Joe Beernink
Author of NOWHERE WILD, NOWHERE HOME
Monthly Archives: August 2010
I’m about halfway through this edit of The Forgotten Road. It has gotten painful, and I’m fighting despair. Somewhere around Chapter 12, I switched into passive voice, and every other sentence for the last 10 chapters has the word ‘was’ or ‘were’ in it. It’s incredibly hard to fix that because eventually you run out of verbs. So far, I’ve chopped about 8000 words and added 2000, which isn’t bad for the… Read More
I had high aspirations of blogging daily, but I’m going back to a weekly promise, because, well, I am working on a book, and that sucks every living word out of me, and by the end of the day, there just aren’t any left. I’ve spent the last 8 days editing The Forgotten Road. So far, I’ve completed work on 13 of 34 original chapters. There’s one new one in there, written… Read More
One of the biggest changes I have to make to The Forgotten Road is to fix a few POV issues in a couple of flashbacks. The problem is that one of the flashbacks is by far the most emotional moment in the book. Unfortunately when I wrote the entire scene, I wrote it through the eyes of the wrong character. My main character is in the room, but he is an emotional… Read More
One of the books I bought at the recent PNWA convention was Manuscript Makeover by Elizabeth Lyon, a very well known editor, and one of the lecturers at the convention. It was particularly timely for me because I am, after all, in the middle of a major revision of The Forgotten Road, and I need all the help I can get. One of the biggest issues I have with editing is that… Read More
I’ve been working through the easy parts of the recommendations I got from the book doctor… typos, grammar, comma issues. Basically I did the easy parts because they were on specific pages, and since the hard changes are going to dramatically change the page numbers, now was the best time to do it. Still, a lot of what he pointed out were samples of common issues throughout the manuscript, so my hope… Read More
Today was a pretty big day for me: I got the feedback regarding ‘The Forgotten Road’ from the Book Doctor (Freelance Editor) I hired. Jason Black (@p2p_editor on Twitter) or http://www.plottopunctuation.com is the man behind the report, and I must say I was very impressed. I was a little nervous at first about having a professional look at my work. Lots of people have read various iterations of the book, but I’ve… Read More
Okay, this is a Young Adult book, and I am only reading YA, because apparently to get better at writing YA, you need to read a lot of it. James Patterson writes about a book a day, splitting his time between the adult mystery genre and this extremely popular YA series. How do I know it is extremely popular? I asked my 13 year old niece Morgan, and if she goes on… Read More
I finished the book I had to read for work, and can now return to my regularly scheduled writing. Today I finished my theme document, which is a really good thing to have, then went back to the book and began to reread from where I started having the issues that stalled my progress. It’ll take me a couple of days to get back to writing completely new material, but I’m in… Read More
If you followed my old blog at Cranium Outpost, you might remember a post I did about having to make some hard choices about my latest novel, The Unexplored Territory. The hard choices have been made, 10,000 words were removed, and the writing has begun again. But it came to a stop over the weekend as my brain tussled with something, and this morning, I figured out what it was. My last… Read More
Hi All, I can’t promise I’ll write much, but I’ll try to be better with the pictures. I finally downloaded everything off my iPhone so here are some of the more recent photos. I’ll get some videos up when (or if) I figure out why the videos off my phone imported upside down or sideways. — Lisa The blanket messes with the cool, kid. Father’s day at the beach. Parked by Daddy’s… Read More
Joe Beernink 