THE REVIEW

DETERMINED DUO

Cougar joined me last night for a Ram’s Meeting of two. I know Annette and Jim have been dealing with health issues. Charity had been doing so as well, but was on the road to recovery two weeks ago. Hope everyone regains their health and stays healthy. I did contribute to immunity of the herd and had my flu shot yesterday. However, yesterday was also known as Weed Wednesday, the first day of legal cannabis sales in Canada. I hope that won’t detract from any writer’s determination to create.

Cougar read his next chapter, which was very long. It was a good chapter that showed Eric’s introduction to Elfa’s home and the people who lived with her. At the beginning of the chapter and part way through, Cougar had switched into omniscient point of view in order to deliver information about Iceland, and I strongly recommended against doing that. I felt it severed the reader’s connection to characters and broke the story line. He said he would try to incorporate that info some other way as part of the story.

I read another revised beginning to my story “Penny Pincher”. Then I discussed with Cougar my thinking that I would send the story to one of two mystery/crime magazines. He said if I did that I should change the title to indicate the story would contain a violent crime, as the story doesn’t start out that way. He said readers of mystery/crime magazines are expecting that type of content and I needed to promise them that at the start. He was absolutely right. I hadn’t thought of intended audience when I started writing this story and had no idea how it was going to end. The violent outcome was a surprise to me when I wrote it. The title “Penny Pincher” applied to the main character, not the situation in which she found herself. I think I’m going to go with “Grisly Remittance” or “Bloody Quittance”. Anybody have a preference on which I should use?

I had downloaded “Proper Manuscript Format” by William Shunn and read through it. Most of the info I already knew, but there were a couple of things I learned. It said if you want a line break between scenes, instead of a blank line, center the character “#” on a line by itself. Do this so scene breaks are not lost with editing and revising, because word processing can often hide blank lines if they come at the beginning or end of a page. You don’t want your scene breaks rendered invisible to your editor. And the other thing was about placing your name in the top left corner of the title page, and also using a byline. The name in the corner is who the publisher sends the cheque to, and the name in the byline is who receives credit for the story when it’s published. Sometimes the two are the same, but sometimes the author uses a pseudonym, and sometimes a married woman uses her maiden name as author. Both should appear on the manuscript.

I gave Cougar an article from the Vancouver Sun entitled “10 Ways Iceland Can Kill You”. It was a travel article warning tourists about natural phenomenon that can be very dangerous. I said there were some good suggestions there that could up the danger to any of his characters. Writing tips can come from anywhere.

The next Meeting will be Wednesday, November 7th at 7:00 p.m. here at my place. Really hope to see you then!

Lisa A. Hatton
Author