E08 – Scene Analysis with Angela Haas (video, show notes, transcript)

Show Notes

V.E. Griffith and Miss Catherine M.H. do a scene analysis with Angela Haas, author of First Strike, Keepers Universe Book 1, using Scene 5 from her next book in the series.

Books
First Strike (Keeper’s Universe 1) by Angela Haas

Find Angela on the web at https://ahaaswrites.com

Support Revision Wizards on Patreon at https://patreon.com/revisionwizards

The Revision Wizards are at https://www.revisionwizards.com. You can find your own copy of the Story Rubric in the top menu.

V.E. Griffith’s website: https://www.vegriffith.com
Miss Catherine M.H.’s website: https://www.scribes-pen.com

Transcript

V.E. Griffith 00:00:00
Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m V.E. Griffith, and I’m joined by my amazing cohost, Miss Cathrine M.H. This is episode eight, and today we have a scene analysis with Angela Haas from her forthcoming second novel in her Keepers of the Universe series. This episode is sponsored by our amazing patrons who help us build our podcast so we can help you make your editing and revision process better.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:00:24
If you’d like to support the show for as little as a buck an episode, we have a bunch of neat benefits for you to take advantage of, including a special podcast feed with extra content and personal updates, early access to scene analysis slots, the opportunity to ask questions for the Ask the Editor episode, professional editing, and more. You can find out everything you need to know at https://patreon.com/revisionwizards. And with that, here we go to Angela.

V.E. Griffith 00:00:57
All right, so we’re here today with Angela. Angela, if you would please start off by telling us your name and your pronouns.

Angela Haas 00:01:04
My name is Angela Haas, and she/her.

V.E. Griffith 00:01:07
Thank you very much. All right, so tell us a little bit about the scene that we’re going to be doing today and any backstory that we might need to know.

Angela Haas 00:01:17
Okay, so it’s a scene sort of fifth scene in of book two of my Keepers of the Universe series, and we are catching up with General Lovella Law, who was in book one and had a main role there, as well as a concept I created that’s called her Handler, which is Tana. The responsibility of a Keeper’s handler is like, there’s a lot more backstory, but the long and short of it is think of it as like a Secret Service agent, a very important figure in the universe and who are down in numbers. And so they kind of need their own private security. They aren’t friends. Handlers have to really keep their feelings set aside. In a way, it comes out of Tana because she’s a caring person. But a good role of a handler is just to kind of provide some extra security for Keepers. And Lovella chose not to check into her check up point with her Handler. And so the scene is Tana tracking her down at Lovella’s homeworld.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:01:17
Okay.

V.E. Griffith 00:02:42
Okay, that sounds good. All right, so we’re doing the scene rubric today, and we have provided you with copies of my scene rubric and the one that Catherine did. Catherine, do you want to start us off with the characters? We only have two.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:03:02
Sort of no, but yes. So we have the General and how do you say her name again? Because my dyslexia doesn’t want me to pronounce the first name.

Angela Haas 00:03:18
General, like Lovella.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:03:21
Okay. Lovella Law.

Angela Haas 00:03:24
Tana or Lovella. But that’s Lovella.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:03:27
All right, so we have Lovella, and we start off with the voice. So you can definitely hear that she’s hurt quite a bit. She’s in the stages of grief, and you can see her shift through them, pretty much. She’s got that sad, almost accepting it at times, but also very frustrated, angry that she will shift through for the physical part. I don’t see any of it until she pulls out the spear. So we’ll get more into that later, but I don’t feel like there was a whole lot of body language to go along with the voice.

Angela Haas 00:04:09
Sure.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:04:11
And then we have Tana, right?

Angela Haas 00:04:15
Yeah.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:04:15
Okay. And the voices sound similar. You can tell that one is just trying to be calmer. For me, I couldn’t tell the difference. But this is also book two so I might have already known the difference by the time I’ve come up to this, too.

Angela Haas 00:04:33
Sure.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:04:34
So I feel like she tries to remain calm, collected, and every now and then you get that slip of, my God, would you just move on and do what I’m telling you to do? That comes out through her voice.

Angela Haas 00:04:48
Sure.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:04:48
And you do see a bit more body language with her. You get to hear the size and a bit of the come on, this way. I’m putting the gun away, or you can see a little bit more, but I would like some more.

Angela Haas 00:05:03
For sure.

V.E. Griffith 00:05:05
I felt like Lovella obviously sounded sad and reflective about whatever it was the situation that brought her here was about. I noticed that she uses more contractions than Tana. I don’t know if that’s intentional or not, but it was clear to me Tana was more precise in her speech. And she seemed to me to be speaking with determination, with a certain grit that I really liked. All right. Emotional state.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:05:44
I did the emotional state. What’s the emotional state for you?

V.E. Griffith 00:05:53
Basically that Lovella is filled with grief. Tana is determined in the sort of bounty hunter way to bring her quarry home. And there’s not a lot of room sort of, between those two, which we’ll find out later in the scene. Yeah, that’s really what I got. Okay. How about protagonist external pursuits? Catherine?

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:06:31
So I feel, like, a little bit different from what Angela had written out for us. So when I was going through, I don’t really tend to read them. Sorry, guys. If you send them, I’ll read them after. But I like to figure out what it is for me.

Angela Haas 00:06:46
Sure.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:06:46
So, for me, she wants to be able to grieve, and I just realized they spelled that wrong, and I’m really sorry, but that’s what I feel like. She wants that time to grieve, to just be able to process things, it feels like, and probably is that she’s been going, going, going, and hasn’t had the time to even stop, to be like, this happened. And now she’s going back and she’s looking around and being like, this is what happened. I’m trying to process this moment. And I feel like, for me, it was really good because I could see that she just wants to be able to grieve.

V.E. Griffith 00:07:39
I sort of got that sense as well. I was a little more unclear, and that was more clear to me on the second reading. On the first reading, I sort of rated this between fair and good. It was very clear to me that she didn’t want to go back to deal with The Sentinels. She says that. When the character beats you over the head with it, that’s excellent. But I was unclear at the beginning that really what we were doing here was a nostalgia or a healing trip. I thought it might have been, and this again, maybe not having read the rest of the manuscript or the beginning of the manuscript, that it could have been she was on some kind of mission to do something and came here as a side jaunt, I don’t know. Or are we trying to do some kind of emotional exorcism or what I felt like was there was some external want here that she’s trying to meet. I just wasn’t real clear on what it was. And that can be fine. Maybe we’ll explore that on the way to wherever it is we’re going next. That’s perfectly fine.

V.E. Griffith 00:07:39
Okay, we’re back. Ms. Catherine has solved for technical difficulties for the moment, and so we’re going to go on with protagonist’s internal desires. I rated the development of the protagonist internal desires as excellent. It was clear to me that really what she wants is an end to this war, to this fighting, to this destruction. She wants to find peace in her world. It was very simple and straightforward to read her emotions and her motivations there. I’m not certain if she — how do I explain this? It wouldn’t surprise me if she needs some therapy, but she doesn’t seem like she knows that right now.

Angela Haas 00:09:53
Yeah, she’s probably not going to get therapy, but it’s not something that’s in the world that she’s in. That’s not an option just because it scifi.

V.E. Griffith 00:10:06
No, I understand.

Angela Haas 00:10:09
I mean, she’s going to need well, I can’t really say without giving it away, but I mean, there was basically a war blew up her homeworld and her planet. She did not want to go to war. The other half of her Keepers team did. It felt like they took an oath to protect the people of the universe, and doesn’t matter how the war started, which this one started because these people broke a treaty, blah, blah, blah. So she did not want to risk her life and her family for people who broke a treaty to rescue one man. So she’s feeling that loss because she never wanted to take those risks in the first place.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:11:03
I felt that the internal need was that she needs time to process things on her own, and I thought that it was done well. She keeps being told where to go, what to do, and almost what to feel, even in this chapter, like, hey, don’t come back and look at all this stuff because it’s just tormenting you or, hey, this is what we have to be doing. Let’s go move on. And so it just feels like she needs some personal time, and that’s why she did this anyway, because she knew she needed just a little bit of time to herself to figure things out. And I can see how this pushes her in the direction that, like, we’ve talked a little bit about where it goes, too. So I feel like I can see it pushing her further away from people than trying to bring them in, where they’re like, hey, we’ll help you. You’ll have a home over here. She’s like, Well, I had a home here. Give me a few moments to process that. It’s gone.

