Tuesday Tally 8/11

EotF Status

# of queries out: 7

# of fulls out: 0

 

T.C. Status

word count: 9,034

 

FwM Status

word count: 5,751

 

Color Poems

complete: 14

min needed for chapbook: 20

 

Previous goals:

• catch up on crits
• revise query with recent feedback in mind
• write a min. of 250 words every day this week
• continue adding to TC outline

 

Goals for this week:

• write every day
• work on description in first three chapters of EotF

 

I didn’t do any writing Saturday or Sunday (shouldn’t have even expected it), and my Thursday and Friday counts were low. But I wrote over 1000 words the other three days, which brought up my average considerably.

 

My husband had a light-bulb moment on a problem with EotF. Not enough descriptive details for my world to really come alive for him. He has a point. My early stories had a lot of description. But the complaint was always that I didn’t get into the character’s heads. Too omniscient. Now my strength is in the dialogue, the emotion. I don’t have a problem getting in their head, but when I do I’m not focused as much on the world around them. Often when I’m reading books, I get very attached to characters, but half the time I couldn’t tell you what they look like.  I know my writing will be much richer if I can combine the internal with the external. They shouldn’t suffer from my own lack of observation. It means a lot of attention to my writing and rewriting. More awareness. And a lot of hard work if I plan to apply it to this book. I added some description in previous drafts, but apparently mostly generic, not unique enough.

 

The problem wasn’t one I could notice on my own. Obviously the world is alive to me. It took an outside source to point out where it’s lacking. I’ll see if I can add those details to the first three chapters before sending out more queries, or entering the War of the Words contest (deadline Aug 20!).

 

In other EotF news, I wrote a new query completely from scratch. I don’t know if it’s any better, but I tried to add more voice. I’ll give it a few days to sit before looking at it again and getting feedback.