"I don't know what to say, without being able to see all of it together."
-Paraphrase of repeated critiques
I've been working on, and submitting, Oracle for about two years now. I've been going slowly, and I keep changing things as I go. Ultimately, I realized how unfair I was being to people in the writers' group. So, I've decided to stop submitting Oracle until I finish it. I have no idea when that'll be, but I think I'm okay with the idea of putting it aside and focusing on short fiction for a while.
This month, instead of Oracle, I submitted a 1,200 word short story, An Ocean Kind of Blue, which I have my doubts about. I wrote this story in a style that's very different from my usual, and I'm curious to see how people respond to it. It'll be good for me, though, to get out of my comfort zone. After all, with Oracle, I'd pretty much hit my narrative stride and the critiques of individual submissions were fairly mild, i.e. "I think Devyn should be madder that Arnell's sleeping with Kelda" and "I want more description of the electric mill" kind of stuff, rather than the major "I'm totally confused, nothing makes sense" kind of comments.
Now, the trick will be finishing the novel without the constant monthly deadline that kept me writing one chapter after another. I have to find some other way to put the pressure on to keep me from dropping it all together.
2 comments:
you can email the submissions to me, and pretend I'm a writer's group with no feedback! lmao
I'm willing to become the demon on your shoulder, Ali, since you fulfill that function so well for some of us.
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