National League of American Pen Women—Denver Branch
Minutes
7/11/2020
I. Diane called the meeting to order at 9:51 AM.
II. Members in attendance: Diane Chambers, Karen Gonzales, Ann Klaiman, Ray Cober, Atlanta Sheridan, and Kelly Ann Compton
III. Inspirational sharing: We need someone to volunteer to take over this part of our meetings. For today, Diane read from “Beauty of Life” by Khalil Gibran on our need for laughter.
IV. No Guests present.
V. June Minutes were approved.
VI. Treasurer’s report was approved.
VII. Committee Reports:
a. Website: All broken links and plugins (apps) were updated. Before updating any plugin, it is now checked for compatibility. The PHP (hypertext processor) needed to be updated, so Virginia did that. Plugins that were not being used, or were no compatible, were removed or replaced. The title “Peace Quilt” has been corrected to “Tapestry for Peace” and the video for the tapestry has been installed directly on to the tapestry page. Virginia also set ups search engine optimization to improve search engine results. She also set up Goggle Analytics to tell us about site visits, what pages were looked at and other stats. She will continue making the needed changes.
b. Membership: Diane has posted our information on the Colorado Café Writer Meet-up and one person is interested so far.
c. Outreach: Tapestry—Diane sent Denver School of the Arts their award letter with a picture of the tapestry in box #6. She e-mailed the DSA teacher and cc’d the secretary. – Kelly Ann still has three boxes. She cannot open and view the tapestries within them. She is still uncomfortable about having people come in her house, but will let people in to get the boxes if they want to look at the tapestries.
d. Programs: Diane received only one response from the worksheet she sent out regarding program ideas. We discussed ideas today: Karen will investigate the cost of having someone from Lighthouse come speak to us. (Having Lighthouse speak to us was Sue Luxa’s idea.) – Atlanta suggested that we pull together local resources we could direct people to for various writing, editing, and publishing information. – Ray suggested that we exchange links with other writers’ groups. Karen will set up exchanging links with the Colorado Alliance of Latino Authors. She will let Diane know about their websites. – Two programming ideas were brought up. The first one is a sharing of our knowledge and talent. Members could share their expertise via workshops or sharing during a meeting. The other suggestion was to have Wednesday critiques available for members. The member being critiqued would send their manuscript to everyone via e-mail. – We also discussed that we will probably be meeting via Zoom the rest of the year. It was suggested that maybe we could do an outside meeting where social distancing would be possible.
VIII. Old Business: Karen needs to find information on the Midwest group meetings. She needs to find their schedule. Kelly Ann will contact the Pikes Peak Branch and see how they are handling meeting during the pandemic. — Ray wondered if we could use Zoom to open up a Q&A session. – We returned to the idea of Wednesday evening critiques. If we do this, it was suggested that the critiques be for 40 minutes and occur at 7 PM. We might consider purchasing Zoom access for $10/month.
IX. New Business: No new business
X. Branch Announcements:
a. Ray has entered the Harper Collins writing contest. It is a contest for books geared toward Middle School grades. The winner will be announced in January 2021.
b. Karen’s book is being critiqued with 3 seventh grade boys. Her book is for ages 7-10. Her book needs to be 100 pages. It currently is 10,000 words and 50 pages.)
XI. The meeting was adjourned at 11:02
Respectively submitted by,
Kelly Ann Compton
Co-Secretary