Category: Magical Words

Image acquired from the Internet Hive mind, via iFunny.com

Today’s visit to MagicalWords reveals another treasure from R.S. Belcher related what happens to your work after the initial writing stage: The League of Extraordinary Beta Readers.

While many people concentrate on professional wordsmiths, like editors and agents, getting your work read by READERS is important too. Mr. Belcher nicely sums up some of the things to look for in a beta reader. Editors find technical goofs, but a beta reader can give feedback like “I just don’t like this guy; don’t know why”. When three beta readers give the same feedback on, for instance, the secondary love interest hero, things may need to be fixed.

Another good post related to Beta Readers in MagicalWords:

AJ Hartley’s “Writing fantasy: Slotted Spoons and the ABCs of Beta readers” (July 9, 2010)

FreeDigitalPhotos.net photo by Carlos Porto

Critique Grief

An adage I have learned as an embroiderer is “as you sew, so shall you rip”. For every stitch that makes it to the final product, two more stitches have been removed. Or so/sew it seems/seams.

With writing comes editing and to get good editing, you have other people whom you have deliberately BEGGED to kill your baby. It hurts. It hurts bad.

Mindy Klasky captured this in “Five Stages of Grief (Critique Edition)” for Magical Words back in 2013. Read it, know it. And for the love of goodness, realize when you hit stage 3 what is happening and do not burn your work. 

(Yes real people do destroy their work. I have seen it happen with friends, amazing, talented friends – poets, authors, writers, calligraphers, artists. Realize it is a STAGE. If you need to burn it, print out a second copy and take that into the backyard and rip it into little, little pieces and light each on fire. Then come back and move to stage four. Please!)

Again the link is here: http://www.magicalwords.net/mindy-klasky/five-stages-of-grief-critique-edition/

Original Image from Unsplash, created by Redd Angelo
Words added by Erin Penn

So I am reading along in the The Weird Wild West anthology by eSpec Books, going through the “about the author” section when I ran across a book title that intrigued me: “The Six-Gun Tarot“. Saw the author was R.S. Belcher and went to read “Rattler”, the short story in the anthology. Not bad, not bad. From there the search went to Amazon to see if the blurb intrigued me as much as the title. It didn’t, but I fooled around a bit (because BOOKS!) and discovered the just released (March 2016) book “The Brotherhood of the Wheel”. Picked the sample up on my Kindle and two days of fighting myself later about dropping money on a new book when I have so many other books to read, write, and edit, I bought the book.

Templar meets Teamsters would be my tagline for the book.

And the next day I run across Mr. Belcher as a new blogger on Magical Words! His “The Great Pants-Plot Comprise” captures one of the many answers to whether plotting (figuring out everything in advance) or pantsing (writing with the flow) is better … and is perhaps the closest to the answer I would provide if anyone asked me how I approached the question.

Flash, which I do a lot of, is a pantsing project; write about 1,000 words quickly. But the novels take a bit more work to be coherent. By nature I am a plotter. Plan life, plan trips, etc. Lists, lists and more lists. Pieces of paper everywhere.

I like the blog because Mr. Belcher tells about two failed novels, one because he approached it from a plotter beginning and the other from a pantsing beginning. Then he found the mix for him. Read about it here: http://www.magicalwords.net/r-s-belcher/the-great-pants-plot-compromise/.