Next NETWO meeting is

March 13, 2008 at 6:30 p.m.

Western Sizzlin, Mt. Pleasant

THIRD AGENT ADDED TO WRITERS’

ROUNDUP CONFERENCE FACULTY

TERRY BURNS (Agent)

was a successful writer long before he decided to help other writers get their books in print by becoming an agent. He has published both fiction and non-fiction, and more than 200 articles.

In 2007, Terry joined the Hartline Literary Agency. His primary interest is Christian fiction, but says any novel he likes well enough he’ll represent. t

You may register online for the Writers’ Roundup Conference, to be held April 25 and 26 at Camp Shiloh, Pittsburg, Texas at www.netwo.org.

2008 Short Story Contest

Report by David E. Allen

We received 50 stories in all, 42 of them from Texas, three from Arkansas, one from Grass Valley, California, two from Bass Lake, California, and two from Silverton, Oregon. I

would guess that the Oregon ones are the farthest distance from us.

As I catalogued the entries, I noticed that we had two different stories from two different authors with the same title. How often would that happen in a hundred years, huh?

I have not read all of them, but we received some really great, well-written stories. I wouldn’t want to be the judge trying to pick the best from this group of entries. !

Much appreciation is extended to David and Nita Allen for taking responsibility for the short story contest.

Winners will be announced at the Saturday evening dinner after the Writers’ Roundup Conference, Saturday, April 26. Winners’ names will be posted on the website in early May, and published in the May issue of this newsletter. @

SCHOOL LIBRARY PROJECT

A parent came to the rescue as Galand Nuchols delivered two big boxes of books to the Avinger High School library. She reports an excited teacher was going through one of the boxes when she left and was very pleased with the wide selection of books we provided them.

Minutes of February Meeting

Jean Pamplin, respectfully submitting

during our secretary’s absence

The Northeast Texas Writers’ Organization met on February 14^th at Winfield in the old Bank Building for a Sherlock Holmes themed party. Eighteen members and guests attended.

Because this was a special night complete with program, regular business was dispensed with except for announcements concerning the anthology and conference. After a high tea meal (low tea is served from a low table in the afternoon with mostly savouries and high tea is served in the early evening with more substantial fare), several recipes stood out including Georgia and Galand’s bouillabaisse (fish stew) served with Jean’s Blushing Rice and Georgia’s breads such as apricot loaf and English muffin loaf, Wally and Bryan’s Holmes cucumber mint sandwiches, Barbara Carl’s Parmesan Peas and Jean’s raspberry jam (but no Devonshire cream—maybe next time).

Jim passed out posters and brochures for the conference and stressed getting signed up. He wanted everyone to check the web—very important you do that if you want to see an agent as sign-ups are limited (www.netwo.org). Gay Ingram volunteered to send press releases; Packet Committee includes Galand and Georgia. Needed are people to man book table, check the set-up the Thursday before conference and organize the reception on Friday night, and a committee to set up awards. There will be a mystery nite on Friday also for those staying over at Shiloh.

Other Notes: Short Story Contest deadline was extended to February 18, 2008. Congratulations were shared with Bill Carl and his new wife Barbara. They were married in January. Skip Hughes won a 2^nd prize (money too) and two honorable mentions for his poetry. He also thanked NETWO for sponsoring his poetry classes which were well attended and enjoyed. Many want more. Skip said, possibly later. Skip also suggested that anyone interested in helping Jim with the website should volunteer and it was also mentioned that anyone interested in helping organize the conference should also volunteer.

Skip Hughes presented a very interesting program on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes character. Doyle studied medicine and was not overly successful. He wrote in his spare time. Everyone loved the characters he created in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson; in fact, they were more popular than the writer himself. Doyle tried to kill Holmes off in 1893 in His Last Bow. That didn’t work and Holmes was resurrected in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Doyle wrote 56 short stories and four novels. Of the novels only one was set in England. Skip presented a very enjoyable talk. If you weren’t there, you should have been.

Short Fiction written with the Sherlock Holmes’ stories in mind were read by Ted Rankin, Bryan Freeman, Galand Nuchols, Jean Pamplin, and Bill Carl. Skip also read his winning poetry. A great time was had by all in the parlor.

