I've gotten two full reviews back from my beta readers (tee hee, I have beta readers!) and both have been extremely informative and helpful. They pointed out things I missed, gaps I didn't see, and also voiced problems that I've been pretending nobody will notice. Alas, people will notice them and highlight them and post these problems everywhere if I don't go back and address them.

While I pushed and word-vomited for about an hour a day for nearly 8 months, I couldn't really see how not writing Book One would actually feel. Yes, yes, I always knew that Hemingway was right when he said "[the] first draft of anything is shit." However, after being up to my eyeballs every day in this manuscript blinded me to how shitty it actually is/was.

Once I finished and gave it to a handful of people who I know won't care if they hurt my feelings with their criticisms, I stayed out of the file for two weeks. Then I couldn't take it anymore. I had to go fix something, anything!

So I opened it back up and my jaw hit my keyboard. It's awful. Now the document has lots of highlighted parts with notes like this:

"This sucks. He sucks. Make all this better."

"Crappy word choice."

"Write a scene for this. It's a cop-out."

(from my sister) "Grammar much?"

"uhhh... really? Cheesy, boring, lame. Make it better."

"She's not shallow, quit making her shallow."

You get the idea. Some of them are quite hilarious. Editor-Nicole is really mean to Writer-Nicole.

Now Writer-Nicole is picking up everything and working through it one scene at a time.