Okay, so Sunday night I entered myself into the Golden Heart. I was super excited and nervous, but I though what the hell? I was already a finalist in the Maggie’s why not go for something even bigger?
Then I received a critique of my chapter one. Now mind you, this chapter one was different than the finalist chapter one because I’d changed some things around. Everything I thought I knew or didn’t know was thrown out the window and I was cast face first into a pile of mud as I struggled to figure out the truth behind one of the so-called “writing rules”
All day yesterday I drove myself crazy over the simple part of a word. -ING. Ugh. What do I do, I thought, because now I have half the people critiquing my work saying to use -ing to help vary my sentence structure and the other half telling me not to.
Not Fun!
Thanks to my WONDEFUL writing groups, I was able to get to the bottom of the “rule” and figure out that it’s okay to use -ing words in your story, just be careful how you use them and use them sparingly because you don’t want too much repetition. I think the “everything in moderation” rule comes into play with just about every writing rule I’ve come across.
So I grabbed out the copy of my old version of the story, used a friends critique and tightened that chapter 1 back to where it should be at least for now. Thank God for that!
I don’t think I would survive if I didn’t have all these wonderful fellow writers supporting me!
So that was Day 1 of my Golden Heart Journey. I’ll now be subsequently fixing chapter 2-5 to fix the whole -ing issue and then will be polishing the entire manuscript until the end of November when I have to submit my entry. Wish me luck!
Until Next Time,
Kaycee
