Writer’s Ink

12/1 Meeting Minutes (the Planning Meeting)

December 10th, 2007 by Erin

Attending: Erin, James, Sandra, Alex, Virginia, Stephanie, and Jamie, with appearances by Janel, Tim, Joxer, and Sebastian.

Meetings: After debating the possibilities, meetings will be on Tuesdays at lunch. People said they were willing to devote an hour to an hour and a half to lunch meetings two times a month so that we can have greater attendance at the meetings and still have time for crits. We’ll be having them in PPC conference rooms for the most part (though we could decide to go out for lunch).

We’ve had non-PPCers join us for meetings this year, so we were working under the assumption that could continue, depending, of course, on days off. As always, you just have to make arrangements for someone at PPC so you can get signed in.

Write-ins: These will now happen on Saturday afternoons once a month — 2 to 4 p.m. We’ll alternate between people’s homes and restaurants (including, but not limited to, 4 Star). Seven people volunteered to host, and anyone who didn’t volunteer on their survey but wants to, just contact Erin. When we meet at people’s homes, it will be a potluck, either late lunch or snacks… depending on what people are in the mood for. The Monday night write-ins were cancelled since most people can’t attend them anymore. And, since we’re no longer having something every week and because meetings will be at lunch, we cancelled the 5th Tuesday lunch write-in. Of course, anyone can suggest/schedule an informal write-in any time!

Cancellation: Meetings with less than four attendees will most likely be cancelled in advance. Please respond to headcount emails! We need to avoid cancelling when it is too late to get a message to anyone off-site who might be joining us.

Meeting Facilitation: Because the surveys indicate that people prefer having crits and other scheduled activities at meetings, we’re going to try to increase that in 2008. In order to do that, we’re going to have a schedule, and people will sign up for meetings during the year. When you sign up for a meeting, it is your job to ensure that we have something planned for that meeting. The plan is up to you — you can submit a story of your own so we have a scheduled crit at the meeting, you can plan a writing exercise we can do, you can facilitate a writing discussion or instigate a brainstorming session. Whatever you want! This will spread the burden of planning activities to everyone, and hopefully give us plenty of things to do as a group.

If you’re not comfortable signing up, it’s not mandatory; however, if there is something we can do to make you feel comfortable, let us know! Also, even if someone is signed up for a meeting, other crits are also an option. With a time limit of an hour and a half, that gives us time for two regular crits — maybe three if we hurry or if they are flash pieces.

Crits: Lack of crits (especially e-crits, but also meeting crits) was a big concern on the survey. At the discussion, people said that the biggest factor is that they forget when the crits are due. To try to improve things, we decided that reminders are in order. When an author sends a story for crit, flag it for follow up (in Outlook, either click the flag icon on the menu bar or click “Actions,” “Follow up,” then “Add Reminder”). Flag it for five days later (assuming that the crit is due a week from when it is sent out, which is our ideal circumstance). This should be done for both e-crits and meeting crits, so people have that reminder. If you don’t have Outlook and your email program can’t flag for follow up, send out a reminder email in five days instead. Also, if authors of stories for e-crit don’t receive responses even with the flag, they should not feel shy about sending out reminder emails. And if you’re not comfortable doing that, contact Erin, Virginia, or Stephanie, and we’ll do it. Reminding is not nagging!

Also, we discussed word count limits on crits. We don’t want to make rules about how long your story can be to crit at a meeting, but the longer the story is, the more time people need to read it and crit it. The rule of thumb discussed was for between 5 and 6K or less, try to submit a week before. For longer pieces, give more time (for 10K, try to give two week’s notice, etc.). This is most important if more than one crit is scheduled for the meeting. And, this doesn’t mean that you can’t still submit something later than a week before the meeting — but you still have to keep in mind that people’s crits will be less in-depth (more first impressions that well thought out crits).

Another thing we discussed is that if you’ve managed to forget the crit despite flags/reminders and it’s the day of the meeting, you can quickly read through the story while we’re doing the preliminary business/goals/etc. Sure, it won’t be an in-depth crit, but you’ll still be able to participate. Every comment is helpful — even if someone else already said it, you should repeat it so the author knows how many people think the same thing.

At the meetings, we’ll try a new format for crits: discussion style instead of going around the table. Then the spotlight isn’t just on one person. And, hopefully, the discussion style will encourage more brainstorming and good ideas. But, that does mean people will have to jump in there with their thoughts. We’ll all have to work harder to keep the discussion going, as we won’t have the round-table speeches to fall back on.

Finally, we talked about how everyone should keep the following in mind. Crits were voted people’s number one thing to do at meetings. But, to have things to crit at meetings, people have to send out stories. Also, sending out your work makes other people feel more comfortable sending their work to you. Because we want to stay away from participation requirements and rules, we’re not going to say that everyone has to send in at least one thing a year; however, if everyone did do that, it sure would be a good thing. And, if you don’t like facilitating discussions or writing exercises, submitting a story would be the easiest way for you to contribute to meeting facilitation, because you wouldn’t have to plan an activity or talk in front of the group much. So, think on it.

