The Gems Hiding Out In Our Hard Drives

I spent the past couple of days going through my laptop hard drive to review the stories that I’ve written to assess if any of them can be made publishable. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Distance from the stories gave me perspective over them, so I no longer hated them as I did when I first finished drafting them.

So I gave a few of them a quick edit and emailed them to some trusted readers to ask for their opinions. Thank you Pam, Janet, Laura, Gaynor, Gillian, Ilva, Alison and Lynn for agreeing to read my various manuscripts. Much appreciated.

 I was relieved by the initial responses from some of my readers: Yes, there are some errors in the manuscripts. Yes, there are a number of things that could be improved. And the stories certainly need a strong hand of an editor. But overall, there is something to work with.

The lesson that sort of registered is that, if  write regularly, you can build a body of work that could potentially be published. It may take you years to actually have something worth showing to publishers/self-publish, and it may be a diamond in the rough, but as Tiah reminded me recently on one of her posts, writing is rewriting. And having a manuscript to fix feels ever so much better than wondering if I will ever get the first draft finished in the first place:-)

To all my others online friends who might be interested in doing some beta reading for me, please email me directly. I have a story that I think would fit pre-teens I'd like someone to read. I need to know if the plot line  and theme works, whether I tell too much and need to show more, and whether the length of the story works for that age group. The story is still a very rough draft, so constructive criticism would be very welcome. Many thanks.


Spending the day doing some intensive client writing; have a deadline to meet.