Minutes from Oct 17th 2021
Between 12 and 15 members attended Sunday’s Writers’ Mill meeting. Some were unable to attend because they had problems finding the email link. It seems rather unproductive to ask you to please email me if you don’t get this email but… if you do get this email, but don’t get the one with the email link for the next meeting, please email me during the morning, so I can resend the link to you before the meeting starts. Our next meeting will be on Sunday November 21st, and we plan to upload the anthology and create the cover “before your very eyes.”
Watch Your Emails
Also, please watch your emails for an email with information about how to purchase “author copies” of the anthology. And again, if you don’t see the email say, before November 14th, please email me before the end of November 14th. Copies can only be ordered if they are prepaid, and you’ll need time for your payment to reach our brave banker.
For reference, our previous anthologies (from #3 onward) are all on our Amazon page at https://www.amazon.com/The-Writers-Mill/e/B081P17P5Q and available at the library.
Also, you can always buy copies directly from Amazon, but they’ll probably cost more. To get the “author” price you have to be logged on as the library. And to get a deal on postage we have to make a large group order.
Zita pointed out the “deal” we get may not be as good as in previous years, but we think the anthologies will cost around $4 to $5 each. When Zita knows how many pages we have, we’ll be able to work it out more closely.
Meeting our New Librarian
Laura introduced our new librarian, Alice, at the start of the meeting. We’re looking forward to getting to know her, and we’re very grateful to everyone at the library for their constant support of our group. Alice is going to be checking into how to make sure Amazon doesn’t kick us off next month when we log on to do our uploads.
Contest Results
Karin announced our contest winners for October’s All Roads Lead to Rome contest:
- · FIRST – Steve Cooper for “All Rogues Need to Roam”
- · SECOND – Judy Beaston for “Jason Knows the Way”
- · THIRD – Michael Fryer for “Witch Road?”
OTHER ENTRIES
- · A Long Journey By Jessie Collins
- · After Rome (poem) By Sheila Deeth
- · Do All Roads Lead to God? By Robin Layne
- · If At First… By Judy Beaston
- · Martin and the Screen By Karen Alexander
- · Puzzles By Peter Letts
- · Roads to Vernonia (poem) By Jean Harkin
- · The Vacation By Von Pelot
- · UBCKOFF By James Elstad
Upcoming Contests
Upcoming contests (deadline the end of the first Sunday of each month; entries to contest @ portlandwritersmill . org; wordcount no more than 1,200 words; genre any; more info at https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/contests/upcoming-2021-contests/) are:
- · November – adjusting expectations
- · December – Family Gatherings
- · January – My New Year’s Resolution
More About Style
Sheila had received some questions from members about the anthology production. Following on from last month’s talk about Word Styles, there were questions about whether tabs are ever useful, what’s an unbreakable space for anyway, what other things can you do with style, etc. Sheila has promised to put a page online on our website explaining some of this. Try https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/help-2/
Another member asked Sheila about our “house style” for the anthology. This is different from Word styles, and concerns how we like to use ellipses, quotation marks, italics, punctuation, etc. Again, Sheila will put a page online with our “style as far as we’ve worked it out so far.” (https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/help-2/writers-mill-anthology-style-guide/) Publishers (and web writers) often have house styles and might say “if it’s not in the style guide, use Chicago.” For us, we’re more likely to say “if it’s not in the style guide, let’s get a group together and decide what to do.” Decisions on house style are made to simplify publishing and layout, to minimize labor, to minimize editing, and to give our books some level of consistency.
Send in Your Edits
Discussion of the anthology covered copy-editing (please send any edits by the end of TODAY, SUNDAY), illustrations (see below), how does publishing stories fit with trying to publish a novel based on those stories (see the Martian, or old-fashioned books in serial format?) and progress so far. Sheila hopes to receive all copy-editing info by the end of Sunday, and will send the file to Zita on Monday morning (she hopes). Sheila pointed out that we are not looking at how text appears on the page at this point, since the pages are 10×8 and the real pages are 9×6. Zita will lay out the anthology, using Word or some other program, and will arrange text appropriately on pages, adding illustration to fill in blank spaces, and creating a final pdf for upload to Amazon.
We Need Your Images
Zita has set up a shared folder where we can store images for the anthology. If you have images you think might be useful, please upload them to the link given in your emails. (If you don’t have the email, you must be missing this newsletter and should let us know.) Just open the link in your browser, then drag the image from the folder on your computer to the page on your browser. A little window will tell you it’s uploading. Once the image has uploaded, please give it a useful name, such as “Cat photographed by Sheila Deeth.” The name should include how you want to be credited for the image (e.g. I want to be credited as Sheila Deeth). To change the name of the image, right-click on it and choose “rename.” If this doesn’t work, please email images to Zita. Karen, David P, Sheila, Von, Robin, Jean, Matthew and Karin offered to work with Zita in finding images. Please email Zita to add your name to that list.
Zita reminded us that we need to be careful of copyright. Just because something’s on Wikicommons does not mean it’s free to publish. https://unsplash.com/ and https://pixabay.com/ are possibly sources of images, but you should always check you’re clicking on free images, not ones you have to pay for. She has sent these links for our members: a tip on what royalty free images really mean. Are Royalty Free Images Really Free? – Stock Photo Guides. And info on Flicker images Flickr: The Help Forum: copyright-free photos?
Not A Pipe Call for Submissions
Not-A-Pipe Publishing is open for submissions to their current anthology. But the submission requirements are a little odd: https://www.notapipepublishing.com/blog/2021/8/12/open-call-for-submissions-for-our-next-anthology It seems you have to write the beginning of a story, stop somewhere in the middle where an extra character volunteers to tell an extra story, then take up your own pen again as your character responds to, ignores, complains about, or delights in the story they’ve been told (a story you knew nothing about), adding a suitable ending and resolution to your tale.
Beginnings Middles and Ends
We decided to do some “round robin” writing (or “literary consequences”) and try it out: Everyone wrote
- · A beginning – introduce your character, their motivation, and their goal. Put them in a place where they might meet someone.
- · The beginning of the middle – someone meets your character and is going to tell them a story
- · The end – your character responds to or ignores the story (which you haven’t heard) and achieves their goal.
We then read our stories in sets of three, making stories nested within stories, with Sheila providing the “unsplit” story in the middle. So…
Person one starts, person two provides a story within a story, stopping in the middle for person three’s story, then Sheila’s story, person three’s reaction and resolution, person two’s reaction and resolution, and person one’s reaction and resolution.
While some themes had vaguely common denominators (coffee being a good connector), the transitions were somewhat disjointed, and it’s hard to imagine how it will work for the full-length (up to 3K words) required by Not A Pipe. However, some of us do plan to give it a go.
Not A Pipe suggest we make sure our characters and situations are sufficiently vivid and unique that readers will recognize them when they come back to them after the intervening tales.
Good luck. And we’ll see you Nov 21st for the anthology upload. Learn how to use KDP for your own print and ebook publishing, and be part of the cover design. Meanwhile, happy writing!