One week.../Weekend Writing

Next week at this time, I'll be about an hour and a half away from starting my reading. Eeeek! On the up side, I did go out and buy a new outfit this weekend, so that's taken care of at least. A really cool pink sweater (Yes, now that I've been told it's no longer forbidden for me to wear it, I am officially addicted to the color -- plus, I guess it's really "in" right now) and yet another pair of black pants. You can never have too many pairs of black pants. I'll go on record right now saying that.

However, I still need to actually read aloud the pages that I'll be reading next week. I've done that already once before the book was published. Reading aloud can help you hear your dialogue and find the clunky spots. But this time, I'll need to read it and revise, or at least note, any places where I stumble in reading. A sentence that's an inadvertent tongue twister or something. Here's the funny thing...I need to do this but I find myself reluctant to do it when my husband is in the house. Duh, Stacey. You're going to have to read aloud in front of a bunch of strangers who don't love you (necessarily) next week. Better learn to deal and fast.

I also worked on a query letter for my mystery this weekend. I took sort of a different approach to that. The more I'm reading about how genres are blending together, the more I think that my mystery could be a chicklit mystery instead of a cozy. The heroine is a young woman trying to get her life back on track and oh yeah, she happens to stumble across a dead body or two. The voice is first person and kind of fiesty (in my opinion). However, length is still an issue, so I may have to work on that. Go another round, create another draft. Oddly enough, this book is only on its second draft and my first readers have already read it. With The Silver Spoon, I lost count how many drafts I went through before I considered it remotely presentable. Maybe one more draft will help in this case.

And I worked on my outline for the sequel to The Silver Spoon. The part that I'm finding difficult about this is that most of my subplot, Zara discovering who and what she is, went into The Silver Spoon. It was originally supposed to be in Book Two. The subplot for Book Three was originally supposed to be more about accepting who she is and the consequences and the way it shapes her as a person. But because it was all the way out there in Book Three, I hadn't thought about this part of it as much. Now that it's in Book Two instead, I'm having to work a little harder at it than I'd like. Plus, as much as I hate to, I find myself trying to compare The Silver Spoon to Book Two. And they're just...different. Shocking revelations abound, never fear. But it's less about creating the world and more about the details of the world or explaining how we got to where we are, instead of dumping you off in the midst of chaos. Which is pretty much how the first book worked. Although, there is definitely more than a fair share of being dumped in chaos in this book too. Ah, well, we'll just have to see what the first readers think of it. But first, I have to finish the outline, so I can revise the draft accordingly. I also think any book in a series other than the first has two big jobs ahead of it. Living up to the first one (which might also explain why I'm brooding over this so much -- writers are always convinced that whatever they're working on currently sucks and their previous stuff was way better than this dreck) and further drawing out the world sketched out in the first book. I hope I've done that, though at this point, I've lost all ability to look at this thing with any hope of objectivity : ) But that is where my lovely, unpaid and very courageous first readers come in... *grin*