It's difficult for me to imagine that if things had worked out a little differently, I might have been wrting about my painting instead of my writing.

During the first years of marriage which begain in '89, writing proved an immediately awkward fit. I tended to write vivd erotic pieces, wrenching poetry, false letters to imagined characters, none of which settled well with a girl raised in a meat-and-potatoes, art-is-weird environment. I would either show her what I had written and she would give me the who-did-I-marry look or she would read through what I hadn't set aside to share and I would hear about it later. I pretty much stopped writing.

Around the same time, I inherited a large number of oils, a handful of brushes and a couple prepped canvases from my maternal grandmother. I liked the romantic idea and the solitude of a painter's life, so I decided to give it a shot.

Knowing nothing about the craft, I set up an easel and created a number of decent though uninspired paintings. In a matter of weeks, I painted less and less frequently. Soon, I abandoned it altogether.

Two years later, by then enrolled in art school, an instructor remarked that I "would be good at sculpture" based on my sculptural method of drawing. He invited me to participate in an 8-week block of painting classes at his downtown Nashville studio overlooking the Cumberland River at Riverfront Park. Visions of the painter's life were revived. I decided to attend. .

Actually knowing what the hell I was doing helped me enjoy painting far better than I had the first time around.

But again, after the classes were over, I found keeping up painting in my private life lacked the same romance and ease. Painting at home with a new baby, with inadequate lighting and without the energy of my fellow students around me paled in comparison to what the experience had been at my instructor's full-blown, well-lit studio.

At the time, I took the fact that it did not sustain for more than a few months as proof that, though I loved aspects of painting, it could not occupy the same place in my soul that writing once had.

Additionally, the high cost of supplies and difficulty storing wet canvases finally convinced me to look elsewhere for my expression. For a while afterwards, I gave all of my creative energies to my schooling.

After school, I transferred that energy to my work. In recent years though I've hit a plateau with web design. I know so well what I need to do in order to give a client what he needs that a certain amount of creativity is missing. The next step would be to design higher-end or raw concept sites, but I'm not interested in pushing in that direction. There's too much technical stuff to learn with increasingly less reward.

So what did i learn from having gone down the painting road?

First off, I learned a lot about how I need to work as an artist. The massive time required to set up and tear down every time I felt inspired to paint was a major problem. When I get an idea, I need to be able to walk right up to a ready canvas and go to it.

Second, and i've written about this before, when you're working in an artistic field of any kind, you need peer support. I thrived in the studio atmosphere. I was motivated because we shared and energy and we gave and accepted our peers' opinions and suggestions.

When I restared serious writing, I took these (and other) lessons and incorprated them. I make sure I go to the SAWG and critique meetings, even if I don't have work to critique and even if I don't feel like stopping whatever I'm doing at the time.

I also make sure my work environment is away from daily temptations and that, at any time inspiration strikes, my writing station is ready for me.

On rare occasion, I'll dig out the travel easel I have in storage and slap some paint on a board. Usually, I paint just enough to remind myself why I am not a painter anymore.

Just before I had finished what I thought was the final edit to my short story Rain, Beckie Ugolini, present president of SAWG and valued critique group member, asked what (with an insinuated “if anything”) did the name ‘Rain’ mean. Halfway through my explanation, I realized the title didn't say enough about the story, nor would it incite someone to read it. Again, from yet another unexpected front,

The main symbol in the story is how gifts of love—though manifested physically—are referred to as unexpected rain. I felt I needed to incorporate that juxtaposition somehow. I think at that point I wrote ‘Rain from the Sun’. But more important than the symbol of rain, I realized ‘Rain’ is a story about the main character, Mr. Salley. So I modified the spelling so I had ‘Rain from the Son’. Feeling that spelling may be missed or, worse, viewed as clumsiness on the part of the writer, I felt I needed to modify the part in question: Son. Mr. Salley’s transformation comes in part from his making peace with the place he grew up as a homosexual in the unforgiving Bible Belt of the mid-60s.

I arrived at ‘Rain From A Southern Son’. The title felt right. It communicated the juxtaposition between rain and sun, throws a curve with “Son” instead of “Sun” and the implied reference to a southern son suggests Dixieland. All this without being too cryptic or too obvious.

I hadn't until now completed anything short of a couple short format contest entries; nothing to bring to critique. For that reason, the mid-June (2008) critique session was my first experience having pages critiqued that were written as the end of a work.

You might arch your eyebrow and wonder what difference could there be between critiquing the last pages of a work and all the rest. At least I hadn't given any thought to that possibility. It makes perfect sense to me now though.

Simply put, the middle pages carry the action whereas the end carries action and ties up loose ends satisfactorily. And that doesn't mean we provide the reader with a happy ending necessarily, or give the sort of ending that pleases the reader. Satisfactorily, in this case, simply means the story must end in a way that keeps up our end of the contract with the reader to finish all storylines that we have introduced. The baby can die or the baby can live. It doesn't matter as long as we know what happened to the baby.

I had recently finished the newly retitled ‘Rain Of A Southern Son’. The group had been following the story from the beginning and remembered in imperfect but still astonishing detail much of what had happened to Mr. Salley. Obviously they hadn't lived with the story on a nearly daily basis as I had. So when the last words were read, they were in a much better position to spot questions that had or hadn't been answered sufficiently.

More on the specifics later, but keep in mind the different eye that is given to the end of your work.