Your Support System

Who's in yours?

By which I mean specifically, your writing support system. Who reads your stuff? Who listens to your moan and whine endlessly about how much your work sucks, how this chapter stinks, how this plot point or that one isn't working and your ending feels unfinished or whatever your particular writing issue is?

I have two main readers. My critique/writing partner Anna J. Evans, and my bestest friend Cori back in Florida who beta-reads. I send them sections at a time. Anna sends them back with comments. Cori actually agrees to waste hours of her time on the phone discussing the intricacies of my plots and characters and what's going to happen next and why such-and-such happens. That's a good friend, folks, because as I'm sure you all know, most non-writers (like Cori) will start rolling their eyes after about twenty minutes.

(This is, btw, why Megan from Personal Demons shares Cori's middle name. It's the least I could do, at least until this actually makes me some money [at which point she has made very clear exactly what I am to buy for her].)

I think most of us have someone who'll beta read for us, whether we found them through an online group or a local groups or a friend-of-a-friend or whatever.

But who supports you? Who do you turn to when it feels like you'll never get anywhere? When it's the middle of the night and your book feels like so much useless gibberish to you? When you feel like you're missing the boat, missing the plot, missing out on everything? Do you have someone?

Do you want someone? How vulnerable will you/do you make yourself?

How about your characters?

This is a big realism issue for me. I always feel uncomfortable around people who open up too much or too fast and it never rings true for me with characters in books. Intimacy and trust go hand in hand. You should be able to see, without being told, who a character trusts, how they feel about that person, by how intimate they allow conversation to get. And I don't mean that in a sexy way (although for reasons I cannot fathom it seems like almost every other sentence out of my mouth these days is a double entendre. Must be all those rumballs.)

I mean, if character A is sleeping with character B (and I do mean that in a sexy way) but telling their secrets to Character C...the reader should be inferring all sorts of things about those relationships. Effortlessly.

What do your characters reveal? Who do they trust? Who do you trust?

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