Angela Haas 00:12:10
Yeah.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:12:10
So I really feel like she needs that alone time. So not so much that she wants the work done like the rest of you, but that she needs this time alone and nobody will give it to her.

V.E. Griffith 00:12:27
Right. What about the antagonist external pursuits, Miss Catherine?

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:12:32
Oh, okay. Good one. She, so Tana, would like things to just go smoothly. I feel like that’s what she wants. She tries multiple times with multiple different angles on how to get her to leave. Does the look, my spaceship is real warm. Hey, I’m asking this as a friend. I’m trying to tell you that things aren’t working. I know you’ve lost everything, but we can create stuff for you and have a new home. She keeps trying until it’s like, hey, if you don’t get in this ship, I’m going to have to shoot you. So I feel that her wants is literally to just make this go smoothly.

V.E. Griffith 00:13:18
Yeah. And it seemed to me to be very clear because, again, I rated this excellent, because it’s real clear what the character wants when they tell you, and she wants it to go smoothly. She wants to get this done, get this over with. This is not where she wants to be, not what she wants to be doing. But this is duty calls, basically, is the idea.

Angela Haas 00:13:42
Yeah, definitely. Am I supposed to say stuff or not? I don’t know what I’m saying.

V.E. Griffith 00:13:50
You can if you like. If you have comments.

Angela Haas 00:13:55
Oh, no.

V.E. Griffith 00:13:56
If you have questions, by all means.

Angela Haas 00:13:59
No. I don’t know if I should explain more or just kind of let you all…

V.E. Griffith 00:14:04
All you can if you like. If you feel like it would help us help you, by all means.

Angela Haas 00:14:14
Tana she just doesn’t have a lot of patience, and she hates to see… in book one. Well, I don’t want to totally give it away, but Lavella was very much betrayed, and Tana, because they were kind of undercover, had to sit by and watch it happen. So I think she’s just a little more like, you’ve been through so much. Don’t stand here and go through this hurt again. Let’s talk about it. And so she also has a job to do but she’s kind of wrestling with, I hate to see you go through this, but also I’m failing at my job and my duty if I can’t get you back home. So that’s her motivation.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:14:59
Makes sense.

V.E. Griffith 00:15:00
Yeah, it does.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:15:01
It comes across.

V.E. Griffith 00:15:02
Yeah, she’s a good readable character, and I do like her as far as I’ve read, which just a tiny bit, but she’s certainly not a hateful character like some antagonists that I’ve seen.

Angela Haas 00:15:19
Yeah, she’s not an antagonist. She’s the force in this scene, but she’s definitely not an antagonist.

V.E. Griffith 00:15:29
Yeah, I didn’t get the sense that she’s the storywide antagonist here.

Angela Haas 00:15:37
That one is much worse.

V.E. Griffith 00:15:38
Yes, we do look on the scene level and in this scene, that’s the role she’s playing, but she’s not on the story level. I can tell that just by reading this a little bit.

Angela Haas 00:15:48
Yeah.

V.E. Griffith 00:15:49
Ms. Catherine, what about her internal desires?

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:15:53
So this one I marked as fair, cause me personally didn’t really see it, and like, I thought that she kind of internally wants to be a friend, but can’t. I couldn’t tell. So it seemed like she wants to be a friend to her in her time of need and that that’s what internally she would like to have happen. She’s mentioned like, hey, look at me, I get it, I see where you’re coming from. But it just seemed to almost fall to me short and flat. As the general, I would have definitely seen this as fake. Her sympathy seemed fake, and that was kind of shown how she was like, no, you don’t get it. And it just kept falling flat to me with her trying because, you know, she just wants her on the ship.

