It's launch day for #MirrorOfWolves. I just had a hugely chaotic move a few days ago, and am surrounded by boxes and having to deal with "issues" the building inspector missed. And am back to work at the day job, too. Tired, stressed, covered in bruises (including a couple of really big ones I can't remember how I got) and do not have anywhere near the amount of time to devote to this launch as I should.
But my second book is out in the world today and that makes me happy. 😊
I love how customisable #LibreOffice is. Doing interior formatting of my upcoming book (both paperback and hardcover), which involves a lot of repetitive clicking on menus to change page styles at the right place etc... Recording a few macro's to do that and assigning them to keyboard shortcuts makes this so much more efficient.
I use it to track my reading, and to share my reviews ... but its utility for authors has diminished significantly. I cut down the number of groups I follow to a mere handful and, to be honest, I can't remember the last time I looked at any of them.
I almost left entirely the day that someone in a group asked for a recommendation of clean Regency romance. I recommended a book, and disclosed that the author was an on-line friend. I was severely taken to task under the rubric of "no author self-promotion allowed here ..." when it wasn't even my book.
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I wanted to try something different and write about the same event but in three different styles: poetry, prose, and myth-making/storytelling. I'm way outside of my comfort zone here but I'd like to write more like this I think. It's kinda fun if not extremely challenging.
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I do reading groups with my 2nd grader's class & they talk about sensory images that come to them. (The ones they name are amazing!)
What about that as a way to give feedback in a workshop? To just name the sensory images that pop into your head as you read a story? So useful know how my words mingle with a reader's experiences to evoke something else!
What other useful forms of non-prescriptive, non-judgmental feedback have you discovered?
I know people use things like neutral questions (from Critical Response Theory).
And I love to do pops when we have like ten minutes to spare--it's just repeating back (on zooms we use the chat) any words or phrasings that particularly resonate.
Those tend to evoke analysis that is useful without being judgmental.
And I also like that they focus on what a story does right now instead of pushing readers to imagine what it could do in the future. It's the writer's job to imagine the next draft--not the reader's.
It's not that I don't think a writer should ever have to hear anything negative about their work--that would be absurd. But I think that when we send readers looking for faults, it often ends up with them saying "I want, I want, I want"--and taking over the story. I look for methods of feedback that center the writer's intentions and help make it more the writer's idea of the story--not this one random reader's.