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Popularity: 9% [?]
More Godsent, and characters with personality
Godsent is still moving along well, albeit a little slower than I would like—but I have a day job too 
I have worked hard on the storyline and plot for this book as, like any good mystery, there are a number of twists and whodunit moments. When I first wrote the outline the story focused around Satisfaction, a god of his namesake emotion who was, well…unsatisfied. Apparently being a god wasn’t everything he was told. While the story still is about Satisfaction, much of my writing so far has focused on the God responsible for solving the mystery: the God is called Suspicion
This is my third novel, and one of the things I have found is that characters have a way of taking on their own personality. Suspicion, for example, has a way of acting and analyzing the facts of a situation he could be nothing else but a God detective.
I am close to hitting the 30,000 mark, and am about to throw in the first real twist of the story. Too many books I read seem to fall flat somewhere around the 30-40k mark. I don’t want Godsent to: this is going to keep you guessing until the end.
For now, however, it is time to get back to it.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Writing is about practice, determination & doing what you love
I have been decidedly disheartened over the past few weeks about my fiction writing. The thought of adding more blog fodder made me cringe. The reason? Another rejection from an Agent for The Seed of Hope. I don’t know, but for some reason I was really excited about this Agent, and thought I had a good shot of representation. After all, she requested the entire manuscript, and took the time to read it, only to turn me down at the end.
Why continue? I thought, and threw myself into writing more of Godsent—my latest novel. Perhaps I should just chalk The Seed of Hope up to experience, cut my loses and move on.
But I thought about it for a while. Firstly, The Seed of Hope was voted by readers in Webook’s Page2Fame competition to be worth promotion into round 2, and I had an Agent actually take the time to read my entire book: What’s more, she wrote a very helpful response on where I could improve the story.
I was looking at this rejection all wrong. No-one was saying “Your book sucks, throw it in the dumpster and forget about your dreams for writing” In fact, they were saying the opposite: “The story is good, you just need to continue to practice your craft.”
And you know what, they are right. Dead on, truth hurts, suck it up RIGHT!
I can already see a massive improvement in my writing for Godsent, just as did when I wrote Of Worldly Deeds. If you want to be a writer the only thing you can do to improve is write-write-write. I can take what I have learned about writing since completing The Seed of Hope, and take a critical look at areas for improvement on the manuscript, and keep plodding along.
Like I said in my biography, I refuse to let the mundane reality win. Telling stories is what I love to do, and by god I am going to do it!
Popularity: 11% [?]