The next meeting will be held the second Thursday in March at the Western Sizzler.

$ $ $

BITS AND PIECES

Ginnie Bivona has received notice that her novel, Ida Mae Tutweiler & the Traveling Tea Party (published in 2000) has been bought by Larry Levinson Productions. A screenplay is being written under the name The Glass Seagull and plans call for it to be a Hallmark TV movie. No date for production has been set.

Skip Hughes won an undivided second place in the Eighteenth International Competition sponsored by the World Order of Narrative and

Formalist Poets. He was also awarded two honorable mentions.

Gay Ingram has an article “To Be a Writer” online. To read it, go to http://www.inscribe.org/FellowScript-feature.htm.

NEW MEMBERS

Randy and Barbara Washburn

Arlington, TX

Lynn Vaughan

Mt. Vernon, TX

EVENT

The library staff of Marshall High School is hosting @ Your Library: Authors and Books, and invite you to join them in celebrating writing and reading books.

The event will be held March 11, 2008 from 6:00-7:30 p.m. at the Marshall High School Library.

Several NETWO writers will be present. Guests will have the opportunity to visit with authors and have them autograph their books. Each author will provide books for sale, and also available will be a selection of books to browse from Scholastic Book Fairs.

For more information, contact:

Marshal Edney, Librarian, (903) 927-1198 or by email edneym1@marshallisd.com.<

The ABC’s of Writing Fiction

By Ann Copeland

Reviewed by Gay Ingram

“Open this book to any page and you’ll find something to charge your fiction…” That’s the challenge stated on the book inside cover, and you will find this to be true. The alphabetical arrangement presents more than 300 “mini-lessons” that encourage browsing and random discoveries.

The unusual format of this book makes learning fun. Cross-references help you see the complex ways all the described elements interconnect and resonate. Who would expect this in a writing book?

Under Exercises: “Physical exercises are important if you’re writing with a keyboard most of the day. Do exercises to prevent body problems. Neck, shoulder, wrist. Change your position every half-hour. Stretch. Move your eyes away from the screen. This is important.”

Under Perfection, the author asks: “Are you addicted to perfection? Such an addiction can undermine, inhibit, and paralyze. Do not fear mistakes. Own your mistakes and move past them. See Ambition; Forgiveness. Now every writer needs that kind of encouragement.

One of my favorite entries is under Persevere. “An unwritten story is no story. An unfinished story is also no story. Persevere. See Faith; Rejection: You.”

This is a good bedside book; one you can pick up and open any place, again and again. It raises issues that, to writers, are timeless.

After checking, I found it is still available through Amazon.com so order your copy today. You won’t be disappointed. &

QUIET DOVES

By Lisa Cecil

This moonlit night, beneath the stars throughout

I ask you dear, how it is me, you love

pray I lend not to, frustration thereof

for I know that your love flows so devout

and be it true I seek, but do not doubt

tho’ yearn for the knowledge of quiet doves

who’s wisdom allows them to soar above

yet rest in the beliefs, they find en route

Eye to eye, unspoken words speak to me

as you express souls en-twined together

I too feel the beat of a single heart

And sense a love that extends forever

one soul we share, which two spirits feed free

one destined soul growing, from heaven’s start

(Ed. Note: This was received and would have been lovely for the February newsletter, but I ran out of room.)

“If writing did not exist, what terrible depressions we should suffer from.”

Sei Shonagon c. 966-c.1013

Japanese diarist and writer

VIRGINIA F. BROWN

A PROFILE

By Jackie Brown

Virginia was born in Texarkana, Texas, attended Lindenwood Girls’ School in Missouri, received a B.A. from the Univer-sity of Texas at Austin, and later received a Medical Technology Certificate from Touro Infirmary School of Medical Technology in New Orleans. She worked as a medical technologist in New Orleans for some years, then returned and worked as a med.tech. in Texarkana, helping her aging parents, also.

