I'm still trying to find a happy medium with my critique groups.  Frankly, I over-extended myself.  I run one critique group that I inherited.  I attend another and then there is my online critique group.  I am neglecting not only my writing but I am neglecting the other members, not giving them the time and attention they deserve. 
  I'm going to try one more thing before I start making cuts.  I'm going to try to critique one piece each day before I start my own writing.  I will see if that will resolve the backlog that keeps building up.  But it still feels like a chore, rather than a pleasure.  There are good things that come out of critique groups, if nothing else it's made me a firm believer in getting someone else's eyes on your work.  There are things (like overuse of the word 'was) that I am blind to but that other people can see.  My first drafts also seem to be a bit 'dirty' with mis-chosen words (I blame my brain for typing 'by' instead of 'my') and occasional comma shenanigans.  Some of that will diminish as I get better at my new craft.
  Well, anyway, I'll work on my critique backlog today and if/when I get that done, I'll move on to Angel Odyssey.  This fourth draft is turning out more and more to be true re-write. Still, we'll salvage what we can.

  Sorry for the delay in posts.  Thursday was IM gaming day, so no writing work was expected then.  Wednesday started out well but I had distractions, visitors and finally I lost my writing mojo entirely.  Bad day for writing and I'm getting a late start today.  (Stupid non-self-cleaning house)
  However, the good news is that I got them off the farm and on the road finally.  Again.  At some point, I'm going to compare my second draft and see at what page Jacob and Jael get their quest underway and compare it to the new draft.  I have an ugly suspicion that I have not fixed the problem of getting my inciting incident in at the 10% mark.  In fact, I wonder if I've done anything except create more, shorter chapters, upped the stakes (a worth goal in and of itself) and trimmed a few paragraphs while adding others.
  Sigh.  Man, cutting is hard.  If there is one skill I want to learn is what to cut and how to cut it.  From everything I'm hearing, as an aspiring author, I need to make sure my new novel is 125k words, max.  I guess we'll see where I'm at when this 4th draft re-write is done but the second draft sure as heck was more than that.  I need to tighten things up, make sure my scenes: reveal character, build the world and ADVANCE THE PLOT.
  Nope. Shouting about it doesn't help.  I'm still not sure how to do it.  Maybe I'll go back to Stephen King's On Writing and see if he had any tips.
  In any case, the Throne of Writing(tm) calls and I need to get Jacob and Jael on their way.  There are unicorns out there that we need to talk to.

  As I mentioned late yesterday, I sent off my Clarion West application.  I had to write a three page synopsis to go along with chapter 1.  It was hard but I actually just got some good advice from Jason Black(http://www.plottopunctuation.com/) about synopsis writing. He spoke at a PNWA event just last week and he gave good advice about only including the skull and spine of my story in the synopsis, not even the skeleton of the plot, just the spine.
  A funny thing happened though, while I was working on it.  Some of the suggestions from Donald Maas's 'Writing the Breakout Novel' came to me. I started amping up the stakes for some of the later plot stumbling blocks.  Rather than just coming to Basal Mount uneventfully, they come to find the castle under siege.  Right away I start having visions of Jael and Jacob cutting their way in to safety, with the giant who brought them there creating a distraction and/or fighting with them. (Haven't decided on that).  That gives the Castellan a more concrete reason to prevent Jacob from going up the mountain.  It also gives the Rider Council a reason to distrust the warning brought by the Storm King...ah but I'm getting ahead of myself.  The point is, I'm going to do more than just increase the pacing with this draft.  I'm going to try to ratchet up the intensity and the stakes for some of the later events.  I'm really glad I wrote this synopsis after I decided to change the pacing.  That's something to remember for future drafts and future novels.

  I also got some feedback on my revised, faster-paced chapters. Feedback has been good, on the whole.  I think I'm improving with each revision.  I still think I need feedback based on the novel as a whole, rather than just one or two chapters at a time.

Whew. I think I have the vapors. 

I just sent off my application to Clarion West(http://www.clarionwest.org/). This is a huge deal for me.  I sent off chapter 1, which is probably the strongest all by itself.  I included a 3 page synopsis and THAT was a trial and a half.  Special thanks to Maryellen Brady (http://starlightblogger.wordpress.com/) for proofreading stuff today.  If there are still typos, I can't see them.

Wish me good luck!

  Sorry for the prolonged absence.  Moving to Monroe was a lot more involving that I'd hoped for. I'm still not unpacked but I have the Throne of Writing(tm) ensconced in my new Library and I have internet access.  That's enough for me.

  I have an opportunity to put in some serious work on Angel Odyssey while I'm between jobs and I'm really going to do that seriously.  I'd like to put in several 8 hour days this week and see how productive I can be. That means no video games or non-work emails or internet in general unless I need to use it for research.  If I get the golden ticket and I'm able to write professionally, I need to see just how much I can get done when I don't allow any distractions. 
  I know I can churn out the pages under pressure.  The first draft of Angel Odyssey was pretty much done in one month.  Smooth Running also got it's final draft done in one month.  So I think I can do it.  We'll see.  I do have errands to run, associated with owning a new house, but apart from those, I'm going to try to put in 8 hour days here.  Writing.
  Wish me luck and I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Packing for my move gave me a lot of time to dwell on this.  If nothing else, it helped me clarify in my mind where I am targeting Angel Odyssey towards.  This is a fantasy novel, it does skew YA since one of the protagonists is 14~15 but it is intended to be a fantasy novel. 

