Writspiration

Saturday was a good day for writing inspiration. I got to spend the day at The Library Station for the monthly ORA (Ozarks Romance Authors) meeting. Bryon stayed home and worked on his boat with Matt and, Grace entertained herself.

The great thing about ORA is it really helps keep me pumped for writing. Of course you couldn't tell that from the blog posts because I skipped a day. I did take my first thirty re-edited pages of my novel back and the group critiqued it. Two of the group had read the first draft when it was in first person and liked it better the old way. The rest of them didn't know any better. They all said they wanted to read more so that's a good sign I suppose.

It's staying in third person. I'm just not a first person fiction kind of girl. First person is so incredibly limiting. I like being able to read the minds of my characters.

I made it through all of my first paper and ink edits. Now I have to go back and fix them all in Word. I swear, editing is more difficult than the writing. I say I made it through all of my edits, but Saturday one of the authors in the club took a bit of time to give me some advice and pointed out how many times I was using the passive tense. It was like opening the Pandora's Box of passive voice and she only read two pages.

Here's the difference in passive and active voice straight from the one true source, Wikipedia: Caesar was stabbed by Brutus = passive voice. Brutus stabbed Caesar = active voice.

So now I have to go back and clean all of that up as well. It's going to be huge pain, but I'm doing it because I know she's right. She's published more than seventy novels. I even had one on my bookshelf that I haven't read yet. I took it, and she signed it for me. I want her to adopt me and be my mentor but it turns out prolific authors only get that way by ... well, ... writing. Not babysitting new would-be writers. I get that.

I got a lot of good advice Saturday, and I registered for four writing classes that are coming up on Monday nights the last two weeks of March and the first two weeks of April. I used to say I'm as smart as I plan to be, but I think I'm ready to learn something new. Since I decided not to try to go to the RT Book Lovers Convention in Chicago, this will be the next best thing.