New Beta Readers

WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL has reached that point. You know, the one where I send it out to be read by awesome people so they can help me make it the fantastic novel I want it to be. That means one thing (or seven, depending how you see it)--BETA READERS!

Let them introduce themselves:

Ally

Ally didn't send me her bio (or if she did, I lost it), so I'll introduce her. If I were Ally, I'd say, "I'm Ally. Y'all need to know one thing 'bout me: I eat raw eggs and guzzle root beer." Actually, Ally would NEVER say that. I took some creative license here. :)

Chris

I'm Chris and I'm self-diagnosed as being allergic to fun and free time.  In that lack of free time, I teach kids how to do martial arts, collect books that I want to read in a pile on my desk, and wear polos.  Despite my self-proclaimed aversion to fun, my claim to infamy is being fan of terrible jokes that don't really make people laugh...just question why they agreed to hear yet another bad joke.

Hannah

Along with reading, I enjoy hiking, knitting, farming, and travelling. I'm a glass half-full type of person. My dream is to live on a farm and to dabble in many different hobbies and skills.

Hope

I am "Baby B" out of a set of triplet girls.  In my spare time I love listening to music (specifically twenty|one|pilots and Jack's Mannequin), reading, and exercising.  I will attend Framingham State University in the fall where I will study Spanish and secondary education.

Jackie

My name is Jackie and I really like driving with the windows open. My hobbies include breakdancing and Tae Kwon Do.

Kim

Hey there I'm Kim and I love hockey and country music. I bet a lot of people just groaned at the fact that I like country music. I love to read and am known to sit down and finish a good book in one day if I get the chance. I'm also a tree hugging  environmental science geek so please reduce, reuse and recycle :)

Query Kombat 2014

I got into Query Kombat!

Query Kombat? What's that, you say? Check it out here.

Thanks to SC's vote of confidence, I'm on team #writerbees. Check out my entry "Loving Logic" on June 1st. Follow the contest on twitter at #QueryKombat.

Look! I'm on the list!!!

MSFV Drop the Needle Contest on Anger

If you write and you've never heard of Miss Snark's First Victim, a blog by the currently anonymous Authoress Anon, then you're missing out on some great writing and critiquing opportunities. With the exception of the Baker's Dozen--a yearly contest--all her contests are free, and they're excellent ways to connect with fellow writers and receive feedback on your own writing. Go there.

Last week, she called for entrants for her Drop the Needle Contest, this time looking specifically for 400 word scenes from novels in which the characters exhibited anger. I was lucky enough to have a scene near the end of WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL chosen. 

One commentator wrote: "This is really great -- so much tension! The dialogue felt very realistic, too. I wish I could keep reading!" Take a look for yourself and let me know if you agree. Although, SPOILER alert. (Yeah, it gives away a huge chunk of the ending.) Any and all suggestions are welcome!

Oh, and I plan to introduce my new beta readers in the next week or so. I so so so look forward to working with them to make WINTER the best it can be. :)

Aaaaand DONE! (at least with the first draft)

This is what someone looks like when she completes the first draft of her second novel:

Alright, so it's what I look like. But I did it. I completed that difficult first draft of novel #2, WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL.

In case you've forgotten (not that you'd care to remember. I get that.) what it looked like when I completed my first draft of novel #1, it looked like this:

Here are some comparisons:

1. D1 of N1: that's me inside in my jammies after having eaten an entire box of chocolate. D1 of N2: I'm outside in the shade (and not in my jammies). My hair surprisingly looks the same. Weird. Okay, so no one really cares about that.
2. D1 of N1: completed during February vacation, after <2 months of writing. D1 of N2: April vacation, after 5.5 months.
3. D1 of N1: I look a lot more excited than I am with D1 of N2. Part of that is because it's true. There's something exciting about completing that first book that can't be matched with the second. I guess the main difference here is that with N2, I've proven to myself that I can do it. More than one story exists in me, which is comforting. Awfully comforting.

So yeah, there you go. Now to reread that which I haven't read since November. Oh, and if you haven't read it yet, here's what WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL is about.

New Betas Wanted

There we go. I just did it. I sent the request to my principal for approval to obtain a new panel of beta readers. I'm, what I estimate to be, four or five hours of work away from a completed rough draft of WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL.

The novel itself has been more difficult to write than LitD. It's taken its toll emotionally. Whereas LitD was a constant high, a wave of pleasure and pride and fantasy, I've had more doubt about WINTER's contents...and more nightmares.  It's the book that I wonder at being able to write at all, and that at some points I feel trapped within. It's high school and college wrapped together--the containment within institutional walls with the delicate promise of liberation in the end.

I look forward to revisions.

Neglected but not forgotten

I have this large--and perhaps unfounded--fear that if I don't update my blog regularly, something evil will happen to my writing career. I read several writing blogs, and many say, "make sure writers have an online presence," and, "agents want to see that you're out there," and, "agents don't like to see a forgotten blog."

It's not forgotten.

I've been busy writing. I'm up to 50K consecutive words in WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL.

So while I have been neglecting my blog, I haven't been neglecting my novel.

That's more important, right? :)

Science fiction to contemporary, first novel to second

Much of my writing time has been spent on my new work in progress--WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL. This novel is in part inspired by a suggestion from some of the people I met at the Colgate Writers' Conference last June. (Unfortunately, I will not be attending this year, although I wish I were.) I don't speak openly about my childhood, but I also don't hide it. So when I spent a week with the same people, they had a way of drawing out my past. Upon multiple occasions, they told me my past should be my next novel--that's the story they wanted told. After spending hours on LitD and deeming it complete--at least until an agent loves it--I delved into WoBH.

I'm finding that writing contemporary is much more difficult than writing science fiction. For LitD, it wasn't a real world, so I didn't have to double- and triple-check facts before I committed them to paper. Yes, some of the science I wrote about there is real; but much of it isn't, and that's okay because it's fiction. Now, I find myself constantly checking facts. When, exactly, does this high school music group hold auditions? Is the color of the sign at such-and-such a place really yellow? I'm sure many people wouldn't blame some small inaccuracies, but if I change a school's mascot, per se, there might be issues. But I'm finding it very time consuming.

Also, because it's my second novel, I'm also being much more careful in this first draft. Some sentence structure techniques/rules I learned when writing LitD are now ingrained in me, but others are not. I find that I spend more time making sure that the words I use are the ones I want, even though I know this will ultimately be edited and changed a million times over from the version I write now.

Lastly, because I'm basing this novel in part on how I grew up, it's a mix of fictional scenes and real scenes that have since been fictionalized. Finding a balance here is difficult. Very difficult, indeed.