![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
May. 7th, 2009
The one good thing about my laptop dying (I think it is a heat issue because it seems to work until the bottom feel suddenly hot) is that I am left with the desktop that I have to work at to get access to. (It is the ersatz TV and newspaper, not to mention CD player and game object.) That means that I have less time on it, which means that instead of using the computer as I hold Lap Boy, I am reading a ton of books. He never sleeps, and he never wants to be put down, so anything I can hold in one hand is fair game. So I've recently read Maggie Stiefvater's Lament, Katherine Marsh's The Twilight Prisoner, Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian, and now I'm on Carrie Jones's Need. I must say, faeries are getting quite the workout these days. There seems to be a lot of interest in the dangerous bad boy as love interest (whether he's a vampire, werewolf, faerie, assasin, whatever). It makes for fun fiction because it has plenty of built-in tension, but of course, those aren't the kind of boys I'd recommend in real life.
Anyhow, it's also good to read books in their full, speeded-up pace while you're revising. It's easy to get fixated on one tiny scene and make it last as long as molasses. I always try to down as many books as I can at once when I'm revising because then I'm more sensitive to the spots in my own book that are as exciting as day-old oatmeal. (Alas. Yes, there are some. Going off to scrape it into the trash now...) All of this is to say that I think I've untangled the events of several chapters and that I need to find one more part of a thread and add it in, and I can rewrite the final two chapters. And polish them. Yesterday I whacked the pacing so that instead of just worrying about bad things that could happen, my character tried his hardest and they really did happen. Hm. Maybe I'm not the only one looking forward to his upcoming road trip. He might want to get away from his author, too.
As to the crits I owe, I'm working on them, too, but with the computer issues it is going slower. DH has a conference going on right now, but once that is over I can hopefully get the computer thing worked out and go back full speed.
Anyhow, it's also good to read books in their full, speeded-up pace while you're revising. It's easy to get fixated on one tiny scene and make it last as long as molasses. I always try to down as many books as I can at once when I'm revising because then I'm more sensitive to the spots in my own book that are as exciting as day-old oatmeal. (Alas. Yes, there are some. Going off to scrape it into the trash now...) All of this is to say that I think I've untangled the events of several chapters and that I need to find one more part of a thread and add it in, and I can rewrite the final two chapters. And polish them. Yesterday I whacked the pacing so that instead of just worrying about bad things that could happen, my character tried his hardest and they really did happen. Hm. Maybe I'm not the only one looking forward to his upcoming road trip. He might want to get away from his author, too.
As to the crits I owe, I'm working on them, too, but with the computer issues it is going slower. DH has a conference going on right now, but once that is over I can hopefully get the computer thing worked out and go back full speed.