Freddy Words

Hi Everyone,

Justin here – I just wanted to say that I’ve finally finished transcribing, polishing, and uploading the copious amount of notes I made during the 2009 Maritime Writer’s Workshop at UNB. I’ve already sent out the file as an attachment to the FreddyWords list serv, but for anyone else interested, I’ve included a download link to the notes here.

I know it’s been a long time since the workshop, but I found much of the advice and tips there highly useful, especially on how to make a good first impression with your writing.

Download from Box.net

We had 7 people at the meeting, and we discussed the upcoming writing retreat and some NaNoWriMo news.

Writing Retreat (Aug. 9)
We decided to arrive at 8:30 a.m. We seem to be set for food and drinks, and we acquired more chips at the meeting, which Justin will bring to the retreat. We did collectively decide that the food listing is seriously deficient in quantities of chocolate, so if you can help us out, please do.

We figured out drives, and two people will bring extra extension cords and power bars since there are limited outlets there.  Next meeting we’ll discuss what worked and what didn’t work in preparation for the NaNo retreat (Sun, Nov. 9).

National Novel Writing Month (November)
We decided to add a mid-October “How to Succeed at NaNo” workshop that Mary will lead as long as she gets lots of help.

We announced our tri-city sisterhood with Peoria, Illinois, and Gainesville, Florida. We’ll try to do some activities in real time with them, and we’ll have many tri-city word wars (to see which city can write more in one hour!). This means  a lot more motivation and fun for us, as well as TONNES more online write-ins (they will be invited to ours; and us to theirs). Yay!

We may also have a “frenemy” pairing-up program, where you’re paired up with someone from the other cities in order to challenge each other to write more. Also to have a target for your smack talk. There will be plenty of smack talk.

Future Meetings
The next memoir meeting is Thursday, August 13, from 6-9 p.m. Location TBD. Please RSVP at freddywords@gmail.com if you plan to come.

The next Freddy Words general meeting is Tuesday, August 18, from 7-9 p.m. Location: On the North side! We will be meeting at the King’s Place bus stop area at 6:30 to take the bus together. Please RSVP at freddywords@gmail.com if you plan to come.

This is a placeholder until notes are posted. Mainly we cancelled our involvement in the women’s festival – not enough people to staff a table all day – and talked about the writing retreat. And we did speed editing, of course, which went very well. Five people in attendence.