Surviving the Holidays

Well, I'm here. That means I survived. If you're reading this, then you too are a survivor. Congratulations!

The holidays, regardless of which ones you celebrate or why you celebrate them, are about tradition and bringing families together. Anyone who survives that dangerous mix deserves their due credit.

I didn't do it alone, my wife and children helped me through it all with a continuous flow of joy and rich foods. My wife is an artist with food and confection at a level that I strive for with words.

I'd have to say the hardest part of the whole holiday ordeal was not writing. It's not that I didn't write or revise at all, but it certainly wasn't to the schedule I've grown used to. It kept leaving me with a nagging sense that I was being lazy and leaving things undone.

I'm revising now, which means I'm learning a LOT about my bad habits and just how horrible and clunky some of my prose can be. 

I've got this fantastic thing I do, which likely comes from my personal speech patterns, where I use more complicated words when simple will do. I don't seem to let it creep into dialog, which is a good sign that I'm not overpowering my character voices.

I'm enjoying the experience so far. Granted, I've only revised 6 chapters in to a ~50 chapter manuscript,  but some of them needed serious surgery. I'm talking the "hit it repeatedly with an ax until it stops moving" kind of surgery. Messy, somewhat painful, but necessary. 

I've started to receive feedback from my Alpha Readers on some of what they have so far and it's been invaluable. It's really quite amazing how much some of them pick up on. I probably drive them batty with how I'm dropping, revising, and re-dropping the same chapters to them on Dropbox, and I'm trying to clean up that process so they'll have a frame of reference when I give them updated revisions.

I still aim to push it out to some Critique Partners over at CPSeek.com and on Twitter by end of January. The timeline from that to Agent Query Submission will have to be more flexible depending on feedback at that level.

This writing thing is a lot of work. It's a good thing I enjoy it.