Ever play a driving game (or, you know, drive in real life, though I can tell you from personal experience this is a lot scarier in real life), and in order to avoid sliding in one direction, you turn the steering wheel and instead the car turns way too far in the opposite direction? (On the ice it’s the worst. Doing a 365 in the middle of I-80 at the top of one of it’s tallest peaks during a blizzard is not the best way to start a commute).

The first 250 words of my novel are up this week on Miss Snark’s First Victim, along with 49 other first pages. I’m not linking directly to mine, just the blog, because if you’re a regular visitor here, or even if you just know what my blog is called, you’ll know which one is mine.

As an aside, I know several others from my blog list are up there too, because I recognized first pages. And the one I saw that made me squee was from Huntress, who has an awesome blog and also helps critique over at Unicorn Bell. So best of luck to Huntress and everyone else ^_^

This is not my first time participating, though it is the first time for this novel. I’ve gotten better over the last year or two at accepting the feedback. This time though, I’m almost giggling (insanely) and kicking myself over it.

If you’re one of my CP’s, you’ve probably read my work and said “This scene could use a little more description”. Like, in 90% of my scenes. If you haven’t said that…no they all have, never mind. It’s because description is a weakness for me.

I knew that when I was polishing this section of work. Those meager 250 words. So I made sure to put some extra description in. I was determined that no one was going to critique my first page and say “I don’t really get a sense of place. I’d like to know more about where we are.” That wasn’t going to happen to me. No way.

And…it didn’t. Instead, I got a lot of: You probably didn’t need to spend so much time describing your setting…

Well then 😛 I know how to fix that. So those 250 words (225 really) are now about 144, and I was more than happy to cut out that extra description. I’m going to need to learn not to over-correct in my writing.

I’d like to say that’s my lesson learned for the day, but I know I’ll make the same mistake again.

And on a completely unrelated topic, I have a question for all of you. Okay, it’s not completely unrelated. It’s actually to help me tweak something else in my first scene.

Place yourself in this situation: A busy city street lined with shops and trees. Traffic is heavy, both car and foot traffic. The sun is hot, the humidity is high, and everyone is in a hurry to be anywhere but there.

And then a gunshot echoes down the street. You didn’t see it coming, you don’t know where it came from, you’re not even sure it’s a gunshot because you may or may not be familiar with such a thing and it seems so out of place in the afternoon.

How do you react?