First Fighting Bookworm of the Month!

Consider me chuffed.
Myself and the other Aussie and Kiwi Fightin' Bookworms have been honoured as the first Bookworms of the month.
We started a critiquing group, y'see, which is going exceedingly well, I must say. It's so nice to be getting feedback that isn't along the lines of: "It's great. It's perfect. Don't change a scene. No it's not cliche! They'd be stupid not to publish it right now!" I mean yes, that's lovely to hear, but not helpful for making your book better.

I agonised for a couple of hours about whether or not to delete Miles and Clover from Life was cool until you got popular. I know I said I was going to, but I've already deleted one character, and frankly I decided that the world does not revolve around Kaley. Yes, the book is about her, but other characters are entitled to have lives too. I'm leaving the decision up to my editor - sounds so cool to call her that. I mean she's not MY editor as yet. She still needs to love the second draft and sign me up.

I still have one last read through to do of my manuscript before I send it off to her. I don't know how much good that'll do, because I know the story so well and haven't had a chance to get much distance lately. The main goal is to notice where things are missing, cos there was a lot of chopping and rearranging in the editing process. Editing sucks, man. But ultimately it will have made for a better book.

I wrote the first chapter of my NEXT book, yesterday which is exciting. I've plotted out most of it, and alas, stolen some pretty integral stuff from my NaNo book, MJ's Blogiverse. That's okay, it was a bit of a mess, and I was scared to look at it again, so alot of the good MJ stuff is going to end up in Ruby's book. MJs life is supposed to be more suburbia, whereas Ruby is a rising star, so it fits better with Ruby.
The new book's working title is "What Really Happened - The Hollywood Life of Ruby Vega".

I've put the Urban Fantasy on hold, because I'm thinking maybe, JUST maybe, I may get asked by A&U "We loved your last book, do you have anything else like it?" and then I'd go "yeah I've got MJs Blogiverse" (cringe) or "Well, no...but I have an Urban Fantasy that's nothing like it at all that you might enjoy..." or I could say: "Yup, currently writing about an Aussie girl who gets carried along for the ride into Hollywood, it's about the tabloid rumours, scheming and conniving and working out what you really want." Okay so at the moment it sounds like all the other YA books about young hollywood, but it DOES have a different spin on it. I've gotta work on my pitching though.

Anyhoo, that's all for now.

Buh bye!
Sairz