So, even though Unnatural Selection (US) isn’t complete, I decided to go ahead and polish up the first three chapters to give to my agent. I did this with Foretold–back when it was called Wyrd, The Turning. Not only was that original title all wrong but Miriam let me know the style of book wasn’t cutting it either.
She was right.
I started from scratch and what that young adult became was sooo much better than the original idea.
I have a better feeling about US from the start. I think my ideas for the Scrap City novels feel pretty solid and so far, the feedback on snippets from book one have been excellent.
So, I polished up three chapters and uploaded them to the email loop I share with my critique partner, Rachel Vincent. (After you read this, check out all the foreign covers of her Soul Screamers books-I love them!) Even after working with Rachel for years, I still get a bit nervous about that first feedback. This is normal. Rachel’s published a lot of novels and she still has the same feelings when one of her babies comes to me. It’s the nature of the game. Rachel and I both have strong ideas about what makes a story good, so we inevitably end up making sense to each other. And when I get a solid thumbs up, I know I pulled something off.
In other news, I’ve been trying out Liquid Story Binder again for this book. I really like it so far and will probably buy it soon. I absolutely love the more creative setup. I use the image and dossier options a lot. In fact, here is a sneak peek of my second, big monitor. I have this plugged into my laptop so I can keep the images of both characters and scenes up. I put little Post-its all over the images because I don’t own rights to post them–these are my private use only images. (If these books sell, I’ll be looking into purchasing the images of Rae for a website. The model is just too perfect for her.)
The dossier is in the bottom left corner. I’m using that image in a scene and I jotted down lines to remember when I get there. I’m a visual writer and so far, Liquid Story Binder is proving to soothe that side of me. Big time. 🙂