Month: September 2023

David Wecker – Making an Ordinary Bio Extraordinary

Join us October 14 for our guest speaker, David Wecker (meeting time, location, and zoom registration below).

David Wecker tells stories for a living.

As a columnist for more than 20 years for The Cincinnati Post, The Kentucky Post and the Scripps News Service, David wrote stories about ordinary people in a way that revealed what was extraordinary about them.

For 16 of those years, David was also head concept writer at The Eureka Ranch, where he wrote more than 5,000 concepts for new products, services and marketing strategies for Fortune 500 clients including the Walt Disney Co., the Ford Motor Co., Johnson & Johnson and scores of others.

If you look up his name on Amazon, the titles of a half-dozen books will pop up. They include “Spinning Beneath My Feet,” an account of a North Pole expedition for which he served as base camp manager, “Mastering the Universe: He-Man & the Rise and Fall of a Billion-Dollar Idea,” a chronicle of the 1980s male action figure David’s uncle created for Mattel, and two books co-authored with Eureka Ranch founder Doug Hall. David’s most recent book, “Square Pegs: Stories about Everything and Nothing,” is an anthology of his columns that were distributed nationally by the Scripps News Service.

His broadcast experience includes creating and co-hosting “Brain Brew,” a national weekly radio program aimed at solving small business challenges, and “The Backyard Barbecue,” a weekly humor/talk show parody.

As founder and president of BrandFlick, David’s work these days focuses on storytelling that connects, using video as its platform.

David and wife, Karen, live in a 200-year-old restored log home in rural Campbell County, Kentucky. David has two offspring, Sam and Betsy. Betsy is expecting to present him with his first grandchild, a girl, in the fall of 2023. David is a not-so-great gardener, a guitarist in his church band and curator of his own private ossuary.

  • When: October 14, 2023
  • Time:  11:30 am EST
  • Where:  Middletown Library. This meeting will also be zoomed. Please use the following link to register. The meeting will be recorded and posted later.

Zoom Registration Link

NOTE:  The meeting registration will show start time of 11am. That is our chapter business meeting. David Wecker will speak at 11:30am. If you don’t wish to attend the business meeting, register, and log in shortly before 11:30 AM EST.

Need a Breakthrough? Consider Taking a Break

With the end of 2023 in sight, I reread my January post in this blog. There it was in black and white: my commitment to finish the first draft of my book this calendar year. The good news is I’m close. The bad news is that, in writing the final chapters, my plot began to collapse like a Florida sinkhole.

I spent most of the summer revising. Then I deleted entire chapters and began again. Eventually, I created more problems than I’d fixed. The story felt like a dead end, and I seriously considered deleting the entire manuscript. I needed a breakthrough.

It was pure serendipity that a class I’d been wanting to take became available during this trying time. The class was on Lyric Essay, and I’d watched it sell out twice already this year. I put my story aside and signed up for ten weeks of writing something entirely different.

Lyric essay is a relatively new form of creative non-fiction. Describing the sub-genre as “essay” is a bit of a stretch. The form is a hybrid of poetry and memoir. Where traditional essays aim to persuade, lyric essays tend to hypnotize.

The best example of this form, if you are interested, is Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark. A beautifully written memoir, each chapter is an essay that braids the author’s experience of raising her two children with her vast knowledge of fairy tales, revealing strangely contemporary insights. It’s stunning.

The class I took focused on structure like the braiding found in Happily, but also juxtaposed vignettes, collages, alphabetical lists, photographs, fortune cookies, body parts, even notes in a medical file with topic prompts to uncover a new way to write about personal experiences. It was cathartic, and I found myself wrestling with topics I’d never had the guts to write about previously.

When the class ended, I had nine essays in my queue and a fresh outlook on structure and language. I opened my manuscript and that dead end disappeared. Sometimes, taking a break can lead to a breakthrough.

Video: Detective Brian Kane Talks Crime Solving – Factual Analysis and Decision Strategy

Retired Detective Brian Kane gave a fabulous talk to our chapter on: Crime Solving – Factual Analysis and Decision Strategy. He was informative and funny and engaging. And he showed us an actual interrogation video of a murder suspect, and analyzed for us how he broke down the guy’s bogus alibi. Fascinating stuff. See for yourself below, for those who missed the meeting. And I know I’m going to watch again and again. Great tips if you’re writing about police investigation of a crime. Thanks to Detective Kane, and thanks to DRS Program Chair Miki Reilly-Howe for getting this guest speaker!

 

Member News – September

Elaine Munsch says

I’m pleased to announce that Mystery and Horror, LLC, has agreed to publish the seventh Dash Hammond book, OLD SINS. The book should be out later this fall, depending on the Hurricane and if I make it back from Scotland. As soon as I get a cover, I’ll let you all know. Just remember what Hercule Poirot (among others) said: Old sins cast long shadows.

Lynn Slaughter  is thrilled that her unpublished middle grade novel, THE BIG SWITCH: VARNEY AND CEDRIC, was named a finalist for the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize in the young adult/middle grade category.

Lynn’s article on character development appeared in Writer’s Digest:

Article Link

Lynn’s piece on mysteries for performing arts lovers appeared in CrimeReads:

Article Link

 

 

Carol Preflatish will be signing books at the Greater Clark County Schools Craft Fair on September 23 at The Fetter Center, 1611 E 10th Street, Jeffersonville, Indiana from 8 am to 3 pm.