So I tried this other writing group

in addition to, not instead of, the local group. Meets in Barnes & Noble on Wednesday evenings (2nd & 4th Wed. of each month. What is this fascination with semi-monthly instead of biweekly?) so I've been to three meetings of this group now, and I'm puzzled. I'm often puzzled, but... So there are four other people in the group.

One of them is not a writer, but likes to come anyway. She's a chatter. Nice lady, but contribution is sketchy at best.

Another is apparently writing something - she's shared a couple of chapters - but doesn't share much regularly. She's also one who has yet to be prepared by actually having read anyone else's work in time for a meeting. To be fair, she does pass along commentary outside the meeting, but I sort of expect that when someone's taken the trouble to share something ahead of time for comment, the members would read the work & prepare some comment.

Another one is a guy who has apparently written (and I gather published) some stuff, but he's already shared his entire current novel-in-progress, so doesn't have anything to put on the table. He also hasn't yet had time to read anything & prepare comment in advance.

Then there's a lady who's writing stuff, and shares it, and reads whatever's put on the table and prepares comments. This is great, but offering commentary to her on her stuff is an adversarial battle (she's a defender), and getting commentary from her implies that she will NOT leave a topic until she feels you've acquiesced to her comments and will make the changes she suggested as soon as you get home.

So it's an interesting dynamic, this group, but it makes me wonder why people who don't have time or inclination to write, or read and prepare commentary, are bothering to be in a writers' group.? All sorts of speculation available of course, but it's fascinating, innit?  I"m undecided as to whether to continue in this group. Dragging my sorry old ass out on a Wednesday evening on a ten-mile hike to sit and listen to chat, and get (and offer) a little bit of commentary, and WRANGLE over some of it, in both directions, might not be in the cards as a profitable exercise for me.

The novel seems to be back on the rails,

since I've decided that "the new piece" is in fact "draft 2" of the original piece, and work on the new one is in fact work on the original piece - it has settled my mind considerably, and stopped me from wondering whether I should be focusing on the first one and whether I was procrastinating on the first one by starting the second one. So maybe it's all one big chunk of writing and everything fits in somewhere and I really shouldn't be worried about "what" I"m working on, I should be concentrating on working, and on making that "work" (writing, the act of, the care and feeding of the process, etc.) the most important thing in my day. This is the toughest part of picking up this passion after perhaps 50 years of deferring it. It's a shift of mindset from "where do I fit writing into my day" to focusing on getting some writing done. Then I've devoted some time & energy - at the top of the day - to what's really important to me; whatever else happens in the day after that can be good, bad, or indifferent, but I can look at the day and say "I've gotten some important work done."

It has just occurred to me that "The Willing Detective" - my novel-in-progress

that I thought was "stuck" transitioning from Draft 1 to Draft 2, may well be making the jump into an entirely different piece. That "TWD" is in fact chunks of text to be harvested into the new piece, which promises to be significantly better organized.

At a certain age, I suppose we need to start expecting

to stop being shocked at the news that (another) old classmate - college, high school, whatever -  has died. Loudon Wainwright III's new album Older Than My Old Man Now contains a bunch of tracks more or less themed on the contemplation of getting on in years (he and I are nearly exactly contemporaries, missing by six weeks or so) including a track called "Somebody Else" (a collaboration with Chris Smither) which opens with "Somebody else I knew just died." Well in my case it's a guy from my high school class ('64), someone I knew somewhat but was never pals with or anything. What's got me writing about it is that I'm wondering how I feel not about poor Tom's demise so soon after retiring to his refuge in Vermont, but how do I feel about the guy who has more or less appointed himself the guardian of the class of '64, and operates under the assumption that we ALL want to know EVERYTHING about what's happening to EVERYONE in the class. Now this guy's a decent sort, he really is, heart of gold, yatta yatta. And he has a cohort of (female) minions (well, two, actually, so maybe a pretty small cohort) with whom he conspires to keep mailing lists up to date, and concoct reunions, etc. etc. And more power to them, really, but I foresee that the "Somebody else we knew just..." emails are going to accelerate as we start pushing 70 with shorter & shorter sticks. And I really don't want to email the guy and say "Hey Joe, I appreciate your thinking of me but..." because I don't want to be included out of news from 50 years ago. On the other hand, a LOT of those people didn't matter to me then, and they're not likely to matter more to me now simply because we've topped the crest of The Hill in parallel and are now progressing down it simultaneously. I had a great time in high school, had some good pals, smoked shitloads of cigarettes and burned tankfuls of gas roaming around doing nothing, got my share of nookie, etc. and have warm fuzzy feelings about some of the folks I shared that with. But it's going to get really tiresome hearing about the snuffles and farts of the rest of the 150-some-odd geriatrics as they begin to wheeze and waddle their way down the red carpet that leads out the door of the here & now into the what's next (if anything). I'm not annoyed or anything, just conflicted. More about this, no doubt, as the emails from Joe (or Fran or Pam) begin to become more frequent.