Scary People

Hmm my once very quiet and boring life is no more. Between my book club, raid progression nights, working out and hopefully getting a library internship for the fall, (well and school, forgot about that, umm and i guess work too) I have that hurried hectic feel that pervades most other people. This has led me to a serious consideration. Should I find another writer's circle, one that meets say once a month. There is one with a seemingly stable membership that meets at the library, has a website and seems like a good place. However, they appear to be nothing like the group I belong to now. That website is well, scary. And prejudice. We can sum up my current group as the happy fuzzy people. These new people are not that, they believe in 24 minute critique stints where the author must be silent and take it.

Ok I could handle that...I think. If not I could definitely learn, I know I could. But they are genre supremacists. And that kind of bothers me. They say no SF, Fantasy, Children's Lit. Two of those I couldn't care less about but my first novel, who's first draft is almost done, is fantasy. I write a good deal of gothic short stories and my next wrimo idea is along the same lines. True I do write everything from angsty pieces to westerns all the way over to the occasional modern fiction.

So to join I will have to write out of my element. But in doing so I will receive criticism that I could apply to the writings that mean the most to me. (Another thing that bothers me is why isn't Romance on that list of unworthy genres? That genre is basically dribble filled in with sex, but hey there's my prejudice coming out.) Plus I do feel like my writing is at a stalemate, where I cannot move forward and don't want to go back to the half hearted plotlines of my teen years.

I think I'll go visit these people and see what they're about. I'll even take my latest proofed short with me, (I call it gothic, they can't argue with that, otherwise throw Poe, Hawthorne, Bronte, and about a dozen others out the window), "Time Bleeds". The worst that can happen is I don't like them and leave. The best...well it could be something truly great.