The Dastardly Dungeon of Deliciously Devious Drinks

Making progress on repairing the novel draft. Seems like every 150 words have been dumped to the bottom. I'm about half way through the draft then I'll finish putting everything in LSB (Liquid Story Binder--Kind of like Scrivener except for a windows platform) this way things don't happen again. I could put the file on a flash drive and run LBS on the netbook when I'm drafting (which I probably will do once things are straightened up.)

Bad news is my wrist issues are acting up again. Tinglies in my right hand middle finger to pinky are kind of numb. Commencing brace wearing and extra stretches.

Winks today:

greendragon said:

Yup. I'm already framing my approach to Michelle in my head.

"Michelle, while I normally don't have any issues with highly sexualized content, I've noticed every story by Paul has some version of an adult having sex with a child. While I'm not judging, I am a little skeeved out by it and I'm worried there might be a deeper issue. You're the leader of the group, and I leave it in your hands if you wish to broach the subject with him, but I had to pass on my feelings. I'll support you either way."

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I wrote my post before you edited that bit in, but yeah, that kind of content is concerning and down to more than just being a scientist. One way or another, I know a pile of scientists and technical writers and while quite a few of them are socially awkward none of them go to those kind of extremes and all of them can write a sentence.

I don't want to generalize or assume based on someone we can't know at all, but you do get strange people in writing groups and his choice of recurring subject is severely off-putting. I think everything you planned to say to your librarian is right-on and it may just be that this is someone for whom a writing group is not a great idea.

Hope it all works out.

*joins Winks*

*joins Winks and JJ*


(pssst, why are we fainting?)

tiddlywinks said:

Winks today:

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JJ Litke said:

*joins Winks*

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Mary Love said:

*joins Winks and JJ*


(pssst, why are we fainting?)

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(psssst, because it's cathartic and accurately, succinctly expresses how we feel without exhaustive details, and also because it's easy to sympathise with! )

I bought some stuff to make cake for my birthday. (Which is Saturday. I shall be an entire 38 years old.) Which means I currently have extra milk and cocoa powder, so I think tonight I'll make some pudding. Because chocolate pudding, amirite?

Aggy, has finished dinner already

I saw Beauty and the Beast today! ILOVEDITILOVEDITILOVEDIT! It was so purtyful and I loved the new scenes and songs! Aaaaaaaaand nobody plays Gaston like Luke Evans! <33333333

Damoclian said:

(psssst, because it's cathartic and accurately, succinctly expresses how we feel without exhaustive details, and also because it's easy to sympathise with! )

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Heh. Me, I had an insanely busy day. Registration starts in about a week. Graduation deadline is tomorrow. Much panic.

JJ Litke said:

Heh. Me, I had an insanely busy day. Registration starts in about a week. Graduation deadline is tomorrow. Much panic.

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Ah. Thought it may have been some pitchmadness stress in there as well. Saw two of your pitches, btw, loved them (not literally)! Any bites?

Damoclian said:

(psssst, because it's cathartic and accurately, succinctly expresses how we feel without exhaustive details, and also because it's easy to sympathise with! )

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Yes.

And it's more of a collapse on the floor, no more, please kind of thing for me, not fainting. I'm sleeping in tomorrow after starting work stuff at 5am today and ending at 6:30pm. Well. Sleeping in until my 9am meeting. Which I'm taking at home. In my pajamas.

Nobody is allowed to quit or schedule another meeting while I'm in pajamas.

I talked to Michelle the librarian tonight. I am the fourth person to talk to her about Paul. She is aware, watching, and has talked to her own superiors as well, and the situation will be monitored. Especially since twice a month we meet at the library, and Michelle is a First Reporter (must report any evidence of child abuse).

We also spoke to a young lady in our group who is studying engineering (she's 19), and had talked to Paul at one point about helping her with math. We made she knew not to be alone with or get in a car with any single older men.

Mary Love said:

Ah. Thought it may have been some pitchmadness stress in there as well. Saw two of your pitches, btw, loved them (not literally)! Any bites?

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Thanks! I did squeeze in a couple of minutes for pitmad, just enough to throw out my pitches. For what that's worth, no agent responses.

