Critique Update

Remember my recent critique woes? I got my new critique from The Literary Consultancy this morning - and it's fab. Taken alone, it might err too much towards the 'darling, it's marvellous' end of the spectrum. However, I can understand why the reader has taken that approach, given the amount of fuss I made about the negativity of the last critique! And it's by no means all strokes (which wouldn't have been much use either - interestingly, she says they get as many complaints from people who are dissatisfied because they've paid several hundred pounds to be told they're doing fine, as from people who are blocked by an overly negative critique).

The good news is that she thinks the novel is original, confident and promising. And she gets what I'm trying to do! I was in tears of relief by the end of the first page (and I don't do that kind of thing usually; far too British). I think she has helped me to understand the main problem with the novel, rather than just have a name for that problem, and has given me useful pointers for how to solve it. Yes, there's still a lot of work to do - but I expected that, and now I can begin to see my way, I'll be very happy to do it. Particularly as I don't have to completely revamp my characters, plot, structure and writing style, as the previous reader suggested.

I can't tell you how glad I am that I'm officially not a rubbish writer after all. And I'm sure the skin-thickening side-effect of this process will come in handy when I get the next lot of rejections from agents... and then the ones from publishers... remind me why we do this again? Oh yes - it's because we're complete masochists who think years of lone slaving have all been worth it when we get one tiny pinch of validation!