when I'm driving around suddenly the words just rush at me.

I know that place. I don't drive, so it's usually when I'm walking, but still it's hard to find a way to write them down. Will you post the 'not quite story thing' when you're done? I'd like to read it.

I will. I'm not sure when that will be, but I will.

Well, whenever it is, I'll look forward to it.

I went to a quite nice critique group last night, and it was useful, and I'll be adding it to my routine.

One person described a section as "too clever by half".

I recognize the problem, but I'm not sure how to solve it.

Too clever="I'm smart and I'm going to show it"? Maybe she was feeling like she wasn't getting all the references or following the style.

"I'm smart and I'm going to show it"?

Almost certainly. And come to think of it, she did complain about too many culture references. Which are deliberate, and are character statements, and are all classic-romance-novel references (GWTW, Jane Eyre, P&P, all of which have had well-circulated video adaptations.)

I drop strange references into stuff all the time (ask Teppy about my faux-James Joycean "Rain was general over Sunnydale" some time). I thought it was clever. Not everyone's going to get everything.

I just don't want to write a Look How Clever I Am novel.

Can you tell my junior-high-school insecurities are showing?

That one would be a personal "is it a clever aside or does it stop the story and yell 'See! I paid attention in lit class!' and call attention to itself?" Case by case, naturally, the annoying things.

Not wanting to write a look-how-clever-I-am story is perfectly valid. It sounds silly, but you might want to sit down and just count how many references there really are. How many per paragraph? Per page? Pull out a few published romances for comparison.

Not everyone's going to get everything.

And you can't please everyone. t mememe I got a crit that said "Your characters are unsympathetic, your pacing is glacial and your dialog is boring because it sounds too much like real people." Aside from being the only person who said anything this stringent, it's not terribly helpful. I mean, what does that leave? The font I wrote it in? t /mememe

Hope the crits you get are more helpful.