I am part of an online writer's community, and some of the more serious (and by "serious" I mean "published") writers there are a bit snarky about the sort of writing group that consists of cheerleading and back-patting.

I say this simply as an introduction to my in-person writers' group, which pretty much consists of cheerleading and backpatting. Oh, and eating tasty snacks.

The thing is: we're all serious about our writing, although all of us have other stuff going on, and most of us (except for me, inflicting myself on you) have very little outlet for talking about our writing. So at our sorta-monthly meetings we talk about writing, read excerpts, and kind of encourage each other along with offering suggestions or little bits of critique or whatever.

I actually had a bit of a breakthrough last night, in a way: I accept that there are too many characters in my story, but I certainly can't be bothered to go back to scenes I wrote months ago and prune out characters just yet. It's much too easy to get bogged down in a first draft. And I've been mostly reading the early parts so far for chronological reasons, so whenever I read I get "you know, you have too many characters in that scene." Point long since taken, and I'll do something about it when I go back to do something about it. Honest. Also, my characters are all really young, so one member keeps telling me it's probably a YA novel and I keep telling her that it's fine with me if it is.

However, last night I read the first half of the scene in which Jordy meets Mrs. Goodnight, after which one member remarked that she still thinks there are too many names floating around. (I finally pointed out that at least a little bit of the problem is that the group is hearing about two pages worth every couple of months--there are too many characters, but more context would help.)

However, after we agreed that I'll look after editing that sort of thing once I get this draft done, pretty well everyone remarked that they like the perspective character, and that he feels like a real person.

Which is the only reason I can see why any reader would want to carry on with this thing--you pretty much have to like the main character. If you don't, why would you worry about how worried he is?

So that was something.

Although a different cake this time.

The frosting recipe I used was a butter cream one from my old Canadian Living Cookbook, and I used the variation where you add a couple of teaspoons of instant coffee for flavouring. There's another flavour variation that uses melted unsweetened chocolate for flavouring.

I may have to try that one. I can get a pound cake or something from Sobey's and save me from having to bake another cake just to try out frosting. But come to think of it, we're having a mystery writers' meeting on Sunday, so if the frosting turns out, I can recruit my group-mates to eat the cake...

The mystery writing group had a meeting last night, which was pleasant. We normally just read bits of what we're working on and shoot the breeze a little--it's not a critique group by any means. Last night one of the members asked for some input on a new and improved opening scene (verdict: it is indeed new and improved) and the hostess gave us a writing exercise that turned out to be quite a lark. She made up a series of lines that must be included in the piece of writing (we all used them as our opening lines) and then we had ten minutes to write something. If you didn't like your first pick you could take another, but since mine featured the detective's sister-in-law, a stuffy Anglican bishop, coming into the agency to ask for help with... [sentence ends]

Well, I kept it. By the end of my excerpt the stuffy sister-in-law was drinking vodka (it really should have been gin) with the detective and telling her in fits and starts about a long-lost out-of-wedlock son. If I was going to do anything with it, the detective would be a smartass and the early part of the story would be sort of irreverent and light-hearted, and then the whole thing would get progressively more serious. I figured the kid's father, a career petty criminal the sister-in-law should have been smart enough to stay away from, is threatening to sabotage her career by Revealing All about the kid.

I'm almost certainly not going to do anything about this but it interested me, given that I have never really decided who Jordy's biological parents are, or anything much about them. So it was kind of an interesting exercise, if only in spotting how I can twist almost anything to serve the story I am currently working on.

Likewise those books about the Grateful Dead. I'm afraid the post over the weekend may have been a dead (heh) loss for any fans of the band who wanted to know whether the books are worth checking out. They are. A Long Strange Trip tries to be more of a history, while Living With the Dead reads like the writers are still high. The second book kind of reminds me of Up and Down With the Rolling Stones, only less muck-raking and a great deal more affectionate. And pretty damn funny. Although really, Long Strange Trip is also hilarious because it researches the same stories Living does, and presents them in far greater detail.

Although no matter how you slice it, even for someone with no particular attachment to the band, reading about Jerry Garcia slowly killing himself is pretty hard sledding.

( And then I just go on and on about character kidnapping, so nothing to see here. )

I actually have a pretty good grip on reality, honest. I know the difference between real people and the ones in my head. It's just always a cause for some rejoicing when the two collide a little bit. Which, I guess, may well happen here. I mean, the material is too good not to use!

We had another writers' group meeting last night, out in Fall River. There were only four of us in attendance this time but as usual it was good to get together. My only disappointment is that when we scheduled the meeting I didn't realize that yesterday was Grey Cup Sunday, and by the time I figured it out it was really too late to change the meeting date. So I missed the game, which is usually a good one and this year featured two prairie teams whose fans really mean it. Oh well.

I got some good suggestions about streamlining the scene I read, which should come in handy. I am aware that I have too many peripheral characters. I am also aware that this may render the whole project unpublishable. I figure I can do what I want with my story, especially if I promise not to whine when the inevitable happens. As I told the group last night, this may just turn out to be another valuable learning experience in terms of writing.

[It's also occurred to me that the Last Waltz idea might actually make a more usable story. It's got a far more limited cast: Kowalski plus Vanessa, and the victim/suspect pool which consists of the five former bandmembers plus an ex-manager and/or producer. And at least on of those guys is dead pretty early on.]

