November 2024 Meeting

 Minutes of Meeting Tuesday 26^th November 2024

7.0pm at Peepo’s Spirit Room 

Present: Suzie, Fiona, Adam, Sue, Stuart, Jennie, Liz (chair)

Apologies: Marie, Esme, John, Kath, Andy, Irena, Ann, Ruth

The meeting began with some discussion about how to engage members who cannot make Tuesday evening meetings or who find the staircase access too difficult. It was decided to explore the possibility of holding quarterly Saturday afternoon meetings, in the library, in January, April, July and October 2025. An email will be sent out with more information for members’ responses.

We cancelled our December meeting which falls on Christmas Eve and decided to hold our annual dinner a bit late, at Peepo’s on Tuesday 28^th JANUARY 2025 in place of the usual meeting. An email will be sent out asking for numbers.

• The next writing theme is ‘Christmas/NewYear’ and we decided to contribute Christmas writing directly to the blog during December as there will not be a December meeting.
• The December writing theme is ‘The Light’ and  
• The January writing theme for the February meeting will be an old favourite: ‘ Choose any book. Turn to Chapter 5. Open the 5th page of Ch5 and count down to the 5th line. Use that line/sentence as your writing prompt.’

Those of us who attended the author’s workshops organised by the library on 16 November were impressed by the practice of the U3A Much Wenlock Writing Group who always circulate a passage of their writing before meetings so that people can make critical comments on the ‘Word’ document. They have found this an essential part of completing writing a novel (they have all self-published!) We thought that could be a useful strategy to adopt for those High Town Writers who want a more in-depth commentary on their work. Not everyone would want to circulate work beforehand, but we decided that those who would like to do so could. To facilitate this, we decided to send an email to regular attendees which is not BCC’d so that members can communicate directly by email.

Our warmup writing exercise was a word maze – shock – grape – joke -word – puzzle – orchid – mannequin and as usual members surprised themselves with the range and quality of writing achieved in under twenty minutes.

We then read our writing on the theme ‘The Typewriter’ which will be shared on the blog. Jennie appealed for people to comment on the work that is published on the blog as feedback really helps writers to improve their writing.

We finished the meeting at 9.30pm.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!