Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

  Yes that is an incredibly healthy looking picture for a Thursday morning on the Mystery Writing is Murder blog.  But hold your horses.  It does have bacon and nuts in it.  My thinking is that the vitamin benefits outweigh the fatty risks. :)  Check it out on Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen.

And now…a report on day 1 of the getting reacquainted with my manuscript project. My grade for my revision technique yesterday is a C.

I had a really tough time not picking the manuscript to death. I’m wondering if the transition was tough because I just came OFF picking a manuscript to death.  But the difference between the two projects is huge—the Berkley project was something I’d been working on for months straight. It was time to pick it apart. This poor project has been on the backburner since April.  I should be reading it through quickly and getting a sense of the plot and characters again.

Very hard.

Today I’m going to approach it differently. I have several different ideas for the new approach:

• Make content change notes on a separate Word document.
• Highlight errors I find, instead of correcting them immediately.
• If all else fails, print the document and see if that helps at all. 
• Chant “I will not fix it.  I will not fix it.” until I make the first initial pass through the manuscript.

Wish me luck!

Maybe this post should be about the family I neglected the past few days before my project deadline. But no, it’s actually about a manuscript that I need to dust off and start working on again.

In the middle of the revisions for Pretty is as Pretty Dies, I wrote the next Myrtle Clover book for Midnight Ink. So about a year ago I started it, then I finished the first draft in February.

I fiddled with it in March and early April. But then, in April, I started working on the Memphis Barbeque series for Berkley. And I haven’t picked up the Myrtle Clover draft since.

Now the plan is that I submit this manuscript in November to Midnight Ink. That gives me two months to really make it shine. I can rewrite any passages I’m not pleased with, or even chuck huge parts of it and overhaul it. It’s enough time.

Simultaneously, of course, I’ll be concocting Lulu’s further adventures in Memphis for Berkley’s book two.

I don’t think this will be a problem. (Okay, I’m putting this in print. So if I start wigging out in a month or so, remind me.) After all, revisions and drafting a manuscript are two completely different processes. I’ll revise part of the day and I’ll be creative the rest.

I’m really, really curious to pick up the Myrtle Clover book today. I’ve got to find the USB drive it’s on, actually—my laptop’s OS was blown away and reinstalled several times since April. And I’ve gone through two laptops since then. Got to get my hands on the right backup drive.

I wonder what mistakes will jump off the page at me. I wonder if the jokes will be as funny as they were when I wrote them, or if I’ll frown and groan and rewrite them.

This is my plan for reacquainting myself with the manuscript:

Read it all the way through.

Make notes of only big problems. Don’t micro-revise on the first reading.

How strong is the basic plot premise? Are there any big holes? Does anything not make sense?

Have I reintroduced these characters? Have I made it balanced enough so that first-time readers can get to know them and earlier readers won’t get tired of back story?

Have these characters grown and changed since the first book?

Is the basic timeline sound?

Do the characters sound like themselves?

This is the first time I’ve put a manuscript down for this long and then come back to it. Usually, if it’s put away for five months, then it’s in my little manuscript graveyard. But it was only circumstance that made me put this project away. Now I’m excited to read it again with fresh eyes—at first to get reacquainted and then critically.

Do you ever put your projects on the back burner? Does it help? Can you pick up on your original train of thought and plan for the book again?

5 a.m. Yesterday, the day before deadline—get up, drink coffee.Decide to pack kids’ backpacks before writing. What’s this? Seems to be an uncompleted sheet for son’s 7th grade Business Computer class. And…oh no. The school needs my signature on about 8 documents relating to son’s science labs and dangerous equipment.

5:30—Start revisions

6:—Get son up to complete homework that he’d forgotten about. Get daughter up, since she has to be at school at 7 every day.

6:45: Drive carpool. Nip carpool argument in the bud.

8:00—12:00 Read the second half of the manuscript over again. Realize I have a timeline error. Fix the timeline error. Read through second half of manuscript again quickly, making sure timeline is correct and I haven’t missed any parts.

12:00—Go get cupcakes for third-grader’s teacher’s birthday at the elementary school.

12:15—Realize that Costco sells cupcakes packaged in groups of 20. I need 24. I don’t need 40. I don’t need 20. Decide to get cake instead.

12:20—Brainwave—if I get cake instead of cupcakes, this means I also need to get plates and forks. I go to that aisle and get a massive amount of plates and forks (this is, after all, Costco.)

12:30—I’m in the car. Oh. If I’m doing a cake instead of cupcakes, I should have candles. I could skip candles with cupcakes, but not with cake.

12:40—I’m back home. And I suddenly realize I have no more birthday candles because the Birthday Princess wiped out my supply when she turned 8 a couple of weeks ago. But I do have matches. And oh! I need a cake server.

12:45—I’m in the car, driving to the school. I park and call a friend. “Do you have birthday candles?!?!”

1:00—We have the birthday party. Teacher is surprised and delighted and it’s all worth it.

1:55—Waiting for school bus in my car at the top of the hill. Scanning my manuscript (I have my laptop with me in the car.) I frown. “This isn’t right. This character wouldn’t do this! And…oh…he’s doing it here, too.”

2:00—Talk to another mom at the bus stop. She asks how the book is going. “Great. Except it’s due tomorrow and I just found these two messed-up scenes.”

2:10—My daughter is coming off the school bus. She has homework and doesn’t understand it. Neither, it turns out, do I.

3:00—Back on the manuscript. What can I do with these two scenes? Think. Think.

3:30—Son is back from middle school. He does understand his homework. Excellent. He’s in honors and I’m not bright enough to help him even if I wanted to.

4:00—I proofread the recipes in my book. Waaaait a minute. There’s no measurement listed by the cheddar cheese. Call my mother to double-check the recipe.

