14 members attended July’s Writers’ Mill meeting, and if you missed it, you missed a fantastic presentation from Erick Mertz. His topic—Self-Publishing Success: What Worked, What Didn’t, & What I Would Do Differently—was particularly timely as we approach the release of our next anthology, and included excellent advice and inspiration for all of us. Notes from his presentation will be posted online shortly, with the current password—which you will find in your emails.

Calls to Action:

1. The deadline for our anthology is fast approaching. Send your entries to anthology @ portlandwritersmill . org (remove spaces) before the end of the first Sunday in September—September 3^rd). (More details below in the minutes.)
2. The deadline for our next contest is the end of the first Sunday in August—August 6^th. The topic is “If these walls could talk.” Find out more at https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/contests/august-2023-contest-page/ and send your entries to contest @ portlandwritersmill . org (remove spaces)
3. Don’t miss next month’s meeting (on the third Sunday in August—August 20^th) when we will issue a call for volunteers to help with the anthology. Learn about purposeful editing and see where you can support your fellow writers and your library, as well as supporting your own writing. Sheila has received a request that we go around the room sharing how our writing is going, so perhaps we will do that near the start of the meeting.

July E-zine

The meeting started with Karin announcing winners of the July contest:

• FIRST–Clayton M. Davis for “Undivided”
• SECOND–Sheila Deeth for her poem “Uphill Both Ways”
• THIRD–Gary Romans for “Puerto Williams, Chile, January 1, 1816”

The other entries are:

• You Have No Idea How Lucky You Are BY Karin Krafft
• Comrades No More BY Matthew McAyeal
• Cultural Evolution BY Steve Cooper
• Infant Power BY Robin Layne
• My Generation, Long Ago BY Jessie Collins
• Privileged Not Lucky (poem) BY Judy Beaston
• Standing Room Only BY Jean Harkin
• Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation BY Lyndsay Docherty
• The Luckiest Generation BY Mark Knudsen
• The Silent Generation BY Peter Letts

Congratulations to everyone. And if you didn’t read this month’s ezine with the contest entries, it’s not too late. It’s still online—https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/contests/july-2023-contest-page/july-2023-entries-voting-page/ and scroll down to the “contents” grid. It’s got some really great writing.

Self-Publishing Success with Erick Mertz

Erick Mertz is an author, screenwriter, ghostwriter, editor, publishing consultant, and all-round great person to talk to us about writing. We were delighted to welcome him back after is earlier visit in September 2020– https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/19/writers-mill-minutes-september-2020/ You will find notes from his presentation at https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/17/self-publishing-success-what-worked-what-didnt-what-i-would-do-differently-with-erick-mertz/ or download the notes from https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Self-Publishing-Success-Version-1.pdf

Upcoming E-Zines/Contests

For new members, we run anonymous online contests every month, deadline end of the first Sunday, word limit 1,200, any genre (just don’t deliberately offend people), entries to contest @ portlandwritersmill . org (remove spaces). The entries form an ezine of excellent writing, free to all our members! Upcoming contests are:

• August, hosted by Lyndsay – If these wall could talk. (Watch your emails for ideas and suggestions, or look on the website: https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/contests/august-2023-contest-page/ )
• September, hosted by Jean – Fall, Falling, Fallen. It’s a challenge month, and the optional challenge is write as many paragraphs as you can without a main verb. Again, look at your emails and the website for more info (https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/contests/upcoming-contests/)
• October, hosted by Michael – Why me?
• And November will be hosted by this month’s winner, Clayton, who will be hearing soon from our contest organizer, Judy.

Anthology

We also release an annual anthology in time for Christmas giving, and we encourage everyone to send submissions. Jean put a comment on one of this month’s contest entries saying, “I hope this will be in the anthology.” We all hope to see lots of your contest entries in the anthology. They would all be great submissions. And we hope to receive writing from the rest of you too, whether or not you’ve entered our contests.

• No theme – a team of volunteers (yes, you!) will choose a title and order the pieces to make them fit together after submissions close.
• No more than 5 entries per person, and no more than 5,000 words in total per person.
• Pictures – yes please!
• Send to anthology @ portlandwritersmill . org (remove spaces) and please note
  • We don’t require first publication rights, but if your piece has been published before, it’s only polite to tell us where it was first published, so we can credit it correctly
  • Your work will count as published after the anthology is released. If you want to publish it elsewhere, you should let your publisher know it was first published by us. (Contest entries, in contrast, do not count as published as they are password protected and so not publicly available)
  • If you send us a submission, that means you are willing for us to publish it. Please do not ask us to take it out after we have started work on the anthology, ‘cause it really is a lot of work!
• We’ll need lots of volunteers, so please consider where your talents lie.
  • Titling (We’ll use Erick’s advice and look for a title that fits the genre of literary anthology, then we’ll look at what sort of cover would fit as well)
  • Editing (see next month’s meeting to learn what kind of editing we mean)
  • Sorting (If you’ve ever made a musical play-list, this is where you might volunteer)
  • Illustrating (We need pictures. Lots of pictures)
  • Publishing (Zita has created our files for print, and Sheila created the kindle files. Can you help?)
  • Marketing (Can you take copies to libraries, contact newspapers, maybe get us a reading at a meeting place of some sort?)
• The deadline for submissions is the end of the first Sunday in September (same as for September’s contest). And the anthology will be uploaded to Amazon at November’s meeting.

One other thing. The library is hoping to host NaNoWriMo in November. We might get some new people joining us to see how the upload works. And if any of you want some writing encouragement and inspiration, keep an eye out at the library to find out more about the various talks and groups they’re offering.

Next Meeting

Our speaker on August 20^th is author/editor Sheila Deeth on the topic of “The Joy and Purpose of Editing,” and we’ll make a start on creating our 2023 anthology. (Don’t forget to send in your submissions!)