Page 3 of Guys Can't Write Romance
Chad was already counting down the hours.
Chapter two
Writers Groups and Other Contact Sports
Daisy arrived at the writers’ group meeting that night to find Margaret, Olivia, and Ruth already gathered at the long conference table. That left Bernie, Phil, and Helen still missing. She deliberately left out Chad. Hopefully, his Jeep broke down, and he wouldn’t be able to make it. She crossed her fingers.
The group met weekly in the back room of the Book Nook Cafe, one of LA’s trendy writer hangouts, with wood-paneled walls covered in art déco paintings of coffee cups, shelves lined with used books, and a coffee bar.
Daisy sat down and spent the next few minutes meticulously arranging her writing materials with the precision of a museum display. Her notebook sat open, flanked by color-coded pens, carefully arranged in neat ascending color order. By the time she finished organizing her workspace, Bernie, Phil, and Helen had arrived and unpacked their materials.
That left only one member still missing. Chad.
“Can we just lock the door and pretend we’re not here?” Daisy asked Margaret.
Margaret Foreman, or ‘Mags’ as everyone called her, was the group’s undisputed grand dame and moderator, thanks to multiple rankings on the New York Times’ bestseller charts. She smiled as she checked her watch. “He still has a few minutes. Let’s give him that.”
“Do we have to?”
Mags grinned. “It’s only fair. We would expect the same from him.”
Daisy groaned and sank down in her chair, whispering a quiet prayer.
Apparently, God wasn’t listening that night, as Chad arrived in his characteristic gym clothes and baseball cap a few minutes before the meeting began. As he hurried over to his chair and sat down, he noticed Daisy’s rainbow array of colored pencils and markers laid out neatly on the far side of the table.
“Chromatic order again?” Chad said.
“Bite me, McKenzie,” Daisy muttered. Why couldn’t Mags have just locked the stupid door?
Olivia Bennett, or ‘Liv,’ as she preferred to be called, a former travel journalist, leaned back in her chair. “Oh, this is going to be good,” she murmured to Helen Hargrove, who was trying not to laugh. In some demented way, the group had come to enjoy the bickering between Chad and Daisy. It added spice to the meetings.
Phil Warren, a retired engineer turned thriller writer, cleared his throat. “Shall we begin?”
As manuscripts were passed around, the anticipation grew. When it was Chad’s turn to present, he pulled out pages that looked like they’d been through a war. Coffee stains spotted the pages, with scribbled notes in the margins and plenty of cross-outs.
“Please don’t let it be another horror,” Daisy pleaded, hands folded on the table and eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Please, please, please...”
Chad grinned. “I prefer to think of them as ‘creative chaos’.”
“I prefer to think of them as ‘unreadable’,” Daisy shot back.
Mags was already enjoying this ‘energy’ immensely. She’d been trying to get these two together for months, convinced they were perfect for each other. “Now, now,” she said, her voice dripping with mischief, “let’s hear Chad’s latest... creation.”
Chad cleared his throat and began to read. It was, predictably, about a group of college students being chased by something slimy and terrifying.
When he finished, Ruth adjusted her glasses. “Well, that’s... certainly something.”
Bernie leaned forward. “Where’s the humanity in the monster, Chad? What drives it?”
Phil nodded. “From an engineering perspective, the viscosity of the slime seems improbable.”
Daisy couldn’t help herself. “I thought you were adding romance to this one.”
“There’s romance!” Chad protested. “The girl and the monster. They kind of connect.”
“And then he slimes all over her.”
The group exchanged looks.