One of our members, who writes mostly standalone thriller-type stuff, was vastly amused by the amount of specific knowledge some of the rest of us have about our characters. (Okay, I may have sent the discussion off on a tangent when I confessed that I've run a Meyers-Briggs assessment on Jordy and also filled out an exhaustive character profile form on him.) The thing about knowing all this other stuff is, it helps me keep the character consistent within the plot, which sometimes means I rewrite the story rather than have the character react specifically to keep the plot going forward. I mean, if Jordy going all Rambo is the only way to make a particular plotline work out, then that plotline has got to go, because there's no way to make that plausible with the character I've written. And readers will definitely notice that.

Anyway, as usual it was part meeting, part social hour, it was encouraging to see how everyone was doing, and the snacks were good. Really, what more can you ask?

The mystery writing group had a meeting last night--sort of scheduled at the last minute so we didn't end up missing September. One of our members had been wrestling with a series of long time characters she was attached to, but was having trouble with. Apparently she's ditched them and now the new thing she's working on is going really well.

Another member is in the edits phase before she starts sending her story around. I think we're going to get to see some more of that at our next meeting.

Me, I'm just working along and making some progress.

It's not a formal group but I do like touching base with other writers. It's good to know we're out there, you know?

I just got an email from some of my mystery-group folks saying there's an author speaking at a local bookstore tonight. We're going to meet up and check it out. Sounds like fun.

Now I must call the person I usually drive to our events and see if she wants to come, too. It's sort of out of my way to go get her and backtrack, but on the other hand I suspect she'd do the same for me.

... one of our writing group members brought a book called Body Trauma to the meeting last night. It is written by a physician and details a variety of things that will not quite kill you. Just in case, as a writer, you wish to have someone coshed or shot or something.

Naturally, we are going to recommend it be added to the collection at the public library. But we'll probably all get our own copies anyway.

I missed the last meeting--I was just getting over the flu and catching up with other things and I simply forgot--so it was nice to see everyone again. A couple of us have started to collect rejection letters, two are into rewrites of their books, and one has really buckled down to work on her project.

I brought along the printout of my first couple of chapters, and at the end of the evening I read the first couple of pages. I'd previously read the first two or three paragraphs but it had been a while, so I figured I'd re-introduce the situation by reading the opening up to the point where Kowalski calls off Speak French Day when they need to give each other directions.

Overall, the group seemed to have the reaction I hoped they would have--they seemed to like the tone, find the bit funny, and be prone to like the perspective character. I did get a couple of suggestions for how to make it clearer faster that they're far from home and I think I'll take them. And there's one member who is convinced the story will only work as a YA novel. I'm... not concerned about that. I mean, I don't have a problem with it, if the story finds a genre and that happens to be it. I mean, I understand National Velvet was not originally written as a children's novel. It was written as a novel that turned out to appeal to children. (And of course, part of that impression is created by the fact that Jordy sounds younger than he is, which is deliberate. Nice to know I'm getting the effect, I just don't know if it'll make the whole thing harder to carry off.)

Yes, of course, any confusion in who to market it to might make the finished novel a harder sell to a publisher. But I'm half-resigned to never seeing publication anyway, so I'm not going to worry about that right now. We all seem to be on the same page in terms of not trying to second-guess the market as we write--we're just going to write our books as well as we can, and not worry about factors outside our control until we have to.

I do like this group. It's just nice to know we're out there. Our next meeting probably won't be held until July, so I hope I get some work done in the meantime. And I'll be very interested to hear a few others read, since there are a couple of new projects on the go now and some others I haven't heard from in a while.

This was our first meeting since July--we couldn't get it together for August because half the group was out of town at any one time, and then September was a total writeoff for everyone. However, four of us made it to the meeting last night (I think after our June meeting when we came down on him we may have really lost the guy who doesn't read mysteries or understand why anybody would want to write one--frankly, I don't know what he wanted out of the group but I'm not worrying about not providing it) and we actually spent most of the meeting working through some problems one of the other members is having with what appears to be a fluffy but very complex romantic suspense thriller set in Virginia and Nova Scotia. It was the first time we'd gotten to hear from this member, and the first time we've really done any heavy writing stuff (although most of us read excerpts the last time.) It was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, I don't think my current WIP works for this group. It's not that anyone has anything bad to say about my excerpts, it's that nobody has anything to say about them. Like, at all. It's a little demoralizing. It's hard to say whether the whole thing sucks and should be abandoned, or it's just impossible to comment on a short excerpt of this story because you need more contact with the characters to form an opinion, or if it just, you know, does not happen to work for these three particular people.

Given that I'm feeling pretty good about how things are going (and I'm not completely blind to flaws in my own stuff anymore) and I'm not bogged down on anything so I don't need help at this point, I think I'll just carry on as I'm going. There's enough other useful stuff going on in the group that it's still definitely worth my while to participate.

The little group of wannabe mystery writers that I'm a part of met last night at my place. One of us was out of town and two of us didn't show up. (One only got told about it at the last minute because we had a bad email address for him and I only found out his phone number yesterday afternoon. The other guy was a non-mystery reader who was sort of trying us on, so he may not come back.)

Anyway, we've been spinning our wheels a little so far but since it's less than two hours a month where we get together and chat about mysteries over snacks, I have a hard time thinking we're really wasting (much of) our time. But last night we bit the bullet and the four of us present shared excerpts. I went first and read the opening three paragraphs of All Its Delicate Fear--I should have read more, at least to the bit where they realize they're lost, but I wasn't sure how much we'd want to share. So there really wasn't much anyone could say except [a] Is it a YA novel? (It's not meant as one but if the shoe fits I suppose I'd wear it) and [b] is is going to keep on being funny? (Encouraging.)

And then two of the other three shared their (slightly longer) excerpts.

And I thought both of them were really, really good.

So now I'm all enthused about the group again, because although we're not doing much as a group, we're all apparently serious about writing mysteries as well as we can.

Whew!