Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Update On Things

First of all, I just want to say that I've been feeling really energetic and happy. I didn't talk about it on here before, but I spent the last few years constantly exhausted. I didn't know why, but it was a battle every day just to get out of bed. When I discovered my diabetes, I honestly didn't know how I was going to have the energy to exercise daily. Now, on the other hand, I've been exercising and eating an extremely low carb diet. I feel better than I have in a long time. It was all that extra sugar in my blood making me feel sick!

I used to tell my Mom all the time that I felt like someone three times my age, but now I feel young again. You don't realize sometimes how sick you were feeling sometimes until you get a lot better. It makes me feel excited about life.

Also, I've found more time to devote to working on writing, which is great, so hopefully I'll be getting more things done soon!

What I've been working on lately is critiquing a lot. For some reason, a few months ago, I decided I wanted about seven critique partners to help me critique my god of light stories. I sometimes think I can do more than I actually can. I thought I could read and critique seven novels in a month. After all, I know some editors who are amazing at their job and can do things like that. But I am nowhere near their level, so a few months later and I'm still working on it.

But finally, I see the end in sight and can start rewriting my god of light stories hopefully.

I've also been adding to some of my other stories here and there when I have the time.

I feel like I've learned so much about writing. I tend to underwrite instead of overwrite if that makes sense. I leave out details. I forget to show important events happening. I skip whole scenes and assume the reader will get it anyway. At least, that's how my writing is before my critique partners see it. One of my critique partners convinced me to add whole chapters to my Medusa's Desire novel for instance!

Because of my critique partners and their constant drilling into my head that I need to work on this, I've gotten better at explaining things, developing characters, and showing my story rather than telling parts of it. I learned that details aren't boring, they make the story deeper a lot of times.

There's always more to learn and improve on as a writer.