Editors' comments resemble instructions from a boss. The suggestions are  meaningful to them, but maybe not to you. I took a chapter book for critique several years ago and was told to "heighten the stakes, put in more tension and anxiety." I could hardly believe it -- for eight year olds?  I enquired just how I should accomplish that in a kids book. Parental discord was suggested, dumbfounding this amateur. Eventually I figured out how to spread fear and loathing among three children and two adults.
When my editor for 1777, Val Muller, asked for more emotion, my scene involved one child and one unconscious adult. I could only express the child's anxiety to leave the scene, because that would have been my own 12 year old reaction!
When I went to Writers' Project Runway two weeks ago, I wasn't sure what take-aways I would find.
​What I learned counted as the full answer to the question above. The lessons on layering emotion let me feel that I'd hit the jackpot!
Bravo Pennwriters for bringing Annette Dashofy and Hillary Hauck to us for a day and
thanks to Bobbi Carducci, for everything!

My last addition to Spot Writers told of a Trowbridge victim of the LaFourche Crossing battle in the Civil War. The attending surgeon was another Trowbridge, originally from Danbury, but practicing medicine in Stamford CT at the time of enlistment in the 23rd Ct. Volunteers.
If they did not know each other before, this could not have been the most pleasant meeting. Dr. William Trowbridge was left the only doctor on the field to care for almost two hundred wounded Confederates. How did it happen that the Union troops went off and left him with the opposing forces for six weeks? At that time their period of enlistment was up and they came back to fetch him and such Union wounded as had been taken. The Confederates appear content to have him to continue practicing as their doctor.
​Stay tuned!

Today's Spot Writers offering is my favorite of the ones Val has given us.
I thought up this topic and now have to do my best by Dr. William Trowbridge, the results to appear in about two weeks.

I had stopped fast fiction and gone back to slow fiction and 1777. Driven by guilt, I have been getting up at 3 AM to refine it even more. I'm following after my editor's suggestions of last summer (before the big move to Hamilton.)

​Soon I will be furloughed from work and plan to visit Clark Hamilton's last battle, at Cedar Creek in Winchester, VA. I have never really done anything more than look at it while turning into my friend Darrell's driveway. A little more research needed here!

 I spend so much time on my recent flash fiction addiction because the Hamilton family characters in my book have lived with me for five years and will live with me for the rest of my life.
Minor characters only see the glow from the flash fiction - there and gone, just as they were. I have always felt a guilt that those people were as deserving as any family member and yet heard, "No full-length novel for you!"
My last FF piece was about a Trowbridge who lived against all odds. This week's offering on the next page is about a Hamilton whose life was taken from him. We would never know how it happened if someone hadn't told his parents an ugly truth. Was the horror of wasting this wonderful young man in such a way worse than having him fall on the field of battle?
How could the truth hurt more than the deceptive phrases we dream up to glorify war?