Today was my local writer's group meeting. I submitted an old story about me and Brown, my grandparent's dog. It was our monthly assignment to write a story on a given prompt using only 250 words. It is such a good exercise to help writers to cut the fat out of their writing. Don't see many 'ly' words in these pieces. Still working on bringing 'Mama Played for the King' into an edited manuscript ready to submit to publishers. I'm trying to bring it up to a 50,000 word book. It was 43,000, but it was bare bones in some ares.
Conversation at our meeting today centered a lot around the amount of detail that should be in our subs as to description of the characters and the place they are in. Lots of thoughts on it as some want the writer to give them almost snap shots so they don't have to create their own pictures, while others want their reader to do some of this description ID-ing as the story is read. I feel that too much info can be boring, whereas a little mystery often defines some of your characters and it certainly does in my 'Hannah.
A review of After the War, Before the Peace' by Tracy Riva was featured in the Midwest Book Review. It was a great review by Ms. Riva. I can only hope we'll get some hits because of this review. THANK YOU, TRACY RIVA.
In closing I'm going to spend some time thinking about this advice from Logan Pearsall Smith, "More Trivia: Adjectives", 1921. "But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?"
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