Tag: revising

Search Engine Fun

One of the ways that technology has changed the writing game–writers used to have to spend time in libraries paging through volumes of books, encyclopedias, and magazines to find the particular facts needed to bring verisimilitude to their work. Having just the right details could bring a story to life.

(Or you could, you know, just make everything up. That’s why they called it fiction.)

But now we have a wealth of information at our fingertips–the World Wide Web (except for the parts corrupted with propaganda, AI, and misinformation. But that’s a rant for another day.)

So writers love to trade stories on the weirdest things they’ve ever looked up on a search engine and to joke about how some of those searches, especially from the crime writers, likely land us on various and sundry watch lists at law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world.

Which brings me to what I know has been my oddest search engine request that I’ve ever done. This past week, I typed into the search bar the words “Klan rallies” with much trepidation. What would I actually find?

I was doing research for a scene in my work-in-progress, set in 1970’s east Tennessee. It was after much of the worst of the 1960’s terror of the Klan was broken, but pockets of Kluckers were still active in some communities. So I imagined my protagonists stumbling into a rally by accident.

Almost immediately I found a press account of an initiation in 2004 (yikes) in Tennessee documented in a local newspaper article indexed by the Southern Poverty and Law Center. I scanned it and figured out exactly how the scene would go down.

I tell this story to show how sometimes it takes staring into the abyss for us humans to understand how to bring justice and fairness to our worlds. I took information about a dark spot in America’s history and transmuted it into a scene that says something about how ordinary people cope in the face of this kind of evil. And sometimes that means us writers must do things that make us uncomfortable for our art.

Including looking up weird topics on the internet.

Happy writing!

Beta Readers Round One

So I heard back from several beta readers on Looking for Home. The verdicts were interesting.

Most of them agreed that minor characters in particular definitely needed more development. I had already realized this fact myself, so hearing it from readers was affirming–I wasn’t just being overly critical of myself. So now I am working at deepening roles of many of my side characters so that they get at least a bit of a semblance of a story arc.

As far as plot, the readers were almost unanimous that the pacing and the surprises were on point. One reader said it started off entirely too slowly for him. So I plan to go over that part carefully and see if there are parts I can cut, rearrange, what have you in order to not spend so much time setting the scene.

Almost everyone agreed that the story was easy to follow. Events made sense in the context of the story and were consistent for how I had set the world. One reader, however, was really unable to read past the heart of the story in the first third of the book. She told me she didn’t read stories that had that kind of situation as a plot element. She gave me her feedback on what she had read, and it was very insightful and useful. I apologized to her for the book being upsetting–and that I appreciated her candor and courage.

So now I have all kinds of ideas running around in my head for improvements. We will see where this goes. Next deadline is mid-to-end of May so I can turn it over to an editor friend of mine. Wish me well!

Storyboarding Fiction

I went to the Southern Literary Festival in Blue Mountain, Mississippi at Blue Mountain Christian University this weekend. What I did was give a talk on how I constructed most of the stories in Hurricane Baby. It was often not as neat a process as this pattern makes it seem, but I did apply it to most of the new stories I wrote for this version of the book. I used the story “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” to illustrate the moving parts of the story.

SET THE SCENE: Answer the questions who, what, where, how, and why your characters are in whatever situation they find themselves in at the start. Always include action to bring the reader in. The reader sees Tommy wake up the morning after Hurricane Katrina, gets a sense of what he’s been through and where his head is at, and learns a bit about the character as well.

RISING ACTION: Get the characters moving. Show the reader what is happening in the world of the book. This piece of the story needs to set the events in the story in motion. Tommy Hebert gets a text message asking for people to come help a family in Mandeville. So he goes out on his boat and meets other men, his best friend Mark, and Mandeville cops who take them to the destruction.

MEAT OF THE STORY: You relay the most important part of the story here. This event should have the potential to cause a change in the characters who experience it. This is where the action is: this is where the heat is. In this story, Tommy and the other volunteers work to dig out Amy Thompson and her baby, Avery Thompson, out of the destroyed house. Tommy and a fireman are able to rescue the baby and get him to the hospital to be helped. But Amy Thompson has a heavy beam on her legs, crushing them–and Tommy finds out later that she didn’t make it.

CLIMAX: For me, the climax is not when there’s a big reveal of information to the characters and the reader. It comes when it’s revealed how the characters react to the big event/the meat of the story. In this story, Tommy is sitting in his house waiting on Mark, and a thirst for something to drown out Amy Thompson’s screams comes on him–and he succumbs to it.

DENOUMENT: The denoument is the fallout of the characters’ reaction to the climax. Tommy drinks three beers before Mark can get to him and starts a fourth as he comes in. They talk and decide Tommy’s in no shape to do the cleanup they had planned–neither physically nor emotionally. Mark leaves, and the reader is left with Tommy continuing to drink and the question of what happens next.