Angela Haas 00:16:51
And I see that. But she’s not supposed to be, she’s supposed to be objective. She can’t let her personal feelings get in the way of her mission. That’s her job. So she’s not supposed to be this genuine consoling friend in this scene. In fact, she has to be, you missed your check in and we’ve got to go. That’s her job. So it’s not that she’s trying to be fake. And because there’s a lot of backstory. Lovella knows that, well, Lovella knows she missed her check in, but she’s just being like, I don’t care. But she knows that Tana, they’re not friends, you know, they’re more colleagues that work together and have been together for a while. So there’s a level of care there, but it’s not a friendship.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:16:51
Gotcha.

V.E. Griffith 00:17:53
I also rated the development sort of between fair and good. It was clear to me that Tana wants to bring Lovella to the Sentinels, but I couldn’t tell why. In the scene rubric that you filled out before we read, you said that she wants to bring Lovella into speak with the Sentinels to help her work through her trauma. I missed that completely. I thought it was about some military check in something, receive new orders, debrief, something like that. I got no sense that it was going to be about any kind of mental health anything. Getting new orders, reporting activity, something like that. Just not sure.

Angela Haas 00:18:37
I probably should have said that better.

V.E. Griffith 00:18:40
Yeah. So that was something that I missed. If you intended it to be there.

Angela Haas 00:18:45
Sure.

V.E. Griffith 00:18:46
What about the conflict?

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:18:48
So, for me, I mark this part as excellent. I think it’s when Tana approaches her and gives her a time limit, she sets the you have two minutes, and that really does click that time and sets that. She was already on edge and she was feeling stuff, but I felt that giving her that time limit just increased all of that anger that she was not quite feeling yet, that it was like, oh, this is grief, and I’m remembering family, and, oh, you set a time limit for me. Wow. So I thought that that was done well. It made the clock start ticking.

V.E. Griffith 00:19:33
Yeah. I felt like it was excellent as well. The conflict was very clear. It was very present in the characters, in their interaction with each other. The friction between them drove their conversation and drove their action, pulling the gun out, putting it away, generating the spear, all of the magical stuff that happened. And so it made a great deal of sense that that’s the conflict and the obstacle in this scene for Lovella

Angela Haas 00:19:33
Cool.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:20:16
A little different from what you had written out for.

Angela Haas 00:20:18
Yes. It’s hard for me to fill out sometimes those things, because.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:20:28
I hear you.

V.E. Griffith 00:20:29
In some ways that’s what you have editors for is to help you see through that because you’re too close.

Angela Haas 00:20:38
Yes.

V.E. Griffith 00:20:40
All right, what’s the choice here, Ms. Catherine?

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:20:44
Okay, so for me, I mark this between fair and good, just on the border of it could be good for me. So I think it’s the best bad choice, and it’s to go with Tana or to go on her own, and she chooses to go alone. And I feel like this would be so much better if I had more than just dialogue to go off of. You can feel the tension through the dialogue, but I’m also a very visual person, and I would really love to see, like, she’s getting tense or she’s pulling away. She takes a step further. Just having that more than just the dialogue for me, I think, would have made the moment where she’s like, no, I’m not doing that a little bit more powerful.

Angela Haas 00:21:35
Sure.

V.E. Griffith 00:21:37
The other thing that occurs to me now is if you’re wretching up attention in that way, Lovella being in the military and being ranked in general is going to be a tactical person, so she’s going to start thinking about the setting here. And so you can use that to describe the setting more about the ruins of the house. What does it feel like under her feet? Because if they get into a physical altercation, her balance is going to become an issue, and she’s going to think through that before she decides what she’s going to do. And so that gives you world building opportunities, too. You can do both character development and world building through her sense as a tactican.

Angela Haas 00:22:29
Sure.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:22:32
To throw a thorn into that. Would she be thinking that because she’s in this grief state. She’s also just at this point that anger is coming on and it almost feels like it’s that red haze where you really don’t care what you say. What you do. What’s around. Because you’ve just made a decision. And if somebody is going to be in your way. Then you’re just going to take them down so you can walk on straight out.

Angela Haas 00:22:58
Sure.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:23:00
Would she really be caring about what the place looked like? I mean, there isn’t a whole lot. There’s a whole bunch of ash, and it ruins pretty much.

