Next Noble Pen Meeting

Feb 4, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

J. K. Rowling, whose books have been the targets of some censorship efforts, received a Free Speech award.

Victories

Cassie got a five-star review on Goodreads.

Ciuin finished a chapter of Nightmares.

Education

Writers sometimes mistake action for plot.  Perhaps plot may be defined as the events that happen to the characters, but a linear series of fight scenes on the way from point A to point B isn’t a very compelling plot.

Readers will expect struggles interrelated with the main character’s overall goals and their limitations, and it is usually more interesting if the goal is more than simply surviving to arrive somewhere.  The characters need to make choices and deal with consequences and sometimes failures.  Here’s another commentary on choices.

Upcoming Schedule

Feb 4
Nick
Bill H.

Feb 11
Aime W.
Open slot

Feb 18
Randy
Ciuin

Feb 25
Erin
Laura

March 3
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

Jan 28th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

NPR book critics offer the best of 2015, organized by categories.

–//–

The Spring (northern hemisphere) edition of Science Fiction News is on line.

Victories

Dylan got his editing program to use multiple spelling dictionaries: general, personal, project, etc.  That helps with the words and names unique to each book.  He is now working to catch up with commissions.

Shannon was heard on two podcasts pushing his book and mentioned Dylan’s publishing company.

Cassie broke through a block on her story Follow You Anywhere.

Ciuin has moved the publication of Petty Theft up to a high priority and promised herself she will get it out this year.

Education

Semicolons are not as common in fiction as in scholarly writing, and particularly rare in dialog.  They can be downright controversial.  James Scott Bell apparently would ban semicolons but he got comments on both sides.  Beth Hill discusses the nuances of different sentence constructions and argues that sometimes the semicolon is the right choice.

Here’s some advice on other punctuation marks, the hyphen and dashes. Here’s more on dashes, and a powerpoint presentation on punctuation marks.

Upcoming Schedule

Jan 28
Bill W.
Ciuin

Feb 4
Nick
Bill H.

Feb 11
Greg
Aime W.

Feb 18
Randy
Ciuin

Feb 25
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

Jan 21st, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Some people who we haven’t seen in a while have been dropped from the email list, which was getting rather long.  If you didn’t get an email but plan to attend a meeting, let us know so we can forward the submissions.

Victories

Cassie got a four-star review of her book on Goodreads.  She made headway on the end of her next novel.

Bill H. reviewed all the (very) old critiques of his short novel and made some edits.

Ciuin rewrote and submitted her personal statement for the graduate school application.  She got a compliment from a former teacher who reviewed it.  Her tutoring of her grandsons on English is showing progress.

Education

Action and fight scenes are an important part of many stories.  There needs to be more to the story than the action, of course, with motivations, personalities, emotional conflict, interpersonal relations, and change in the characters often making important contributions to the story.

But when the action goes down, how do you set it up and describe it?  Action usually is carried best by short sentences to imply a fast pace. This is not the time to give setting or character background.  Simple sensory detail without over-describing, no passive voice, few adverbs, and selected action verbs will convey the excitement.

Make the battle(s) important to the plot, with high stakes, and not just the script of a video game with one unrelated fight after another.   Can you make the hero’s fate in doubt or does the reader know he will emerge unscathed?

Robert Wood tells how he approaches action scenes.  Fonda Lee gives some good advice.  Linda Adams gives her take on it.

Upcoming Schedule

Jan 21
Cassie
Dylan

Jan 28
Bill W.
Ciuin

Feb 4
Nick
Bill H.

Feb 11
Open slots

Feb 18
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

Jan 14th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

WorldCon is now accepting registrations for the August 2016 event in Kansas City.  Supporting members can get all of the Hugo nominated works as ebooks and vote on the awards.

Victories

Cassie has 7 people with her forthcoming book on their Goodreads bookshelf.  She has signed up for her third event to promote the book, this one the Romance Rendezvous in Cedar Falls on April 9.

Dylan now has a quarter million words on his Fedran world wiki site.

Education

Authors often want to have a series of books that share characters and settings.  However, new authors are advised to never try to sell a series until they have success with one book.  Still, a stand-alone book can leave hooks for a series without a too-obvious cliffhanger leading into a sequel.  Kurtis Scaletta offers advice on how to do this.  Karen Wiesner has more.

Upcoming Schedule

Jan 14
Bill W.
Aime W.

Jan 21
Cassie
Dylan (will cede)

Jan 28
Open slots

Feb 4
Open slots

Feb 11
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

Jan 7th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

No news is good news.

Victories

We all made it into a new year.  We’ll have to wait until the meeting to find out what literary victories everyone had.

Education

As our culture changes, so do the words.  Gender neutral language has been slowly gaining usage since the introduction of Ms for a female with unspecified marital status and flight attendant instead of stewardess.

English has an easier path to gender neutrality than languages such as Spanish where even inanimate objects have gender and use “el” and “la” instead of “the.”  As such, English may be considered genderless.

Yet English is short on neutral pronouns and nouns.  We can say “person” instead of “man” or “woman”, or “server” instead of “waiter,” but traditionally we were stuck with “him” and “her.”  A recent trend is to substitute “they” as a reference to one man or woman, which would have been considered poor grammar in past times. New pronouns have been proposed.

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the topic, another discussion, and a guide from a college.

Upcoming Schedule

Jan 7
Randy
Nick

Jan 14
Bill W.
Aime W.

Jan 21
Open slots

Jan 28
Open slots

Feb 4
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill