Acknowledgement

I always felt the long list of acknowledgements for assistance in the writing of a novel, increasingly  prevalent it seems, was just a tiny bit pathetic - after all, if they were proper writers surely they could  do it all themselves?

Humbled, I now know different.   A complete stranger, met only through the good offices of the 'whole MS read-swapping' group at WriteWords, not only read the whole of my second draft of 'Not wanted on Voyage', she also made sixty-one comments.   Some were a treat, noting phrases she particularly liked (and henceforth I will always include them in any critique I do), some were small but vital (like pointing out I'd written 'Madigan' when I'd meant 'Mirabel') and several were "too much show, not enough tell".

Having dealt with the minor points I am now tackling these larger ones and already I can see that I am making vast improvements.  Yes - I am making them, it is still my book, but I might not have done so had it not been for her pointing them out, and so I will gladly include her name among other acknowledgements.

And I am very slightly less trepidatious knowing this will be the novel I shall, in September, be handing first to a 'book-doctor' and then pitching to an agent at the York Festival of Writing.

Things I wake up with ...

"Emerging naked from the bathroom, he slipped the plastic soap box into the fluffy blue pencil case and dropped it into the bottom of his briefcase, rummaging other contents about until it fell, concealed, to the bottom.   It never failed to bring a smile to her face, although his original explanation had not been anything to laugh about."

This is the first sentence of an additional four hundred word snippet introduced into 'Making good' to make a later episode more comprehendable.   It arrived, fully formed, before five thirty this morning.

Also today, and less satisfyingly, I made myself critique a most unsatisfactory book I began reading yesterday.  I was on the point of giving up after only ten pages, but then gave myself a stern talking to:  "Why is it so bad?" I asked, "how can you be so sure you're any better?"  and so I read another 200 pages, making notes.

This is my review:

First there isn't enough dialogue, so it feels heavy, but what there is is unreal. Use of words is either lazy or ignorant - someone 'swigs' from a bottle, several times, and female prisoners are referred to as 'ladies' when women would be more appropriate. The same phrase is repeated twice within a single paragraph, and the repetition of facts strongly implies that the writer believes each and every one of her readers to be thick as the proverbial. And there is a ludicrous amount of clothes description.