Have any of you heard of the Amazon White Glove publishing program?

Here’s an interesting article on publishing your book if you have an agent.  I’m not sure I’d go this route because you lose some of the rights over your work for a time, but it’s an interesting read.  I’ve never heard of this program.  To read the full article and reader comments see Jane Friedlander’s blog here.

Still Rewriting my WIP

This is sort of how I feel right now

I know this is getting old, but I’m slowly making progress.  Most people don’t realize how long things like this take.  I only work on it in the evenings because of other things I should be doing daily.  I won’t even talk about this today.

The good news is it’s warming up a tad here, and I adopted a kitten Saturday, so to read about him see my other blog here.

Nothing Accomplished Today

Well I didn’t do one-blasted thing today except try to get a lizard out of the fireplace.  By the time we took the thing apart, the lizard vanished through an air hole and we never did get him.  Then it was cleaning up what you don’t see when it’s in the usual state of being a fireplace, and figuring out how to put it back together again.

Editing on my WIP and making packing progress didn’t happen.  To read this story, see my other blog here:  Surviving Life

Still revising my WIP

It's time to post again and sometimes I can’t think of anything at all useful to post on here.  I’m still too busy revising my WIP to put my mind on writing an intelligent post.

As some of you know, I’m doing this while trying to organize things toward my moving endeavor, deciding what to keep and what to part with.  The last couple of days I’ve been working on more rewrites than organizing.

On top of this, my husband sends me an ad about a cat that needs a home.  Oh geez!  I’m not one to send something like that too because you know where this will go.  Being the cat lover I am I always want to come to the rescue, especially after seeing the picture of this cute one-year-old baby.  He reminds me of a cat I had twenty years ago.  But that’s a story for another time and my other blog.  I’ve emailed the gal, so we’ll see if she still has him when she responds.

So back to my novel that my friend, Lisa, is critiquing for me.  I appreciate her help in bearing with me through this book that’s excessively long.  I’m wondering as I go through this thing if I should split it into two books.  I have about 150 double-spaced pages left to go on my rewrite and then I’ll to do a word search for some words I want to delete.  I’ve learned a lot by Lisa’s comments on my work.  It’s so important to have that other set of eyes.  Sometimes I can read the passage so many times that I skip right over the errors.

If you’re working on this now, some things to bear in mind are info dumps, which Lisa told me about right from the get-go.  They slow the story down and are only necessary in small chunks as the story moves along.  I’m not one to utilize an outline until after I write the book, except for keeping a Word doc of places and people in my book that I can reference.  With my mystery, I also added in all the murder evidence I would have to account for by the end of the book.  Otherwise, I’m not really an outline type of writer.

Another thing to keep in mind is POV.  This is another biggie for me as I’m doing this book in first person, my first attempt at this kind of writing.  I’m having fun with this now that I’ve got it all straight in my head, but I think you can do more using third person POV.  Because of the first person POV, some of my chapters are shorter than they would be in third person.  Maybe this isn’t ideal because you can’t use filler to make them longer.  Sometimes you really have to put on your thinking cap to come up with things that fit, aren’t redundant, and still move the story forward.

I usually write in third person, but I wanted to give a more personal feel to the story.  I think I can do that using first person.  This can be limiting at times, if you’re thinking about using it.

Another thing to bear in mind is “show not tell”.  We’ve all heard that many times.  However, it needs repeating because it’s better to have some description to draw the reader into the story.  This doesn’t have to be done everywhere, as long as you keep the telling part real short.  Think about the books you really love.  They would be boring with little or no description of the places, characters, and action in the story.  I’m good with description most of the time, but there are places I need to fix concerning this.

I really think I can read the book fifty times and still find something in there to rewrite.  That’s the nature of writing.  Nothing will ever be perfect in our eyes, but we can get it close if we try hard.

After I finish this rewrite, I want to get rid of the garbage (disposable) words.  I thought I had written them down and they are probably here somewhere on my desk, but right now there’s so much paper and many sticky notes all over.  I can’t lay my hands on it without going through everything, which I don’t have time for at the moment.

Then I remembered Lisa wrote a post on this last year, so I spent the last two hours looking for that post on her blog.  She listed all the garbage words that you can remove from your writing.  I couldn’t remember which month she posted it.  I’m linking to it here for those writers who need a reminder and are revising their work.  I don’t think Lisa will mind.  This is an excellent post to use when rewriting your WIP.

Please click on Lisa’s Djen Den to read this entire post.

Until next time, thank you for following me.  If you have any helpful writing hints, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Sunni

Still Editing and Rewriting

Yes, these are my new glasses.  I guess I'm officially old now.

I’m organizing, packing, doing house repairs during the day-- rewriting, and editing at night.  I’ve finally reached the halfway mark of this mystery book.  I only have about 250 pages left to go (double-spaced).  However, this book is excessively long.  After I reach the end, I need to see how I can cut some words, even though I’m doing it as I go.  We’ll see how brutal I can be.  I’m determined to have this thing done up to that point, at least, within the next two weeks.  Therefore, there’s no TV for me, limited internet time too, so I can focus on this until I’m ready to drop into bed at night.

Thank goodness they make DVR’s, so I can record and watch later.

That’s about the extent of my life right now.

The Numbers Don’t Look Good for Authors

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How many of you saw the article in Galley Cat, from 22 January, about the amount of money authors make?  This article talks about traditionally published as well as self-published authors.  The numbers, after interviewing both types of authors, show a small percentage of writers actually make a living writing, so we better love what we do, or not give up the day job, if we’re lucky enough to have one.

To read the full article, click on Galley Cat.

Sometimes I wonder if editing will ever end

Free Clip Art

I know many of us feel that way at times.  I’m still working on my mystery book that I finished writing a year ago.  I’m doing corrections and rewriting in places.  Generally, the result is adding more in the way of word count for me and not taking away word count.  I think I talk too much in general and this carries over into my writing.  So I’m trying to be careful about going through and removing redundant material and “garbage” words.  However, I’m not removing all of them if it sounds better to leave them in.  I’m hoping it doesn’t take me another year to get this book finished.  There are times I have to remind myself not to get frustrated.  Meanwhile, the next book in this series is sitting in my WIP folder, as I’ve already written the majority of it during the NaNo in November.

As some of you know, I’m trying to sell stuff, pack, and get the house ready to sell, etc at the same time.  This task is really cutting into my writing time, as well as looking for a place to move from here, so I’ve been lax about posting as often as I should.  Eventually, I’ll get back on a regular schedule again.

Happy writing everyone and lots of success in 2014