I’m making decent headway on my TBR shelves, too, which is great–but there are a couple of books I’ve had on there for a while that I just can’t bring myself to get excited about with all these shiny new books people have been raving about dropping on my doorstep.

So, let me outsource this decision to you, my lovelies. It’ll be much easier to pick up my next read if people I trust vouch for its awesomeness.

Which of these books should I read next, and why?

The Damned Busters, by Matthew Hughes
Under the Dome, by Stephen King
Kraken, by China Miéville
Finch, by Jeff Vandermeer
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

(Yes, this is the majority of the adult books on my shelves. Um. I have a much easier time working through my YA books, okay?)

Would love to get your thoughts on any of the above. Thank you! <3

That said, voice is easy to overdo, and that’s something I don’t see advice on as often. I love, love, love a strong voice in a book, but I’ve read several novels I would’ve probably enjoyed more had the voice been toned down.

This seems to be most common in YA, where some authors try so hard to get the teen voice right that it ends up coming across as fake. It gets very tiring, very quickly when every other paragraph goes along the lines of, “Ugh, I totally hate this grade-A jackass, and what in the name of all that’s holy is up with his clothes? Seriously.”

Sometimes, less is more.

It happens in other ways as well, though. Sometimes if you want to achieve a certain rhythm or tone of ‘pretty prose,’ you end up repeating yourself. Sometimes if you want to try to be funny, you end up trying way too hard, or your sentences get so tangled that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. (Cough, cough. That would be me.)

What it comes down to is this: Voice needs to inform the character and the tone. Voice needs to intrigue the reader. What voice should never do is detract from the story. If at any point voice gets in the way of clarity, emotion, or character development, you’ll snap the reader right out of that spell you’ve worked so hard to cast.

When editing low-budget indie flick Avengers, Joss Whedon purposefully went through and cut out a lot of his voice. He has a very distinct style as a writer, and didn’t think it would serve him well for this movie. Opinions on this seem to vary–I’ve seen complaints that him cutting out his voice made the movie dull and mainstream, while others lauded it as a good decision. He kept his voice, just streamlined it.

I have problems with some of Joss Whedon’s work, but I’m a nineties child: I grew up with Buffy, and grew to love Angel and Firefly as well. Still, I’m in the camp that says Whedon made the right choice to tone down his voice. These weren’t his characters. They have a history–both as comic characters, where they’ve existed for years, and as movie characters, where they were written by other writers. It’d be very jarring to suddenly have them talking in Whedon dialogue.

A similar thing can apply to your work. Often, it’s good to go all-out. Pour as much of you in the book as possible. Other times, your voice as an author may not serve the story you’re trying to tell, and you’ll want to reel yourself in a little. I think both skills are essential to developing as an author.

Once you learn to strike the right balance, the story wins.

Thankfully, I have some awesome news to share regarding my friends/critique partners. Celebration time \o/

Natalie C Parker sold her debut, Beware the Wild, to Harper! You can find all the details at her blog, including a very catchy description I will now shamelessly steal to entice y’all:

… in which a claustrophobic Louisiana town is dominated by its sinister, encroaching swamp, which swallows up a boy who is instantly forgotten by everyone except his sister, and replaced by a mysterious girl from the past who is intent on taking over his family and his life.

Doesn’t that sound awesome? I think it does, and luckily, it is awesome, too. I had the pleasure of reading this book the other month and I blazed through it, which is always a good sign. You want this book.

Next, Jodi Meadows revealed the title, cover, and back cover blurb for the sequel to Incarnate on her blog–right here! I read Asunder, too, and also blazed through it, which at this point isn’t a surprise because I do that with all of Jodi’s books. This new cover is particularly fascinating knowing what happens in the book… and that’s all I can say about that.

Seriously though, go look, especially since she’s holding a contest for one of her awesome mitts!

Lastly, Beth Revis’s Shades of Earth is up for preorder on Amazon and the Book Depository, which I am VERY EXCITED about. I haven’t read this one, sadly, which means the wait for January seems… pretty insurmountable.

*makes grabby hands*

Red Glove, by Holly Black
Crossing Over, by Anna Kendall
Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane
Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver
Darkfall, by Janice Hardy
The Maze Runner, by James Dashner
Where She Went, by Gayle Forman

… evidently not.

In my defense: a) I’m working on two adult books right now, and b) new YA books are showing up at my house at a frightening rate.

