Tag: novel

Dealing with doubts, and Community Story

First my update, and it ends with a goodie. Last week, I said my revision was zooming along. By mid-week, I was back to feeling insecure about the story. Doubts were cloudy my mind. Will people get it? Will people other than me think it’s good? Will they be entertained? Will they understand everything that’s…
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Great openings

Quick status update, I’m still working through the revision of the climactic scene in my novel and am on track to finish the revision of the whole book by this weekend. Fingers crossed. But I wanted to talk about great openings. The first few words, paragraphs, pages of a book are all important, not only…
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Join the Community Story – March 30

I must admit, I feel great. I’m on pace to finish my polish by the end of this week, and I can feel the excitement welling up. That excitement seems to also be helping me wake up early to write. I woke up at 6:45 with no alarm on Sunday and 5:45 this morning. It’s…
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It’s all about plot

Just a quick post tonight. In my check in, I did the revision for chapter 18 and started chapter 19. Tomorrow’s goal: finish chapter 19. I’m still hoping to have this revision by the end of the year, but that deadline’s coming up fast, so my goals are going to have to start getting tougher…
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Day 27

And I’m back on track! As promised, for the much belated day 27 of my unofficial participation in National Novel Writing Month, I got up early and finished my outline/timeline. That exercise has proved priceless. I now have a plan for the plot points that I was stumbling over. And I found solutions to a lot…
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Day 25 and 26 and Authors Read

Forgot to check in for my unofficial participation in National Novel Writing Month yesterday, so this is a double post. I wrote both days, but yesterday, after still going back and forth about the plot line of my novel, I decided to try a new tack. I needed something that could better help me see…
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Day 16 and reading books

All’s going well in my continued unofficial participation of National Novel Writing Month. This morning I was back to revising chapters I had already written in my first draft. Everything was going well until I started looking back at my original layout for the book and realized some of my early ideas that weren’t used…
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Sticking with it

My revision is coming along. I’m pleased to be able to report that I woke up early every morning this week and worked on the revision. I’m now about two-thirds through, and I’ve surprised myself many times when I’ve found new and better ways of doing scenes just by pushing away my apprehension of scraping…
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Just TRY

I found my novel revision floundering a bit. As I said in my last blog post, I’ve been hesitating moving too far forward because I could only read five pages every two weeks at my critique group and I valued their feedback. But, I realized that if I wait for that, it’ll take a couple…
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Revising from notes

At my critique group a couple of weeks ago, someone asked me what I wanted to achieve in my revision of my middle-grade novel, if I had specific things I knew I wanted to do.   During my break, I had thought about this a lot — anxious to start working on the novel again…
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