Thursday Thoughts

It's interesting the things you'll find when you go back through a manuscript for the first time. I wrote Stud a chapter at a time, sending it to my buddy Sandy James for critique, and then starting the next one, rarely going back to read the earlier chapters. This was a little different than the way I'd written before, writing it straight through, going back to edit as I went. Having gotten Sandy's input along the way, I felt like the editing was pretty much complete, but I was wrong. Spreading it out over several months like that had made us both forget some of the details. I found three discrepancies that needed fixing, one of them requiring a rewrite of two places in the book. Granted, they were minor, but these are the things you'd rather fix yourself, as opposed to having someone point them out to you later on.

This will also mark the first time I've used a beta reader. I did send Virgin to my agent, and she suggested some changes, which I made before sending it off to my editor, but the edits, if you will recall, were fairly extensive. I hope I've learned enough from that experience to enable me to write a better book to begin with, but Stud is still 100,665 words long. If the folks at Sourcebooks are wanting to save paper, I'm in big trouble!

The Sextet is getting together this Saturday to do a group critique of Entanglements, our second set of short stories which all have a bondage theme. It'll be interesting to see the different ways each of us handle the topic. We're having a pitch-in lunch (as usual, I've been asked to bring the potato casserole) and along with the work, we're sure to have a ton of fun.

If this blog has a theme, it would be: How did I ever write without a critique partner/group before???? The answer to that is, Not nearly as well. Thanks to Sandy and the Sextet, my writing has improved tremendously, and I thank them very much!