Magic Hour Writers

Our Mission: To encourage and promote excellence in writing for children through
friendship, education, and peer support to writing colleagues.

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Friday, May 20, 2016

Meeting Highlights May 11, 2016

Those attending: Luneil, Karen, Ruthann, Suzy, Patty and later joined by Helena.

There was some discussion about the meeting day of the week. Those present, Luneil, Karen, Suzy, Ruthann and Patty were in agreement about the change from Thursday to Wednesday. They also mentioned that they all thought it would be a good idea to try and have the meeting on the FOURTH Wednesday in order to not compete with Streamline. They thought it would eliminate some of the meeting conflicts.There was further discussion about the need for Jackie and Judy to appoint a regular substitute to run meetings when both of them would not be present.

Ruthann brought in two books from her class with Sharon Palmeri: The Everything Guilde to Writing Children’s Books by Luke Wallin and The Business of Writing for Children by Aaron Shepard. She talked about one of the exercises they had in class about taking a fairy tale and changing it around and coming up with another ending. Several suggestions were given to Ruthann about her class assignment of the fairy tale switch.

Patty brought in SCWBI’s THE BOOK for others to leaf through. It is a complete guide to children’s book writing, publishing, setting up a blog, finding an editor etc. Karen mentioned all the benefits of belonging to SCWBI.

Karen read the first chapter in her book, “Haunting Mom” She explained how she has rewritten the book numerous times from several points of view and was happy to settle upon the new method of dual dialogues running at the same time.

Suzy read a short story “The Goblin Gathering” It was suggested that she could easily turn this into a chapter book and several ideas were given regarding those chapters.

Ruthann read “Changing Lives”  a true story based on a box of puppies being found on a train tracks.  The story told about the entire process of adopting animals.

Helena read an excellent poem about the “Delete Key” It was a poetic argument for using the key more, eliminating not only errors but the wrongs done to human beings through emails.

Patty asked if Karen would read the remainder of her chapter about Francine because of a sore throat. It proved to be VERY useful to hear it being read rather than ‘knowing’ what was written. Patty suggested we might read each other’s in order to hear our work better.

Karen spoke more about “Ivy” and the work she has had to do to promote her book. She talked about publishing rights, agents etc. It was very informative. Karen will bring us all handouts from a class she took at SCWBI’s last conference. She also mentioned that SCWBI has webinars that have been very useful to her, regarding marketing, writing a picture book etc. Webinars give great information without having to spend a lot of money on conferences. She also said she will be on the panel at Printer’s Row Sale in June.

PY