It's been a couple of weeks since I have posted on my
blog. I really have no excuse except that I am
currently in between YA contemporary projects and haven’t pulled the trigger on
my next idea yet. So to purposefully
distract myself, I have been doing a lot of critiquing – some long standing
writing friends, most new first-three-chapters type of beta reads. So at the risk of sounding brash and a bit
snarky, let me tell you a bit about my critiquing pet peeves.
~Please, please, PLEASE I beg you to give you manuscripts a quick read before you
send it off to your critique partners, especially new ones that haven’t read
for you before. There is nothing like a myriad of spelling, punctuation, and
formatting errors to pull me right out of the story and irritate the crap out
of me.
~Think creatively. There are a thousand and one better ways to emotionally
tag dialogue then a simple “he said.”
Now don’t get me wrong, the simplistic
nature of that tag is highly appreciated, just not twenty seven times on the
same page.
~Make sure the
person you ask to critique actually reads
your genre. You send me the first three chapters of your erotica story, and I
will read it, correct your grammar and formatting, even toss in a comment or
two. But because I am not familiar with
nor do I ever read that genre for fun,
my comments, thoughts, and opinions probably aren’t worth much.
~Lastly,
(and I am throwing this one in for you Lindsay)
Description! I love it when it pertains
to word building and drives the story forward.
Wield it too heavily or inappropriately and I get peeved. For example “I sat down on my mother’s pink and green
floral pattern couch, the small flower buds hanging delicately off the green
vines.” Okay, unless those flowers
are going to come alive and strangle me then I don’t give a crap if the couch
is floral, paisley or just plain butt-ass ugly.
I don’t need that bit of description.
I know what a couch is, no need to describe it.
So that is it, my usually snarky self is back to blogging. But before you go, I would love to hear some
of your critiquing pet peeves.