Abilene Writers Guild

"Not failure, but low aim, is crime." (Lowell)

P.O. Box 2562	Abilene, Texas 79604
Monthly meetings are the fourth Thursday at 7:30 P.M. Meeting at the Center for Contemporary Arts, 220 Cypress St.

Us and Ours: News and Stuff

A Stand-Up Triple

Animation from Animation Factory

One, two, three strikes you're out? Well, sometimes that's the case, but sometimes there's the grand and glorious experience of a stand-up triple, and that's what's available to a diligent writer. So how, you say, do you manage a stand-up triple in writing? That's what we talked about at the August meeting.

Sue Turner tood the assignment of being the leadoff hitter a little too seriously in this regard, and she colored her face in triumphant black, blue and purple hues about the size of a softball, not a baseball, including a tremendous shiner of a black eye. Therefore, we be used her handout but pinch-hitting for her at the program was Barbara Rollins talking about flash fiction.

Sue's handout was her flash fiction story you can read at her web site.

Barbara's cheatsheet from which she talked is somewhat cryptic, but for what it's worth, here it is:

Flash Fiction

Other names are:

Lots of markets. Put the words "Flash fiction" into a search engine (Yahoo) and get 1 site match (Vestal Fiction, a Flash Fiction Magazine) which is a market paying 10 cents a word for stories to 100 words, 5 cents for stories from 101 to 200 words, and 3 cents a word up to 500 words. I also know of a site that would fit, the Flash Fiction Writing Workshop whose URL is published on our web page. When you move on to web page matches, you get 925! This is an area of great and growing interest in the writing world!

To give you a better idea just what Flash Fiction is, here's a handout with a story Sue Turner wrote. I'll also read one of mine that's a 100 word story. The title doesn't count in the words, and it's "The Class of 1991."

"Marcie! Ten years? You haven't aged a day. And twins! Beautiful! I saw you and Rick. Ol' Hick Rick? Girl, you picked him green but he did blossom. What a hunk! And bank Vice President? Who'd have thought? Oh, you're looking for my Yalie? Gone. I tell you, girl, I went after a man of means. I came away from that marriage with a Lexus and fistfuls of money, but you know, maybe I've grown up in ten years. He was a man of means, but more than that he was just plain a man of mean. Look! There's Alice!"

So. Are you ready to give it a go? Here are some tips for you to get started.

Keep it focused. One point. Few Characters. Everything moves toward that one point and contributes to it.
Be willing to edit and re-edit.
Choose your words carefully. Make them stir souls.
Use imagery to hold the story together and suggest deeper meanings.
Keep it tight. You can't and shouldn't tie up all loose ends.
Play against expectations. Let the narrator tell the reader one thing while the text, the action goes elsewhere.
Implication. "The key requirement of a literary short-short is implication." To imply means "To involve by logical necessity, to express or implicate indirectly." How?
- Use a directive last sentence. I think this means direct their thinking to the implications by a confusing or oblique final thought. The source I got this from quoted two last sentences as examples: "In this way Fourati, as is well known, had ruined not only the lady's life but his own as well" and "He asked us what he should do to be freed from his guilty conscience, but we cared not give him any advice."
- Make rereads necessary or at least inviting. In "Three" Gordon Lish tells three stories. He prefaces them with the statement, "One of them taught me the meaning of fear," but doesn't say whichone. In the first story he talks to a woman who enjoys the funeral of her lover. In the second he sees a headless baritone on the subway that sings to him. The last reads, "The third thing was I went home."
- Close with a phrase that sends the reader back into the story.
- Know when you've made your point.

Pamelyn Casto and Geoffrey Fuller in the syllabus to their course "Suddenly Flash Fiction for CoffeehouseForWriters.com say this:

More and more magazines and journals (both hard copy and online) are asking to see more of this type of work. More and more anthologies featuring short-short stories are being published. More and more collections are being released. Some writers have even created novels from flash fiction, and some have had their flash fiction stories turned into movies. One prominent journal even goes so far as to claim that longer fiction is now a dinosaur. (We won't go that far, but interest in such fiction continues to rise, on the part of writers and readers alike, and shows no signs of slowing down.)