Again, this is the kind of book I would have wanted to read when I was fourteen and I was not reading middle grade or even YA books at that age (no doubt because that category did not exist by that name back in 1984).

This is a book for those boys who are about to become men.  It's for men who remember what it was like to be fourteen. This is my chance to talk to them and say, 'hey, this is what kind of life Jacob comes from.  These are the challenges he faced and this how he faced them'.

This is also a book for girl who dream of falling in love with a boy who loves them back, not for their looks and not because of what they can do for them but for who they are.  Its about being powerful and powerless, being dependent and yet having someone depend on you.  It's about choosing between love and duty.

This is for people that are done with Harry Potter but may not want to jump to Joe Abercrombie.

This is ultimately a moral tale.  Oh it's adventure story of course, with a healthy dose wish fulfillment, dragons, flying eagles big enough to ride on but it's also about the rites of passage boys go through (or went through once) to become men.  Those rites of passage are: Leaving home.  Sex.  Killing.  Taking responsibility.  Not quitting, even when things get hard or look hopeless.  I would hope that the novel could be judged by it's whole and not by two sentences out of 400+ pages.

I'm not trying to offend, the sex, violence and bad language here is so much less than anything you can see on TV it's not even funny. Which is what confuses me so much about the feedback I get over Luther and Samuel.  I mean, really?  A 19th century obscure reference to girl parts, an oblique reference to oral sex and a crotch grab and people are ready to write the book off?

Don't get me wrong, I WANT to know what stumbling blocks exist, if what I've written would make someone stop reading, I need to know that.  But people read Robert Silverberg?  George RR Martin?  Stephen King?  I'll leave Phillip Jose Farmer and Robert Heinlein to one side since they are pretty notorious and I'll avoid bringing up Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (apart from that reference) but there's nothing here that's not mentioned much more explicitly in The Merry Wives of Windsor or the Canterbury Tales.  Heck, Francine Rivers has much, much, much more explicit references to sex in just one of her novels and she writes exclusively for Christian outlets. (Redeeming Love, ISBN 1601420617)

And again, the context is always negative when this ribald language is shown.  I am showing the wrong way and the right way to treat women in this book.  We learn from both positive and negative examples, don't we?  I mean, part of what got me started was reading some fantasy or sci-fi novel and thinking 'Oh, I know I can write better than that.'  The same here, I want to show by negative example in some places and by positive example with my male protagonist.

Someone mentioned (and I'm not picking on her, heavens knows I respect her opinion) that "If one of my sons were reading this, I'd be having a stern conversation with him about respect for women and how this may color his perception of what is acceptable". I am having the same conversation with your son. I am showing him how respect women by Jacob's example (or Tibor's example for that matter, though he's....rougher).  So have your talk with him, this book is MY chance to have that talk with him as well.

Do we all want to be writing books that have the tagline: 'Books your mother would approve of'? 

 Again, I'm not going out of my way to include adult content, I have my Sci Fi novels for that :)  And I am taking all your comments very seriously but in the end, this is my story written in my voice.  I hope it's a good, interesting story but I have to tell it my way.  If these two sentences ruin the book, I don't know what to say. I'll think about changing it but I may wait until someone paying me for this tells me I need to.
 

  Well I finally got back into the Throne of Writing ™ last night. This will be my last week doing my Throne work at my current rental.  I’m going to miss the view of the trees and hills and the river.  It’s been wonderful but I’m a homeowner now, makes sense to do my writing there.  Where I’ll have a view…of…my driveway.  And the neighbor’s garage door.

  Sigh.

  Maybe I’ll turn the Throne around and write staring at my library or some Thomas Kincaid paintings.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be more productive without the distracting inspiration and happiness that comes from viewing nature from my writing room window.

  After some warm up writing, I did a little re-writing of the Grange scene, which I think is a bit more dramatic now. (It didn’t make sense for Jael to be passively doing nothing while Jacob was fighting.  Now she’s actively doing nothing.  Big improvement.)  I started on the return trip back, from Jael’s POV again and got up to the appearance of Abrax.  <rubbing hands together>  This is going to be good.  It’s a rough draft and needs more polishing and grace notes, of course, but it’s flowing again.

  Ugh.  After December, I’m glad to feel that again.  More re-writes coming, including an edit to chapter 2 to allow it to fit within the Clarion West application guidelines, but I’m excited to get back to work.

Sorry for the lack of updates.  I'm still working like a dog* to get a new website launched at my other job.  I haven't had time for writing for the past few days.  With a little luck and a lot of hard work, I'll have new writing progress and progress updates by Friday. 

*Most dogs don't actually seem to work that hard but at SOME point they must have.  Otherwise, how would that saying come to be?  Maybe 'working like a sled dog'?