Meanwhile, Virginia (nicknamed “Choo-Choo” by friends and family) always enjoyed writing poetry, short stories, and other articles. She’s belonged to several writers’ clubs, and was a Toastmaster for several years, writing prize-winning speeches, although she never learned to like to get up in front of an audience to deliver them. She tried oil painting, and was good at it, but it didn’t hold her attention. Then she became interested in dolls, and learned to repair them, and even create them—usually large dolls, designed to look like Elvis, or President Reagan, or some well-known figure. For some years she maintained a Doll Museum in downtown Texarkana, and displayed her dolls and conducted tours in her spare time. The Museum is sold now, but many of her best dolls are still for sale.

Virginia’s friends will tell you that “she walks and writes to the beat of a different drummer,” and her poems are versatile and entertaining. They reflect her interest in life, death, cats, triumphs and disappointments, and many tongue-in-cheek Dorothy Parkerish type poems. She’s won several First Place money and awards for her poems, including a TEXARKON S.F. Convention, where her poems were judged by S.F. great L. Sprague de Camp and Greta Koger. She also won a state BY-LINE contest for light verse, and several local and area club contests. Her poems appear in The Net, an anthology of college writers, and some other writers have used her poems as quotes in their own books. She’s been published in The Storyteller, State Line Journal, and others.

Virginia also loves cats, and some of her best poems concern some of her many feline friends. She bred six-toed, cross-eyed, tailless cats for a time, and probably would have been a great veterinarian. The Texarkana Gazette has featured her in several stories about her various hobbies.

This past year, Choo-Choo has held down a part-time receptionist job, but they closed their doors, and she is looking for another job. She doesn’t worry about her age, and until recently, always declared, “I plan to live to be 120!” I see a lot of her, as I’m married to her brother (Bob Brown, another poet) and I’m always amazed at her inveterate optimism. Of course, her poems can put you in a good mood, as they are witty, imaginative, and poke fun at the human condition. She’s compiled many of them in a booklet called Views from the Vacuum, and it would be hard to pick my favorite. I like Poetic Principles especially, however, and will quote just a few lines to show you why.

So torture now a word
And warp it to your pen--

To explain a certain notion

That is quickly lost again.

Now scramble your new line

And force it in a mold

To express a special feeling

That others left untold.

Just twirl and turn a thought

Until its cryptic tale

Is unfathomable to scholars

Who would find the content stale.

etc., etc.

I believe Virginia “thinks” in rhyme. This tricky little poem, and its other stanza, may have taken her as much as an hour to write. The rest of us might find it took a week, or more. She couldn’t resist the one she calls Literary Success Assured (combining the four most popular literary subjects), (the four subjects being Lincoln, Mothers, Doctors, and Dogs.)

Lincoln’s Mother’s Doctor’s Dog

Wandered, lost, in smoky fog.

Slipped and slid into a bog,

Where he dined on slimy frog…etc., etc

I think you get the idea—her imagination just never quits!

* * * * * *

WHISPERING FLIGHT

By Allan Smith

The sailplane pictured was a favorite, the Schweizer 1-23, one of the most popular models in the l950’s and 1960’s, and provided many hundreds of silent hours among the beautiful snow white cumulus clouds of summer. In the picture is one of the typical long “streets” of cumulus that range for long distances over Northeast Texas on summer days being a continual avenue of supporting lift.

Our atmosphere is constantly in motion with subtle and unseen currents, one of which is the “thermal,” a boon to soaring flight. It is constantly employed by our fine feathered neighbors, intrinsically by the hawk, eagle, vulture, and the wild geese on their seasonal continental flights.

Assume a sunny summer afternoon when little cottony wisps of moisture are beginning to patch the blue sky over the countryside. The sailplane is towed to two or more thousand feet of altitude, tethered by hook to a thin line of nylon rope. The two plane and sailplane pilots coordinate the flight, with the sailplane main-taining a constant position in tandem. When the pre-agreed altitude is reached, the sailplane pilot releases his tow hook and turns away to slow to gliding speed.

