Last night was the inaugural meeting of my new writers group. OK, “new” isn’t quite true. Three of the four of us have been in a group together before, for about 5 years. We disbanded in part because my writing coach felt that I was getting too much input on my book-in-progress, none of it consistent. So I went it mostly alone for a few years before the realization that I missed having a writers group set in. Sure, I can talk to my husband Daryl about writing, and because he makes his living as a fine artist, he is perfectly capable of having head-scratchingly important conversations about artistic process, blocks, frustration, and the creating vs. marketing conundrum that every artist, if he or she wants to get his work out into the world, slams into.

But when you are a writer, there is something about connecting to another writer that isn’t the same as connecting to another generically creative person. We’re an odd and sometimes tortured bunch, what with our quirky working hours and our social discomforts, and how it is we can labor over a project for months, years, decades, never knowing if it will make it out of the chamber of our minds and into the world, alive.

And so it was that last night the four of us descended upon a quiet living room in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with essays, chapter summaries, and book overviews in hand, to see what we could forge from the fire of our history and our desire to move forward together again. After a dinner of tortellini soup and salted caramel matzoh brittle (my wan nod to Passover) we commenced to doing what it is we do best, and most passionately: laboring over arc and voice, narrative distance and word choice, reader expectation and marketing strategy, and branding and blogging. Except we did it together. And I’m here to say that it was about damn time.