Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Update

Well, just so everyone knows the current status of things, I've sent my first set of revisions off to D.A. It took me a little longer than expected, and you won't believe the reason. LOL. I had this small little scene tacked on the VERY end of the pages, and I wanted to amp up the tension there. I couldn't come up with anything that seemed to make sense. Finally, it hit me and I got something I think is pretty good. Maybe not perfect, but there's something there, and it could always be changed later. Anyway -- that held me up.

I also had to cut about a thousand words in the form of a phone call to a newbie agent. I liked a lot of the information being conveyed to the reader, but after a lot of thought, I decided all of it would come out in the book at one point or another. I'll admit, that scene was a concession to early readers who complained about various aspects of the book, claiming they didn't understand, etc. The thing is, while I appreciate that, I think there are enough clues/hints/dialogue/actions to explain it all already. All I can hope is that people will give my book long enough to figure those things out. People say you shouldn't spoon feed the reader with backstory upfront, and that was what this scene was -- pure and simple, so it had to go. Don't worry, I salvaged the best lines from it. The music montage thing HAD to stay... lol.

Other than that, I spent Sunday night working on that new scene in BTPM. I have two different sections of the chapter/scene written -- but a HUGE gap right in the middle and no big finale. It actually took a turn I hadn't expected, but it's just going to make it that much better. It's a bit violent, but hopefully not too bad for YA. Just gives me more cause to make one of the characters go crunch at some point... gah, makes me mad thinking about it. (g) I guess that's a good thing. (g)

What else? Oh. God. I bought my school books yesterday. How depressing. One of my classes has roughly 500 pages of reading for the first day. That's SO wrong. Is it too late to go to dental college? Hair College, perhaps? Okay, one more year -- keep reminding me of that when I start whining about a week from now. (g)

Oh, and I miss my pups! :( They'll be home in a week -- I can't wait! Okay, I promised a review of ECLIPSE, so that's next on the agenda. After that, I'm gonna spend the day working on BTPM. WOOHOO.

2 comments:

Susan Adrian said...

I said this in my comments too, but wanted to say here:

CONGRATS for getting that off to D.A.!

Jennifer Hendren said...

Thanks, Susan! (s)