Hello everyone,

It's really good to start the year again, and to feel that I'm in full communication with you all. It's been a busy summer, with excellent crops of raspberries, tayberries, loganberries, blueberries and now with the harvesting of apples, pears, blackberries, figs, walnuts it's not quite over yet. We don't go out on the hills to pick whortleberries, though. (Do you know what "whorts" are?)

Anyway, I hope we all have a good year, and feel that our standards of writing moves ever forward.

Membership etc.:
You will all have seen the email that I received from Laura, meaning that we have lost her for this year. Please remove Laura's name from list: I hope this is temporary, and she will rejoin next year. However, Chris has got himself re-organized and is rejoining us for this season, and we welcome him back and look forward to his contributions. Dawn will not be rejoining - I've had an email from her, and it seems that she's got a mountain of business work. We may have a new member joining us by the name of Frances: I won't know for another week.

Plan for year:
We will, as last year, use the regular challenge as the basic operation that holds us together. I think we all benefited from contributing to challenging exercises, and by reading the way others tackled them. I know I did! I am not planning a longitudinal exercise - at least not yet - as we have only just finished the cliffhanger to which a number of us contributed. David has all the contributions, and he is checking through them to smooth out problems that arise from having different contributors. The final version will be circulated either at the same time as this circular, or as soon as possible thereafter, and it will be distributed as ALPHA DAY 3.1c.

One of my main hopes this year is that we will all be able to contribute to a group novel. I have sent my outline to a few members to get reactions, and they are generally pretty favourable, although they all did point out problems which could arise, both in the novel plot and the organisation (which is pretty daunting). I am taking these into account, but my whole plan is described in ALPHA DAY 3.1b with its accompanying attachment. Please look at it, and think about my approach.

I hope that we'll raise discussion topics again - that dropped away last year, and it is quite interesting, even fun! Please give thought to some good topics.

Story/article crits:
Last year, we had two stories sent around for criticism by members. The responses were helpful, and I would like to see more of you take advantage of this idea. It's quite a common thing in a Writers' Group, and it should work with us.

Website:
I have renewed our website so that we can continue putting our work on it. Sally has done such a good job with it - but is there anything we can do to encourage people to look at it?

My Early Computer Days:
My description of my early days in computers is going to be published on the net, but there has been a delay in getting it published. As soon as it is available, I'll let you know.

Book:
As I said in my pre-season circular, book sales haven't done very well, but I'm still keeping them in reserve - I've still got about 80, I think. Our cash in hand is now £95.90.

We can decide what to do with the money. If we wanted to do a simple anthology of about 40 pages of A5, with a copy to everyone, that will probably use most of it - but suggestions will be welcome. It may be worth waiting to see if we sell any more - I don't give up too easily, and I've got some ideas for more exposure.

Other responsibilities:
As I have mentioned before, Christine is taking over the Writers Log this year. I think Margaret has done an excellent job over that last couple of years - it amazes me when I see the total of writing work that has been done by members. It's so much more than most writers groups achieve, I'm sure.

I'm not sure what to do about the Learning Curve. Not much transpired during the last year, but I'm sure there's a lot of info which can be passed around. It was such an excellent design that Dawn did, and I feel that we haven't really done it justice. Has anyone any ideas about what to do next?

Regular Challenges:
Judging this year:
Despite our best endeavours to create a fair system last year, many of you found commenting on the contributions quite a chore. So this year, I am suggesting cutting down in the work you do - but I'll still ask you to do the judging.

As before, there will be a collator, who will receive all the entries, allocate them a number, and circulate them to everyone. Everyone will do the judging (just picking the three best), and send the results to the collator. The collator will then ask three members to comment on two of the entries each. If this works, members should only be making comments on just 2 entries once every 4 challenges.

The first challenge of the year: see the Challenges page for details.

As I am acting as collator for the first challenge, I can then circulate the complete set of entries before I go away. When you have sent me your judgements, I will be asking three of you (John, Ann and Di) to comment on two of the entries.

I need collators and commentators for the next challenges. Can I suggest the following (the dates are the dates which the challenges are set):

	Date:	Collator:	Commentators:
1:	Sept 21st	Olaf	John, Ann and Di
2:	Oct 12th	Margaret	Sue, Sally and David
3:	Nov 2nd	Margie	Clare, Zena and Geoff
4:	Nov 23rd	Ann	Catherine, Christine and Olaf
5:	Dec 14th	John	Chris, Margie and Margaret

I won't go any further than that at the moment, because we might get new members - and anyway, I'll have to add in Chris, now! If you have arrangements that would make this difficult, please let me know.

Best wishes to you all

- Olaf