Tuesdays with Story

04-30-14
WRITERS MAIL

Fifth Tuesday . . .
Twenty of us – 21 when you include our writing challenge judge, Sean Patrick Little – packed into Mystery To Me Bookstore on Tuesday evening for our Fifth Tuesday celebration, potluck, and writing contest.

Thirteen entered the contest, and Katelin Cummins walked away with top honors for her story, “Treasure.” She collected the pot of money with which she will take Sean out to dinner at one of our finer restaurants where they will discuss Sean’s critique of the first 50 pages of the novel Katelin is writing.

You can read all the stories. They’re on our Yahoo group page. Click on the Fifth Tuesday file to find them.

Second-and-fourth group will host our next Fifth Tuesday. That’s July 29. Put it on your calendar now so you will be with us.

Who’s up next . . .
May 6: Amber Boudreau (chapter 4-6, Stone), Millie Mader (chapter 53, Life on Hold), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter 3, novel), Bob Kralapp (short story part 4, “Hole in the Wall”), Andy Pfeiffer (chapters, The Void), and Jerry Peterson (chapters, Rub Out).

May 13: John Freiburger (poetry), Terry Hoffman (chapter, The Tome), Holly Bonnicksen-Jones (chapter, Into the Rain), Liam Wilbur (character piece), Rebecca Rettenmund (new story), Carol Hornung (scene, Ghost of Heffron College).

May 20: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Andy Brown (chapters 3-4, Man Before the Fall), Cindi Dyke (chapters, North Road), Pat Edwards (???), John Schneller (chapter 2, Final Stronghold), and Judith McNeil (chapter 13, My Mother, Savior of Men).

New website . . .
Not TWS, but Jerry Peterson. Here’s the web address, http://jerrypetersonbooks.biz Check it out.

Geocache gets into the Scrabble dictionary . . .
The story from Time Online earlier in April, April 10:

You voted for it. Don’t blame us if your opponent beats you with it. Here’s the winning word from the #ScrabbleWordShowdown, as seen this morning on Good Morning America!

The people have spoken: Scrabble fans have voted to add “geocache” to the players dictionary – the first new addition in nine years.
Hasbro revealed the word, “a verb meaning to seek items by means of a GPS device as part of a game,” on ABC’s Good Morning America today. “Geocache” beat out other finalists “zen” , “ew”, and “booyah” as part of a call for nominations on the Hasbro Game Night Facebook page.

“We’ve been watching geocache for some time,” Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster, said in a statement.

According to a 2010 New York Times article, this high-tech treasure hunt has been popular “only since May 2000, when President Bill Clinton announced that intentional degrading of signals received by civilians end, making their GPS devices more accurate.” It has become a family pastime, a budget-friendly hobby among parents and their children because they only need their smartphones to play. They find coordinates on websites like geocaching.com and head out to suburban malls and amusement parks together to find a “cache” or trinket hidden somewhere.

In fact, some might say it will be easier to find “caches” than to find a place to put down “geocache” on the Scrabble board because it’s an eight-letter word. On the Hasbro Game Night Facebook page, players are complaining in the comments section, arguing “Most bingos are 7-letter words that are connected to other words with an S or by a two-letter joiner (such as EW)” and “When will we ever need to use that one – always try to use ZEN and EW – many more opportunities for that to happen.”