Members present: Joe, Linda, Sal, Carolyn, Ron, Colleen (new), Claudette, others I shared a piece of mail from a local theater addressed to: Monte Holland, Beanery Writers Group, addressed to our street location (our mail is directed to a Post Office Box)! A momentary bit of humor… As for the blog, the site has had difficulties twice, causing a shutdown. The repairs were completed, but the site manager had to reset the counter. It was set back to zero for everyone. Our daily count is also being lowered because those accessing it through the Internet search engine are greeted with “site not available.” Furthermore, during nice weather the count naturally drops some. These situations drove the daily count into a nosedive. Even so, we’ve accumulated enough hits to maintain a healthy lead. The total count to date with the old and new figures takes us to 40,000 hits. The new count is over 2500 and slowly climbing. My site, ProBlogs.com/CarolynCHolland is maintaining the second spot. I tried an experiment. A way to increase traffic to a site is to respond to the most popular daily news articles and searches. I responded to articles on the blue moon and Mt. Everest by writing an article (one article on each site) and each article brougnt a 50 count response within the hour. Interesting. I announced I’d be out of town for the July 13 meeting. Someone will need to take over. Prompt: You’ve accepted a paying writing assignment to do a town profile. You signed a contract, then discovered you wouldn’t make the deadline because interviewees didn’t return repeated phone calls and the information you did gather indicated the town wasn’t as booming as you were lead to believe.----------After much thought, you decide to quit the project. Write a letter to the project director explaining why you are choosing to opt out of the assignment. NOTE: Even though the hiring company and the town assigned to you are thousands of miles away, your actions will reflect on your current community (through one of their employees rooted in the community). (We invite readers to try writing this letter. E-mail the results to beaneryblog@yahoo.com with “Job Letter” in the address line. Group discussion: When is it time to call it quits? The prompt was about a real situation. I was solicited for this writing job and discovered I really didn’t want to do it because my other writing was more prime. There was also question of integrity: how to promote a community that wanted to be viewed through “pipe dreams.” The local connection was also real. The prompt writing went all the way from “shove the job” to sharing responsibility for the failure to follow through. After sharing the responses, I read the letter I wrote to the company with the group. It included both personal and project responsibility. We then went into a period of critiques and sharings. Critiques and sharings: Joe did the assignment, writing a piece Pork Chops. Sal shared her self- published genealogy book. She said it was agonizing, and recommended “For goodness sake don’t do it, take it to the publisher,” about self-publishing. Copies will be donated to libraries “to which we owe a great debt.” She said she and hubby Chuck learned about doing a table of contents and an Excel index/bibliography. Next meeting will be June 22. Carolyn | 
