I made some progress on the story yesterday though in retrospect I'm not sure I like what I did much (I'm attempting to eliminate a flashback without actually "eliminating" it, which thus far has involved some tense changing which, in my head, I like but I'm not sure how readers are will react to it. This also resulted in my descriptions becoming a bit more gory than in the previous draft, which I'd wanted to avoid.). Indeed, I spent a good deal of the day reading my new favorite blog, Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, which is just awesome. I don't consider myself much of a romance reader--I do read some romance but pretty strictly SF/F romance, like Sharon Shinn and Tate Hallaway, so nothing with covers featuring half-naked men trying to lay a wet one on swooning women--but I find this blog incredibly funny  and smart. They're opinionated on practically everything--which is in no way a bad thing--and they're shockingly frank and vulgar--again, not a bad thing. If anything it's refreshing to see women talk about sex and how great it is without blushing or apologizing for liking to not only do it but read about it. I was particular interested in their discussion of the virgin trope in romance and why so many writers employ it, often to cliched extents, which is particularly pertinent to my own novel since, though not technically a romance novel (the romance between my protag and her "hero" isn't the point of the novel but rather just a side effect of events)--I do employ this trope and I want to make sure I don't fall into the "reader rolls eyes" group in how I deal with it (I also discovered, much to my embarrassment, that I need to rewrite another earlier scene because I had some anatomy details wrong, but then most women make this same mistake. Luckily it's just a small detail and easily fixed. So the Smart Bitches are educational as well:).)

Anyway, enough rambling on. I've decided today that I'm going to work on making a new novel outline and work towards a synopsis. I use Ywriter for outlining, which makes it easy to isolate scene-by-scene events and I think will make having to write a synopsis less overwhelming. Plus I want to dink around with some ideas of how to fix the last section where my plot goes all to hell and outlining will help me figure some things out.

Worked on an outline today and made it through 8 chapters. yWriter has a nifty feature that lets you import a txt file of your work into it and it will automatically separate it into chapters and scenes. Saved me a bunch of copying and pasting. On the actual plot front, I've been mulling over some new ideas for changes but haven't settled on actually doing them yet (though at the moment I feel they might be a good idea to pursue.). On a somewhat funny note, I got to a scene that I didn't really know how to "synopsize" and ended up writing "[protag] has a dream about her brother that will only make sense at the end of the next book". Well, if I'm looking for candidates for cutting, that looks like a prime one. :)

I'm off to cook dinner now.

ETA: and another sub out tonight, to Aeon Speculative Fiction.

Because Jeff has decided he needs to stay at work later and I can't start dinner yet....

( And since it's been a while since I've done this, I'm subjecting you all to pictures of one of my dogs (and the nose of the other). )