Got my first query rejection today, too.

I did #Pitmad too, no responses - but there are a lot of agents saying they'll look through later. I did notice that YA pitches seem to get most of the love. Sigh. I'm really aiming for #revpit in two weeks.

My 150 words with the new novel turned to 550 before I realized

More today. But I had an idea last night to work on a short story related to the series instead, one I'd thought about for a while, Eamonn's father's story. It could be a freebie I give away to lure others into the series. We'll see. I'm really not skilled at short stories.

*stumbles into Cantina* Sleepy this morning.

GD, I'm glad people are being made aware of that guy in your group (especially the 19 year old girl). Here's hoping everything works out okay and if he needs some kind of special help, he'll get it.

Meant to say yesterday that I saw a preview for Wonder Woman before Beauty and the Beast. I hadn't bothered to watch any of the trailers for it before because I frequently am just not that interested in the super hero stuff, but the preview they showed at the theater looked really, really, really good. I was surprised by how good I thought it was. I may not want to see it on theaters, but I do think I want to see it at some point, maybe on DVD. This is significant coming from me, as again, I'm usually not that into super heroes. My aunt loves WW though and will probably want to see it in theaters.

I'm not into Transformers at all and have no interest in seeing it, but there was also a preview for that movie that I at least liked what they did with it. Very girl-power feeling.

Words are going to try to happen today. I've been beating myself up a little lately because I've been having trouble yet again doing a (in my mind) significant amount of daily wordage, but beating myself up doesn't help me focus, so I'd really like to stop that now and just write.

GreenDragon: I once beta-read part of a novel for an older engineer. His writing was stiff (and heavily influenced by Heinlein and Asimov) but it was still readable. And, although he did have a weird bit about sex in the opening chapters it was more along the lines of "We're both consenting adults who have had sex with other people and each other before we were married because sex is just a part of life." (It was weird because he rather emphasized the idea that women are designed to have multiple partners because their bodies adapt to whomever they're with.) So, just as a one-to-one comparison, I'd say the dude in your writer's group sounds like his issues are related to something other than just being older and coming from a technical/engineering background.

Sorry y'all are having to deal with that though. It's always tricky trying to figure out if someone is just a little awkward or if there's something more serious going on. (I had a class once with a girl who refused to sit near me or my roommate because we apparently gave off bad vibes. And, roommate's boyfriend had told this girl that clowns kind of scared him when she was dressed as one for Halloween. It made class very awkward, although the teacher was pretty reasonable about not making any of us work in the same small groups.)

ION, planning on making a cake today. Bought some milk chocolate chips and heavy cream yesterday so I can make a ganache. (Will probably mix the milk chocolate chips with some semi-sweet in the cupboard, but the semi-sweet by themselves are almost too dark for the dark chocolate cake. ) Trying to decide if I want to go all fancy and add some caramel into the mix, but I'll have to think about that a little.

Also, more wording today. So much emotion in this last novella so it's hard to do long stretches of it because I get a little worn. Maybe if I keep the pudding handy while I write...

Aggy, mmmmmm, pudding

Yeah, I was glad to know she was a mandatory reporter (I knew there was an official term, but forgot what it was). We did discuss the possibility he suffered abuse himself and was working it out, and if that's the case, fine. But if something else... yeah. BTW, I forgot to mention there is another group member we have, John - he's retired SWAT/police. He was one of the people who were visibly disturbed by Paul's stories when they were read. He's actually dealt with abusers at several points in his career.

Aggy's cake reminded me, today is my dad's birthday, so we'll have cake as well. Ice cream cake from Cold Stone Creamery because, Mmmmmm!

Filigree said:

I did #Pitmad too, no responses - but there are a lot of agents saying they'll look through later. I did notice that YA pitches seem to get most of the love. Sigh. I'm really aiming for #revpit in two weeks.

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I know, right? These contests always seem geared toward YA. If you judged by the contests, you'd think there's no other markets.

I saw something about revpit, guess I should check into that.

Oooh, JJ, the HAIR! <3 I lurves it! I don't see everyone's avatars when I'm lurking from my email.