Next Noble Pen Meeting

October 27th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Nationally known Cedar Rapids author Ed Gorman died October 14th at age 74.  He published over fifty books and seven short story collections in multiple genres, but was best know for crime, mystery, horror, and western works.

Victories

Randy sent 30 queries, and received 12 rejections.

Dylan rewrote 15k words (5 chapters) to avoid a plot hole.

Cassie wrote a scene for Fight to Bear, although she isn’t sure where it fits yet, and another 2k word chapter.  She heard chapter 1 of her audio book and likes it.

Andrea finished a good outline for the book she has been writing on, so better knows where it is headed.

Education

Critiquing other writers’ work may seem like you are doing them a favor, but most people find the experience actually improves their own writing as well.  Seeing problems in unfamiliar words sensitizes you to things you might pass over in your own work.

Here’s a list from Amy Sterling Casil of things to think about when preparing critique or editing your own work.  Victory Crayne has another good one.  Rich Hamper looks at it from both the critiquer and author points of view.

WritingForums is an on-line place for writers to chat, submit pieces for critique, and practice the art of critique.  Critique Circle is another.  However, posting to an on-line forum exposes your work to the world, which could have implications for future publication, so you might want to just read and practice critique there, or keep submissions short.

Upcoming Schedule

Oct 27
Riley
Laura
Randy

Nov 3
Nick
Cassie
Andrea

Nov 10
Dakota
Open slots

Nov 17
Open slots

Nov 24
Thanksgiving – no meeting

Dec 1
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

October 20th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Our attendance is picking up.  We had nine people giving critique at the last meeting and except for life events we might have had six more.  Our relaxed meeting style has worked well for an average attendance, but as we get more people, we will need to follow more closely our operating procedures as given in the Member Guide.  Please read it again so we are all aware of it.

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Some may be interested in a talk on Tuesday Oct 18 at 7 pm at the Coe College library by an author of a book on the divided US at the beginning of World War II.

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Iowa ICON science fiction and fantasy convention will occur in Cedar Rapids on October 28-30.

Victories

Ciuin was consulted by the author of a story that included gypsies, and she convinced them to not make the story ethnic.  A client of her Writing Fairy service has a book published.

Cassie got the proof copy of her next book that officially releases Nov 1.  She is offering a free ebook to the first fifty takers and they are almost gone.  She is hoping most of them give a review.

Education

Characterization, either directly by description or indirectly by showing thoughts, words, and actions, is an important part of writing about people, real or fictional.  Characters need to be interesting, at least the main characters.  Paula Wynne discusses character quirks, habits, idiosyncrasies, etc. that may make characters distinctive and come to life for the reader.

Here’s an essay on why certain famous characters are memorable.

Just for fun, take this quiz to see which famous character you are most like.

Upcoming Schedule

Oct 20
Cassie
Greg
Dakota

Oct 27
Riley
Laura
Open slot

Nov 3
Nick
Cassie
Open slot

Nov 10
Open slots

Nov 17
Open slots

Nov 24
Thanksgiving – no meeting

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

October 13th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

An Italian author who sought privacy has apparently been identified.  This commentary says many deplore the unwelcome exposure of the author, and notes that the mystery created by seeking privacy often draws more publicity.  Is there a clue for us in that?

It also says her novels seem to have drawn very little if anything from her own background, which is encouraging for those of us who don’t have a lot of exciting fodder for a novel in our personal history.

Victories

Cassie met with the narrator for her audio book.

Andrea got her story ready for critique.

Education

Every story needs to keep the reader wondering what will come next — why else would they finish reading it? In some stories that will be just uncertainty of the outcome, and in others it will be nerve-tingling suspense.  This blog discusses how to get and hold the reader’s attention.

A series of events that are logical but not everyday, ordinary occurrences can make a plot interesting. Lee Masterson offers some advice on arranging your plot to hold the reader.

After you get the reader wondering, suspense can be heightened by giving more detail to slow down the events in a creepy scene.

Upcoming Schedule

Oct 13
Riley
Cassie
Stacy H.

Oct 20
Aime W.
Greg
Dakota

Oct 27
Riley
Laura
Open slot

Nov 3
Nick
Cassie
Open slot

Nov 10
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

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

Next Noble Pen Meeting

September 1st, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

A large new anthology calls itself the “ultimate collection” of science fiction, and includes famous authors from the early period to first English translations of lesser known authors.

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The first black author to win a Hugo for best novel talks about her struggle to finish the book and about diversity.  Diversity has been a hot topic for the Hugos.

Victories

Dylan’s Sand and Ash got a four-star review.

Shannon will participate in the Clinton, Iowa book festival.

Education

Last week we had information about types of editing.  So you got someone to edit your book, they made a lot of changes, and that fact doesn’t feel good.  Jessica Strawser talks about how to deal with those edits.   Kathie Spitz has similar advice.  The editor is probably right most of the time, but perhaps you will ignore a few changes.  Diane Jacob has advice, aimed more for freelance work where the editor has actual power and not just expert advice.

Some  of that advice applies to using critiques, although a single critique would carry less weight than a majority of critiquers’ opinions or an editor’s changes.

Upcoming Schedule

Sept 1
Stacie S.
Nick
Randy

Sept 8
Laura
Stacy H.
Dylan (if no one else)

Sept 15
Aime W.
Open slots

Sept 22
Open slots

Sept 29
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

August 25th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Although it is generally a good idea for writers to understand the country and people they write about, this article says Mark Twain did not understand Germany when he wrote A Tramp Abroad.

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J. K. Rowling will release three small collections of Harry Potter short stories.

Victories

Ciuin got UNICEF to fix the grammar and another problem on their web site.

Dylan wrote 17,000 words this week.  His editor is working on Sand and Bone, and likes it.

Education

An editor is an editor, right?  No, there are several types of editing, with a little overlap  (another discussion of differences).  When a writer starts looking for an editor to prepare their work for submitting to an agent, traditional publisher, or for self-publishing, they need to consider which kinds of help they need.

If the author is attempting the traditional publishing route, they may use an editor to get the manuscript in very good shape to improve the chances for acceptance.  The company will do, or work with the author on, the final edits.  If you self-publish, it’s all up to you.

A content, developmental (see wikipedia), or substantive editor looks at the big picture – does the story hang together, read easily, hold interest, and appeal to a market?  Is the dialog okay, the POV consistent, the characters developed, the plot logical?  This is what we mostly concentrate on in Noble Pen reviews.

A line editor takes the middle ground – are the sentences well constructed and varied enough?  Is the vocabulary effective and not repetitive? Are the verbs strong? Too many references to time (then, after a moment, later, etc.)  This is also a reasonable area for our comments if there is a pattern of problems, or markups if there is an occasional problem.

A copy editor looks at the details of punctuation, spelling, and grammar, and may offer suggestions to smooth out the last rough edges in sentence flow.  This is usually what Noble Pen readers should leave on the markup page and not spend time discussing.

This site, although slightly old, offers some estimates of typical cost for professional editing services, and discusses the pros and cons.  You might conclude that in our group we are providing very valuable services for each other.

Upcoming Schedule

August 25
Dylan
Shannon
Stacy H.

Sept 1
Stacie S.
Nick
Randy

Sept 8
Laura
Stacy H.
Open slot

Sept 15
Open slots

Sept 22
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill