I’m happy to report that the craziness of my life has started to calm down.
Hopefully I didn’t just jinx myself.
I am settled in my new house, mostly settled in my new job and settling into a new routine. I was able to complete the scariest part of revisions for The Blood Between Us. And soon my pup will be coming back home! It’s all a huge weight off my shoulders, so I am starting to feel like a fully functional human being again. Yay!
What I Read
GRAND TOTAL: 1 (womp womp…again)
Wilder Girls by Rory Power ★★★☆☆
The premise for this book is so fascinating, and I was hooked from the beginning. We follow a group of girls on a remote island, quarantined due to a mystery disease called “The Tox” which causes things like gills, metal body parts, third eyelids, etc. It’s very animalistic and horrifying and awesome.
I think the characters were very well-developed, and the descriptions were vivid and spot on. The beginning was a little slow with a lot of “telling” and backstory. But it picked up quickly with a break-neck plot with lots of twists and turns.
Honestly though the ending deducted an entire star for me. It didn’t feel complete enough, and I didn’t get near enough resolution. Overall, I enjoyed this read, but it was a bit underwhelming.
What I Wrote
So as I wrote last month, my biggest challenge for this round of TBBU revisions is to cut my word count. I started at 137K, and my goal was to get to at least 115K. I was extremely stressed, nervous, doubtful – you name it – that I could accomplish that goal without losing important scenes.
But to my surprise, I was able to cut a whopping 27,331 words to get to a grand total of 110,018!!!!!!!
Even crazier, most of my cuts were just from going line by line and deleting any unnecessary words/sentences/paragraphs. I only cut five short scenes, so the integrity of my story is intact – just much tighter. I am extremely, extremely proud of the work I got done this month!
Coming Up
September will be another month chock full of revisions! I have a few running issues that need to be fixed/added throughout the draft, and I want to do one final read through for word count and consistency after those are done. I also have to write a query letter and synopsis (UGH). The submission deadline for Pitch Wars is September 25, so I’ve got a lot of work to do!
For those of you unfamiliar with Pitch Wars or who are curious about my decision to enter, I’ll have a blog post coming soon all about that topic as well as a dedicated post on The Blood Between Us since it’s been a while since you’ve seen a sneak peek 🙂
Depending on how everything else goes, I am hoping toward the end of September, I can also start plotting my new romance novel.
Stay tuned!
