Jumping the snark

Well, the machine I have my email account on seems to have been down for the last ten hours. Yay. I'm sure the friend who runs said machine is more annoyed than I am.

I'm just back from my twice-monthly writers' group. We read/commented on a short by the woman who questioned what kind of guy would want a 'sex kitten' in In Our Image. Her story was about a girl who was repeatedly raped and brutalized by soldiers, watched her sister be repeatedly raped, brutalized and ultimately killed by those soldiers, and escaped to become a kind of peep show prostitute who files her teeth into fangs and castrates one of her johns by... well, you can figure it out, right?

I can't help but think there are a lot of snarky things to be said at this point, but I won't hunt for any of them. (To be not-so-snarky, her story draft could be hammered into an effective modern horror piece--although I'm not sure sending it to a horror magazine would ever occur to her.)

There's talk of limiting reading time in the group and getting to three works per night instead of two. New members may be joining and old ones may be returning, though; if the group size approaches 12, my quick computation of four years to get through Image (at one chapter every two months) still holds true.

Of course, I've barely added anything to chapter four in two months, which means I need to... well, do something else. Maybe just go on to chapter five. Go back to some of the notes I'd developed and get reinspired. Tweak what I know of the plot line, keep the tension building.

Take a day off from work to do these things. Or a week. See if anyone notices.

Okay, I won't do that, really, but I won't say it isn't tempting.