Friday, January 2, 2009
07 January 2009, Wednesday
This year I'm definitely attending the RWAustralia conference in Brisbane. It's still a huge disappointment to me that I will not be able to go to Washington DC but I'm taking it better now. Next year or next year will be okay.
Today I just made and pre-ordered business cards for the conference. It was much harder than expected. I spent half the day debating if I should add a unique line or quote about the stories I write. In the end, I chose simplicity over informative. My card is extremely simple but I find I like it. All it has is my name and email address on it. I did have a card which had the works - Name, Mob Number, Email Addy, Web/Blog, and even a one liner of what I write - and I found I did not like it at all. Too much information thank you. So hopefully this time around it won't be too little information!
It is only the seventh day of January and already my New Years resolution has flunked. I didn't write the other day - I can't quite remember when, but I'm still determined and I have written every other day. I'm trying to stick to writing only one story but sometimes it bleeds into writing another story cos I get an idea that I have to get down or it will simply bug the hell outta me. When this happens I've learned to just give in and write it out before I go nuts! Apart from that I hope to have my manuscript done by the 200th-ish day, that is, if I manage to write one page every day. Fingers crossed everyone.
I signed up to be a Golden Heart judge this year - I've never judged before, this being my first year being a member and all that. I'm judging the Paranormal romance category. I received five manuscripts in all.
A quick note about these:
- One out of five manuscripts used Courier font, the other four all were Times New Roman font. That wasn't an issue to me - I've never seen the difference. As I say, it's the story that matters. No matter what font you use it won't change bad writing to good.
- The paranormals ranged from, futuristic, historical, contemporary, or of made up worlds. They were all truly fascinating to read although one gave me a ridiculous headache and I scored it quite low. Sentences all short and disconnected. Did not flow or make much sense. I wanted to scream even though I was trying my best to give it marks. Dang that was hard, but I shall stand by my score.
- Only one manuscript had a title page which I thought made it look a bit more professional, but of course I didn't take that into account when judging. It was quite a coincidence that this was also the one which used courier font. I think this story received my second highest score of 6.9.
- The synopsis' submitted were not bad. All were pretty good ranging from 3 to 9 pages long and averaging on 6 pages. The one manuscript with a three paged synopsis was accompanied by a manuscript that was only 27 pages long. It was a rather short story of about 60 or so thousand words so I suppose that may be the reason for the short manuscript.
- Two of the manuscripts had the names of the authors in the header. I confess that I didn't even pay attention to these. I still don't. I just thought it was a point of interest. It's really the story that matters. Similarly, when I buy books, it's the good story that matters, not the author.
- The titles didn't do anything for me. I usually disregard titles - even in published books I buy. Though truth to tell, the titles for each of the manuscripts were cleverly done and relevant to the book.
- One of the stories were written in first person POV. It didn't make a difference to me as long as it was well written. Fortunately, a bit from an awkward start the story was written so it flowed well and I didn't even notice I was reading from a first person POV.
- All of the stories ended with a hook. None of them just suddenly stopped or cut off.
I don't know if it's because this is my fist time judging or if I'm just simply a hard marker. For some odd reason, I didn't give one manuscript a high score. The highest being a 7.4 and the lowest a 3.5.
I truly do not believe I was a hard marker. I read through every single word. I read them all separately, and did not judge them against one another. Basically I followed the rules to the dot.
It could simply be that I simply did not get a winner? I just want to know because I don't want my score to make a writer lose out on a golden heart. But seriously (can you hear me lamenting now?) I really don't think I can give a higher score to any of those! it makes me feel quite horrible. Maybe I'm not cut out for judging other peoples works?
One thing that was clearly noticeable was the fact that all these stories did not have good writing execution. This really hurt the stories. The stories all had good plots and ideas, but when it came to executing these fabo ideas, it fell off short. There were two stories which made me want to read on - that's how good the story was. But the writing fell short when coming to execute the story. I know, it was frustrating. It's not like we can comment and say that the writing was just missing that extra polish to make it a winner.
Back to my amateur writing now. Enjoyz!
