Blogs

I’m moving my blog, mostly because I got tried of keeping two sets of software up to date.

New link: http://www.jackiepowers.com/pages/blog/1

New RSS feed link: http://www.jackiepowers.com/pages/blog/1/feed

And as for the b2evolution folks that decided that it wasn’t worth their time to make it easy to export info from their software to other software… folks, you want to do that so people say good things about your software. Duh! **sigh**

It was a busy day for me. I filed my extension for my taxes since I can’t pay them at the moment, but come the first of the month I should be able to, so all will be well.

And I spent the whole day today judging contest entries for my RWA chapter. This is the chapter’s main fund raiser, and there are never enough people to judge them, so even though I didn’t want to, I let myself get roped into it again this year. I was hoping that being a category coordinator (organizing stuff that other people judged) would be enough, but alas, that wasn’t the case.

I only had seven contest entries this year, which is fewer than most years, which was good. But they weren’t any better than any other year, which makes it terrible to try and judge. As a contest and a chapter, we pride ourselves on “do no harm", but God Almighty, that’s really hard to do with some of these entries. So **sigh** I don’t know if I succeeded in doing no harm or not, but I tried and they are done… which is all I really care about at the moment.

So, I’m exhausted and off to do something enjoyable for the first time in two days.

Awhile back I put a monthly income goal up on my vision board, a goal that I saw as attainable but out of the realm of possibility at the time. Then, yesterday, I realized that due to an interesting twist in circumstance, last month I brought in that much money, and I’ll do it again this month, and potentially for the next several months if not longer.

Huh. Who’d have thunk it?

The extra money came in with the intention of helping me pay off my debt… but is that the only/best use for that money? So I spent yesterday pondering how best to use the money.

About mid-afternoon inspiration struck: Use the money to de-stress my life rather than just blindly pay off debt.

Sure the debt is stressing me out, but if I use the money to only pay off my debt, I’ll get to the end of the money and be no further ahead than I am now.

Whereas, there are things that are stressing me out more than the debt, and with the terrible amount of stress I’m under, my muse has not just gone on vacation, she’s gone to the other side of the world and has no interest in returning.

So, if I destress my life, I’ll be able to write again, and I’ll be able to get some books done and money coming in. And, the reality is that be destressing my life, I actually may be able to pay off my debt faster.

So, that’s my goal. Figure out the highest priority stressors, use the money to cancel or mitigate the stress, and go on to the next one until I finally get to the point where my muse starts talking to me again.

And of course, I’m going to put up a new goal on my vision board with an even higher monthly income. I’ll keep you posted.

Last night I critiqued a manuscript that had been waiting since November for me to get to it.

I’d been in contact with the author and she was happy to wait, so I waited until I was in a decent mood before I opened it. Finally, yesterday afternoon, I was in a good enough mood, and it was nagging me loud enough that I printed it off and began. I like to do a critique in one sitting so I don’t forget the beginning by the time I get to the end, so seven hours later I was done.

The fact that it took me that long proved that it was quite a good book and deserving of detailed comments. I’ve discovered that a good book will take be about an hour to critique for every 10k words… whereas a lesser book will have larger flaws that make detailed comments worthless, so it takes me much less time to critique.

So, what did I learn out of this critique?

The manuscript was set in the 1920’s Chicago, which was fun, except the author didn’t exploit the setting for all it was worth… I didn’t feel like I was transported to the time, I only got snippets and snaps of the atmosphere. So, it makes me ponder my Victorian, and what more I can do to transport the reader to the time.

I also realized how important the character’s word choice is to the atmosphere of the book. While several secondary characters spoke in various accents, the hero and heroine spoke in, what I’m terming, generic-timeless-English. The author was careful to weed out current colloquialisms, but didn’t add back in any regional flavor or colloquialisms of the time, nor was any account taken for how the meaning of words shift over time. It resulted in a certain flatness to the primary characters. Which again, brings me to my historical… how can I avoid this word-usage-based flatness? My book adds the secondary complication of having to adding a written British accent to the complication of timely colloquialisms, regional variations and meaning shifts. I did tell the author in my notes that I’m a tad bit of a perfectionist, and they may want to take my comments with that in mind. :-) But, still for me and my manuscript, it’s a realization to ponder.

