Witing News
This week Sweet Boy#1 and I took the glorious trek to Office Depot, printed up my manuscript, and mailed it off to my second marvelous beta reader. So now they are both off into the world, ready for the scratch scratch scratch of the red pencils of doom that shall mold my stories into…I’m not exactly sure what. But it is bound to be better that what I myself offer up independently. Thank you thank you illustrious and brave beta readers! By all means, mark away.
Also, I began Rough Draft#6 this week wherein I again look at every paragraph of the story. I only made it to page 32. But in this read through I make sure that each paragraph has a beginning, middle, and ending and ensure that each word is exactly what I wanted. As I read each page I keep an eye out for tension and how I can add tension. This is my version of the “tension on every page” exercise from the writing the breakout novel workbook. You are supposed to go through the pages randomly looking for tension, but I am doing them in order. I am sure that random is more effective, but occasionally I must rebel against my shelf of writing books and combine a few revisions. So Rough Draft#6 will be both a tension tune-up and a paragraph polish.
It seems kind of scary after only six drafts, but I think (knock on wood) that this will be my last major on my own revision. I will of course revise the story according to the feedback of my first two beta readers and then again to the specifications of my two (hopefully) final beta readers. And then I’ll do a final read through and revision after taking a break from the story for a month while writing something totally different. But yeah, it’s scary because I’m almost done and it looks like I might actually come in under the two year mark on this one. Yikes! Could it actually be done if it doesn’t take five years?