Angela Haas 00:23:12
It’s hard because usually when I write, this is like I just feel silly for even submitting the scene. Because.

V.E. Griffith 00:23:12
Don’t.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:23:12
No!

V.E. Griffith 00:23:12
This is a good scene.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:23:27
We are helping you.

Angela Haas 00:23:31
Yeah. Anyway, when I write, I just do stream of consciousness and I plot and I get things on paper, and that’s the level that this is. It’s on paper. And then it helps me just to get through, this happens, this happens, this happens. And then when I go back through, because I’m not the setting and description, I’m better at dialogue and action sequences, fight scenes. So I layer back in more of like, okay. The mannerisms and the world building. And so that’s good. I made a note about that. But yeah, it’s just not here because it’s not…

V.E. Griffith 00:24:16
That’S not you just haven’t gotten to it yet, and that’s fine. We’re not in that place in your revision process, so it’s perfectly fine. In some ways, that’s just what I want to flag because as you go through your next passes, you won’t miss that.

Angela Haas 00:24:35
Yeah. I’m kind of like making some notes here. I use Scrivener, which is helpful because I love that you can kind of to make the notes on the side. Yeah. I’m not sure Lovella she’s not very threatened by Tana, though, either. So I don’t know. Tactically, I think she kind of just knows she can overpower her.

V.E. Griffith 00:24:59
Yeah. But Tana has a blaster pulled.

Angela Haas 00:25:04
I guess I got to think about that. It’s a great point to think about, like, how is it more of a spontaneous explosion or is she come in thinking tactically? And she could do either.

V.E. Griffith 00:25:17
Yes, she could do either. It’s just, from my perspective, if somebody has a gun unholstered, that’s a threat, even if it’s not pointed at me.

Angela Haas 00:25:27
Yeah.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:25:28
She put that away, though.

V.E. Griffith 00:25:30
She did.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:25:30
She pulled it back out towards, okay.

V.E. Griffith 00:25:32
She did put it away. But when you happen on me and you have a gun pulled, you’re a threat. And just because you put it away from a tactical perspective doesn’t necessarily mean you’re won’t pull it back out.

Angela Haas 00:25:46
Yeah. And maybe I could, and I’m just jotting thoughts as they come to me, or else I’ll forget those will be like a pop of smoke gone. So maybe Tana does not bring the weapon at first, so I’m going to think about that. But some really good points to just like, how I’m going to set up in the beginning, how it’s going to be at the end.

V.E. Griffith 00:26:09
Yeah, cool.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:26:12
V.E., what did you think of the choice?

V.E. Griffith 00:26:15
I rank the choice is fair. The choice she needs to make is clear whether or not whether she’s going to go with Tana or not. I see that I didn’t complete my sentence in the scene rubric that I did, and maybe I’ll do that at some point, but it wasn’t clear to me what the consequences of the choices were. If she says no, I’m not going to see the Sentinels, does a physical battle ensue? That seems to be the direction we’re heading. If she says yes, what does that entail? Are we going back in a cage or in handcuffs? Or is it less custodial than that? Presumably she knows what going back to The Sentinels would entail. So that is something that would occur to her as she considers what to do. And that’s a character voice thing that then would convey that consequence to the reader. For example, would she be assigned to some kind of mission that she doesn’t want to go on? Would she be punished for whatever happened in book one? What are the consequences here? And she may not know all of the consequences, or she may be wrong about what she thinks the consequences will be, but she will have in her mind what’s going to happen here.

Angela Haas 00:27:40
Sure.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:27:41
See, and I went slightly different on the consequence where you’re like, I’m looking at these consequences. I was looking at no. They’re so caught up in each other that they don’t see the big consequence happening. So when she chose to be like, no, I’m going alone, they pretty much distracted each other from recognizing anything around them. So I thought that was good, and that’s how someone was able to sneak up on them. So because she says no, this whole confrontation has now started between them, and they miss out on the fact that somebody has been watching them. And had they probably just been like, okay, we’re heading back, the Handler probably would have been more attuned to, like, watching around them again instead of being focused on, is she going to explode? No, she’s walking with me. What’s around us? I feel like that’s my version of what the consequence landed up being.