I also realized that the author finally got into the head of the hero about 3/4 of the way into the book. Which I can sympathize with, since this one bit me with my last book. In this draft I need to rework many subtleties in the beginning of the book because my heroine’s not portrayed accurately. This author needs to do the same thing, go back through the beginning and rewrite the hero to be who he is in the last 1/4 of the book. Not fun, but necessary.

And, finally, this manuscript reiterated to me the necessity of making sure each scene moves the plot forward. Over the last couple years I’ve talked to several new and mid-level writers about requiring a plot “change” in each scene and many have poo-poo’d me, saying that informing the reader is a good enough reason to have a scene. But, this manuscript made it very clear to me that I’m right. One or two information-only scenes is okay, but more than that really starts to drag down the pacing of the book. The scenes were interesting and well written, but they made the manuscript feel more like a character study than a book with a plot toward which the characters were working. And since this was manuscript was a suspense/mystery that just plain didn’t work.

So, all in all, a very good book, worth the time I spent with it and, as always, a learning experience for me.

I’m working at a paying job, which is a very good thing, the only down-side of working is that my reading time is now severely limited… down from several books a week to one book a week if I’m lucky. So, I’ve been careful about the books I’ve read lately, wanting to get the most enjoyment for my limited time.

Unfortunately, two of my favorite authors majorly let me down. And I’m seriously annoyed, because they were both stupid newbie author mistakes.

The first author has switched from writing romance genre to writing science fiction, which would be an okay thing to do if her publishers would start shelving her books in the science fiction section, but… alas, they haven’t. So her last four or five books have been increasingly unsatisfactory as she really doesn’t write very good science fiction and her attempt at it has ruined her romances. She’s been building for the last six or seven books to a big climatic book… which I wasn’t holding out big hopes for. In fact, I held out so little hope that I didn’t buy the hard-cover and I had serious reservations about putting out money for the paperback. From those of my friends who have read the book, my reservations were well placed, which completely annoys me.

If you’re going to build for books and books to a climactic book, then for God’s sake WRITE a book worth the build-up.

On top of that annoyance, I shelled out the money for this same author’s book two books after the supposed big climactic book, in hopes that the author had gotten the stupid story-line that I couldn’t care less about out of her system. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. This book was shelved on the romance shelves, and the spine claimed it was a romance, but **sigh** less than 1/4 of the book had anything to do with the relationship between the hero and heroine, the other 3/4 was about other people and the stupid story-line that I’d hoped the author had finished two books ago.

If you’re going to write a book to be shelved on the romance shelf, then could you please write a damn ROMANCE!!

Then, just to annoy me further, I switched to another of my favorite authors, in hopes of enjoying my limited reading time. Unfortunately this author also disappointed me. Again, she built up our hopes and this was the climax of a four book series. This book was supposed to be the redemption of the villain of the other three books. Again, lots of hype, and for this author I actually had hope that she could pull it off. Except, instead of having a real plot… she had the “gods” pick up the hero, heroine and a bunch of others, and dump them all on a deserted island to fight-to-the-death amongst themselves for no other reason than the gods’ entertainment. How stupid is that?!? **sigh**

If you’re going to write a big redemption book, don’t have a plot that’s so contrived that the reader goes GAK! ten pages into the book and skips to the end in the faint hope that something interesting happens in the middle… and to make matters worse, you have NOTHING interesting happen in the middle of the book.

So, to say I’m annoyed with these two authors is putting it mildly.

I might give the second author another chance, because this is the first bad book after a long series of excellent books.

But the first author, even though she’s written two of my all-time favorite books… I’m done with her. Blessings upon her and her career, but she’s not getting any more of my time or money. Her writing just isn’t worth it any more.

The lesson to get out of these examples is if you’re building for books and books to a big climactic book… then DELIVER A CLIMACTIC BOOK!!