I’ve gotten my first critiques back for the week, can’t say I expect to get more. Just like I thought, they found the things that I never expected to come under fire blazing. And things I didn’t think mattered to shine out (in a bad way), like the prologue sequence. It’s more of a prologue that exemplifies the theme of the novel, but it seemed like people didn’t like it or didn’t get it. I frankly never thought about it that much (which might be an indication it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things), because that’s a part I wrote years and years ago, and never needed to touch since. I also probably made a mistake saying it was fan fiction. It really isn’t. And I hate the way people see those two words and automatically think “some poor basement-dwelling fanboy getting his jollies by inserting gratuitous sex every paragraph”. There’s plenty of good fan fiction out there. I can point you to it. Read some, I’m a booster. The other critiques have let me know that I still have a long way to go as a writer, but I think I’m still further than I was before, breaching into the ever-elusive ‘publishable’ status.
