Our February meeting will be THIS WEDNESDAY, 2/24/2010, at 6:30pm. It’s at the usual place, the OKC Coworking Collaborative on 7th and Hudson in beautiful Midtown OKC. We have an awesome guest speaker lined up, Steve Lackmeyer, writer for The Oklahoman and OKC Central fame. Lori will also be discussing the upcoming Script Frenzy event that will be starting at the beginning of April. It should be our best meeting yet!
It’s almost time for our January meeting and a chance to start a new year off with a bang! In order to make it easier for the OKC CoCo guys to schedule events in their ever-growing list of groups, we’re changing the date we meet from the clear-as-dishwater “next-to-last Wednesday of the month” to a clear-as-tapwater “4th Wednesday of the month”. This will change the date of a few of our meetings, including the January meeting. So now our next meeting will be held: JANUARY 27th, 2010 at 6:30pm.
You can always view the full OKC CoCo calendar
A few people expressed a desire for an easier way to keep in touch with new meetings. I try to remember to post reminders to the Facebook group, Twitter, the mailing list, and the website itself but if there is something you guys would prefer I’m all for it. I could set up a shared Google Calendar for meetings and local events pertaining to writing, we can migrate off of Wordpress to Meetup.com, or I can unleash a flock of White Ravens to carry the message from the Citadel and pray they are not shot down by enemy archers. 
I look forward to seeing you all again later this month, and hopefully we’ll see some new faces!
This is a reminder, that due to the holidays and NaNoWriMo, we’re having our meeting for both November and December on TUESDAY, DECEMBER 1st at 6:30pm at the OKC CoCo.
We’ll talk about the experience of writing a book in 30 days and the challenges it presents. See who completed the challenge, who came close, and who pulled their hair out due to unfair real life time constraints.
If you didn’t participate in NaNoWriMo this year, don’t worry; we’ll still have plenty of fun stuff to cover in the meeting, such as information on self-publishing and a new writing prompt. I look forward to seeing everyone there!
The slides are up for anyone interested in them. Unfortunately several of them don’t make sense without the context of the talk given with it, but use your imagination. You might even imagine something even MORE EPIC than what really happened! Be warned! The PDF linked below comes in at a whopping 9.9MB in size.
Our meeting for October will be on Wednesday, October 21st at 6:30pm at the usual place, the OKC Coworking Collaborative. We’ll be discussing the National Novel Writing Month coming up in November as well as discussing our latest writing prompt.
Don’t forget to submit your writing prompt before the meeting! Even if you can’t attend the meeting join up with our mailing list and take part in the group virtually.
One last thing: The guys at the CoCo are being generous enough to provide a cool opportunity for people participating in NaNoWriMo. Check out the promotion here!
Our meeting for September with be Wednesday, September 23rd at the Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative, at 6:30pm. We’ll be discussing the Creative Commons, go over some of last month’s writing prompt submissions, and cover some more writing tips.
As a reminder, the writing prompt is DUE ASAP! Post your submissions on the mailing list! As a reminder, here is the writing prompt:
Write a scene of any length or style that SHOWS character emotion and
action rather than TELLING us about it. Use the following:
- A character who is nervous and suspicious
- An authority figure who is getting angry and impatient
- A plucky, happy-go-lucky teenager
- Use an aged, falling apart building as your scenery
Try to follow the guidelines for showing instead of telling. If you
missed the meeting and don’t know what I’m talking about, check out
the slides on http://geekwriters.net and check out this website for
more info: http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/sep01/browne.htm
Here is the video for our August meeting:
Thanks to Derrick and the OKC CoCo for letting us use the facility and filming our meeting for us!
I’ve reserved space the the OKC CoCo for our August meeting. Due to some unforeseen scheduling conflicts I had to push the date of the meeting to the last Wednesday of the month, August 26th at 6:30pm. I hope you will all be able to attend!
I plan on giving a presentation titled, “Tools of the Trade” discussing some of the various pieces of writing software that are out there and that I use personally in my own writing. I’d like to have a second presentation for the meeting, so if anyone wants to speak let me know and I’ll pencil you in to give a presentation. It’d be really awesome if we can rotate speakers so we can all learn from each other!
See you guys at the next meeting!
Hello!
It’s been a busy few weeks for me with vacation and work. But as promised, here are some of the ideas we had from our first meeting as possible presentations for future meetings:
- Podcasting as a means of distribution. Authors can discuss their work, the craft, and even read their work for the podcast.
- Use of licenses such as the Creative Commons for distributing your work electronically.
- Writing software such as word processors, mind-mapping tools, interfacing with websites such as Twitter, and other tools of the trade.
- Social media as a means of communicating your writing.
- Pre-writing strategies and story structure.*
- How to properly research for writing.
- Writing for audio and narration.
- Learning how to critique writing properly and how to accept critiques of your own work.
- Featuring a “Rejection Slip Hall of Fame”.
- Spending time finding out what everyone is reading. Reading is integral to anyone who enjoys writing.
* Ryan mentioned the late OU professor and author Jack Bickham (author of The Apple Dumpling Gang) who wrote an amazing book on Structure called Elements of Writing Fiction – Scene & Structure available on Amazon.com.
Of course I also still plan on bringing in guest speakers, using this mailing list to send out some writing prompts, and anything else that we think would be fun and beneficial to the spirit of the writing group.
It’s official! The first OK Geek Writers meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 22 2009 at 6:30pm. We will be meeting at the OKC Coworking Collaborative in Midtown OKC. It’s a beautiful facility if you haven’t been there before. Directions are available on the CoCo website with maps so you won’t get lost.
The first meeting will consist primarily of us getting to know each other so we’ll have an idea of what kind of writers we have in the group. We’ll talk about what we enjoy writing, anything we’ve written in the past, and our future writing goals. We’ll also discuss what we’d like to get from this particular group and determine the best possible day and time for subsequent meetings.
I plan on bringing food and drinks, so I need to get a rough idea of how many people will attend this first meeting. If you plan on coming, please let me know. The best way is to join our mailing list and send out a message, but any means of communication is acceptable.
