Writers’ Block

The submission period for the Fall 2008 issue of Beeswax is now over. Any submissions received after 11:59 PM October 31st will be considered for the Winter 2008 issue. The submission period for winter is undecided, but starts November 1st and will probably end around February 1st. If you wish to submit for winter, please consult the fall guidelines until an updated form is posted.

The contents, cover, and purchase/pick up information is forthcoming. Please check back soon, and remember to look for an e-mail if you contributed to our magazine.

– Joe

The deadline to submit to Beeswax is tomorrow! No one brought anything for the magazine to this meeting! What’s up with that?? …So what if Joe’s play took an hour and a half to read anyway?

 Stuff We Talked About:
- Movie Night is being moved to the beginning of next quarter. Movie will probably stay the same though.
- Midnight Write-in for NaNoWriMo is tomorrow at the Metro! Bring your laptops! Come in your costumes! Drink tapioca!

Stuff We Read:
- Act I of The Royal, a play by Joe.

Heading into finals time already… crazy. We will still be having regular meetings during week 8 and 9, but there’s no meeting week 10!

– Yidi

I was interviewed for an article in this week’s Connect Savannah about NaNoWriMo. Writers’ Block and our awesome midnight write-in got a brief mention. :D The print version of the paper should be available at various places that carry papers starting… today, I guess, since it’s five in the morning.

Also, reminder that you have three days to submit something to Beeswax. We’ve gotten a lot of lovely entries from students that aren’t regulars at Writers’ Block. This should be rectified either by the regulars submitting more stuff or by those people becoming regulars sometime soon! Thank you.

– Yidi

Q10 is the word processor program I was talking about yesterday. It’s a fullscreen program so you won’t have any pesky distractions while you write. It saves automatically every few paragraphs or even every paragraph if you set it like that. It calculates your word count as you go and even has a built-in timer so you can have timed writing sessions and see how many words you can write in x number of minutes. And? It makes typewriter noises when you type!

Q10 was probably the only reason I finished my 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo last year — three days ahead of time, even. I would time myself writing for ten minutes two or three times an hour. For ten minutes at a time, I had no distractions and just wrote. I have no idea what I wrote, I just wrote it. Q10 doesn’t have a spellcheck unless you specifically install that version. No spellcheck and no grammar check really speeds you along. As does the lack of boldface, italics, etc. After all, for NaNoWriMo, editing is for December! (Or January. I suppose you can sleep in December.) I would be able to average 400-500 words per ten minutes, which meant that a little more than half an hour a day would get me to my daily word quota of 1,667 words, though more accurately, since I was way behind by the time I started using Q10, it meant that using the program caught me up really, really quickly. Here is my progress chart from last year as proof!

So yeah. This is my big testimonial for Q10, so no excuses for not being able to find the time to come up with something for Beeswax. Writing a 2,000 word short story should only take an hour, max! Dragging it into Word or Open Office and editing it will take, what, two more hours? You should definitely be able to find three hours between now and next week and write something amazing to submit to our magazine. So there.

Unfortunately, Q10 is only for Windows. No worries though. I’m told JDarkRoom is pretty similar and is available for Macs as well.

– Yidi

Wow, I think this week was the shortest meeting ever. It was thirty minutes long! Amazing! (To anyone that happened to stop by later: we’re sorry! See you next week?)

Things We Talked About:
- Beeswax: SUBMIT TO IT. Next week is your last chance to bring it in before the deadline!
- The Beeswax cover shall be a gigantic bee head. The back cover may or may not be purple.
- Halloween open mic is canceled, but the NaNoWriMo midnight write-in is still on! Halloween night, the Metro, be there!
- The Movie Night movie will be Stranger Than Fiction. Time and date TBA, but it will probably be during week eight.

Things We Read:
- A collection of poems by Patrick.
- A collection of haikus by Seana.
- An unfinished short story by Andres.

And that is why our meeting was so short. :P

– Yidi

What follows is a list of more well thought out reasons than anyone could ever possibly need as to why you should submit to Writers’ Blocks’ literary magazine, Beeswax.

1) Because Writers’ Block loves you, and you should return that love.

2) Because people deserve to read your writing. (Note: This may be because it’s too good for you to keep to yourself, or because people are inherently bad and should be punished by having to read your writing.)

3) Because if you don’t, it could get filled with bad writing and people will suffer! (See above.)

4) Because if you don’t, the terrorists win!

5) Because if we don’t get enough pages, no one will buy it, which means we won’t have money to make one in the winter, which means we won’t get to beg you to submit!

6) Because Scarlet Johansson, Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, Ashton Kutcher, Johnny Depp, Usher and/or Neil Patrick Harris will think you’re sexy for doing it. (Note: I’m only 94% sure that this is true.)

7) Because it’s kind of, sort of like a publication. It’s not the New Yorker, or the Missouri Review, or even an underground press book with a devote following, but it’s kind of a publication, right?

