Once again, the Greenville Chapter is well represented in the annual SCWW anthology, Catfish Stew. Leading the list with a Third Place finish for her essay "Writing Basics" as well as a featured essay and poem is Vice-President for Life Sue Renault. Another pair of long time members doubled in the essay category: President Phil Arnold and Russ Burns. The budding talent of some of our newest members is also featured: Kami Kinard in poetry and John Migacz in fiction. Leland Beaudrot, Pat Stewart and Faye Tollison also contributed featured fiction.

If you want to "do the math," the Greenville Chapter netted just over 17% of the 69 slots in this year's publication. Not bad for being one of 12 chapters statewide. But there are a lot of names missing from the list. Let's all whittle our quills and get writing for the 2004 anthology to show 'em what Greenville's got!

Be sure to join this august body of muses at our next meeting, 6:00 p.m., Thursday, August 7th at The Open Book.

John Migacz kept us spellbound with the first part of his short story, "The Table." Written in first person POV, he went searching in the classifieds for a poker table and found just what he was looking for. The price was perfect, too perfect. With a suspicious feeling, he went to look at the table. He had to have it! However, his suspicions grew even stronger when the owner quickly lowered the price. He took the table home and prepared for that night's poker game. A new deck of cards slid through his hands in perfect alignment bringing a smile to his face. Obviously, he was going to enjoy this table.

Fast moving and good pace to this story, it was compared to Stephen King. There were good descriptive phrases, and the suspense continued to build as the story progressed. The group did feel it would add to the story if there had been an additional reduction in the price of the table.

With tongues hanging, we are waiting for the next part of this story. Will it be the end of the story, or will John keep us hanging by lengthening the story even more and making us wait even another month to hear the ending? The next meeting should tell the tale!

Kami Kinard read a collection of poems bringing many expletives from the audience. There were good descriptive phrases throughout the poems presenting us with many good visuals. It was, however, brought to her attention to be careful of passive voice.

Kami has a talent for looking at things in different ways, which keeps her audience spellbound. We anxiously await more of her writings. We like what we read!

Back to the drawing board and we get a new look at Jake and Paige in John Kingsbury's Trailer Trash. Jake has just returned from a three-month separation and the ease at which he slides back into his life with Paige let's us know that they had indeed played these parts before and were masters at it.

The description is excellent. We can smell those steaks grilling as they perfume the air. We can feel Mason, the cat, drawn from owner to owner as he wanders through each scene. Jake's paper bag luggage and his meager furnishings takes us to the edge of poverty. The fact that Jake grills one steak at a time tells us the grill is not a deluxe model.

Jake surprises Paige with the announcement that he is seeing a doctor, one who will help him with his drinking problems. We can sense a conflict just around the corner. Add in a shaky marriage, bi-polar disorder, recovering from alcoholism, and a new job. It will be interesting to see how these two pull through.

John has us interested in Jake and Paige. Two real people facing extreme challenges.

Heat packing hottie meets old man with cat in "Peacekeeper" by Leland Beaudrot. It turns out that the old man isn't that old (he's sixty-ish) and though she seems to have it all, the enigmatic young lady may need someone to lean on.

Everyone enjoyed the fast paced dialogue and the clever banter between the characters. There were two places in the dialogue where the group thought the speaker was unclear. We also debated Leland's choice of the words: pocketbook, giggle, and pasketti.

"Peacekeeper" hints at both romance and suspense. We are looking forward to reading more dialogue from Frank and Cheyenne, and to finding out what that gun is really all about.

Bob Bearden / Five Mossy Rocks

We were joined this month by science fiction writer Bob Bearden. The prologue and first chapter of his book Five Mossy Rocks were met with enthusiasm by the group. Everyone felt that Bob had the makings for a fine story.

There was a general consensus that the prologue, which showed a space ship Commander and a biologist preparing a sample of single cell life forms for shipment back to Earth's moon, was not as interesting as what followed and actually delayed the start of the story. The first chapter caught the group's attention by introducing Navigator, a man who was so altered by the environment in his ship that he scarcely appeared human. Several people suggested that Bob start his book with Navigator - either with the physical description, since it was so unique, or with the line "He had no friends," as a human interest hook. It was felt that since agents will read only a few of the first pages before making a decision on a book, Bob should start with this interesting and different character.

We hope to hear more of Bob's story in the coming months.

