Critiquery

I’d like to start this week by giving a big Thank You (a “shout-out”? “mad props”? “wicked ups”?) to Chuck Wendig, who just last week personally critiqued the first 5,000 words – about twenty pages – of my novel. He gave a lot of helpful constructive criticism and was very encouraging in general, and made me think that getting the thing published might not be utterly impossible. So, pretty excited.

Chuck is a seasoned veteran of the Writing Down Words For Money industry, and I was able to snag his critique due to my insider connections paying out cold, hard cash. Not to him, though. See, Chuck was kind enough to donate his time in a charity auction to benefit the survivors of the earthquake in Japan. I won two other critiques in the same way, one for 50,000 words and another for 100,000 words, and I’m waiting on both with a combination of Christmas-Eve excitement and stark terror.

Critiques are a funny thing. On the one hand, you need (crave, lust after) honest feedback: someone who will read your writing and tell you what they actually think, and not just say it’s “good.” (Protip: to make a novelist want to kill himself, read his 115,000-word manuscript and tell him it’s “good.”) But on the other hand, the tiniest bit of negative feedback makes you feel like this:

(Heh. Yeah, that really is me. Think I can use it as my book jacket photo?)

Anyway: critical feedback. Yeah. They say you need thick skin to survive as an author, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it’s more a willingness to get stabbed over and over through really thin skin, and act like you like it.

Second pass revision status for The Counterfeit Emperor: 80%. SO CLOSE