This month’s meeting was held over zoom due to air conditioning problems at the library. 17 members were present online to hear a talk from Walt Socha, one of our longest standing members.

Angela, our librarian, asked if we had read the list of 100 best books of the 20^th century in the New York Times. The newspaper can be accessed via the library’s digital newstand at: https://www.wccls.org/news-magazines and https://www.wccls.org/research/digital-newsstand .

Our meeting started with the usual zoom etiquette stuff and “four more things” that Sheila tried hard to remember.

Zoom rules:

• Please mute your microphone if the doorbell rings, the dog barks, the child cries, the need for loud, crunchy snacks overwhelms you, etc. There’s only one online microphone, and if there are noises in your room, that microphone points straight at you.
• Please use speaker mode (top right) so you can see the speaker’s face.
• Please switch on closed captions (somewhere at the bottom) so you can what zoom thinks it sounds like we’re saying.
• And please use headphones if you really can’t hear us – they make the sound much louder.

1) Website

Sheila displayed the website and pointed out we’ve got rid of the error message at last! But we haven’t got rid of the errors. Fixing them will take a little longer and be a lot scarier; we’re still looking for volunteers—anyone understands computereze, or who has a child or grandchild or close friend who loves fixing WordPress websites. Ron created the site 10 years ago and has maintained it wonderfully over the years—we love our site and we are very grateful to him. But now it’s time to give him a break. Sheila will do her best to update the apps behind the site, improving speed and security. But those updates do come with warnings that things might break.

As a first step, Sheila moved the help pages to posts and gave us a new “landing page”. As a second step, she WILL REMOVE OLD EZINE/CONTEST ENTRIES SOON, so, if you want to preserve anything from 2014 – 2022, please do so NOW!!!

2) Ezines/Contests

One of the most important pages on our site is the contest/ezines page. Jean hosted our Relationships in a Flash contest and expressed her delight in the surprisingly varied submission, from lightning bugs to ancient Romans! Most votes went to

1. First David F for “Prodigal Cocktail”
2. Second  Nora for her poem “Before We Met”
3. Third Liz for “The Universe Spoke to Me” and Mary for “What Happens in a …”

Other entries were:

• Upon Waking to a New Day (poem) –BY—Judy
• Gentle Marble Joins My Family –BY—Judy
• Light of My Life –BY—Peter
• Powell Street Station –BY—Ric (New member/1st contest/June was his 1st meeting)
• Riding With Romans –BY—Lyndsay
• Sorry (poem) –BY—Sheila
• Such a Help –BY—Jessie

Upcoming ezine writing prompts:

1. August Scheming, hosted by Clayton https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/contests/august-2024-ezine-contest-page/ Deadline Sunday August 4th
2. September  Telling yourself the truth, hosted by Robin
3. October It came to life, hosted by Lyndsay
   word count limits 1,200 words (but 6 is fine), all genres, send to contest @ portlandwritersmill . org before the end of the first Sunday of the month.

Find out more at https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/contests/upcoming-contests/

3) New Books

Gary Romans has a new novel out and credits our contests with part of the inspiration. You can find it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ask-Aardvark-Mormon-Story-Book-ebook/dp/B0D6L7ZY9D Also, Gary says “Anyone who would like to read Ask Mr Aardvark can get a pdf file of the text for free by emailing ZotMormon@gmail.com twice: once asking for the file and once with their comments after they’ve read it.”
Matthew McAyeal also has a book inspired by our contests, and is looking for an illustrator. The first Carl and June book was an anthology of writing from Writers’ Mill members (https://www.amazon.com/Carl-June-collection-childrens-stories/dp/1978282435), released through the library’s account. This one will be released on Matthew’s own account, so, in the spirit of Writers’ Helping Writers, if you volunteer to help with illustrations, maybe you should ask Matthew what help he can give you in return. Matthew’s email is mmcayeal@yahoo.com

 4) Anthology

This led to the topic of our annual anthologies:

The Writers’ Mill anthologies (and some other books) can be found on our Amazon page at: https://www.amazon.com/stores/The-Writers-Mill/author/B081P17P5Q