Novel Crit Groups: Novel crit groups will be continuing under the same rules as in 2007. Some people in 2007 didn’t get as many critters as they would have liked for their novel crit groups. To address that, like with crits, you can flag your original message for follow up and, also, if you don’t get a big enough response, send a reminder email. People seemed to be of the opinion that they would have volunteered more but that messages got buried in inboxes and forgotten. Also, just because you aren’t writing a novel, that’s no reason you can’t be in a novel crit group! Anything you do to support the writing group is a good thing, and if you’re in someone’s crit group without having a novel for him/her to crit in return, you’re guaranteed at least one crit for every story you submit for a long time!

Themed Collections: These were voted the favorite project overall. We’ll kick off 2008 with crits for the “Supernatural That Walks Among Us” collection. There is interest in having two collections in 2008, but if so, we’ll have to shorten the time limit on revisions for the first collection. Jamie’s update on the Apocalypse collection is that it’s only waiting on the final cover, which was delayed due to busy season. However, it should be ready soon. And, something else that came up, if you want to submit stories that we print in these collections, you can always do that. We don’t take any rights, and, since the collection is never sold to anyone (i.e., it’s just printed up for our own enjoyment), it wouldn’t be considered previously published.

Prompts: We’re going to buy in for them this year. If you want to buy in, give $10 to Erin by the first meeting in January. One buy-in of $10 means you are eligible to compete in the contest and win the prize for the whole year (if you write a lot of prompts, you can probably win more than $10 easily — just remember how many times this year no one actually won because not enough prompts were written). Erin will be buying a selection of gift cards up front with the money from the buy-in, and we’ll use them as long as they last. All the gift cards will be used in 2008 — if we don’t have enough prompt winners, we’ll do something else with them (use them for NaNo swag, draw lots for them, award them to the people who wrote the most prompts for the year… whatever the group decides as a whole when it comes up).

As always, you do NOT have to buy in to participate in the contest — if the winner didn’t contribute to the pot they still get the glory of coming in first, and that month’s prize will go to the second place winner (assuming that person made the minimum requirements). We didn’t discuss this, but since the prompt contest starts over every month, if we get any new members later in the year, it should be OK for them to buy in at that point.

Seven people volunteered to help facilitate prompts (i.e., for one month’s contest, the facilitator provides prompts, keeps the tally, makes sure people meet the minimum requirements, sends out any reminders/encouragement, etc.). If you didn’t volunteer, but want to, let Erin know. We’ll set up a schedule and rotate through as many times as we need to during the year (right now, we’re assuming that we’ll have the contest from Jan. through Oct., but that can be revised as needed). FYI, several of us (Virginia, James, Erin, etc.) have prompt books and/or lists of prompts facilitators can borrow — you don’t have to come up with prompts yourself unless you want to. And, keep in mind, when you’re the facilitator, you have the freedom to try something new if you want to– make it a five-things challenge, etc.

The minimum prompt requirements will be the same. For a prompt to count, it must be at least 500 words long and on the topic of the prompt. You should include the prompt and a title in your email to the facilitator. And for a prize to be awarded, the winner must have written at least five prompts (if the winner wrote less than five, s/he is still the winner, but they win only the glory of winning). At the end of the month, the facilitators can send the completed prompts to Virginia, who will be archiving them for the year.

Major Projects: We’re still going to do these in 2008, but we’re going to make facilitating the projects a group effort. The second meeting in January will be our major project planning meeting, and everyone will share their project ideas. We’ll approve them as a group, and we’ll have a MP email list so we can talk about how we’re doing on them over the course of the year. Current members will have to commit by the deadline we set at that meeting — new members (if any come in later) can join only up until March.

There will be a one-time buy in of $20 (for people who want to have a prize) due at the second meeting in January. Erin will hold the money and buy gift cards for the winners (like this year’s NaNo buy in, those who complete their major project will split the whole pot — you’re guaranteed at least a $20 prize if you make it, but it could be a lot more — in 2007, only one person totally fulfilled their MP goal out of the, I think, five that signed up).

Activities: No one wanted to cancel any of our activities (anything we do other than what’s already been discussed). We’ll approach things as a group going forward with the idea that we’ll probably keep doing all the activities that we did last year, though there will probably be discussion at a meeting before activities commence. New activities that were suggested were all met with interest (NaNo prep month, writing slumber party, 3 day novel, shared world stories, 5 things stories, title generator stories). If you suggested one of these things and want to admin, move forward with your plans. Feel free to email the group to gauge interest, plan to discuss it at a future meeting, etc.

Email List: People have concerns about sharing their work with people they don’t know. To that end, we’re going to try to keep the email list for active members only. That’s going to be difficult, because we don’t want to go back to having rules for active/nonactive/hiatus, etc. We’re still committed to the new structure based on getting out of the group what you put into it. However, ultimately, we decided that the best route is to decide on a group basis. So, if you are uncomfortable by someone who is on the email list but who seldom/never replies to email discussions, comes to meetings, crits stories, sends in work, etc., bring it to the meeting (or tell Erin, Virginia, or Stephanie and they’ll bring it to the meeting), and we’ll discuss the issue and decide as a group how to proceed.

Upcoming Events: 12/11 is our last meeting of 2007 — it will be at Erin’s house (bring your own dinner). There will be two crits and, as of the time of this post, it has not been cancelled.