Well let’s start out with the winner of the Make Believe Anthology.

Of course, we can only have one winner, but for everyone else, the Make Believe Anthology releases December third, and you may be able to pick up another free copy during the MASSIVE blog tour in December.

Drumroll Please!

By YOUR VOTES The winner is: Vanessa Chapman

Congratulations! And Thanks for everyone who pleaded with the Little Blue Lady to set me free.

Do you think we’ve seen the last of her yet? I don’t know… She sais she’s sorry, but still seems to want an interview.

Anyway…

It’s been all about memes lately. I keep getting slapped with one meme or another. It got me thinking… What the frig is a meme anyway? (Except being something like a blog chain letter)

Definition time (Off Wikki):

A Meme (pronounced Meem, as in dream), is generally defined as anything that can be transferred from one mind to another. Glenn Grant defines a meme as “A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds…

Ummm… Okay… Anyway… In the blog world, a Meme is something you have to do, and then tag others to do it also. I have to pass on a lot of these, unless I think they are valuable. The one I was tagged in today was a good one that every author should do anyway. Soooo… here we go!

This is the “Look” Meme.

The rules are to run a search on your current work in progress, and count how many times “Look” appears. Why look? Well, Look is one of those nasty telly words that get editor’s britches all in a bother, and (even worse) can get your manuscript rejected by a publisher or agent.

I’d like to pass a special thanks to ultra-cool author Claire Gillian (From “The Pure” fame (Yes! She actually remembers me!)) For tagging me with a constructive meme.

So, the WIP I have chosen is my Single Short Romance, A Test of Faith. It is 5,902 words.

Searching for…. “look”

There we have it. “Look” appears 13 times. Hmmm. That’s not so bad. Now, what I need to do, is show a few examples. Let me page through them.

Okay… so, it seems that out of the thirteen, eight of them are “good looks”, which means they are in dialog, as in: “Don’t look at me like that!” Those don’t count. They are legal.

Here are the five that remain (Hey, only five? Statistically, that’s pretty good!)

Anyway… here they are:

1. She ran up the steps, stopped mid-way, and looked down toward us.

2. I looked up into the warmth of his eyes.

3. He ran his finger under my chin. I looked away self-consciously.

4. The redness in his face cut a hole into my heart, severing the arteries and forcing it into my throat. I looked away.

5. He looked to the side, pursed his lips and walked into the kitchen.

Now, you are supposed to give a little bit of the paragraphs around the “look” as well, but I want these to really stick out. ERRRRR. They don’t look as good here as they do in the manuscript. My inner editor is screaming.

So, what do you think? Are these too telly? How would you change them to Write Without Looking?

I’m gonna tag EVERYBODY on this one, because I think it’s a great exercise. If you don’t strive to make your writing better, ignore it. If you want to be the best writer you can be, give it a try. Wether or not you post it is up to you. 🙂