Interesting things happened last night

Our writing group can get pretty rowdy in that we have a good time. You can't miss Kevin's laugh - he doesn't mean to be loud but he's very loud when he laughs. He's a jovial person to say the least. So we were sitting there critiquing a story and having a good time and the author who was at the bookstore doing a book signing comes in to join us for the last 45 minutes of the session. She was very nice and even did a couple of critiques on a few of the readings - which was pretty cool in itself - seems her book signing was kind of fizzled out by this time.

Susan hasn't read in a while but she's busy coordinating the writer's conference to be held in October at Myrtle Beach and being on the board of directors for the group of which we are one chapter. I miss her blogs about jazzercise and the Queen of Pain and alien instructors as well as her reading in group.

Aimee (don't you just love the spelling of her name - French) - started something different and now we are going to be exposed to something new with her writing. She usually does articles or essay type things, but last night, hum, she brought a screenplay to group (okay the first five pages). Said she had wanted to do a screenplay, so bought a book about writing one and then started doing one - she's hoping it will be a movie. Someone said that screenplays had to be under 155 pages (120 more like it for a 2 hour movie) - so now she has to cram all these thoughts into a 120 pages - talk about tight writing. The few persons who knew a little bit about screenplays said that she would basically need to have a minute's worth of "air time" per page (that means every scene, every action, every conversation that can be captured in 1 minute has to be on the page) - needless to say there will be more than fits the "usual minute per page" because she is experimenting and this is something new for us too. So my question is this - how does one critique screenplays, especially not having been exposed to screenplays before? You can't really critique the writing because you aren't familiar with the specifics of what is required for screenplay writing, so what do you critique? I guess I need to do some research now on critiquing screenplays - hummmm - not like I don't have a ton of stuff to do already.

The last young lady who read last night - well I must say she really has a good reading voice - her story is about an autistic girl who lives in a group home and runs away, hops a train and ends up in Texas with her uncle. And the author was really impressed with her story as well, made some very nice comments. As we were leaving, she (the young lady who read and I'm sorry I've forgotten her name) asked me to give her some zingers that kids nowadays toss out - remember when we were kids and we would get snidy or something would ensue and you'd quip out - "Yo'r mama" or things like that - so that's what she's looking for. So if you have any phrases that kids toss around today - drop me a line (I'm going to ask my younguns but they probably don't know any zingers, we'll see).

And I got to attend the socialization time after group again - what a month - I've had two good meetings, been able to attend social time and have had a fairly productive month work wise so far (about to make the rest pretty productive too since I was assigned over 260 minutes' worth of dictation yesterday) -- hope to see you all in the postings - E :)

(I found out her name - Marjorie - and she is very sweet - so ya'll come up with some PC little quips or zingers that the kids yell at each other please - E :) )