May 24th Meeting

Yesterday's meeting turned into a business session at the end, but we had much to talk about after our critiques.

Marie joined us, and is eager to return. Welcome! Jaimie's book, Support Your RV Lifestyle, has been racking up both national and state awards and recognition. She also reported on a poetry workshop she attended. Marsha secured a book cover designer for her forthcoming novel, Spinster's Folly, and is excited about an image the designer found. Jaimie also shared a couple of articles about punctuation that she found in a blog she follows.

T read a chapter from his memoir, about the experience of writing his first poem ... in sixth grade. His flair for words is so delightful that he could publish it for a larger audience than he foresees doing. Marsha read a scene from chapter thirteen. The members received it well, so she needs to finish the novel soon.

Instead of taking time to free write, we discussed options for meeting places. Each member got an assignment to check out locations and report back so we can decide which option would best serve our meeting place needs. The proposed locations vary from a park ramada to the town meeting hall, so watch for an announcement of where our next meeting will be held.

Meeting changes

by Marsha Ward

For a while now we've met on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of the month. In email discussions before our meeting yesterday, I told the members that if we could shift the meetings in June back a week, I could attend them. They agreed that would be good. At the meeting, we determined that there was no reason why we could not make the shift permanent, since we all could make it work.

Therefore, beginning in June, our meetings will be on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of each month. We have not held a second meeting in November and December since the time when we began meeting twice a month, because of the holidays. We'll determine later if this week shift makes any difference in that schedule in those months.

We are also looking into different meeting location options. We're meeting in an environment with hard floor and wall surfaces that seem to increase the ambient noise levels. This is problematical, as most of us have soft speaking voices. We brainstormed, and came up with several possible meeting places, which I assigned various members to check into. Chaya offered her home, as well (Thank you!). We each have until June 1 to investigate and report back to me. If we don't find a good place in Payson before our next meeting on June 7, we will go to Chaya's home in Star Valley (which I like as a meeting place, BTW).

Stay tuned for our next update on location.

May Meetings

We had a lovely meeting on May 10, with a few members present who haven't been able to attend for a while. We missed others who couldn't come, but a good time was had by all.

T. read another of his pithy memoir segments, and Marsha shared a short scene from her Work-in-Progress, Spinster's Folly. Then Carol B. gave a very useful lesson on Interviewing. We all interview people in life: car salesmen, politicians, prospective dates. Why not learn techniques to help us gain the information we need to find out what makes our characters tick, or our sampling soar? Thank you, Carol, for the tips.

Our next meeting is at 12:30 p.m. on May 24 at the same location. Ce Ce will tell us why reading is so valuable to us, not only as members of the human family, but as writers. If you have a manuscript to be critiqued, bring several copies of up to three pages of double-spaced work.

See you there!

22nd of March

We had another excellent meeting yesterday. We tried a new order of agenda, beginning with reading and critiquing our work: John read from a fiction piece he's working on; Larry read a vignette from his ongoing memoir writing; T read "Dueling Banjos" from his memoirs; and Chaya read from her sci-fi novel.

Chaya presented a wonderful lesson on self-critiquing your work using different colored pens for specific types of editing notations on successive read-throughs. It made good sense, so I'll have to try that when my novel is finished.

Marsha ended with a writing thought from Elmore Leonard: Leave out the boring parts.

See you on April 12, when Marsha' lesson will be on creating characters.

A look at the e-book price-fixing brouhaha

We briefly talked in our last meeting about the pending suit of the U.S. Justice Department against the Big 6 publishers and Apple.

Here's an excellent take on someone's absurd letter about the problem.

8th of March

Despite Marsha's discombobulation, several people showed up to the meeting today and participated in the discussion and writing exercise. Unfortunately, due to Marsha's discombobulation, we didn't have time for reading our work. She apologizes.

The 15-minute writing exercise on the prompt to write in any form or genre about "the last time you slept outdoors" had our participants scribbling madly away for the allotted time and beyond, and quite a bit of good work came from it. Some pieces fell into the category of non-fiction, one was a poem, and others were fiction.

We had our individual arms twisted to give 15-minute lessons over the next few months. Our teacher at the next meeting (March 22) will be the ever-gracious Chaya, who will address "Critiquing."

See you in two weeks!

March

Meetings this month are on the 8th and the 22nd, at 12:30 p.m. We'll stick with Mountain High Coffee Works, in the Swiss Village, until Marsha can check out other locations that have been suggested. Sorry, she's been terribly busy and not in town, of late.

See you later!