I appreciated David Pelzer's piece, "Writing Critique Groups Offer Mutual Support." I'm working on a women's contemporary fiction novel and would like to find others interested in forming such a group. 

~Kim Marie Murphy (kmurfsurf@gmail.com)

I really dug Lindsay's article about transitions. You made me remember all my transitions, adjustments and reinventions my family and I went through. Great work.

I was just thinking about this topic the other day as I watched "Three Women" by Robert Altman.  I loved the ending of that movie, which relied on an unpredictable and totally unrealistic and inexplicable switch, but I thought how hard that would be to write effectively.  That movie depended so much on the emotions created by visual imagery -- and while you can "write" visual imagery, it's not just quite the same as seeing it. 

As Renee notes, the characters and plot of a movie are only half realized by script and then the actors, music, cameras shots etc. take up the slack.  I have never tried using the plot and characters of a movie to write a story, but I have been inspired by specific movie images in my writing, and I sometimes adapt image-driven folktales which also requires one to flesh out plot and character. I'd like to experiment with movies, specifically switching plot and characters  relationships at the ending as Altman did in "Three Women."

Thanks, Terry Brennan, for your essay about pitching and what you learned at the San Francisco Writers Conference. Since that's what I'm currently doing, I opened your article and read it immediately. This: " In one illuminating session, four agents read a query letter and raised their hands when they would have stopped reading the pitch. Few agents got all the way to the end of the letter. " Yikes! Did you also get a sense as you were listening that that's where you would have stopped reading, too? I love the podcast "The S**t Nobody Tells You About Writing" for this reason. Query letters and pitching, the author's bane!