Monday, December 24, 2012

Happy Holidays


To everyone who wanders by this little corner of the Internet:

May you have a wonderful season of the type that mans something to you, whether it be Christmas, or Hanukkah or the love of your choice.

And may you have health and success as you define it in the New Year.

All the best!

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Quelle surprise!

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Well, the end of the world has been delayed. Moving along.

Freedom Does Matter is being read by critters from Critters.org. I enjoy the feedback.

However, I’m not sure how to interpret some of the comments. For example, in one scene, Beckie’s been captured by a sheikh who’s not sure what to do with her. She’s on the beach with a Bedouin girl, talking. The beach is on the Mediterranean Sea, and it’s July, in the mid-morning. They have a guard, but in the sun, he’s fallen asleep. This point is made three times over the course of the scene. Beckie and the girl run away, and the reader questioned why the guard didn’t stop them.

So, I didn’t make it clear the guard was sleeping? Or, more likely, it didn’t register as important. But I don’t really want to beat the reader over the head with things like this: Hey, look here, this guy is sleeping so he won’t notice when the girls leave. I was afraid that three times was too many, so I’m just not sure how to fix this.

A different reader had a different problem in a different scene, but it boiled down to the same thing: missing a point that had been made earlier, so the current action doesn’t make sense.

How to strike the balance? Any thoughts on that?

I hasten to add that these same readers have made many useful suggestions, and I appreciate their help more than I can say. I guess it goes to show that while readers are intelligent, they are no more perfect than the writer.

Feedback on the part of Background Check I finished during NaNo was highly positive (if I took it as intended!), so far. Results are not all in. Now I have to figure out where the rest of the story goes, make it all neat and then do the minimal outlining that makes even the first draft a lot easier to both write, and I am reliably informed, read. Maybe I can get that done in less than a year!

Comments are welcome.