Good morning Hounds.
Hi, guys. Sorry I've not been around today. We celebrated Mother's day with a big cookout. Had a good time.
On the other hand, my mother has finally tipped over into incomprehension. She spent the morning agitated, and this afternoon calmer but utterly incoherent. It's been coming for a while, but nothing quite prepares you. Mom never did have any luck on Mother's Day.
Alzheimer's sucks.
Sorry to hear that, Junely.
Final word count for the first draft of Giggles? 1,849 words! Yay! It's done! It's done! Pass the blood wine please?!
Congratulations! Now get it alpha-ed, beta-ed and send it out somewhere! (Eyeblink has spoken.)
Hah, yes, Atlanta! Is it too soon to start thinking about Atlanta? Let's do Atlanta, all of us, because Portland was so, so incredible.
I have to say, the pro workshops were just amazing. Mine was so encouraging, and Soaps' workshop was, and yes. Everyone was super supportive and kind. But fair and constructive and yeah, those things, too.
I did WHC four years ago, when it was in the UK. Cons in other countries don't look like being on the agenda, this year or next. My finances should be in much better state a year and a quarter from now, so maybe 2016.
I would imagine that I'm not the only one to notice, just the only one to comment.
Sometimes I don't respond to things, but I do read tham. I try to imagine the forum as a group of people I'm conversing with, and where there are people who sagely nod their heads in agreement or whatever but don't actually say much a the time.
I don't post here as often as others, and not as often as I should, though I do read most posts.
Back to that - I'm going over the notes I got from the pros at the workshop I went to, and boy am I the last person on the planet to realize my writing voice is super YA.
It's weird how blind we can be to our own writing quirks - not just young writing voice, necessarily, but word choice, or structures we use.
What's something about your work you didn't realize, that someone else has pointed out to you? Tendency to use a weird word? Grammar quirk you can't kick? Yeah, that's my preoccupation at the moment.
YA is no bad thing. My novels in progress are YA (unpublished), though at the older 14+ end. My short fiction is not aimed at YA though.
A grammar/punctuation thing I tend to overuse and always have to take out again in revision would be brackets and parentheses. Otherwise I tend to use present tense a lot - except when I don't. First person - except when I don't. Female leads and POV - except when I don't. (My published stories are roughly 50/50 in that.) "Mourning Becomes Me", my novella in progress, is the latter two, though the "first person" is a lot less straightforward than it might appear at first.