It's time for a sabbatical from the critique group, I think. I will probably stick with the local group, oddly enough, because I feel like my role there is fairly vital. But the Odyssey alumni group, while VERY valuable and very enjoyable and very wonderful -- I'm not sure how to explain it, but it seems to "draw" all my forces. Like I concentrate my creative efforts on getting stories ready for the group, on getting critiques done, and then I don't take the stories further -- almost as if the group itself is the final goal.

I am not sure I'm making any sense, even to myself. All I know is that when I think about taking a sabbatical from it and concentrating purely on the writing, I feel a sense of rightness.

After the apocalypse, there will be all these dazed people wandering around saying: "where's the reagents vendor??"

Dark stories these days, and I'm happier than I have ever been.

I dunno. I think I see the world out of the corner of my eye and through greasy windowpanes and under blood-soaked bandaids, over the hill and to your right, sir. There are saints and sinners lurking under pretty haircuts and suit jackets. Watch out for the guy with the scythe.

One of my critiquers this weekend says that often things don't come together in my stories until they fall apart, which he didn't mean at all negatively. I think.

In critique group this morning, I found myself twice explaining things in terms of social and pack behavior. (Both stories had characters whose roles in society were fairly unclear to the reader.) "We need to know their roles to know how to interpret their responses to events in the story."

This is both true and disturbing. The characters were human. Why did it matter to me what they did for a living? Whether they had authority over other characters? But it did, and it was an anxious itch in my brain while I was reading.

Of course, some of this thought process was affected by my adventures avec Will this week. Still, humans are social creatures, and we care about these things even when the humans we are thinking of are fictional.

Brainstorming Amazing Edison

From a very helpful IM exchange with John this evening:

J: each stage, you think you have reached Henry's true core

M: right!

J: only to realize the view is limited by Alice's understanding to that moment

M: yeah

M: exACTly

M: which is how humans are

M: look at the ex-family situation

M: today i know it

M: and last week i knew it

M: and they are not the same answer

J: right

M: and it is not because i have changed

M: or they have

M: but because the complicated mix of knowledge and reality has changed

J: yessss

M: i'm cutting and pasting THAT

J: what you want (we want)

J: is a reality that IS the narrative (i think) and that stretches and grows and changes with all the elements of narrative (scene, plot, etc., and esp POV) --- with half-questions and half-answers woven throughout, that spring from the curiosity and needs and pain of the characters, not from the writer's interest in telling a story.

At the local writers group last Tuesday, we talked about plotting and ideas and fleshing out those ideas, and I "drew" a little picture on my notebook page to "illustrate" what I was saying, which was basically this: if the world I am writing about is the size of a piece of graph paper, then my story method is often to pick one of those squares and write about it. But it is more than just the one square. It is not a random square, for one thing. Part of the fun for me, the challenge, is to pick THE square that illuminates the story the most precisely. The square that shows the blood spatter from the bullet -- not the gun, not the getaway car, but the pattern of the repercussions that will be amplified forever after.

I tend to do this when I blog, too, without necessarily realizing it. The yellow Corvette? That was Sunday. It was the little square of the big page that was our weekend. Greg bought his new wife a bright yellow Corvette convertible. Is that a story? Is it a problem? A solution? It is a trigger, for me, to think through all the decisions that I/we have made, the mistakes, the successes, the path we walk now.

It is a little square. A bright little square, but really a very small one indeed.

Just now: a rejection for "Manassas Magic", from IGMS -- form rejection. Form rejections are particularly hard on the soul, I think. (Although... I suppose they are better than "What on earth are you thinking? Writing involves TALENT, you idiot! Go get a real job!" Which is what I'm usually assuming the editors are writing in response to my work. Optimism is the writer's best friend.)

So breathe and send it out again.