Book:
Progress is being maintained on the book. I am in touch with Michele in South Africa about the cover, and progress is being made. I’m still waiting for the final contributions to fit in, and then it should be ready to prepare the final file to send to the printer. As soon as I am at that stage, I’ll set advertising in progress, including a note on the website. I will be asking you all for your home addresses (well, not all, because I know Sally’s - and don’t put any wrong interpretation on that!) so that I can send a copy to each of you.

There is a second point: it is often written that the contents of the book are copyright, and there’s hell to pay if anyone copies anything from it. I’m planning on saying that anyone can copy anything, provided that they give credit to Alpha Writers. If we choose copyright, then we have a problem if we ever wanted to enforce it, because we don’t exist in a legal sense - we have no constitution as a body. We perhaps could prove that despite that, we do exist, but it would be a hassle. Most of the writing is unnamed contributions.

Does anyone disagree with my suggestion? It’s better than saying nothing.

Website
Every time I look at the website, I am struck by how good it is. In fact, I have told several people to look at it to see well it has been designed. It is in itself a promoter of our Alpha.

Organising Challenges
Christine is dealing with Challenge 6, and Catherine will look after (this) Challenge 7, and Ann will deal with Challenge 8. I’d like an offer for dealing with Challenge 9, but I am happy to finish off with Challenge 10.

Regular challenge:
Members rankings after Challenge 4 (on my scoring of 3 pts for the first, 2 for the next 4 and 1 for every entry):

Chris, Sally and David have 8 points each
Christine has 7 points
Clare, Laura, Catherine and Ann have 6 points each

A couple of competitions could change this dramatically!

Challenge 5: I am now collecting the assessments for Challenge 4 (including those which had to be revised because I sent out one entry late!!), so you will shortly get the comments on the entries, and the top classifications. From the 11 responses I’ve had, two stand out, but there’s little to choose between them. So everyone’s assessments are crucial. I’ll send another circular round as soon as I get the last responses.

I’m getting the feeling that judging the entries is considerably harder than writing your own contributions!

Challenge 6: Christine is currently collecting your holiday entries for Challenge 5, and she will be sending the entries for assessing after this Alpha Day.

See the Challenges page for details of this month's regular challenge, and for the results of the Christmas Challenge for this year!

Longitudinal experiment:
Click here for details.

Group Creative Writing:
Click here for details, and also for news of David's idea about cliff-hanger writing.

Discussion:
Thank you all for your critiques of the story THE HEALING. Clare was the writer, and she has found the feedback very helpful. If some of you only sent your crits to me, can you please now send them to Clare. I’ve got them all on my disk, but I didn’t keep a note of whether they were only to me or not!

- Olaf