THAT story

You know? The one that I edited out my voice? Edited it so much so that one editor remarked that "your style of writing would be good for nonfiction"? THAT story? Well, I'd started a quick edit to put things back in. A couple of spots where it still hurt that I took stuff out. Added about 1800 words. Then you know what? I had to work on something else.

I finished my query workshop through CJ Redwine http://cjredwine.blogspot.com *you know, it's bad enough I can't do that fancy-schmancy hide a link under the words, but now, it won't even copy and paste the link! One of these days...* who is a fantastic and gifted query critiquer with a record number of only 3 tries. I don't remember the number from my first one. However, if you look back on my blog, you may find that I was so happy to have finally finished I may have dared to put it out there for all to see. Now, nope. Not happening.

So, with that query finished, waiting to hear back from queries, I went back to work on this one. However, before I actually opened up the file, I got word back on an art piece that I entered into forever nocturne's ezine. And you know what? They really liked it and said they had to find a story to match. So guess what? I wrote a short story to match. Now if only they like the story as much as the artwork! *bites nails*

So back to this wonderful fantasy and throwing back in those beautiful purple prose words that need to be there when you're world building. And guess what? I'll bet you can't guess. (Unless you follow me on twitter!) IT WAS GONE. AGAIN. Yep. It's happened before, despite this wonderful world of auto save and auto recover (a HUGE reason I still use Word, thank you.) I had lost it before.

During a woe is me pity party, a wonderful person @AuthoressAnon on twitter, asked if I'd sent it to anyone for critiqueing. Well, sort of I said. I sent a chapter at a time to a friend who then edited it and I, ehum, over fixed it, plus added a couple of scenes. That was gone. But then, this reminded me. Good little girl that I am, I had sent it to my husband as backup. The completed story with the edits. Yep. The day was saved. Well, that All happened again, except I kept the pity party short as I went straight to the back-ups to see if I'd sent in the corrections--and I did, of course. *Gulp*

So now, I'm putting in beautifully woven adjectives and description and when I went back through, you couldn't even tell. One more thing though. In all the rearranging I did (I moved a couple of scenes around in the beginning. mwah. Beautiful effect, I think.) I moved the description of the characters down a bit. I'll wait and see what the beta reader thinks. Then I'll worry. Now, it's there at the back of my mind as something that may come up.

Added another 1k last night. I'm jazzed. Rereading it myself and I can't hardly tell where the additions went. At least 2k words in the first 3.5 chapters and they seamlessly flow? *pats self on back* I am so relieved. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to add the necessary words without sounding stilted or contrived.

You know what else? This fantasy is what I wrote for last years NaNoWriMo. At the end of that month, it clocked in at 64k. Now it's 86+.

So for last NaNoWriMo, I wrote 64k on one book, and over 2k for another one. (I didn't clock the other one.) Talk about pressure on myself that I have to live up to. I'm thinking I may need to shoot for 70k That means, if I follow my own rule of taking 2 days off a week, I should aim at 4k a day. Definitely attainable if I put my mind to it. I had over 7k one day last year on this manuscript alone, plus some on the other. For the day I was around 8300 words. And I did hit 4-6 consistently.

So, do I have any writing buddies? Or people who want to egg me on, er, encourage me? And in case you missed it, my twitter handle is @L_Bushman now. Will be for my writing networking for ever and ever, amen. Well, maybe not that long :P