So this process is just one way to organize a story, but it’s been a very effective way for me to think about how to make all the events in a story/book fit together and flow naturally in a cause-and-effect manner.

No more book events in April as it’s usually a busy one for family in our house. Keep writing!

Highs and Lows

Let’s talk about the low point first.

I suspected as much, but I got the official notification on who won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award, and it wasn’t me. Which was a bummer. It’s one thing to not win an award because you wouldn’t dream something like that anyway. But to be nominated unexpectedly and then not win feels a little different.

But no matter. I called out the winner on Facebook and congratulated him and encouraged everyone to buy his book. It costs nothing to be gracious even when disappointed.

But one high–the nationwide Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference and Bookfair was in Los Angeles, California this past week, and Hurricane Baby: Stories was there! My publisher, Madville Publishing, had a booth there and they took my book with them! I saw a photo of it because my MFA program was also there, and they hunted Madville up and posted my book on their Facebook page. So nice to see my book in such an exotic locale.

And another high point–this Friday, I went to my hometown high school where I graduated from in 1988 and spoke to the junior and senior classes about having a vision for their life, and setting goals, and executing plans to achieve those goals. I was told before the event that this was a pretty unmotivated bunch of students.

But I didn’t approach them that way. I told them I was just like them back ages ago when I’d been a high school senior, but that I had a vision of what I wanted my life to look like and I worked until I achieved it. It seemed to perk them up somewhat. They asked me to read some of the book, and when someone asked where they could find it, I handed out my bookmarks and told them how to order. I hope I inspired someone at least a little bit.

So what’s ahead? I plan to start working back on Looking for Home on April 1–hopefully my beta readers’ feedback will come in and I can start incorporating what they have to say. And Friday I am conducting a breakout session at the Southern Literary Festival in Blue Mountain, Mississippi at Blue Mountain Christian University. I’m going to talk about how I constructed the stories in Hurricane Baby by a pattern, then I’m going to give them a silly writing prompt I hope they can have fun with.

Happy reading and writing this week!

The Many Sides of Terror

I’ve written here a few times about terror and writing and publishing. The terror of people actually reading your work, the terror of writer’s block and of never being able to write again, the fear of presenting your work–all of that is real.

Today’s terror is whether I can make lightning strike twice. I have a work-in-progress out for beta reading, and I’ll do a rewrite after that, then send it out for a deeper reading to get the opinion of other writers on my text. Then probably another rewrite.

But what about after that? I go back to the rounds of sending it off for queries. I don’t have any kind of deal with my current publisher to submit it to them first, though I probably will do that once they open for queries again. I have a publisher I met last year at a conference that’s interested in it, so I’m definitely going to send there first.

But what if they don’t like it? What if I haven’t sold enough of Hurricane Baby? What if, what, if, what if?

I’m learning to ignore the “What if?” question. It doesn’t do me any good to ruminate over that. All I can do is work to advance the book and get it in as many hands as possible. I have to write the best book I can right now and ready it for querying with as much care and concern as I can muster up.

What about writing terrorizes you? List it in the comments. Happy writing!

Revision Finished!

So last night I finished the last few issues I had discovered in Looking for Home at the first of January! I managed most of the revisions and took two sections out of the book–they were short scenes, and while I knew what I had meant to do when I first wrote them, when I came back around to them, the story was cleaner for me having taken those sections out. All done!

So now it’s the waiting game. I sent it out to six beta readers, which sounds like a lot. But I had many, many more people read Hurricane Baby through the years than that. And each person had expressed a desire to read it when I got finished. So there you go!

So what’s next?

Some papers for conferences are next in the writing queue. I’m thinking about trying to write a few craft articles, which I’ve never done, and shop them around a bit. I want to read more. Maybe think about the next book? Too soon? 🙂

I feel very satisfied with this draft as a draft–there are areas that need work, especially in the first section. So we will see what suggestions come across the transom! Have a great week!

MORE GOOD NEWS!

I found out this week that Hurricane Baby: Stories has been nominated for a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2025 Fiction Award! I had heard of this award but didn’t know much about it; you can look up more information about it here.

I asked who the other nominees in my category were, and I was blown away. Only a few small press books were on the list–the rest were all with the big New York presses. Almost all of them I had heard of except two that were debut authors like me. To be included in such company with my first fiction work was astounding to me. It’s still blowing my mind.

So that was that.

In other news, I have podcasts, interviews, talks, and conferences to get going on in the rest of the month and in February. I need to write out my talks to present them, and that’s going to be interesting. One is a talk on how to go after your goals and dreams, and the other is how I figured out why I write and what I write. I have the basics of that one already typed out–it will just need a good bit of tweaking.

