I had entered my Scottish ghost story in the Heart of the West contest sponsored by the Utah\/Salt Lake RWA.\u00a0I did not final, however the responses were not that bad.<\/p>\n
This is the first response I have received about my writing and I was apprehensive about what would be said. I have heard many horror stories about contest critques that were contradictory, non-imformative,\u00a0and down-right insulting.<\/p>\n
Across the board it seems that my characters\u00a0were likable, and I have great visualization. Negatives were my use of commas, which I have been working on, but I do not think I will ever understand, and that Vanessa seemed to need more meat to her. This was not that surprising, because I recently did a character work up for Vanessa and Aiden, and I noticed the same thing about her. So at least now I know I am on the right path when I go to edit some more.<\/p>\n
There was one judge\u00a0 that was not very helpful. The entire critque was twenty words long. The “what needs work” section was boiled down to three words: Hook is weak.<\/p>\n
Great. What does that mean exactly? This is from a published romance author. You would think that they would be a little more forth coming. Maybe it is a conspiracy, and my work was so good that they are trying to be unhelpful so that I don’t sell. Yeah. That’s it. (please know that I am joking here. mostly)<\/p>\n
My favorite response (naturally) was from the judge that said ” I get the same feeling reading reading your manuscript, as I do when I read a Maeve Binchy novel- it feels like sitting in a garden with a good friend and a cup of tea.”<\/p>\n
I almost fell out of my chair when I read this. You go along and hope that your work resonates with someone. This one comment made all of the late nights, and worrying if I am wasting my time, worth while. It’s so gratifing that someone, not blood related to me,\u00a0understands and enjoys\u00a0my work.<\/p>\n
Now I just have to remember that when I get the critques back that say I should never write again. Let’s hope that never happens.<\/p>\n
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How I’m okay in not finaling in the Heart of the West writing contest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p39eCR-1c","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annaalexander.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annaalexander.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annaalexander.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annaalexander.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annaalexander.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.annaalexander.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annaalexander.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annaalexander.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annaalexander.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}