Minutes of the Meeting - 23 January 2020 Venue: Neo’s Sports Club, Pegeia

Present:

John Goodwin Jennie Rook Derek Whittle Dee Leigh David Greensmith

June Megennis Helen Radcliffe Richard Powell

Greetings Scribes,

A good meeting with plenty of humour this week.

Derek has agreed to be custodian of the PWG Library. Books from the list in our tutorials page can be borrowed by arrangement with him. He has our textbook collection at the moment. Copies of members published books and a collection of textbooks on script-writing will be passed over to him next week.

Readings:

David: ‘2020 Visions: A personal report on the world as it is and looking onto the future, finishing with some sport and weather predictions.

Derek: ‘November weekend’ – a development of last week’s speed writing exercise, a seasonal wardrobe story.

Dee: ‘Remembering’ – Memories of wartime.

June: ‘A Winter’s Tale’ - a development of last week’s speed writing exercise, a story of surviving 20 hours with a power failure, during the Cyprus storms.

Rick: ‘Winter’ – A beautiful description of Rick’s favourite time of year and two visual aspects in particular.

Coffee break: 11:00 – 11:30

Discussion:

Saving different versions of texts, while drafting your books, since Helen re-told how she had regretted changing her mind about ‘typing over’ her first chapter and hadn’t saved the original draft under a different filename. John discussed using ‘Auto Save’ in Word and the group discussed saving to the Cloud:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-version-history-documents-office

This is a useful guide from Microsoft but only works if you have a cloud account or subscribe to” Microsoft office 365” Otherwise it is a good idea to rename documents as soon as you open it (simply adding a number to the file name will suffice) At least turn off autosave and let word prompt you to save changes then decide if you want rename or overwrite. The problem with this is you are vulnerable to power cuts or if your computer crashes for some reason. At least you will only lose the current sessions work as the original is still safe on your chosen drive

Reading:

John read an extract from his ‘Take A Look in my Shorts’ collection entitled ‘The Rise of the Geriactivists’. A humorous take on geriatrics taking over the UK streets.

Homework: ‘The Truth or a Lie?’

Write a story or poem in any genre, up to 500 words, that is either the ‘Truth’ or a ‘Lie’. Make it as believable and obscure as you can, so that when it is read aloud it’s difficult to tell which it is.

Next meeting will be on: Thursday 30 January at Neo’s Sports Club.

Thanks to all who attended and happy writing.