Secret Screwup

Secret Screwup

I entered a “Secret Agent” contest but I screwed up. If you follow that link you can see what I submitted and what the Secret Agent and others thought. To get my entry down to 250 words, I deleted the section headers which included time and location. The basic response was therefore people had no idea what was going on. Which is understandable. I also included some lines from the next chapter…which further served to confuse people. I think 250 words isn’t quite enough to get a feel for a story, but hey, I got my stuff in the hands of an agent. He/she didn’t care for my snippet, but at least gave me a couple lines of feedback.

Every time I get feedback on my writing, it contradicts earlier feedback. I use too many adverbs. So I replace them with action verbs. Now I use too many action verbs. I put in too much background. I remove it, now people have no idea what’s going on. I can’t seem to win. Like my previous post on voice…I’ve completely lost mine. I have no idea if I’m doing the write(sic) things at this point. It’s like I keep adding ingredients to the soup, but now the pot(plot?) is overflowing and there’s just too many things in there. Cutting words is not making things better. It’s like taking ingredients out of the soup once they’re already in there. You take out stuff that should probably stay in the mix.

Speaking of time and location, here’s mine. So whenever you need to find me, you can come to this blog post. Note the timestamp. If it’s not current, then I’m probably not there. If this isn’t working, it’s probably because I disabled my location updates since posting this.