Ugh, y’all know how I feel about this one.

I was in a local group on a dying social media platform that was unrelated to writing. It was about the local area and catching up with other women who were new to the city or who were wanting to have friendships outside of their home-life or families now that their children were in school. Someone asked if there any ladies interested in an IRL writer’s group where we could get together, have a coffee(bleh!) and make small talk then sit around and write for a couple of hours.

The idea alone seems pretty good. You still get your own space to be creative, if you don’t gel with someone. I don’t like coffee but I could get a hot chocolate and slink away into the corner to write my next disemboweling scene ala, King of Spades (Frank, the motel owner.)

Most of the time groups like this are online, rife with pompous assholes who don’t realise they’re re-writing an idea or trope that has been done a million times over –AND, there’s nothing wrong with that (just don’t be delusional that you are onto a completely new idea!) As past blog posts have mentioned, I love tropes. I like to see how a new writer/a new take on the circumstances weaves the story. What gets to me is the tall-poppy nature and the unhelpful wastes of time certain people suck you into.

What I would look forward to is potentially bouncing ideas off someone with regards to sentence structure, and to a lesser extent, plot structure, the kind of things you pick u pas you go along, but things you can spend a LOT of money on hiring a professional. To achieve a skill-level where you either don’t need to hire someone, or that they would have minimal work to do on your manuscript is probably a goal for a lot of writers.

If I take the plunge, I’m not expecting much but it would be something to write a blog post about. (???)