RENEGADE WRITERS' GROUP: 27th OCTOBER

In retrospect I shouldn't have gone to the Renegades last night - my guts were really churning - but in the end I'm glad I did. The highlight of the evening was Tim reading the continuation of his sex-o-drama. He reads well and there is a plaintive quality to his work that I like: it's sort of 'American Psycho' set in the Midlands. The 'hero' certainly has a arm's-length, almost detatched view of the world, a world which he seems intent on proceeding through murdering en route. I know from my own experiences that maintaining that feeling of disassociation - the character being in the milieu of the novel but not of the milieu of the novel - is an especially difficult trick to pull off. He's the observer who is simultaneously the catalyst for the plot's action. Anyway, I hope Tim perseveres: there is something interesting happening there. Nelli thought so too.

All the other pieces were interesting too: I thought, in terms of quality, that it was the best Renegade evening yet.

The one exception was my own effort. I read a part of a chapter from the third Demi-Monde book - Summer - in the hope that I could get some feed-back regarding my use of the old 'book-within-a-book' device. The problem is that by Book 3 the assumption is that the reader is now pretty much up to speed regarding the DM's foibles and idiosyncracies and, of course, that isn't the case. I won't make that mistake again!