An Interim Update

Well, I’m fairly pleased with my progress on Rose thus far.  I’ve been going back and making edits and minor rewrites to each chapter again.  As tedious as it’s been, it’s also been very productive.  It’s amazing all the things you catch when you’ve put your work down for a while and come back to it fresh.

I mention in my previous post a few of the issues I’d found and were correcting, but even more have presented themselves.  First, I’ve been a little guilty of letting my protagonist “know” what other people are thinking.  Of course, I’m sure you can break that rule if your character is psychic, but mine’s not, and there were numerous instances where she had minor insights into other people’s thoughts and emotions.  Needless to say, those have to go.

Another issue is her awareness of how she looks to other people.  Sometimes we all know we’re smiling, but not necessarily how we’re smiling.  There have been times where I’ve been grinning, but someone else has pointed out that I look up to something.  While I think it’s okay to say “I grinned mischievously,” that’s more a matter of intent rather than interpretation.  You can’t say, “My grin betrayed my mischievous thoughts.”  You don’t really know what your grin is betraying.  Not to mention, the prior statement also implies that you know how other people will interpret the grin, which takes us back to the former problem.