Yesterday evening was our second meeting in the Great Lakes Coffee and Chocolate Co. off Jackson Rd. and they once again accommodated us without complaint.  I trotted out my new opening for “The Alchemist of Liberty” and it went over well.  I’ve started to notice when I (finally) work out the right starting point for a story.  It is difficult to define, but I know when I pretty much have it nailed.  I felt that way when I stumbled on the first person framing narrative for “The Shaper’s Daughter” and I feel that way about Sir Tristan and Teal on upper observation deck of the zeppelin Waking Dream, both of which I was influenced to put together by comments from the writers’ group (not with standing that not many people in the group liked the first person framing of the “The Shaper’s Daughter”).

Yesterday evening we had our first writers’ group meeting at the Great Lakes Chocolate and Coffee Co. (located on Jackson Rd. in Ann Arbor) rather than the standard location at Borders in Arborland (’Tis the season and all, so Borders, who are quite gracious hosts, would rather not have us around for November and December). The topic of agents and editors who blog came up, as well as writing query letters and pitches. I wanted to share the interesting blog entry by eeknight on character based pitches (which is the excuse for this bit of blogging) so check out my prior blog entry on this here (see second paragraph). I also mentioned DeepGenre, which has the interesting ‘13-line critiques‘, which I am not sure that it is still active as the last submitted critique was in 2006, but the archive of 177 critiques is interesting.

I read another excerpt from “The Alchemist of Liberty” (sorry not much behind that link yet) and received some good feedback which has, luckily or not, started me writing a new opening scene (and I was reading in the middle of the story!).

Yesterday evening I had the second reading of “The Alchemist of Liberty” at the writers’ group that I frequent. It went over a bit better than the first part (see my rant from last week), which is not too surprising given its more intense action sequences and introduction of a plethora of new terms (which I have been working on cleaning up). The main critique was to more on the characters and not be so relentless in my introduction of new things, which is, of course, a good suggestion as compelling characterization will usually pull you through the rough spots.

One interesting suggestion to come out of yesterday’s reading was that I should try writing it up as a movie script and sell it to Hollywood as the SFX wizards could do better justice to its visuals. This is not the first time that I have been told, in not so many words, that my writing has a cinematic quality to it. On the other hand, I can’t help but think this is polite way of saying that I should give up on trying to describe complex and/or exotic situations and events. I will politely ignore that, if it is the actual intent of the comment, and continue on trying to describe said exotic complexities.

This does bring to mind one fond wish of mine, which is to have Matt Howarth illustrate a graphic novel based one of my stories. How is that for pie in the sky?