Thursday, September 10, 2009

Manuscript Feedback

Well, today we got our manuscript back from Joyce Sweeney.  It included handwritten notes on the hard copy, plus almost two pages of suggestions.  In general, the comments were positive, and I was pretty thrilled. 
Biggest problem was POV - we said things we couldn't know, like how Emma felt, when the book was supposed to be from only Abby's point of view.  This is pretty hard.  We were aware of POV before we sent the manuscript, but we thought we'd only left one bad piece.  Wrong!  there were several places that need correcting. 
We also had an unneeded character and need to add some more delineation between Abby and Emma.  That means strengthening, and making consistent, the examples of their strengths and weaknesses. 
There needs to be a minor change at the end, and a pretty big rewrite in the beginning.  After this and after my critique group, I'm seeing that the first chapter is a big weakness of mine.  I'm doing to much telling of the backstory, not getting POV set early enough, etc...
So - aside from that, I worked on Lucky Tuesday today, finished a whole rewrite - changed chapter 8, where my biggest problem is trying to explain how Tuesday comes to deal with the problem of Aunt Lydia. It's better than it was, but I don't know if it will hold up in the long run - I'll take another look at it tomorrow.  Then I think I'll send it to Joyce!

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