Monday, October 25, 2004

Reading/Stumbling/Learning/Crawling

"Family Plot" got a pretty good critique on Saturday. One one other member of P.O.E. reads speculative/fantastic fiction and her reaction was very positive. As I anticipated, people commented on the story's uneven ending, which I think I can fix.

I do think it's valuable to have non-speculative readers look at your stories. I've received a lot of very helpful comments from them. But I do miss (Am I feeling okay?) the critiques from my Clarion buddies. I'll work this one over one more time before I send it to them.

DC Writer's Way has a reading scheduled for Nov. 6 in downtown DC (at The Corner Store Artist Studio, 900 South Carolina Ave, SE, if anyone's interested) @ 5:30PM. It's always tough - there's usually so many people reading that you only get 5 minutes. Most of the readers are poets, so for short story writers like me, 5 minutes is a real challenge. But I think I can read a portion of "Family Plot" and a 100-word story called "Tonight" that I wrote for a contest.

What did I learn today? That Kelly Link is incredible. (But I knew that already.) I'm still studying "The Specialist's Hat" and I'm still blown away. The twins are fascinating characters; I'm more convinced that Samantha (rather than Claire) has made a transformation by the story's end. It's very interesting that Claire is obsessed with numbers (cold, calculating?) and Samantha keeps thinking about horses. Is Samantha partially living in a fantasy world where she can have her mother back and horses too? By the story's end, Samantha seems to have accepted the situation and the aid offered by the babysitter. I do think that the larger issues here are abuse (by neglect) and the ability (or inability) to establish trust between children and adults. Whether I'm right or wrong, this is one fascinating story. It shows me how far I have to go in my writing, but it's also a big motivator.

Time to get back to it.

Now Playing: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook

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