Dorothy

I often watch the police programs and have noticed that there is a frightening increase in young women rolling out of pubs and clubs almost paraletic. So I am not at all surprised about this report of noisy henparties. Dorothy

If you can't let yourself get emotionally involved with your characters, how can they become real to your readers? When I wrote The Cup Bearer I became Emilio and wept buckets when he was hurt and felt elated when he got one over an antagonist. A good writer fee's evrything a character feels, even the baddie. Dorothy

Meraning no offence but the only thing about those two paragraphs is that there are too many 'was' words, and too much involved discription. This is another topic which I wanted to talk about in a following email. I'll have another look at them and post my revision, so WAYCH THIS SPACE, he, he. Dorothy

Hi everyone I was told to join in the forams so here goes. Several years ago I attenpted to take a writing course but found it ever so dull, so I tried another tack and joined several Yahoo writing groups. They were a mixed bag of amatures and experts whose only aim was to lead new writers into enjoying their craft. Imagine my surprise to find that the kind of prose modern publishers required was not like the books of the fifties and sixties. Gone were the formal and stilted passages with whole pages of discriptive passagers. One of the first new rules was to get rid of He said, she said and most words endng in ly. At frst my reaction to critiscs pulling my my beloved El Tigre to pieces was 'How dare they'. But then I tried it their way and eventually managed to cut out almost a quarter of the words in the book, which was a good thing to do when working towards pleasing a publisher with a budget to keep. All it took was the turning of sentences around Take for instance, "I don't think we ought to critisise other people's work," Robert said angrily as he threw the manuscript down on the table. 22 words Robert threw the manuscript down on the table. "I don't think we ought to critisise other people's work." 18 words Putting the action in front of the dialogue tells the readeres who is speaking and so makes he said unnessessary. I get annoyed when I have to read the whole of the dialogue to find out who is speaking. This way also rids the sentence of the word angrily, as the reader knows from his action that Robert is angry. Why waste words? The Cup Bearer was originally 900 A4 pages long before I used these rules and othersI learned about. Dorothy

Hi everyone. Allow me to introduce myself, I am Dorothy aka DJ aka The Bull Singer. I am so pleased to hear about all the support for me on this website so I think I had better explain things. Not long ago someone complained to David that my story, The Cup Bearer, was not a gay story and shouldn't have been posted to gay male/adult youth. It was origianlly posted to bisexual/adult youth but i felt it needed a larger audience. David refused at first and I said I would withdraw my stories. He compromised and added it onto both lists. I was happy with that and had a lot more response from my readers. Then an old codger put his complaint in and forwarded a copy of his letter to me. I treated it as a joke at first, and posted his letter to a couple of the groups I subscribed to. A lot of readers wrote to David in support of me, and I in the meantime received not so nice emails from the complainent. AS a result of all this David sent a letter to the old codger saying I and my friends were whining and removed my stories. So there you have it. I wonder if the owqner of awesomedude would agree to my posting my stories here? Dorothy