So, I'm stuck. I'm stuck and unsatisfied. Despite all efforts I'm where I was six months ago with the Gingerbread. Unhappy, forcing things unnaturally and because of that, parts of the story are implausible. To remedy this, I braved the sweltering heat and bought four books in the genre I write.

I had, for a long time, eyed this one particular book. More drawn to the story of the author, I decided to pick up Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. At first, I wasn't impressed. It remi...

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Wow. This is more rough draft than I thought. Call of Bone was written in outline form about a year and half ago. Not only have I progressed as a writer, but the outline was written so quickly based on a fleeting whim that as I flesh it out I see where some things are not working. Aside from blaring holes, it seems that it will be wordcount short--something I'm sure I can fix easily with my verboseness.

I am telling myself not to get too emotionally attached to the outline, as it's obvious it ...
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I have to remember that this isn't a final draft I'm polishing. CoB was half-way finished when life interrupted writing a year ago. Now that I've been getting back into writing making my pieces marketable, when I'm completing the rough draft of CoB, I spend too much time rereading/revising and editing on the spot. I need to stop doing that or this will never get finished.

June has whipped by and I feel like I'm a little behind because I forgot how much was actually left to finish CoB. Hopeful...
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Part of being an author is critiquing. Not just your own stuff, but your peers. Your partners in scribe, your sounding boards, the only people in the world who seem to GET you. One of the many kernels of advice given to me by published authors is to have your manuscript read by as many people as possilbe. Find people outside your demographic, who aren't your normal audience, find friends who are readers--not writers, definitely have your writer friends read it as well, and by all means, if a ...
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I am way ahead of schedule! What I lost in getting stuck in the Shadow series, I made up for with GBM. Though, I anticipated that with the Gingerbread Man MS. It's still in rough draft form, and once I get feedback, if any, I'll revisit the story to further polish it, though whatever polishing that needs to be done, I'm confident it'll be simple.

The death of a character in this story was necessary. I knew it was, everyone told me it was, and while I fought it and fought, it just made sense. ...
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I forgot what a fast read GBM is. Because of the constantly switching point of views and the hyper-drive action, the 80K thriller is a read-in-one-day kind of story. That made revising it (and rereading it to find the character's voices again) also very fast. I made notes where I want to change things and go back and elaborate more to flesh out a stronger character or thicker plot, so once I complete THE ending my re-write and edit will be that much more streamlined.

As I mentioned before, I ...
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Ulterior Motive is as done as it's going to get. After revising it further, tightening it up and tweaking sections (not to mention finding lame grammatical errors and correcting them) UM is now 104K. I'll wait for the consensus to come back to see if there's further points I can edit.

I had to finish fleshing out the new story idea (Political Thriller) and my outline for the Zombie Apocalypse as those two things were preventing me from focusing on the very end of UM.

I am so excited to dive in...
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