My last group was LAME. And not in a Biblical sense...that was the one before. They always thought my stuff was nasty, too(and that was pre-Buffista. I think I could kill them now.)

Drabble:

Half a lemon, slightly shriveled, with patches of green and white starting to fuzz one side, lurks on one side of the refrigerator next to two-and-a-half beers and a Mountain Dew. Three boxes of leftover Chinese takeout slowly leak drops of sauce onto the dented top of a pizza box on the shelf below, spotting it brown and red. A wedge of cheese, loosely wrapped in plastic, weighs down a paper plate on top of an old bowl of chili.

An open box of baking soda sits forlornly in the back corner, inadequate to the task.

The Book, Pg. 14,969,478

James, Harriet (cont.)

10:31am 21-May-1944

She: turned the corner by the bookstore::walked down Reed to the train station::stopped at the intersection and waited for the bus.

10:42am 21-May-1944

At the: coffee shop she met her current fling::train station got on the #12::corner, the buss’s brakes failed.

10:50am 21-May-1944

Her: lover pulled out a gun::brother met her at the station.

10:58am 21-May-1944

She: sprawled on the sidewalk, bleeding::screamed as the grill of the truck headed straight toward them.

11:05am 21-May-1944

The body was prepared for viewing at the county morgue.

Impassively, he closed the book on that particular destiny listed therein.

edit: made it fit the 100 words. Hah.

Tricky.

How about some extra formatting to help demarcate the threads?

etd irrelevant comment

What kind of formatting are you thinking of? What is unclear?

I made some changes. Is it more understandable now?

Maybe it's just me, but the slashes read like alternate word pairs instead of thread separators. How about:

She:
turned the corner by the bookstore.
walked down Reed to the train station.
stopped at the intersection and waited for the bus.

No, that looks like sequential actions instead of alternate paths. Maybe a font distinction too?

edited to play with fonts

I tried alternating regular with italic phrases. Does that set it off enough?

Maybe replace the slashes with something that isn't a punctuation mark that could logically go there -- something like :: or something.

Once I figured out what was going on, reading it made me shiver.

Think I'm going to go with alternating fonts and :: separators. I want everything on one line to give the effect of destinies flickering in and out of possibility. Things are fairly amorphous and not set in stone. It should look fairly confusing, because any one or a combination of destinies are happening at the same time. It's not necessarily a choice of one of three or one of two, it's all of them intertwined. Hard to do in print.

Those are great, dcp and Sail.

OK, I'm really having trouble understanding the no explanations school of critique groups, and I'm wondering if it's one of those "talk past each other" things. So I'm going to give two examples from my weekly group where I feel like getting to explain myself helped me get more valuable info from the process. Would this kind of explaining be allowed in your groups? And if not, how would a writer get this type of info?

1. In Ch. 2 of the wip, Anna talks to her cousin and his wife, her closest friends in the army, about her husband's death and her impending return home. Ch. 2 happens to be a big sloppy mess that I'm going to have to edit and refine eventually. I'm putting it off, telling myself that I need to let it rest, and that if I push forward with new work, I'll have a better idea how to edit it, because it's sort of a bridge section. But anyway. M in my writers group said that Anna needs to be warmer and more honest about her feelings. I had to fight the urge not to "yes, but," but rather to say, "You're absolutely wrong," because the whole point of Ch. 2 is that Anna is alienated and has built thick self-protective walls that even her closest friends can't get through.

So I tried to explain the story purpose and cultural reasons Anna wouldn't exactly bare her soul, and ask if there was a way to make her more sympathetic within that framework. I think M still wants Anna to tell everything to her cousin's wife (which is crazy because that would dilute the impact when she finally does open up to Jack in a few chapters), but J and A had some good ideas for how to work in more of what's going on behind Anna's correct facade, and how to avoid Buffy S6 issues in working with a depressed and traumatized lead character. But if I hadn't tried to explain what I was doing, I would've just gone home thinking, "M just doesn't get it." And I wouldn't have learned anything that'd help me strengthen my story.

2. Last night J wanted Jack to slip up and call Anna by her first name while they're having their "we screwed up and we'll never do it again" conversation the morning after their first kiss. Now, I've already planned when and how they're going to get to a first-name basis, and it's an important character point that Anna is the one who pushes for it. So I explained, said I had this lovely scene all planned for a few chapters down the road. So J said then I needed something else in last night's scene to signify the moment in the conversation where they stop interacting as Lady and Sergeant and slip into Woman and Man. Which was the huge "Aha!" moment--I already knew I was writing a story with a tangled, convoluted power dynamic between the protagonists, but I'd never spelled it out for myself quite that neatly and efficiently.

Which brings me back to the question of how you get to those moments if you can't talk back to your critique partners? Or is that type of talking back allowed in all groups, and y'all are talking about something else entirely.