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February 9, 2021 Meeting

(Copied from Jenna Madsen's email sent on February 10) 


Hey Writing Group Friends!


Last night’s meeting was really great and I just wanted to thank everyone who came and contributed. Hopefully we all left knowing that we have a team of people cheering us on and supporting us through our writing endeavors!

Heres a quick recap to remind us all what happened and to inform anyone who wasn’t able to attend:

Meeting attendees: Ray, Amy J, Natalie, Lawrence, Homer, Marla and Jenna
Date/Time: Feb 9, 7:05-8:05 (we might need to start a titch earlier next time so we can end by 7:50)
Place: Sheps Grill


-Short recap of January meeting and Anthology deadlines (see James’ previous email for those)

-We talked about we’re working on right now and what our individual writing goals are for 2021 (it was great!):

Ray: He has 4 novels written (yay!) so we challenged him to start the publishing process on just one! We’ll check in next month to see what steps he's taken ;)

Amy: She has a good start on her first novel so hopefully by the end of the year she has a complete novel ready to start editing! Next month she just wants to have her anthology story done so by April we’ll check for progress on the novel.

Natalie: She has 4 children’s books written (so awesome!) so we challenged her to pick one and find artists to audition for the honor of illustrating it. Hopefully she’ll have some fun drawings to show us or a few artists she’s choosing from by next meeting!

Lawrence: He’s working on the third installment of his series. He is mostly researching right now but hopes to be mostly done with the book by the end of the year. We’re going to check back and make sure he’s still on track with that goal next month.

Homer: He has a goal of compiling his songs into a book (like a collection of poetry). We challenged him to bring one of the songs/poems to share with us for next time!

Marla: She likes to write short stories so she is working on her anthology piece this month - you got this Marla!

Jenna: Still working on my first novel - it’s been pushed aside for too many years! This month’s goal is to have a new chapter written!

——I just want to say that I loved hearing everyone’s goals and I was inspired by all of them!

-After learning what everyone was up to, we talked about having a Word Addicts book display in Das Cafe. Ray and Lawrence were nominated to oversee this project, the motion was seconded and it passed unanimously. So if anyone wants to give input, please call or message one of them. Otherwise, we look forward to hearing about what they come up with at the next meeting.

-As a group we talked about what our needs/wants/expectations are for this writing group. Since the anthology will mostly be done via email and other “Team Word Addicts” projects are going to be done behind the scenes, our monthly meetings are going to focus more on our individual writing goals and education. Hopefully each month we can come to discuss our writing and also different writing topics so that we can learn from each other.
For our March meeting we’re going to try out this new meeting structure. I am hoping it will look a little something like this:

----A group member takes 5-8 minutes to share an original writing with the group (Homer was volunteered to share one of his poems/songs with us for March)
—Each member takes 2-3 minutes to update us on how their personal writing is going
—One member will start a discussion on a writing topic (5 minutes) *when it is your turn to lead the discussion, you can recap an article you’ve read, you can lead a writing exercise for everyone to take part in, you can just launch into a monologue using your own knowledge/experience/good sense… it’s totally up to you!
—The group will take the remaining time (10-20 minutes) discussing the topic with each other.

We are not married to this outline, so if it doesn’t work we’ll try something else until we find something that does!

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