Fillet of Soul

Attended my second writing group meeting last night, my first being about six weeks ago. I think I shied away from the group after the first time due to the fact that I seem to be the only one there under 50, which wouldn't bother me overmuch except that my writing style tends to be the kind of thing I wouldn't really want to read to someone as old as my dad. For example, the only thing I'd brought to the meeting last night was a rambling 8-or-so-page dialgoue between myself and a potential leading character in a prospective story. And somewhere in that dialogue, we were attempting to decide the basic personality of this character. The character threw out the idea of possibly being gay. I told him it wasn't a bad idea, but that I may well want to include a few sex scenes, and that I don't know how interested I'd be about writing at length about two men making love in semi-graphic detail. My character began chiding me with possible scenarios that would've embarrassed me if I hadn't been the one actually imagining them (something about being pleasured by pulsing hemorrhoids). Either way, it wasn't really something I was going to read in front of a group of polite geriatrics.

But at the end of the last meeting, I was assigned the task of tacking on the next chapter of their relay fiction -- I haven't read all of the preceding chapters yet, but it's something about a man who awakes to find a dead body that's the spitting image of himself. I think he finds that the body's his clone (or vice versa), and he's made to chop up and bury his own body. I did read the last chapter, which was written by a woman in her seventies and read like a Hardy Boys meet Tom Swift mystery. Didn't give me much to work with, and if I get really mired, I might have to throw in one of Donn Erik's old all-purpose man-with-sniper-rifle elements to help it along a bit. Hell, I might have lots of different snipers, all unconnected and with various bizarre agendas -- the only thing they have in common: sniper rifles and the will to shoot people. I call this "character purge!"