Merry Christmas and Best Wishes for the New Year

Titles I'm Loving Right Now

I wanted to take a little break from the me-fest to share what I'm reading right now. A wonderful Xmas short and an exciting mystery/suspense.

Here are the covers and blurbs:




Gabriel Sandoval is crazy in love. His life with his wife Lily is everything a man could ask for. She’s beautiful, funny, smart and sexy. She even swallows. There’s just this one little thing…


Lily Sandoval is wild about her man. He’s strong, supportive and gorgeous. There’s no one in the world she would rather spend time with, and their sex life is off the charts. But she knows that deep down, Gabe has a secret wish. And this Christmas, Lily will let go of all her inhibitions to make that wish come true.







Dolores Cruz (Lola for short) loves shoes, chicken mole, kung fu (she’s a black belt) and her close-knit family. When her brother’s hunky old high school friend Jack Callaghan moves back to town, Lola falls hard. Now, after a year and a half as an underling at Camacho and Associates, a local private investigation firm, her oh-so-sexy and mysterious boss, Manny Camacho, assigns Lola her first big case: solving the mysterious disappearance of Emily Diggs. Can Lola juggle two men, her loving but demanding family, her PI exams, solve her all-important first case, and shop for fabulous shoes?



So, tell me what you're reading right now.

Slashing

I am not a fan of slasher movies. Give me a suspense or a thriller, but please don't waste my time with a magical being/crazy/psycho who is slashing people just to see blood.

However, last night I felt like I was the antagonist of one of those horrors I despise. The protaganist was my beloved WIP Reunited Undercover. She barely survived.

Had you going for a second there, didn't I?

I recieved great feedback from the Mills & Boon New Voices Competition regarding my first chapter of Reunited Undercover, but there were a few issues the commenters agreed on. It took too long to get to the point in the beginning and the end of the chapter didn't end on a hook. Then a very lovely pubbed author sent me an email also agreeing with those comments and adding a few more. My secondary characters are cliche. Oh the horror!!! But wait, I thought I was being clever in my beginning. I thought having my cliche secondary character end the chapter added a little humor.

So, last night I sat with my printed pages, took out my pink (yes, pink, not red) pen and began slashing. Like all serial killers, once I got a taste for the kill I couldn't stop. I hacked almost 2k out of my WIP. Bye-bye clever beginning that took too long to get to the point. Bye-bye cliche waitress. Bye-bye backstory I didn't realize was abundant in that first chapter. And so I moved on to the next chapter and the next after that.




This morning I'm feeling only a twinge of regret, but realizing my WIP will be a better book (I hope)should get me through the next round of slashing. And hopefully, by January I'll be ready for Savvy Authors EditPalooza and then my beloved's scars will be healed and I'll be ready to send her on her way.

So, what about you guys? Do you find it easy to slash words from your WIP when you are trying so hard to make a specific word count?