Lately, the hot topic on the blog
has been our big twice a month “no name blood thirsty” critiquing group. It warms my heart to bring my own journey of The Zealot around to this topic as
well. As you may recall from last time,
I had, through friends and revision, trimmed my monster from 205,000 words down
to a small dinosaur of 180,000 words. I
knew I needed to get it to around 100,000, more or less. Another words, I needed help. But who?
I found myself In the middle of a
totally foreign endeavor. Did I need to
go enroll in some classes in a local University to learn what I needed to
know? Would I have to spend thousands of
dollars with a professional to get the desired result? I didn’t have a clue.
While I pondered the possibilities,
I kept playing with the manuscript. I
couldn’t leave it alone anyway. I had
read in the different books on manuscript submission to condense, condense,
condense. They all said, “look at each
and every word. Look at every word as if
they were necessary on their own.” So I
did. The problem was my brain thought
every word was needed. Those clowns who
had written those books had never seen MY manuscript. I kept moving along and was able to trim
more.
Being out in a cab all the time, I
listened to the radio all day and at the time, I listened to talk radio. There was a local personality I listened to
each day. One day he started to promote
a gathering of local authors at a downtown bookstore each Saturday
morning. I decided to go. It turned out to be great. I kept going.
From this, a group was formed of local hopeful writers, including
me. We would meet for an hour after the
authors every Saturday. The leader of
our group turned out to be the current Mayor of Indianapolis.
For me, this was an incredible breakthrough. I sat at a table of eight people who were
doing what I was doing. We could all
relate to each other and talk about what we were going through. The group contained a couple school teachers
but, unfortunately, we never got into the nuts and bolts of writing.
I belonged to this group for about a
year. During this time, we would come in
each week and talk about what we had been doing the past week on our
project. I would compare it to some sort
of writing therapy. We sat around and
looked at each other and talked about writing, but really didn’t TALK about
writing. We never got into the nuts and
bolts of writing. We never brought our
work to the group. We never shared our
work with the group. We just talked
about what writing meant to us and how we felt when we wrote. Very therapeutic, but it didn’t make my
manuscript magically go from 180,000 words down to 100,000.
So, after a year, I felt better
about myself for having a large manuscript.
The birds were chirping. The
skies were blue, but I still had a problem.
Logic prevailed. I figured if I
could find this group, there had to be others.
Am I amazing or what? I fired up
my computer for something other than writing a huge manuscript and used that
thing that Al Gore invented…the internet.
After searching and searching and
searching for about, oh, maybe 45 seconds, I found the Indiana Writers
Center. A year’s time of building up
self-esteem and 45 seconds to tear it down by finding out there was somewhere
else out there all along. The website
looked very professional, with all sorts of writing classes. I found one that looked extremely
interesting, so I signed up for it. The
website did not mention any groups, so I kept going to the group downtown
. I really looked forward to this class,
taught by a guy by the name of David Hassler.
Hopefully I would get something out of it that would help me with my
behemoth and perhaps lead to other classes.
I’ll let you know…
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