Friday 6 July 2012

One Job Accomplished now for the Big One




I am not a natural leader.  At every management course I've attended when we  fill in questionaires to discover our best team functions,everyone else has finished up with a self-defining function such as co-ordinator or shaper or implementer. I, on the other hand always  end up as a plant!
Whenever I've asked course leaders to define the function of  a plant  they've looked embarrassed.
One said a team would be in a pretty bad way if there were two plants on it but sometimes it might be useful to have just one, another said it wasn't altogether a bad thing to be a plant, another said just act normal and it would be all right, but no one ever defined the role.
Realising then my leadership skills are obviously a bit dodgy, I was somewhat apprehensive last year when elected as the annual president of our local Writers Club last year. I sat down and created a list of targets.I had wanted to accomplish for a long time

  • Getting readers and writers to discuss at an open meeting what each expects from the other.
  • Raising the profile of SF within the club. Most members claimed never to have read any!
  • Having an open meeting with  a panel of authors, technicians and librarians to discuss where epublishing is now and how best to do it
and  hardest of all
  • Getting a consensus on the revision of our 50+ year old constitution.
  My term of office is now over. To my amazement  every target was achieved. This had nothing to do with my non-existent leadership skills but  was due entirely to our multi-talented club members' unique blend of loudly assertive, argumentative co-operation and their ability to make last ditch compromises. Leicester Writers Club I am so grateful to you.

Now, having at last finished two years of copy editing I can concentrate on trying to market my trilogy Land of Broken Promises
Anyone know an agent interested in novels set in the British Mandate of Palestine between 1933 and 1948?