Do you remember when you were a kid, and an hour actually was an hour? It was a lo-nnng time. Long enough that days seemed to last for a day, not a minute or two.
That was how my day was yesterday, and it was lovely! I was amazed at how nice it felt to look at the clock, expecting to see it was around ten but finding it was only eight. Then looking again, hours later, to find it was just ten.
I kept expecting it to speed up, to hit "normal" speed in the grup world where a minute lasts about a second (unless something bad is happening when that minute becomes ten seconds). But it didn't. All day and all evening time moved at a stately pace and I was thrilled.
I edited about ten chapters of 'Shady'. Not just edited, but read and tweaked and re-read and refined. I went back farther than where I wanted to actually start working, to make sure the transition from what I had to what I was creating would be seamless. It is. I've added a "spoiler" to Melanie's happy time. I've brought the story to where I wanted it to be, and have modified it a bit. I'm still not entirely happy, but it is better than it was.
From more than 122,000 words on Friday I'm down to 117,000 - even fewer than I was yesterday even though I've added detail and a few other things. The fat is being rendered and the roast is coming along nicely.
I also tweaked the blurb I wrote in preparation for submitting it this week. Sticking a fork in it on Saturday, I discovered it wasn't quite done, so I messed with it a bit and it's better. Now I have to see what's needed / expected and then decide if what I have will work, or if it needs work.
On top of all of that, this is a short work week here in the States. Thanksgiving is Thursday and our company (as most do) is closed on Friday - so I'll have a four day weekend to write and edit and fix and tweak and mess with my story. At the rate I'm going, I may beat the end of January deadline I've set for myself by five or six weeks. If I'm lucky.
Of course, I want to get through this pass, then do another. The end of the story has got to be as strong and well-refined as the beginning, and that's almost harder than writing the thing in the first place.
When I was participating in Authonomy, before it shut down last summer, everyone would read and comment on the first few chapters of a story. Because of that focus and attention, the first chapters always were the strongest - you got feedback on every little detail, all from different perspectives, and adjusted based on what was said and suggested.
The rest of the book would pretty much just lie there, unread and unloved. Personally, the vast majority of the books were okay but in my time there I never once found anything on which I would willingly spend my money. I'm too picky and most writing today is, in my opinion, lazy.
With the ease of self-publishing, the ability to publish a mediocre story at the press of a few buttons, there isn't a striving for real quality.
For instance, there's a book that's just been selected by Kindle Scout for publication, and it's a head scratcher to me. In my opinion it is, at best, mediocre writing.
The entire first chapter is pointless. It adds nothing to the story - nothing to the plot, nothing of merit to the main character, and the secondary character in that chapter isn't more than mentioned another time or two throughout the remainder of the book. Why is he there in the first place?
It also breaks about every rule of good writing there is for an opening scene.
The book (I won't say the story) opens with the first line about a barking dog. Okay... and then what? It's not explained. This is the first line of the book and that dog evaporates without explanation. Why is it there?
The main character wakes up. Big deal. So did I, this morning and yesterday and the day before. That is not an Earth-shattering event because there's nothing else going on. She opens her eyes and achieves awareness. Yippity-skippity.
The blackout curtains aren't as good as advertised. So what? What has that detail got to do with anything else in the story?
She's in bed with a man whom she neither likes nor loves. In the bathroom, which is about the most interesting thing that's happened so far, she has an internal soliloquy about how many times she's found herself in bed with him. Now there's a bright and shining light for the women's movement. The stereotypical woman who can't make up her mind about a man.
And, when that's all said and done, that scene has zero to do with the rest of the story which is about the apparent disappearance of this woman's younger sister. The first part that has to do with the actual storyline is when the main character walks out of work and finds her father waiting for her. He looks scruffy - not like his usual self, and isn't at work, not like his usual self. That's where the story really starts and all that came before is nothing but styrofoam packing.
This drives me NUTS! The book has the potential to be a much better story - if the opening had to do with the rest of the story.
Honestly, if that first chapter were taken out completely the only one who would notice would be the author. It's a darling, pure and simple.
Further, in the draft that I read, the male characters were no better than stick figures. They were mentioned in off-hand terms and, because of the casualness of how they were handled, they didn't even have enough depth or interest to qualify as cardboard cut-outs. They did not stand up off the plane of the page and "feel" as if they might be real people.
Yet this kind of writing qualifies as "publishable". What makes it "publishable" is, almost exclusively, because it's going to be an e-book and the author self-promoted and got a lot of friends to back it. None of that makes the story good. It was just pushed harder than the others.
Once it hits the shelves, assuming it makes it into print, I doubt it's going to go anywhere. There are just too many flaws, in my opinion. I certainly wouldn't buy it - not based on that first chapter or on most of the rest of it I read. It isn't interesting enough to me, although the premise has potential.
Now I am not saying that mine is better, because I don't know that it is. But I am trying to make it better, to make it more interesting and to make all of my characters, primary and secondary, interesting and better than cardboard. That's why I'm laboring over this so hard. I put the first half of it up on Write On back in September, and I haven't added anything to it in weeks. Primarily because I am rewriting much of it - tightening it up and killing my darlings.
And this, my critique of this other person's story, is why I don't write reviews. I'm too brutal, too demanding from the standpoint of a consumer.
Several months ago when I was participating in a "critique" group, I commented on another person's writing and got blasted for it. In that story, there were so many plot holes I could well have been spelunking through a cave system someplace. I pointed them out, honestly and without much in the way of cushioning because that's how I am - and how I prefer to have my own writing critiqued. That did not go down well.
I heard from another member of the group, privately, and was pretty well told that I was too harsh. Perhaps so, but that message didn't change my opinion. All it did was make me drop out of the group. I can't do squishy reviews. I can't do ambivalent critiques. Not about writing and its quality.
So, now that I've written what I have about this story, which may be recognized by someone reading this post, I'll probably get smacked for saying what I have, but I'm not going to retract this because it's one person's opinion. Mine. And I'm entitled to it.
Now, with that said, I'm going to go back to building my world, to killing my darlings and getting my characters up, standing on their own two feet.
Have a lovely day!
Best~
Philippa
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