In Which You Can Win Goods!

Elana Johnson is having another awesome contest (she is like contest queen) in which you can win books!

Yippee!

Go forth and enter!

Also Suzette and Bethany are having a contest that involves, not only free things like books and toffee (*droooool) but also the possibility for a 40 page partial submission and critique by Suzie Townsend of FinePrintLit!


Enter Here

In Which My Typo Is Hilarious

So I finished reading Foxfire.

It was weird; the parts that I thought were very weak, weren't as bad as I originally had thought, which is aways a pleasant surprise. Either that or I have an underservedly high opinion of my writing... I guess time will tell. And my crit group.

The pacing in the beginning seemed much much quicker than I had intended. I don't know if that's bad or not yet. I do think I'll be throwing in some scenes from some of the minor character's POVs (the ones that already have scenes and that I want to build up some more) so I'm sure that will help slow the pace.

I also came to the realization that it has a Part One and a Part Two.

I kind of hate that.

Mostly because I'm not a big fan of "parts" when I read books, but mine clearly has two. I think if I do decide to make them separate with a part distinction, it will help the pacing a bit in the beginning. I don't know, we'll see how it goes.

Also when I had finished writing it, I really thought the ending sucked big time. I thought it was much too passive and had too much of a touch of Deus Ex Machina (Tee Hee! I need to get a pet and name it that, just so I have a reason to say it out loud all the time. A ratty maybe...)
But when I reread the ending, I found it much more tense and action packed than I remembered. It still needs work (the Deus Ex Machina needs to go, or at least be trimmed so it's not as unbelievable) but I was much more pleased with it than I thought I would be.

The typos were horrendous. This is the only piece that I've ever written that I pretty much forbid myself to fiddle with as I went along. Normally I'm a "read the previous scene before I start the next part" type of gal. But not for this one.

Hence, the typos.



The best typo I found, and this may be the best typo I've ever made in all my years of sloppy typing, is the following:

What I meant to write:

She had striking long black hair

What I wrote (or what spell check cleaned up for me):

She had stinking long back hair.


Take it all in. Every word.

When I came across that (and Twin had highlighted it with a pen because she had obvs also found it hilarious) I laughed so long that I actually glossed over a few pages of reading because I kept thinking about the typo and kept laughing.

Ah good times.

Anyone else have a good typo they'd like to share?

PS: as of the writing of this post I'm at 92 followers (CRAZY!) once I hit 100 there will be a writing contest held with prompts and prizes!

Future Excitement!

Friday Fun Words

You'll never believe what happened on Sunday!

So Mom was writing out blog posts and I was sitting next to her when we heard a sound we had never heard before.

Fwwwooooshhhiiiissss is more or less what it sounded like.

Well of course George and I started barking. It was an emergency after all, a strange sound can be a dangerous thing...

So Mom got up (we let her go first because, you know, strange sound...) and walked into the dining room.

And what did we find? Tula's dog food bag tipped over and spilled ALL OVER THE FLOOR!



Of course Mom kept us out of there while she cleaned it up. But there was no way she could get every piece of kibble. That was when George and I got to go in and clean up the rest of it.

It was like a second breakfast!

Anyway, I thought I'd just share my bit of luck before we got into the words.





Obsoles - shoes that are no longer required



Pocardot - freckles on the Queen of Spades (this one is a bit of a stretch)



Explo - detonations for those people who are short on time



Liger - this is already a real word



Unwoody - what a beaver eats when they go on a diet (on a side note, in case you didn't know this, one of my many nicknames is Beaver)



Curefad - clearly when a cure is popular (like feeding everything antibiotics!)



Xpert - when someone is no longer vivacious





Bark at ya next week, ape friends!

In Which I Am Delayed

I'm behind on editing.

I know, I know, I was so excited to get started and I'm already behind? But I have some pretty good reasons as to why.

I'm still not done with reading the manuscript. I'm about half way there. It's one thing to read a mass market paperback. That is easy to carry around. But lugging around 300 pages of printer paper is not as easy, even if I've broken it up into four parts.

Also, Sundays are typically my day to do writerly things, but this last weekend we hit the Home and Garden Show. After hours of walking I came away with a new pillow, a garden gopher, a new set of earrings and a cute little owl statue.

my earrings

Twin's earrings

I've wanted an owl like this since I saw a similar one on Things I Yell At You

I was also reading a book on editing, which I hoped would get me in the mood. But the book was OK, and 98% of the stuff they suggested you do to edit your fiction novel was stuff that I already knew to do. So, meh.

