JULY AGM – SUNSHINE AND NEW MEMBERS

We met on Tuesday for our Annual General Meeting at Sophie’s house.

It was a fantastic turnout of 5 members, 3 potential new members and 1 previous member who is returning to the group after a year away.

We finished the AGM quickly (final accounts to be presented later, officers to remain in place, fees to increase) and moved onto introductions and feedback.

The potential members had different reasons for coming to the meeting but all fundamentally had a love of books, reading and writing at heart. One had already started work on a short story for our next collection!

The theme of our next collection – A Winter’s Tale – had been set as the feedback exercise for this month resulting in three excellent poems and the draft short story. We reviewed the poetry first and were excited by the different experiences of winter presented – from the feelings that seasonal affective disorder create to the sudden rush of summer anticipation in the appearance of a warm winter sun. The short story opened well setting the scene for a fable in France that we are looking forward to reading in full.

The next meeting will be on 13th August and our next Away Day on 28th July.

Until then, happy writing!

Where Fishermen Stand – Place. Family. Identity.

We’ve done it! Our first poetry collection – Where Fishermen Stand – was published on Amazon UK and US this week.*  We already have a five star review from one of our readers and are so pleased that our poetry is resonating with people. The book is a perfect showcase  for the talent of our group of writers, many of whom had never written poetry before producing some in response to our monthly writing exercises.

The themes for the collection are Place, family and identity – many of the poems involve a combination of the three. It was when we were sorting through the poems submitted that we realised how closely linked these three themes were – can you separate your sense of self from the place where something significant happened or from your family or from the places important to them?

We are grateful to NAWG for their support through the process and for agreeing to us publishing the collection under their imprint. We are also grateful to local artist Sally James who created a piece of art inspired by our title poem which we have used as our book’s cover – we have included a photo below. Thanks must also go to the collection’s editors, Marion and Shahida, without whom we would never have got sufficient momentum to reach this point.

We will be setting up a separate page for the collection this week so if you do purchase a copy then please do leave us a review on that page (as well as on Amazon please), we would love to know what you think!

• The collection is available on all of Amazon’s marketplaces so you should be able to find it on your local site

November – an evening of mist and cake

Sheila kindly wrote a blog piece after our November meeting:

November’s evening meeting was our first meeting after our away day.
One of the members was kind enough to open up her house to us and even had a very tempting cake and a glass of wine to welcome us in on that misty evening.
We shared our latest writing – three poems and another section of a short story about 3 very misbehaved young lads and offered friendly critique.
Then we turned our attention to the progress of our Group’s poetry book. We are so close – our poetry is due to be published at the end of this year.
More good news shared was that our host has found a writing consultant who will review her first novel and work with her to make it the best it can be!

September meeting – all about the poetry

We had a very productive meeting in September at Marion’s house discussing the poetry collection. Marion and Shahida had done a fantastic job in putting the poems into a collection – a lot of thought had clearly gone into the themes and order of the poetry – and Marion had been grappling with formatting this for CreateSpace to see if this was the way in which we wanted to self-publish. It was amazing what a difference formatting could make to the look and feel of the document.

It really feels like our publication will finally happen!

April meeting – a poetic catch up

This month Marion set our writing task which was to write using two of the three following poetic devices: consonance, dissonance and repetition.

Despite a few members being unable to attend at the last minute we had an active discussion of the feedback work shared by the group which fulfilled the brief with a description of a frightening experience at Skegness and a portrayal of the behaviour of young twins waiting at a photographer’s studio.

We also took the opportunity to talk about the WWG poetry collection which continues to be a work in progress and decided on next steps in relation to obtaining quotes from self-publishing companies so that we can move this project forwards – we may be moving at the pace of a snail with this but we are determined to get there in the end! Stick with us and you may finally be able to purchase a copy in the next few months.*

We discussed the use of Dropbox for sharing feedback work and agreed that this was a great step forwards in terms of ease of access to each other’s work but regretted that it meant we were no longer able to guess which member had written what! We also decided upon some future rules for how we would run the feedback sessions given that we were now using Dropbox, including a rule that we’ll consider the work in the feedback session in the same order as it was posted – hopefully this will encourage posting of work with sufficient time for it to be read before the session!

Our next meeting is on Tuesday 8th May. Until then, happy writing!

* or possibly years

If at first you don’t succeed…

Some time ago the WWG decided we would publish a collection of short stories. We wrote a few posts about it so you may recall the plan.

Well everyone who was keen to write stories went away and produced some really excellent first drafts. But that was the problem – they were first drafts, they needed more work, more polishing and honing to make them the stories they were clearly meant to be. Some went away and revised and submitted further drafts of their stories but others were unable to commit the time – for very good and more important reasons life got in the way. The result was that we didn’t have a sufficient body of work to move to our publishing goal – plus the work involved in editing, formatting and preparing the book for publication was also going to present a challenge in terms of time.

Does any of this sound familiar?

A quick browse around writing blogs shows that finishing work that has been started is a common problem. In the interim the WWG’s membership has changed and we have moved on but for all of those writers that produced draft stories, they now have something to go back to and work on when they decide that they are able to go back to and prioritise those stories. I sincerely hope those writers do so – those stories deserve to be told.

Now the WWG is trying again. This time we are having a go at a poetry collection. We all have one thing in common – the wonderful areas we live and work in – the rolling North Downs, the Kent Weald, London. The theme we have chosen for our collection is Place. Many of the poems submitted talk of places much further afield than Woldingham. Our hope is to self-publish the collection at some point. We shall keep you updated and hope that this time we shall succeed.

In the meantime we should receive some tips from The Self Publishing Partnership who are coming to our meeting next week to talk to us about the world of self-publishing.

What about you? How many unfinished drafts litter your desk or sit in computer files? Do share, we’d love to carry on this conversation.

We’ll be back next week (assuming we can prioritise the time – ha!) with a post about our September meeting and what we’ve learned about self-publishing.