Don't worry, you're in a safe place.....

   Sounds like the start of some sort of drug, alcohol or anger management group meeting doesn't it? Actually its part of the writers group I just found. I had been thinking that maybe I should try to find a writing convention or symposium or something similar, there's a word for it, but it escapes me at the moment. Don't worry, I'll remember it in time. So I was trolling the Internet to see if anything was happening in my area and LO-AND-BEHOLD! there was a writers group that meets once per month at the library just down the street from me! Awesome! Now I can inflict my pedantic writing on others, not really, but I thought it would be a good place to get some criticism from others besides immediate family and friends, someone who didn't have a vested interest in NOT hurting my feelings.
   Needless to say, I missed the meeting by a few days, but I contacted the group leader and got the stuff for the next session. Then that one was canceled because of poor attendance. The next one I'm going to miss because of vacation. Geez, what does it take to attend a writers group, huh? Well, since there is no one else to listen to what I have to say, I'm going to post it here. Maybe I can convince someone to visit my rather sparsely visited and updated blog and read it over. I thin that once I join this group, my postings will increase. But that's for another time I suppose. An now, without further delay, here is a REALLY short story on the most recent group assignment:
   Topic: The devil needs more people to sell their souls. You have been hired to come up with an ad campaign.

   My fingers ache, and not in a good way. I've been hunched over this computer for far too long. But despite my discomfort, I'm excited, a few more minutes work and I'll have finished the toughest assignment ever to come through the firm of Barton and Farrel. The end is in sight, five more words, three more, two one and PERIOD!

   I lean back interlacing my fingers and stretch my arms over my head, tilting to each side to relieve the strain I feel in my back. My neck cracks as I roll it around in a circle, glorious sharp pain and then relaxation follow the popping. I look down at the glowing screen in front of me, marveling at the complex simplicity of my work. Novelists! HA! Convincing a reader to believe in something using 400 pages is a breeze compared to advertizing! Cramming that much emotion, subtlety, coercion and sex into a sentence? Now that's hard!

Cigarette and alcohol companies have been doing it for ages so there are ways and ways. That's what makes my job so unique, I have to convince people to sell their souls. What university is going to teach that? Still staring at the screen my mind starts to wind down. The lassitude that I have been fighting for the past hour now settles on me like a blanket. I don't fight it, I can relax now. I have just taken the second long blink on the way to oblivion when a knock at my door startles me out of my torpor.

I glance over at the lighted face of my kitchen clock: 1:22 AM. Who would be calling at this hour? I stand up and stretch, loosening my tired back. My muscles protest as I stand, the ache in them screaming at me to go to bed, ignore the door and just fall onto the blissfully soft pillows waiting for me. Trudging over to the door I check the peep hole before grasping the knob and gasp in surprise. There is a woman dressed all in black on the other side! I've never seen her before but there can be no doubt who she works for, the tattered black wings are a dead giveaway. I lean back from the peep hole, contemplating not opening the door. The client can surely wait until morning?

   “Sir,” I hear her voice from the other side of the door, “open the door, or I will.”

   I know I haven't made a sound, but I do as asked.

   “Let me have it.”

   That's it, no introduction, no please or thank you, but this has always been the way with the client, or rather his representatives. Rather than try to be pleasant, argue about the time of night or the complete lack of social niceties, I decide it's easier jut to give her the assignment. I move over to the laptop to print out the slogan and advertizing campaign when she interrupts me.

   “Just give me the computer. We'll pay for a new one.”

   Shrugging I hand over the laptop, and just like that, she's gone. Disappeared in a golden flash. I stare at the place where she was for another second or two, and shuffle over tot he door to close it. Just before the door closes, a hoof sticks in the jamb and the door bounces crazily open again. Oh damn. Its him, the client himself, resplendent in red, a cloak hiding his wings, That's all I can make out, the rest of him is kind of fuzzy, like my brain is refusing to admit it exists. I've been told that would happen as my brain erases elements of this ultimate evil to protect itself. I take tow hurried steps back, trip and fall on by butt. From the floor I hear a voice, both silky and full of horrible tearing gravel. Seductive and repulsive.

   “Where is the assignment?”

   I think I'm in trouble.

Sometimes my brain surprises even me.....

   I was standing in the shower the other day, well not really the other day, more like two years ago when my brain did something that I really did not expect. It came up with an idea for a book. I was following a thought train, as often happens when you have nothing else to do but wash, when I jumped from experimental alternative energy sources to a fabulous idea for a book. I repeated the idea over and over in my head (at least seven times, that's how long it takes me to remember stuff) and then when I finished my shower I wrote the idea down. I took me about 30 minutes of writing to get all the ideas I had down on paper. I did run into one stumbling block, I could not figure out what the motivation of my antagonist was. "Do not bother me with fiddling small details, I'm going to be a Novelist!" I thought in hubris. A day or two later, I was regretting my words. Then a few days later the motivation hit me and there was another flurry of writing. Since then I have written seventeen chapters. I think I'd like to follow the example of David Wellington's serialized publishing model, but I have some reservations on that point.
   Now, I would never dream to consider myself a writer, but isn't there an old saying that everyone has at least one book in them? It might not be a very good book, but I digress. So, after finishing a section (two or so chapters), I asked  DocMaureen to read it to see if it was any good at all, anything worth wasting a significant chunk of my time on, or was I just fooling myself. After the longest few minutes of my life (save for the time DocMaureen had to have an emergency appendectomy) I got my answer. In the spectrum of goodness mine was the equivalent of.... toilet paper. Soft, there when you need it, and useful for wiping your @$$. Not really, she was much more gentle, but that's how it sounded to my sensitive ears. She followed up with "But I've read published books that were worse than this," which made me feel a little better. I've since learned that one must develop callouses on their heart when exposing it to public scrutiny, go figure.
   Since then, more than two years have passed, and I have written many more chapters, in fact, I have just finished the book. The only problem was, that tight ending I had planned? Yeah, that didn't happen. I realized halfway through the climax chapter that there was no way I could end the book as I had originally planned. It simply wouldn't work. Then the unthinkable happened, the story told me what to write, not the other way around. I had always heard of characters in a story taking a life of their own, the writer loosing control of them, etc. I had thought that was nonsense, a form of self aggrandizement to make the pretentious feel better about themselves. I mean, I MADE them, who were they to tell me what to do? Any of you Kurt Vonnegut fans will probably see the connections to Breakfast of Champions in this inference. If I ever offended any fledgling authors out there by stating this point of view, I humbly beg your forgiveness and mark myself an @$$. Get the tar and feathers.
   So, now all I have to do is find some poor schmuck to edit it, polish it, edit it again and we'll be ready to go. Go find someone who wants to publish it, that is. I've heard this can be monumentally hard to do. Especially if it is deemed that the genre you have written in is not "the next big, hot thing". 
   Whether it is paper or electrons, I have news for all you Sci-Fi /Action /cyberpunk /Anime fans out there. Anyone want to read a new book?