8) Because if you don’t the Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo will be released from their treasure chest. Vincent Price is dead, so don’t expect his help trying to get them back in.

9) Because you will be shunned if you don’t! And possibly bit by small children (and us).

10) Because we really need you to.

– Joe

To those that didn’t make it tonight — I hope your midterms are going okay.

To those that did make it — you are all, of course, awesome.

Things We Talked About:
- We need all submissions in for the literary magazine by the end of October, and we really want to see your submission at a meeting before you turn it in. There are two more meetings left in October! BRING IN YOUR STUFF. (Joe will be angry with you otherwise.)
- The literary magazine now has a name! Beeswax. …So there.
- Since all of… five people seem to be serious about NaNoWriMo, there will be no budget allocated towards buying NaNo merch — you’ll just have to reward yourself.
- Instead, we’ll be devoting $50 to food for a movie night and $125 to the lit mag… So once again, here is a big emphasis on the fact that we need more stuff for the magazine!

Things We Read:
- “Little Red is a Slut,” a 24-page comic script by Cat.
- An untitled short story by Seana.
- “True Close Encounter,” a short story by Keith.
- “Three Bags,” a short story by Yidi.

Not a bad show this week considering midterms. Here are a few quick reminders for people who are new to bringing stuff in though:

1) You should have 8-10 copies of your work.
2) It should be double-spaced.
3) The pages should be numbered.
4) Each copy should be stapled.
5) If you’re bringing in a novel, please bring only one chapter at a time!

Thanks! Your Grammar of the Week is forthcoming.

– Yidi

Writers’ Block has received $175.00 from its budget allocation. This is half the amount we asked for. We will be discussing how it should be distributed next meeting.

– Joe

For those of you who weren’t here last year, I wrote two grammar packets that detailed a lot of the mistakes I saw over and over again at Writers’ Block. You can download them here and here, and I’ll be bringing some copies to the meeting next week. In the meantime, here’s your dose of weekly grammar.

COMPLETE SENTENCES

All right. For some reason, people don’t seem to understand what a “complete sentence” is. I feel a little ridiculous explaining this, but maybe it just has to be done.

A complete sentence must contain both a subject and a predicate. A subject is the noun the sentence is about and is modified by the predicate, which must contain a verb. The predicate often also includes an object, another noun. In the below examples, the subject is bolded, the entire predicate is underlined, and the object is italicized.

1. He ate the food quickly.
2. Even as the breeze whistled through the branches, the bird remained huddled on his branch.
3. Brushing the hair from her eyes, the girl shrugged. (No object.)
4. McGonagall would not approve, he knew, but there was nothing either of them could do. (Compound sentence, no objects.)

These examples do not cover all classes of sentences, but you get the idea. A more exhaustive explanation of predicates can be found on Wikipedia.

SEMI-COLONS VS COLONS

Now that we understand what a complete sentence is, let’s revisit those damn semi-colons. Semi-colons separate complete sentences. If there is not a complete sentence on either side of your semi-colon, then you’re doing it wrong.

Bad Example: There were many things he was afraid of; like spiders, snakes, and dogs.
Good Example: There were many things he was afraid of; these included spiders, snakes, and dogs.

Perhaps you were thinking of colons when you wrote that bad example. Colons are used for 1) dramatic pause, 2) lists, 3) separate complete sentences. Yes, colons can also be used to separate complete sentences, just like a semi-colon. This means that you can use a colon in place of a semi-colon, but not the other way around. That’s why it’s called a semi-colon. It’s not as powerful. Colon use examples are as follows:

Example: She did not like the dog: it was smelly and disgusting. (Separating complete sentences.)
Example: Without preamble, he explained exactly what it was about her that he disliked so: her fear of rabbits. (Dramatic pause, portion following colon is not a complete sentence.)
Example: There were many things he was afraid of: spiders, snakes, and dogs. (A list.)

Now for an exception to the rules (don’t you hate these?). If your list contains individual items that contain commas within them — say, if you’re listing cities and states — you should use semi-colons to separate the list items (instead of a comma). Note that this does not mean you should use a semi-colon to start off the list — you’d still use a colon for that — just that you should separate the individual items in the list with the semi-colon.

Example: He had visited many places: Boston, Massachusetts; Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois; and Portland, Oregon, but no place ever seemed to capture his interest as much as New York had.

– Yidi

To everyone that walked/ran through the rain to come out tonight — you are all awesome!

To everyone else — get your midterms done ahead of time so you can make it next week!

Things We Talked About:
- We still need a name for the literary magazine. (Joe wants this decided!) Several names were discussed, mostly centered around Greek myth, so as to connect with SCAD’s official writing anthology Artemis. Some suggestions included: Apollo, the Owl, and Athena. No one could agree, but we will probably have some kind of vote at a more populous meeting.

Things We Read:
- “Chapter 1: the blue light,” from a novel by Rex.
- “When the Picture Goes Black,” a super short story by Joe.

– Yidi