Summer Reading

With these long hot summer days, there is nothing better than curling up with a good book and a glass of ice tea. I tend to be very eclectic in my reading. A few of my choices so far, include Dorothy L. Sayers Have His Carcase, A Little House Reader, and Sod-House Days: Letters from a Kansas Homesteader 1877-78, by Howard Ruede.

What are you reading this summer?

Starting Off With A Bang

Right now the trend is start your first chapter off with a 'bang'~something to get the readers attention immediately and make them want to keep reading. After all, we do want them to keep reading.

If it is an adventure story, that's not so hard to do. But sometimes with a romance you have to do a little bit of mulling over the story to come up with something. Is this something that you struggle with?

Weeding

I made a post on my other blog about growing weeds in my flower/herb gardens. I'm more of a brown thumb person than green, so if a weed is attractive, I tend to keep it if it pops up among my flowers.

On the other hand, weeding out words in my work is a bit harder, as it must be done. Sometimes I really love a sentence that I've written. I become attached to it, it just has to be in there. But I know that it doesn't work with the WIP. There have been times that I've stubbornly left it in, only to go back and reluctantly delete it later.

My solution to this problem has been to open a document dedicated solely to sentences that I like, but don't work in the current WIP. This gives me a chance to review them periodically and see if they will work in another project. And it makes me feel better knowing they are still there, just waiting for the right novel.

Do you have trouble weeding out words?