Next Noble Pen Meeting

October 6th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Time travel aficionados may be interested in a new book that considers the literary history and the physics.

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The Marion Public Library will host a Celebrate Writing event on Saturday October 15th. It’s free, with an optional $5 lunch with the presenting authors. Two morning sessions and one afternoon session each offer a choice of topics on writing and publishing. Registration is encouraged for the morning, and required for the lunch and afternoon session.

Victories

Dylan submitted a story to a publisher for consideration.

Stacy rewrote her reviewed chapters.

Cassie wrote a scene for a possible future story.  Whe is working to get an audio book made for Home for the Holiday.

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.  Here a discussion of participial phrases.

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.

The present participle implies simultaneous actions.  “Walking into the building, John opened the heavy door” obviously violates the order of events, since he can’t walk in until after he has opened the door.  “Chugging her beer, she laughed in his face” can’t happen all at once; pick an order and rewrite accordingly.

Upcoming Schedule

Oct 6
Nick
Laura
Andrea

Oct 13
Riley
Cassie
Stacy H.

Oct 20
Aime W.
Greg
Open slot

Oct 27
Open slots

Nov 3
Open slots

Keep Writing,

Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

September 29th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The Marion Public Library will host a Celebrate Writing event on Saturday October 15th. It’s free, with an optional $5 lunch with the presenting authors. Two morning sessions and one afternoon session each offer a choice of topics on writing and publishing. Registration is encouraged for the morning, and required for the lunch and afternoon session.

Victories

Andrea started a new book which is not related to her prior series.

Dylan finished the serial release of Sand and Blood.

Education

How long should a chapter be?  The answer seems to be “how long is a piece of string?” Various writers use widely varying chapter lengths.   The general advice is to make each chapter serve a distinct purpose and tell a distinct piece of the story, whether that is 1,000 or even 15,000 words.  If you are worried about people with short intervals for reading, then a good rule of thumb is under 5,000.  Some claim the average novel chapter is under 3,000.

The first chapter is special, since it must hook the reader into continuing through the book.  Anne R. Allen offers a checklist for things the first chapter needs to do.

Upcoming Schedule

Sept 29
Stacy H.
Greg
Aime W.

Oct 6
Nick
Laura
Andrea

Oct 13
Open slots

Oct 20
Open slots

Oct 27
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

September 22nd, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The Marion Public Library will host a Celebrate Writing event on Saturday October 15th. It’s free, with an optional $5 lunch with the presenting authors. Two morning sessions and one afternoon session each offer a choice of topics on writing and publishing. Registration is encouraged for the morning, and required for the lunch and afternoon session.

Victories

Cassie finished the epilogue of her novella.

Dylan got another commission.

Education

You want your characters to seem real, so they need motivations, a little description, and individual characteristics.  Anne Leigh Parrish discusses  making characters plausible.  Characters need both good characteristics and flaws to seem real. Perfect saints are boring and not believable.  A “tough” character has appeal because they are able to handle what comes at them, but as Angela Ackerman points out, don’t go too far in making them insensitive, cynical, or otherwise nasty.   Even the old “hard boiled” detective usually had a soft spot to make them more relatable.  In another article, she categorizes character flaws.

Syndney Katt offers advice on creating flawed heroes and villains with redeeming characteristics and Anne Tyler talks about writing strong yet flawed characters.

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. ~Confucius

You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. ~Diane Arbus

Upcoming Schedule

Sept 22
Aime W.
Dylan
Randy

Sept 29
Stacy H.
Open slots

Oct 6
Nick
Laura
Open slot

Oct 13
Open slots

Oct 20
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

September 15th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The Marion Public Library will host a Celebrate Writing event on Saturday October 15th. It’s free, with an optional $5 lunch with the presenting authors. Two morning sessions and one afternoon session each offer a choice of topics on writing and publishing. Registration is encouraged for the morning, and required for the lunch and afternoon session.

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Watch for used book sales at or associated with your library.  You can often pick up a lot of reading material for very little money as they sell off discards or unused donations.  Aime reports the Hiawatha library has an ongoing sale. The Friends of the CR Library have occasional events and their big fall sale Nov 4-8, 2016.

Victories

Aime finished revision edits on her short story.

Stacy H. received a nice personalized rejection letter.

Dylan got another commission.

Cassie received a new review on her first book.  The ad campaign she joined in with other writers raised her newsletter signups to 700.

Education

Writers, like anyone using a computer, need to use a backup strategy.  You will eventually need a backup, probably at the worst possible time.  You should find some combination of methods that would allow you to recover from corruption of a file or loss of the hard drive where you compose your work.

A first easy step, after each significant writing or editing session, is to copy the working file to another name.  Then if the word processor crashes and can’t recover today’s file, you still have yesterday’s to go back to.   If you decide today’s edits took you in the wrong direction it is easy to rename the disappointing file (don’t delete it!) and copy yesterday’s file to the working name.  I like to back up a file named MyNovel.doc by renaming a copy as MyNovel20160911.doc, where the digits are year, month, day, and if needed the hour.   Using that order causes an alphabetic file name sort to list them in chronological order.

To deal with potential disk problems, a widely advised strategy is to have two flash stick drives and alternate, copying your work onto one today and the other next time.  Occasionally you should open some files on the flash stick to be sure it is reading properly. Flash drives are cheap, and the smallest one for sale would store many backups of all of the writing you will ever do (sans pictures).

You can occasionally give an additional flash or a burned CD (using the Mastered option) to a friend or family member to store at another location, in case something happens to your apartment or house.

Cloud storage is another option.  Several services are affordable or free.  One such 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

Sept 15
Stacy H.
Dylan
Cassie

Sept 22
Aime W.
Open slots

Sept 29
Stacy H.
Open slots

Oct 6
Nick
Laura
Open slot

Oct 13
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

September 8th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The Marion Public Library will host a Celebrate Writing event on Saturday October 15th.  It’s free, with an optional $5 lunch with the presenting authors.  Two morning sessions and one afternoon session each offer a choice of topics on writing and publishing.  Registration is encouraged for the morning, and required for the lunch and afternoon session.

Victories

Cassie is back after time away from the group.  Her 2nd book came out this week and has some good reviews.  She is doing a signing at a local store and another at a multi-author event in central Iowa.  She finalized the cover for her third book and started writing on another.

Dylan finished a 50k word commission.  He got fan mail.

Nick wrote on his second sci-fi story, and sent a query.

Faye submitted queries.

The author Ciuin was helping has her book published and is doing signings.

Education

Nathan Bransford has some excellent articles  (Publishing Essentials links in his left column) on how to write a novel, edit a novel, write queries, etc.

Upcoming Schedule

Sept 8
Laura
Stacy H.
Dylan

Sept 15
Aime W.
Stacie S.
Open slot

Sept 22
Open slots

Sept 29
Open slots

Oct 6
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill