My first reaction to editing notes is always shock, horror, and "How could you criticize my deathless prose! Heathen! Philistine!" But recognizing the problem is half the battle. I don't know how pros do it. They probably don't react like their only precious darling child has been prepped for a beauty contest, only to be booted in the first round.
According to "how to write" books that is, in fact the normal reaction. The way the pro's handle it is to send out short note thanking the editor or beta responder for the feedback, taking a deep breath, putting the feedback aside, and looking at it again the next day. By then they have recovered from the shock of criticism and are able to evaluate it rationally. (Your time may vary. Some writers are able to reach that stage within hours, some take weeks, but very few don't have that initial reaction. The secret is not in not having that reaction, but in moving beyond that.
Maybe someone can tell me how to deal with the "why won't someone publish my book cause it can't be my fault" reaction.
Okay, I'm writing a story where my character, aged somewhere mid-thirties, is going to eventually find out she had experimental brain surgery as a child, but right now, her hairstylist has just discovered the scar. What would it look like?(bearing in mind that I pulled this particular operation out of my butt and it doesn't currently exist, but let's say she had a "pacemaker" of a sort implanted in her brain's motor center.) Like I said, being that I made this up, it doesn't have to stand up to fact-checking, but I'm drawing a complete blank.
I just image-googled "brain injury scar" and some good pictures came up -- it looks like they can get pretty unobtrusive, but I don't know how no one would have noticed before. Maybe previous haircutters were just more discreet?
Maybe she could have the wrong idea about where she got the scar from...her memories have been manipulated, too, so maybe she remembers it as happening from a childhood rollerskating accident, but it didn't. Because after I posted that, I went to the Google and while I was surprised about how small they can get, not quite *that* small, you're right.
I signed up for NaNoWriMo, username Laga. Who else is in this year?
Had a dream last night with a plot bunny. A hit woman is close friends with a woman, and is hired to kill that woman's husband. She is too professional to consider not taking the job. As an act of kindness she does persuade to couple to take out a large life insurance policy. She murder the husband a few weeks after the policy goes into effect. And of course that act of kindness eventually leads to her being caught, because the wife eventually grows suspicious, wondering why her friend was so insistent on their taking out that policy.
i'm registered as tskaredoff. Thursday.
I decided not to do NaNo after all--I've almost finished the first "act" of my WIP, and I'm in a place where I want to go back and do some rewrites rather than push forward.
The place my head is in, I could probably use NaNo to write this short story I promised. But deadlines and I are unmixy things, I get stubborn and think I'm proving something to the universe by saying, "I'm not going to get it done, and you can't make me!"
It is not helpful when you have authority issues with the inside of your own head.
Hee hee! I love the email I got from NaNoWriMo, especially this part:
leave ugly prose and poorly written passages on the page to be cleaned up later. Your inner editor will be very grumpy about this, but your inner editor is a nitpicky jerk who foolishly believes that it is possible to write a brilliant first draft if you write it slowly enough.