"Ten Easy Steps." That's all it takes. How many times have you heard that? Well, that's just the point. Practically any endeavor can be distilled into ten easy steps, and magazine editors snap up how-to articles, and Sue Renault is going to tell you how to get one of them to snap up one of yours, in ten easy steps, of course. Sue is her usual lucid, clever, informal, accessible self, and delivers useful information in an entertaining fashion. Some of the reviewers thought there were too many examples, fun though they were, of potential topics. She also needs to clarify that multiple queries are okay, but multiple submissions are not. Sue's example of a friend she consulted on matchmaking was a nice personal note, and more of that would be helpful. Thanks, Sue, for keeping us focussed on marketing our work.

Cindy Kay said, when she joined SCWW, that she wrote stories for her students. Der Tubemeister hopes she doesn't read them Dance of the Water Spider, the novel she has been reading to us. Parents would rail against the controversial topic (abortion clinic demonstrations), the jealousies, the sex, the violence. All the stuff we love. And Cindy writes it like she's been doing it for a while, not that she escaped from the critiques unscathed. Most reviewers liked James Martin Stephens' sermon, but variously thought it was too long, or needed some scripture quotes, or needed some beats, or required a different reaction from the congregation. Nothing that a capable writer can't fix pretty easily. Reaction to the rest of the reading was more uniform. We're hooked. The med school flashback really sets up the emotional issues that will drive the rest of the story, and we can't wait for the next installment.

A wonderful picture book, Is Spring Here Yet?, is unfolding in Gene Fehler's mind. With the right artwork this is a wonderful picture book about whether Spring can arrive without little boys and girls playing baseball. Amber shows Rudy that "the brown grass in the yard was dotted with patches of snow and splotches of mud." When Amber sees a robin tugging at a worm she runs to Rudy's room and finds him reading a book. I liked this image because it is important to reenforce reading in a book and not television watching or computer game playing. Gene is so good at keeping his children's stories on message. The ending doesn't seem surprising to us because we know Gene so well, but to an average reader the little kids gathered for Spring Training is a wonderful plot development. After all, baseball and not robins and worms, girls on bicycles, and tulips and azaleas ushers in Spring.

"No Hats, No Hoods, No Sunglasses, No Service at this Bank" is Pat Stewart's latest entry in her anthology of personal essays. It seems that Missouri has the right idea, no hats, no hoods, and no sunglasses in a bank because it will be easier to identify you if you rob the bank. Then Pat moves to robbing a bank from the inside, such as the folks at Carolina Investors did. I was reminded of a cartoon I saw in a magazine years ago. It showed a banker seated in an office looking out of his office door toward two men robbing a bank teller. The banker said, with contempt, "Amateurs." This lawyer I live with worked for HomeGold, which owns Carolina Investors. In the six months my friend worked there, HomeGold lost over a hundred million dollars. My friend insists it wasn't his fault. I'm not so sure about that. He wore a baseball cap and sunglasses to work.

I was looking forward to a cool dry place to rest and found myself in Kevin Coyle's wonderful story about the near future with a fake Lunar colony. Addressing the narrative to the main character's deceased girlfriend in A Cool Dry Place is different, but so far it seems to work. It is a little hard to get a feel for some of the technology in the book, such as the node that beeped and led into a conversation between Chris and Floyd. It seems a cell phone with a monitor screen, which is almost on the market now, would fill this "node" function. Still, it is the characters and not the technology that is important in science fiction. Chris being convinced that he is on Earth and not Luna as the result of a massive government conspiracy is an interesting comment on the allegations that the manned landings on the Moon were faked to justify the expense.

Trust your sub-conscious mind. It knows the story, it knows the characters, the plot, and the sub-plots. It even knows the beginning, the middle, and the ending. Get your conscious mind out of the way, get your critic--your in-house editor--off your shoulder and let your sub-conscious run free. Just let the words fall on the page then sit back and be amazed! Your mind is more capable than you ever imagined. Trust it.

[Randy is the author of A Killing Shadow and recently retired as President of the Greenville Chapter of SCWW.]

Printed Matters is the newsletter of the Greenville Chapter, SCWW, which meets on the first Thursday of each month at 6:00 p.m. at The Open Book, 110 S Pleasantburg Drive, Greenville, SC.

Thanks to our contributing writers and news reporters: Randy Crew, Faye Tollison, Cindy Kay, Kami Kinard, Marcia Migacz, Steve Heckman and John Kingsbury.

Copyright 2003 by Leland Beaudrot, Editor. Contributing writers retain all rights to their work.