Odd Woman Out

Has Fiorella ever told you about the time she was kicked out of a critique group? It was the first one she'd ever attended, and Fio doomed herself from the start by going into English/Creative Writing teacher mode and getting picky, but she put the cap on it by calling out one of the authors for having her heroine screaming liike a banshee during childbirth, then throwing things at her husband because he was the cause of it all. The author came back at Fio, of course, and yours truly made matters worse by saying that, without screaming or throwing things, she herself had endured six hours of induced labor with the ptosin up as high as it would go, then an emergency c-section sans any kind of anesthesia. And that the baby, her first birth, weighed eleven pounds, seven ounces.

A couple of days later, Fio got a phone call aplogizing for not telling her sooner that the critique group was limited to five people and she had been the sixth.