Back in January at the beginning of last semester, I created a side blog (write.robohara.com) to track the creation of my novel. The semester’s over and my work on the novel is done, so yesterday afternoon I exported all the posts, deleted the blog, and imported them over here into the Writing category if you want to read them. If you subscribe to email updates for this blog, it’s possible you received a flurry of emails from my website when I imported them. Sorry about that.
I got the grade for my novel’s rough draft back last week. I got an A-. I also got some valuable feedback on ways to improve things from my professor. This time around I didn’t take the critiques as personal criticism. I framed them as, “here are things you could do to make your novel better.” That helped take a lot of the sting out of them. In fact, I didn’t feel any sting at all this time. Instead, I feel motivated to retool the novel a bit and possibly shop it around. It’s not really the genre or style of novel I plan on writing long term, but it might be worth shopping around just for the experience.
I’m not taking any classes this semester, so I plan to use the extra time developing another novel for next semester along with keeping my skills sharp with a few short story ideas I have floating around.
Thanks to everyone who supported me along the way. I’m excited about what the future might hold.
Well done on scoring the A-, Rob. I’m now on medical leave from work (foot surgery) so I’ll be digging into the novel. Looking forward to it.