We had our first Friday night meeting last week, and as David couldn’t make it, I’ll provide the feedback this time.
Our usual Chair, David Carson, wasn’t able to make it along this evening, but 9 of us did, including two new folk who had seen Abby and Rosie’s presentation at the Creative Dundee Petcha Kucha event and decided to come along and see what we are like.
As we had new visitors, we started with some quick introductions, with each of us describing a little of our writing interests and what original brought us along to Nethergate Writers.
We then moved on to discussing upcoming dates, and Rosie agreed to check that we could secure the room for our next meeting.
Craig had brought along some questions for a proposed ‘Meet the Nethergate Writers’ section for the website. A couple of additional questions were suggested by other members, and Craig agreed to send them round the group.
After the boring business was out the way, we also had some work to discuss. Roddie had brought along two poems – Justice is an older poem, which became sadly topical following the dreadful events in London last week, and lead to some interesting political discussion. Frustration looked at a situation we have all been unfortunately familiar with at one time or another – the inability to make the transfer of thoughts and ideas to the written page, and was very much enjoyed.
Craig had brought along two possible entries for this month’s Scottish Book Trust 50 Word Fiction competition, on the subject of campfires. They were both well received, but the second was seen as being more of a ‘story’, while the first seemed a more descriptive piece. Craig agreed that the second would be the best option for submitting.
We finished our evening with a short writing exercise. Richard said that he had been thinking about memorable opening lines, so we each tried to come up with an interesting or arresting opening. Richard’s own was seen as particularly amusing ‘It was a wet Wednesday morning when my goldfish bowl caught fire’.
We agreed to meet again next on Wednesday 5th April.