I've finished another draft of Girl in the Shadows, and it's getting pretty close to where I want it to be. In this last rewrite I completely rewrote one character (Mrs Steppa), deleted an entire chapter (which actually felt quite good) and weeded out a whole lot of unnecessary description.
As part of the master's course, my manuscript gets assessed by a professional manuscript assessor, who will tell me everything that's wrong with it (along with some ideas to fix it, hopefully!).
So I think I'm almost ready to send the manuscript off for assessment. But before I do, we're going to do some peer critiquing at our next class. I've put up my first chapter for the rest of the group to critique (& have since then already changed some of the opening lines). But first chapters are always the hardest.
It wouldn't matter if your book was the most brilliant thing ever written. If the first chapter was crap, no one would ever read past it to find out how brilliant you really were!
I know my first chapter can still do with some improvement. I'm confident that the rest of the master's group can give me a couple of brilliant ideas to make it just that bit better. And once that's done, it's off to the manuscript assessor for a major reality check.
When I have the assessment in my hot little hands I'll have a pretty good idea of how publishable Girl in the Shadows is. Or at least know how much further I have to go before it's ready to submit to an agent or publisher.
And if they reckon it truly sucks, well, it'll be bum-down-head-up for another major rewrite.
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