Happy Weekend!

"One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide." ~Charles Horton Cooley

So I finally got my first-round edits for One Night in Memphis back, from my Samhain editor. This is some of what she had to say:

This is really a pretty clean manuscript, so hopefully these won't make you want to tear your hair out or anything like that.

Still like the story, still love your writing, so yay!

A couple of things.

One: There's a *lot* of introspection going on in the manuscript. [Ah, yes. How I love my "deep POV." Gotta work on that. ] Particularly with Ethan and Dakota doing a lot of thinking. Take a look at the italicized stuff and see how much, if any of that, could possibly be turned into active dialogue, if you would.

Two: I'm not sure how well the scenes written from Gunnar and Mike's POVs work in this manuscript. [But - but - how else am I going to show the reader what's going on while Ethan and Dakota are, you know, otherwise occupied?] I understand that you want to use them to connect pieces of the puzzle or let the reader know what's going on outside the main story, but given that they're not primary characters, I found myself wondering what the true reason for being in their heads was...

So it looks like those are the two big issues. I have one week to work out the kinks (I haven't even opened the file yet...am probably going to put that off for a day or two, since we have out-of-town company this weekened). We'll see. I have this dreadful fear that she's going to want me to axe entire scenes, and, well...there may be some tears over the keyboard in that case...

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On a different note, I've blogged today over at The Wild Rose Press, about the print release of Lost in Paradise and include "5 Fun Facts" about the story you might not know. If you have a chance, pop on over and leave a comment, so I'm not too lonely there!

Enjoy your weekend ~ it's supposed to be gorgeous here. Hooray!