Writer's Night March 2017

Writer's Night for March 2017 was held at Edd and Amy's place in West Seattle.  I suspected there wouldn't be very many people there, because Michael was recovering from surgery and Gene wasn't planning to come, and Quinn had theater and Chuck didn't have a ride or plan to come (no David or Kristin either).  The people from Bellingham rarely come down except when it's held at Matt's place in Woodinville, and Matt hadn't said anything, and Sheryl hasn't shown up for a while.  I wasn't actually sure who would show up!

Gene sent a short story ahead that I printed out before I left.  I drove up and for once didn't get lost on the way there.  ^_^  It turned out Jeff was already there, so we had four people total -- and four stories!  Jeff read Gene's story, I read one, Edd read a complete version of his fantasy story that he'd read at an earlier writer's night, and Amy read chapter two of the book she's currently working on, which is a sequel to one that hasn't been published (has been sitting at a publisher for six months, after sitting at a different publisher for something like 2 years before being returned).

Amy's story was a bit confusing at first, given that she skipped chapter one, but other than that was interesting.  Kind of hard to critique chapter 2 of a novel, but she was just looking for whether it held interest and wasn't too detail oriented, since there's a lot of stuff she's trying to explain or set up near the beginning of the story, but doesn't want to slow it down too much.  It was a first draft, I don't think we noticed anything major, just stuff that she's bound to fix in a rewrite anyway.

Gene's story was a one-off set in his fantasy world, and we all liked it but felt like it didn't reach the actual ending.  Edd was going to send comments back in a return e-mail.  That was about our only criticism, the  teacher in the story sets out to teach a lesson, but the lesson hasn't been taught/learned when the story ends, so it feels like the central plot or premise hasn't been resolved.  (Jeff thought it worked as is though.)

My story was a Grandpa Anarchy tale that I'll probably publish tomorrow, Raw Justice.  It's very short and everyone thought it worked, there were only a couple of minor corrections which I already fixed.

Edd's story was a fantasy story, a kind of spin on a duo like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, something I picked up on even before Amy pointed out that Edd has been rereading those stories recently.  It ended about halfway through the last time he read it, so he read it from the beginning.  We liked the story -- like any Edd story it has some true weirdness in it -- but there was a scene at the end where Edd kind of assumed we knew what a particular creature looked like without describing it, and it confused all of us, so he's going to fix that bit.  As far as I remember that was the only major quibble, it's a fun story.

Amy and Edd cooked a turkey, and made angel-hair pasta with marinara sauce, and had salad and cheese and crackers... way more food than four people could eat, but they sent some turkey home with Jeff and I.