The Noble Pen Holiday Edition

Next Noble Pen Meeting

December 1st, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Most companies are giving their employees Thursday off to work on their writing, so we won’t interfere with that to have a meeting.

Victories

Aime decided her story was ready to publish on Amazon.

Stacy sent query letters.

Dylan wrote a 3 kword essay on the electoral college and a chapter of a commission.

Education

Writing a character who is not of your own gender can be difficult.  A.  Lee Martinez offers advice.

Part of the advice is to make sure your characters aren’t stereotyped.  But if you are writing in historical fiction or an alternate world which parallels our history, then you may need to pay attention to these historical attitudes of gender roles that have changed.

For fun, you may want to see if this Gender Guesser can correctly determine who wrote a selection.  The tool is mostly a curiosity, but could help you balance your writing to appeal to a wider audience.

It doesn’t seem to be very accurate for fiction.  I tried the first chapter of my story and it was 51% confident I was male, whereas Randy’s first chapter came up 63% for male.  But it indicated male for recent submissions by Cassie and Laura.  The most “female” result from my trials was a submission from Stacy that came out only 46% confident.   Do these results indicate our group is influencing each other to a neutral style?

Upcoming Schedule

Nov 24
Thanksgiving – no meeting

Dec 1
Dakota
Uriah
Andrea

Dec 8
Laura
Aime W.
Stacy H.

Dec 15
Open slots

Dec 22
Open slots

Dec 29
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill