"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

Hey Folks, it's time we tried something new at the table. We have more readers than time and we need to remedy the problem. The summer survey's number one idea was to limit the number of readers and I'll put that suggestion into effect at the November 2^nd meeting.
Ten readers will be the limit – that gives us eighteen minutes per person after announcements. The first ten people on the sign-up sheet will read first, then, if we have extra time, we will work our way down the list.
Also, we will be starting on time. I know many of you come from work and getting through traffic can be a hassle, but unless any of the sci/fi folks can come up with a time stretcher we will try it this way. If you know you are coming late and just have to read, send me an e-mail and I'll sign you up.
If this doesn't work, we'll try something else. If you have any recommendations on making this transition smoother, send me an e-mail. ( migaczmarjon@prtcnet.com)

Keep writing.

John Migacz
SCWW Greenville Chapter Pres.

At the conference SCWW Business meeting, President Sandra Johnson announced that an election for new board members will not be necessary because the number of nominees matches the number of available board seats. Thanks to the board members who are leaving the board at the end of the year, and congratulations to our new board members: Hope Clark, Kevin Coyle, Steve Heckman, and Jim McFarlane.

This year's conference was held at Ocean Creek Resort in Myrtle Beach on October 20-22. It was well received by all attendees. In a few weeks, planning will begin on the 2007 conference. If you have comments, requests, or suggestions for next year, you're encouraged to contact one of the Board members or bring your ideas to one of the Greenville meetings.

Greenville Chapter member Steve Heckman won "Best of Issue for Fiction" in the SCWW 2007 Anthology, Catfish Stew. Steve's entry, "War on Terror," was judged by three successful, published authors against at least forty other pieces. Steve was present to receive his award at the SCWW Conference in Myrtle Beach, where he also had the opportunity to read the winning story to about 200 conference attendees. Congratulations to Steve, and to all the other members who were published in Catfish Stew.

Kevin Coyle has had two more successes with his short stories this month.
"Looking for Elves," will appear in the premiere issue of The Literary Bone, to be released next summer. More information may be obtained at www.theliterarybone.blogspot.com.
The other short story to be published this month is "Canadian Ballet." It appears on-line at: johnnyamerica.net. It may also appear in their print edition (issue four is filled, while issue five is still up for grabs).
As Kevin himself so succinctly put it, "Yippee!"

The following e-mail was sent to Leland Beaudrot on October 11:

"Hello! Just a note to let you know that your web site is SCIway's "South Carolina Web Site of the Day." You can see your home page featured link here: SCIway.net.
Thanks for providing this great SC resource, and thanks for linking to SCIway. We really appreciate it, and it is a pleasure to be able to link to your site in return.

Kind regards,

Cedric
SCIway.net - "South Carolina's Frontdoor"

The statewide membership meets the last day of every conference. Here are the highlights from this year's meeting:

• With 350 members, SCWW is one of the largest writers groups in the state. There are three other areas in SC that might be starting new chapters.
• A new interactive website will be open November 1^st. The website address will be the same – scwriters.com.
• Catfish Stew is available this year from Amazon.com.
• The three workshops this year in Greenville, Columbia & Charleston were a big success.
• The Quill will be late this month due to computer bugs.
• SCWW is continuing to grow and be a large part of the Southern writing community thanks to our hard-working membership.

Is there anyone who's not familiar with Strother Martin's famous quote from 1967's Cool Hand Luke? "What we've got here is a failure to communicate." And that's the crux of the problem in the latest installment of Kevin Coyle's The Saga of Snorri the Priest.

Illugi, Sigurd, and a scouting party of Icelanders are returning to their ships when they encounter a small band of boys carrying bows and arrows. Attempts at communication fail, threatening behavior ensues, and Sigurd ends up with an arrow through his "good eye." The fighting that follows is vividly described, interlaced with the well-balanced doses of gore and humor we've come to expect from Kevin's adaptation of Icelandic literature.

Having little else to work with, the group critique focused on nitpicks: a line of dialogue sounded too modern for the time and needed an attribute; branding the boys as "Skraelings" should occur through dialogue rather than narration; and deleting the modifier "available" from Every available man grabbed a shield. There was some discussion about the boys' native language. Some liked Kevin's use of the strange dialect; others found it distracting. Everyone thought the action sequence was well-written.

For me, this saga took a bit of getting used to, but the more I hear of it, the better I like it – especially the humor, some of it blatantly gross: By the shit clinging to the hairy hindquarters of Fenris. And other, more subtle touches: A large rock caved in the navigator's skull, ruining his Russian fur hat.

Finally ... we all wait to find out where (in the world) this raucous bunch has landed.

Steve Stewart read Chapter 2 of his story "Homey." Homey and Effie have a discussion about the possibility that he will be able to get his freedom after Master Bailey's will is read. We were glad to see Steve changed the master's name from Master Bates.

Steve impressed us with his strong verbs and the humor in the conversations. Where Homey spoke to the farm animals he should use quotes, not italics. Omit italics when he described hussy-bath, "just hittt'n the warm and sticky spots."

His dialog using the black speech patterns impressed me. His description of a "frog frozen beneath the pond ice, seeing all the world out there but ain't going nowhere," is another example of his excellent command of this dialog.

He does a good job using all the senses. I liked the phrase where he described Homey as "the loyal worker bee --- always busy for the good of all, and always humming in a gravelly refrain."

In the 1840s era, Effie would not have used the "griddle cake mix." A mix is a modern item; she would have used griddle batter. Check closer for typos.

Overall, Steve's beginning makes me want to hear more and tell us about Homey's life with the Cherokees and as a freedman in Charleston.

Bob Strother has the enviable ability to reveal a character's essence in just a few words. From the time he takes his first drag on a Chesterfield, it's evident that Billy Page is a good guy, an old-shirt type of friend to the protagonist, softhearted cocktail waitress, Lovie. To know them is to love them, and as soon as you know Bob's characters, you care about them.

Harold, Lovie's new flame, is the perfect foil to Kid Chabert, the one man she just can't seem to forget. While Chabert is unreliable and untrustworthy, Harold is kind and wholesome. As the story opens, it appears that Harold just might be Lovie's ticket out of the tumultuous life of a musician/scoundrel's sometimes woman.

Harold makes Lovie feel good about herself. He visits her at work, tells her she's beautiful, and even invites her to the movies. For an instant, Lovie lets herself dream of a contented, stable life with Harold. But Billy Page, the Busted Blues Band's elder, knows better. In a moment of foreshadowing, he advises Lovie, "Take your pleasure where you can find it."

Boy did I want Lovie to get her mini-van man in the end. But no dice. Harold, the sensitive reporter with a nose for the truth, finds himself in the hallway where he witnesses the heartbreaking kiss. Lovie didn't mean to do it – it wasn't the first time she tried to break loose, but Chabert has some kind of grip on her, and despite her settling-down dreams, she just can't resist the dangerous embrace of bad-boy Kid.

True to its blues format, the story is eventually "wrapped up, but not quite wrapped up." We cry with Lovie when her own bad habit drives a good man away. In the end, it seems that Kid will continue to blow in and out of her world like a summer storm, and that Lovie will probably let him. But, as one reader put it, "That's honky-tonk life."

Bob intersperses lines from Ida Cox's song "Blues Ain't Nothin' Else But!" throughout, making "The Blues in Twelve Bars" hum and resonate. The story of Lovie and Kid is a new riff on an age-old tale that, like the blues, we need to hear again and again.

We hear a preponderance of fiction at our meetings, so this reviewer is always happy when someone brings a good essay. Aimee Caruso has read us several strong ones, including her most recent, "Why The Grass Is Greener in Greenville." As several members stated, this essay needs to be submitted; it is worthy of being published.

Aimee is a transplanted New Yorker, and she does an excellent job comparing life in Greenville, SC with that back home. I enjoyed her interesting use of words (I looked two up in the dictionary just to be sure I got it), and I love the one word she invented: "slumsick." Aimee turned several wonderful phrases – my favorite is "smell of dogshit emerging from its icy sarcophagus."

Bob Strother made one suggestion that seems right on target after a second reading of Aimee's essay. He thought the title's reference to the grass in Greenville required a mention of that subject. With Aimee's talent, it should be easy to weave in something about Fescue that stays green all winter and isn't buried under layers of snow for month-long stretches like back home in upstate New York. Here's one other thought. This essay will have to appeal to Editors right here in Greenville if it is to be published. Perhaps the chances would be improved if the last paragraph didn't talk about skipping church to stay home and read the Sunday New York Times.

Aimee, keep bringing these good essays to our meetings.

In John Migacz's novel A Second Chance, Jon "Jolly" Steele gets a second chance at life – via the clock magically turning back twenty years – and a second chance at love – via careful planning of an encounter with Sara. The excellent writing puts us deeply into Jolly's head, where he's teaching the class and simultaneously studying Sara. Because this "first" meeting between Jolly and Sara is so critical, the author needs to maximize the suspense by building Jolly's fears she might find him repulsive and by eliminating any hints of Sara's attraction to Jolly until the fateful moment they shake hands and sparks fly. Then the reader needs to vividly see Sara's reaction but also to understand why Sara is destined to fall for this stranger.

I'm glad to see variety in Migacz's sentence structure. This allows him to create a mood with several short consecutive sentences beginning mostly with "she."

In the nitpicking category, the boy gulped audibly. Jolly shouldn't focus on his true love's alluring legs. One subjunctive was missing. Five yen a day seems an incredibly low pay scale. However, I liked Jolly's psychological economics.

Since this is a novel, we're waiting to see what obstacles Migacz puts in the path of true love.

The plot thickens in Susan Boyer's Southern murder-mystery called Lowcountry Boil. Taking time to reflect, heroine Liz Talbot recounts what has happened so far: blackmail; spying and manipulation; adultery; murder; and a "Guardian Spirit whose job is apparently to nudge [Liz] into figuring this mess out."

As always, Susan's writing was witty and entertaining. A few folks expressed confusion about characters and action, but this was just a memory lapse caused by reading the book over more than a year. It was probably why people felt that having a summary of events here was helpful. Someone suggested that instead of the narrator doing the summary, Liz could write it all down and then rip up the paper. Since Liz is the narrator, that seems a moot point. The only solid suggestion for Susan was in the form of "show, don't tell" – instead of telling us that "[Liz] watched [Marci's] face closely" in order to read her reaction, we'd like to see Marci's reaction for ourselves so that we can make our own judgment. It's good to let your readers form their own opinions.

Keep it coming, Susan! You've found your voice.

Jim McFarlane's novel has come to an end, and so has The Widow Dunn. The epilogue begins with the words carved into Laura Ann's tombstone. A near seventy-year-old Angus has brought his granddaughter and a visitor, "Myrt," to the Widow Dunn's gravesite. He tells Myrt a little about his wife and their short life together while his three-year-old granddaughter, Annie Laura, scampers, plays and almost steals the scene from the still steel-hard carpetbagger. Jim has neatly tied up any loose ends with a scene that had not only Angus misty-eyed, but several in the group as well.

Folks around the table wanted to see Laura Ann live on to a ripe old age like Angus —and that is sound endorsement of good character development and fine writing.

The table found a few parts confusing – the carving on the backside of the tombstone, some "she" confusion and a mix up between brothers Gaston and Hampton. The POV Police had a flat on the way to the scene and never arrived, and were never needed anyway.

Everyone agreed The Widow Dunn had a good all 'round ending and expect this historically accurate romance to be on bookshelves soon. Nice work Jim.

I always enjoy Pat Stewart's family essays, so I was thrilled for her that she's decided to compile them into a book. My favorite of her pieces so far is the preface and introduction that she shared with our group during the first Thursday meeting in October. I especially liked the bit about Joe, the unemployed camel.

Everyone loved the title of her forthcoming book, Stuck in My Own Family Tree, and could find little to quibble about in the preface. One point of discussion was the first sentence, "Everyone has a family, right?" Because the harsh truth is that everyone isn't so fortunate, the group consensus was that perhaps that should be reconsidered. Most everyone agreed that the first paragraph on the last page – the one dealing with rejection – seemed out of place, and the preface would be stronger without it.

A few of us were confused by the visual of Grossmutter's leg being thrown under her hospital bed, since it wasn't clear to us that she had a wooden leg. And, since Grossmutter had an apparent German heritage, for a moment it appeared that Pat had ventured into Kevin's alternate history genre when we read the sentence in the introduction that allowed as to how her family had won World War II. Grossmutter is a fascinating character, but she may need a little clarification.

Another bit of advice the group had for Pat was that she may want to move things around in the preface, organizing her vignettes with a little more structure, rather than describing a few on the first page and a few on the back with narrative in between.

Kudos to Jack, Pat's husband, someone we all know well even those of us who just met him this past weekend at the annual SCWW conference – for the great introduction! We're all looking forward to seeing Pat's collection in print, and getting our signed copies at a future conference.

Bob Strother read Chapter 8 of his novel Burning Time. Mary Alice, Louise's grandmother, gets a visit from Rosie Reilly, owner of Rosie's Bar and Grill. Rosie tells Mary Alice that her son Will has gotten one of her barmaids pregnant and asks Mary Alice if she can help. Mary Alice agrees, and the next night, she goes to the girl's room to end the pregnancy. She tells the girl, "It will be all right" because "everyone deserves a second chance."