Aaaand I finished revising the first section of my work-in-progress, aaaand I realized I had too many fight scenes in it. Four one right after the other and one in the next to the last chapter. %$#@#$%. I don’t want the character in that many fights. So I’m definitely going to cut one scene and rearrange the others so it’s not one right after the other. I still can’t believe I did that.

So a really really high high, a middling low, and the rest business as usual. Except a year ago I could not imagine such a life for myself. Praise be!

Tracking Progress

When New Years Day 2024 rolled around, I was about half-way through revising Cassie Beck’s story that ends Looking For Home–it was the most developed, so I began with it in November 2023. I decided to track my progress by writing my down what scene I had worked on and my word count for each day I wrote on it. I started on 1/3/24 with 1160 words. Very auspicious.

In February I hit a writing slump. All I could do was sit and stare at the computer. I was stuck on how to begin Carlton Dixon’s story and how to fill in the scenes I already had. Once the slump started in mid-February, I wrote one day from then to April–335 words on March 22. But I finally got my voice back on April 1 and wrote steadily from then until Thanksgiving 2024, when I finished Merrilyn Beck’s portion of the book.

So how am I going to track my progress with the revisions I already know need to be made?

Same notebook–I tallied up how many areas needed work in this revision. I came up with 22 spots. I highlighted the areas in yellow on the screen inside the document. So then I wrote down what needed to be done in each scene in a list in my notebook in list format. This January, I plan to go through the list, make the needed revision, then check it off my list in my notebook as I complete them.

Why am I doing this?

Because it helps me counter the lies that my critical mind tells itself of how I don’t know what I’m doing, how I’m not accomplishing anything, how there’s no point in even going on with the work. Each line of accomplishment in my notebook represents a promise I kept to myself to bring this story out and share it. Seeing the accumulation of progress spurs me on to continue. A simple system–but enough of a one for me.

How do you keep track of what you’re doing and how you are progressing? Drop a note in the comments!

Fallow Time

The old folks used to talk about letting a field lie fallow for a certain period of time–sometimes one or two growing seasons, sometimes longer. It would mean that the land wasn’t cultivated for that period of time; they didn’t grow crops on it. They might let cattle use it for pastureland, or they might leave it alone completely. The idea was to let the soil rest and replenish itself with the necessary elements, compounds, water, etc. so that after the fallow period, it might would bring a bumper crop when it was planted and cultivated again.

After I finished this draft of Looking for Home, I decided to just let it sit for a bit.

I did this because I know myself.

If I read it again too quickly after finishing it, I would still be in the glow of creating and finishing the work and would not be able to see the holes in it. I always, always think the writing’s great as it runs through my fingers to the page. What other way is there to say this? So I need to get some perspective on the document itself.

While I was writing each section, I bracketed some words like “redo”, “fill out”, “develop more”. Those are scattered throughout each section. I would put them in when I didn’t exactly know how to work out a narrative problem. My brain needs some time to work subconsciously on those problem areas.

The fallow period for a manuscript can last a short or a long time. I decided to rest mine over Christmas and take it up in January, the time of new beginnings, right after the solstice as the sun begins to stay longer in the sky here in the southeastern United States. I am really itching to get back to it when December is over. Whenever I have the urge to go ahead and start, I give my brain a narrative problem in it to chew on for a while. I’ve already done some preliminary planning for them from this practice, so that’s good.

Are you in a fallow time? Let me know in the comments!

MILESTONE UNLOCKED!

I finished this draft of my current fiction project Looking for Home on Thursday night!

I fought so hard to get to that last page. I realized halfway through the chapter that I was writing that I needed to scrap a planned final chapter on this section because where I was happened to be a perfectly serviceable ending in and of itself and heaping even more bad fortune on the character might seem excessive.

So I wrote over 2,100 words Thanksgiving night. So far the manuscript is just under 300 pages with 78,697 words total. And getting to the last page really was a fight–I knew exactly what image I wanted to leave the reader with; I just had to wade through some setup to get there. The characters were in no hurry to finish talking. I kept thinking, “Really? Another page? Do you really need another page?” and the answer was “Yes.” Until it finally wasn’t any more, and I was done.

I looked it up–I started on this project almost right at a year ago. I queried and shopped it at the HOMEGROWN conference on the Coast in February of this year and already have a press that may be interested based on that pitch alone. So that’s exciting to think about.

But I’m trying not to think too far ahead. I’m going to take out some time to rest through Christmas, then I’ll review it in the New Year and rewrite, then let some readers take a look at it.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to do a little reading, keep up with this blog, and keep hustling to get events set up where I might get more sales here and there. And keeping you folks up to date on all of that.

Off to relax until I start back to work tomorrow. Happy reading!