Welcome to High Sierra Writers



Next HSW Meeting 

Saturday November 9th at 10 am at
Raleys ONE Supermarket on Wedge Parkway in the Community Room

SAY WHAT? It’s time to have a dialogue about … dialogue.How dialogue can add oomph to a slow scene.
 
Data dump? How to work the same information into a more interesting frame.

Conflict? Action? Yeah, try dialogue.
 
November 9th, we’ll have a presentation on dialogue followed by working on your material.

Do you have a scene you want to workshop and see how dialogue could improve it? Email it to board@highsierrawriters.org by 5:00 PM Friday 11/8, and we’ll throw it onto the big screen for feedback at Saturday’s meeting. 3-page limit.

ONLINE BOOK PROMOTION IS COMING UP!

Rene is happy to report that we have 41 books in the Fall book promotion. It will start on November 4th and run through November 20th. Although I didn’t get as many books from our HSW group as I would have liked, I did get quite a few. 

The graphic above, which has a little over half the offered books, is the initial click image to invite readers to our HSW website promotion page with all the offered books and their genres. From there, the reader can click to a purchase link or an author’s website. We’re asking each author to promote the event via their website, Facebook page, or other social media. If they have a mailing list, we’re encouraging them to send it to their subscribers. 

We will purchase an ad on Facebook to reach readers. The link to the web page is active, but the sale won’t start until Monday! Participating authors can begin promoting it before it goes live. 

The objective is to sell more books and connect with more potential readers. We’re excited to see how this works.


GUEST OR TOPIC IDEAS!
If you have a topic area you’d like covered or know of someone you’d like to have as a guest speaker at an upcoming meeting, please drop a line to board@highsierrawriters.org

Critique Groups Update

Reminder: You must be a current PAID member of HSW in order to participate in one of our critique groups. 

If you’d like to join a group or have general questions about critiquing, contact Linda Enos at lynda.r.bailey@gmail.com

MYSTERY WRITERS (and more) WANTED!

The Mystery and More group is looking for authors! If you write mystery, or any genre other than romance or children’s, let Linda know. She’ll put you in touch with the group leader, Ron, so you can learn more details.

HSW CRITIQUE GROUP RETURNING TO B&N

President, Matt Bayan, has reestablished the B&N critique group. For more info on how this group works, email Linda.

PLEASE REMEMBER…

If you have a few pages you’d like the HSW members to critique cold, don’t forget to send your submission (max of 6 pages, double spaced with New Times Roman, or similar font, 12pt) to Linda at least 3 days before the monthly meeting so hard copies can be made.

FYI…

The After-the-Regular-Meeting (ATRM) critique group will gather following the regular meeting on November 9th. Feel free to sit in if you’d like. 

Don’t forget to contact Linda Enos at lynda.r.bailey@gmail.com with any questions or concerns!


Change in Price for 2025 Dues

Annual dues are $5 for 2025

Our dues are climbing back up for 2025 and will be $5 for the year. We need to pay for the coffee somehow! 

You can pay them online using this payment link for PayPal: $5-for-25
or send a check to:
High Sierra Writers
PO Box 12241
Reno, NV 89510
     (Please let us know by email to board@highsierrawriters.org if you mail it in, so we can check the mailbox.)


Drop-in Critique Group at B&N

Matt is hosting a drop-in critique meeting at the Barnes & Noble cafe on S Virginia Street from 6 PM to 8 PM. Meetings will be held on the FIRST and THIRD Wednesdays of each month.

Drop-in means no prep and no homework. Just bring 5 or 6 pages on which you want feedback and read them to the group. If you want, someone else can read your material out loud. If you’re really ambitious, you can bring hard copies, but that starts to look like homework and we really want to avoid work of any sort.

Your material can be a chapter or a passage you want to test, like an action scene, or dialogue, or something you’re just not sure about. Fiction or nonfiction.

You don’t need to be there for the whole meeting. If you can’t make it until 7 PM, no big deal.
You don’t have to bring material. These sessions are a great way to build up your editing muscles by analyzing work of other writers.

See you there.


NANO WRITE IN AFTER THE MEETING ON 11-09!

If you’re participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo or want to do it, you are welcome to join us after the meeting at Raley’s for the 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. session. Simply bring your laptop, notepad, journal, phone, tablet or whatever you write with you and join in. Stay as long as you like, up to 4 p.m. Raley’s has a nice deli department if you want to grab lunch before we begin. We will meet in Room A, and the Critique Group will be in Room B. 

Want to know more about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), send your questions to board@highsierrawriters.org.

HSW Writers’ Success Stories

High Sierra Writers has quite a few published writers in the group. We have a page featuring the various books grouped by author under genre. These are under HSW Authors link. As our authors release new books, we’ll feature them here. If you have a release coming up, send me your press release to RPAverett@gmail.com.

The only release I have information on at this time is the second The ACES Anthology book of short stories.  This volume just came out and includes several HSW writers, including Rene Averett, Teresa Breeden, L.F. Falconer, Kelli Heitstuman-Tomko, Angela Laverghetta, and Ken Sutherland. The book features stories from northern Nevada writers. 
It is available from Amazon here.


The second released is a book years in the making, but it marks the debut novel for Nicole Frens. A thrilling speculative fiction, CryoShift takes the reader into the future with a man from the past. 

Here’s the sales blurb for it:

 He died in 2010. They reanimated him in 2123.

Joseph’s gamble paid off, and now he has it all – cool new tech and the ultimate life do-over.
     
When a family tragedy mucks up his plans for a normal second shot at living, he’s forced to

focus on triggering a supernatural ability instead.

Which is sort of cool. Sort of terrifying.

Definitely not how he’d anticipated spending his Life Take Two.

In a time when not everyone welcomes the New Revives, Joseph must discover where he fits in while opposing forces push him forward.

Caught between the love of his past and the thrill of the present, will Joseph unlock a power beyond belief and find his role in society, or will his hesitation cost him and his family everything?

CryoShift is a new release on Amazon.com and available in Kindle Unlimited. 

Congratulations to both authors. As always, please read and review books by your fellow writers. We all need all the support we can get. Thanks.

Another Bonus for Ken Sutherland

Besides his newly released book, his first release, Balance, got a bit of a bounce when a publisher chose a section from it to be included in a short story anthology! In his recent newsletter, Ken wrote: I just got word from Living Springs Press that they are ready to publish their anthology, STORIES THROUGH THE AGES. It contains an excerpt from my novel BALANCE: The 200-Year Journey of Andrew Crawford. As it turns out, the backstory for Michael McGhee, one of the characters in that book, works well as a stand-alone short story. Look for STORIES THROUGH THE AGES this fall. 

Ken will also have a new short story in the upcoming ACES anthology, which is a good reminder to get your short story submission to Dragon Crown Press for consideration for publication this year.