Erskine Writers

 Meeting on 25th March.

Eleven members attended the session on 25th March and were dismayed on hearing that Donnie had suffered a heart attack. They send their thoughts,  prayers and love at this time but were heartened to hear that he was now home. Other apologies were received from Lorna, Brian and Jackie. 

Joan and John gave us a fairly in-depth account of the annual SAW Conference which they had attended over the weekend with Joan praising the food especially! Joan attended three workshops - at only one of which she was actually asked to produce a piece of writing and whereas she enjoyed the other two they came across more as lectures than practical sessions. John was enthused by the successful author Valerie Masters and her insight into self-publication. She had whittled it down to the fact it could be done with the use of three apps - Word for the actual creative writing, Velum for typography and formatting and Tanvar for illustrations, cover and spine. He was encouraged by the group to do a presentation of self-publication in the new session, once he had successfully completed his own work. It was agreed that it had been a successful conference and feedback from our group will be given by Sandra at a meeting in early April.

The rest of the meeting was given over to double decker writing where a noun and adjective blindly chosen were prefaced with the definite article and a short story be written on the resulting title. Sandra began with “The Horrible Brother” , an account of a young novice’s first impression of the monastery he had joined and the monk who met him at the door. John H’s account of an online dating profile was, as we would have expected, humerous and ended up with the subject dating his sister! Morag’s title “The Uninvited Murderer” was enigmatic and she related the dark tale of a family reunion held in a highland castle. It was very atmospheric and Christie-like and had an unexpected ending. Hilary’s offering “The Dangerous Corpse” told a dark tale of two feeding brothers who ran an undertaking business and benefitted (?) from a rather grisly conclusion. Irene had “The Myopic Mistress” based in a laundromat, Sandra R “The Bountiful Child” , a character study of a rather wonderful, kind young girl and Marilyn delved deep into her nursing experiences to produce “The Comforting Experiment”. John M wrote a very deep and moving piece on “The Deaf Sister” which had the potential to be taken further. Rob’s piece on “The Wierd Writer” told how Ben Gunn had used a dodo’s claw to write a recipe book based on cheese whilst marooned on Treasure Island and Ryan gave us the tale of Puff, a missing feline in his offering “The Strange Cat” and Joan ended proceedings with here piece based “The Jealous Couple” which had a tinge of reality about it.

A further selection of titles was made and used as a flash fiction exercise - the results  of which will be heard next week. All agreed it had been a fun and fulfilling afternoon.