Today, I powered through a draft of the back cover copy for my novel, updated with the new positive action and elimination of the trope-for-trope’s-sake character.
This time, I also studied the sales copy on Amazon of my comp books, looking for the common elements that they tease out about the setting, characters, and story. Some of them struck me as being quite amateurish and awkward, but the books are still clearly selling, so there must be something there. I am trying to avoid amateur and awkward, though.
I am happy with what I came up with and am looking forward to actually printing off the package this time to stick to my wall or window.
I also downloaded and started reading Rachel Aaron’s 2k to 10k. Not because I think I can increase my word count like that, but because I found it referenced in another blog for its comments on finding excitement in your writing. That was definitely something that I have been lacking. In my last attempt at this story, writing was a drag nearly every day. The blog author, Susan Dennard, talked about how Aaron’s advice was to find something in each scene that makes it fun and exciting to write, so I wanted to learn more about that.
My next step for this Book 1 Project is going to be going back to look at the plot again. Last time through, I think I tried way too hard to force it into meeting Truby’s model, with all of the detailed steps. This time, I want to take a step back and just focus on the major tentpoles of the story to start, instead of trying to meet all of the elements in order. I can worry about that when I go back to edit.