Have been reading some wonderful advice from publishing blogs, and although it still conflicts, it's getting easier to weed out the relevant from the irrelevant (notice I do not say 'good' or 'bad' because it's all subjective.)
This morning's read, on Nathan Bransford's blog, was about showing and telling. Now, I always enjoy Nathan's blogs; full of great advice, and humorous too. But amongst the "Ooh, thank you, that was wonderful, please can I have your babies?" comments, it was nice to see some people start to question the hard and fast rule so many crits seem so delighted to pick up on.
I've lost count of the times I've read a crit (not always my work) that gleefully leaps on a sentence and shrieks: "THIS IS TELLING, NOT SHOWING!" And you can almost hear the subtext: "found something impressive to say, yay me!" But you know, I've read some of those sentences over again and thought: "yep, it is. But it works."
Lots of 'rule' breaking works. Let's just enjoy the writing process and not get too hung up on it.
To be fair, Nathan wasn't being heavy handed on the subject, he rarely is. http://blog.nathanbransford.com/ Always a good read.
Okay, writerly rant over, this is kind of nice:
http://www.inplymouth.com/newsindetail.asp?category=Around%20Plymouth&serialnumber=73 it's a little piece written about me on Plymouth's online presence.
This came from a simple tweet (@TerriNixon on Twitter) that mentioned I was writing, and a couple of e-mails where they asked me some questions about myself and my completed MS, The Dust Of Ancients.
The book I'm doing now is about as different as it gets, which is mad fun! I'm now at a little over 40,000 words, there have been some changes (including the working title) and I'm having a wonderful time with it.
