And anyone else interested who I've had read things before (Abridged Speculists, etc.).
I've decided to work on Black Bull again, finally. Well, I've been meaning to forever, but what with being sick and having so much to work on at work, it was very easy to put off (and not to mention, guilt-making, like I should be reading at home instead of writing). But I'm tired of meaning to work on it, and tonight I read through the last of what I wrote and cleaned it up a bit in an attempt to figure out if it's even worth continuing with. I'm going to try to write at least a couple more pages tonight.
What I'm wondering is if anyone would mind reading the first 40 or 50 pages that I've got done so far (about 12,000 words) and do a mini-writing group on it--what works, what doesn't, big-picture wise. It's got a LOT of editing problems because I've been writing this in bits and pieces since Nanowrimo, almost a year now. So it'll have continuity errors and POV errors and all that fun stuff. But I'm wondering two things:
1. Is my contemporary voice contemporary enough? I wonder if it feels either too whiny or too adult-looking-back-on-being-a-teen. And I imagine it being set in the late 80s/early 90s when I was in high school, and wonder if I should jazz it up with cell phones and all that kind of modern stuff. I had to rely upon a pay phone to call home, for example, and I doubt a girl today in the same situation I was back then would be able to afford a cell anyway, but I wasn't sure how dated it might feel. A lot of the realistic scenes are a hodge-podge of autobiographical stuff that I'm not sure work, and will need a lot of editing to make it look not so autobiographical, but I wasn't sure if electronic stuff should be a part of that editing.
2. Since you've read Black Bull in its novella form (right? I think most AS people from when I was in Boston read it, and I know Chimera read it, because her reading was part of what gave me this idea)--anyway, for those who have read Black Bull the novella, how do I fit the journey with the bull into this modern world? Should it be a journey to another world kind of story, and the hidden room is the portal? That'd make for funny, Maggie trying to sneak the bull into a church. But mainly I'm stumped and the one scene I have with the bull in the barn doesn't feel right. I like the stuff with the bull horn, but I'm blocked as to how I can make that fit into the tale I want to tell.
Anyone want to read and comment? Or perhaps I could be a guest one time of AS? I don't want to commit to going full-time again yet, because I'm not quite up yet for reading other peoples' stuff--I'm just now barely looking at my own and wondering if it's worth even looking at, you know?
(But hey--12,000 words in a year? I could have sworn it wasn't nearly that much. Wish it could have been a whole book, but perhaps that can be the goal for the next year.)