Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Writer's group is invaluable to me.

Read chapters 4 through 6 of Tuskers II to writer's group, and they seemed to like it.  I had a time problem that I need to fix, but other than that...they especially seemed to like the little surprise I spring at the end of 6.

The new member, who was horrified by my horror tinged first chapter, "Liked this one much better.  You didn't kill anyone."  Heh.

Interesting to see what she was confused about, and how much I need to inform the uninitiated reader into the second book if they haven't read the first book.  However, I don't want to warp the book trying to do that, because I really doubt very many people are going to read a book entitled: Tuskers II without reading Tuskers I first.

The "problems" with this book, which come from rewriting, come later in the book, so I'll be interested to see if those chapters work as well.

Writer's group is invaluable to me as feedback.  Even just reading something aloud makes the whole thing clearer to me.

Sometimes as I'm reading, like last night, I'm thinking "Oh, my god, this is slow....." and so I wait for them to tell me that, but usually I'm harder on myself than they are.

When they are hard on me, I know I have a problem.  I've had several stories that I loved that they pretty much tore apart (in a nice way) and I knew they were right.

Unfortunately, I usually only get the writer's group help on the first half of my books because I can only read three chapters every two weeks and I write faster than that.  But better the help I'm getting then not, and the first chapters are awfully important.

But it's always been nice to get feedback of any kind every couple weeks or so.  Writing can be pretty lonely otherwise.

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