An aspiring local author is getting an opportunity to hone her skills and work with a best-selling author to learn how to best tell her story. Cindy Ashworth has been selected to participate in BLAST: Building Leaders, Authors, Speakers and Teachers, an online mentorship program run by Shannon Ethridge.
Ashworth says that it was meeting Ethridge which got her interested in the program and starting the process of getting involved.
"In 2008 me and a couple of girlfriends went to a women's conference in Saskatoon, and Shannon Ethridge was the presenter. I stood in line to get the book that I had purchased weeks before signed, and I asked her a question and she said to me 'I don't know who you are or exactly what's going on in your life, but you have a story to tell. You need to write a book or get involved in public speaking, I feel you need to get your story out there,'" Ashworth says.
In the intervening years, Ashworth says that she has been working on improving her own life, and now she says she felt it was the time take the plunge and go through the program.
BLAST is a twelve-month writer's conference which has students working together to critique each other's work and improve their public speaking ability.
"Working as a group, we get everyone's ideas together and we can write off of that," Ashworth says.
Ashworth's ultimate goal is to do some mentoring and public speaking with the knowledge gained from the course. She says she is working on her book right now, and hopes that the course helps her make it the best it can be and get it published. She says she wants to inspire others to improve the lives of people around them.
"In this day and age a lot of people are hurting out there. They want answers and there is nowhere to turn and nobody to encourage people and stay with them," Ashworth says.
More information on the program can be found at www.shannonethridge.com/blast.
