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New - Amazing - Read all about it!
WAG Member dishes on pods and the value of membership.
Get the scoop here.
The WAG Speaker series is now scheduled through April 2012! Check out the "Coming Programs" page! The new WAG Tales page is alive with insight and experience. Check it out and let us know what you're working on - how the project is progressing, what you struggle with as a writer and how you overcome those difficulties. Advice and commentary from your fellow wag members. |
The "Long Road to Publication"
Rhonda Riley on Adam's Hope: A Geography
Rhonda Riley won a State of Florida Artist Grant during her writing of Adam's Hope: A Georgraphy. How would she describe her first or "debut" novel? Similiar in some ways to Audrey Nieffenegger's best selling book The Time Traveler's Wife , she says.  Riley "did her homework" and searched diligently for an agent who enjoyed working with unpublished novelists. It was a strategy that paid off. A dozen years in the making, her book is scheduled for publication for Spring 2013. But why not earlier, if her agent has sold it, if the publisher has given her an advance and Rhonda has re-written countless times? It's difficult to publish a debut novel and compete with the US Presidential Campaigns, the publicist from Harper Collins said. |
 Above: Rhonda Riley (left) with author Darlene Marshall at the January 15 meeting of the Writers Alliance. Rhonda shared numerous adventures from the writing path, idea to fulfillment, and several tips for writers struggling with the blank page and juggling plot and character and pacing and .... "You have to be willing to kill your darlings," she says, suggesting that what the writer sees as golden may not appear in the same bright light to a professional at the agent or publishing house level. "I just followed their directions. I was persistent and I didn't give up." And what about feedback from all those trusted friends and family members who wanted to read her work? "Not helpful," she says, "but members of a WAG Pod, extremely helpful!" |
WAG's Susie Baxter Program on Memoir Development Attracts Huge Crowd
 Susie Baxter
discusses memoir outline
with WAG Founder/Member Kal Rosenberg. Like a novel, Susie says, your memoir will have a point of view, a theme or plot and a narrator. Ask "What is the story I most want to tell?" And then address that issue first. |
 Begin your memoir with an idea of the ending, says WAG Member and memoir writer Susie Baxter. You can even begin with an epitaph! |
 Susie
(right) with WAG's Faye Alexander. About 60 people attended Baxter's
talk on memoir writing in October at the Tower Road Library in
Gainesville. Writing a memoir is not just "I was born...blah, blah,"
says Susie. "It's about solving a problem or an issue. It's exciting!"
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WAG Presents Best-Selling Author Lauren Groff  Following her presentation, Gainesville author Lauren Groff (left), author of The Monsters of Templeton and Delicate Edible Birds, visited with WAG members and autographed copies of her best-selling novels. Here, she shares secrets of negotiation and re-writing with WAG member and novelist Rhonda Riley, whose novel Adam Hope will be published in 2012 through Ecco Press. |
According to best-selling author Lauren Groff, writers must read widely. In a presentation to the WAG monthly meeting at the Millhopper Library, Gainesville, Groff maintained that reading was "the second half of good writing." Groff, whose new novel Arcadia will be published in 2012 spoke to the Writer's Alliance about "inspiration," but covered a wide range of topics in an animated talk. "Carry a notebook," she said, "and write. Make notes of interesting people and circumstances. You may very well be able to use your observations in future stories. The very act of noticing wakes you up, makes you more attentive to small things that make characters live." Writing diligently since she was 13 years old, Groff said it took 10 years to have her work published. Her point of view includes a firm belief in rewriting and editing. And "inspiration?" That, she says, is an active process that requires you to go look at the world, perhaps to study those situations that make you uncomfortable, because it is those lie at the core of what drives you, inspires you to write. Does she write from an outline? No, Groff said, she lets everything pour out onto the paper and then begins to assemble, edit, rewrite. "I write, perhaps from the same internal pressure you feel," she told the 52 people present. "I have to." Groff was recruited and introduced by WAG speaker coordinator Judy Etzler. |
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Bacopa Contest Winners 2011 Fiction
1st JoeAnn Hart, "Open House" 2nd Mandy Manning, "Growth" Honorable Mention Q. Lindsey Barrett "Toronado" Nonfiction 1st Amanda Skelton, "Warding off the Monkey" 2nd Carolyne Wright, "Los Olvidados: The Forgotten Ones" Honorable Mention Ed McCourt, "Watching Rocco" Poetry 1st Colleen Runyan, "me or the tea" 2nd Erika Brumett, "Fight Overheard in Sign Language" Honorable Mention Carolyne Wright, "Acrostic: Evcharistoic Eulene" Submitting to The 2012Bacopa Literary Review
It is time now to think
ahead, to begin planning, outlining and writing for the 2012 contest
and publication from the Writer's Alliance of Gainesville.
