Novel on Pause. Let the Short Stories Flow.

Hello Again.

Remember when I said I wouldn’t rewrite my novel, because then I’d never move on to the next book? It was in my last blog post.

Well, guess what!

I rewrote the prologue. I had some down time and some motivation and figured, why not. It’s not like I'm working on six other things at this point. This is my baby and I can’t just let her die on a shelf somewhere, covered in digital dust and never to explore the adventures of Dak and Ulysses and all the other inhabitants of the solar system.

So I rewrote it and submitted it to a critique circle and got over twenty critiques back and do you know what they said?

The Prologue ain’t working. (I’m paraphrasing here.)

Ugh. Guys. Shoot me in the face with a bazooka.

That’s ok. I was starting to suspect that anyway. It only contains the inciting incident for the entire six book series. I’ll just have people refer to it over and over until the reader is sure to know the impending doom headed their way.

So what do you do when you have an overwhelming amount of people, who only read the first thousand words, telling you an important part of your story ain’t working? To be fair, a lot of these critiquers are rushing through and giving pretty vague and unhelpful critiques.

“Uh, I read the first three sentences and all my questions have not been answered. Please expand. It didn’t draw me in. Can you critique mine now?”

Unfortunately, a few of the critiques did make sense and have me questioning my entire beginning. So I ask again, what do I do?

Well, I guess I'll rewrite.

So, as I mentioned, I’m on a short story kick, so this will go faster than my novel. By the time I write my next blog post, maybe I’ll have two or three out somewhere.

And maybe I’ll post more short stories on my page, and you can see how far I’ve come…Or regressed. And if I get rejection after rejection and no encouragement to continue, well then maybe it’s time I get back to writing for who’s really important.

Me.