Her head ached the pain of the hysterical; a personality flaw that had come to grow out of the mess of her life. It crept up the back of her head and wove into her hair, around the back of her skull like a crack on a windshield.
Chapter 21.
Things are getting intense. Natalia is in Alcatraz, surrounded by strangers who may or may not want her blood. Steven is weak, shot, and dreaming of his dead wife, out for revenge. And the writer, as simple as she is, bangs her head against the keyboard in hopes that words will magically form into more concise sentences.
It fails, alas.
It’s been over a year since I joined Critique Circle. My writing has improved monumentally. Thank god. It wasn’t the overall process of submitting and receiving reviews that did it for me. It was meeting two writing partners who have brought considerable things to light such as point of view structure and dialogue tags. Little things I should have realized years ago. Woopsies.
I love Mondays for our meetings. 9:30 a.m., we meet on Skype and try to casually point out some of the flaws. Fortunately we’ve become closer to each other, so our recommendations and points are fairly blunt. “It seems to me that he’s just acting like a dick.” And “But wouldn’t they notice she escaped?” are fairly common phrases. We give each other a hard time and do our best not to go on the defensive.
This is the first time anyone, at all, has gone through my entire novel. We’ve gone all the way to chapter 21. Twelve chapters to go. I feel that edge coming on, that the end is in sight. I’m giddy for them to get it, because every time I reach it I think “Wow, I can’t believe it. It’s done.” I want them to want more. I want myself to want more. And I do. I do, I do. I want 9 books to the series. I want the readers to stick to Natalia like a piece of toilet paper. There is a natural process happening, we’ve met a girl in a stage of metamorphosis, and I want the world around her to be so uncertain that the reader’s fear for her life.
WordPress seems to be the go to, so as with everything, I will try to stick to keeping up this blog so that when The Code: Book 1 hits shelves (Amazon shelves) readers will have something to reach to. Something to offer a little bit of insight into the why’s and how’s and what if’s.
And trust me, there is a lot of what if’s that need to be answered.
The Code Series 