Isn't it time you went home and worked on some short short fiction?

To learn more about how exciting flash fiction can be, check out these web sites:

Second at bat was Elaine Coleman, author of the newly published Texas Haunted Forts. which will be featured on endcaps at Walden Books and Barnes & Nobles during October! Read more about the book and about Elaine at her web site. Elaine's talked about the process after the book is finished and before it's polished enough for publication. She pulled off a real coup with this book, folks. The editor when accepting the proposal gave her a grand total of sixty days, that's two and only two months, to research and write the book. During that time Elaine visited tons of forts and wrote the whole thing. She'll be the first to admit it was a bit rough at that point and to tell you the benefits of polish and spritzing, but folks, I've read the book and if it was rough it was a diamond in the rough. Elaine distributed copies of one page after a first round of editing and at the final point, showing the extent of the changes made.

And the last batter in the stand-up triple (okay, so the baseball analogy's a little off. Give me a break.) was Dr. John Busby. Busby, a professional environmentalist. He talked about the process of technical writing and the wide-open market for his kind of work. John certainly knows the subject, and his credentials show how broad the subject is:

So far I have written a number of technical reports dealing with groundwater hydrology, especially geochemistry while a member of the U.S. Geological Survey and hydrology reports for other consultants. Some background reports to support litigation in personal injury cases, a couple of business plans, a few requests for proposal while with the government, a few proposals, thesis and dissertation, several scientific papers, papers, a couple of instruction manuals on the sampling of groundwater, and two back-of-the-book indexes.

John has made his notes available for us, and they're a great resource:

Some Stuff About Technical Writing

by John Busby

This material is a blend of notes taken from The Writing System for Engineers and Scientists and my own experience.

For most of us technical writing is a survival skill

The Market is good and diverse -An internet search using the Google search engine using the search "jobs technical writer" yielded hundreds of hits. Opportunities include scientific papers, articles, reports, business plans, letters, proposals, manuals, memoranda and all of the other stuff your employer decides you need to write about. Here are the technical writing rules developed by Weiss, with an addition or so by me and some annotation am using an embryonic work as an example. In this work my goal is to persuade the audience that we must use alternative energy if we are to survive as a nation

Timing - Before I do anything I else I reduce the time available to me by twenty percent. That's right. I arbitrarily move my deadline back in time by twenty percent of the total time allowed. I allow three-quarters of the time allowed for a research based project for both planning, including research, revision and editing. One-fourth for writing. Later in the process you need to develop a detailed schedule.

Planning - These three, but the greatest of these is planning - The following steps are from Weiss, op. cit., p. 16

Do you need to write anything? -Well, yes. In my example I need to write and publish to reach a sufficiently large and diverse audience with my arguments supporting alternative energy.

To read the whole outline, click here.

Members Only Contests.

The winners for the August contest on "When I was 21" are:

First Place Charles Felix, "21"
Second Place Stewart Caffey, "Fighting Mother Nature"
and
Third Place April Bennett, "The New Home"

Congratulations to each of you!

The September entries for the members only contest are due by September 10. The theme is "Cemeteries." Your entry can be fiction, poetry, essay, reminiscence, or any other literary form having something to do with a cemetery. Here are the rules for each contest:

You must be a member of the Abilene Writers Guild (dues current) and may enter as many times as you wish. Each entry much focus on the theme for the month.
All entries must be typed, double-spaced (except poetry, which should be typed but can be single-spaced).
DO NOT put your name on the entry itself. Put your name and the name of your entry on a cover sheet and paperclip to entry.
There will be 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, with a prize of $20 for 1st place only.
Entry length: No minimum, maximum of 1000 words.
Entry postmark deadline the 10th of each month.
Mail entries to Nancy Masters, Vice President, 4898 Newman Road, Abilene, Texas 79601. If you want your entry returned by mail, include sufficient postage and envelope suitable for returning it. Otherwise, entries will be returned at the meeting or discarded.
A different volunteer judge will be used each month. While we hope they will provide comments/critiques, we cannot promise they will do either.
These entries should be NEW WORK and should not have been entered in any previous AWG-sponsored contest.

