Meeting Minutes July 11, 2010

A lot of emails have been flying around through the group lately and I wanted to wait until the flurry died down before I posted the minutes. To protect the innocent, I will not use names in one of the discussions we had during the meeting.

Nancy was leading this week since Judy was away. We had a bit of discussion about whether or not to introduce ourselves to Marilyn, our new member, since a lot of us already knew her from the Retreat in Eramosa Eden and the photo shoot in the canola field. In the end, we did a quick go around the circle.

Richard received is copy of Manuscript Submissions for winning the blog contest held by C. Patrick Schulz during HWG week on his blog. He offered it up to anyone who wants to borrow it. It was printed in 1990 and relates more to typewriters than computers, but does hold some nuggets of wisdom for those who would like to see it. Alberta took it home this week.

Nancy asked if we could take turns being the "Guest" Bloggers on our own blog. We would like to have people post blogs about writing, their struggle with getting published, anything to do with the writing process.

Richard had set up a little photography studio in the room and took the rest of the headshots for the anthology.

During the readings, we had one member complain about the length of another member's short story. The direct quote was that it was "putting people to sleep." That launched a discussion about how long items should be that people read in the group. The piece in question was about 5000 words. Glenn and Nancy agreed that we all need to have tolerance of what people read. Sometimes members read aloud short stories that are longer than others.

Over the years, we have learned it is easier NOT to have a limit. Members will tell us if it is a longer piece than normal and we can decide to cut it short or wait for another meeting depending on the time available. Since we have no need to vacate the room by 3:45pm anymore, we have a little extra time to allow for longer items. When members let us know beforehand that the story is longer than usual, we can make that choice as a group BEFORE.
We are a group created to SUPPORT and HELP each other, not judge each other.
That can be done outside the group if anyone wants a real critique.

The prompts this week were a little different than normal. Nancy handed out fortune cookies and we used the fortunes as our prompts! What a delicious idea! I didn't collect or write down everyone's fortunes, but mine was "You have a good head for matters of money." From it, I wrote a piece about a man down to his last $5.

This is my own aside here, consider it an afterthought of our meeting:
We need to revamp our website. If any member wishes to be included on the website and post some short pieces of fiction or non-fiction, please contact me, Nancy or Shirley. Shirley will set you up! Our little group has grown considerably and we want to give all of you what exposure we can so that when Agents and Publishes and Fans look us up, they have something great to find!!!

Keep in mind our next meeting is JULY 25, 2010 and Richard will be leading.
As soon as we can find him...right Waldo?

Keep Writing!