Freedom, Frustration, and Fun

How do you like that alliteration, hm?

As you can tell by the title (or maybe not) I've been busy. I finished my last didactic (aka classroom/lecture) quarter of pharmacy school on Tuesday. I passed all my classes and actually I avoided C's this quarter! Bam said the lady! However, on Monday I will start my first rotation at a local Target pharmacy. It'll be great experience to learn my counseling points for the drugs I'm not totally comfortable with yet. However, I might not be getting home 'til 8:30 M, T, W, F. I think my preceptor wants me to work 4-10's with her since she has Thursdays off. *sigh* But then, it's only for six weeks. I can live, right? ;-)

And onto writerly things: I've spent the better part of the past two days writing up a chapter play-by-play document for Untold Secrets. Let me just tell you... ARGH! As I was lamenting to my wonderful CP, Cari, there is just so much that as I was reading through the MS all I could think was, "This is complete crap." Or, "This is SO not necessary". Or, "Where the Hell are all these adverbs coming from?!"

I never noticed adverbs (whether in narration or dialogue tags) until Cari brought it to my attention. And now I see them everywhere. In my writing, in published works, or in MSs I'm helping to edit. Some of 'em I leave b/c they're what I needed, but seeing the empty adverbs are the worst. And boy did I have a lot of them.

Regardless, my reason for doing this play-by-play is to visualize my story via post-it/whiteboard!!! That's right! I got that aforementioned whiteboard and it's now hanging on my wall. Tadaaaa!Yes, I blurred everything out again, though you can probably make out the name Isaac. And yes, it's upside down. I put on the pen-holder thingy upside down just to see if it would go on and lo and behold, it wouldn't come off. So I've gotta rearrange, but that's all for the best since Untold Secrets will be going on there now instead of its sequel, which is up there at the moment.

Anyway, writing out all the scenes via the play-by-play onto post-its will help me visualize the book. More importantly, it will hopefully help me see what can come out. B/c at 138K, US is just WAAAAY too big. I'm aiming to get it down to 115K and that's on the high side for a first Urban Fantasy novel. Still, that's 23K to whittle down. However, based on this brief skimming I've done, I'm going to have a lot to switch up and remove so I just might actually make this a workable novel soon. Which would be ideal since I told myself I will start querying once I graduate in June.

Nevertheless, I still like working with these characters and I love em too much to just chuck the whole MS. Plus, it's proof that I've grown as a writer since I started writing/developing US two years ago. So that's where the "fun" part of the title comes in. Writing is still (and I hope will always be) fun for me and that's all I can ask for. :)