LOL I'm so tired that my editing efforts have been useless so I've been reading some back blogs to try and catch up. As a result, I'm full of information, doubt, righteous anger and what ifs.
I decided to post a couple of those to you. What if you're writing a multiple POV book? I can here the dreaded word "headhopping" hopping around in your heads already. But really, if you're writing a book form omniscient or multiple POV you must have some transitions. I've heard everything from, "Make sure you put space here so reader knows it's a change of POV" (heard it from multiple writer friends) to you can't do that. You have to have new chapter, scene change, whatever.
I've also heard from some editing friends. Mostly, they say the key is transition, like dialogue. But then, you have all the writer wannabe's (including myself) reading books going "hey that's headhopping, how come they got away with it! or I can't read this book cuz I'm now in the 7th person's POV for the book.
What do you do if you're reading an Omnscient storyteller type book? If you have an all knowing narrator, you're going to know everyone's thoughts and feelings. Have we gotten so stuck on holding everyone in the craft to a list of rules, that we've forgotten how to enjoy a well crafted story? I took one such person's supposedly educated wisdom to heart that, I, who was in AP classes growing up, have a hard time staying in one tense because I radically and frantically worked too hard at taking "was" out of my vocabulary because someone's creative writing teacher told her was was passive voice.
I was new at the writing thing and enoungh years out of school to believe said person. They were wrong. Anyways, I'm working on it. Of course, it's not helping that I've spent months changing my mind about tenses in a particualr book I wrote (went from third person past tense to first person present to first person past. You try it. Change a completed 85k word MS from one tense to the other and see what happens!)
Then there's the self pubbed stuff going around about poorly written etc. Well, to my deep horror, I have published a version of Winds of Fire that wasn't the final draft and can't seem to find the final draft (after beta readers & final changes.) so I dropped the price on my books and offered a major coupon to the twitter followers. I may have to pull it for a bit since I started a job and I'm having MAJOR formatting issues with everything. I got to thinking. Everyone is saying, you have to pay for editors, etc. Well, most of the writers I know are not rich enough to pay the 2-5 cent PER WORD cost of a professional editor. We are all trying to help ourselves. In doing that though, a lot of, "you absolutely have to do it this way" is happening and when I ask my editor friends (which I got through following their blogs and participating in discussions!) will tell me the right way and I have to follow my heart on it.
Then there are people who say don't cuz you might get poor sales. Well, maybe. I've backed off on advertising when I found the errors (after a fit of crying) so I can fix them. But also, I'm selling the fun ones through indie means. Not that the ones I'm holding back are dull and boring (quite the opposite, in fact!) but the ones I'm self publishing are the ones that I wanted out there, but have decided that I no longer want to pursue traditional publishing routes with those particular books. I wonder how that will bear on things later? But since I'm querying a project that is not of the same genre, will it be a mute point whether the sales turn out good when I go back to hitting the advertising hard, or if I pull it from the market? They're not the same genre, just some books I've written.
And maybe I'm too tired to really see any of this clearly LOL Oh, and by the way, I don't LOL in my books or use much in the way of parenthesis, or say cuz. Those are cheats here as I'm lazy on the blog :D (Oh, and I don't put smiley faces in either, even though it's tempting since I'm self pubbing LOL)
If you've self pubbed, share why. If you now read books looking for errors instead of enjoyment, even if it's subconsciously done, fess up here!
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