THE REVIEW

INSPIRED WRITERS

There were seven of us here on Wednesday, some of us inspired writers and some of us looking for inspiration. Lorelei joined us again after about a year’s absence while she was sequestered, looking after her aging mother. Wendy also felt well enough to attend and we were so glad to see her as well. These two joined Jason, Annette, Kristi, Jim and me for a lively meeting.

Kristi read first, her second chapter in “Jane And The Midnight Daisies”. It’s the morning after Jane has learned that the daisies devoured her parents, and when she agreed to bring them ‘fresh meat’ in exchange for her own freedom. She sees blue streaks in her hair, and when telling her Gran what had happened and crying, her nasal mucus is also blue. She tells Gran she wants a plan to kill the daisies. Since Gran was already brewing weed killer, they start planning what they will do. And Gran tells her that as a last resort, they can always call on the Dryad.

Annette read the next chapter in “A Touch Of Wormwood”. John arrives at the cabin where Alyssa is hiding out, and helps her talk to her family. She still tries to protect them by not telling them too much of what has happened, but at the same time wants their love and support. Later she gives John a USB flash drive with all the dirt on George West. She had made copies of everything when she worked for him, all his contacts and all the dirty cops on his payroll. We were all glad that she had been smart enough and courageous enough to risk doing that.

I read a first person account called “The Prompt”, which I wrote after reading prompts in “A Writer’s Book Of Days”. It has a writing prompt for each day of the year. The story tells of an encounter with a spiritual entity through a friend who acted as a channel for a spiritual guide.

Jim read his next chapter in “Coventry Ghosts – Book II”. Sarah and Joel are inside the compound and she is trying to keep Joel invisible from both the soldiers and the Umbra. Inside the lab, Abigail, the computer, tells Jason that someone had arrived there. Abigail starts shooting bolts of energy and Jason calls in the soldiers who start shooting bullets. Sarah is warding off both bullets and bolts of energy. Abigail is shot by a boomeranging bolt of energy and starts to shut down.

Margaret Moffatt had a short history of Burnaby published in the November issue of Today’s Senior Newsmagazine. Kristi said she submitted her short story “Of The Moon” to the CBC literary contest. Annette said she is entered in the NaNoWriMo, which is the National Novel Writing Month, where during the month of November, you write a whole novel. She has a goal of so many words per day, and will meet weekly with other entrants. And Bob Jacoby phoned me to say his daughter-in-law had attended the Surrey International Writers’ Conference and achieved some success with her writing, and had two agents asking to represent her. Exactly what she entered and what she wrote, I’m not clear on, but good on her anyhow.

We spent the last part of the Meeting discussing plans for the website and looking at the mock-ups that Leah had dropped off. It was agreed that only Leah and myself should be the ones to enter the outgoing blurbs on the Twitter account, and we will use it as a news feed. It should work great whenever there is a contest notification or a call for submissions to post. We will not publish incoming responses to our Twitter account.

And all members are now asked to consider submitting things for two of our pages. One is the Resources page, where we will publish on our own website things like critique guidelines, or plot diagrams for short stories or novels, or any other material we put together that site visitors can download and print for themselves. The second page is for Links, where we will list writing links that we find helpful for writers in some way. You can submit things you’d like to see on these pages to Leah now.

Annette said she designed and built her own website and we asked her how she did that. She said she got all the instructions from www.w3schools.com . The rest of us were thinking that might be more than we want to tackle.

The next Meeting will be Wednesday, November 19th at 7:00 p.m. here at my place. Hope to see you then.

LISA A. HATTON
Author
Published eBooks available at Kobo Books:
FIRE: http://kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=9780991739615
LOVE FOUND: http://kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=9780991739608