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November Writers’ Meeting

Hi Everyone,

Today we held our November JWB meeting at Bella Caffe. Our next meeting will be held on Dec. 18, 2011 from 12:30 to 3PM at Bella Caffe in Park Rapids MN.

Present: Tarah, Niomi, Scott, Jerry, LuAnne, Sharon

TALKING STICK:

We plan to do TS21 a little early for next year. We hope to send out the call for submissions early in December 2011 and have the deadline on Feb. 20, 2012, instead of March 1. We will have a board meeting soon to work on that along with our next book release party. We are considering having a two day event in Sept. 2012 instead of one day.

OTHER BOOKS:

Tarah and Sharon are working on Tarah’s big fantasy novel and hope to have it out by the end of the year. Check it out on Tarah’s website www.embracedbydarkness.com. Sharon’s third poetry book is also almost done. She hopes to get a few copies from lulu before the end of the year and do a larger printing later on.

DONATIONS AND BOOK SALES:

We are still getting in donations along with book sales from the website. We plan to email out our donation friendraiser letter to all our email address soon.

20×20:

Blank Canvas wants to order some of our 20×20 books to sell for the holidays. They should be ordered through Tarah to get the wholesale price. We will look for specials. Sharon and Scott and Tarah will work on this.

RECENT WRITING EVENTS:

Jerry attended a fiction writers event at the loft. There was some interesting information on publishers and agents. Gray Wolf and Milkweed get 300 manuscripts a year. They maybe publish 12 of those. 70% are agented. Agents save you time and they know which publisher to send your book to.

UPCOMING WRITING EVENTS:

AWP Annual Conference and Book Fair in Chicago is coming up in March. Authors, publishing houses, agents, publicists.

WRITING DEADLINES:

Narrative and Glimmer Train both have November 30, 2011, deadline.

MISC. WRITING:

Jerry mentioned Glimmers. These are short writings, a page or less. They are a moment in time, a glimpse of life, a detailed description of a scene or a feeling or a brief happening. They are almost poetic. They can be taken from journals or just used as an exercise. Maybe they can be used in some future longer writing. These are also called Snapshots or Vignettes.

Niomi and Jerry spoke of writing in long hand versus writing on the computer. They like to do their first drafts in long hand. It slows you down so you can think. You can rework it and digest it and live with it as you write it out in script. It seems like if you do your first draft on the computer, you don’t have time to really live with it until later on.

Tarah spoke of describing something. When you see something beautiful that you want to describe–if you can’t come up with a way to describe what you see, perhaps try describing how it makes you feel, how it changes you, how it affects you.

Hope to see you next time!