1. Do we want to release an anthology this year? Probably
2. How many authors do we need for a viable anthology? 10-12
   1. Looks like we usually have around 20
   1. Got 4 so far (5 by the end of the meeting. Yay!)
3. How many submissions do we need? Around 30
   1. 29 in 2012
   1. 70 in 2016!
   1. 63 in 2020
   1. 50 last year
   1. Got 19 so far (21 by the end of the meeting!)
4. How many volunteers do we need?
   1. Editors (simple edits only – may have 3)
   1. Playlisters (putting pieces in a smooth order, choosing a title and cover ideas, may have 2)
   1. Illustrators (Do we even need illustrations???)
   1. Formatters (print and ebook versions, may have 1)
   1. Promotion—if we are doing an anthology, we should probably try to promote it, say with a two-hour reading at the library. Sheila will talk to our librarian after the deadline, as these things have to be organized well in advance. The reading will probably be next year.
5. The deadline for submissions is the end of the first Sunday in August, so 2 weeks away. Anyone who has written for our ezines already has something worthy of being published, so you COULD submit something, but WILL YOU? Send submissions to anthology @ portlandwritersmill . org. Volunteer to help by writing to the same email address. Let’s make this another great year!

Some members asked how to choose what to send into the anthology. There’s no theme, so please just submit your best work that you want published, unless you have another publisher in mind (because, unlike our ezines, this counts as published). The only rules are: no more than 5 entries per person, no more than 5,000 words in total per person. The playlisters will organize the pieces so they read smoothly together, and the editors will polish your work (removing typos and making all the formats agree, for example).

Another approach is to look at the short—less than 2000 words usually—pieces that you had a lot of fun writing and that you’ve revised and maybe even workshopped with some writing friends.

If we receive enough submissions, Sheila is happy to run zoom meetings with volunteers to clarify what they need to do, why, and how. This is one of the ways we can share expertise among us and truly be writers helping writers.

Speaker

Walt Socha has done what many of us dream of – published a book and sold a lot of copies to real strangers. But who defines “a lot”? What Walt did next is what we should be dreaming of—he found out how to make good writing great. And today he offered to help us find that out too. Find notes from Walt’s talk at this link on our website: https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/21/help-your-reader-get-lost-in-your-book-with-walt-socha/

More Website Discussions

We ended the meeting with more discussion about the website. Our librarian pointed out the importance of knowing what pages people actually use.

• The (password protected) contest/ezine pages get a lot of use.
• The schedule is used by the library (and by some of our members, though the info is sent in our newsletters).
• No one seemed to recognize the book page, and Sheila pointed out there’s a list there of books that members are willing to lend to other members. Some of these are really useful books.
• The links page is ordered with website, facebook and goodreads links separately. We should probably rearrange it to show all the relevant links for each member, though that would require members to send that information to someone to add to the site. Could email addresses be included (if the page were password protected)?
• Sheila has moved most of the help pages to posts, leaving links to the posts on the help pages. She sends people to these pages when they ask for help. (Unfortunately this means the “posts” page now looks as if it’s just help topics, which is why Sheila created a new landing page.)
• Contact us contains useful email addresses though it’s not clear anyone looks at them.
• The sign-up page is working well, and the new newsletters (through MailChimp) seem to be working well too.
• The welcome page is new. Sheila explained that she added it so readers wouldn’t be overwhelmed with a list of weird posts (mostly help posts, since the posts are ordered by the date they were created and she’s just been moving help pages to posts). She added buttons so people can easily access a list of speaker presentations, minutes, and announcements. She asked if there were other things that should be easily accessible—what do you think? PLEASE let us know!
• The posts page is what used to be our front page, with a chronological list of posts, currently dominated by help posts.
• Sheila asked if we need a page for a privacy policy. Zita suggested something at the bottom of every page. Sheila will look into what she can do about it.

We talked a bit about writersmill email addresses. Some of us still have addresses such as SheilaD @ portlandwritersmill . org. However, our librarian pointed out that this may not be permitted now that the website is owned by the library. The admin, contests, anthology and other writersmill email addresses are not affected as they go to volunteers helping the library.

The meeting closed at 3pm. Don’t forget our next meeting (August 18, Minnette Meador on creating a convincing point of view), the deadline for our next ezine (August 4, scheming), and the deadline for the anthology (also August 4^th)