With Ulterior Motive at a friend's who is an editing whiz (she should do this professionally!) and the Gingerbread Man currently being reviewed and critiqued by friends/fellow writing colleagues, the question is, which manuscript should I tackle next?

It could take a few months before Ulterior Motive is back to me to rewrite, and same with the Gingerbread Man so querying them might actually not be feasible until beginning of 2012. Perhaps that's not a bad thing. With so many literary agent pow...
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This year my writing world has been productive. More productive than it has been in the last 3 1/2 years (basically since I started & finished my bachelor's program). This summer I made it a point to get more involved in the industry. 

 I read from the genre I love to write in and completed the entire Sigma Force series, the entire Millennium series (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series), and tried as best I could to get through Oryx and Crake. I'm all for a apocalyptic stories, whether the ...
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A dirge of bloated brass and gut-rattling bass is playing as I march a quasi funeral parade with Brandt Bogue to the Boneyard Bayou. Call of Bone is going to purgatory until I can figure out how to better make use of the story line. 

I'm not being lazy.

I promise.

I'm not blaming writer's block on the unwillingness to focus harder on the story. It's just that it simply isn't going to work the way I want it to. And if I'm going to keep up with my "make as many manuscripts marketable" for my Query...
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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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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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We are always on a path of continual growth and I can honestly say I've had my own personal writing breakthrough. It came after reading four different suspense thrillers this weekend. Actually, I should say, re-read. I've not been able to read for pleasure in so long that I went hogwild in the genre of manuscript I'm trying to publish. It was a smart thing to do, because I realized, in comparing my own writing to these authors, who bookish and "telling" my writing can be. Instead gently leadi...
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Ever take an art class and you're working on your masterpiece, whether it be oil or pastels or even acrylic and you're just not as happy with it if you add just one more thing? Or you try too hard to make it perfect and end up spoiling the art? I feel like that's where I'm at with Ulterior Motive. Currently it's in the hands of three people; one, a writer, another an avid reader, and the third an English major (I'm a glutton for punishment), but despite this, I've already made changes after t...

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Characters. Antagonists and protagonists, supporting and unimportant--we all have them. But how do we get them? How do we name them? The all seem to have their own unique personalities with minds of their own who hijack scenes and steal the plotline from you. They live inside us like some sort of latent personality disorder and are all distinct individuals. How do they get there?

Who is our inspiration for our characters? For me, they all seem to possess elements of people I know. I think it's...

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