Greetings Wordforge! Currently, I'm looking for possible willing guinea pigs beta readers for some material I'm working on. One is a literary essay that will be a prelude (hopefully) to a full book. The topic is the Final Girl trope and how it shaped American literature from the colonial era to now. The other project is a short story collection that I'm hoping to publish after my next novel is released. Anyone willing to read either of these items and give me some feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Shoulda asked me two years ago. I'm wrapping up my Good Will Hunting self-training, then I'm gonna write my book. Coming in on the finish line on that.
Getting started is the hardest part. Staying committed is the second hardest. Make sure you write something in it every day.
LOL, I'm so sorry, I keep meaning to get to it. Now that I am past the spring semester grading and my daughter's graduation and move to Huntsville, I should have some more time to relax.
I'm currently traveling to Orlando for a family vacation, but once I have a few moment I will inflict my drafts on you poor unfortunate souls (and anyone else who sticks their neck out in the meantime)
I tried it once. Knew the whole world and the people in it, haw to set everything up - and how it would resolve. I had maybe three chapters or more, depending on how you break it, and could have written the last one or two in an afternoon. But I stalled out on how to build dramatic tension to get from point A to point B - that is, how to make the reader keep turning the page. Soon after I hat that wall, a hard drive crash erased all of it (and some other stuff) and I found out my backups were not useable. Without solving the narrative problem I never went back to it. What I had is still in my head, I could write it again but I've concluded that I can write a decent short story but not a novel. And this isn't a short story plot. As far as the process, every bit of writing advice (which I believe to be good advice, at least for fiction) I've ever seen is to just run through the whole story and not worry about whether it's just like you want it, then polish it later (including being willing to kill the parts you think are good but don't serve the story) and in spite of that I found myself constantly trying to make those first few chapters more and more perfect which, obviously, slowed the production of new content. But either way the wall was still there. Also, it pisses me off that I don't have the imagination to write the genre of stories I like to read. But that's a separate complaint.
1) It will never be perfect. You'll always have to live with "good enough". 2) the advice you got is right. If you stop to edit along the way that intensively, you will never finish. Write yourself an outline first, then just plow through filling in that outline without looking back.
I'd be interested in getting exploited lending a hand. Er, eyeball. Whatever. No formal training so any feedback will be amateurish by definition but I am an avid reader and fairly adept with the written English language if I say so myself.
Thank you to everyone who has replied! Please just message me an email to send the file to, and I will get it out ASAP. I'm starting with the Final Girl essay. It's still a pretty rough cut. I haven't finished the works cited page or properly cited everything, but the meat of it is still there.
First round is sent out. If anyone didn't get something, please let me know. Maybe check your junk mail, hahaha.
