Next Noble Pen Meeting

September 5th, 2013 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Welcome to Tina, who found the group.

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Barnes and Noble continues to have bad news as its founder drops a plan to buy out the corporation’s bookstores, splitting the company.  And a deal falls through that might have transferred their digital media to Microsoft.

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Writer information:  Tyree brought in a digest from Pro Se Press, www.prosepulp.com.
They are looking for pulp-type fiction, from short stories to novels.  They also promote a pulp culture convention in Springville, Arkansas.  For more info check out
http://www.pulpark.blogspot.com.  Next convention is April 2014, I think.

Victories

Dylan is happy with progress toward an expanded family, but is unhappy that he still has  no response from his editor.

Barbara & Matt did some recalibration on their story and have decided  to give it a change of direction, which will be evident in their next submission to the group.

Janice managed to do more writing than usual, despite the distraction of classes.

Jed’s new story keeps reminding him to work on it.

Education

Accents and dialect are tricky for authors.  They are easily overdone and difficult to do well.  Anyone wanting a bad example might look up Poe’s Gold Bug, or the example used in this advice, and here, and here.  It points out that subtle use of word choice , sentence length, slang, idiom, and phrasings can be more effective than overpowering the reader with difficult spellings, overuse of contractions, and other devices that make it difficult to read.

At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects. ~David Crystal

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories. ~Ron Rash

My whole deal when I do accents or dialects is I gotta fool the locals. If I fool the locals then I’ve done my job.  ~Brion James

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. ~John Steinbeck,

Upcoming Schedule

Sept 5th
Nick
Laura
Rachel

Sept 12th
Tyree
Open slots

Sept 19th
Nick
Open slots

Sept 26th
Open slots

Oct 3rd
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill