First off I want to thank all of you who participated in the charity auction for men at risk in Chechnya. At last count we raised over $2000, and the money hasn’t come in for the donated royalties yet, so the final amount will be even better. Thank you thank you thank you! There are still people in terrible danger, trapped in Chechnya. I hope we can get more of them out. Unfortunately it isn’t a straightforward process to reach them and help them. They don’t know who to trust, and I’m sure the government forces there are setting up fake meetings with the LGBT Russian Railroad to grab more of them.
Kathleen won the auction for an original story written by me. I’m working on it! It took me a little bit to find the character’s voice, but now I’m there and it’s progressing. I’ll be shopping the story around once it’s finished, and if it sells I’ll donate those proceeds as well. Depending on the publication, they may allow me to mention the reason for the story, the auction, and everything. Hopefully the plight of gay men, and men suspected of being gay, in Chechnya will not be forgotten. There was so much initial outrage, and now of course people have moved on to other issues. That’s natural and normal and I’m not going to rail against it. That’s as senseless as railing against time itself. I just hope that this will get at least a little bit more visibility before it gets smothered by murders, bombings, and all the other things that some people feel inclined to do to other people.
On to book stuff …
A Dark Radiance is completely drafted, and now is in a first edit. Once I’m done with the first edit, it will go to a developmental editor, and then back to me for revision.
Some of you might be curious about how editing differs from revision, and might wonder, why all the fuss? Just spell and grammar check it and it’s ready to go, right?
Once upon a time I used to do that, and the results could have been better, to say the least.
I’m editing the rough draft before I kick it to the developmental editor (who I will announce, if she’s okay with that, once we’ve settled on contractual stuff). It isn’t strictly necessary and might be somewhat of a waste of time in that I’m editing parts of the book that may vanish or be rearranged and require editing for flow reasons. I’m okay with that. I want to do this read-through so I know in my heart that there’s nothing I can fix all by myself with my wee little brain before I give it to a pro whose job it is to find plot holes and other major issues. I don’t want her to make some note about how a section was confusing and made no sense when it would read just fine if I hadn’t left out a sentence or two, or hadn’t gone off on a tangent for no apparent reason. I want her to spend her time on issues I can’t see, not the issues I know are there.
So once I get her comments back I’ll have to revise.
It’s very difficult for the writer of a work to pull their heads that far out of their own manuscript to do this themselves. You can create an outline as a tool, which I do, but even that has a bias. I may focus on the relationship side of things, while a developmental editor will see beyond that and nudge me with questions about the intrigue that I’ve all but forgotten about, or an argument that was never resolved from earlier in the book, or timeline issues (though I generally don’t have trouble with those, thanks to my crude little maps and calendar.)
Hopefully she’ll give me small scale suggestions, but if she says scrap it and start over, I will, because getting this right is that important.
Finally, a big shout-out to Candie Aaby of Massage Intentions. She’s done truly remarkable things for my ability to work. Plus, (don’t tell her this) it’s really awesome to work from 7am to 3am with very few breaks and then to call her and tell her I’ve been a very bad girl and that she needs to come fix me. (Shhhh …) She heals the damage from all my bad habits, and she’s teaching me a better way, although I probably will always have the occasional binge-writing fest.
Take care, everyone!