Positive Progress

This has been a productive morning for Daniel's Daughter. I spent most of it freewriting; that seems to be my best way to get the creative juices flowing. It helped me to consolidate my ideas for the early chapters, where I need to engage both returnees from Redstone's Valley and newcomers (who were silly enough not to have read the first book first ). Much of the first chapter that I posted in the WIP Concepts section stands, with a few changes. I now know how to introduce all three time lines and connect the RV storyline to the DD one.

I have a tentative outline for the book - enough to finish setting up the yWriter program.

Guys, if you haven't looked into this freeware aid to writing novels, I really do recommend it for helping to stay organized and to be able to put everything in one place so you can keep track of it all.

I also got some great feedback last night, during family dinner at daughter Lynn's. Her mother-in-law is in the process of reading it. She told me two things that made me feel really good. She liked the way I wrote my sentences, and thought that the short scenes were very effective in moving the story along without having to go into too much detail. (Thank you, yWriter.) I was especially pleased about that last, since my feeling is that most readers today don't have time for reading long books, and that if I work at being carefully concise, I can tell a longer story with fewer words.

Haven't actually written much new text, but maybe by the end of the day, I can put a new teaser into the WIP. (With possible spoilers for those who are reading but haven't finished Redstone's Valley.)

I have a much clearer idea now re how to incorporate the story of what happened to the Comanche bands, thanks to the Empire of the Summer Moon book that I critiqued in the Writer's Cafe. My preliminary perspective holds, but still a lot of valuable info, and reassurance that my hunches were factual.

Later

Ann

8/31/2012

Ann..

Congratulations ! I had a friend for 30 year who was a film

editor, she would read my writings and told me the following.

Writing and editing a story is like editing a film, make it short and

to the point because people get bored reading on and on.So I

always try to remember that, my book I just finished I created my

murder scenes short, no one knows who the killer is and the ending

is a big shocker....Keep up the good work..

Cheers..Joe...

Thanks, Joe - you, too.

The afternoon and evening have been productive. I've posted part of the result in a new Concepts thread: Daniel's Daughter officially begins, if anyone is interested.

The trickiest part, especially in the beginning, is to start the new book in a way that will be interesting to those who have read the first book without completely losing the new readers who are starting en media res.

I haven't even begun to think about editing yet, so the problems with the technical stuff will likely be there - you don't need to tell me about it, but if anyone would be willing to comment on that starting a sequel thing-y, I would appreciate it, and promise not to play WDY-YB.

Ann