In attendance were Mary, Cherrie and Jennifer.
It being nearly the end of January and New Year's resolutions being still fresh, we checked in on resolutions. Everyone lost weight in Jan but Mary wins with a grand total of 30 lb weight loss. Congratulations Mary. Way to go.
Mary is getting a jump on the year in other ways as well. She joined Maryland Writer's Assoc and through them discovered The Writer's Ally. She signed up of an editing package. She finished the first draft of her new novel about Rachel, a girl in a religious cult at the 100 Day challenge and now she is trying to get her edits done before 2/15/18 when they are due at her Developmental Editor.
Mary is reading 4 unpublished novels for a writer's contest she has entered. She has to score each novel and then the novel with the most points wins. Good luck Mary. She is also reading The Rithmatist and the Mistborn Series.
Jennifer has been taking many courses through Margie Lawson Academy. She plans to do an immersion with Margie when she comes to Australia in mid March. She even scored a new editing partner through Margie, Tracy. Through her conversations with Margie, she is learning body language cues and she started reading The Graveyard Shift and looking at the body language in this book with a protagonist who reads body language. She's also reading The Book of Fate and some Darynda Jones.
Both Jennifer and Mary felt Outlining Your Novel was worth while instruction.
Cherrie continues to have a hard time settling in but she has now taken a permanent position at Flagstaff, AZ and her last day of doing two jobs is the first day of Spring, March 21. This has been a slow year for Cherrie due to the move, but she has finished a course that really helped deepen her knowledge of what makes a novel resonate with a reader done by John Granger and looking specifically at the Harry Potter series. The course will repeat and you can get on the mailing list at PotterPundits.com. She is reading a well written second novel with her editing partner the is titled Red vs. Blue. And she is reading another book by Granger about the Twilight Series as well as Ursula K. LeGuin's Malafrena and The 5th Wave for fun.
Cherrie proposed a new direction for the monthly hangouts. She would like to start a deep analysis of a popular book or series similar to what John Granger is doing to learn how to analyse gifted writers and to learn how to make her own work more resonant. Mary and Jennifer agreed that would be useful. Cherrie will try to have something up by March about such a class.
