Something different for our January Wordherders meeting! *** CHANGE OF LOCATION FOR THIS MEETING ONLY *** Chez Seiders Snacks and beverages will be provided When life hands you lemons, make ... sangria! Unfortunately, the Richland Public Library has no conference rooms available for us to use for the January meeting. So, for this meeting only, we'll be meeting at my house. I'll have wine and other beverages available, along with snacks. In our discussion this…

Program: Introductions Your Great News: Who queried? Got accepted? Published? Signed with an Agent? Survived Snowpocalypse? Discussion: Cindy Shaw, SCBWI Inland NW Local Coordinator for the Tri-Cities and Walla Walla Discussion: "Writing What You Don’t Believe" by David Corbett Marketing: What’s Up? Last year, DeeAnna Galbraith rented a stall at the Richland Farmers Market to sell her books. She was kind enough to point out that if any of the Wordherders are…

Let's continue with the fundamentals - this month we'll discuss some basic building blocks of story telling: sentence structure and action/reaction sequences. And if we have time at the end, maybe we'll have a little grammar trivia from the new book, Dreyer's English, by the copy chief of Random House, Benjamin Dreyer. Program: Introductions Your Great News: Who queried? Got accepted? Published? Signed with an Agent? Resources: Recent Guardian article on Piracy: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/06/i-can-get-any-novel-i-want-in-30-seconds-can-book-piracy-be-stopped Discussion: Sentence…

Program: Introductions Your Great News: Who queried? Got accepted? Published? Signed with an Agent? Discussion: Seven Ways to Create a Killer Opening Line for Your Novel, by Brian A. Klems; https://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/7-ways-to-create-a-killer-opening-line-for-your-novel; The First Five Lines, by Donald Maass; https://writerunboxed.com/2019/05/01/the-first-five-lines Discussion: Writing Advice from Matt Stone & Trey Parker (re the lines in between) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGUNqq3jVLg Discussion: Writing Closing Lines in Novels; https://www.novel-writing-help.com/writing-closing-lines.html; Three Tips on How to End a Story; https://blog.reedsy.com/how-to-end-a-story Discussion: Examples of First Lines, Last…

Program: The setting for your story can establish the mood; ground your scenes; carry the plot; act like a character; provide continuity - or discontinuity - across multiple points of view; and/or convey change over time. In The Martian by Andy Weir, the setting dominates the story. In The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, the "black-and-white-with-an-occasional-shock-of-red" setting grounds the story and adds to the mysterious mood. In Maureen's book, Between Before and After, I like that she uses New York…

Program: This month's topic will be a discussion of the creative process. How do we go from the idea of a story to a finished manuscript? What's your process? For those of you who have written or are writing more than one book, how has your process evolved? In her article, "A Snapshot of My Writing Process" Cathy Yardley describes using a variety of tools - Word, Excel, Post-It Notes, a timer,…