5. Headlines from the Zoom

Transcript

Hello, micro-memoir people. It’s John-Paul, a bit later in the day on Friday.

Some of you who were at the Zoom yesterday know I’m not at home right now.

I had a lot of complications this morning trying to record a voice note, and had to invent a whole workaround so I could get the transcript and post it on the site. Boring. The point is that any month-long creative output, yours or mine, is going to hit a roadblock. I’m making a note of that so you can say: yes, I know how he feels.

Thank you so much for your replies to the emails in the last couple of days. Some said thanks for the Zoom. Others said: did I miss anything in the Zoom? So here are the headlines.

More or less half the people on the course turned up, and it was lovely to see. I completely understand anyone who couldn’t make it.

My abiding sense, 24 hours later, is that it was nice for people to get a chance to see each other. I hadn’t predicted, perhaps stupidly, how important that might be. Some knew each other already. Some didn’t.

After saying hello and introducing ourselves, some people wanted to ask about certain technical things. I was happy to answer, but also happy to say that some of those will be resolved by emails I’ve already written, which are coming to you later. They included how many pages your book can have, and what size page to use.

I said: probably stick with A4 for now, although you’ll print it as A5. That means you use much bigger type than you normally would, because once it’s shrunk it still needs to be readable at the smaller size. But don’t worry if you’re not thinking about that yet. We’ll come to it.

The other good thing was that someone towards the end asked if we could hear what other people were working on. So we went round and heard some of those. As one person said, it was helpful even to say it out loud. I think that’s so true. Telling someone what you’re working on can be clarifying.

After everyone else had had a go, the last person to speak said hearing everyone’s projects made it clearer why I’d been asking some of the things I was asking in this week’s emails. I’m glad that was useful.

I don’t want to go on too long. I wanted to say hello. The emails over the weekend are more of a take-your-time recap: think about what we’ve done this week.

I hope you know I’m still here, happy to answer questions one to one. I haven’t yet replied to all your emails and replies today, because of these technical problems, but I’m hoping to get round to that shortly.

Thanks for listening.

jp at this domain name.