Showing posts with label online social groups. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online social groups. Show all posts

My Critique Partners

Thought I'd introduce you to my critique partners, the Cowtown Critiquers. We are all part of the North Texas RWA chapter where we all met. We send our chapters back and forth through email whenever we need help. We're pretty relaxed as far as scheduling goes, although we started out with deadlines to turn stuff in, but that kind of fell and got scattered along the well-intentions trail.

We meet in person once a month after our RWA meeting. You'll usually find us at a Cotton Patch in Colleyville around a table laughing and talking and the waitresses there are so sweet, they never make us feel like we've overstayed our welcome even when we've been there for hours and ordered nothing but dessert and something to drink.

I love hanging out with these gals and brainstorming. I come back from our sessions pumped up with creativity and jazzed to get back into writing. It's amazing how a table full of creative people can uplift your own creative energies.

So on with the introductions: This is Chrissy. She's the baby of the group, both in age and in when she joined RWA and really got serious with her writing journey. She's such a hard worker though and in a relatively short time, her writing went from "needs a bit of work" to "amazing". She has a stubborn protective streak when it comes to her characters. In a brainstorming session if we suggest putting her characters in harmful situations, I can see her mentally shift in front of her characters with the stance of a protective mama bear: "Oh, no, you aren't putting my characters through that." It's rather amusing and very cute. But then after she takes a moment to process, she'll go ahead and put her beloved hero and heroine through as much hell as the rest of us do to ours anyway. Somebody has to suffer for literary greatness, right?

This is Jen and Gina. Two of the most amazing generous, get-the-job-done people I know. Actually I can say the same about Chrissy and Michelle. All my critique partners are hard-working generous people, who end up volunteering to do a lot of things that benefit others for our chapter. 
Jen is our grammatical go-to goddess. Once my writing has passed through her fine-tooth comb, I know it's in a fairly stable shape.  It won't need life-support at any rate. Her writing tends to hone in on characters going through periods of growth and self-realization. Strong people becoming stronger. Much like Jen herself. Out of all of us, I sometimes think she doesn't see how good of a writer she really is. 

And Gina is so calm and able to focus on a story-line as a whole, seeing the big picture and what the characters need to go through in order to have their happily-ever-after. Even when she speaks, she has that peaceful lulling kind of quality in her voice. She's a tinkerer though, always finding a new scene that could be added to make a story better. I'll bet if she could, she'd go back and tinker with her books that are already published.   

This is Michelle. She's a go-getter, knows exactly what she wants out of a writing career, and isn't afraid to go out and grab the bull by the horns to get it. She writes the most genuinely true-to-life character interaction scenes I've ever read. The characters might be doing something mundane and simple, yet I'm hanging on every word, every movement. 

So, that's them, my critique partners, women I treasure as friends and as my first readers who won't let me get lazy or take easy short-cuts and keep my writing focused and on track. 
Love 'em. Share the love and check out their sites if you get a chance.   


One-Dimensional

I've become One-dimensional. I didn't mean to. It just sort of happened.

I've thrown all my energies into writing, into educating myself on the craft of it, and into learning how to make a shy person as myself more of an extrovert.

I belong to two writing groups, which I love. I come back from those meetings buzzing with creative energy and so happy to have spent time with people who have become great friends.

But I want to spread my wings a bit and join one or two online communities that focus on something other than writing. The problem?

I have no idea what else I'm interested in. Pre-marriage, I traveled the backyard of the west with my 3 buddies, one tent, sleeping bags, a cooler, and money for gas. We hiked, we explored ghost towns, nearly rolled down a cliff, waterskiied and jetskiied when we found a lake and someone with a boat or a place to rent jetskis.

Nowadays, the thought of climbing a mountain makes me want to hurl myself off of one. And since I moved to Texas--camping in a tent in this heat? Not happening. All that camping fun drained out of me along with buckets of humidity when ignorantly innocently enough I volunteered to be the camp director for the church 14-18 yr-old girls while I was pregnant. NEVER again. NEVER.

As for boating and skiing, I'd do that if I still had a boat or if there weren't alligators stalking Texas lakes.


Early marriage, I got hooked on those DIY home decorating shows and, yes, my house went through many, um, interesting transformations--some we will not speak about.

I did a few crafty workshops with church friends, but I mostly enjoyed the social aspect of working on a project together for a few hours while I speedily finished my ugly project because I knew I would NEVER finish it at home. And they rarely got hung up either because that cutesy crafty look isn't for me. My sister once said my interior reminds her of an old movie set from the mummy or something. Dark woods, old world style, not a cross-stitch sample in sight.

See my delimma?

What am I interested in at this stage of my life? It's a little disconcerting to really have no idea.

Okay, I do love ghosts. I've been fascinated with them since I saw one when I was eight. But that's a story for a separate blog post. And yes, being my one-dimensional self, I've written several things featuring ghosts. How could I not?  

So I could join a group about ghosts maybe? Ghost-hunting? Know any good ones? I have no idea.

I also want to travel, so perhaps there are some great traveling communities I can get into?

Genealogy too. Not that I've done a lot of it, but I have done some and let me tell you, it is a time suck. I get going and hours fly by. I feel like a detective, finding lost souls and connecting them with the right family lines.

So help me out people. I'm determined to take this month and find an online group (outside of writing) that I can connect with.

Tell me about groups you belong to and interests you have so I can go check them out a find a place for me. Even if it doesn't seem like something I'd be interested in, I'd love to know more about you and things you enjoy. Who knows, maybe that will spark a long buried interest I've forgotten I had.

Post your groups here in the comments or on my facebook page. I'll let you know how my search to become at least a two-dimensional person comes along throughout the month.