Snark Surprise

When I sent my hook for Cheese to Miss Snark's Crapometer, I have to say I wasn't expecting much. I'm not a writer and never have been - English really wasn't my thing at school. Ok, I've written three novels, which is fairly unusual, and I definitely feel that Cheese is the best of them. But that's not saying anything.

But as I read through hundreds of other hooks on the blog and saw them picked apart, I started to get my hopes up. Hook after hook was rejected for the same reasons - reasons which didn't apply to mine. Sure, it had its own problems, but maybe, just maybe ...


And then this happened (#359). She actually liked it. I quote her response:

This is a hook.
The only quibble I have (and it wouldn't keep me from reading pages) is wondering if the inspector is hanging about town (befriended his daughter when he catches them together) or if the inspector is not there for the duration of the novel (return of the inspector imminent).

This is an old trope but it's got a fresh twist with the EU thing.

I had to look up trope. But she thought it was interesting enough to get me to send in the first 750 words. I made the second round! Boy, was I excited! I also got a bunch of good comments. A lot of the issues people mention are things that I actually know I deal with in the book itself, but they just don't come across in the hook, so that's encouraging too. I'm very pleased with myself, and probably a little surprised. Ok, the choice is necessarily subjective and rather arbitrary, and there were some "winners" which I felt were a little lame - but there were a couple of great ideas which didn't make her cut too - #162 and #213 (#209) really struck me.

So, my next problem: like the rest of my novel, my first 750 words were nothing more than a brain dump composed at 30wpm. (You can see them on my NaNoWriMo profile - view excerpt). I hadn't edited them at all - that would have been presumptuous. But I didn't want to send them in like that. Unfortunately, Christmas week isn't the best time for editing - not with three sets of parents to visit and a wife and two children at home. In the end I made time for one revision, then posted it. As it turned out, the deadline for posting it isn't until this Friday - but I didn't know that at the time and didn't want to miss out. Better to get feedback on something which probably isn't the best I'm capable of than get nothing at all.

So, next weekend, hopefully, I'll see what she makes of my first 750 words (in version 2). Watch out for it. My first round number was 359, I won't get a 2nd round number until it gets posted.

However seriously I'm not taking it, I'm really enjoying the whole crapometer process. I've learned a phenomenal amount about writing through reading the excerpts and hooks and the comments on them. Almost, but not quite, enough to make me want to write something else, and see if I can put what I've learned into practice. Or re-write Cheese. At the moment, though, that feels like too much like hard work. I'm currently bogged down half-way through re-writing the first chapter.

I suppose what I should do is run through it doing an 80-20 rule edit, not worry about overcutting and leaving it too short, and see where that gets me. One day ...