The SLUSHPILE Blog

What is a good story teller? A good story teller is someone who writes a book the reader can’t put down.
A good story teller is invisible. I can not stress this enough: THE GOOD STORY TELLER IS INVISIBLE. For more understanding on this, read Rebecca’s Rules on Writing #1: Leave your Author Ego at the […]

I’ve met two people in my life that were convinced they were literary geniuses. Three if you count myself. I used to be one of them.
The two I’m referring to have never come out and stated to me, “I am a literary genius,” so I cannot say for a fact that they believe themselves to […]

Yahoo - the edits for One Sloop and Slow Match are done! Despite having one interruption and distraction after another, I managed to finish them late yesterday afternoon with a great deal of relief.
I don’t know how other people edit, I only know how I edit. For me, the best case scenario is being left […]

Throughout the hard slog of an edit it is easy to focus only on the problems in a story and much of what I’ve written about in the Editing 101 section of this blog deals exclusively with those. Sometimes it’s easy to skim past the things I like.
Every writer we have was chosen for the […]

As it is Monday again, I’m trying to get back on track with the editing series that we began on James Spurr’s pending release of One Sloop and Slow Match, his sequel to Sworn for Mackinaw (the second of a planned three book series).
Our last edit took us to the end of the first page. […]

It’s Monday again, which brings us back around to our editing series. We’re continuing on with One Sloop and Slow Match by James Spurr which we’re looking to release in February.
We’re working in Chapter 1, Page 1, Paragraph 4 from the edits posted here.
The paragraph originally read like this:
Black Partridge, a young Potawatomi of […]

(For our normal Monday One Sloop and Slow Match edit analysis, see post immediately before this one.)
Four ways to transition POV without losing or annoying your reader (examples follow):
 a). Switch the POV at the beginning of a chapter.
 b). Switch the POV at the beginning of a new scene, and leave a line space in the text […]

The next paragraph in our Editing 101 series is the third paragraph of the first page. Originally it reads like this:
Edward called, “Run, Sarah!  To the water, don’t stop!”  He sensed she needed no urging and called more to assure her of his presence, still behind her, if she had even comprehended the threat to […]

As it is Monday, we will continue our editing series on James Spurr’s One Sloop and Slow Match. Once again you will want to refer to our first page edits, but this time we will be looking at the second paragraph.
As originally submitted, it looked like this:
Sarah was descending the same rise, running toward the […]

Yesterday, I posted the first page of edits for James Spurr’s One Sloop and Slow Match. Today, we’re going to look at the first paragraph of edits and break down what I did and why I did it.
The first paragraph looked like this with the manuscript submission:
Chapter One
            Edward wheeled and swung his musket ‘round behind him.  […]