Submitted my entry into the latest writing competition I joined. I absolutely love the way this one is set up and I highly recommend it to any author that enjoys short story writing competitions. It’s called Writing Battle. https://www.writingbattle.com They send out your prompts and you have four days to write a minimum of five hundred words and a maximum of one thousand in this particular battle. The word count is different for each battle. Their website is very user friendly, and you can actually write directly on the submission form if you like. I’m using Word, you may recall my disaster of the lost blog number six, then I copy and paste. The prompts are a genre, character, and object, you have to include all three in your story. You’re dealt random prompts. You may redraw your genre one time, and your character and object up to seven times between them.
There’s four days to submit your story, but the final twenty-four hours the draws are locked in. I didn’t realize this until I submitted my story, but apparently you can get extra prizes for not redrawing. I didn’t redraw, so maybe I’ll win something. Each entrant reads five pairs of stories, choosing a winner from each pair (or duel). Readers aren’t reading stories in their own genre, and in addition to choosing the winner, offer some feedback on the story. This goes around until it's down to eight final stories, or four final battles. The judges choose from the last four battles. The final four win something and the top winner gets two-thousand-dollars! I don’t expect to win anything, but I enjoyed writing the story and I look forward to the feedback. I’m definitely interested in entering more of these battles, we'll see if I’m up for the one in April.
I haven’t gotten anything from my three Force Majeure beta readers yet. It’s so difficult to leave them alone. I want to know how it’s going, if they like it so far. Or hate it. I think the most stressful thing is that it’s so long, if they hate it, one-hundred-fifty-three-thousand words is a lot to be stuck reading. In my own efforts to support my fellow authors I’ve forced myself through some tough to read stories. Not that they were necessarily poorly written, just sometimes they’re completely outside my interests. It’s hard to read three hundred pages about the history of building a railroad, or underwater welding, even if they’re impeccably written.
I've also done some critiques of very rough drafts on a writing critique forum online. Some of the stories are wonderful and a joy to read. While others are from very new writers who do not speak English as their primary language. English is a difficult language for anyone, but if you have to learn it as a second language, it can be brutal, it makes no sense! It can be a struggle to not highlight the whole thing because there’s that many mistakes, and I desperately want to help them.
I’m a person who reads every single word. Lots of people, probably most people, look at a sentence and their brain will fill in what should be there, so they don’t see as many of the mistakes. My brain likes to torture me by finding all the mistakes and making them flash in neon so I can’t escape. Unless it’s something I wrote, then it fills in all the mistakes so I can’t see them no matter how hard I look. Brain science is wacky!
I got a new review that I found very interesting. I’ve had several reviews where the reviewer said they thought Force of Corruption isn’t spicy enough. I think one person said, “it’s like Haunting Adeline without the sex.” I'm a glass is half full kind of person, so I took the compliment of my story being like Haunting Adeline and ignored the criticism on the spice. I mean H.D. Carlton is a bestselling author.
But back to my story, this new reviewer appears to be a male and I’m guessing he doesn’t normally read romance. He most likely picked it up for the suspense part of the story, and he was probably surprised by the spice. I don’t think thriller/suspense books have trigger warnings and if you aren’t familiar with romantic spice, it can be quite the shock. He gave me four stars and said that he would’ve given it five stars if it didn’t have so much graphic sex. I love that he thought my story was worthy of five stars, and I kinda feel bad that the sex got in the way of his enjoyment of the book.
I’ve considered writing “closed door” or “fade to black” romance, especially after how embarrassed I get about what’s in my book. But I love the spicy romance books I read, and I want to write what I love to read. Sometimes I skip over some of the sexy parts, if it’s just too much, or includes kinks I find cringe worthy, but I still love my spicy romance. There're some authors who write spicy romance that are SO talented. I end up reading all of their books and loving multiple series.
I’m in a couple “clean romance” groups on Facebook and they seem very popular. Maybe I'll try one out down the road and see how I like it. What do you think? Do you like spice? Hate it? My mother, daughter, and best friend don’t usually read spicy romance and were surprised by the spice level in my books. My best friend actually mostly reads horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. She teases me about being her shy-librarian-never-curses-friend, who writes graphic spicy romance. What can I say? I’m an enigma.
As I mentioned above, I try to support my fellow authors by buying, reading, and reviewing their books. Recently I’ve read a few and I gave them stellar reviews because I liked the stories overall. There were mistakes in the books, so I reached out to the authors to share those directly with them. I’ve decided, as an author, the best way to offer constructive criticism is not to point out any negatives about the grammar or punctuation in a review. I only talk about the story there. If there’s any typos or other mistakes, I tell the author in a direct message. I offer to discuss it with them if they like, I’m always happy to help a colleague.
In my last blog I talked about the different types of reviews. Now I’d like to talk about do's and don'ts of reviews.
· Do write about what you loved in a story.
· Do talk about the characters you loved.
· Do talk about any short comings in the story, if you were disappointed it’s okay to share that in your review. Just remember to be kind, no reason to hate on someone pouring their heart out.
· Do take the time to pretend you’re trying to convince a friend to read the book. What would you tell them to share your love of the book and entice them to read it?
· Do make sure your star rating matches your review.
· Do compare the book to others you love that are similar, so a potential reader has more books to reference when considering this book.
· Don’t take away stars because it was a genre you hate and you read it anyway or even worse, couldn’t finish it, that’s not the author’s fault.
· Don’t shred an author because you didn’t like their book, there’s a nice way to make other potential readers aware of things they may not like, or things that are expected but were missing.
· Don’t only give a star rating without any written review! That helps no one.
· Don’t point out grammar or punctuation mistakes in your review, unless it was so many mistakes you had difficulty reading the book. Even then, it’s better to message the author directly about those issues.
· Don’t give a bad review because you didn’t like the cover, or the free sample of another book in the back.
· Don’t mention that you got the book for free as an ARC (Advanced Review Copy), Amazon especially is deleting reviews that mention anything related to getting the book for free or ARC copies.
· DO post reviews on as many sites as possible. Amazon often deletes reviews, nobody knows why. Post on your social media, post on Goodreads, post on the website for the store where you bought the book. If you love an author and love a particular book, support that author with lots of reviews. They’re better than gold, especially for indie authors who struggle without a marketing department to get the word out about their wonderful books.
Thanks so much for reading! I appreciate your time and I hope what I’ve learned, and all of my mistakes are helpful to others. Don’t make the same mistakes as me, don’t blow your money. My journey is a cautionary tale, heed the warnings!