So these are the foremost reasons as to why I'm behind on my revision process. Still, no rush I guess.

Anyone else behind on their goals?


Also, Al from Publish or Perish awarded me The Sunshine Award, which was awfully nice of him.

I'll be passing this on to Sonshine Thoughts (because it's fitting, right?)
And AchingHope (who is hilarious)

In Which We Like To Cook

So in my house, we rotate cooking duties. Brother cooks Monday, I cook Tuesday, Wednesday we go to our parent's house for dinner, Thursday Twin cooks and Friday we rotate.

We allow ourselves to eat out on Saturday and Sunday Twin and I rotate because brother is off doing super ultra nerdy things.

I decided recently to start taking pictures of some of our meals, because, you know, food is good.

Last week Brother made Tempura.

we just stuck with sweet potatoes, shrimp and onions, our favorite tempura options

Not that he wanted to, but Twin and I hounded him into it. Otherwise he makes a lot of soups and Asian dishes.

Tuesday I tried a new recipe: shrimp pot pies. It was so frickin' delicious that Twin and I had it again on Sunday (which was both a genius and terrible idea...)

Then on Thursday Brother and I told Twin that we wanted her baked mac and cheese. This time she wised up and only made a half a recipe so we didn't have so much left over.

it actually reheats pretty well

So how about you? Do you cook in your house, or is it a lot of take out or dining out?

In Which I Set A Hook

So since I have to cut my prologue in Foxfire, that means I have to start my story elsewhere.
And though it seems like it should be an easy decision (just remove the prologue and start at chapter one) it really isn't.

One of the most important things you can do to give your novel a starting chance, is to give it a great opening. After all, when an agent is looking at your manuscript you want him/her to get as far into your story as possible. You don't want them to read the first paragraph or page and then set it aside.

So a strong opening will strengthen your chances.

The best way to craft a strong opening is to start with a hook, and an inciting incident. The hook is something that catches your reader's eye. Something like "Fred thought things were going great until the monkeys attacked," or whatever. I'd keep reading after that, because, I mean, monkey attack!

The inciting incident is the moment where your character starts on the path to change. What is it that happens to your MC (or, better yet as we discussed in my posts about passivity, what is it your MC does) that starts that change?

Hopefully this will also set in motion a surface problem. A surface problem is just what it sounds like, a problem on the surface of the story. Typically these are solved but then another one arises, etc.

So for Foxfire I'm struggling a bit with wondering how I want to handle my inciting incident. There's two places I could start it and I originally thought it would be when Fox has an accident and injures himself. I still think this would be a great place to jump into the story. But the issue I have with that is that I would lose a big big chunk of Fox's story before that and I would like to build him up a bit before I stick him with the first disaster.

So it's looking more and more likely that the inciting incident will have to go earlier (coincidentally, in a chapter one scene) and I'll have to rewrite that chapter to start with the hook and bring about the inciting incident.

I'm really excited to dig into this part of my revision. It seems to me it will be like playing with clay, and I get to smash it all around before the clay comes out looking like a horse head (that's pretty much the extent of my ability to shape clay...)

So what's your inciting incident? And does it happen early enough in your story?

In Which Prologues Are No Longer Welcome

I love prologues. I love to write them and I don't mind reading them.
Recently, though, I came upon the discovery that many many people skip reading prologues all together. Prologues are kind of the "red headed stepchild" of the writing world and are looked down upon by many people.

Though, to be fair, I guess they've got a point when they state that almost all prologues (unless you're doing a frame story) is backstory. And since you never want to start your novel with backstory, you should cut that prologue and cut it quick.

And even though I know this, I still love to write prologues. My prologues almost always revolve around an incident with one of the characters that happened years earlier. It's almost always an inciting incident of some sort (for Foxfire, it revolves around how Fox, the Male MC is abandoned as a child), but not really of the novel itself.

So even though I love it, and I don't think it's really all that much backstory (even though this is just an excuse I tell myself) I know the prologue has to go.

Sadface.

The tough part, though, is to now take all of the necessary info in the prologue (and there is quite a bit of it regarding how the world works, etc) and inject it later into the story. The difficulty about this is I always want to stick it in too early and that is, of course, a bad idea because then I'd just be starting the novel with backstory again.

Hopefully once I draw out scene cards, I'll better be able to see where to stick the prologue bits.


So does anyone else write prologues? And do you keep them, or kill them?

Tomorrow, a bit more on where to start your story.

Also, two weeks ago I received the blogger purrfection award from the lovely Piedmont Writer(check her out if you're not already. I really enjoy her blog)