Next Noble Pen Meeting

Sept 10th, 2015 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Someday you, too, may get a chance to continue a series started by a well-known author.  This time it is someone adding to the Stieg Larsson series that started with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Victories

Eugenia found a better job.  Unfortunately it is in another state.

Ciuin’s writing will be used for a museum exhibit.  She even got to edit her boss’s writing for part of it.

Dylan finished the draft of a 25k word commission at 42k words.  He will participating in four panels at ICON in October.  He was a semifinalist, but is now out of the running, in the Mark Lawrence self-published novel competition.

Cassie made a post on her blog and newsletter including another picture relating to her story.  The pictures seem to attract interest.

Education

Participial phrases can be tricky to apply correctly.  The participle is a verb form (action word) which most often, but not always, ends in -ing.   Participial phrases are attached to a complete sentence to modify or supply additional information about the subject or object noun (person or thing) of the sentence.

For example, “Rowing the heavy boat, John soon tired.”  The participial phrase “Rowing the heavy boat” is not a sentence because there is no subject person to do the rowing.  “John soon tired” is a sentence, but needs the added phrase to explain why John, the subject of the sentence, became tired.

The phrase should be set off with commas from the sentence as above, or in “Pulling into the driveway, the noisy car alerted the occupants of the house.”

The noun should always be the nearest one to the phrase that modifies it.  It would be incorrect to write “Pulling into the driveway, the occupants of the house heard the noisy car” because the phrase appears to modify the nearest noun, occupants, not the intended noun, car.

Here is more discussion of participial phrases.

Upcoming Schedule

Sept 10
Dylan
Laura
Dylan’s lesson on POV ?

Sept 17
Open slots

Sept 24
Ciuin
Open slot

Oct 1
Open slots

Oct 8
Nick
Open slot

Oct 15
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill