The Noble Pen for June 5, 2014

Next Noble Pen Meeting

June 5th, 2014 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The battle for the book market continues, as Amazon is accused of selectively delaying or dropping books to punish some publishers.  (Another report.)   Amazon defends their position.

Victories

Tyree got a new computer and has (mostly) figured out how to use it.  He can now open .doc files.  He was annoyed, and worried about privacy, by its default of saving everything to the cloud and got that changed.

Ciuin has broken down the revisions needed to Petty Theft into a manageable list.  She has organized all critiques of the beta submission for efficient implementation, and has decided to fix a timeline discrepancy to match the historical information.

Education

Writing groups have proven helpful to many writers.   Cassie pointed out a recent article in Writers Digest that surveys several, and they feature several more in an on-line supplement, each having its own character, operating methods, and even purposes.

You can also find some on-line places (here or here, for example) to give and get critiques.  Practicing the giving of good critiques and comparing your analysis to others can be helpful in improving your own writing.  You need to be careful to not “publish” your material by making too much of it available to the world at large.

Noble Pen has evolved to our current Member Guide, which we follow in general, but frequently not with precision, and it seems to be working most of the time.

Here’s another discussion of writing groups.  I like to think we fall in the “Circle of Friends” category described there, but we need to keep alert that we don’t drift into another category.

Upcoming Schedule

June 5th
Nick
Jed
Tyree

June 12th
Aimee
Ciuin
Jed

June 19th
Open slots

June 26th
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill