Invite me to speak to your group

Thank you for your interest in allowing me to speak to your group! I love the opportunity to meet new people and to combine my loves of psychology and writing.

Many of the talks below can be adapted for formats from 45 minutes to three hours. I’m also willing to discuss a custom lecture or workshop if you have an idea or want to use one of the talks below as a springboard for other ideas.

Alternately, if you would like to invite me to attend your conference as a panelist and/or attending professional, please let me know. I have had the pleasure of being an attending professional or guest at Anachrocon, MidSouthCon, the Steampunk World’s Fair, JordanCon, and DragonCon. Conference guests and attendees often tell me how much they enjoyed my perspective, which is different from what they normally hear on writing conference panels. Click here to read an article on the writer’s block panel at DragonCon 2017, after which I was approached by several people with compliments.

“…I highly recommend her workshops for writers at any level of their career.”

Christine Glover
Romance Author
VP of Programming for Heart of Dixie RWA

Scroll down below the workshop descriptions for the rest of Christine’s testimonial and others.

My two flagship talks:

How Busy Professionals Can Make Friends with Their Sleep!

Is sleep the first thing to go when you’ve got deadlines looming?

You’re lying there, tossing and turning, thinking about how tired you’re going to be tomorrow.  You keep thinking about that project at work.  You’re thinking … if I go to sleep right now, I’ll only get 6 hours … 5 hours … 4 hours …

Let Anne, a Behavioral Sleep Medicine Specialist, guide you as to which sleep rules are important and which can be tossed into the night.  She’ll also discuss tips and tricks to make sure you meet your deadlines AND get a good night’s sleep.

In this talk, you will learn:

1. Five sleep myths everyone believes that work against you getting the zzz’s you need.
2. Behind-the-scenes info about the secrets of sleep and a new way to think about what happens across the night.
3. Life hacks that can help you be productive and get good-quality sleep.

With Anne’s help, sweet dreams are closer than you think!

How To Find Peace & Still Be Productive …

Tempering The Type A Personality

Life can get crazy, taking all you’ve got, only to come back for more. Do you feel the tug and pull between your desire to be productive and the need to take care of yourself? Is relaxation always taking a backseat to the next urgent thing? If so, you’re not alone. If you’re always stressed and don’t take time to care for yourself, your mind and body have a way of rebelling, and then where do you find yourself? Burned out? Miserable? Sick?

But what if you could make time for yourself AND increase your productivity?

Let Anne Bartolucci, Ph.D., confirmed Type A and psychologist, let you in on how she maintains a successful private practice and writing career while still having time for family and relaxation. It’s not as hard as you think to get the rest and re-creation time you need while doing the things you want and need to accomplish.

In this talk, you’ll learn:

1. A more flexible way of looking at balance so you’re calm and confident when life throws you curve balls
2. How to change your mindset and get out of your own way so you’re productive as well as relaxed
3. Specific relaxation hacks that’ll not only leave you feeling better, but also prevent productivity killers like procrastination

With Anne’s help, you can make sure you’re taking care of your most important asset – YOU.

Brief descriptions of workshops I’ve given previously and can adjust for future events include:

Overcoming procrastination:  Creative strategies for creative avoiders

Are you a champion procrastinator? Would you get more done if only you could make yourself do it? Rather than being an easy problem to solve, procrastination encompasses many motivations behind one behavior, and if you’re not addressing the key underlying problem, you’ll never overcome it. In this workshop, I discuss the different types of procrastination and matching strategies to overcome them.

Psychology 101 for writers

While it’s important to include characters with psychiatric problems, it’s important to do so compassionately so you don’t further the stigma of mental illness. Consequently, it’s important to make your characters layered and complex — especially your villains. So, it’s time to toss out the serial killer who kills because the voices in his head tells him to and build in layers from the ground up.

Characters on the couch: Personality as the key to internal conflict

Internal conflict is one of the toughest principles for new writers to understand and master. Myers-Briggs personality types can provide the building blocks to discovering a character’s internal conflict and the challenges that will help them grow.

If you’d like a more hands-on, intensive experience, I can easily add material and exercises to this one to lengthen it into a three-hour workshop.

Hysteria and the occult in Victorian times

The Victorian era was notable for several reasons including the acceleration of medical discovery and the fascination with the occult. Find out what one has to do with the other in the context of the history of mental health.

Testimonials: (Note: Cecilia Dominic is a pen name. These reference my professional identity.)

Anne Bartolucci’s presentations go above and beyond the usual PowerPoint slide show. She understands her subject matter, makes it fun to learn, and is extremely professional when sharing her knowledge. I’ve attended two of her workshops and was so impressed that I asked her to present a program to my local writing chapter. I highly recommend her workshops for writers at any level of their career.

Christine Glover
Romance Author
VP of Programming for Heart of Dixie RWA

Having attended Dr. Bartolucci’s presentation at the GPA Annual Meeting in 2016, I was pleased to ask her to consider presenting for GPA again the following year. Dr. Bartolucci is knowledgeable in an area in which so many of us hear of distress in our patients – sleep – and eager to share this knowledge with her colleagues. Her presentations have focused on not only treatment of sleep disturbances, but also educating her audiences about the underlying architecture of sleep, and how to best assess the nature of sleep disturbances. She has also been a pleasure to work with on the logistical aspects of putting together a presentation.

Rachel Anne Kieran, Psy.D., past president, Georgia Psychological Association

Georgia Romance Writers has benefited on two occasions from the workshops presented by Dr. Anne Bartolucci. Her Overcoming Procrastination workshop was highly attended, and she not only defined procrastination in a simple and effective way, but she also aided our members by discussing where procrastination comes from and presented helpful tools on how to get around it. I especially appreciated her advice on creating defensive to-do lists and benefited personally from her sharing her insights.

Tanya Agler, VP of Programming for the Georgia Romance Writers chapter of the Romance Writers of America

When I stepped into the writing conference seminar titled “Not tonight, Morpheus, I have a deadline,” I thought I was going to hear about ways to increase my writing productivity when I had limited times to write.

Instead, I received something much more valuable.

As someone who writers in spurts when he has a few minutes, I treat each opportunity as a way to get a few more paragraphs down on my next project. However, I’d never considered the effects of late-night staring at the blue screen of a computer can have on my sleep habits.

Through attending Anne Bartolucci’s seminar, a writer can learn strategies that allow them to focus on tasks that won’t impinge on a good night’s sleep, as well as ways to power down from tasks that already have.

I heartily recommend this seminar for anyone trying to squeeze additional minutes out of the night and into their sleep.

– Walt Mussell, Author, The Samurai’s Heart

The feedback we received was that folks loved the content and you!

We’ve been making strides in our own household. We’ve been shutting down electronics about 90 minutes before bedtime and making our nighttimes a bit quieter, begun using 9PM as our cut-off for conversations of any depth. This has been very effective!!

I’ve had several ask me for your info and said they wanted to follow up with you…I’m hopeful they do as I’m sure they’d benefit greatly from more time with you.

-Executive Pastor Michael Sanders, Redeemer Atlanta Church

Speaker bio:

Anne Bartolucci, Ph.D., aka author Cecilia Dominic, became a clinical psychologist because she’s fascinated by people and their stories, but she couldn’t stop making stuff up. By day, she helps people cure their insomnia in her private practice. By night, she writes fiction that keeps her readers turning pages past bedtime. Yes, she recognizes the conflict of interest between her two careers, but she prefers to be called versatile, not conflicted. Anne is a sought-after speaker for her entertaining and engaging talks on topics ranging from hysteria and the occult in Victorian times to how modern professionals can make friends with their sleep. She has been published in short and novel-length fiction as well as full-length nonfiction, and currently writes steampunk, urban fantasy, and her own brand of meta-fiction. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with one husband and two cats, which, she’s been told, is a good number of each.

Speaker photo:

If you would like to discuss my coming to speak for your group, either in person or via an online platform, or to invite me to be an attending professional at your con, please submit the contact form. Thank you!

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