THE REVIEW

HIDDEN EDITORS

Had a great Meeting here Wednesday night. Jim, Chris and Cougar joined Annette and I for an evening where the women were outnumbered by the men for a change. It was inspiring to have their different viewpoints on things that were read.

I read first, my short, short that I have submitted to Polar Expressions. I had read it before, but I think Annette was the only one who had heard it. It is the fictionalized story “Grief or Guilt”, that I wrote about another writer whose health was declining and was contemplating suicide.

Then Annette read her short, short that she is submitting to Polar Expressions. Her story was first person, a mother watching her tween daughter wanting to play in the dirt with diecast cars. Ignored by her brothers, she is finally offered a car to play with by another boy. She eventually comes back inside covered in dirt, all wide-eyed, to tell her mother he invited her to the school dance. And just like that, she went from tomboy pursuits to being a young lady. This was a great story. Annette had titled it “Playdate”, but we thought that denoted much younger children. Annette said she would research the specific name of a diecast car and perhaps use that as the title.

Jim read Chapter 3 from his novel about Emilie. She is still at the meeting for recovering addicts, and passes out from her withdrawal. Mosi tends to her and two other attendees also remain. 911 is called and an ambulance and paramedics arrive. She will be taken to hospital. This episode has profound effects on Mosi and Josh and Doris, all recovering addicts themselves. Since Jim had passed out hard copy and red pens to everyone, this evoked the editor within all of us and we spent some time helping Jim with every sentence. He emailed me later to say that was probably the best critiquing session he’s ever had!

Chris and Cougar both said they weren’t going to read. But Cougar did spend some time outlining the creative process he’s gone through in writing the novel he’s working on. We hope to have him read more of it to us.

We had some discussion about using just chapter numbers versus chapter titles. We seemed to prefer simple numbering. Choosing actual titles for things is sometimes difficult. We want our titles to pique interest, but not to mislead the reader, either. And I chose chapter numbers for my novel that I self-published at Kobo. Since I used the EPub formatting for digital publishing, I found it difficult to format the hyperlinks in the table of contents with words rather than digits.
The next Meeting will be Wednesday, July 18th at 7:00 p.m. here at my place. Hope to see everyone then!

Lisa A. Hatton
Author