My critiquing of the contest entries ended up better than I thought, and I actually got seven of the twelve done. Yah!!! And the best news is that five of the seven actually ended up being surprisingly good, given their awful beginnings. 

The bad news is that three of the authors started their entries with dream scenes, which I hate, because it screams "LAZY AUTHOR" at me... they can't find anything interesting enough about the characters to start the book with, so the have to have a bad dream. Yeah... right... <sigh>

Two of them I spend a very long working on (2+ hours each) because I was trying to figure out if their problems were fixable (more for my own edification than theirs). One ended up having a fairly simple fix... rip out 7 pages of very out-of-character stuff and it will read much better. As for the other... well, she's got some major logic flaws that are actually fairly simple to fix (yank most of the scene out) but her world-building is so slap-dash that I wanted to throw it across the room.

And I really wish I kenw who you were, so I could invite several of you to my convention. Yes, you write FF&P and not SF/F... but if you have your book set on another world, you still need to world-build. Duh!

Otherwise, way too much to do, more contest entries to judge, and all I really want to do is crawl into bed because my allergies are dragging me down.

But the good news is that while I was waiting for #1-son to go on a campus tour for the college he starts this fall, I got a bunch of words written on the painter story. Now I just need to find the time to run the OCR software on the pen files and get those words dumped into the manuscript. I feel better about that book, because these words get me past a hump that has had me hung up for quite a while.

And... over spring break, I worked on editing the completed manuscript. I can't say I got far word-wise, but I got quite a ways mentally, and I think it will go fairly quickly, once I have the time to work on it.

Back to the contest entries, so I can get them done and get on to the rest of the list.