• Alexa Kingaard had a great discussion about her book Keep Forever on The American Veteran Show, July 1. Alexa said show host, Steffan Tubbs, was very interested in the Veterans Writers Group as well. Listen to the show. (Alexa’s segment starts 26 minutes in.) 
• There will be a celebration of life for Terry Allan Severhill at Miramar National Cemetery at 2:30 on July 16. Terry was a proactive member of the group for many years. He shared his poetry with us and many other writer’s groups in the area. For more information or to RSVP, please email maryseverhill@gmail.com.
• Our vets read their stories:

o   Rat hunting for nighttime recreation in Vietnam.

o   The VWG’s influence in getting one member to get off his *ss, stop being an aggravation to those around him, and move on.

o   A party, dress whites, and red wine don’t mix well with a young officer’s spill on Admiral Zumwalt.

• Frank Ritter shared a couple of writing tips:

o   For hyphenation of compound modifiers (e.g., well-written sentence), if you can replace your modifying words with “moss-covered” then be sure to hyphenate. The exception being when the first modifier ends in “ly”, like “sharply honed knife.”

o   When deciding on present or past tense, imagine that the time line of your story is a rope stretching from the beginning to the end. When you are writing any part of the story, first ask yourself where you are in your story, then where this particular part of the story would be located on your time line. If it occurred before your current location on the time line/rope, use past tense.

• Bruce Rowe briefed the group about publishing options for authors, including traditional publishing, independent publishing, and hybrid publishing. See the link below to download a PDF of the presentation.
  Here are links to some of the other resources discussed in the presentation:
• How to Pitch an Agent 
• Stephanie Chandler: Why I Left Traditional Publishing 
• CreateSpace and Smashwords do-it-yourself publishing
• Independent Book Publishers Association professional standards checklist  
• Ingram/Spark and FastPencil hybrid publishers
• Publishers Weekly Booklife for indie authors.