Polish It Until It Shines

I read the first three chapters of Redemption and tried to look at it with a fresh eye. I pictured myself being the overwhelmed literary agent with hundreds of queries, just looking for a reason to hit delete and flush my dreams down the toilet. I analyzed every sentence, every word, and then I became nauseous.

After taking a Zofran and chasing it with a glass of wine, I contacted three of my friends, who are amazing writers, and put their critical eyes to the beat up, overworked, pages of Redemption. The main things I wanted them to look for were consistency. Do my characters remain in deep POV? Do I have information download? Too much too soon?  A huge pet peeve of mine is when I meet someone for the first time and I know their entire life story in the first ten minutes of meeting them. Where's the mystery? It's a tough line to walk sometimes, the balance between intrigue and oversharing. Can you feel the personality of my a characters? Because if you can't feel them, you can't bond to them. Weave all this into grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation--Whew! I think I need another glass of wine.

So I have roughly 25 pages to make the magic happen. 25 pages to convince this critical, tired, literary agent that I'm the next Stephaine Meyer or Becca Fitzpatrick. That's a lot of pressure, I think I need another glass of wine.

One of the things I'd suggest doing, is to get 3 or 4 books of similar genre and read the first three chapters. Compare their structure and try to pick out what it was about these books that hooks you. Look at character development and plot building.

All in all, I think Redemption is finally ready. Thank you to my critique group, you've been amazing. Next week I plan to tackle the dreaded query letter.