What Makes a Good Critique Team Member?

This past Friday, I had the great pleasure of sending the manuscript for A FLAME IN THE WIND OF DEATH to my critique team. After months of work, and especially after 2 or 3 weeks where Ann and I killed ourselves to get it ready on schedule, we’re finally enjoying a short break while someone else carries the ball.

Ann and I were very lucky that we had a great group of beta readers for DEAD, WITHOUT A STONE TO TELL IT. But from that group, we narrowed it down to a smaller group that we consider our core critique team. So, what makes up a good critique team?

• Everyone brings something different to the table: Our team is made up of an editor, two authors and a reader. Sharon, our editor, has a sharp eye for language, and never fails to catch our small errors while still seeing the big picture. Margaret and Jen are each excellent authors in their own right. As such, they’re skilled in storytelling and identifying strengths and weakness in plot or characterization. Lisa is a reader, but, more than that, she’s our technical advisor and our logical thinker. A 20-year veteran of a northern California fire department, she’s been essential to us during the writing of FLAME. But she was just as essential through DEAD because she knows law enforcement officers almost as well as firefighters, and was always able to catch our logical missteps.

• The ability to give constructive criticism: This is actually a real skill. To give constructive criticism, team members not only need to be able to pinpoint what isn’t working for them, but also why it doesn’t, and then give suggestions about how to fix it. All four team members are great at this—this situation doesn’t make sense because of this, so why don’t you try that instead? They see the issues that we don’t simply because we’re too close to the story.

• Willingness to help out on a moment’s notice and stick to a schedule: I try not to call on my team at a moment’s notice, but regardless of that intention, I’ve done it to them twice in the past. To make it worse, one of those times was two weeks before Christmas 2011 as we were sprinting to complete an edit our publisher requested. Each time, they’ve all willingly jumped in and stayed on schedule, even as Christmas loomed large. I always try to keep them in the loop, giving them at least a month’s notice and then setting a hard deadline two weeks before, but sometimes that’s not always possible. Luckily, this time, I was able to do that for them.

How important is a good critique team? They’re absolutely crucial to our writing process. Some authors have only one critique partner, but I like having a team to work with us because they each help out in different ways. Put them together and their feedback is essential to the production of a solid manuscript that I then feel confident sending out to professional editors.

For other writers out there, do you work with a crit partner or team? And do you feel their input is paramount to the success of your manuscript?

Those $%&@# Crutch Words!

Ann and I are currently working on the last revision of A FLAME IN THE WIND OF DEATH before sending the manuscript to our critique team to tear apart over the next few weeks. The manuscript was written earlier this year and we had the opportunity to put it aside for a few months to ‘age’. But it’s amazing what pops out at you when you suddenly have some perspective on your work. One of those things is the use of crutch words.

The most important aspect of writing a first draft is to get the words down. Whether you are a pantster or a plotter, you simply want to get the story sketched out, hitting all the plot points and emotional notes while still including the necessary character development. But, in doing so, often authors fall back on using familiar words or phrases—those infamous crutch words—to an unhealthy extent.

I remember when we first started revisions on DEAD, WITHOUT A STONE TO TELL IT with our agent Nicole. There was a somewhat ridiculous amount of looking and glancing, accompanied by an awful lot of eyebrow movement. I think if I’d used the word ‘gaze’ or ‘that’ one more time, my word processor (and my editor!) might have gone on strike in protest. In an effort to write the story in my head, I’d fallen back on crutch words.

Now, this kind of writing is perfectly acceptable in a first draft. In fact, it’s a good thing if it helps you get the words down, but it simply can’t stay that way. You might not even see these repeated words and phrases because they seem so comfortable to you, but they’ll drive your readers insane.

The revision stage is the perfect place to weed out those repetitions and replace them with better and more varied descriptions. A good way to do this is to take advantage of Word’s ‘Reading Highlight’ option under the ‘Find’ feature. It really helps drive the point home when you see a swarm of highlighted words on the page. If you’re not sure what your crutch words are but know they’re there (and they almost always are), enlist the help of a crit partner to help you identify them. They also have the pesky habit of changing as your writing evolves. As soon as you beat a couple of them into submission, new ones pop up, so just because you’re on novel number six doesn’t mean you’re free of these irritating little gremlins.

To other authors, what are your crutch words? Have you found a way to keep them from creeping in, or do you just resign yourself to whacking them during the revision stage?

Now if I could only get my characters to stop striding everywhere they go… *eyeroll*

Photo credit: Tony Crider

Forensics 101: Strontium—You Are What You Eat

In past Forensics 101 posts, we’ve discussed skeletal identification through adult or pre-pubescent aging, sex and race. But what if only partial remains are found, perhaps only a few bones? Is there a way to start the identification process when the skull or pelvis is missing and all you have to work with is a single femur? The bones themselves can still share information with investigators, and one of crucial piece of evidence is the analysis of strontium content in the bone.

Elemental strontium is found in the soil, water supplies and bedrock of our planet. Due to an extremely long half-life, strontium isotope levels remain constant in the environment for extended periods of time. Plants that grow in strontium-rich soils naturally incorporate the element into their cellular structure. Herbivores in turn consume the plants, absorbing the strontium. Similar to calcium, strontium becomes part of the mineral structure of bone.

The key to strontium analysis is its four stable isotopes—strontium-84, -86, -87 and -88. Geographic distribution differences exist for all four isotopes, and, as a result, different geographic areas of the world have characteristic ratios between isotopes and will transfer those identical ratios to local plants. Small sections of bone are analyzed through mass spectrometry to reveal their strontium profile. Match the strontium ratio of recovered remains to a geographic location, and you’ve learned an important detail about your victim.

But strontium analysis can be even more precise. As children grow and bones lengthen, the strontium they consume becomes a part of their skeletal structure. But, like calcium, the strontium content in bone turns over approximately every six years throughout life. As new strontium is integrated into bone, it leaves a geographic fingerprint that lasts for the next six years of life. Conversely, strontium is incorporated permanently into tooth enamel during dental development in children, leaving a lifelong indictor in adult teeth as to where the individual spent his or her childhood years.

While not leading directly to a definitive identification, information about where a victim grew up or lived during the past six years could be crucial in providing investigators with a starting point for missing persons’ searches. DNA would be the next logical step in victim identification, and I’ll discuss that in the next Forensics 101 post.

Photo credit: Buddy8d

A Computer is a Writer’s Best Friend

This past week, what many writers fear happened to me—my four year-old XPS laptop died. Long time readers of the blog will remember last Janaury when I waxed nostalgic after my keyboard died. I should have known then that the end was near, but I think I was in denial.

By the time the display finally decided to give up the ghost, I was living on borrowed time. The second battery was barely functioning, the webcam had died, I was on both the second motherboard and keyboard, and to say that my 300GB drive was overflowing would be an understatment.

I bought my XPS when Ann and I had been writing together for only a year and were still just writing for fun. At the time, the idea of writing professionally hadn’t even entered our heads. But just over a year later, we’d set our sights on Go big or go home, and were focusing on a new manuscript and starting the querying process when it was complete.

And here we are, three years later, with the first book out next May, our editor asking for the second book by the end of this year, a new proposal finished, and we’re already thinking about the next project and future possibilities. And, to do that, I need my main work tool—a new (working!) laptop.

Above is a picture of my new best friend as I’m neck deep in edits for A Flame in the Wind of Death, the sequel to Dead, Without a Stone to Tell It. My old, trusty laptop served us well as we wrote over a million words while we learned our craft. Now I’m looking forward to the next million words with this one!