Please plan to come for our next meeting on Thursday, November 15th at 5:00 at Yianni's in Greenwood.

Unrelated but funny:



Thanks, Savage Chickens.

September Meeting

Our next meeting will be Tuesday, September 18th at Yianni's in Greenwood.

The writing prompt from the last meeting is to write from a photograph. If you want to participate and do a writing prompt, please bring the photo the meeting.

See you there!

Conference

The Mississippi Writer's Guild conference was August 3-4 in Raymond, Miss. I wish you all could have been there. I learned some, made some new friends, and the contact buzz I got from writiness of it was awesome.



Novelist Joshilyn Jackson and me, at Pentimento Books in Clinton, Miss.

Joshilyn gave a rousing and funny opening address that was inspiring and motivating (the jist of which was: Write, then write some more. Write what you like. Write what you love. Then? Write some more!). She also led two workshops, which I took. One was about great opening lines and what makes them great. It was very informative.

I am working on (deep breath) a novel. A mystery. I feel altogether uncertain and downright squeamish about how I don't know what I'm doing. But we've been plotting and now it's time to write.

What are you working on?

This Is Your Assignment

Beverly has given the group its first assignment:

She suggests we write a one to two page description of either our mother, father or someone we admire greatly, living or dead. By writing about what we know, we can delve into more description, even the little things.

This will be "due" at our next meeting on Saturday, July 14th at 11:30 in Winona. We'll meet at my place and I'll get you all directions there.

Happy writing --

What Makes It Happen

Very interesting article by The New York Times about why some books are bestsellers and some are not. It has some good insights in to the publishing industry and the way it does business. One quote by an author, who overheard this from an editor: “People think publishing is a business, but it’s a casino.”
Read it here.

New Book

Check it out.

Blogs = Good

I think that blogs are doing the writing world a ton of good. How many people do you know personally who blog? Probably a few, right? How many blogs do you read every day?

The number of people who are discovering blogs – both reading and writing them – grows every day. More than two blogs are created every second of every day. There are about 1.6 million posts every day. On July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog.

Pooh-poohers talk about the lack of grammar, the lazy word choices, not to mention that blogging simply glorifies online writing, hurrying the handwritten letter into an early grave.

That’s flawed logic, I think. Sure, there are blogs with abominable writing and there are the blogs detailing their day’s activities in boring detail. There is also much bad writing in print magazines, ads, and handwritten letters, for that matter.

But look at all the writing that is going on online. That is a great and wondrous thing. I suspect some, maybe many, bloggers start their online journals as a lark or for fun or to be hip and in style. I bet any number of them find themselves thoroughly enjoying posting, particularly as their writing grows richer and fuller during the process, something that I think can’t help but happen with lots of practice. If you’re posting often, you’re getting lots of practice.

And I firmly believe that the more you write, then, well, the more you write. Someone who blogs for fun and sport may be, after a while, more inclined to write a handwritten letter to a friend, to send a note to the editor of their local paper, to try their hand at crafting maybe a poem or a short story.

I think writing in general, whether it’s blogs or The Great American Novel, helps us to become more discriminating readers, as well. Writing more helps you with reading and reading more helps you with writing. The two are co-dependent like that in the best possible way.

They also become more aware, more livers of life – looking around and mining the world around them for material, maybe without even realizing they’re looking for ideas for content but yet feeling of this world more so than before.