No Girly Man Allowed

I met with my critique group and we went over my contemporary that I’m submitting in September. They liked it, but in the first scene apparently I made my hero too much of a girly man. Well...okay...maybe those weren't their exact words. But he was apparently being too sensitive. Granted the guy is at a funeral and his whole life has fallen apart, but they still want to see him more alpha. More manly. More the way he appears later in the chapter through the heroine's eyes.

I'm not sure how the girly man thing happened. I wasn't picturing him that way in my mind, but somehow it turned out that way on the page. Good thing I didn't make the poor guy cry at the funeral or there may have been no redeeming myself.

Anyway, that's the challenge for today. To show him broken but not completely bowed. Damaged but not destroyed. I need to inject a bit more manliness into his pain. This will take some thought. Part of his journey is that he's broken and has to rebuild himself. And he is a bit confused and bewildered about how it all happened and how he got so lost. I just need to convey this in a way that doesn't make him look...soft. No double entendre intended.

I think I've figured it out. Or rather my critique partner, Pam, figured it out for me. Gotta love that. I need to switch two scenes around so one comes before the other, already establishing a more alpha picture of the hero before you get into his POV. I worked on that this morning and made some improvements that hopefully will work better than what I had.

And then there's the synopsis. Yeah...I'll get to that later. Maybe the less time I have to do it the less I'll stress over it.

In other news -- I won a digital camera at work yesterday. They did a draw for anyone who contributed to the company newsletter, and as editor, my name was in the hat. It's a nice one too. A Canon Powershot A520. Now I just have to find some time to sit down and discover what it can do...