August Writer's Night 2016

I feel as if I should write about writer's night.  It gives me something to put in this blog of mine, and it helps me remember when and where I read a given story.  I've read a lot of Grandpa Anarchy stories at writer's nights over the past few years, but I tend to forget when I read them after just a month or three.

We had writer's night for August on Saturday.  Since it was one of the hottest days of the year, we decided to hold it at Matt's place in Woodinville which has air conditioning, rather than the small apartment in Ballard where Mike and Gene live, which is a brick building with little shade and can get pretty hot inside.  My apartment is on the first floor and is surrounded by trees -- in fact I've been making "shade tea" lately since there's really no place on any side of my apartment where I can set a sun tea jar so that it's actually in the sun.  So my apartment has remained relatively cool even in hot weather.  But I went for a walk in the midle of the day on Saturday, and by the time I got back I really was not inclined to go anywhere.  I missed writer's night in July however, so I didn't want to miss it again, and my car was just repaired the day before so I could feel safe driving a distance of more than a mile.  Eventually I got myself together and drove all the way up to Woodinville.

We had a big crowd -- Jeff and Jeri-Lynn, Matt, C.D., Gene and Mike, Jared and Sky, Quinn, Chuck.  I think that was everyone.  Quinn read a poem that was quite interesting, and then I read the story "Happy Jack", which of those stories I wrote in July seemed more of a stand-alone with a decent ending.  People liked it, I got some feedback that improved bits of it, and I changed the name to "One Night In Happy Jack's" which was suggested by Chuck and definitely is a better title.  There were some other good suggestions as well.  Chuck read a full Felicia story that he's reworking to submit to an anthology of Fred's.  He said it was based on something he'd read before, but it wasn't until we got to the end that I recognized what was coming.  I think it's been quite a few years since he read the original version.  It was a story of about 14,000 words, and there was a lot of feedback.

Lastly, Gene read three new scenes from a revision of his first fantasy novel.  He also mentioned he's working on a story for a different anthology by Fred.  That made me think two things:  I really need to work on getting some of my stories published, even if it's only the self-published books I have planned, and I really want to work on my own fantasy stories that I've had in my head for years.  I tried to do that last year and didn't get very far.  Maybe that should be my project for NaNoWriMo in November.

Sky had something to read, a reworking of a comic script I think, but we ran out of time so he's going to read it next month.