Mack Clarke read his essay, "A Week of Foolishness." Mack's Uncle Juggzy, "better known as Dead Elvis Baumgardner,... plays in a quasi-bluegrass band." Uncle Juggzy got his tag while the band was playing years ago at K-Mart. An attractive woman from the audience told him he played just like Elvis. The woman's husband, noting the looks his wife was getting from the men around them, said, "Yeah, he sounds just like Elvis 'cause Elvis is dead."

Kevin Coyle's book, The Saga of Snorri the Priest, continued. Finding themselves in a waterway they have named "Snorrafjord," the travelers decide to follow Icelandic tradition and let the gods show them where to go next. They throw a set of high-seat pillars into the sea, then follow the pillars northward as they drift along Snorrafjord's western shore. They are watched from the shores by many Skraeling villagers. The pillars wash ashore in a sheltered cove, the ships land, and Snorri addresses all of them from atop a boulder. He tells them that things are turning out differently than expected, and he will not object if anyone turns around and heads back to Iceland.

Phil Arnold read two short items: one a blog article called "The King's Chamber"; and an essay called "Pure Zero." Phil complains that as he ages, his doctor bugs him about stuff, such as exercise, and how much water he drinks every day. His doctor tells Phil to stop drinking any soda except Diet-Rite, because it's the only soda without sodium (which leaches calcium from the bones.) Dutifully, Phil checks out Diet-Rite sodas at the store and finds "Pure Zero: No Calories, No Carbs, No Caffeine, No Sodium." Phil figures that these Pure Zero's are 99% water, so when his doctor asks next time, he's going to count it as water.

"The King's Chamber" is a room on the second floor of the Hard Rock Cafe on Beale Street in Memphis that pays tribute to the King by providing a place where guests will be surrounded by Elvis memorabilia. It currently contains items like the denim jacket Elvis wore in the movie, "Jailhouse Rock," some Las Vegas jumpsuits, Elvis hats and belts, and along the stairwell going up to the King's chamber, a progression through Elvis' life.

Aimee Caruso's flash fiction piece starts like this: "He is a rat and he is digging a path through Saturday night into Sunday morning. The earth resists and it takes him many green bottles of Rolling Rock to break through the first layer. He hits shale, calls for bourbon."

Aimee's second piece of the night was called, "The Vertiginous Land of Unemployment." Aimee says that as she tries to cope with unemployment, she "finds herself careening between euphoria and despair." She tries to delay her husband's departure for work in the morning, then saves the act of checking her e-mail until after the dishes and the vacuuming. When she finally checks, she sees, "You have three new messages." With these "words of hope," she "greedily clicks on only to discover a form letter asking her to sell life-insurance, a long-lost relative from Nigeria who needs to send her $250,000 but first requires her bank account number, and a chain email that she may ignore only at great danger to her physical well-being. She steels herself – no tears!" "She pulls up a copy of her resume, pours another cup of tea, and sits back to wait. The mailman comes at 4:10. Sharp."

Susan Boyer's Lowcountry Boil has moved from ghost story to private-eye mystery as Liz dons a disguise and trails Courtney and Deanna to Charleston. She discovers that Deanna thinks husband Adam is having an affair.

John Migacz's A Second Chance finds Jolly hiring Becky to grade papers. During their talk, she fills him in on the local gossip and rumors concerning him.

In the first of two essays by Janelle Beamer, her Aunt Irene lives up to the essay's title, "Designated Mourner," by "facing death with brightly colored dresses and plenty of home cooking." The second essay deals with a death most of us has had to face: the death of our computer.

Jim McFarlane's Penelope As Good As Dead, has been resuscitated as Penelope. In Chapter One, we find Penelope summoned to an inquest concerning her apparently un-churchlike behavior.

The next meetings of the Greenville Chapter of SCWW are as follows:

• Thursday, November 2 - First Thursday Meeting, 6:00 p.m. at The Open Book
• Tuesday, November 21 - Third Tuesday Meeting, 6:00 p.m. at The Open Book

All genres welcome at both meetings. Suggested limit for reading selections is five double-spaced, typed pages, although longer selections may be possible if time permits.

The Open Book, 110 S Pleasantburg Drive, Greenville, SC

Printed Matters is the newsletter of the Greenville Chapter of South Carolina Writers Workshop.

Thanks to our contributing writers and news reporters:
Bob Strother, Pat Stewart, Aimee Caruso, Phil Arnold,
Jim McFarlane, Marcia Migacz, John Migacz, Susan Boyer

Copyright 2006 by Marcia Migacz, Editor. Contributing writers retain all rights to their work.

To unsuscribe, send an e-mail to Unsubscribe.