Hello everyone,

General:
For the Future:
Having made a decision to progress into another season, I will aim to raise the membership to 18. I will endeavour to get members from all parts of the English speaking world. However, members various commitments change with time, so it may be that some of you will not be able to progress to next year. I - and I am sure that others will be as well - sorry, because I feel that we have established ourselves well as a unit, but I am also a realist and pragmatist.

As a start, I will assumes that every third Thursday will be our Alpha Days. Because my wife has a commitment to lead a team reading Talking newspaper for the Blind every six weeks on a Thursday, I want alternate dates to coincide with these Thursdays, because it makes it easier to organise out diary. So for next season, the Alpha Days will be Sept 13, Oct 4, Oct 25, Nov 15, Dec 6, Dec 27, Jan 17, Feb 7, Feb 28, March 20, April 10, May 1, May 22. There'll clearly have to be some flexibility about December 27th!

I propose that we continue setting challenges in the pattern as we have done, but I would like each member (or at least 10 of us) to take turns in setting a challenge, collecting in the entries, and then the assessments, summarising the results. I would take the first one, but I would then set out a timetable for other members to take charge. I will also have a list of challenges which can be used if you can't think of anything suitable.

For judging, I am taking up a suggestion by (I think) Christine that we have a number of points which we allocate to the best entries. I suggest 6 points which can be divided between the entries, but there must always be at least 3 entries chosen for the points. That means the maximum that any entry can get is 4 points, with two runners-up with 1 point. The varied patterns of awarded points would thus be (4,1,1), (3,2,1), (2,2,2), (3,1,1,1), (2,2,1,1), (2,1,1,1,1), (1,1,1,1,1,1). I want to avoid giving anyone more than 4 points, as it could well create a runaway leader overall.

In addition to the winning points, everyone gets 1 point for entering provided that he/she has also entered a points assessment of the entries. Not all entrants made judgements in the past season. This, however, does not stop those who have not submitted an entry from making an assessment.

Regular Challenges:

Points totals so far (following Challenge 8's results):

	Points	Stars
Zena	15	4
Christine	15	2
Clare	13	4
Chris	13	3
Sally	12	2
Margaret	12	1
Geoff	10	1

It's pretty close!

Challenge 9:
Geoff should by now have received all assessments and collating them. I hope he's got mine, because I only sent mine at 5 pm on Wednesday due to faulty fingers when I was away. I'll update the points list as soon as I have those details.

See the Challenges page for details and results of all challenges.

Group Projects:
Click here for more details of the group novel, and of another idea from Chris for a group writing project.

Discussion:
Thank you to those of you who have commented on writers and authors. The comments seem to suggest that authorship is primarily concerned with books, and is on a somewhat higher plane than writing. Chris and Christine make the comment about "author of", and I understand what they are sayiong - perhaps one can take it further. If you are recommended or read a book - and it is a good book - you might say "Who was the author?" or "Joe Bloggs was the author", but you wouldn't say "Who was the writer?" or "Joe Bloggs was the writer". On the other hand, if it was a poor book, one might say "Who wrote that rubbish?". That seems to imply that authorship is associated with good material only.

I remember a radio interview I heard with Jeffrey Archer. Not my favourite person by a long way, but I think some of his books (esoecially Kane and Abel) are exceptionally good, and I would have classed him as an author (ignoring other vices/virtues). Modesty isn't among his characteristics, but he classed himself as a writer and not an author.

I've just finishing reading another paperback "The Interpretation of Murder". It's been the book of the week last week, and some of you may have heard it. But I would rate it as a high quality book, especially in the use of English - it is a delight to read sentences with construction like he uses. The plot is good and well told, slowly unfolding, but the early part contains a lot of psychoanalysis with supposed conversations between Freud and Jung. I'll circulate a review of it when I finish it.

Best wishes to you all

- Olaf