WiP Wednesday and the Return of Kirby

WiP Wednesday and the Return of Kirby

The Wicked Critique of the West
Hoo, boy, has this one been on my mind lately. Since I am now finished with NaNoWriMo for the year (woohoo, I won! Yay me!), I'm going to go into another round of edits on The Surface of the Deep. I actually threw out a paragraph or so over on Quill and Ink for review, and so far they've said exactly what I did: What the heck happened?See, I took advice from a few different people--about five or so--back during my last round of revisions, and none of them were really writers or even readers. Silly on my part to take their advice so seriously, but they sounded right at the time. Truth be told, if I had listened to just the one, I probably would have been fine. But no, I listened

Up It
When I edit, I first do a sweep through the MS and add notes to sections I feel need work using Microsoft Word's comments feature. When I go back and do a read through of all the notes, the most common comment that I find is this:Up it.Up it, meaning make it more intense, more dramatic, more tense, more hyped-up, more more more. Scenes that drag make for boring reading, and that means a lot of readers will wind up skipping through the story for the "good parts."Here are my five tips for "uppping" the flabby, draggy scenes in your WiP:1. Cut it OutCut out all t

Go Tell it On the Mountain
*Climbs to the top of the nearest mountain and pulls out a bullhorn.*Hear ye, hear ye! Let it be known that I, Jennifer Breanne White, being of slightly unsound mind and a body that could use a little toning, have completed National Novel Writing Month two thousand and nine on this day, November 27, 2009, at 10:50 pm, with just under 71,000 words in a novel in a genre that I have NEVER BEFORE WORKED WITH with an idea that I came up with JUST DAYS BEFORE THE KICKOFF.That is all.*Climbs down from the mountain and puts up the bullhorn.*

The Other Sense of the Word
Tracy Marchini did a fantastic post the other day about using more than just sight to describe things in a novel. It struck a chord with me, and I thought I'd add my own thoughts to the mix.I'll admit right off that I'm guilty of using only sight to describe and neglecting the rest of the descriptive arsenal. But there are, after all, four other senses: smell, touch, taste, and hearing. As writers (unless, of course, we write screenplays that actually get turned into tv shows or movies) we don't have the advantage of actually being able to show

Dictionary Size
Hey, lookit that. I woke up this morning and my leg is fine again. Guess it just needed a day of rest. Thanks for all the well-wishes, everyone. :)I have family coming into town today (they left at about six in the morning EST, should be here later this afternoon), and they're going to be here for a week. I'm going to try and post every day, but I don't know if I'll be able to. Plus I'm behind in NaNo (well, by MY word count goals, anyway), so I'm going to try and step it up in this last week, here. Just a heads up.Today I'd like to throw out a little something-something that I've been thinking about lately: word count.I love long books, don't get me wron