When You Can't See The Trees for The Forest

I've been working on The Clover Key forever. At least, it feels like forever. Yeah, maybe it is forever.

I began writing TCK back in 2008. Can you imagine working on a novel for that long? I lived with those characters for eight years. Eight years! Fleshing out their emotions and actions, pulling the story out of them. At one point, I even started to hate them.

I lost count on how many rewrites this novel went through. When I thought it was ready, I sent it out to beta readers and then took their thoughts into consideration. And then rewrote it again. I also lost count on how many rounds of agent queries it went through. I never received any requests. None of the agents gave me feedback. The only thing I could think was that the novel was horrible.

And so, I shelved it. I figured TCK was going to be one of those first novels that never get published, and I started to believe that maybe it shouldn't be published.

But then last year, I opened that file again. I read through the manuscript and found I just couldn't give up on it. Not yet. I did another read through, tweaked it a little more, and began the query process all over again.

This time, I got feedback from agents. They liked the story, but couldn't get excited about it. So, I stopped querying and decided to bite the bullet and hire an editor.

What better editor than Kelly Hashway? Not only is she a fellow graduate of ICL, but she also has several published YA and NA books, AND she's my daughter's former Middle School English teacher. Small world, huh? Buy her books. She's an awesome writer.

In two weeks, she returned my manuscript with valuable input. I'd been doing stupid things that I KNEW I shouldn't have done. So many of her suggestions were obvious, but I never caught them. Why?

I was so involved in the story, but I couldn't see the WORDS. I couldn't see the individual sentences. I couldn't see the problems.

Now, my eyes can SEE the problems. Kelly was nice enough to point them out (in bright red print.)

I'm excited to get back to work on this novel. Will it ever get published? Maybe. Maybe not. But I won't rest until I know that I've done all I can.

Thanks, Kelly!

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Fending Off The Grammar Police

Spelling.

As a kid, I was thrilled whenever my teachers uttered the words, Spelling Bee! 

I'm a good speller, except when I type on my phone and my fat sausage fingers hit the wrong letters. Typos happen. The Twitterverse can attest to that. Thank goodness we're now able to edit tweets.

Grammar. 

I'm not good at grammar. I dangle participles, end sentences with prepositions, misplace modifiers, and my sentences have a tendency to run on. 

But now, the Grammar Police can leave me alone. I've found Grammarly.

I'm so excited about this service! I downloaded the free account and played around with it for a few weeks before deciding that I HAD to upgrade to the Premium service.

Let me tell you what Grammarly can do for you: 

Whenever you're online, composing an e-mail, updating your Facebook status, writing a blog post, or typing up a tweet, Grammarly's free service will check your writing for punctuation errors and misspelling. If they detect an error, they will notify you and give you options for correction. 

If you're like me and write your manuscripts in a program like Open Office, you can copy and paste your work on to a document and Grammarly will check your work and save it for you.

If you use Microsoft Office, the Premium service will work directly with the program! (I'm too cheap to purchase Office, though.)

Grammarly's Premium Service also checks for plagiarism, sentence structure, style mistakes, and grammar enhancement. 

I'm looking forward to uploading the draft of my second novel, THE HALCYON DREAM, to Grammarly. I can't wait to see the suggestions for improvement. It's like having a personal critique partner.

Check out Grammarly's Blog, follow on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. I highly recommend you download the free service. I'm convinced you'll WANT the Premium Service. 

What is your favorite writing service?

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