I am almost through with the second draft of my novel Arroyo. I have finished four out of five segments and have been pretty pleased with what I have. While working on this I became reacquainted (as a reader) with Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch via their respective websites; they have a lot of useful information to impart. If you are a writer, you need to be reading their blogs.
Dean Wesley Smith has Killing The Sacred Cows of Publishing at http://deanwesleysmith.com. There is lots and lots of useful information here. One of the reasons I’m bring this up now, is that he talks about rewriting in a way I have never heard before. And, of course, here I am rewriting Arroyo. However, turns out I was pretty much following his advice before I read it: what I already had on the page was good and didn’t need much tweaking other than reformatting, correcting errors and making sure the continuity was correct. I have a new hero.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has The Business Rusch Publishing Series at http://kriswrites.com. Her writing is about the business end of writing and is every bit as interesting as Sacred Cows, though much more technical as it is dealing with contracts, agents, publishers, publishing and more.
After I finish this second rough draft I have one more to do. I still see a few plots that need to be tidied up, I’ve got a bit more research to do, and I need to redo some sentences. Maybe I should be doing that now in the second draft, but I want to see the whole as I originally wrote it (mostly or minimally untouched by my editing pen) before making third draft decisions.
Read these people, please. You wi
ll learn so much no one else is willing to tell you.
WHAT I’VE READ THIS WEEK—Simply Irresistible by Kristine Grayson.
Photos by Roxanne Rix
THE COWBOY’S BABY is available as a Kindle e-book at Amazon. com. Here is the link.