Adding a Thread

I just went through about four chapters of my WIP and added in a thread with my villain, making him increasingly, well, villainous. I've always thought that this was easier to do than the other way of just writing it in the first place. I guess it's part of the revision process, but it occurred to me about 3/4 of the way through that I needed to do this. Unfortunately, this meant resending a chapter or so to my crit buddy so she could read through the additional thread.

So in order to keep up with what POV I was using, and where this thread shows up, I started a spreadsheet of sorts to keep up with scenes and what happens. Eventually, I'll use this for my chapter-by-chapter synopsis. But it saves SO much time (duh!). I can just click on my chapter synopsis and know which chapter to bring up in my word processor to access what scene. (This may sound very simple to those of you longer in the biz and with more common sense, but I've always written my stories all out in one document, so I could just scroll through at will and see what I wanted to see. But being a part of crit groups, etc., working in chapter units is essential...so this had been a s t r e t c h for me. But a good one. :)

Synopses

Two days ago, I wrote my first synopsis for the Genesis contest. Amazingly difficult to do. Condensing a 90,000-100,000 novel to one single-spaced page? Man, you really have to know your stuff. You have to know exactly where you are going with the story, and exactly how you are going to get there. You have to know who your main characters are and who the extraneous ones are that you don't have to include.

You want to be able to wrap it all up by the end of the page, but not give absolutely every little tidbit away. Ideally, the person reading it would be intrigued enough to want to request a partial or full manuscript.

The consensus from my crit partners was that I did a pretty good job. I felt good about it, which is good. But I'm very anxious to get my feedback from the judges, regardless of how I do in the actual contest. The feedback is what I'm entering for.

So, here's to the Genesis contest submissions and my first synopsis!

Mary DeMuth critique

Author Mary DeMuth does a free critique per week on her blog, So You Want To Be Published. This week, she critiqued the synopsis of my current WIP. You can read the post here.

I was almost embarrassed at how much better the re-write sounded! But, that's why Mary DeMuth is published, and I am not. :) Unfortunately for me, after I sent her the synopsis, I got a fabulous crit partner through ACFW who really helped me become more aware of my cliches. I really had a tendency to write using them. I find that the cliche sticks out in my head now, though, and I search for a more unique way to express what the cliche expresses. This can take several minutes for me!

Anyway...but thanks to Mary for pointing out a much better way to describe the plot of my book. Less passive voice and less cliches (and less run-on sentences, which was the result of my run-in with the Snowflake Method that indicated I should have a synopsis in about 5 sentences...see post here).