Writing: With a little bit of help from my friends

Mystery Cover!

I am in the mad-dash-final-draft-edit-before-my-editor-edits-and-I-need-to-edit-the-final-version-to-publish stage of my novella. It was supposed to be ready for readers by the end of September, but unfortunately I was not able to follow my editing calendar. What is it with me and calendars? Anyway, A Demon Born will be ready by the second week of October and I look forward to many comments and reviews!

Which brings me to today's post. I can write to my heart's content, but if I want to share my work I understand that my story (while it makes perfect sense in my head) must make sense to other readers. So I would like to thank the beta readers that helped locate all sorts of character development flaws, continuity issues, and other random things I would have normally not caught on my own. And now that I have reworked nearly the entire piece and practically rewrote two whole chapters, I hope I didn't create more problems. I will leave that to my editor to decide.

I was a little stumped on a discriptive problem I was having in a scene, and so took to Facebook and Twitter to ask for inspiration:

Not easy to get responses on Twitter, especially when you have 200+ tweets coming at you every hour, but I got a couple of responses from FB and I would like to say thank you, I was inspired and you shall see your suggestions in action (if you get my novella). Again, thanks to my friends I was able to improve my writing.

I'm going to ask for more inspiration now - You walk into a cafe where the wait staff are dressed as Victorian maids and butlers. Your attention is drawn to one thing, what is it?

My goal is to create stories worth reading. First, it has to be a story worth telling, so if I don't like to tell it who's going to want to read it? But once I discover a story I feel compelled to share, I want it to be the best possible reading experience. Every writer should have a band of friends with the guts to tell you where your story went south. Or north. Winter is coming, after all. They don't need to be best friends, or even good friends, but they need to be readers.