Monday 2 April 2012

Inspirational Mondays - the rewards of mentoring someone else

Today’s blog is about offering help and inspiration to others. I became friends with fellow Siren author, Angela Wray, last Autumn. It sort of started about the time I was exclaiming to fellow authors how excited I was that my second story had been accepted and I got an email from Angela being delighted for me, particularly as her second one had been rejected.

Subsequently she rewrote it and re-submitted it but didn’t hear anything much back so I offered to look at it for her and pointed out that, whilst it was a very good story, there were some problems with the mechanics of the story which is why they probably hadn’t accepted it, like the perennial head-hopping issue, punctuation problems, and over-long paragraphs. Writing a good book is more than just coming up with the content – how it is written is just as important.

We worked together to eliminate these problems. From my point of view it was great helping someone else with their editing – so much easier than working on your own as you get so attached to it. It also made me realise how much I know – or have learnt – about the art of writing. It was also extremely rewarding mentoring someone else.

Anyhow, it all worked because she recently re-submitted it and got her acceptance email last week. I am so proud of her because I know how much hard work I made her do to put her manuscript to rights.

So do look out for ‘Collared: Ashton’ by Angela Wray which will be out sometime late June. It is a BDSM m/m/f story with terrific sex scenes in it (one thing I can learn from Angela is how to write sex scenes – she is much better at it than me!)

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The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed I have added extra pages to this blog. I am going to do a separate page for each series I bring out. This is intended to draw together the bits of detail I tell you about the books on this blog into one place - and I have also added a photo gallery! Enjoy.

Jen

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