This has helped me...

I'm in the middle of huge revisions on my MS. I've lots of time to work now that school is out.

But more important than that, I have a deadline. I applied to be part of the Nevada SCBWI Mentor Program. Program participants are matched with a mentor who will work with them for six months (six months!) to get their MS on track.

I'll know by August 1 if I've been accepted. If I am accepted, I'll have to send my mentor my MS within a week of the notification.

So, I've been hauling though my MS, revising the new second half that I wrote last year. This is not a pruning, polishing sort of revision. This is digging in, up to my elbows, so I can extract gems from the rough draft and arrange them in some sort of compelling order.

I'm halfway through, but it's been exhausting work. Several times I've finished revising a chapter and not been able to tell whether it's been an improvement. I'd lost my vision, which is a big part of revision (six letters, by my count).

My tendency is to push on through, to show the MS who's boss, but Steph mentioned a piece of advice that Alisha Niehaus gave her: if a scene is giving you trouble, write a few scenes past it, and then come back to it.

Yes, it is ridiculously simple, but it has been saving my bleary-eyed self. When I get tired, I lose perspective of what's working, what's necessary. Every time I've worked a few scenes ahead, it's given me a better idea of what needs to happen to set up the scene I've moved ahead to. Then I'm able to return to the difficult scene, weed out the unnecessary, and emphasize what's working.

So, for those of you who are working hard, who (like me!) will be as pale at the end of this summer as you were at the beginning, consider skipping ahead when you hit a wall. I'd also love to hear any other tips you might have for tackling a difficult stretch of writing.

Camp 2 (Saturday afternoon) at the SCBWI Mid-Atlantic Novel Revision Retreat

My two fellow campers and myself sat through the downpour, happily dry in the Big Meadow Lodge but with worries about our campsite. The storm tracked along the Blue Ridge Mountains and put it directly over our tents which were comfortably snuggled among the trees of the Shenandoah National Park. But who could pull themselves away from the second craft session on First Chapters to the futile task of saving our camp? Our tents were staked down, so no threat of Wizard the Oz II. Fellow Slushbuster Stephanie, the engineer amongst us, had strung up a tarp over our picnic table the day before. It withstood a very windy night so we hoped it could survive this summer thunderstorm.

Again Alisha Niehaus, Senior Editor from Dial Books for Young Readers led the session. Her advice on what needs to be in your first chapter came in three pitches: show who the characters are emotionally, plant a seed of where the plot will take the reader and create a clear and unique voice. Hit all three and you’ll have the bases loaded.

On the matter of voice, she described it as heart, made from melding together the voices of the author and characters.

As examples Alisha used two novels she edited, showing the before and after rewrites. This was a real treat of the s’more variety. The two books were Savvy by Ingrid Law and The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson. Her edits included changes in plot to build more tension, scaling back characters so as not to overshadow the main character, creating other characters and, of course, grammar corrections.