Categories will be fiction, nonfiction/creative nonfiction, poetry and
short fiction. [Check here
for new submission guidelines.]
Contest
Submission dates -
September 1-November 30, 2011.
Remember there are cash prizes for First Place ($200) and Second Place ($100) in each category. First, Second and Honorable Mention works will be published in the 2012 Bacopa Literary Review. For your copy of the new 2011 Bacopa Literary Review please sent a check for $12.50 (includes $2.50 shipping & handling) to: Writers Alliance of Gainesville, P.O. Box 358396, Gainesville, FL 32635-8396. |
WAG members in the news. Let us know when you have a story or book published and how it is accessible. Contact any member of the board of directors or let us know direct at the newsletter here. 1. Kaye Linden's flash fiction story Perfect Body in One Sentence appears on a "Weirdo site" (Kaye's words) called The Mustache Factor. The editor there says "We publish Flash Fiction only, that means all submissions must be 1000 words or less." Kaye's quirky story involves surgery and anesthesia and body parts...shiver me timbers, mate!
3. WAG member Stephen Smitherman has published a novel called "Island of the Paper Dragons." It is available through Amazon.com where it is called a "science fiction fantasy for young readers. One thousand year sin the future, on an Earth completely dominated by a computer network, a great catastrophe occurs. Two survivors living on a remote island in a dragon-worshipping culture must venture across the ocean to seek the truth." 4. WAG member Mary Bridgman, an attorney in Starke, has recently scored a trifecta. Her Thanksgiving essay titled In Everything Give Thanks is being broadcast on Wednesday, November 23 between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. on "First Coast Connect" on WJCT 89.9 FM. If you miss the reading or are out of the WJCT listening area, it will be available on the Connect WJCT archive.
5. Jack Owen has a wonderful book for sale - for the magnificent price of $1.00 - on Amazon.com. It is titled "Revenge of the Pendle Witches." Surely this is a must-read as its 21kb size can be downloaded quickly and reading about witches is always fun.
6. Wendy Thornton's short story "Donegin Takes on the God of the Sea" has been accpted for publication in the Fall 2011 issue of Epiphany Magazine. Way to go Madame Prez!
7. Larry Brasington's "The Last Bridge" has been published by the Nautilus Engine, a webzine of speculative fiction. Zombies. Wolves. Emperors. And the search for an ancient Witch Crown! Read-on.... 8. Kaye Linden's collection of tales "Ma's Watering-hole and Cafe: Tales of City Dreaming" has been picked up by a new press, ShelfStealers. The press intends to serialize the tales and then publish them as one collection. In a new development,
ShelfStealers has "given me a new blog,"
Kaye says, "and considering that I am new to blogging, I wondered if
you all might post a comment or two in response on occasion. Love your
wonderful support!" 9. If you go to Dogzplot you can read Kaye Linden's latest story "Fractured Parts." The magazine Six Minute Story will feature her longer short story "Breaking Through Stone" in its September issue. Kaye is a WAG member and the short fiction editor for the 2012 Bacopa Literary Review. Congratulations Kaye!! 10. WAG member Rhonda Riley has sold her first novel, "Adam Hope: A Geography" at auction to Ecco Press, a Harper Collins imprint. Rhonda says, "Robin Ecker's fiction pod was very helpful to me as I edited the novel and submitted it to agents and publishers. Publication date is tentatively set for late 2012. Rhonda is speaking to the Writer's Alliance in January! Previously, Rhonda's novel won the 2011 State of Florida "Individual Artist Fellowship" in the literary arts. "ADAM HOPE is the story of a young woman from Appalachia at the end of WWII who is sent off to manage her aunt's farm and dsicovers a mysterious stranger unconscious in the red clay mud, beginning a life-long love affair that leads her to question the meaning of otherness in race, religion and marriage as the country lurches forward into the modern era."
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Unless otherwise noted, all meetings of the Writers Alliance are held at 2:30 p.m. at the Alachua County Library (Millhopper), 3145 NW 43rd Street in Gainesville. |
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Writers Alliance of Gainesville
P.O. Box 358396
Gainesville, FL 32635-8396