I’ve gotten a lot of help from some amazing friends and colleagues getting my novel to where it is (that is, ready for an agent), but this week I’ve been lucky enough to get input from two new beta readers.

On Wednesday, I spent a couple of hours talking to a fellow aspiring writer, and she gave me some very insightful observations that are going to allow me to make a couple of excellent refinements. Better yet, she’s going to let me beta read some of her own stuff, and I suspect that will be a good process for both of us. All of my beta readers have been fantastic, but it’s a wonderful opportunity to have another writer to talk to.

On Thursday, I got the results of the first copy-edit from another friend. He caught a number of really awful typos (its/it’s, their/there), missing words, double words, some mixed up subjects, and what I thought were some amazingly eagle-eyed grammar catches. He also had some very nice things to say about the story, which is always nice to hear, and offered up some insightful commentary on things that I found quite helpful.

Again, I’ve been very, very lucky to have so many people encourage me and help me with this project, and I wouldn’t have gotten even this far without them.

Image made with help from Shutterstock.

Update: I didn’t think anyone would notice it, but a couple of people asked about the text in the image.  Here it is in full, including the part that runs off the page and is underneath the hand.

It was a dark and stormy night.
The kind of storm that leaves you
feeling like it’s dark out. Because it is
dark. It’s night, after all, and the night
is known for being dark.

Being faced with this dark night,
he did the only thing he could.
He grabbed a flashlight—he had to get fresh
batter[…]