Woot! A little over a month ago I gave my edited novel to my beta readers. They are, for the most part, still working on it, but I have gotten the first one back. I will remind everyone that the changes were quite thorough. I rewrote nearly half of the novel and added another 15,000 words or so to it. So, yeah... lots of changes. But the verdict is in!
This is a picture of a productivity app I use. It's called Forest and it rocks. It's on Android, Apple and Windows!
For the most part, the verdict is good. This beta reader hadn't read my alpha version and was coming at it completely new. She seemed to really enjoy it and gave me a lot of compliments as well as shared a few of her favourite lines with me. She said that the first chapter works perfectly to get you into the world and tell you exactly what type of a story you're getting. She quite liked the story in general, loved how I tied up all of my threads while still having some frayed ends to pull you into a sequel. She enjoyed seeing the characters grow and enjoyed seeing the character arcs. She even picked up on some of the secrets that I've sprinkled in that will tie into the main threads of the overall series arc. Not enough to solve it, but enough to make her wonder.
I think my favourite quote of hers was, "
It was a cheering/sense of dread moment and if that’s what you wanted to come across, it worked 100%."
Now, while I'm super excited about this review, it wasn't all good things. She pointed out a few points where I had slipped up, identified one place where I'd cut too much (meaning parts of it are going back to the original way I'd written it) and a few places where I can tie my story and characters to make it an even more cohesive story.
The word from my other three beta readers is "good so far, loving the characters, and not done yet." I'm bouncing from anticipation, and can't wait to see what they all have to say.
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