I still have time, but I really need to participate in an Beta Reader exchange. That seems like the only way I can get a Beta Reader to read any of my writing.
This makes me nervous because, lulz, I’m afraid the Beta Readers will think my novel sucks. But I have to accept that as a possibility, given that I definitely need to suck things up and realize that there will be literary agents with real jobs and lives who will be the gauntlet ahead of me.
I just don’t know. I need to get over myself. It will be interesting to see how things work out.
It seems, at least at the moment, that the Beta Reader process is a non-win situation for me. Either I find a good one and they give me all this input that I have to use to make the novel better, which will slow things down, or….I can’t find any at all and the novel isn’t as good when I need to query.
Rachel Sennott is who I think my female romantic lead of my novel looks like.
All of this would be a moot point if I wasn’t so fucking broke. I would just pay a professional manuscript consultant if I had the money. And, yet, lulz, back when I did have enough money to pay someone a little bit they laughed at me because they thought I was a unserious kook (or that my novel was trash, take your pick.)
So. I just don’t know.
I have a few more people I want to give the novel to, but at least one of them I want to actually print the novel out and give it to them. But that’s a slow, pain in the butt process given how I developed the novel so I’m going to punt that particular issue down the road until I’m in the right mood.
At long last, I’ve finished a novel that is good enough to query. It’s been a long road as documented by all the posts on this blog, but I’ve finally come to a new era of all of this.
This is the farthest I’ve ever gotten.
Now, to see if I can find some beta readers. The thing about beta readers is too often people promise — PROMISE — to read anything I give them, then they ghost me.
I’ve decided that I’m just going to start querying in September no matter what unless something unexpected happens — which may. I’m generally pretty pleased with the novel, even if it’s a little bit too long for a first novel.
But I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Completely on a lark, because one person asked for the first chapter of the novel I’m working on, I decided to send the first chapter of the beta draft to some people.
I kind of goofed and didn’t read over it one last time before I sent it to these people, so they may see some rather embarrassing goofs on my part. Or not. I just don’t know.
But I think I have learned my lesson on that front — always do one last check of your copy before you sent it out for *any* reason. And, yet, I also think doing it this way is a good way to manage my expectations.
I have to appreciate that things may not quite go the way I expect with beta readers. It could be that I actually write something pretty good and I STILL can’t get anyone to be a beta reader.
I’ve had problems with expectations about novels I’ve written in the past. So, hopefully, I can avoid that kind of stuff going forward.
Anyway, I’m nearing the end of the first act of the beta draft. Soon, things are going to slow down significantly because I’m going to have to do some structural rewriting. And the second half of the novel is far less written out than the first. So that is really going to slow me down as I make my trek to the end of the novel.
You must be logged in to post a comment.