President's Corner

JUNE 2007

NTRWA President, Jen FitzGerald

Dear Chapter Mates,

Well, the National Conference is just around the corner. The winner of the conference fee raffle is Barb Woodward. Congratulations, Barb!

I’d like to send a *huge* thanks to Kisha Jordan for taking on the Newsletter Editor position. Kisha, it is much appreciated. I’ll be taking care of June, but then Kisha will come on board and take over in July.

And don’t forget that a good way to get your name recognized is by writing articles. If you write articles for the newsletter, Kisha or myself can post them to EditorLink (the Yahoo group email loop used to share articles amongst the newsletter editors) so that other editors can use them, if they wish, in their newsletters or they can forward the articles to their chapter loops. You get credit and retain the rights. Just FYI.

We also had two new members join at the May meeting – welcome to Wendy Watson and Cindy Sinnema.

Our National Conference Literacy basket is in desperate need of donations. The theme is ‘Romance as Big as Texas’. We are mainly looking for gift cards to national store chains, like Wal-Mart, or Visa or Amex gift cards. Gift cards to book stores are another idea. If our published authors would like to donate signed copies of one or more of their books, we’d love those too. Texas collectibles are always nice, and goodies for consumption (chocolate, chips/salsa, etc.) during the conference would be welcome too.  Please contact Mindy Obenhaus at mindyo@sbcglobal.net to get more info if needed.

On a sadder note, neither our chapter Web site nor our newsletter made it into the finals. But not for lack of effort – thanks to Marty and Angi for working so hard to make sure the Web site was perfect. As for the newsletter, I did my best, and I’m that it wasn’t enough.

I hope you all take advantage of June’s meeting to either get a critique or to talk writing. Even if you aren’t getting a critique, the June meeting is a wonderful time to get to know a chapter mate or two that you haven’t had a chance to meet yet or to just talk writing generally or your WIP specifically with another writer. I know I don’t get the opportunity to do that too often, and I’m really looking forward to it. And since I won’t be getting critique this year, I hope that many of you whom I don’t know so well, will come by and say Hi.

Well, my kitchen is non-existent (just a sub-floor at the moment) and the countdown to the Fourth of July has begun at my house - it’s my husband’s favorite holiday and he puts on a great show every year. I’m tired already.

See you in June.

Sincerely,

Jen