4:05—The children pick the moment I’m on the phone to go completely insane. They run up and down the stairs whooping and hollering. I slam my door shut and keep talking to my mother. My daughter opens the door. “Mom, he’s….” She stops at my threatening look.

4:10—My mother is distracted because she’s got a huge household emergency involving broken pipes and a workman who has an urgent question. I continue pressing on the cheddar cheese issue.

4:30—6:00—Revise. Children are scared to bother me.

6:00—I decide Hamburger Helper sounds like a great meal for the family. Oh. Why is the meat still frozen? I put it in the fridge the night before…

6:30—A computer problem erupts. What have I done to displease the gods? I am consumed by the problem. Nothing will work…no printer, no online connection, the keyboard is possessed by a demon that makes me type in the wrong spot in my document.

7:15—My husband comes home from work and considers returning there after seeing wife who appears to be having a nervous breakdown.

7:20—Husband starts working on computer issues.

10:00—Husband finishes fixing all related computer issues.

10:05—I realize I’m exhausted. I set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. and go to bed.

10:10—I can’t sleep.

10:15—I take a Benadryl.

10:30—I have an idea to fix the two messed-up scenes. But now the Benadryl has kicked in. I turn on the light. I scribble on a post-it and stick it to the top of my laptop.

4:00—I get up. I put lots of sugar in my mug. I drink lots of coffee.

4:15—I fix the two scenes.

6:00—7:00—Repeat the process of getting children up and doing carpool.

7:15—9:00–Put finishing touches on the manuscript.

9:02—I realize I don’t have a title for my book. Or the series.

9:05—I put a bunch of ideas on a piece of paper.

9:15—I email my editor with the manuscript and the ideas for the titles.

Now? I’m planning a lunch with my husband. And I think I’ll take the rest of the day off…..

I’m a huge fan of storytelling. My mother used to read stories to the children at my elementary school, my parents read nightly to me growing up, and I read to my own children.

Reading aloud from books helps them come alive. But I also enjoy oral storytelling (Isn’t all storytelling oral? I never understood that…) Beowulf is a favorite of mine (recorded after many years of being told by firelight), the Grimm Brothers wrote down stories that had been handed down through generations, and folk tales like Paul Bunyan had their genesis with families telling stories.

My singing is wretched, but I always sing to my daughter (and did for my son when he was younger). Their favorites are old American folk songs like “Oh, Susanna,” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain.” They also loved hearing nursery rhymes set to music.

Alice in Wonderland was penned after Lewis Carroll had been telling his young friend Alice story after story about her made- up adventures in a magical place.

My children love for me to tell stories without using a book. Sometimes they like to hear my renditions of fairy tales like “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but frequently they’re happy to hear stories about the day they were born, or funny stories from when they were toddlers.

It’s amazing how fast the story comes when there’s someone asking “What happens next?”

Wednesday, I’ll start writing my second book for the Memphis Barbeque Series (due April 1.) Right now I don’t even have a concept for the book.

One thing I do know is that I’ll be muttering aloud to myself. My cats and dog will stare oddly at me, but no humans are at home during the day on Wednesday. It’s the perfect time to work out a primitive story outline and see if I have a good enough concept for someone to wonder “What happens next?”

Reading aloud helps me with my revision process, too. I find so many errors that I’d otherwise never have noticed.

With any luck, by the time my kids get off the school bus, I’ll have a foundation to work with. After all, my mysteries are basically, “Once upon a time, someone was murdered….”

Does anyone else talk to themselves when they’re plotting? Or am I the only nutty one out there? :)

So I’m back in the grocery store yesterday afternoon (because I can’t organize a week’s cooking menu to save my life) and I’m navigating the extremely crowded aisles at the Harris Teeter. They’re having a Buy 2-Get 3 free Breyer’s ice cream deal, and I was intrigued by the idea of having that much ice cream crammed in my freezer.

My happy epicurean daydream was suddenly interrupted by a conversation two women were having next to me. “Did you know that Nancy has swine flu? She’s horribly, horribly ill. And I just saw her the other day!”

I’m not proud to admit that I got as far away from Nancy’s friend as possible. With two kids in the house, I’m already a germ magnet and there has been an incredible amount of press devoted to H1N1 here in North Carolina. The schools are making automated phone calls about it, the newspaper has a story about it just about every day, and the television news is rife with it. You’d think it was like cholera in The Secret Garden or something—run! Run for your lives!

This hype makes me wonder if I should even care about H1N1 (although I wasn’t taking any chances at the grocery store.) I mean, I already wash my hands about 2 million times a day, and have the dry skin to prove it. I know this virus is serious. But so is the seasonal flu and really everyone is incredibly blasé about seasonal flu. The fact that it’s getting so much press makes me suspicious.

Hype in general makes me suspicious, actually. I also wonder about heavily-promoted books. I usually see hype this way: Literary fiction=no hype unless Oprah discovers it. Chick Lit=lots and lots of hype. Cleverly written novels=cult-like hype that sometimes results in mainstream success. Genre fiction=author generated hype and hype from avid genre fiction readers (which is VERY appreciated by genre fiction authors.) Best selling series=publisher-generated hype .

I was a rebellious child in many ways and sometimes I think I haven’t grown up all that much. The more I’m told by the press to read something, the less I want to read it.

It’s gotten so that the few people I really believe are book review bloggers. Why? They’re devoted readers. They care about the plot and the characters. They’re not making a dime from the process. They are savvy readers who read a ton of books from a variety of genres.

There are some fantastic book review bloggers out there. Some of them are listed in my sidebar. Now I have a to-read list that’s pages long—but I’m excited about the books on the list. And I feel they were recommended by friends.