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!