This would be good–yay books!–but it makes it very hard to stay on top of things, especially since I’m leaving for my epic US trip in less than a month. Before that time, I need to:

• Edit a novel.
• Edit a novella.
• Edit a short story. (Probably.)
• Pack and prepare and irrelevant stuff like that.

It will come as no surprise that with that much editing to do, I’m really in the mood to do some rough drafting.

Maybe when I get back. In July. *cringe*

It’s funny, because the Dutch pride themselves on being a very practical, level-headed people. We don’t really do the patriotism thing. Three exceptions:

1. Queensday. BREAK OUT THE GIANT ORANGE WIGS.
2. Soccer. BREAK OUT THE FACEPAINT.
3. When we’re criticized. We’ll be all, “Oh, nah, we’re not really that patriotic, we’re way too sober for that,” and then someone goes, “You know, the Netherlands have a real problem with this-and-that” and then this orange haze of pure rage covers our vision and we wake up three hours later asking “WHAT JUST HAPPENED.”

That said, I don’t think Queensday is that much about patriotism, though it looks like it on the surface–there’s flags and facepaint and “I LOVE HOLLAND” shirts. It’s an excuse to… well, here’s how we celebrate it:

• Orange. Just… orange.
• Nationwide garage sales held on the streets. Everything from ten-year-old sunglasses to brand-new clothes to stained My Little Ponies cover every conceivable foot of pavement.
• ORANGE. Jeans and hats and hair dye.
• Getting the day off work. We’re so keen on this, in fact, that if April 30th falls on a Sunday, we’ll move Queensday to April 29th instead.
• Partying. Lots of clubs organize Queensnight parties and the beer consumption is through the freaking roof.
• ORANGE. Flags and socks and shirts and wigs and coats and flowers and and and and…

Because of how busy the Amsterdam city center is, they lock it off from most traffic, trams included. This makes the streets a free-for-all, with tourists, people hawking their wares, drunk partygoers, cyclists, and regular visitors all sharing the streets with taxis and buses.

CHAOS REIGNS.

I did mention the orange, didn't I?

Since today is the official opening to my stepmom’s new restaurant, I headed towards the bus stop, which was already filled with orange-wearing neighbors and tourists waiting for the bus. We dutifully chatted about the weather, which was awesome–after a week of rain, today was T-shirt-and-ice-cream weather, with rain picking up where it left off tomorrow–until the bus drove past without slowing down. The driver threw up his hands in apology. Orange-clad passengers with Dutch flags painted on their cheeks waved at us through the windows.

“To the trams!” we shouted, figuring we’d see where we ended up and walk from there. We kidnapped a handful of confused tourists and marched towards the other bus stop. On the way there, I changed my mind and swerved towards home, where I climbed onto my bike for the fifty-minute ride into town.

Pay special attention to the feet of the girl on the left.

Once arrived, I spent some time at my stepmom’s restaurant, took people’s money when they needed to use the bathrooms, and nibbled on some delicious chicken saté before heading back out to Purchase Junk, as is my duty as a Dutchwoman on Queensday.

JUNK: There was lots of it.

For the record, I bought a) ice cream and b) this cute little spool to wind up the cord for my earphones. VICTORY IS MINE.

Cute spool aside, there are a lot of good reasons to dislike Queensday. Criticize the trash people leave behind. The drunken partygoers screwing things up for everyone else. The noise. The damage caused. Criticize the monarchy, the capitalism, the patriotism… I can go on.

But most of the time, I like Queensday. I like people being in a good mood. I like people enjoying themselves and being completely, utterly ridiculous, wearing huge orange clogs and orange dresses and sparkly tiaras. There’s music on every other street corner, people dancing and laughing and starting conversations with total strangers. The streets are packed with people just out to have a good time. Friends will take their boat out for a boat ride through the canals, just putting on their music and basking in the sun. Entire streets will congregate around single cafes.

On Queensday, the city is one big party, and sometimes, there’s nothing better than wandering around and soaking up the atmosphere.

When a scene is draggy, though, it helps to print it out single-sided. That allows you to spread the pages out next to each other and see a lot of things in one glance instead of endlessly scrolling in Word/Scrivener/insert program of your choice.

What I like to do is marking similar ‘types’ of narration in the sidelines. If you have a lot of exposition, you can see if you’re repeating yourself. If you have a lot of dialogue, see if you can condense it. If you have a lot of description, see if you need to lump it together more, or vice versa.

