13 August - Week Behind and Week Ahead by janet lane walters

Been a lot of talk on various places I visit about judging writing contests, especially those for published books. Many of these contests are changing and there are a lot of opinionated people out there. I do judge these kind of contests and for those who have score sheets that want you to evaluate various aspects of the writing, I always ignore them when I'm reading the book. I am not an editor or a publisher. Yes, I am a writer and I do have my won style, but when reading other people's works I must put my tastes and my own style away and read the book forwhat I call the "blew me away" factor. Some of the books I read don't reach this peak but the ones that do get high marks in all the categories. Then there are the almost and they get lower scores. Occasionally there are ones that totally do not "blow me awy." Those books will be scored lower and lower. So I don't sweat the various categories of scoring until I finish the book. I am reading these books and hope the writer will make me want to read more of what they write.

As to my own writing. Last week I came within one chapter of finishing the Plot draft. For me this is the important one. While I am finding and plugging the holes in the plot I find the characters are growing and changing. I now have a real idea of what they want and how they are going to either reach their goal or fail. In this case one must discover who of the villains will be around for the second book of the trilogy and where the third book will take up. Though this draft takes longer to write than most others I'm becoming one with my charaters and the place where they exist.

Coming up this week will be finishing this draft and allowing the material to sit fallow for a week or so. This I hate because I always want to rush ahead and finish the book. I do have something to work on that has intrigued me. A story I wrote perhaps 30 years ago and I think might be salvagable and be another to add to my J. L. Walters group of stories that hopefully will be five whenever I can get the rights back to the other stories. Only 2 to go and 1 will be available by the first of the year. That will be wonderful. It's already August. I'd like to get book numero 3 from them and perhaps that will happen.