today, critique time, and I always go in thinking, “Yowzer! I have nailed this.” And. I come out thinking, “Whoa! I have so much more work to do.” Good times. 🙂 Now that is a good critique group. Here are three things I think a good critique group does:

1. A good critique group talks about your work. Not you. They identify [or not] with the characters and they work with you to make sure your characters are honest.

2. A good critique group encourages the work you are writing. They look for the good stuff, and help you to focus on keeping the good and getting rid of the not-so-good.

3. A good critique group wants you to be successful, they provide information, support and a little bit of therapy.

The best critiques I have EVER had were the ones where the person critiquing asked questions. Why does your character want to go into the basement? If your character gets in this mess, how are planning on getting him/her out? 

Done now. Off to critique and to find out. Sigh. At some point in time, they are going to say, send!

Apparently I am a much more visual person than I previously thought. I have my DVR set to record all of the my favorite shows, regardless of whether they’re reruns or not.  Just because. Well sometimes there’s nothing on that I want to see and so I’d rather reread a book or revisit an episode than go to something new. This past episode of  Grimm. You know the story, right? Present day, a police man, named Nick Burkhardt,  a descendent of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the fairytale brothers. These, then,[via NBC]  are true tales, the brothers told the stories because they could really see all the daemonfeuer’s, or, fuchsbau, or lowen.  In Grimm, the TV show, our erstwhile scion of all things fairytale, is a policeman, and, he’s rather a live & let live kind of guy. If they aren’t breaking the law, you know, enslaving, using, killing and/or eating normal everyday people, well then they can live. But if not, they are hunted down like the criminal they are and poof. By whatever method poof happens, it happens.

Now. Onto unresolved subplots and the strange things in the dark Grimm.  Although the website says Captain Renard is Nick’s politically adept superior officer and a descendant of a powerful line of Grimm royalty, I’m not sure I get that. Wouldn’t he have known all this time, prior to Aunt Mary, that is, that Nick was a Grimm? Is he trying to keep Nick alive? Does he want Nick dead but can’t kill another cop? Or is he using Nick to make sure that the fairytale population is kept in check? So a Grimm royal is part of the ‘fairytale’ bit, not really of our world? We’re into the second season, so a bit of resolution, if not total resolution would be awesome. Okay, yes, I am able to live with my disbelief suspended here, I’ll wait a while.

But, then, last week’s rerun of Let Your Hair Down. Whoa! There’s this young girl, abducted nine years ago, who fought off her kidnapper and survived in the woods all this time because she is a blutbad, like Monroe [who may be my favorite character, if for nothing else than his own perception of reality]. Great! Right? Until one night, when a very normal couple, camping in the woods are kidnapped by a ruthless drug dealer cum MJ grower. The couple thinks their life is over  when Voila! the guy is killed. They run away, get the police, etc. etc. We see them one more time telling the police all they know. Then ruthless’s two brothers want revenge for their brother’s killing and they kidnap the guy and hold him prisoner in their basement. With me so far? Okay. They, ruthless’s brothers, go out into the woods, there is the denouement, Nick and Monroe are there to save the young girl, ruthless’s brothers are wounded and captured, the now sixteen year old abductee is safe, Nick takes her home to her adopted mom. Tears, hugs, a cute little pink barrette, all good. Last scene: Nick home in bed with Juliette, she’s amazed her found her. All done. Really? WHAT ABOUT THE GUY IN THE BASEMENT? Sheeze. I tell you. This will bug me for a while!

as a reader of mysteries, it’s the plot twists that make for a sensational story. Yanking your readers down one path only to have it blow up, leaving them feeling like there is nothing left and then opening a new path. That is tough work. I know, I’m trying to do just that in my mystery. Get those red herrings in as soon as I can and then spread out the suspense as to how important those little devils are.

As a fan, I’m delighted there are  two TV shows doing this very thing. One, Once Upon A Time, the story of no happy endings has pulled back a curtain [not ‘the’ curtain because it’s not the Brothers Grimm who are doing the revealing] on the ‘rest of the story’ as Paul Harvey used to say on his old radio show. The story has shown how all the different characters of Fairy Land, now in Storybrook, Maine, interacted outside the confines of the story. This week, it was Little Red Riding Hood’s turn to have her story told. We learn of Red’s true love for Peter [and seriously, could they not have come up with a better name, because I kept thinking about Peter and The Wolf Glory Be! I grew up on Sergei Prokofiev’s composition] And What a Twist! So, do not read here, if you’ve DVR’d the episode and don’t want to know. But…Red is the big bad wolf. Whoa! And the red hood is to keep her from changing. And Granny never told her about her, well, what shall we call it, her gift? her ability? her curse? That was interesting because  a number of OUAT blogs were thinking that the mysterious stranger, the writer, was the Big Bad Wolf! Instead in a great reversal coupled with amazing feminism, and it’s Ruby.

The second series [Awake, the series about a man who’s been in an accident and is living in two realities. Well, he thinks they are two realities. One is which is wife is still alive and one in which is son is still alive. And, the therapists are trying to make him choose. And you can so understand his answer, ‘how can I choose who lives and who doesn’t?’] has done the plot twist far more subtly, mainly because we don’t have any recorded memory to give us backstory so we are amazed by the twist. And, we’re moving back and forth between two worlds and we still don’t know which one is a reality and which one isn’t. But in the second episode, and this is the reality where his son is alive, his police captain has a very terse conversation with someone who looks nasty and wants to make sure that it’s all under control. She assures him it is, and mentions that they didn’t have to take out the whole family. Whoa! All of a sudden you wonder what else is going on in the confused and befuddled brain of the main character. Now. That is truly a twist.

just how much do you think about vowels? I mean…seriously? We all grew up with the A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y. Right? And we all know that we can’t live without vowels. Think Slavic surnames and you know that vowels make it a little bit easier to speak.

So. When I ran across this in the Wall Street Journal, I was fascinated. OULIPO is the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature, a group of writers and mathematicians. Members include Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais, Claude Berge, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino. It was actually in an article by Daniel Levin-Becker, I admit I was taken. Someone who talks not only about the fun of wordsmithing, but ‘language as playground’, Lordy, my Mom would have loved him.

Glory Be! There are seventy six vowels in the first paragraph…not counting the Ys. Out of two hundred eight characters means that 36.5% of the characters used are vowels. 36.5%! Wow! If I add in the spaces, making for two hundred fifty eight characters, it’s still better than a quarter of the characters used are vowels. 29.5% actually.

What does this group of playful language experts, aficionados and others do?  Their goal is “the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.” And they identify constraints with which to establish their stories. Like writing a poem where each word is on a single line and each successive word is one letter longer, which they call Snowball. Or a Lipogram; Writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, H, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z (it does not contain any of those letters).

I don’t know if my brain could do this for long. But I do get the value. As writers we are told that every word counts. Sometimes you don’t see that, especially in most commercial writing the ‘boiler room’ novels. But if you are into writing for the most discerning of readers, that is, parents and children, then you know that every word means you are telling your story the only way that you can. And a misplaced word can take the reader right out of the story and back into real life…before they’ve finished. That would be sad.