V.E. Griffith 00:28:45
Yeah. It was unclear to me that the discussion and the delay because of that discussion led to the attack. I’m wondering if… I can’t know or how long this guy had been listening to this conversation. So if they started to move together to some other location like Tana’s ship, would he have acted then? Did he just happen upon them? I have no way to know any of that. And that’s something that I probably shouldn’t know in this situation, but it’s something the author needs to know. How long ago did this guy get the drop on them? That might affect the consequence and the set up for the next conflict.

Angela Haas 00:29:35
I can explain that, but it’s not what you think.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:29:40
Okay.

Angela Haas 00:29:42
Yeah, I don’t want to give it away, but that’s fine.

V.E. Griffith 00:29:46
You don’t have to. Maybe you did explain it in the next scene, and that’s great, but in this scene, I mean, in some ways, if I’m reacting that way, and that’s the way you want me to react as the author, then what that means is you did your job.

Angela Haas 00:29:46
Okay.

V.E. Griffith 00:29:46
Okay, that could be that’s a problem that I have at the second but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s a problem you want me to have.

Angela Haas 00:30:13
Yes, I do.

V.E. Griffith 00:30:13
Okay.

Angela Haas 00:30:13
Because I want you to turn the page, being like, well, who is that? Hello? Yeah, that’s kind of something I like to do. I like to have pacing, like that page-turner pacing. I want to get you to keep reading, and that’s a little trick I do

V.E. Griffith 00:30:13
Well, that works.

Angela Haas 00:30:13
Yeah

V.E. Griffith 00:30:13
That works. What about you, Ms. Catherine? What about the consequence?

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:30:42
Like I said, I really thought that that consequence was definitely the fact that they were so caught up in each other they didn’t see the danger that was actually around them, because this planet is in ruins. Who would show up on this planet? Clearly two people. Why not a third?

V.E. Griffith 00:31:02
How about showing versus telling? If we’re going to move forward and go to the mechanics.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:31:02
Sure. So I drew you a little picture, but it was strange because I’ve heard people talk about the floating head syndrome, and I felt like I was reading that where they were definitely floating heads, but I wasn’t in a white room. I felt you described the world. Well, I knew that we were in a Sci-Fi setting. I mean, I drew you a really bad alien ship on the side, but I knew that they had spaceships. There was the blaster. These were it was Sci-Fi the world. And then you did describe the ruins, but I didn’t have any description of them. So for me, it was just two women talking in ruins. So I really would have liked more description. Granted, this is, I now know, scene five of the start. You would have already known some of her, both of them from book one, so that would have been fine. But then I also, like I said, didn’t get really much body language from the two of them either. So it did feel like you could have done some more showing and telling, I felt, but it was I got very much a dialect or dialogue from them, and that’s fine. I just prefer a little bit more. What about you, V.E.?

V.E. Griffith 00:32:31
I rated this to be excellent. I didn’t see any significant tells. There was no significant info dumping, which is always a wonderful thing for me. I know that since we’ll have seen these characters in book one, we’ll have a sense of what they look like. I also would caution that we might want to put in some description of them either in previous scenes or here, because not every reader is going to come into your series at book one.

Angela Haas 00:33:03
Sure.

V.E. Griffith 00:33:05
But other than as Ms. Catherine identified the floating head with no description on the body, I thought emotions were shown well. I thought internal dialogue and memory worked well. You’re know, from the POV characters situation, I thought that was good.

Angela Haas 00:33:32
I was a little confused just because I have things in here. Tana pursed her lips. Lovella raised her hands. Lovella shoved her hands in her pockets, and Tana exhaled. Tana shook her head. So we want more than that, because I feel like I did have a lot of body language, but it just seems like…

V.E. Griffith 00:33:56
Seems like you have body language, but what you don’t have is physical description.

Angela Haas 00:34:01
Yeah. And those are in previous scenes. And I think I have sweat breaking out on Tana’s brown skin, but I can discuss a little bit more of that, for sure.

