MARIE DRY’S EDITING JOURNEY & Giveaway!

We invited author Marie Dry. She's here with her latest release ALIEN UNDER COVER. There's a Kindle Copy Giveaway of Alien Under Cover to one commenter! 

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Marie is a proud member of ROSA, Romance Writers Organisation of South Africa.

MARIE DRY’S EDITING JOURNEY

I tried to think about this brilliant craft blog that would wow everyone and have writers talk about it for weeks afterwards, but I think I may have been over confident. All that came to mind to do was something about editing and I became almost panicky trying to write something fresh and interesting. There are so many good craft posts so I will talk Instead about my journey and where and how I learned and are still learning to edit my work and my CP’s as well.

Somewhere in my life I must have done something really well and was rewarded with the best critique partner a person can imagine. She suggested we take the same courses so that we can grow at more or less the same rate and critique each other’s work. I would suggest this to every writer and their critique partners. 

Cassandra L Shaw (my CP) introduced me to savvy authors and that really put me on the right path. I did many of their short courses and they had something tailor made for me at every stage of my writing journey.  In 2010 Liz Pelletier presented a three month editing course which both Cassandra and I  enrolled for. At the time I still thought checking spelling and grammar was the major part of the editing process. I changed the story structure a bit but mostly I had no clue on how to edit a rough draft into a polished manuscript. With Liz I learned how to check the pacing, to ruthlessly cut out any sentences, paragraphs or chapters that does not serve a purpose.  I will never forget we had a Webinar with Liz and she looked at my manuscript and cut out huge chunks of it and I was secretly horrified. She was cutting out all the good stuff. The long boring scenes of dialogue (I thought it was witty and insightful at that stage), the endless inner monologue (I thought I had some good inner conflict going there) and what little descriptions I had. I had promised myself from the beginning that I would learn from people like Liz so even though I wanted to put every precious word she cut back, I listened to her and tried to put my story into some kind of three arc structure. I did win one argument though and I was sneaky. Liz taught me that you cannot have too many characters in your story and I was determined to have loads of aliens on tap for future stories. She insisted no more than four. So I parked them in a spaceship orbiting earth. Even though the story arc is planned for three books I am glad for the aliens in the space ship. Eventually I can write a few more stories that are knocking at the back of my head.

The other good thing about this course was that Liz suggested a few good craft books. Up to that point I had read Stephen King’s On Writing and found it really helpful. I bought Secrets of the selling writer by Dwight Swain but I was just not on the right level for it yet. That is a brilliant book and never far from me when I edit. I went ahead and bought the books Liz suggested. The one that stands out for me is Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. It made me aware of the fact that the characters in my story needed different voices. This is the first time I really thought about how you would practically manage that. I had this horror of all my characters speaking English with a strong South African accent. Giving my characters different sounding voices is something I struggle with in every book, but being made aware of this helped me take a huge step forward with my writing. Another book that helped me tremendously wais  Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave KIng. It pointed out all the rookie mistakes I made and put me on the right road.

You have to excuse me for raving about the next person that crossed my writing path. Once again Cassandra suggested I do course at WriterU and she specifically mentioned Mary Buckham, who is just amazing and if you ever can take any of her classes jump at the chance. And if you don’t have her craft books on your shelve you have a space there that needs filling. She self published some of her craft books and it was picked up by a publisher so it might be withdrawn from the market for a little while, until the publishers bring out the new versions. I cannot edit without her Active Settings book next to me. It’s like my security blanket. I tend to be very sparse with descriptions. The first thing the editor at Black Opal Books pointed out to me was that my alien didn’t have any clothes on. 

  Doing the active setting course with Mary showed me that I can do descriptions that serve a purpose in my story.  By the way Mary write great fiction as well and her latest book was released this month. The first course I took with her was about the twelve steps to intimacy. I am keeping my fingers crossed that will be one of the first books released. It is a must for every romance writer. It saved me from writing damp panties and peaking nipples the moment the hero and heroine met.

I will continue this blog next week and I’ll talk about Lori Wilde, Margie Lawson and a few other craft books and what I have learned.  Also about the importance of body language for dialogue tags and few other things.

Marie Dry's latest release...

In a bleak and apocalyptic future, Julia Benzoni flees the violence-saturated world of her mafia family to build a peaceful life in a No Name Town, Montana. Now, while civilization disintegrates into anarchy around her and evil men prey on the innocent, she’s pursued by an alien, whose warrior life thrusts her back into the world where might makes right and violence is the order of the day. Torn, she now has to choose between her need to distance herself from war and violence and the alien warrior who holds her heart.

You can purchase Alien Mine from the following stores:
 
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