Catherine has been busy working on her entry for an Arthritis Care competition, working on her blog and writing for the six word Arvon story competition. She was pleased to announce that she had completed the set number of small projects she set herself and has now started working on romantic fiction.
Mo has had a lesson on how to tweet on Twitter. She has fallen out with her publisher and has started writing her autobiography.
Barbara is still writing her diary. She has written everyday for forty years. She is busy working on the programme for the Southampton Writers Circle for the coming year. She has booked Wendy Hughes to do an article writing workshop. Local author, Nicky Slade, will judge the Scroll Award competition this year.
Sylvie has written all twelve chapters of her children's sci-fi novel and is now editing it. She says she was 'inspired' by coming to the last Writing Buddies meeting!
Tessa's second book in the 'Dohlen' trilogy, Hobgoblin Gold, has just been published and is out now. Her illustrator, Andrew Jones, has several pieces of his work on display at The Art House Cafe.
Jacqueline is on assignment five of The Writers Bureau fiction course. She received a mixed reaction from her tutor to her fourth assignment, which was to write a People's Friend short story. Jacqueline has re-written her piece and has now submitted it.
Glen, with her Writing Buddies Anthology Competition Secretary head on, reported that there had been 7 flash fiction entries, 11 non-fiction articles, 4 non-fiction fillers, 5 plays, 5 poems and 20 short stories.
Glen has been busy working at Express FM in Portsmouth, where she has been involved with writing a soap - Conway Street. She found it an interesting assignment as she was paired with another writer - writing with a partner is new to her - and had to write for other people's characters, which she found challenging.
Eileen is celebrating the publication of her crime novel, Miss McGuire is Missing. She was looking forward to joining other writers at Selsey on 20 August, as part of the Selsey Writing Festival there. She is on the fifth draft of her second novel and half way through her third novel. She was interviewed in Writers' News this month and won a Moleskine notebook from Writers' Forum for her work. She has been invited to judge a short story competition and give a talk in Lee-on-Solent. She will be book signing in Waterstones in Fareham on 11 September and her book launch party will be in Gosport on 9 October.
Bridget joined the Writing Buddies for the first time and was warmly welcomed. Bridget is a poet who has been with the Southampton Writers' Circle for 17 years. She says she has been 'lucky' to be widely published in magazines and, in particular, in South, where she is listed as the Poet of the Year. 18 of her poems are to be showcased by this publication. Bridget tutors on poetry for workshops and also gives public readings of her work.
Jimmy has had a second article accepted by Best of British magazine. He is happy with his website and is pleased to see that his forthcoming book, Growing Up in Wartime Southampton: Someone Else's Trousers is now on both Amazon and WH Smith online for pre-order.
John is busy making corrections to the proofs of his poetry collection, Poetic Imagery, to be published shortly. This will be published using a local printer - George Man Publications. John has been looking at a website giving advice about rejections and found Query Fail useful. He also looked at the Publetariat site, which is useful for general freelance writing tips - including the value of having an agent.
Penny has been dealing with the complete crash of her computer system. As this was just before the manuscript for her book, Haunted Southampton, had to be at the publisher, she was not best pleased. Folklore of Hampshire seems to be well received by the public.
Carol Blake's book, From Pitch to Publication was discussed and was generally felt to be very useful.
There was a general discussion about backing up data on computers and the value of doing so.
The phone-in on Radio 2 on the Jeremy Vine show about self-publishing was discussed and it was noted that the increasing popularity of self-publishing reflects the difficulties of interesting a mainstream publisher nowadays.
The next meeting of Writing Buddies is at 2pm on Friday 27 August at The Art House cafe, Southampton. Everyone is welcome.
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