How We Met

“Welcome to the Sea Breeze Writers Association.  Now, let’s eat!”

That’s how our meetings begin.  We eat. A lot.  Usually at a favorite restaurant but sometimes we’ll put together a potluck at someone’s home.  Always good food, good friends, and good times.  And sometimes we’ll sneak a little bit of writing onto the agenda. 

We are all writers from the Chesapeake Bay region of Virginia.  But we did let one writer from the outer banks of North Carolina join, because she always brings the best food to the potlucks.  You haven’t lived until you’ve tried Eliza’s Sweet Pickles (you add five pounds of sugar to one pound of pickles and you’ve got some real sweetness there.) 

We originally met online in a Writer’s Aerobics class.  All of us were suffering from the dreaded Sagging Middle.  No, not on our tummies, but in our works in progress.  A Sagging Middle is when the story slows down because there isn’t enough momentum or conflict to carry it through to the exciting black moment.  It’s a struggle many writers face.  So we joined this Writer’s Aerobics Class to Tone and Firm our Sagging Middles. Once a week someone would propose a topic or a starter sentence or an element of writing--be it description or dialogue or setting--and we’d have one week to post our results.  Some great topics came about and it really forced each of us to write something every week.  We became better writers all around. 

Then one week an evocative topic came into our in-baskets.  Four words:  BEHIND THE BLUE DOOR.  Oh, what possibilities there!  We all got busy writing.  The stories were all fascinating.  It was interesting to see how many different things the writers came up with.  Eliza Fleetwood and Jayne Ormerod took their ideas and fleshed them out until they became novellas.  (A novella is a short novel, about 25,000 words, or 1/3 the length of a traditional novel.) Their stories are now available to readers.  There will be more coming soon. 

Another topic that tickled the imaginations of the Sea Breeze Writers was a Valentine’s Day exercise on Red Magic, or the magic of love.  Again, some of the stories were grown into novellas.  You can read more about that project at http://www.ALittleRedMagic.blogspot.com

Members come and go in the writing group, and new ideas are proposed weekly.  There will be a lot more stories, both in these two lines and others, so stay tuned.