Feed...Back...

There was a lot of good feeding happening yesterday! Fed my body with a great walk, fed my soul with lots of Mabel love, fed my my heart with great friends whom we made dinner for and fed my brain with a great writing day. And then today I got actual feedback from fellow writers about the first chapter of my novel and well, I am pretty darn pleased.

Okay there are some problems where I switched tenses back and forth, accidentally forgetting to change everything back to first person past tense, so it was a little back to the future in some parts, and there is my unique way of bastardizing the use of the apostrophe and the comma, and a few skips in logic, but for a first draft, I was pretty darn pleased with the response.

Apparently I have a great opening line, and my readers were hooked and they asked such serious and pointed questions about my protagonist and wanted to know more about her sooner, which is great, because they care. I once had somebody tell me that they couldn't stand a character I loved, they thought he was a total cad and completely undeserving of the love and attention of my lead character. That was hard. I loved that cad and spent several drafts trying to flesh him out, so that readers would see what I saw.

But that is the great thing about feedback, it gives you a whole new set of eyes to see your work and for me it helps me to define what I love and what I am willing to change about my characters. Knowing how others see my characters, informs me as to how I see them, even if that means I disagree with someone else's interpretation.

And a final note of feedback came from a friend of mine who reads my blog. She had this to say about the picture of me and Mabel "Yes Gina, you do like a crazy stalker!"

I must say, I have to disagree.