'Tis the Season of the Stuffing -- of the gobblers sitting around the table.
Lessons from My Reading: Went to the Northern Colorado Writers coffee this morning. Since they are local, I won't talk about them. But, I came away with a flaming insight -- I get craft input from more than the books I read. Online peer group forums are a great way to learn your writing craft and industry scuttlebutt. My favorite is Absolute Write Water Cooler (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/
Writers of all skill levels gather at the "cooler". You can lurk (just read). You can post. I do a bit of both. I think I've posted less than 200 times in the two years I've belonged. Others have posted thousands. Whatever, one of their forums is Bewares and Background Checks (or something similar) where there are lots of threads on agents and publishers. Another name for the forum might be Avoiding Scams 101.
Can't resist talking more about NCW. (http://www.northerncoloradowriters.com/) It's a great place to talk with writers who understand what you are trying to do -- even if you don't accomplish it. The director had us bring a writing question we wanted answered. Mine was 'which paranormal ability would would like to have?'.
Most responses wanted to control time in some way -- probably useless when trying to appeal to teens. But then, the participants were at or near retirement age. Guess I have to go crawling online to get out of my mind-rut. Why is this pertinent? I'm doodling with my next book (Maren) and need some abilities for my secondary characters. Age-specific characteristics.
Progress: Emma is resting before I start revising.
Blog. I'm thinking of upgrading this in some way, but will worry about it after the holidays. After doing it a while, I think I can sustain frequent input here ... even if I'm talking to myself.
(I do that very well. I even answer. Worse, I enjoy the more than talking with some real people.)
Maren. I'm gathering binder pages and file input (computer file, that is). All sorts of things are free-associating. Who knows what will appear in the manuscript. At the moment, I'm strengthening my villain's organization.
Gargoyles. Yeah. It's the manuscript I thought was ready for agent submission. Got a couple bites for a partial. No fulls. -- So, I dumped the prologue full of back story.
At the moment, I'm half way through editing it -- eliminating typos, passives, replacing phrases with single verbs, chopping redundencies, etc. etc. Then, I'll send it out to agents again. There're still gobs of them I haven't submitted to.
1 comment:
There is something very appealing about a boring life, Kay. It gives us more writing time and it's probably less expensive. Maybe we should call it something else, though. Like contented, or peaceful.
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