This kind of overview is nigh impossible to achieve on the computer, and makes it a lot easier to see what needs fixing, and how.

Bonus: it’ll give you no choice but to clean up your desk/table to make room for all those pages.

A well-known Dutch band called BLØF brought out an album in 2006 filled with collaborations with artists from other countries. The combination of Dutch vocals combined with different musical styles had some lovely results. In some cases, they even had multiple singers, each singing verses in their native language.

Those are so my favorite.

Here, for example, is a duet with Counting Crows, Wennen aan September (Getting Used to September):

(If you dig that, try this other collaboration between them: Holiday in Spain — LOVE IT.)

I suspect I can appreciate those duets in a slightly different way from most of you, given that I speak both languages, but I’m equally in love with the next song, Herinnering Aan Later (Memory of Later), which is part Portuguese–a language I most assuredly don’t speak.

This collab is with Cristina Branco, a well-known fado singer. Unfortunately the official music video on YouTube doesn’t allow embedding.

I have a special fondness for this duet–it’s on my BLINK soundtrack, which means I’ve played it approximately three hundred times by now.

Do share your opinions–do you like the above tracks? Do the different languages add or detract, you think?

Yeah, you read that right. Whoo!

Here’s another thing I’ve discovered in my endless quest to annihilate all words: set arbitrary goals.

This ties in with the previous tip: If you don’t cut, you don’t know what can be cut. By the time you start line editing, you’ll probably have read your manuscript half a dozen times already. Every sentence will look more necessary than it is. You can read a page twice and get away with only cutting a handful of words that stand out as useless. It’s only when you force yourself to take a better look that you notice the rest.

Try telling yourself this:

• I have to cut at least 15/25/30 words per page.
• When the last line of the paragraph is only two or three words long, cut that paragraph until those words fit on the previous line.
• When the last page in a chapter is only a few lines long, cut that chapter to get rid of that extra page.
• When a scene feels draggy but you can’t pinpoint why, tell yourself to go back and cut three paragraphs.

This is arbitrary, you might argue. What if you can’t get rid of those extra words or sentences? You’ll be cutting words for the sake of cutting words, not because it makes for better writing.

The goal here isn’t to cut words, but to see if you can. If you go into a scene with a specific goal as opposed to “see what stands out at me as unnecessary,” you’ll be a lot more critical. I’ve cut tons of words this way from scenes that I was sure were 100% edited, done, all words necessary.

Once you’ve set a goal and re-read the page five times looking for ways to achieve that goal, and there’s no tiny voice in the back of your mind whispering, Do you need all the emotional cues? You know, you’re kind of repeating yourself with that paragraph. then yeah, please do move on to the next page before shredding your work to pieces unnecessarily.

Most of the time, though, you’ll probably spot a couple of new ways to trim. And, if you’re anything like me, it’ll be embarrassingly obvious. *g*

I’ve actually edited more than 134 pages; this is how much was left after all my cuts. *cracks knuckles*

Since I’m knee-deep in line edits, I thought I’d share my method and why it works for me. Although I work entirely digitally up to this point, line editing is definitely where you’ll want to print your book and go at it with a red pen.

Reason number one: The words will look different on the page.

Reason number two: You can get away from the computer, which helps against distractions.

Reason number three: Your changes are less final, so it’s easier to be ruthless. After all, you’re not actually incorporating the changes into your file yet. You know you’ll get a second chance of considering your changes.

That last reason is the biggest for me. If your goal is to cut, be vicious. I recommend not just looking at sentences and thinking of how you can rephrase it or remove words, but actually doing it. It’s easy to stick to sounding out sentences in your mind, or to think, “No, this word is essential.” Don’t fall into that trap. Take out your fat red pen, slash through any dubious words, and re-read the paragraph. It may work better than you think.

If not? Underline your change with a green pen to remind yourself to ignore it when you’re entering your edits on the computer. You may be surprised at how rarely the green pen will come into play, though.

When I heard this quote in a movie, though–The History Boys–I had to share:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something–a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things–that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

I have entered the stage of printing out my manuscript and line editing with a smooth red pen. After that, I suspect I will declare the book officially done, and send it out into the wide, wide world.

I’m kind of excited, and kind of terrified, and quotes like the above make me lean toward the former.