Writer's Voice from Blogging?

I was judging some unpublished manuscripts in a contest last night (not paranormal) and while I still had critical eyes, I went ahead and worked on the "1st Pass Pages" for Road of Adventure. I read them clear through even though in my huge attack on my desk I found both the copy edits and the original page proofs. I'll look at them later.

But back to the contest. When I do critiques I'll mark up pages to my heart's content if I know the person (or, in the case of the charity critiques I've done, if a person wants me to dig deep). My first entry I could have done this. NONE of my entries were without potential or promise. All were pretty good, one was excellent in the pages but confused the hell outa me in the synopsis. But one lacked...something...I finally figured out that it was voice. I don't think the writer has developed her own voice yet.

And it's really a pain when you hear that! 'Cause I did. I had crit buddies give me books on voice. But I really think it's a matter of writing 1,000,000 words, and perhaps BLOGS like this help. They don't often do story arcs, but they might help you definitely develop your own unique voice. Everyone has them. I listen to audio all the time and if you read me Rowling or Roberts or Krentz or Lowell or Howard I could tell you who it was. The rhythm of the words, the sentence structure, the word choice.

As for Road of Adventure, I'll look at my previous stuff because there was a couple of awkward phrases, and I'll look at "1st Pass Pages" again because there was some copy editing questions about cutting a sentence to stop an orphan (one word hanging at the end of a page or paragraph) which I didn't SEE. Huh. Maybe I'll call my editor's new assistant on Monday. Give her a try.

May your voice ring fresh and true today.
Robin