#critiquematch

The fourth revision of my debut novel is complete! Now, in the runup to Thanksgiving and the Holiday season, it's time to begin the Beta Reader process.

The fourth – and final pre-Beta – edit of The Watching is complete! I’m still not satisfied with the Prologue – it serves a purpose, but I’m not sure how well. It might be better to let the reader put the world together as they read the novel, but at least for now I think a primer might be worth the effort.

The Watching, 4th edit project statistics.

I’ve come in at a little under 90,000…

A Positive Outlook: My mood's better, even if nothing else is. Meanwhile, I'm planning the next stage of writing for the two projects I have underway.

My outlook seems to have undergone a bit of a change of late. I’m starting to feel that there might indeed be a light at the end of the tunnel. The only change I’ve knowingly made that might be responsible is to keep what I’m calling a ‘Positivity Journal.’ At the end of the day, I write down all the successes I’ve had during that day. The point is to counter the feeling of complete failure that…

Finding Beta Readers hasn't been as straightforward, or as successful, as I had hoped...

Well, on the bright side, I don’t feel overwhelmed and swamped by the response to my Beta Reader invitations…

CritiqueMatch.

The way CritiqueMatch works is, once joining, you send invitations to people who are already with the site and form a pool of people willing to work with each other. The intro 5 Steps to Get Started (under How to use the platform, bottom of the home page) advises ‘inv…

I've finished with the Pre-Beta revision and I have a few thoughts on migrating the manuscript into Scrivener which I wish I'd thought of earlier...

So, on Wednesday just gone I finally reached the end of my pre-Beta revision process! There are a few things I’d like to comb through again and straighten out, but the reality is that fixing them before Beta could possibly be an enormous waste of time because it’s entirely possible that the whole thing might get flagged up as being in need of a complete re-write.

I seriously hope not though.

Mig…

I'm almost done with my Post-Alpha read through, thinking about how and where to find Beta Readers to move forward once I've combed the manuscript through one last time.

Old Man Update.

I’ve actually been a little hard on myself for not having completed the post-Alpha read-through, but on checking I find I’ve been at it a mere three weeks and I’m about 75% of the way through, so I should be complete before next blog post.

Beta Readers. Thinking About Betas.

As far as progress on the novel goes, I’ll have to leave it at that introductory paragraph, but…