Ladies first

My read-and-critique update comes first so the boy update will be at the top of the page.

I had critique group last night. We had a new member, someone whose baby is one day older than Young Master L, which means he's right around A's ago. She was pleasant enough if only looking not at all like she'd had a baby.

I am back to calling the prat the prat. He's a horrible writer but doesn't know it, which is the worst kind of horrible writer. His women are stereotypically "dark" in an Orientalist way that skeeves my little historian's heart and "hot" in a fifteen-year-old writing fan fiction based on Buffy or Babylon 5 way. He's having something published online this month, and that apparently gave him the confidence to nitpick everyone else's work.

One of the writers brought the same piece she'd written before because there's an anthology at the end of the month she's submitting it to and she wanted a last look-over from the group. He looked at it briefly, made the same complaints he made before, then lectured her on letting go over pieces and getting on to the next thing. "I have started something else; I'm just submitting this at the end of the month so I wanted a last opinion," she said. Never mind; he's still going to lecture her on the importance of not working a piece to death. Then he got up and left the table and paced around the restaurant, thank God.

He wanted to have an argument about whether or not "that" was needed in a sentence. Just for those of you playing along at home, current writing trends are to cut words, not add them, and most of the "that"s in the universe can be excised. The prat likes to add "that"s. He wanted to add one where it wasn't needed. I said, no, that's not needed. He ignored me and told the writer to go check with a picky grammar person. She said, "I am a picky grammar person." I said, "So am I, and you don't need it." So he was a little put out. I think he's working in Best Writer In The Room mode, and I don't have the heart to tell him that I've spent the last ten years writing and the last two years copyediting. That'll be my secret.

He had an POV (that's point of view) argument with me about whether or not the POV in my story switches. The story is first-person (just like this here blog), and his argument that it was a POV switch was because of a sentence like this: Now Jake has a toy mouse. See? Did that throw you? I, Miss Kim, writer of the blog, am making a statement about something my cat possesses even though I am not my cat. Did you suddenly feel like I went all omniscient and God-like there? Did it throw you that I didn't say, "I see that now Jake has a toy mouse"? No? Then you're three steps ahead of the prat.

The rest of the group is lovely. I was happy because I got to hear some interesting ideas from other people and spend some hedonistic little time talking about how to make my writing better. It's nice to be with people who are struggling along in their own causes. I have been consuming Miss Snark's blog, but I think it would be better if I didn't read her vorpal wit before read-and-critique group. I felt like my already pretty sharp knives were honed and poker-hot.