Boy Meets Geek Read Online Free PDF Page A

was going crazy, and it had absolutely nothing to do with an item that seemed to not exist.

4: Creative Writing
     
    “Magic? Really?”
    I blinked. I wanted to reach across the table and smack that smarmy look off of that asshole’s face. I don’t know why I expected anything different from a critique from the great literary master Ryan Arnold, at least he was a great literary master in his own mind, but there it was.
    “Do you have a problem with magic?” I asked.
    “I have a problem with genre fiction,” Ryan said. “You’re getting an MFA in creative writing. Why are you wasting your time with this garbage?”
    I balled up a piece of notebook paper in my hand and concentrated on crushing that rather than reaching out and trying to crush Ryan. Not for the first time I cursed the day he’d ever sat at the same table as me.
    “I don’t know, I thought it was okay and that stuff seems to be really popular right now,” Devon said, though the way he hesitated, glanced down at the short story I’d presented for a critique, told me he was thinking the same things but he was too polite to say them out loud. It wasn’t exactly the best defense in the world.
    “Just because something sells well doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile,” Ryan said. “And besides, we’re here to expand our writing ability. We’re here to learn new things about the craft. We’re not here to write about witches and wizards fighting goblins or whatever the hell this is about.”
    I rolled my eyes. He hadn’t even bothered to read the damn thing! And to think I’d wasted valuable time I could’ve spent playing Tales of Elassa a couple of nights ago reading that crap he’d vomited out on the paper about divorced parents or something like that. I’m sure he thought it was all very literary and mysterious, but the only thing I could think the entire time I read those twenty pages of crap was boo-hoo, baby’s still upset that mommy and daddy got divorced.
    But I wasn’t going to be violent. I wasn’t going to rise to what he was trying to start here. I was going to be the better person.
    “Do you actually have any constructive criticism?”
    “Yeah, stop writing this fantasy crap,” he said.
    I rolled my eyes. There wasn’t a chance I was going to stop writing this “fantasy crap” as he called it. For one it was my favorite kind of book. For two I was spending so much time playing Tales of Elassa these days that I’d started taking some of the role-playing scenarios I’d worked up in world and changed some of the names, reworked some of the settings, and presented them to my class as original works rather than the stuff that was based on a videogame I happened to be spending way more time than was strictly healthy playing.
    Genre fiction was already a four letter word in this class. They’d have kittens if they realized the stuff they were reading was fan fiction as well as genre fiction. Of course I still thought it was damn good even if it did start its life as role-playing scenarios for a video game.
    “What’s your problem with this anyways? It seems like this goes a lot deeper than not liking what I wrote,” I said.
    “You’re right,” Ryan said. “It does! I have to see this crap on TV, I have to see this stuff taking up space on the book store shelves while real writing by real writers…”
    He punctuated that sentence by smacking his own short story which was on the table in front of him. “Real writing like this barely even gets a shelf at the bookstore. The public doesn’t even know what’s best for it! It’s ridiculous that crap like this sells so well and literary stuff barely gets a mention!”
    “Well if they had a Nobel Prize in whining about literature then you’d certainly win it…” I muttered.
    “What the hell was that?”
    “What seems to be the problem here?”
    Like a guardian angel professor Timms stepped in. She was an older woman with auburn hair that definitely looked like it came off