Day two of Banff.
Time to critique the first chapter of Nathaniel. Now, going in, I was pretty confident. Extremely confident. Afterall, this was already edited, re-edited, and slated for publication. So what could go wrong?
What went wrong were 7 glowing reviews from my peers. Awesome, fun to read, loved the character, super voice, great pace…
Then
There are two things that get a manuscript rejected. The first is the macro: storylines, arcs, characterization, themes. The second is the micro: the sentence structure, the word choice…and this manuscript is sloppy and a mess.
Oh, it didn’t stop there. He hammered it home for quite a while, going on about how it was messy, how it was lazy…fill in the blanks.
Boom. My god, how can I recover from this? If I don’t see what he’s pointing out, how can I fix what’s wrong?
It hasn’t been a good day