The rush of wind outside the bubble canopy is suddenly replaced with the incipient air flow of sailplane flight. Gliding toward the nearest wisps of condensation, attention is focused on an instrument known as a variometer on which a needle-like digital display shows the rate of descent or ascent of the air being entered. The variometer is similar to the human inner ear whose Eustacian tubing allows the in- and outflow of air pressure to the eardrum. The variometers’s intricate construction enables it to sense minute changes in air pressure that are too subtle for the pilot to detect, as the air pressure in a column of rising air minutely decreases.

Nearing the overhead wisps, the variometer needle may begin to register the first nibble of rising air. The usual technique is to continue ahead until the needle is deflected steadily upward to an estimated peak. Visualizing that the core of lift has been reached, a steep bank is entered and held to maintain a maximum rate of climb. The average thermal in East Texas may continue up to the base of a developing cloud at possibly six or seven thousand feet above ground. On a summer day under the darkened cool cloud base, hawks and buzzards are impromptu playmates, cavorting about their big white interloper. It is the cool, silent avian world that can have a near intoxicating effect, “the poetry of flying” as has been remarked. On the very hot days of summer, when thermal lift is greatest, there are many things found aloft including many small birds whose short wingspans would not ordinarily support soaring flight. They seem unfazed by a large white sailplane lazily spiraling in company. Gaggles of swallows are sometimes glimpsed with their pinkish gullets open, supposedly to harvest from among the clusters of small gnats, fruit

flies, or whatever, brought up from the fields and meadows thousands of feet below. The dark, chill base of a big cumulus can appear menacing. You feel it’s pull and open your wing spoilers to fly from under it through ghostly shards of mist until again out into the sudden glare of sunlight.

Searching ahead, other curlicues denote the genesis of another swelling cumulus, to pursue and restore the altitude possibly to be lost in covering the air miles to reach it. Only a slight deflection of the nose and a seventy-mile or more airspeed will allow a comfortable glide to the new cumulus. 879 had a glide ratio of thirty-to-one, being able to glide almost thirty miles from five thousand feet of altitude.

This is the essential technique employed to soar for impressive distances on a summer afternoon. The sailplane pilot is continually considering his sailplane’s capabilities in varying atmospheric conditions that arise when trying to soar a long distance. The first challenge to the novice in the sport of soaring is to develop the self confidence to continue farther away from the safety of a close-at-hand airfield.

The soaring sport extends worldwide. Societies have developed among enthusiasts from many nationalities, some members of which served in their respective military air services during World War II. National and international modern day meets have developed.

A particular friend who began in his youth in Germany as a Luftwaffe fledgling, circa 1930’s, has related his experiences, first being launched off mountain ridges to fend for himself in learning to fly.

In the Treaty of Versailles at the end of

World War I, it was decreed that Germany could no longer build and fly powered aircraft.

Hence, there followed the influx of crude stick and canvas open gliders to be towed off of mountain ridges into rising air currents. The construction of such primitive primary gliders evolved into those with increasing wingspans that engendered the thrill of soaring flight. <

BUCK GOES TO DEER CAMP

By Janice Glass

Bubba met a girl from Ashdown named Toni Ann. He decided she was the girl for him because she and her young son, Ronny, liked his dog, Buck. They married, and mother and son moved into his mobile home with him.

Toni Ann liked to deer hunt and was teaching ten-year-old Ronny to hunt. She also trained deer dogs and was convinced that Buck would make a good deer hunting dog – with training.

Deer season came around, and we loaded our trucks and travel trailers with equipment and set out to deer camp. Our camp had an old farmhouse we used in case the weather got stormy and we needed to leave the trailers for sturdier shelter.

The deer dogs were kept in a large pen built around an old shed. Buck refused to stay with the other dogs and camped on the front porch of the house.

A storm threatened the first night there, and we decided to sleep in the house. Bubba and his family – and Buck – went to sleep in the front bedroom by the porch. Buck snored so loudly during the night that Bubba put him and his blanket on the front porch so the others could sleep.

It was almost midnight when a large antlered buck sneaked into the front yard and crept up to the porch for the bagged corn we’d left there. He woke Buck.

