Deb,
Thank you. I was leaning towards that one as well. I think it's a little more cryptic then Unwritten, but what the hey, it's a bookish audience right? For the new piece, I was leaning toward reading the haikus again... Although is it a faux-pas to read something(non-published) more than once?
sj
It's in Adobe Acrobat form... Do you have it on your computer? Even if you do, it could be that the site -relatively new in that it was totally revamped- has still got some kinks to work out. Thank you for trying though.
Why a faux-pas? Best way to get them published.
It's in Adobe Acrobat form... Do you have it on your computer?
No. Sorry, wish I could have helped.
Brynn, I agree with Deb. Unwritten is good, but it doesn't have quite the air of mystery that Lucid has. It's got layers. Beat's a nice way to put it.
Insent with the story you e-mailed me yesterday. I'm sorry I didn't get it to you sooner.
sj, I still owe you yours. Sorry. Things have been awfully hectic lately.
I'm really going to try to sleep now. Goodnight all.
sj, I still owe you yours. Sorry. Things have been awfully hectic lately.
No worries. Get some sleep.
Bow before me, for I am Susan the Word Slayer.
I'm, oh, a sixth or a seventh of the way through my manuscript on my first editing pass, and I've already cut over 2,000 words!
Wow, Susan, that's fantastic!
Well, it helped when I asked myself why in hell I'd felt the need to introduce and give a personality to the housemaid who plays lady's maid to the heroine at the house party where most of the action takes place when she has absolutely no relevance to the plot. I cut two pages in one fell swoop without losing a bit of plot or characterization.
Hee! Susan slays the Unnecessaries!
Random editing rambles....
As it stands, Lucy meets her future husband James on page 64 of a 530-page manuscript (for those of you who got my editing copy, it fattened up considerably when I changed the font to Courier to make it all professional-like). To my eye, the story really picks up once he appears. For starters, he's the hero, and he's an energetic person who likes to shake things up. And, he slightly edges out Lucy as my favorite character. I love writing him, and I love any scene he's in.
So I keep asking myself if there's any way I can move that first meeting forward, perhaps even open the book with it. And I keep deciding I can't--that the reason James shakes up Lucy's life so much is in how he contrasts with and contradicts everything she's always taken for granted, and I need that first 60 pages or so to set the scene and introduce her properly. Otherwise it's just a woman meeting a man, not a particular woman meeting the man who'll turn her well-ordered world upside down.
But I'm not happy with the first 60 pages. I don't fall in love with my own story until James comes in.
