Feedback and some good news

 Good morning writers and readers! I received the feedback on my novella (Christmas theme) recently. I decided to leave it for a while, though there was the temptation to open the file. My current  novella was nearing completion, and I didn't want an added distraction. So, I ploughed on with my writing. One day I worked on it off and on throughout the day to get it completed. The piece runs to just under 50,000 words, the longest novella I have written so far.

Having saved and filed my document away to stew, I opened the feedback document. This particular lady and I use Tracker in Word. Somehow I must have clicked something I've not used in the past and I couldn't get it to do what I wanted. Frustration kicked in, and I was making mistakes and deleting things I didn't mean to. Tracker has all sorts of things you can keep tabs on, but I just wanted to make the changes, not keep what went before. I really need to learn how to use it properly. I'm sure there is a YouTube video I can watch. You can find anything on YouTube.

Eventually, I got it to work, though I still don't know what I did to right it! All the amendments have now been made. These are the silly things like typos, grammar, punctuation and sentences that don't sound right. All my usual things, like changing names of people and change of tense came up (though I picked up one that was missed). It's advised to do most of these things in the final run through, but I prefer to have a lot of these ironed out first and to get an overall feedback. There is still a bit of work to do. Mainly, this is description. I charge quickly into my stories and when I leave things out, it's usually description. So the next thing will be to go through it again and fill out the detail. But I'm going to leave it for a week or two now and go back to it fresh.

I have two poems due out in Seaborne magazine next month. They only publish poetry and stories about the sea, and it thrilled me to learn they are taking both my poems. I'll post a link when I know the day of publication.

Now the sun is calling me. Time to stop writing and get into the garden with a book.