V.E. Griffith 00:34:17
For example, if we know what they’re wearing already, that’s fine. But it’s like, from what I was, and it’s possible the reader may have missed the description previously. So let’s pretend that’s what happened here. Are they wearing military uniforms? Are they in civvies? Are they in some kind of combat fatigue? What are they doing?

Angela Haas 00:34:41
Yeah. Okay, so more physical.

V.E. Griffith 00:34:44
Yeah, it’s physical stuff that I felt like I was missing. It was not body language that I thought was the problem.

Angela Haas 00:34:50
Okay.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:34:51
And I thought it was the body language, because I clearly read over and skipped all of that. I didn’t see that at all when I read through it..

Angela Haas 00:34:58
Okay.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:34:59
So I feel like it might not have been enough or, like, maybe it was too subtle. And as I was reading through, I just went right over that.

Angela Haas 00:35:09
Okay. Because I have a section where it says though there was a chill in the air, beads of sweat glistened in the moonlight on Tana’s brown skin. That’s kind of trying to show you she’s getting a little nervous. Lovella stood up and kicked at the ground. Tana pursed her lips. So that just wasn’t clear enough.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:35:31
A bit of that was at the very start of it, and then you get into a lot of dialogue.

Angela Haas 00:35:36
Okay.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:35:38
That’s how I’m at least.

Angela Haas 00:35:42
I’m just thinking it through and trying to highlight. Okay, sure.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:35:47
Maybe I’m just a person who really likes a lot of detail, who knows?

Angela Haas 00:35:51
Yeah. So the genre action adventure, too, you have a little bit of that, but it’s not like, real prosy. It is really like, the pace has got to be like this. And so the master works that I’ve read, they don’t include a ton of that. It’s enough to get you to see them, but it’s definitely different than fantasy, because that’s how I write. Yes, it’s Sci-Fi, but it’s action adventure, so it’s a lot of like yeah, I’m just saying that I can see where I could beef up some more of it so that you feel like you can really see them. But if you read, like, true masterworks of action adventure, there’s not a ton of body language.

V.E. Griffith 00:36:53
There doesn’t need to be a ton, but it’s also a question of just giving me a basic visual. And yes, the reader can fill the details.

Angela Haas 00:37:04
I agree with, like, yeah, I need to describe what they’re wearing. That was a good idea. That’s definitely a note I made. Like, what are they wearing? What are they wearing in the scene? What do they look like? So for sure. Yeah.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:37:19
And also take into account that this is book two, so the reader would already know what their body language is like. So if there’s something like, she shoved hands in pockets, the reader would be familiar with her already. I’m not for me, I probably glossed over those for a bit. And that’s what book one, it would have taken me a little bit just to get into the flow of this is what the character acts like. And then by book two, this probably would have made sense to me, this amount of small movements for them. So I take that into account. Just because I like the detail doesn’t mean everybody needs to.

Angela Haas 00:37:57
Yeah, I’m just trying to still find, like, how much do you put in, so it doesn’t slow down, like, the action. But it’s still hard for me sometimes to find that balance because I skim over a lot, but I don’t have a great attention span as a reader, so sometimes that’s how I write.

V.E. Griffith 00:38:21
All right, the next section is passive voice, which is always my favorite. I rated this to the use of passive voice here to be excellent. I did not notice if there were any of my favorite word “was.” “Was” slaps me in the face every time I see it. And if I see it 30 times, I’m going to say something. But I really didn’t see it. On second read, I noticed a “had,” but it didn’t really bug me the way most passive voice does. I found this seem to be actively voiced. It held my attention, and the word “was” wasn’t used in the context of passive voice. You can get away with it some in dialogue, sure, you know, well, she was pretty, but she’s pretty ugly now. That kind of use. But I found it to be excellent. Catherine, did you agree?

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:39:26
Yeah, I definitely agreed. I come from genres that are a little bit more slow paced and use passive voice more, but this was definitely a quick read through for me, which is maybe also the reason I missed some of the body language. Maybe it was just that I was like, yeah, okay, I’m just reading, but it was definitely a very fast, quick read for me, and it felt clean, so..

Angela Haas 00:39:51
Great. Thank you.

