I miss my old friend Elma Foronda. I think this is her birthday. I can’t remember how many times I’ve tried to find her over the years, but I hope this is the year it actually works out and we get back in touch. Elma, are you out there? Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I hope you’re happy and having a wonderful life!

Happy Birthday!

*** UPDATE *** Thank you all for your help and suggestions - I have found Elma! She’s doing well and we’re now back in touch. I love the internet!

I’ve been a slug about blogging and the guilt has finally gotten to me, so here I am once again.

What have I been doing to keep me away? Revisions. Revisions, revisions, revisions. I am taking my current work-in-progress and revising the hell out of it. Well, some hell will stay in, but most of the hell - outta there. I’m looking at characterization (are my characters likeable? do they develop naturally-yet-surprisingly over the course of the story?), pacing (I tend to start too fast, I’m finding, and need to slow myself down to let readers enjoy the unfolding motivations and escalating conflict), description (those damned five senses, including, yes, smell, I’ll get smell in there if it kills me), the funny (it’s a romantic comedy, so both tone and plot must contain hints of insanity), the list goes on and on.

Written on sticky notes on my monitor right now:

EDGY
on the edge of being pissed off or thriled or excited or
EDGY

and

EVERYTHING HAS CHARACTER.
EVERYTHING IS CHARACTER.

The Edgy note is a reminder on tone and attitude for my main characters. The Character note reminds me to imbue my descriptions of secondary characters and inananimate objects (houses, rooms, cars, trees, everything) with character. So instead of describing a room as ‘cluttered’ I’d write something like ‘objects marched over every surface’… and then play off that metaphor to make the description of the room really a description of the owner of the room, the state of her mental health etc etc. Great in concept, but it didn’t come naturally in the first drafts and I’m going to have to go back and re-read umpteen bizillion times to catch all the meaningless descriptions I have scattered throughout my manuscript.

All of which is to say, WAAAA. I’ve been busy, and I’ve been lazy about updating my blog.

And I’d really like to tell y’all about my plans for the new year - my last day at my day job is February 1 - but that will have to be another post on another day. I’ve got revisions to do.