Love That's Out Of This World

My Journey

 

So I left off with me wondering what the heck dialogue tags were.

After searching the internet I found a whole slew of information about dialgue tags. Problem was that it still confused the hell out me. I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I went through my entire WIP and added a dialogue tag after every dialogue.

I know that sounds right crazy, but hey, I thought that’s what my editor was asking me to do.

Then I tackled the next thing she wanted me to work on, fixing all the grammar mistakes in the document. That was easy enough – I paid someone else to do it. Grammar has never been my strong point. I blame the public school system in my home town for this. I honestly do. So much so, that a couple of years ago I asked my sister if she wanted to join me in a class action lawsuit against them. She declined. I also blamed that on them as well. Somehow along with failing to teach us grammar they also made her compliant.

Anyway, on with my story.

I sent off my edits and patiently waited for her to send me an email with my release date.

Fast forward a month later. I finally received my email. But it wasn’t what I was expecting. My dialogue tags were still all wrong, but now I had much more to fix because every friggin’ dialogue had a crazy tag. I think I should also mention that if I didn’t know what to add at the end of the dialogue I put things like, ‘she tilted her head’, ‘she sighed’, she peered’, ‘she walked away’ and ‘she cried’ and so on and so forth.

So my tags were still all wrong and my grammar was apparently still a mess. My editor told me to find a critique partner to help with getting my WIP together. So I did what any newbie author would do faced with a situation like mine. I stayed in bed and cried. I was a horrible writer who didn’t know diddly about writing.

After a lot of coaxing from my husband, a few days later I got up and tackled my edits. The first thing I did was search for critique partners. I had no idea that such a concept existed. But did I truly need a critique partner? I could do this myself, I thought. I did more research on dialogue tags and queried a couple of authors on the authors loop. I had my answer. Not right now.

I went through my WIP again and fixed all my dialogue tags. Next thing I had to do was fix my grammar. I went through the document again and added all my missing commas, because honestly, when someone talks about grammar, comma’s are the only thing that comes to mind.

Even though I was able to complete my edits without the help of a critique partner, I did send out a query for one. After a couple of days of waiting, I still didn’t have any takers (go figure?). But I couldn’t wait on that, I had a deadline to meet and wanting to show my editor that I could get things done early, I sent my WIP back off  and waited patiently for my release date.

To be continued.