V.E. Griffith 00:39:52
Yeah. And how about sentence structure?

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:39:57
Sentence structure I thought was good. There were a few little spots I did mention them to you where it just felt like it had been needed to be the other way around.

Angela Haas 00:40:07
Sure.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:40:07
So, granted, spelling goes over my head. It has to be very obvious for me to pick it out. I’m not against it, and I didn’t really see anything wrong with grammar, so I thought it was good.

Angela Haas 00:40:24
Great.

V.E. Griffith 00:40:24
Yeah, I’m the grammarian between the two of us, I found a few redundant or awkward sentences, but I didn’t find any significant mechanical issues. There was one place where I saw and this is highlighted in green on my copy of Word. There was one place where you had the response before the stimulus.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:40:47
Okay. I think that’s probably the same spot I saw.

V.E. Griffith 00:40:50
Yes, probably. But your command of English is excellent, and I didn’t really have a problem with it. And whether you’re depending on Scrivener’s spell check or not, the result is what matters to me, and the result has been excellent.

Angela Haas 00:41:09
Okay, good.

V.E. Griffith 00:41:10
I really didn’t have any trouble. So that completes the rubric. What else comes to mind that you have questions about Angela?

Angela Haas 00:41:21
Nothing. The rubric is just helpful because it’s just right there. And when you went through kind of some of the individual sentences, I was like, yes, I thought that’s helpful. I really appreciate how you organize this, and it’s a good refresher because I kind of came in TALC just with learning about the three C’s first and taking that kind of course, but you kind of like, I forget sometimes. And this was a great refresher to really keep those strong, at least in each scene. And I went back and made some notes as I go through to revise myself to really use this a little bit more because I kind of just right. I have to get it out of my brain or it goes away. It’s kind of like, get it out, and then it needs to lean back into the three C’s. So it’s just helpful to have that. Awesome. Yeah.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:42:31
I’m glad we could help.

V.E. Griffith 00:42:34
I really do hope it’s been helpful, and I’m looking forward I’m going to go back and read the first book, and I’m looking forward to this one.

Angela Haas 00:42:40
Okay.

V.E. Griffith 00:42:41
You’re going to wind up on my TBR.

Angela Haas 00:42:47
Yeah. I think you really learn a lot more about Lovella, and she has a major role in book two and poor, kiddo. She’s been put through the ringer, but she has a good redemption stories.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:42:47
Nice.

V.E. Griffith 00:43:05
All right, Angela, where can we find you on the Internet, and where can we get your stuff?

Angela Haas 00:43:11
So if you go to my website, is there a way to drop a link? It’s just ahaaswrites.com, we’ll put it in the show notes. Yeah. I’m going to put that link. Should I put it in a DM to both of you?

V.E. Griffith 00:43:30
No, I’ll find it. Or I’ll ask you later. It’s not a problem.

Angela Haas 00:43:35
It’s just ahaaswrites.com. And you can sign up and read a scene from book one and get a taste of that and then get updates for book two and three and four. So yeah.

V.E. Griffith 00:43:53
Okay, great. Well, thank you very much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Angela Haas 00:43:56
Thank you. No, it’s so fun. I love your wizard hats. It makes me feel like, can you just make a one wave, a magic wand and just fix everything?

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:44:09
We’re trying. Slowly.

V.E. Griffith 00:44:11
That’s what we’re doing. One scene at a time.

Angela Haas 00:44:15
Yeah, that’s great.

V.E. Griffith 00:44:17
Yeah. Excellent writingo.

Angela Haas 00:44:23
Cool.

V.E. Griffith 00:44:25
All right. Thank you very much.

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:44:29
Thank you so much for joining us for today’s episode. You can find every episode on your favorite podcast player and on YouTube. For transcripts, please visit our website at revisionwizards.com. They go live the same day as our episodes.

V.E. Griffith 00:44:43
If you’d like to reach out to us separately, you can find me vegriffith.com and Miss Catherine at scribes-pen.com

Miss Catherine M.H. 00:44:43
Stay magical!

Liked it? Take a second to support Revision Wizards on Patreon!