After THE END

On New Year's Eve, right before fireworks and falling into bed (because that's the kind of party girl I'm not) I wrote THE END on my current book, FIND ME.

The next day, my eldest gave me a card she drew. It said - Did you write a Book? YOU DID? Good Job! (many smiley faces and flowers)(Can't find the card now, but when I do, I'll post it here. You know it's totally adorable.)

If you get a card from your kid, that means you're all done, right? No....
After taking a couple of weeks to noodle around with an ending I was just not happy with, I'm now ready to put FIND ME out to Beta readers - ALMOST.

Here are the things I had to do to make it ready. It's my Get Ready For Prime Time Check List:

1) Spell Check
Yeah, duh. But you'd be surprised how in the heat of writing you can misspell exhilerate. excillerate. exhilarate. Spell check also catches repeated words. His his or or on on - when I'm cutting and pasting I'll inevitably leave behind some orphan prepositions. And the grammar check wants to ask you if you really need quite so many fragments.

2) TK
TK is copy edit short hand for To Come, as in, I can't stop to look this up right now so I'm going to slap on a TK and move on. Yesterday I filled in my TK's which means I did the following google searches (in case the FBI is wondering about my browser cache)

• Quote from The Neverending Story
• MTA Maps
• Irish Football shirts
• Latin phrases
• Indigenous place names in Northern New Jersey
• Scouting NY (an awesome website by a NYC film scout - he finds the most amazing places!)
• Maps of Palisades Parkway
• La Lupe (Cuban singer)
• Blood Donation and replenishment
• Brust Park
• Tastee Kake
• Trojan Horse
• Spanish name origins
• What's in a knish?
• Colleges near Bronx
• wax melting temperature
• metal melting temperature
• HS AP English syllabus

3)Crutch Words
Oh Lordy. When you are drafting, you've got your voice flowing, you're ducking and diving you're in the zone - it's awesome. Then you come up for air and realize you use some phrases and words too much. These words are repetitive and can echo in the reader's mind - in a bad way, pulling them up short. When I use lazy crutch words it's because I'm in the zone and I'm too rushed to be thoughtful, so I grab at a word I use a lot, one I like and am comfortable with. Comfy words are fine and make up a writer's voice, but DON'T GET LAZY! Some words are used really really a lot in real life (like 'really') so it's not quite so egregious to use those often. But for me, so far, some of my crutch words are pristine, probably, paste a smile, and whatever. There will be more that I don't catch. I'm trusting my beta readers to stop me from using lazy words.

4) Beats
As in dialogue beats. I am usually pretty good when writing dialogue, I tend to include beats - moments around the dialogue that ground the reader in the action and location of the characters speaking. This is so you don't finish reading a section of dialogue and have no mental image of where the characters are or what they are doing. People don't (unless they are stoned or robots) usually walk into a room, stand in front of each other and talk until they are done. They fidget, they pick things up (and put them down.) They interact with their space. I want to make sure I don't inadvertently turn my MC into a robot or a stoner.

And that's it. On friday FIND ME will go out to beta readers and I will forget it exists (HA!) for a month. Then in March I'll take it out of it's virtual marinating drawer, compare notes from beta readers and polish the EFF out of it. Then I'll send it to Barbara while swilling a new cocktail of my own creation called the Nervous Nellie (recipe to come.)

What do you do to get ready for Beta Readers?

Writing Tip Thursday! #5 - First Revision: Steps One - SPELLCHECK THE FRIGGING THING

Last May I went to my first writing conference at Pennwriters. I didn't attend the whole weekend, money and mommy duties being what they are, but I did attend a one day intensive workshop with Timons Esais. He's a writer and a teacher and people, he's just good. I admit I was quaking in my boots when I turned up, having never faced the inquisitorial power of the writing conference before and - did he make me feel warm and fuzzy? Did he tell me I was a genius just waiting to be discovered? No. He made me work and think hard. But, for the effort of sticking your hand up and your neck out to answer a question or read from your WIP, he did give out candy.

He gave us advice on how to revise after the messy business of birthing the first draft. I pass it on to you in the hopes that it helps. It helped me get to stage two editing (where I linger, likely because of fear, on my first book)

1) Spell check the entire manuscript with a notepad and pencil in hand. Every time spell check brings something up DO NOT hit ignore like I do. Write the word down. There are so many words, especially in a book like mine where I've made up names for things, that I just ignore in spellcheck. Fair enough, but then how do I know that I'm consistent with my made up cosmology? Keep a log of the words that are coming up as misspelled. Later you can go back to that handwritten list and see how many different ways you spelled the name of your made up country.

2) Using that same hand list, check the spelling of names. You'd be amazed how many times I come across misspellings (or creative spellings) of my characters names. Jen, Jenna, Jenny, Jennifer - how could a reader know if it's the same person or four different people? This goes triple for creative names like Story (Storey, Storie). Creating a bible, or series bible in my case, is a good way to have a fixed reference for character names, nicknames and spellings.

3) Start looking for words you use a lot. 80K words is a tonnage for someone to spew out and some of those words, lots of them, are repeats. That's all well and good, but writers have favorite words that they use when they are being lazy. Words that are fine on their own in a paragraph, but when read as a whole 'clang' that is, they stand out as being repeated too often. This can cause the reader to come out of suspension of disbelief and that is big trouble. Watch out for these lazy words that are used as filler. Write them down and then keep a tally of how many times they appear. Some software programs do this for you. It's an eye opener.

4) Read your work out loud. This is a great way to uncover those 'lazy words' in #3, because you'll remember just hearing a word a few minutes ago, whereas sometimes, when we read, we don't 'register' every word, especially as the writer who knows the words so well. I think we unconciously polish and edit, making it sound better than it is when we read it to ourselves. Read it out loud, no matter how much you hate the sound of your voice. You'll hear clangers and awkward places immediately. Again, don't stop and try to fix it on the spot - write it on your 'revision' list for later.

Pennwriter's Conference is in Pittsburgh this year so I'll be missing it unfortunately, but I definitely recommend it. It's a great group of people and a great starting point for newbie conference goers.