Reading Tai-Bo

This week I read one more Chicago PI/Wizard book and finished off a YA fantasy about garden gnomes that I have been putting off. I had been growing a wee bit weary of the whole revisions process with my story and wanting to simply be finished. It was good enough was it not? Why not just send it out to my Beta readers and be done with it.

Now I know why.

I began reading this YA garden gnome book some time ago. But kept getting sidetracked by…good books. First I got sucked away by Ally Carter’s girl spy books, all 3 of them, and then a cowboy romance, a book about dragons that pilaged shiny objects from a mountain town, and then 3 PI/Wizard books, but I finally got back on track and finished the gnome book. Now I am newly inspired to revise, determined to send my poor story to those two incredibly picky BFFs that I am privileged to know (you know who you are) even though I might be tempted to stop the feedback chain after my mother reads it, she will love it, except for the grumpy parts.

But no longer. I am now eager for the inevitable evisceration of my masterpiece by the aforementioned friends. For it was painfully obvious that the friends of the author of the gnome book were not nearly as fierce and bold in their critiquing as mine.

It was a good book. Good enough. He is a teen writer. Started the book when he was 14, finished when he was 19, and I love his blog. But the book is not nearly as witty and well done as his blog. Being someone who has also spent five years writing a single story, although mine as of today is unpublished, I believe I can imagine what happened. He got stuck. Stuck in the tale he was telling and couldn’t rise above it because he had sunk so deep he couldn’t see the thing anymore. He needed fierce and picky friends.

So now I am eager to continue with tedious revisions. Eager for the heart rending critique of honest friends that will propell my words beyond mere okness and into the rhelm of…possible amazingness, or at least competence. I will crush those cliche’s and squelch the badly wrought dialogue, I shall carry on. And all thanks to that nice, but somewhat lacking gnome book.