I learned how to make animated GIFs! Isn’t it exciting?
I know they’re not very complex or well done or whatever, but that’s because I’m just now learning how to make them. But I thought they’d be really useful for what I wanted to talk about, and I always want to keep up with what the kids are doing these days. Which brings me to my point…sort of, and that is that you need to keep track of your characters.
I talked about this once before a really long time ago, but since I keep running into this problem, I figured I’d reiterate it. When you have a scene, you need to constantly be aware of each and every character that is in it. This seems obvious, but it’s really hard for me to do. Especially if I go back and change a scene so that one character who wasn’t there before suddenly is there. The problem is, even if that character isn’t doing or saying anything, you need to keep the reader aware that he or she is there. Because if you don’t, when it comes time for that character to say or do something, it kinda feels like this:
So yeah, your characters can’t just be appearing all of a sudden like, “I’ve been here the whole time! Ta-daaa!”
Sorry if I’m not the most comprehensible or intelligible or…digestible right now. I just got finished with a four-day stint of speed reading and editing Hellbound to include some last-minute changes. It has basically made me brain dead. If you’ve read the last few strips of Writer’s Block I posted, that’s pretty much my life in a nutshell. Coffee. Typing until brain hurts. Spongebob (Or just television in general. Or video games. Anything that doesn’t require extensive thought). But I finished those edits and I think the book will be better for it. And um…as I was editing I realized I had this problem with characters suddenly appearing or disappearing. So I thought I’d just throw it out there, bring it to your attention that it is possible to make your characters poof in and out of existence without meaning to. Okay, I think I’ve repeated myself enough for today.
As for an update on how Hellbound is doing, I recently heard from my Agent that she has sent it to an editor at a pretty big publishing house. I won’t say which one for the sake of not jinxing anything. And that’s pretty much all I can tell you for now. An editor has my book. He or she is going to read it and then tell my agent what he/she thinks of the book. I’ll keep you posted on how that process goes. For an inside look at how I reacted to finding out Hellbound had been sent to an editor, see the comic below (click to enlarge).
Word of the Day: Stint (n) – a period of time spent doing something
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