Critiques

So, I'm not even half way through my WIP, but I decided to have my first chapter critiqued by my sister and my friends at Absolute Write. My sister got the entire chapter, all 3500+ words of it, but I only posted the first 977 words on the forum. You can find that post and all the lovely comments here.

Now this whole critiquing process was both good and bad for me. First we'll talk about the good.

Good Things:

A) It was a great lesson in having a thick skin and thanking people nicely for reading my work and taking the time to comment on it.

B) It showed me some of the very stupid mistakes I had made.

C) It gave me some great ideas/tips on what I could do to make it better.

Bad Thing: (notice I said "Thing" not "Things")

Now I want to go back and re-write the chapter and go a head and edit and re-write all that I have so far. This is not good. I can not afford to think that way. Because if I go back now and start re-working what I have now, I'll never finish the story.

There are people that I know that have been working on the same story for many many years but have never finished it because they've spent so much time editing the little bit that they have. I don't want to be like that. I need to finish telling the story. I need to see a completed first draft, all 70,000+ words that I'm hoping it will be. I need to know I can finish something before I go back and try to fix it.

But that is really hard. The Editor in me is dying to go back and work on that first chapter and make it perfect so that when people read it again they will have nothing to complain about. But i know that if I do, I'll get caught in that vicious little editing cycle and I'll never get back out.

So I must press on. Knowing that 90% of the words I type are total shit. I must keep putting my butt in my chair every morning and trying to finish this story. Because if I don't, my MC will jump out of my head, torture and then kill me in the slowest most painful way possible. And she can do it too, that's kind of her profession.

Oh, and as an ending note, I am not sure I'll make my self appointed deadline of May 26th. That gives me only 23 days to write more than 50,000 words. I'll try though, I'll try really hard.