Our November meeting will be at Scheels at Legends in Sparks. The meeting rooms are on the second floor. The entry door is a key card door, which is unlocked, just past the restrooms to the left. We will be using the first two rooms on the left. Masks are required and the seating should give us adequate space to spread out. We will link to an online meeting, using Google Meet. Details are below.
 

November’s Program Will Appeal to Your Artistic Side

Do you want to add more interest and color to your blog posts and newsletters? Want to get your book cover front and center to draw attention to it? 

For our November program, we will have Kathleen Sweeney from Book Brush on Google Meet to show us how to use Book Brush to improve your marketing. The program works for designing graphics and other elements to take your marketing up a notch.  At the training, Kathleen will be focusing on two areas of their training.

1. Professional Looking Images- She will highlight how to use Book Brush to produce images that look professional. 
2. Unique Images – The Templates and Instant Mockups that Book Brush has can lead to several authors having similar looking images. It doesn’t have to be this way! Kathleen will help you discover how to use the Templates and Instant Mockups as a starting point for you to customize and make unique and amazing looking images!

She’ll also tell your more about Book Brush and answer questions. Join us at our November meeting to learn about  this.

FIRST PAGES

Matt will be doing First Pages at this meeting.  If you have a first page you would like feedback on, please send it by Friday  November 12 to MattBayan@aol.com  For easy reading, please use 12 point Times New Roman and double space.  Do not include your name on the page, but indicate the genre. 

To join the meeting on Google:

Join with Google Meet
meet.google.com/xem-wgex-eji

Our monthly meetings are scheduled from 10 AM to noon. I’d like to host a new activity to follow this meeting with workshop time. If you’re interested bring pages to work on. This doesn’t require a finished manuscript. This session is designed to give you feedback on your work, whether you have just a chapter finished or an entire novel.

If you don’t have pages to bring in, you can still participate by giving feedback on the work of other members. It’s a good way to strengthen your editing muscles.

If you bring work, please use a font like Times New Roman or Arial in at least 12-point font.

You don’t need to submit work in advance. This will be a drop-in session. If you’re concerned about reading out loud, don’t worry. Someone else will read your material.

Looking a little bit forward, sometime in the next month or so, I’d like to convene a Jump-Start group for finished manuscripts. If you want to get detailed feedback from other writers in the group, you also have to give feedback to the others in the group. I’ve found that four is a good number for a group. That way no member has to wait too long to get feedback on material.

If you’re interested in participating, let me know at the November meeting or send me an email with this heading: JUMP START GROUP. If you don’t use this subject heading, I may not see it. Send to mattbayan@aol.com. Give the title and genre of the book you want analyzed.

My Jump Start group will only work on novels.

Matt

Recently, we told told you we would be doing a book exchange where any of our published writers could put one book into it and we’d put them all on a flash drive. Any member could then take one and read whichever books interest them with the ultimate goal of writing a review of any book they read from the drive.
     To date, I have three books submitted (including mine)! Does that mean all of you have enough reviews on your books and you don’t need a boost? Or does it mean you don’t want to share your book for free in exchange for a review?  We had hoped we could help our published writers a little, but it appears not that many are interested. If we have that wrong and you do want to do it, then send your book in a pdf format to RPAverett@gmail.com.

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If you join High Sierra Writers in November or December, your membership will run through the end of 2022, so you get these two months free. (In fact, if you joined in October, this also applies.) 
     For those members, and you know who you are, that did NOT RENEW in 2021, but are still coming to meetings and participating in critique groups, we’re offering a one time deal this month. Renew now and you will also be up to date through the end of 2022.
     To join or renew, just go to our website and click on the PayPal button.

You do not need a PayPal account and can pay using your credit card. If you benefit from HSW, then please join or renew your membership. It helps pay the cost for the meeting room, guest speakers, and other things. Thank you.

For the ambitious or those who like the competitive nature of writing 50K words in a month, NaNoWriMo begins November 1 at midnight. It’s not for the faint of heart or those who claim writers’ block. It’s for those who want to develop a writing habit and stick with it. It is challenging to write every day on a project, but it is also rewarding. You might have a lousy first draft at the end of the month, but at least, you’ll have one. You can’t edit a bad draft if you don’t have one written. Or it may be total drek, but the kernel of an idea is enough for you to see the potential to edit or rewrite it. 
      If you’re bold enough to try it, you can join the Reno NaNo group on Facebook where we run daily sprints and chat with each other between writing. If you haven’t experienced the challenge of writing at the same time others are and seeing how many words you can get in an hour, you don’t know the adrenaline rush you get in competing with others. To join us in a writing frenzy, go to:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/NaNoReno/