The inimitable Paul Kelly hosted GWC’s first Social Writing Evening last night. The idea of these is to have a more free-format approach with lots of writing and people sharing their work. However the main thrust of last night’s proceedings was focused on getting the Scottish Icon project back on track. We are hoping to get a book published by the end of the year.
As such we are still looking for more icons, so we have relaxed some of the rules.
Cut-off date for entries is still October 27th.
Members are no longer restricted to just 3 entries each.
Pieces longer than 1500 will be considered (though do try not to make them too long).
Paul began a general discussion with the suggestion that at least part of the proceeds should go to a local charity/hospice. This was generally agreed as both a good thing in of itself and also that it may promote sales.
The minimum size for a book is 100 pages so we are only about two thirds there. So get your thinking caps on for more icons. Someone came up with the idea of including famous Scottish recipies – especially good if we have an icon to go with the recipe. Another suggestion was to have photos in the book(which would pad it out a bit). So of any of you have photos associated with your icons they could be included (subject to copyright).
One area where we were a bit short of icons was about famous Scottish people. So Paul set us a writing exercise about the most famous Scottish person we had met. From Berti Auld (Celtic player with the Lisbon Lions) and Alex Ferguson (Man. United) to brief encounters with John McKie (news reader) and confident confrontations with Daniela Nardini (actress) there was no shortage of material. Though Anne stole the show with her picnic on an Argyle beach with THE QUEEN! So hopefully some more icons to come from this rich vein of material.
To aid Grahame put the book together it would help if everyone submitting material could try to adopt the same formatting style. So Grahame has suggested the following
Try to use 12 point font size.
Single space your pieces.
Indent your paragraphs.
Leave no blank lines before or after your paragraphs.
Tip: If you are in Microsoft Word highlight your document and right click. Then select paragraph. There you will see the options for indenting and paragraph spacing.
Next meeting is on 6th October – Writing Fiction based on fact – guest speaker Theresa Talbot – if you have any questions for her pass them on to Margaret.
Ho Hum, onwards and upwards.