YAWP (Yet Another Writing Post)

March 16, 2024 by Julie Holmes, author 2 Comments

Last weekend I stayed at my son’s apartment, just me and the 4 cats. First–glorious silence! I mean, my husband has the TV on all day long, and usually has the volume turned way down because he has a bluetooth ear piece he listens with, but he’s generally working in the kitchen in the mornings until around noon, then does stuff around the house until his lunchtime (which is about 2 hrs after mine–don’t ask; we’ve been together for almost 35 years and I stopped trying to plan lunch at a particular time a looong time ago). Then I get some alone time while he takes his afternoon nap, 2+ hours of alone time (it’s weird, but he does stay up until about 2:30 am and gets up between 8 and 9 am).

So spending time alone hanging with my son’s cats is a treat. I managed to go through my police procedural (again) and found a few things to shift around. I’ve been working on that book for *unintelligible* years, and I finally feel like it’s about as ready as it’ll get. I’ll listen to Word read it to me in a week or so, let it rest a bit; I’ve got two more books to read before Left Coast Crime anyway. Then I’m shipping it off to my agent.

What is interesting, I think, is how much I’ve learned about writing since I intially wrote that book. Stuff like plot points, character flaws, deep POV, active description, stage directions, description, setting, mystery structure, and so much more.

I think authors have some innate sense of these things as a result of being voracious readers, but an innate sense isn’t the same as consciously thinking about those things. And then there’s the whole paying attention to them and making sure our stories follow some sort of guidelines, like there’s a beginning, middle, and end, and the characters have to have a goal and a flaw and they have to change in some way through the story. Stuff like that.

And I think we learn stuff on our journey that we sometimes have the opportunity to apply to projects we wrote before we learned as much stuff. And hopefully we fix things before we send them to our agent … But hey, it’s been a few years since, so maybe she’ll read it as if it’s a brand new story and she’ll forget she saw the version before I “fixed” it.

Yeah, probably too much to hope for. We’ll see.

For those with Irish blood (and those who pretend they have Irish blood), Happy St. Paddy’s Day!

Hey, keep writing!

That strawberry never had a chance against Phoebe the mighty hunter! Or the mighty thief–that’s my daughter’s stuffed toy 🙂