Oh dear, I’ve been slacking off in my blogging already, although to be fair, I have been ridiculously busy doing volunteer work at my kids’ school lately. Anyway, since my last post, I’ve finished chapter 14 and also I attended my second meeting with the critique group. Once again, they gave me excellent feed-back, and I feel like I must be improving somewhat since there were a lot less edits than last time. I think (I hope!) I’ve been pretty good about accepting their criticisms because they’re certainly constructive and helpful. Because the nature of my book is a fantasy escape from the everyday, i.e., it’s not really very serious, I think we’ve been able to joke around and all the comments are light-hearted. Today I incorporated the edits from the group for chapter 2, and worked on fixing up chapter 3 for their perusal. Chapter 3 is kind of long-ish (more than twice as long as chapter 2), so I only got half way through. I hope it doesn’t matter that the chapter lengths are sort of inconsistent. Are there unwritten rules about this?
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My brain is a bit fried after writing all morning as well as this evening, however, I finished chapter 13 and am almost half way through chapter 14. I’m trying to get some extra writing time in because I know I won’t get much of chance to write next week since I somehow got signed up to volunteer at the school three days next week! I’ve been thinking about how I could edit my manuscript to death and it will still not be perfect. I’m consoling myself with the fact that every published book I’ve ever read has mistakes in it though. Take Stephen King’s “‘Salem’s Lot” for example (yes, it has vampires in it). I noticed one line where he said a woman hadn’t quite “unthawed” to a certain fellow, meaning that she hadn’t warmed up to him. Too bad “unthawed” would technically mean “frozen”. I felt very smug about noticing this error, but I’m sure Mr. King sitting on his mountain of money has a million reasons to be smug. I also noticed in one of the books I’m reading that’s part of the Noble Dead series by Barb and JC Hendee (yes, also with vampires) that some poor sucker was stabbed in their right eye, but two pages later it was their left eye. Books laden with errors piss me off, but books with only the odd mistake make me feel all smug when I notice them. So maybe, my book would be better with the odd mistake so I can make other people feel smug!
Finished up chapter 12, and started lucky 13 today. I have three main characters, all of whom are very different, so it’s kind of a challenge to switch from one character’s point of view to another. Each chapter is from the perspective of one of the three main characters, so to move from chap 12 to 13, for example, I have to go from being in the mind of a 200+ year-old vampire, to the mind of a 17 year-old guy. Then onto chapter 14 into the mind of woman in her 20′s, fun! None of these people even remotely describing myself of course, but that’s what makes it so amusing.
Wrote the first half of chapter 12 today, and doing the research for it has been quite fun. My main characters are in Vegas, another place I have never been myself of course! I’m relying heavily on Google for researching luxurious hotels, etc. If you could mind-control your way into renting a hotel room, wouldn’t you get the most kick-ass room ever? And boy, are there some crazy expensive “rooms” to be had! When money’s no object, $25 to $40 thousand a night is nothing, right? I think that’s the whole point behind writing a fantasy book – letting the reader experience a world beyond reality.
I finished up chapter 11 today in good time, so I might even start chapter 12 (that never happens… it seems like I always finish a chapter just in time for a late lunch). I was thinking about all the poor suckers I’ve found to review my book so far – I don’t think a single one of them would normally choose to read a teen vampire novel. One woman said she hoped she didn’t have nightmares after reading the first chapter, which I found highly amusing. I personally find the level of violence in my book to be pretty minimal, with only the rare decapitated head flying through the air, ha ha! Of course, I love shows like True Blood: that show makes me laugh a lot. And that scene in Daybreakers where the vampire dude blows up into a million little pieces of blood and gore, so funny!
I spent the first part of my writing time this morning on a recount of a casual get-together with my best friend, Heather. There wasn’t anything particularly notable about the occasion, but it perfectly illustrated her natural kindness and generosity. I thought it would be a fitting tribute to what would have been her 39th birthday, tomorrow. Anyway, after I wrote that, I went back to working on chapter 11, which is probably half way finished. My DH and I did a bit of research to see if we could find any instances of publishers that specifically say on their web sites, “Don’t send us any vampire stories!”, and all we could find were publishers that said, “Send us your vampire stories!”. This seems encouraging, but I still have plans to create a whole section on my blog site for rejection letters. On a completely different note, would it be tacky for me to “Like” my own blog site on Facebook?
You know what’s nice about my blog entries? I don’t have to worry about anyone editing or critiquing it… I’m not trying to sell it. I can just write whatever the hell I want! There’s probably typos and all sorts of rotten grammar, and who really cares? Anyhoo… I spent some time today editing chapter 2 to prepare it for the writer’s group critiquing session next month. I tried to carry over all the suggestions they had, using less of the passive voice for example. We’ll see what they make of it. I also started chapter 11. So to sum up my progress so far: it’s taken me 27 “days” of writing to complete approximately 1/3 of my book. My schedule of writing all morning both Wednesdays and Fridays seems to be working quite well. Unfortunately, I have almost completely stopped working on finishing our basement, but it’s all about priorities after all!
I attended the writer’s group for the first time early this week, and they critiqued my first chapter. It was a bit weird revisiting the first chapter, but I had some excellent input. I spent all of today editing the first chapter based on the group’s comments. I am officially sick to death of my own first chapter – I feel like I’ve read it over a hundred times. I hope I never have to look at it again! They say the first chapter is the one that really counts since it makes the first impression, obviously. I feel like it’s a much stronger chapter now, so hearing all the criticism (mostly constructive) was definitely worth it.
Besides being my daughter’s 7th birthday, today is also the day I finally got back to writing! I didn’t write a single word during the entire Christmas holidays, but now that the kids are back in school, here I am again. This makes me think that I won’t get a chance to write all summer long when the kids are home, but we’ll see. I’m quite sure that I won’t be able to finish the whole book before summer vacation is here. I wrote another 1200 words today, and I think I’m half way through chapter 10. My first meeting with the writers’ group is coming up in less than a week, so we’ll see what they do to critique my Prologue and first chapter… hmmm, I’m a tad nervous!
Spent today going over the rest of what I’ve written (that is, chapters 1-6) to add in more description. I have to say, doing so is decidedly less fun that doing the actual writing. Which makes me think, maybe I should try writing with more description in the first place so I don’t have to go back and add the odd sentence or two here and there. Anyway, I’ll get to do some actual writing next time – on to chapter 10 at last!