Buck raised up and saw that deer staring at him – eyeball to eyeball. He let out a horrendous below and went airborne through

Bubba’s bedroom window. His hundred pounds and shattered window glass landed across bubba and Toni Ann in the bed by the window.

Bubba was a fireman, and he jumped up searching for his clothes. He was half asleep, forgot where he was and thought there was a fire.

In the next room, my family jumped from bed. We thought the storm blew a tree on the house and went into Bubba’s room to see if they were harmed. We saw Buck sprawled across their bed by the broken window.

I ran to the window and saw a large buck standing at the edge of the clearing. He saw me and bounded away. “Bring me my shotgun,” I shouted to my son, Tom. “That durn dog was scared by a deer. He ain’t worth a fart as a deer dog. I’m going to shoot that worthless dog for scaring us to death.”

A trembling Buck still lay across Toni Ann. He hadn’t moved since he landed. “Wait!” She yelled. “Get me out from under him first!”

Bubba was awake by then and hollered, “You ain’t shooting my dog! We’ll let him run with the other dogs in the morning. He’ll learn what to do.”

The dozen or so hunters staying in the house that night grumbled and went back to bed.

Before daylight the next morning we gathered in the yard with the dogs. Toni Ann left ahead of us to walk to her stand and took Buck with her because everyone was still mad at him. They’d walked a long way up the pipeline easement when two young does were startled by the pair. Both were smaller than Buck. They leaped into the brush and disappeared.

Buck bellowed, turned, and took off back the way they’d come. He was headed toward the house with his tail tucked between his legs and making noises like someone was killing him. He bellowed with every leap he made up that pipeline easement toward us. We heard him coming.

“Ol’ Buck’s jumped him a deer – listen to that mouth! Sounds like he’s bringing that deer to us!” Bubba shouted, danced a jig, and slapped me hard on the shoulder. “See there – I told you he’d make us a deer dog!” He raised his rifle, anticipating the deer to run past us.

Buck slid bellowing around the fence corner and into the yard with his tail between his legs. He completely missed the porch when he soared through the broken window into the house.

We haven’t let Bubba forget it. J

Janice says she has written several stories about Buck – this is the second story in the collection. She also says she could write a whole book about Buck’s antics. – Ed.

WRITER’S MARKETS

SHORT STORY CONTEST

<Entries must not exceed 2,000 words.

< Manuscripts must be double-spaced on

8-1/2 x 11 white paper.

<Each submission entered must include:

· A separate cover page with name of contest, title of manuscript, number of words, writer’s name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address if available.

· A title page with the manuscript title only.

· On the manuscript itself, each page should be headed with a title key word and page number. Nowhere on the manuscript should the author’s name appear.

· No staples please.

< For those without Web access, a winner’s list can

be obtained by sending a #10 SASE.

< Photocopies accepted – manuscripts will not be

returned.

<Only previously unpublished stories accepted.

<Copyrights to manuscripts remain with authors.

WRITER’S Journal requires only first rights to

winning entries.

< No profanity.

Reading Fee - $10.00;

Prizes: 1^st - $500; 2^nd - $200; 3^rd - $100

Annual Deadline: May 30

Winners List Published In Issue: Nov/Dec

Addess all entries to:

(Name of Contest)

Val-Tech Media

P.O. Box 394

Perham, MN 56573

Make checks or money orders payable to:

WRITERS’ Journal

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22^nd Annual NETWO Spring

Writers’ Conference, April 25 & 26

This year’s Writers’ Roundup Conference is shaping up to be the best ever. If you have not yet registered, it would be a good idea to do so soon – fees until April 12 are:

NETWO member $55 Non-member $65

After April 12:

NETWO member $75 Non-member $85

Full time students: by April 12: $35

after April 12: $45

Pay dues now and take advantage of the member rate.

Let all your writer – or want-to-be writer – friends know about this opportunity to participate in a workshop, meet authors,

agents, editor, other writers in a beautiful setting. They will hear those who know speak on such topics as “The Do’s and Don’ts of Query Letters”; “ The Submission Process”; “Seeing Your Novel in Print,” and more.

They can find complete details and even register online at www.netwo.org.