President's Corner

APRIL 2008

NTRWA President, Jen FitzGerald

Dear Chapter Mates,

I hope April and the advent of spring finds you all well and writing productively.

Thanks to everyone who attended the March meeting and made our 25^th Anniversary celebration a success. It was good to see so many faces, both our regulars and those we don’t see so often.

I want to thank Gina Nelson our Program Director for bringing in Linda Castillo to speak at our celebration.

I also want to give a big shout out to Marty Tidwell who stepped up as Party Committee chair and made sure the meeting room looked festive, that we had a yummy dessert, and put together the cool goodie packages everyone should have received. Special mention goes to Sandra Ferguson for researching the Post-It Notes, and to Regina Richards for researching pens.

Our next major event is the June Roundtable Critique. If you are published author and can provide critiques on ten pages for 2 to 3 of your unpublished chapter mates, please contact Candy Havens, our PAN Liaison, or Gina Nelson. If you are an unpubbed author and want to be on the receiving end of one of these critiques, please let Gina know what genre you’ll be submitting—that way she’ll know how many published authors in what genres we’ll need. More details about the critique will be available soon.

Be on the lookout in your mailbox—the snail mail one, that is—for a paper ballot regarding the proposed Bylaws. Please vote and return the ballot as soon as possible. Our Bylaws need to be back to RWA by May 1. The proposed changes were posted to the NTRWA loop for discussion, of which there was none. The board made very few changes from the standardized version provided by RWA National. If you missed those postings, the entire document is still available in the files section, including the reasoning for any proposed changes.

Gina has arranged a great lineup of speakers for us this year, and for those who won’t be attending the national conference in San Francisco, Jennifer Archer will be speaking in July for an hour and a half on ‘Writing a Mainstream Story that Sells.’ We hope you’ll be able to join us.

Until April 19th!

Jen FitzGerald