Writing Update

I went through all my critiques of my novelette "For the Love of Trees" yesterday and today, made a couple pages of notes, and did an edit/rewrite of the first ten pages.It really wasn't as hard as I thought. Fortunately, I continue to make progress as a writer so the me of summer 2008 looking at the critiques is a lot smarter than the me of summer 2007 when I first got them. I'm editing this in two passes. The first pass is to tighten and take things out, while expanding a few other things and writing some notes to myself about other possibilities. The next pass will be to see if anything I took out needs to go back in, probably in a different way or different place, and deciding what to do about the things I made notes about.ME: Ok, so I'll get rid of this chunk of exposition and worry later about how to convey the information in it or whether the reader even needs to know that. Oh, duh! I've found the perfect way to get it out in dialog in a scene that needed to be expanded with more character interaction anyway!The great thing about critiquing others' work regularly is how it makes you look at your own work with new eyes. After critiquing some pieces that had bumpy or unclear transitions between scenes or in and out of recapitulation and dramatization, I'm better able to understand when my own transitions aren't smooth.Among other things, I'm open to the possibility of a new title, but nothing has jumped out at me yet.ETA: I'm off to the yard to whack down the mint patch to make up lots of jalapeno-mint syrup so I can freeze it and drink jalapeno-mint margaritas whenever I want.