons. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Bon Appetit, and Time, and she is a frequent book contributor on The Today Show.

Northern California Writers' Retreat is a juried fiction retreat held four times a year in Carmel Valley. Join us for four nights and five days of writing, workshopping, yoga, live piano music, delicious food and wine, plus community and connection!

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