Our Hard-Working Board of Directors

We're well into our new year, the officers having been elected in May, but I'd like to take an opportunity to let you know who they are and how hard they're working for you. We meet the first Thursday each month at 5:30 and forge through all the matters needing attention.

Members are welcome to attend, and I believe if you do you'll find a new respect for the amount of work necessary to keep the AWG a smooth-running machine.

     Our president, Stewart Caffey, is beginning a second term, and what a jewel he is. His leadership through the difficult times in his first term remained calm, courteous, and even courageous. We owe him a major debt of gratitude for all the hours he spends on AWG from normal activities through grant applications and the recent sale of our building. Stewart is publishing a periodical about the Comanche County town of Sydney. Thanks, Stewart!

     Vice President Nancy Robinson Masters brings to her job a wealth of information as well as enthusiasm. She travels the country and beyond speaking to writers and other groups, and she brings many of the people she meets on her travels to us. The quality of speakers we have is unbelievable to people who attend almost any other writers group, but she does it so smoothly we tend to take it for granted. It's like another friend of mine said who goes from Abilene to present workshops everywhere, you're only an expert when you get a long way from home. Thanks, Nancy, for being our resident expert when you come home from being experts far away! Nancy not only writes books and sells them like hotcakes when she speaks to all those groups, but day after day, week after week, she makes her living by writing mundane things that somebody has to write. We love you, Nancy!

     Secretary Carolyn Dycus takes minutes not only at the meetings but at the Board meetings, and she gets the minutes to me long before I get them up on the web most months, for which I apologize. Carolyn works as Court Administrator for the 104th District Court and writes children's stories, articles, and books. She has taken courses at ACU and Institute of Children's Literature to improve her craft. She contracted with Iam3rd.com to write devotionals four times. Thanks, Carolyn, for the writing you do including minutes.

     Treasurer Gail McMillan keeps up with our money and our memberships and does so much else besides. She works faithfully behind the scenes managing things like the annual June workshop and the Thanksgiving meal. Gail is a long-time member of AWG and also an active member of the Mesquite Storytellers. We appreciate all you do to keep us organized, Gail.

     Other Executive Board Members are Mac Davis, Elaine Coleman, Barbara Rollins (Web Page Fat Cat), Augustine Tennant, Laura Thaxton (Immediate Past President), Juanita Zachry, Barbara Darnall (Alternate), Eunice Eversdyk (ex officio - Publicity Chairperson), and Ginny Green (ex officio - Newsletter Editor). Here are pictures of some of the board members:

Stewart Caffey, President	Nancy Masters, Vice President	Carolyn Dycus, Secretary
Gail McMillan, Treasurer	Elaine Coleman	Barbara Darnall
Mac Davis	Ginny Green	Barbara Rollins
Augustine Tennant	Laura Thaxton

Search us!

Check out the little box on the left, at the bottom of the index! We've moved into the big time with AWG site search capabilities. Type your name in the blank and see what comes up! With this new capabilities, I'm going to be saving a lot more of the "back issues" of the web page to look at our past history.

I suppose I owe an apology, or at least an explanation, though. Since the AWG web site is part of my personal site, Sharpwriters.com, the search engine finds entries on the Sharpwriters page as well as my genealogy pages. But hey, you can figure out if I'm talking about you behind your back! (I'm not, but it was something to say.)

Barbara B. Rollins

I'll Tell You When...

You may have also noticed we now have a link for you to indicate you would like to know when the web page has changed. It didn't work for a while but is off and running now, so feel free to request notice.

If you'd like to see other innovations, let us know. THIS IS YOUR WEB SITE!

Thanks for stopping by!

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