Critiques?

I’ve been actively working on some other projects that I haven’t – and won’t blog about. However, I’m still looking at polishing these projects. I have a wonderful, amazing and talented group of critique partners, but we’re all busy writing and doing other real life things. I’ve been thinking that I need more critique partners, but the question is: How do you find them? How did you find yours?

During my first NaNoWriMo I lucked out and hooked up with some amazing women who write better than I do. We’ve stuck together and shared a lot of our joys and frustrations of writing, but like I said, I can’t burden them all the time. So it stands to wonder, should I fish in the NaNo pool to try to find more crit partners? How do you evaluate someone to know if they’re good or not for your project?

On a whim last week I joined two online critique sites. Both operate under a critique and be critiqued method where you gain credits or points from each critique you do, which can be spent to put your own critique up for consideration. I was obsessively checking them both to begin with, and then I got busy. I’m working up the nerve to go through the critiques and work out some things and do the next chapter, if these look worthwhile.

I’m not sold on the idea of the online, whoever wants to critique it can, style. There’s a certain bond you develop with someone who sees a project all the way through to the end and reads a whole piece. They can offer feedback on a whole manuscript, and not just that chapter. Maybe I can find people on the sites who want to go to a direct one-on-one approach, but how do you broach that subject? Is it considered rude to bypass the website?

So that’s where I’m at this week. I’m not really focusing on revisions or writing or critiques since I’ve been so ‘on’ over the last few months. This week is more of a recharge week. Lots of cleaning and reading and doing Book Addicts stuff. Next week I really want to be cracking on the revisions, so critique partners are going to be on my mind a lot.

Do you have critique partners? Where did you meet them?

#ROW80 Check In

I haven’t done a proper accounting of what I’ve been doing as far as my ROW 80 goals.  Though I’ve been working on them, everything has been overtaken with my Savvy participation.  It’s worked because the goals have matched up, but I haven’t been focused on this.  There’s two weeks to go, so here’s hoping I can do a good showing of myself over the next two weeks.

ROW 80 Goals…

1. Finish Casual Love

The story is done.  This week I’m going to do a read through and begin writing the new beginning.  I’m disappointed that I need a new beginning, but it will be stronger if I start the real tension earlier in the story.

2. Finish at least two short stories.

I’ve finished two: Rescue Me and Decoy.  I’m working on a third with a ridiculous name because I couldn’t come up with something that worked.  Names are difficult for me.  *sigh*  I’m hoping to finish it by the end of ROW.  I’m well into the story, but thanks to June and the boot camp I’m a little burned out on solid write, write, write!

3. Do writerly things every day.

With a few exceptions, I’ve written almost every day of the last three months.  That’s a major success I think.  Building that daily habit is important.  My day doesn’t feel complete unless I have written something.

4. Juggle revisions and writing.

This has been fairly successful.  I do better by large when I can focus on revisions or writing, but I can do both.  Right now I’m doing deep edits on Decoy while polishing Rescue Me and making progress on the zero draft of Booty-Call Bust.  It’s difficult, but I think I’m learning!

Overwriting your plot?

I’m just going to have to accept the reality of something that I’ve done – to myself.

I’ve overwritten my plot.

I think I started my story 40K too soon.  I’m more than a little bummed about this, because I need to somehow condense all of the events that happen during that 40K into back story and still keep the overall flow happening.  It means that revisions will be complicated, but I’d already anticipated a good deal of problems with the story.  In a way it’s good that I’ll be trimming it down so much because the hero and heroine don’t interact as much as I wanted them to.

This isn’t the first project where I see big problems during the writing.  When writing Blood Bound I knew that I would need to fix certain things in revisions.  It just made sense to do it then, as fixing it in the ‘zero draft’* would mean basically going back and revising the beginning of the story.

For this reason I have a tab in my OneNote novel notebook that is devoted to my revision notes.  I make notes of inconsistencies, character quirks that evolve as I write that need to be added in before, inside jokes that can be established quicker in the draft.  It’s usually the first thing I go through and fix in revisions.

I’m talking about OneNote this month as part of my Organization topical blogging, so for more information check out those blogs.

Do you think ahead to revisions when you write?  How do you handle the urge to go back and fix your ‘mistakes’?

*term zero draft courtesy of Suzan and her clone-motherness.

Writing Update

It’s Monday! Already? Lordy, where has the time gone?  Well, if it’s Monday then it means it’s time for me to check in and account for what I’ve been doing.  Accountability is a big motivator for me – that and the competition factor with my other #writersdatenight girls.  If I don’t have something to show for my week, I feel shame!  But no shame for me over this last week.  Oh my goodness, I have done a LOT!

Blogging.

I have topical posts scheduled through, are you ready for this? MARCH! YES! March! I’m not announcing what I’ll be blogging about next month, but I’m happy with the posts.  There will be fewer topical posts, but I’m okay with that.  February has been a lot of work to get going, and I feel like instead of having a nice, targeted shot with each post – I’ve been firing buckshot and just hoping to hit the target.  March will be better.  Besides that, I have a new blogging feature I’ll be talking about later this week, I believe… Unless I change my mind and push it out, which is a possibility.

Revising.

This needs to be handled, like, someone give me a timer and Make. Me. Do. It. I’ve started the terrible process of himhawing around and wondering if I should just shelve the project because ‘Maybe it’s not really that good’ or ‘Revising is such a hassle. I’d rather write!’ or any number of other very invalid excuses for Not Revising.  I finished the read through of the zero draft on Sunday, and I’m working on my big revision notes of the stuff that really needs to be fixed.  In a day or two I want to start tackling this.  I would like to get halfway through this draft by the end of the month, which roughly means 10 – 15 pages of edits a day.

Writing.

This was a huge success this week, like phenomenal.  It felt so good to just sit down and do tons of writing in one sitting.  I haven’t really done this since November/December and I’ve missed that feel that something is just pouring out of you and you have to struggle to catch it all because every bit only comes out once and there’s no second chances.

Project: Formerly Fat Club: prequel novella, yet unnamed
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Type: Novella
Progress: This is a novella that I’m writing for a currently seekrit project.  The project was so seekrit that I forgot about it and realized this last week that I needed something to contribute.  Because I’ve been working on my contemporary romance, I came up with the idea of exploring the main character of the first novel’s sister.  She’s not technically part of the Formerly Fat Club, but I do talk about how it effected her life growing up with her sister and her sister’s problems.  It’s a sweet romance, which means the culmination of the romance is a kiss, but the characters were a lot of fun to write and the story just jumped onto the page.  I finished the 20K novella in three days.  I loved it!  I also learned more about the main character of Casual Love by writing about her sister and their deceased grandparents.

Project: Formerly Fat Club: Casual Love
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Type: Novel
Progress: I am currently working through the material I had written before, changing the story from first person to third.  It’s time consuming and doesn’t put many words on the page, but when it’s all said and done I’ll be much farther along in the story than I was.  What’s really fun is that I’ve come up with ideas for the following books featuring each of the Formerly Fat Club ladies, and an idea for a spin-off novella.  I’m getting a lot of encouragement about this project from my friends so I really think I am going to see this project through to the end this time!  I sat down on Sunday and wrote out the plot for the rest of the book and I’m excited and nervous about it.  I’m writing up a synopsis to send to my other writer friends to read over and give me feedback on, so hopefully I’ll be writing lots on this in the near future.  I’m going to be writing up the other character profiles soon too!

Project: Reti Guild
Genre: Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Type: Novel
Progress: I feel terrible because I’ve skipped writing on this all week to work on the novella, but I did a lot more research and started working on how the religions all mesh.  This weekend I’ve been focusing on getting to know my antagonist, I feel like I shouldn’t write much more until I figure him out.  Granted, he doesn’t really show up for most of the novel, but knowing him and his motivations will help out writing.

All in all, I’m very excited about the way this week has gone.  Now to tackle this next week!!!!

Whew!

Well alright, there’s been a lot – and then not a lot – going on. It’s been sort of a huge sweeping pendulum.

Last week I sent off my novella to Samhain, which was both a huge relief and a thrill. I like what I turned out and though I’m not sure that it fits what they were looking for, I know I took a chance and I’m okay with that. I’m toying with extending the plot in the case that it is not accepted and submitting it elsewhere.

I’ve also been doing a lot of reading. So far in January I’ve read like 30+ books. What. The. Heck. Where do I find the time?

My revisions are starting slowly as far as Gate Keepers is concerned. I really should have done more on it this week, but I didn’t and I’ll have to double time it this week.

And, as of this weekend, I have a new project to work on, well, two really. One is something I started last year but never followed through on, and the other is a new idea.

Brief update, yes, but I’ll be doing a monthly check in soon!

More on BB and revisions and stuff!

As I sit here typing this, my brain numb, I’ve just rewritten the ending for my novella – Blood Bound – AGAIN. However, I like this one best I think. I scrambled last night to get the whole thing under word count, and in it’s current incarnation it is, but tonight I will do another read through and see what I have left and what needs to be fine tuned just a bit more before I go off and let yet another person read it. I’m no longer bleeding optimism about the fate of my book, but neither am I bemoaning how awful it must be. I’ve settled somewhere in the middle. I like the characters and the story. I want to write what happens next – because I’m still not quite sure what happens!

