Writing Update: Beta Readers

This week was pretty productive. I finished Survival Agreement. I'm actually pleased with the turn out and the changes I made to make it more logical. I have one person beta reading at the moment and giving me great feedback. I think I'm going to be looking for another beta reader or two before I schedule a time with my editor. Yay!

One of my goals it to have my brother illustrate parts of my novella. It would be a nice touch to the world and I know a few people who have read the novella would really like seeing parts of it. This is somethings I have to ask him about. He's a very busy man.

I'm currently working on some character development things for Hourglass. Which I plan on finishing the rewrite in July for Campnano. This is going to be a real pain in my ass when it's over and the edits will be awful but the novel will be where it needs to be for the most part. I won't have to do another overhaul. Just revisions and edits.

Well, that's all I have for my update. I'm hoping to have a very productive weekend...I probably won't.

Luca Moran from Mirror Magic

This week, in order to get ready for NaNoWriMo in less than a month, answer the following questions about as many of your characters as you’d like.

I saw this and thought it would go well with my blog post about getting to know your characters. This might be a fun way to get you started. 

I've decided to just do my main character, Luca. The story will remain in her point of view throughout both novels so it's good to start there. There is a reason why she is named Luca but that will be explained later.

Full name: Luca Moran (Female)
Birthday: December 3
Hair Color:  White (used to be brown when she was younger)
Eye Color: Gray
General appearance: She looks very washed out when it comes to color but she is lanky and looks homeless because she is. Her clothes get torn from traveling constantly. What really makes her stand up is the mark in the middle of her forehead known as the "Gods' Mark" that makes her stand out more.
Personality-type (this can either be Meyer-Briggs or you can write out their personality): Since I don't want to do the personality test for her or any of my characters, I'll just write it out. She can be shy at first, mostly because of what happened to her. She is weak, physically, and doesn't know how to fight at all. She gets anxious when dealing with something she's never encountered before - which is a lot. Despite being weak physically, she has a strong sense of will and is pushes her to continue on. She tends to think about things logically and is wary about jumping in blindly.

 I did not create this myself. If you would like to find this for your own blog, click on the image below.

Know Your Characters

Knowing your character is a must when writing your novel. They are usually a selling point to most stories since you want your readers to connect with them. So, you want to know all about your character and how they will react to things, to make them seem more believable.

This is a task that can happen differently for each character but for this post, it's about developing your main character.

• What is your character's name and age? These are pretty basic when it comes to writing but they can be important. Age will explain a lot of things about how they view things. How the world sees them. Their experiences as well. A 30-something-year-old is going to have way more experiences than a 16-year-old.

• What changed in their life that made this story important? I've read a lot about characters and this is a common thing that comes up. Something has to change in the character's normal life. So what made this change so much more different.

• What was their past like? Someone's past is important to who they are in your current novel. Even childhood scars can still effect them. Make connections with their personality and how it changed them.

• What kind of personality do they have? This connects with the past question. Something might have a huge influence on who they are in your novel. This is important to how they will react to certain instances in your novel. And make sure that you follow it. 

• Name some of their flaws. Flaws aren't the same as imperfections. You characters need to have flaws that will conflict with something in the story. It has to cause some kind of issues.

• What is their culture? Culture can have a big impact on who they are as a person or some of their strange habits.

• What do they look like? This one can be tough. You don't need to know every single detail of your character unless it's absolutely important. If their tattoo is nothing more than a mark on them when they got stupidly drunk and really has no purpose...then we don't really care. But if the tattoo becomes a mark that causes your character to become a target, then we might need to know about it. 

These are the absolute basics of what you need. Characters are another thing you want to develop as your write. You want them to grow. You want to learn somethings about them too. By giving them room to grow, you'll build a more realistic character.

What I Do With My Time

Procrastination
What is your worst time waster? How long do you allow yourself to procrastinate? Do you regret it, or do you think it’s worth it?

Bonus: Try to forego one of your time wasters this month and see how much higher your WC is! But not that school, work, necessary stuff. We need you happy, healthy and not in trouble for truancy.

Lately, I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos. I have my moments but I just get really tired when I get home and just want to veg. My hours at work at changing and I'm trying to get used to it all, not to mention school has started. Sometimes I just want to kick back. YouTube videos are usually short and I try to use them as more of a character study since I don't have the energy to go out and people watch. It's really easy to pick up on certain quirks that people have. You have to go and find the right ones though. Not the scripted messes that people tend to make.

I don't know if that's considered procrastinating since I'm actually doing something but I think it's procrastinating. It's not something I do for long, maybe an hour or so before I get bored and go back to writing. My attention span for watching videos/TV/Movies is really short. I don't mind when I'm doing something while its playing in the background but I can't always just sit down and watch stuff.

Since I tend to pick up a few personality traits that I can use, I don't tend to regret it much...until I see the pile of work I have to do later - then I regret it. So, yes. Yes I do regret it. Actually, writing this post is me procrastinating from the massive amount of stuff I really should be doing...

The Editing Process: Knowing What Went Wrong

Dowsers is one of the longest novels I've written and decided to edit. There are a lot of mistakes that I need to fix before this reaches other people. Aside from the normal grammar and spelling mistakes I have, I found several things wrong with my main and sub plots.

Going through it once was enough to force me to understand where I went wrong. Thankfully, there is no insta-love. Or love triangles (I hate them). The relationship between my characters is important for their development because my characters have problems. Don't all characters, though?

I do need to redo the ending. I'm terrible at writing endings and beginnings. This is something I'm going to have to work on because it's the most important part of the book. I can't having it being lame. That just won't do.

There is also a matter of my antagonist being slightly bipolar. He really shouldn't be that way. I mean, he's good at acting because that how he gets what he wants, but he isn't bipolar. So, that is on my list of things I need to fix.

Now, the plot. I've been playing with some other options that my plot has to offer to see if they work better. It might. I might have to figure out what works best - which offers the strongest plot. It's going to be a lot of work, but it will be worth it in the end.

Pretty soon, I'll have to do some trimming...and adding. Adding is the hardest parts editing but it has to be done.

Second Edits - Done!

Finally! Finally my second edits are done for District Pluto: The Survival Agreement (formally known as The Sacrificial Son). I've even created a checklist for what needs to come next. My third and final round of edits (which is mostly a syntax edit) should be over quickly before I sent it out to Betas. Then I'll be editing two projects at once. The next story in the District Pluto series, Morality Sentence and my stand alone novel Dowsers. I'm hoping to get some of these out to Betas by the end of the year but I have a feeling that Dowers will take me a long time to edit but I really need to get back on it.

One thing I noticed when doing this second edit was that my characters were weak. While typing up my edits, I tried to fix this but I don't know how well I did. I guess I find out when I start the last round of my editing. If not, then hopefully my betas can help me with how they read. It occurred to me that my characters didn't even have the barest of description so I had to add that in. That was a struggle.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the outcome of this short story/novella (possibly a novelette). I can already see the improvements compared to my very first draft. I finally have a name for it too, as I stated above. It's no longer Sacrificial Son, it is now titled The Survival Agreement. I already have the cover art made (and fixed). Actually, I have two. I have one that I picked out but I'll also ask the people who are my betas - if they want to. I'm not going to force that on them. I already have one in mind.