Saturday, Saturday, Saturday!!!

Hopefully when you read that, it kind of echoed like it was supposed to and you heard the announcer voice in your head...yeah...

Anyway, yesterday was a wonderful day full of fun and frolicking through meadows full of flowers and...

*screeeeeech*

Okay, I gotta admit, I have never been a frolic through meadows kind of gal.

I am however THIS kind of gal.

Yes, that is me, firing a gun at a plastic bottle filled with colored water. The bottle I was aiming at was filled with green colored water and exploded in a rain of green water (take that zombie water!) and you may also note my lovely pink nail polish...no reason a gal can't be feminine and kick ass...

So, Saturday we were invited to a friends shooting party. If you don't have friends who have shooting parties, these sort of events are a chance for people who are gun enthusiasts to pull their weapons out of the safety of locked gun cabinets and bring them over for some target practice. We aim at a variety of things from clay pigeons to paper targets to (my personal favorite) the water bottles/pop bottles filled with colored water.

(I rock with rifles. I suck at handguns. My teenage son is great with both. In case of zombie apocalypse, I plan on reloading him as much as possible and just cleaning guns and keeping him armed.)

There were a wide variety of weapons at this shooting party and my son was thrilled to get to try out stuff he hasn't tried out before (this is him trying out an AK74). He is a weapons enthusiast and since he has so far shown the proper respect for what the weapons CAN do and is quiet, patient and moves slowly, I allow those who understand them to teach him more about them to encourage that respect to grow. I'm not scared of people who respect weapons...I'm scared of people who hold guns and DON'T comprehend what they can do with one slip and wave them around like morons.

This weapon was NOT loaded while he was holding it. But it was heavy. Hence his grin. He was afraid to shoot this Maverick 308...he was nervous about the kick.

We got to see some cool pieces of history as well. My favorite was probably the Mauser.

The Mauser, according to Tony, the owner, was a Czech WW2 Mauser that was authentic and he got it from the local grocery store. (If you haven't been to our local grocery store and seen the stuffed bear, you wouldn't understand how one could get a gun there but...yeah...you could.) I held it...it weighs a TON and it still fires. When it fires, it managed to knock him back a little...it kicks.

I researched the Mauser a little online. It turns out that his 8mm Mauser, 24" barrel is a 1937 dated rifle...Czech VZ-24. According to what I can find, it dates one year prior to the Sudeten Crisis.
It really kicks, knocked Tony back a few inches when he fired it and it was LOUD.


Probably because it is loaded with this. I think you could probably take out a zombie with this. Or an elephant. Holy wowza. I do know, for a fact, it can blow a ginormic hole in a two liter bottle of red dyed water. SPLAT.

At the shooting party, I got to eat smoked round roast. It turns out that men are far better cooks than me. Yeah, you are thinking to yourself that the competition there wasn't that great to begin with but they SMOKED the roast over water soaked applewood and it tasted amazing.

After that, I slapped on a little makeup and headed to Tony's sisters house for a spa party.

Yes, guns to spa in one day. That is my kinda Saturday. After some pampering, we talked books. I had a BLAST. I had a glass of hot tea, veggie pizza, some lovely toffee cheeseball with vanilla wafers that just exploded with flavor in your mouth, good company and we were talking books while being pampered.

Aaaaaaaaaaahhh....*sigh*

Then, in a rare event, all of my children were elsewhere for the evening.

What is a gal to do when she is single, sexy, pampered and home alone on a Saturday night?

Edits, of course!

Speaking of which, I need to get back to them.

Hope your weekend was as fun as mine (and a much needed tension breaker after last weeks stress filled chaos and finals week ahead)!!
Remember, you can still enter to win The Love Thieves until tomorrow. If you don't know what I am talking about, check out the blog here.

Until tomorrow, Happy writing!

From the mixed up files of Virg: How I edit my own work

I got an interesting email on one of my loops about editing and it got me to thinking about one of the steps of the writing process that I haven't shared with my up-and-coming author friends.

So yes, this is another one of my very popular How To Be A Writer Posts.

(You are giggling but if you saw the number of views that these posts get, you would agree that they are very popular indeed. *wiggles fingers at writers*)

Editing Your Own Work

After you write something, we all know that you should go back no less than a thousand times and edit it to death. Then you should let it sit for a week or a month or some other lengthy amount of time and then edit it again.

And then your work is perfect.

No, it isn't.

You then need another set of eyes (or ten) to look at it. Me, personally? I send it out to my beta group. I am a lucky gal. My beta group consists of a group of dedicated readers. I have posted what a reader is before on another blog. A reader is someone who is able to see a story for the storyline and tear it to bits. Why did your character talk through a door? Why did they hop in the shower and start blow drying their hair? (Yes, I once electrocuted a character by having them blow dry their hair in the shower. It actually made it through three rounds of edits and got caught in copyedits... but I digress.)

Then I send it out to three professionals. In my case, professionals means people who are either a. also authors so they are just as anal as I am or b. also editors so just as anal as I am. They aren't going to tiptoe around my feelings and treat me like a mamby pamby sissy girl. They are going to make my manuscript bleed. And I like it when it bleeds.

But they are honest and that is why I like the blood. It is good, healing blood. It will get any poison that is making my manuscript sick out and let it be what it could be.

I do the changes, fix it and then...

I send it to three other people.

So, yes, I send it to an ARMY of people. *hellooooo beta world!!*

And then I write a query letter. And I send THAT to an army of people. And they shred my query.

(Are you getting that this whole writing thing isn't the solitary process you were thinking it to be? Yeah, the network you are building? It is an incredibly useful thing. And not just for bitching at 3am about lack of Starbucks delivery service. Although, they are good for that as well.)

And then I submit it to a publisher.

With the full knowledge that if they chose to accept my manuscript that they will then put my work through at least three rounds of edits and one of copyedits. And that the editor might have completely different views and opinions from mine and from the people who beta'd for me.

I once rewrote a book three times while in edits. The editor had me change the point of perspective THREE times throughout the editing process.

And here is the key...

I did not tell off the editor.

Your editor is your friend. Their goal is to help you make your book better using all the tools in their vast arsenal. Not worse. No editor has ever (that I know of) sabotaged a book. Why in the hell would they do that?

Have I always agreed with everything my editors have had to say. Nuh-uh. But they didn't know that.

It has become ritual for me to open edits and a bottle of wine with my best friend and any edits that frustrate me are duly yelled at and told off the first day I get them. With as colorful of language as we can come up with. (Points for creativity are awarded on a scale... meh, we won't go into it.) And then I put the wine bottle away... (Okay, it goes in the trash because it is empty. Don't judge.) and I get serious and do the work. The editors never hear any of those colorful comments. Because that isn't professional. But it is fun to rant and rail-- In the privacy of my home over wine and with my friend.

One of my currently dear friends edited one of my books and I can tell you right now she probably was frustrated as hell with me. She probably was telling me off from her editors chair... which makes me giggle. *wiggles fingers at friend in question* I have a really bad habit of starting out books in first person perspective, changing to third and staying in third. My voice is in third, for the most part. But when I am finding my characters, getting to know my world... I start out in first. And then I catch my stride and fall into third. I ALWAYS do this. I don't fucking know why. But I do. You can literally tell when I get immersed in my story because everything literally smooths out, makes sense and flows... and the red edit marks magically stop. But those first few chapters are always a struggle for me.

Not every editor has known how to deal with that.

But each one I have worked with has taught me something. I have learned bits about blocking from one that I didn't know before. Another gave me priceless information about showing and not telling. Another editor really brought home the value of action modifiers vs tags.

I hit ARe's bestsellers list. I have won awards.

I wouldn't in a million years THINK of self pubbing a piece of my own work that was not EDITED EXTENSIVELY.

The value of editing is something I cannot promote enough. You are too close to your work. You have read and reread the same passage so many damn times that you can probably recite that shit in your SLEEP.

An editor is a fresh set of eyes that can see what you wrote vs. what you think you wrote. An editor can see what your reader will see.

Okay, moral: Edit. Be open to edits. Your work is not as perfect as you think it is.
Drinking wine and playing games that involve coming up with colorful insults is good.

Happy writing!!

Missing in Action

I have been missing in action lately. Between the final week of my college classes and edits for Sleeping Garden, I haven't really had the time in my schedule to get on here.

So that you can have some idea what I am working on, read a sneak peek of Sleeping Garden here.

I will be back to blogging next week. Or perhaps later this week... However long it takes to have Garden not eating my world.

It was the hardest book I have written and it isn't editing any easier. But I am hoping that due to all that, it will be the best yet.

Well, until next we meet, Happy reading!!