September 16th, 2026

Hello again, and welcome back to our blog. After missing the last meeting, I am excited to join an evening of interaction with fellow writers. Some evenings, pre-meeting general intercourse with writers produces stories nearly as interesting as those produced on paper or electronic media. Our group is privileged to host several old war horses from various branches of the military. Oh, the stories…

That’s for another time and place. Join us one of these Wednesday evenings and hear the tales for yourself.

A discussion on how much time we take to edit our work after we’re finished telling our story. That is where the real work of writing begins. We’ve dashed out pages of words, most of them our darlings, rich in meaning, clever beyond description, and devilishly descriptive. There are a lot of them, maybe too many? Many of us have spent hours toiling at a writing station; we have reams of yellow pad pages stacked on our desks, a list of files aptly named resting on hard drives, memory sticks, and even those shining discs that electronic gurus laugh about when they see the stack. There might even be a thick manuscript waiting to be read by a Beta reader with a blue pencil in hand. Whatever it is, it is a story fresh out of our brain and in need of editing.

What’s next? Do you have an editor willing to read and suggest how you can get it on the market? At nearly 500 pages, that might cost more than you’ll earn from all that work. Okay, you’ll edit yourself first. You’ve made a lot of corrections as you were writing; spell check has helped with those words you struggled with, the ‘I’ before ‘E’ issues, and other spelling conundrums you’ve encountered. It’s pretty clean, but just a minute: in the first paragraph, you’ve used ‘that’ four times. Oh, only one of those ‘thats’ is needed. Click, click, click… There, that should do it. Wait, how many other that’s are in the story? How many are needed?

Where are we going? Let’s read the story carefully, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, fix, fix, fix. Oh my God, did I write that? More fixing. Didn’t I just read that a couple of pages back? Where are these words needed? Delete, delete, copy, paste, fix that thought. Will that be clear to the reader?

I took six months to write this novel; how long will it take to edit it? You think—I’ve been through the book five times; I can’t even see another error. I guess it’s time for an editor to look into it now. Let me see, how much is left? 320 pages, single-spaced, in a 6”9” format, nice for a paperback edition. My editor wants it in an electronic format in a standard “WORD” or equivalent word-processing format. Why did I choose to hand-write a novel on a legal pad?

 

Let’s move on to the reading portion of the evening.

 

Leading off this evening, Ernie Ovitiz reads from his latest work, The Roaring Lion. Ernie writes a financial thriller involving money often connected to the Chicago Mob and the Communist Party of China. Talk about international intrigue! A consortium led by Lee Santino, a crime boss’s nephew not involved in the Mob’s nefarious activities, has purchased a Chemical Factory in Taiwan to move operations to the United States. This meeting’s reading is a chapter describing a meeting of the plant’s operational staff and the new management team. Tension and issues with social niceties arise in the Chinese American interactions. Ernie reviews the proper protocols so he can present the tensions generated in the meeting realistically.

 

Don Westerfield is a poet whose life experiences influence his work. Don reads two poems this evening. Only A Matter of Time explores how people respond to the passage of time. Don’s line in the first stanza reflects time’s true importance to people: “It’s the coin of all existence;” an insight into time’s value. In the poem, Dementia, Don’s last stanza issues a plea for remembrance. As usual, these powerful poetic stories evoke a deep feeling in this writer.

 

Haiku is a unique poetry form. In the hands of a master, these brief words evoke visions in the mind of the reader that are unique to each reader or listener. Scott Anderson is striving to become a master of the Haiku. In doing so, he presents his work to an august publication, The Heron. Tonight he reads twelve of his latest works. Each is unique and personal.

 

Roberta Molaro is a poet who uses her word skills to tell the story of a young woman exploring the world for the first time without the company of her adoptive parents. Having lived without the knowledge of her adoption for twenty-plus years, Jennifer sets out on a road trip to possibly find her birth mother. In tonight’s reading, our explorer meets and forms an opinion of a young man living in a rural county in Pennsylvania. She sees a different family dynamic as she spends an evening with new friends. Roberta has found a story, and much of the telling is coming together well. With each reading, she incorporates new ideas and suggestions, many of which come from the critique offered by our little group. Thank you, Roberta.

 

Is Bruce Haedrich a visionary? Bruce wrote a novel several years ago and several essays over the past years that depict things now coming into being. In a sci-fi story, Nadia, about humanoids, the technology that wasn’t available two years ago when Bruce began writing is now producing a product similar to what he depicted. In 2012, Bruce released a book entitled The Fifth-Generation War. Today, many of the ideas and issues depicted in this work are surfacing. Internal strife in the world is closely mirroring the incidents in Bruce’s work. Whether or not we subscribe to a particular political view, Bruce's stories and essays are good reads.

 

A retired military officer and a history buff make for a great storyteller in James Kelly. His series, I Am A Soldier, First and Always, tells of a family of soldiers from the American Civil War through the Indian Wars in the American West, to action in the Spanish-American War in Cuba, and now his latest tome encompasses action in The War to End All Wars, World War I. Entitled Advance the Line, Jim is entering the editing stage. As in all his stories, the Mackenzie soldier fights for what he believes is right. Jim has written these stories and will write more as he strives to keep the action significant and historically correct.

 

Well, there you have it. I can’t give you a word-for-word recap of the meeting. You’ll have to attend to get the full impact of how these writers think and strive to tell their stories. If you can, join us, even if it’s just for one evening. But until then—KEEP ON WRITING! Read a lot and write a lot. Everyone has a story or two in them. Write it down, type it up, put it on a computer, even if just for the fun of it. Maybe you’ll share it with us.