Next Noble Pen Meeting

January 31st, 2013 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

On-line reviews continue to be problematic.  Not only are positive reviews sometimes solicited or even bought by an author, but negative reviews can be used as a weapon.  A recent book about Michael Jackson received a huge number of bad reviews, mostly by people who probably never saw the book but only posted in response to postings on social media.

A potential solution to much of the problem, it seems to me, is to only allow reviews by people who have purchased the book through that site.

Victories

Janice recovered her writing files from a crashed computer.

Shannon has survived plagues and misfortunes to come to our meeting again.

Tyree was asked to submit a vampire poem for an anthology (paying).  He had it written in a half hour and accepted the next day.

Education

Shannon brought up the Hero’s Journey or Monomyth, which describes the structure of a great many stories.  Here are some links:

The Wikipedia overview of the topic.

The Vladimir Propp version of it.

A chart showing how the journey works with Star Wars/ The Matrix.

—//–

We discussed the need for backups.  Flash drives are great.  The cheapest one in the store will hold more writing documents (without audio/picture/video) than all of us together will ever produce.  Another convenient (and free up to 2 GBytes) option is Dropbox, which not only backs up a folder to their servers, but will also synchronize its folders between all of your machines, and will let you send a link for other people to download selected files.

Upcoming Schedule

Jan 31st
Janice
Tyree
Aimee

Feb 7th

Nick (1 or 2)
Tyree (if no one else)
Janice ?

Feb 14th

Open Slots

Feb 21st

Open Slots

Keep Writing,
Bill