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I survived the hot seat at the No Safewords Writers Group on Monday night! Two hours of just talking about 18 pages of my work (by which I mean manuscript formatted pages, so more like 20 pages of a paperback than 20 pages of academic writing). I have a blind spot where I take the last feedback I heard as gospel, so I'm writing this down here so the next time someone gives me TOTALLY OPPOSITE advice I can triangulate.
Any of you who are reading my work and would like to jump over to this story to read, comment, kibitz, etc. before having your opinions colored by the group's feedback... Look for "Bait and Hook" under the heading Playing House. It doesn't include any spoilers or require any background past Mark. Don't read it at work. Trust me.
( The work-safe but not necessarily interesting-to-you details of what I got out of the group feedback. )
In other news, my opening story SUCKS as a representation of the whole. I am chained to certain aspects of it in the way they define character meetings and provide a couple of very specific emotional ingredients.
But it's a saga of romance and hot M/M action, and the first section has... um... no romance and no action unless you count platonic respectful bondage for plot reasons. Which, y'know, I find hot (hence having written it), but I wouldn't expect the rest of it from the first, or vice versa.
Since the relationship necessarily develops, I can't really start with romance, though the first splash scene is currently a heated conversation between the appropriate people, so that might count. But then it slooooooows down. I just want to cut the damned thing out, but it anchors the rest.
I had the brilliant idea of making the second scene something implicitly if not explicitly sexy, and then I'm still left with the frickin' frackin' interminable camping trip of doooom staring me in the face and standing between me and the rest of the plot.
It's the first thing I wrote. It's clumsy. It requires more plot exposition and a larger cast list than the next 200 pages put together, and then it is discarded as soon as it is over. It has POV problems: In later sections I crawl around in people's heads, while the first story is in distant omniscient because close third-person would be too personal. I've tried rewriting in different perspectives, and it dies on the vine.
My instinct is to somehow throw it away and pretend I haven't written it, and start from scratch on that entire bit, see what comes out. I don't know how to do that. It's canon in my head and I don't know how to scratch it and start fresh, and there are POV problems to deal with, and...
It's a millstone, I tell you, a millstone. Any suggestions on how to deal with this?
Any of you who are reading my work and would like to jump over to this story to read, comment, kibitz, etc. before having your opinions colored by the group's feedback... Look for "Bait and Hook" under the heading Playing House. It doesn't include any spoilers or require any background past Mark. Don't read it at work. Trust me.
( The work-safe but not necessarily interesting-to-you details of what I got out of the group feedback. )
In other news, my opening story SUCKS as a representation of the whole. I am chained to certain aspects of it in the way they define character meetings and provide a couple of very specific emotional ingredients.
But it's a saga of romance and hot M/M action, and the first section has... um... no romance and no action unless you count platonic respectful bondage for plot reasons. Which, y'know, I find hot (hence having written it), but I wouldn't expect the rest of it from the first, or vice versa.
Since the relationship necessarily develops, I can't really start with romance, though the first splash scene is currently a heated conversation between the appropriate people, so that might count. But then it slooooooows down. I just want to cut the damned thing out, but it anchors the rest.
I had the brilliant idea of making the second scene something implicitly if not explicitly sexy, and then I'm still left with the frickin' frackin' interminable camping trip of doooom staring me in the face and standing between me and the rest of the plot.
It's the first thing I wrote. It's clumsy. It requires more plot exposition and a larger cast list than the next 200 pages put together, and then it is discarded as soon as it is over. It has POV problems: In later sections I crawl around in people's heads, while the first story is in distant omniscient because close third-person would be too personal. I've tried rewriting in different perspectives, and it dies on the vine.
My instinct is to somehow throw it away and pretend I haven't written it, and start from scratch on that entire bit, see what comes out. I don't know how to do that. It's canon in my head and I don't know how to scratch it and start fresh, and there are POV problems to deal with, and...
It's a millstone, I tell you, a millstone. Any suggestions on how to deal with this?
