The Noble Pen for Feb 1, 2018

Next Noble Pen Meeting

February 1st, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The authors planning to have a booth at the Cedar Rapids summer Farmers Markets will have a meeting Feb 1 at 6:30 at Scott’s Restaurant (just before the Noble Pen meeting) to discuss planning and fill out the application.

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Cracked Walnut is a traveling literary group based in Minneapolis. They will be doing a prose and p**try reading in Cedar Rapids, 7 pm Saturday Feb 3 at Peoples Church, 4980 Gordon Ave NW (a block west of Jacolyn Park).  See link for information.

Victories

The Farmers Market group has 14 authors involved and are finalizing plans for displays.

Aime edited one third of Scourge.

Jeremiah finished reading a 700 page fantasy book.

Ciuin was recommended by someone she had helped in the past and another author now wants her to work with him.  If she takes the job, it would involve typing a handwritten manuscript and ghostwriting the middle of his novel.

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.

Another way to supply additional information is a prepositional phrase.  Taken all together, the phrase acts as an adjective or adverb, but is not a sentence in itself.

A preposition is a relational word (from, in, on, under, behind, before, etc.) and the phrase includes a noun object (or other words operating in place of the noun) to complete the relationship.  For example, “The box sits under the table.”  The basic sentence “The box sits.” is technically complete, but not terribly informative.  The addition of the preposition “under” and its object “table” tell us a lot more.

Here is some further explanation and some examples of prepositional phrases.

Upcoming Schedule

February 1
Stacie S. 10-minute educational
Nick
Stacy H
Riley

February 8
Randy
Stacie S
Open slot

February 15
Aime
Stacie S
Open slot

February 22
Randy
Ciuin
Open slot

March 1
Nick
Jeremiah
Open slot

Keep Writing,
Bill