JUNE 2018 MEETING

1. SINC NATIONAL: Check out future month's themes. Submission guidelines and deadlines are here: https://www.sistersincrime.org/page/BookClub 2. HBMF: great success, thank you to those who helped, attended and donated. We had 8 people sign up for possible interest in being members. Cheri - Carol Janezic - Kelly - Annie - Jerrica - Andrea - Kim & Julia. Welcome to Carol who joined us at the meeting. 3. WRITERS POLICE ACADEMY: SinC National offering $150 discount for conference. Visit www.writerspoliceacademy.com for more information. 4. BOUCHERCON ST. PETERSBURG, FL: Sept 7, 2018. Sign up for SinC member breakfast. Cost $25. 5. KAUAI WRITERS CONF: Dates Nov 9-11 at Kauai Mrariott Lihue. www.kauaiwritersconference.com 6. EDIT RECOMMEDATIONS: • Check for overuse of adverbs. One way is to do a search for words ending in LY. • Search for sentences beginning with IT. It is a pronoun and you must be clear as to what it represents. (It caught me by surprise: A laser snake, fangs dripping with deadly photons. --- "The laser snake caught me by surprise" is way better, ) • Do a quick search for "there was" and "there were" There were a couple of Evil Nephews guarding the Outer Inner Sanctum, and they looked like the horn-toothed kind. You can change that to "Two Evil Nephews paraded in front of the stone door to the Outer Inner Sanctum" • Try to reduce usage of the word “was” "The Dark Fortress was on top of a large-ish mountain" is bland, and "The Dark Fortress loomed over a large-ish mountain" is more thrilling. • most experts will tell you to avoid the verb "to be" as much as possible, they'll also warn you away from passive verbs. It's the difference between Captain Samson was being thrown off the catwalk by a Bad Uncle and A Bad Uncle lifted Captain Samson over his head and hurled her over the edge of the catwalk. • Do a word search for "he saw" or "she saw" and "he felt" or "she felt." They dampen impact by filtering it through someone else's perceptions, which is automatically less compelling. 7. BLOGGING RECOMMENDATIONS: To blog or not to blog? That is the question. P.S. Hoffman points out five ways an author blog could kill your writing, and what you should do instead. 8. AMAZON SHUTTING DOWN KINDLE WORLDS: As of May 17th, Kindle Worlds will no longer be accepting new submissions. Previously published Kindle Worlds stories will no longer be available for sale on Amazon.com on or around July 16th. The Kindle Worlds website will be closed on August 29th; we ask that all Kindle Worlds participants update and validate their banking information, mailing address, and contact information by July 31, 2018 in order to facilitate a timely final royalty payment. We plan to remove Kindle Worlds stories from Kindle Unlimited on May 16th.

9. BLAISDELL OCT 19-21 FAIR: We have a booth #212. We must provide our own table and chairs. Will be submitting for a grant ($500). 10. THE MAYORS ARTS & CRAFT SHOW: at the Blaisdell was free last year. It is only for 4 hours on a Saturday morning. We did fairly well in 2017. We will be discussing at July meeting to see if anyone is interested in attending this event as well. 11. MANOA SPEAKING ENGAGEMENT: We have been asked to provide 2 people to speak to a class at the The Words@Manoa Annual Writing Conference. Sales and book signing available- will see if we can bring more authors books to this event. We need to decide how to select the 2 speakers. 12. JULY, AUGUST, SEPT & FUTURE MEETINGS: • July will be at St Andrews Cathedral on Beretania Street. Next door to governor’s house. We will have an outing where we will be given a tour of the Cathedral. • August we have another outing - we meet at the Da Shop. Voting for future meeting locations. • Sept will be at St Andrews Cathedral as it is Yom Kippur and we will not be able to meet at Temple Emmanuel. Parking for St Andrews is in the lot in front of it and we will be given cards to put on our dash. Details will be given on your meeting reminder notice. 13. OUR MEETING PLACE: Due to the craziness n the cosmos, we now have 2 locations for our meetings. Both Temple Emmanuel and St Andrews Cathedral has a place for us. We will be discussing further and what this means at our July meeting. 14. TRUBY SEMINAR: Gay and Carol attended and found it to be excellent. His topics addressed both plotters and pantser’s. He also spoke on how not to let your book lose interest in the middle. We will be looking into Gay/Carol telling us more at another meeting. 15. BOOK SALE GOING ON NOW: Subject: Library book sale at McKinnley HS. NOW • Thu 11am-7pm 10% discount for active military • Fri 11am-8pm 10% discount for Seniors 65 and older • Sat 9am-8pm 50% off for everyone • Sun 9am-2pm Everything $.50 16. WRITERS DIGEST: $89 has great little seminars. They will edit/comment on your pitches. 17. BOOK DOCTORS: Another good help for making a pitch. You submit, they edit 18. READINGS FROM BOOKS: Katharine from Vo2 Max, Kent from Fire at the Bottom of the Sea, Gail from her work in progress that involves family history & Vicki from new series Teddy Snow and Emma Rae.