I think this is the story of the new Earth finally emerging from it’s cocoon and moving forward – but to do that it needs a new kind of guardian. I’m working over it in my head, but I’m sure the rest will come to me later!

So for now, I’m happy that Blood Bound is one step closer to being done.

Draft 2, and whole new directions

Okay, so I knew I was going to be changing stuff in Draft 2, but I didn’t expect to write a new ending!

Draft 2 took much longer to get through than I anticipated. I cut around 4,000 words of stuff that I decided wasn’t necessary. Most of it was smexy bits; I felt that I was sacrificing a more complex story for the sake of having smexy bits. So – I cut the smexy bits and beefed up the plot. All in all, I think I will be much happier with the way draft 2 reads.

My goal is to hand this off to my critique group by the time I leave for Florida on Wednesday. That gives me very little time to do my vocal read through and revise the new ending, but I have today off, and the rest of the weekend free to work on this and I intend to do just that!

I have, however, hit the wall of thinking everything I’ve written sounds dumb. Hopefully I go back to being excited about it this time around or else I run the risk of getting nothing done. Eeek!

Okay, off to eat and then work on this!

Draft 1 and Beyond!

I’ve officially gone through and done a whole slew of revisions to Blood Bound. As I was saying the other day, I removed a big chunk o’ stuff and I think I’ll be cutting even more to come on this next pass. My inspiration came from reading two Nalini Singh novellas today. I adore her Psy-Changling series and while struggling over what to do with some portions of my novella, I think I’m going to take a lesson from what she has done and rework some things.

But, first I need to put it down for a day, read, knit, watch some Dr Who and then come back with ‘fresh’ eyes and look at it again. I’m hoping that this next pass will be quicker than the last. The most painful will be the third – when I start reading out loud. I have a feeling I will be ripping things to bits when I do that. I passed up some dicey parts because I was making the focus all about plot and world building this last time.

All in all, I’m still excited about this project, and maybe even a little hopeful.

When less is more.

I’m on page 72 of 113 of the novella revisions. I’m very happy with the way Blood Bound is coming. There’s a lot to work on, things to make tighter and emotions to ratchet up to the next level. In doing all of this I started to contemplate the number of sensual scenes I had written in the original text. I knew during NaNo that I was writing them for the word count and that I wanted to give myself more than enough material to play with during revisions.

After mulling it over in my head the last few days, I’m going to cut a significant portion of the more sensual moments. This isn’t to say that I’m taking the sex out, I’m just going to make the bits that are left to read more meaningful.

When I stepped back and read over what I was looking at, I asked myself a few important questions.

• How does this move the story along?
• What do we learn that is important about the characters?
• Is there a better, more efficient way to communicate the important details?

Quite honestly, in two instances, there are much more efficient ways to handle the situation than letting the moment play out on the page. I can communicate those details in conversation and have more elbow room to compound the plot and make the overall story more exciting, and by waiting until later to show the intimacy level of the characters it will make the end result more meaningful.

So, today I’m looking at decisions where less really is more.

Revisions: The Read Through

Tonight – er last night – I did a “quick” read through of Blood Bound. I’m chaffing at the 30K word limit. I keep thinking that if I just had a little bit more elbow room I could do this or that really cool thing.

What was really nice about this read through was that I found I’m still excited by the story. Yes, I stripped it down to a very small part of the full story arc, but it’s still a great spring board for the next novella in the series – or else a good starting point to do something else with it if everything doesn’t pan out in February.

I read through it on my ereader, which was a nifty experience in and of its self. As I read I made some notes about things I want to do when I go back through the text. In the next few days I’ll be concentrating on adding a few scenes. This is going to bump it over the word limit, but I’m just going to have to suck it up and trim words later.

After I add the scenes I think I need I want to work on world-building; I need some info dump. There’s just no way around it to explain everything, so I’m going to find a few places where I can insert an artfully written paragraph to explain things and flesh stuff out.

Then begins the really fun stuff where I go through and start hammering at sections with a pen and making angry faces at awkward sounding sentences. There’s going to be a lot of those. I’m sighing inwardly in frustration.

Right now it’s like looking at a diamond in the rough. I know it’s there. It needs some polish. I just know it’s going to be great! Now if only I can buff it just right.

Also, yes I made a new mock cover. I decided I really didn’t like the last one. This one is prettier, but I just can’t find an image I like well enough. Oh well.