Very Short Blog

I'm still working on typing up all my re-writes from my last five revisions.  I have to have a clean copy or I'm going to get confused.  But it's taking soooo long.  I will finish for sure tomorrow night, so I can make another print out.  I know some people can work off the computer, but not me for a couple of reasons. I have to have a print out that I can take with me, and I have to be able to see it in print. 

Also, I am almost unable to walk after Saturday.  It keeps getting worse.  I did my regular 60 min on the eliptical thinking it would loosen my calves up, but they are seriously damaged.  I think boot camps not my thing.  I swear I can't put my legs straight when I walk I have to walk on my toes.

Beats and Boot Camp

Today I finished highlighting all  the beats in my manuscript.  Now I need to go through and make sure that none of them are strangling my dialogue.  Also to make sure that I have beats where I need them.  I'm still hoping to eliminate a lot of the "saids" in my manuscript. 

Tomorrow I need to type up all my changes from the past 5 reviews, and make another print-out, so I can continue reviews.

I also have to get my first 500 words up to perfection for the contest.

So what's boot camp?  Well although this blog is 99% about my journey as a writer, I thought it might be good to include some funnies from my day-to-day life.  So boot camp has nothing to do with writing.  It's a class I took at the gym.  It was an intence one hour hell of areobics, weights, spin, all together.  Oh Lord help me, I'm pretty sure walking is going to be out of the question tomorrow. 

Here's the thing, I didn't just haul my big 44 year old behind out of bed one day and decide to go to the gym and do "boot camp".  For one thing, my behinds not all that big, for another, I work out 28 days out of 30 and have been doing for over two years.  I spend an hour every night on the eliptical machine, sweating like a pig and shedding 600 calories.  So I thought, boot camp, sounds tough, but I can handle it.

HA

Oh my what a joke.  I thought I was going to die about 3 minutes into the initial warm up (laps around the classroom which progressed to bunny hops.)  Milo would be disgusted with me, 'cause this girl cannot hop.  I think it's because of my ankle, even after three years it's weak after the break.  I'll have to get a wrap for it. 

So they only do this every other Saturday.  I don't know how that's going to work out with my schedule.  I'm serious!  I'm not just slacking, I swear.  If it's on a knitting Saturday, I can do it.  But when the weather gets better if it's a zoo weekend I can't do a 11:15 program. 

Thank Heaven for SCBWI

Let me start by saying that if you write for children and you're not in SCBWI, you need to join.  http://www.scbwi.org/

Through the Society of Children's Book Writers in Illlustrators, I have joined a critique group which has been very helpful.

I also posted a question about "Interior Monologue" (see previous post) on the SCBWI discussion boards.  I got some amazing answers from expert writers. 

Not to mention last weeks mini-conference about Social Networking. 

Thanks to everyone who makes SCBWI possible.

Interior Monologue

Yesterday I highlighted all of the interior monologue in my book.  Now I need to go back and review it and find out if it needs or does not need thinker attributions.  I think probably not in most cases.  Milo is the only one who has any interior monologue, except for a few rare cases where Grandmother Oakentower has a snarky thought on something.  So I'll probably eliminate most of the thinker attributions.  I just typed those without much real thought in my first draft. 

The next thing is to look at mechanics and here I must say I'm confused:  I don't know if I should use italics for all (in which case there could be a lot of italics), 1st person when for all of Milo's interior dialogue (some came out naturally in the 1st person, but I don't know if that would work for all.)  Another option is to put them in a separate paragraph.

I'm going to get some advise from some of the gurus.

Also, critique group meeting tonight.  This will be our first time to meet twice in a month, although I don't know if you can count that first week in Jan because we had 20 below wind chill and 18 inches of snow.  Anyway, it will be good to see everyone and really get back into the swing for 2010.

Dialogue a Done Deal

I can't believe I'm already done with my dialogue revisions.  I thought it would take all week.  One concern is that I have severl passages where one of my mid-level characters bounce really short comments off of each other.  I hope it doesn't come out soudnign choppy. 

I also logged into my first #kidlitchat on twitter tonight.  Very interesting.  Some people seemed to be having their own conversation with no one in particular. I'm going ot have to bone up on my typing to be fast enough to chime in.

Dialogue My Fave!

So today, I worked mainly on my dialogue, and got about half way through.  This is my favorite thing.  I did get a little confused, however when reading over what a few people had to say on the subject.  In my "Self Editing for Fiction Writers," it seemed to be saying that your dialogue should have beats, but in another blog I found they seemed to downplay this idea. 

Maybe I didn't even get that right.  I am getting a bit frazled at this point.  Anyway, I liked my dialogue more than I thought I would.  Some of it has beats that add context, setting, actions, etc.  But some is very spare.  I don't want to "strangle my dialogue".  Of course I made a lot of changes, but not as many as I thougth I would have to. 

Also still working on the Social Media thing.  Something is wrong with my picture on Tweetdeck, it needs to be in jpg.  I'll have to find it, and fix it later.

Social Networking

I did some more work on POV by reading only MC POV and then reading only the omnicient narrator POV.  That worked really well.

But mainly this weekend has been about Social Networking.  I attended a fantastic program at our regional SCBWI in Kansas City.  Thanks to Jenn Bailey (see http://www.jennbailey.com/).  She's amazing and will be speaking at the National SCBWI conference in New York. 

So now thanks to Jenn, I'm no longer afraid of twitter.  And I've also learned about tweetdeck.  I've made some changes to my blog and now all I have to do is set up a web page.  Oh boy.

Oh yeah, and write a book. 

Once again it brings it home that writing is a long and time consuming effort.  Although it's a little frustrating and I want things to go faster, I feel that putting in the effort will make the reward all that more meaningful.