Monthly Meetings

The Monrovia Writers' Group meets the third Thursday of every month at 6:00 pm in the Monrovia Library meeting room.  It doesn't matter if you've never attended a meeting before, or even if you are new to writing, we want you here! 

Our group supports all kinds of writing: fiction, non-fiction, scriptwriting, poetry, short stories, songwriting, chapter novels, children's writing, and more.  Our group's focus develops and changes with the needs and desires of our active members. For example, some of our members are gearing up to participate in the annual National Novel Writing Month challenge in November.  Other members are in the editing stage of their work, and others still just enjoy sharing their literary voice with our group. All ages and skill levels are welcome.

Feel free to bring along a piece of writing to share with the group if you would like.  We look forward to meeting you!

NaNoWriMo is Almost Here!

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, starts in November.  NaNoWriMo is an annual internet-based creative writing project which challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel between November 1 and November 30. During the 2010 event over 200,000 people took part - writing a total of over 2.8 billion words.

Writers wishing to participate first register on the project's website, nanowrimo.org, where they can post profiles and information about their novels, including synopsis and excerpts. Word counts are validated on the site, with writers submitting a copy of their novel for automatic counting. Municipal leaders and regional forums help connect local writers with one another for holding writing events and to provide encouragement.

Several of the writers in our group will be participating in this year's event, and will be sharing their work with our group throughout the month of November.

Remember, even if you have never attended one of our writer's groups before you are welcome to join us at any time. Participation in NaNoWriMo is an optional part of being in our group.

Sharing Through Google Docs

At our October 2011 meeting we decided to begin sharing our writing outside of meetings with each-other online through Google Docs.  Google Docs is a free, Web-based office suite, and data storage service offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Thus, we can upload our writing and other members of the group that we choose to share our documents with can add their own comments and feedback online.

Documents, spreadsheets, presentations can be created with Google Docs, imported through the web interface, or sent via email. Documents can be saved to a user's local computer in a variety of formats (ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, Microsoft Office [you can view a complete list of file formats supported here.]). Documents are automatically saved to Google's servers to prevent data loss, and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed.

1 GB of storage is included for free. Currently additional storage costs per year are: 20 GB-$5, 80 GB-$20, etc. up to 16 TB.

We hope that by sharing documents through Google Docs, we can use this blog for general communication about the writer's group, while still accessing and sharing our writing online with each other in a private setting.

If you have any questions about using Google Docs, please come to our monthly writer's group, which takes place the third Thursday of every month.