If I ever utter those words again at 7:45 on a Monday morning, someone please throw a boot at my head. Or a cat. Or something equally as painful and jarring. Because within about ten minutes of me saying that, the world (someone’s anyway) blew up. Not like Superman and Krypton blew up. More like ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ blew up where it’s kind of incomprehensible and goes beyond suspension of disbelief and is all better once the snow melts.
*Steps back a little* Hi to all my new followers ^_^ I feel loved and warm and fuzzy. And the feeling is doubled by all the great comments I got to my 99th page on Friday. I grinned all weekend as the comments trickled in. I grinned even more when I got to read everyone else’s pages. There are some amazing writers on the blog circuit.
This morning I woke up to another of my stories being published 😀 The Muse Who Never Was. This was one that took a while to get accepted. I sent it to many, many places (okay, like 4, but still). And since it’s got Conner and Lexi in it (yes, Conner and Lexi from my page 99), and they’re possibly my favorite all time characters to write, I’m rather fond of the story. That and it’s a little darker than what I normally write. Since I don’t write dark.
And I got reader notes back on my novel this weekend. They were exactly what I had hoped for. Well, except for the note that said (and I am paraprhasing, not quoting, and exaggerating, possibly more than I should) ‘there’s no conflict here. Like at all.’ and continued to (not) say ‘please someone stab my eyes out with an ice pick, I can’t believe I agreed to read this crap. You suck’ (Yeah, it didn’t. And fortunately, I was in a good mood when I read it, so I didn’t imagine it did either. Never read reader notes when you’re in a bad mood. It equals epic fail.)
Got my reader notes back, right. And they said what I thought they would. So why didn’t I fix it before I sent it to readers? Even though I had an idea of what was wrong, I didn’t know how to fix it. Now I have a better idea of where certain pieces of missing information go, etc, etc.
And I will go and revise again. But I will stop soon because I’d hate to edit it out of existence.
Do you struggle with things you know need to be fixed but don’t have a solution? Or is finding the problem all it takes to point you in the right direction?
I struggle with things that need to be fixed all the time, especially when I don’t know how to fix them. Case and point, my opening chapter. Nothing stumps like starting a story. I wish there were some secret formula I could just follow and get it right every time.
That was a great blogfest. I enjoyed the comments, the entries and everything else that went along with it so Thank You. Cause I wouldn’t have even known about it if I hadn’t seen your entry.
Usually I struggled with not knowing how to fix something after a critique and not before it. I’ve had a few people who would make comments about the story but when they were vague I could only kind of get what they were trying to say. It never really helped me figure out what to do about it. Some took me over a year to go “oh, maybe this is what they meant” but I had a couple bad experiences with the group back then, so that didn’t help.
My problem is often I wonder if people are being too nice to me. Blogfests are an example but it reminds me of reviews on WDC. The ones where the comments are all “this is great” “awesome writing” and then they rate it 3/5 stars. There obviously is something not right about it but the review didn’t say what.
Congrats on getting your story published!
The blogfest was super-fun. Yeah, I wonder the same thing sometimes, whether people are just being nice. Fortunately, I have one brutally honest person in my life, who also happens to be a pretty smart reader. Hard as the input can be to get, it is pretty valuable!