Hi Alphas,
Welcome to Alphaday 11. We’re definitely approaching the summer break now. Summer? Well, there’s a lot of vegetation activity out there and it looks gorgeous… especially when the sun shines and it’s reasonably warm. But we don’t call it the ‘summer’ break in Alpha lingo anyway, because for some of our members the seasonal flow is inverted. The ‘fallow period’ will do. We’ll be idling, just ticking over while we wait for the next season to start.
This Alphaday’s activities are reduced. There won’t be another Alpha challenge until September. That’s going to be hard. We’ll have to concentrate on our personal writing!
The following is on today’s menu:
- This bulletin from me
- The Log from Margie
- The results of the jealousy challenge from Clare
- The compiled entries for the diamond ring challenge from Geoff
- The ongoing and ever-growing collection of showcasing pieces from Clare
One of the usual items may be missing from the list, but there’s still a nice lot to get on with.
I’m sure we all appreciate the work that the above-mentioned members have put into organising the stimulating writerly experience that our Alphaday is. And, of course, everybody who entered a challenge contributed as well.
Our group works because everyone puts their shoulder to the wheel.
Over the next month or so I shall sort out responsibilities for next season. I shall also ask you for ideas about how to improve the group’s activities. New ideas are important; we don’t want to get stuck in a rut and risk going stale.
We need volunteers to take responsibility for certain tasks. I’ll go into details later. But while there’s no challenge to write perhaps you could formulate your ideas and send them to me. That should set the ball rolling and will be very helpful.
First of all right now: Enjoy the Alphaday menu which includes the final lot of challenge entries for Season X.
General news:
Shakespeare would have been 450 years old on the 23rd of April – had he lived. Happy birthday to you, Old Bill! In fact he’s still very much alive through his works.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has just died and he, too, is very much enjoyed by many readers the world over. Will he last into the 24th century? Who knows?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is said to have started the genre known as ‘magic realism’. I know I mentioned ‘genres’ in the last bulletin, but this is one genre that I very much admire. Putting magic into reality is, in my view, the one thing that gives fiction the edge over reporting and takes a story into the true dimension of fiction where we experience that mysteriousness that we can’t see with the naked eye. Salman Rushdie does it superbly. And I love Joanne Harris’s novels as well. Not to mention Shakespeare! The Tempest is my idea of perfect magic realism.
Christine