The Cleckheaton Writers Group met last night where Sarah, Mandy, new member Arline and I were in attendance, Andy, Kathy, Martijn and Neil having passed on their apologies.
There were no minutes of the last meeting passed from those who attended last time, so we moved to WIP updates. Mandy had filled a notebook with notes whilst on her holiday for her novel and Sarah had finished her novel and begun to sketch out her next book.
Sarah passed on to members details of the Myslexia children's novel competition, deadline 19 September, and other competitions that are open at the moment are Brighton short story (deadline Friday), V S Pritchett Memorial Prize (2-4k words with a £1000k prize for a £5 entry, June deadline), Moth, Wells Festival, Bare Fiction (October deadline) and the Ilkley Festival.
The group started the feedback session with Sarah's short story 'A pint of blue' which came about following a couple of the Cleckheaton Literature Festival short story workshops and was well received by the group. It was felt that it was a relevant piece in the current climate and the members passed on their individual feedback. Please could those members that could not make the meeting but received the work please pass on their feedback direct to Sarah.
Sarah feels that she may use it as a basis for a book and Arline recommended that she read The Bookseller of Kabul, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Soaring Circles of Herat and The Swallows of Kabul if she has not done so already to help with research.
I shared a new section for my serial killer WIP that I had worked on during the Alison Taft Committing the Perfect Murder workshop at the Cleckheaton Literature Festival which lead to a discussion about whether a writer could use brand names in their novel without incurring copyright issues.
We then discussed various writing manuals including How to Write Using The Snowflake Method, an ebook by Randy Intermanson and How to Write a Great Synopsis by Nicola Morgan and Sarah recommended the Caledonian Novel Award competition, deadline November.
The next meeting will take place on Monday 20 June 6-8pm at Cleckheaton Library where both feedback sessions are available.
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