Hello everyone,

General:
It's good to be back into an active organisation – and its nice to see everyone as enthusiastic as in previous years. In particular, Tara and Rosemary seem to fit into the group so easily and naturally.

Circulars:
A reminder that Circulars with an ‘a’ as a suffix will be the general ones, while those with ‘b’ will be to do with Challenges. There will be up to 3 with a ‘b’ suffix because one will deal with the next challenge, one will deal with the distribution of entries for judging, and one will reveal the results of that judging. The ‘b’ circulars will come from different members. Circulars with the suffix ‘c’ will be for members to circulate a piece of their own writing.

Anthology:
I’ve had two or three more contributions for the proposed music anthology, but I would like to have a few more.

What we were looking for were contributions on the theme of ‘music’. The contributions could be short stories, articles, poems, even anecdotes or a haiku*, so that we have a variety. Please send them to me. If you have some sort of idea of what it’ll be, than it would be helpful to me if you could let me know as soon as you’ve firmed up on your idea.

I’m not sure if one can write ‘a haiku’ as an individual verse – or whether ‘haiku’ just means the type of writing. Anyone know?

My summer activity:
My Summer activity

Following on from the note I put in the last circular, the only thing that has happened is that I’ve got a free book sent to me by Mike Hally, who is an independent writer and photographer, but who does quite a bit of work for the BBC in presenting programmes: he’s clearly done some on early computers, but not really covered anything which I was concerned with. Interesting to see if anything further develops. Daniela has been very quiet!!

Writers' log:
It’s good to see that members are active in general writing activity. I’m trying to increase my output this winter, but there isn’t enough time to do everything. I’m sure most of you feel the same.

Discussion topic:
I’m throwing an idea into the ring for discussion.

Airports are places where people buy books – paperbacks - for their journeys. Most paperbacks take three or more hours to read. In this age of cheap low-cost travel, many flights are less than two hours. So is there scope for a series of shorter books, of around 15,000 to 20,000 words? This is in effect novella, I suppose, which now has no market to speak of. The idea is that it is a book which will entertain the mind for a shorter journey (I don’t really take long to read the Easyjet magazine), and that you can complete reading it before you get off. A book of this length can be very cheap to produce – in single section stapled form.

I’ve only ever written one story of this kind of length (13,000 words) and I printed and produced it for the 50th anniversary of VE-Day in Watchet in Somerset. I printed 200 and sold about 150 of them within the town (and made a fair profit for the cause). I did get the remark that it was a nice length for a story like that (though what that actually meant, I have no real idea!).

Anyway, is this a worthwhile idea? Circulate any comments with the subject box marked NOVELLA.

Offer of Writing Workshop:
I have received the following invitation (which dosen’t apply to any of us, and certainly not to me).

If you are between 11 to 18 years of age and love to write, come to the "Young Writers' Workshop" and meet other young people interested in writing.

At the workshop, you will also be introduced to various types of writing and visuals through simple tips and mini projects. You will learn how to write, design, prepare a book dummy and also get to rewrite some familiar tales.

What you may be interested in, though, is that it all relates to Singapore based.

Finally:
I never knew that telephone boxes could be that interesting.

So should we finish the music anthology, I am sure that there’s enormous scope for a collective work on ‘telephone boxes’ – or just ‘telephone numbers’. Is there scope for a group story? What started it all?

It’s lovely to be starting a new season – and I am grateful for the enthusiasm which comes through in all your emails.

- Olaf