Encouragement and Awards.

I find inspiration from my fellow bloggers. I have some awards to acknowledge and share:

From Wool N Nuts

From One Significant Moment at a Time

From Book Dreaming

Because I love themes, I'm going to pass these awards onto my newest followers - thanks for joining!:

Miss Lemon's Mysteries

The Quintessential Questionable Query Experiment

Paul & Karen from MuseItUp Publishing

Spunk on a Stick

Glynis Smy

Benedictions

Head in the Clouds

Just Jemi

Paper Dolls

I'm going to work on making an award too. I'd like to do one up for young bloggers. There's a lot of great blogs out there by kids!

Speaking of encouraging young bloggers, Paper Dolls posted a review of the book Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror by Chris Priestly, and the author left a comment on their blog. You'd have thought Elvis had stopped by, the way Miss 12 jumped up and down with excitement. She has since told all her friends and is singlehandedly working the sales for Priestly's books in our country town here in Australia. It's great to see marketing work on a personal level and not just at the masses :-). So, in return I suggest a visit to the author's blog: http://chrispriestley.blogspot.com/ (his new book cover design is awesome!).

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T is for Timelines and Thanks

T is for Timelines. The online editing course I'm taking, How to Review Your Novel, has gotten me to use my scene cards (a previous exercise of recording each scene on a separate index card) and note down the day and time the scene takes place. I'm including the start time and finish time.

The object of this exercise is to catch yourself up on parts where the story does not flow cohesively, but also to think about time of day for your descriptions and actions. Things are easy to find in the daylight and night time is best for sneaky characters.

What did I gain from this exercise? Once all my cards were laid out in time order, I saw ways to shorten the overall timeframe of the story, down from three weeks to just over one week. This provides my narrative a faster moving pace.

Another part of the exercise was to decide exactly what time of year this is all happening, which makes you think about scenery (snow or falling leaves?) and the temperature (bikinis or sweaters?). The full rewrite of Dog Show Detective starts next week!

T is also for Thanks and I have to thank some lovely bloggers for awards! I try to get to everyone's blog every couple of days, the A-Z blog challenge is fun, but when I get back to blogging every couple of days, I'll be able to keep up with leaving comments :-). The awards:

From Mason Canyon at Thoughts in Progress

From Niki at Wool n Nuts

This award is from Angie Paxton at Answering the What if

It was easy to work out who I should pass them onto, because I owe great thanks to my beautiful followers who have made the effort to also follow my daughters (8 & 12yrs. old)  book review blog at Paper Dolls. The girls are absolutely thrilled when they get new followers and a comment is like christmas for them. I appreciate the supportive enthusiasm you've shown (and always feel free to post a link in the comments here, if you know of a young person's blog we should visit), so I want each person to receive all three awards, THANK YOU to:

• Book Dreaming
• Answering the What If
• Writing in the Crosshairs
• Wool N Nuts
• Unedited
• The Watered Soul
• Neat Zine
• The Innocent Flower
• Head in the Clouds
• Dutch Hill News
• Literary Rambles

And, because I've seen the girls working hard to finish books and spend hours on each review, I'm also passing the awards onto Milly and Tilly at Paper Dolls - keep up the good work girls!

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First Impression & Lasting Impact.

Dog Show Detective edits are coming along nicely. I owe this completely to the resources I've found on editing that turned a daunting task into an achievable process. This week I've been looking at position and placement.

'cause position matters

(pic found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/68003527@N00/254633689)

Position, Position, Position!

By now you all would be knowing about the ol' opening hook necessity (or you can see a previous post I did on hooks here). The opening hook can get your reader interested in starting your novel, but it won't be enough to keep them going. There's no point in letting the rest of your story drag through.

In Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore, Elizabeth Lyon explains the importance of certain positions throughout your novel. This guide (which I've found very practical) suggests spending an entire round of revision on 'power positions'.

What is Power Position?

"When a word, phrase, or sentence is in a first position, it serves as a hook to draw the reader in. The impact of the last position should cinch the meaning of the sentence or paragraph, and create suspense and curiosity leading to the next hook." Are you at least thinking carefully about where you pack the important stuff?

Examples:
Miss 8 was today writing a story about a valuable piece of paper missing from the museum. Her story started by telling me all about Greg, the man in charge of guarding the valuable piece. I heard about his family and his work habits and then finally about the day he discovered the piece of paper was stolen. I suggested she start with the discovery, and then tell us about Greg. The re-write started by expressing the concern in finding such a valuable piece missing and what it might mean for his job, then we learn who 'he' is.

Miss 11's story would be about a thief who is escaping a detective and during the pursuit get's hit by a car. After learning about 'starting with the action', she decided to begin with the impact of the car hitting the thief and then explaining how he got there. This shows how the opening paragraphs of the chapter would have the hook, the excitement, the puzzle and the closing ones would explain and deepen the curiosity of the reader.

In Dog Show Detective, I've been working through my chapters and paragraphs to see how I go on position placement, but I think a big change will be for the placement of chapters in the book. I start before the action, I figured I needed to 'inform' my reader of what was going on. Wrong. I can inform them later, right at the start I want to make them wonder what's going on.

My other main source for editing has been How to Revise Your Novel. 

I know I rave about this course, but it has broken the process of editing down to weekly steps. I'm not sure what's coming up, but so far I've been able to complete the steps without difficulty. 

In lesson 2 I looked at the weight of each character and item mentioned in the narrative and making sure it directly links to the story and hopefully propels it along.

This week was lesson 3 and I had to summarise each scene into an impact sentence and write them on individual index cards (without knowing what Holly Lisle will want me to do with those cards, I have already found scenes that will be surplus). So far this course has had me identify problems and I haven't had to actually rewrite (yet - I KNOW that's coming!)

As well as editing, I have been working on my plotting for my next book (possibly named The Warracknabeal Kids). In 1939 a fire swept through the Warracknabeal racecourse, burning down the old decrepit clubhouse and providing much-needed insurance funds to build a new one. I'm using this as a setting for my story about a kid who struggles with morality and understanding that sometimes you have to do wrong to make things right. I think this is my favourite part of writing - planning. I love research and finding out more about my MC's world. Today I'm going to get a Google Maps pic of the small town he lives in.

I also received a Kreative Blog award (from Ann at All Write With Coffee - thanks!), the idea is that I pass it on, but you know what? I've decided if you follow me, or I follow you - then that means I love your blog and would like you to accept this award (I realise most of you probably already have it). Feel free to post it up and share ten things about yourself (I won't do that because I did it last post and things about me actually run out at 12). So for all my followers and followees - your award:

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Pass it on...

 A while ago I received this award from Book Dreaming, a great site about reading and writing that I love to visit. Book Dreaming receives quite a lot of these awards, and it's easy to see why! The catch is: I tell you ten things about myself, and pass the award onto ten other bloggers. How hard can that be? #famouslastwords 

In no particular order....

1. I tweet too much. Sometimes 20 tweets a day. I tweet links about writing, reading, educating and just random fun sites, I tweet about my process in writing and editing, and I tweet about my purchase patterns as a book consumer and blog follower. I figure this stuff is helpful, but have had close friends in the earlier stages of twitter threaten to stop following me because I fill up their screen with tweets. I have now found I can keep them on Facebook and my ramblings on Twitter.
2. When I start laughing, I can't stop for a really long time. This usually starts when I go to bed, my neighbours must feel sorry for my husband (I'm not laughing at you baby, with you, with you).
3. This almost seems sacrilegious for a book lover to admit, but I now prefer Kindle and e-books to physical books. I have many crates of books in my shed that won't fit on my shelves, I LOVE electronic books and would be happy to have every book I own on Kindle or audio-file format. *ducks as angry paper-book lovers throw heavy texts*
4. I will sign up for ANY course (even if it's something I suck at) crafts, arts, accounting, education, marketing, etc, etc. I think the weirdest thing I've studied is a dog groomer's course via correspondence (it's really hard stuffing those finished Shih tzu's in an envelope).
5. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Never have. 
6. Truth: When I was 13, a friend and I co-wrote a book that turned out to be quite dirty. We thought it was hilarious but knew it could never see the light of day, so I hid in the bottom of my craft box. I was horrified to come home one day and discover my mother had donated the box to the elderly lady next door. Nothing was ever said about my shameful 'book' *still blushing*.
7. My husband keeps me grounded. Without him, I honestly believe I would be one of those crazy ladies with over a hundred dogs in her house. We have just 3 dogs, a cat, 5 chickens and a bunny (don't tell him but I want just one more puppy).
8. When my kids ask if I have a band-aid in my purse, I remind them I'm not that kind of mum. I'm the kind of mum that drags mattresses into the lounge room on a Saturday night so we can have a slumber party and watch movies all night. I also do not ever get school forms in on time.
9. I love jelly-beans, the special little fancy ones. My favourite flavour is buttered popcorn.
10. I have an endless number of fears, just a few of those are: flying, hairy spiders, typing the word spiders (*shudders*), balloons, identical twins (not the people, just the idea of a person genetically existing twice at once), the sun/earth exploding/imploding (yes, I've contemplated this), telephoning strangers, milk more than 24hrs old, going into banks, a knock on the door, and, as it turns out, a man over 60 wearing a superman t-shirt in the supermarket (I had to keep changing isles to make sure I was never in the same one as him).

Then came the catch, finding bloggers who didn't already have this award displayed on their blog (kind of reminded me of the chain letters we used to write each other as teens):

1. Michelle McAlleer - Actress, teacher and dog lover, wonderfully honest and humorous life blog.
2. http://theinnocentflower.blogspot.com/ - because I saw my friends book on her site (check out Amy's The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Dogs)
3. The Write Words - This blog has a contest for 200 writing minded followers!
4. http://penultimatepage.com/ - another contest for 200 followers 
5. Inkspot - I love some  of the mystery covers of their books!
6. http://www.suspensebyanne.blogspot.com/ - another blog with contests
7. http://jenniferswriting.blogspot.com/ - a writer's journey
8. Play of the Page - this is a lovely blog where the writer shares her thoughts, writing and family with us :-)
9. It's a Mystery - because I love mysteries, lists and the Friday cartoons
10. Breakthrough Blogs - the latest addition to the list of blogs I follow.

Next blog we'll return to the subject of editing, in particular word and sentence placement and priority (let the fun begin).

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