I sent off the first eight chapters of Finding Sam Healey to my critiquing partners the other day. The results were mixed; one was confused about who died, they loved Tom (Sam’s husband), and one edited the entire section.

It’s quite scary to let a piece of your story go, and to have others look at it for the first time. By the time the book is up for sale, it’s been through a few hands, so it’s not as frightening to let others read it. Hopefully, by the time it’s published, it is polished and ready to go out.

The critique manuscript is first or second personal edits. It hasn’t been in the hands of the editor, or your ARC (Advance Reader Copy) team, its straight out of your brain and onto the screen.

When you critique, or beta read, these terms can be interchangeable, you’re looking for any basic problems with the plot and structure of the manuscript. You’re looking to see if the characters are likeable and readable, if the story moves forward, if there is a storyline, a theme perhaps.

When you get a script back which has lots of comments on it, you know that something isn’t right, and if the comments are in the same place, you know you have a problem. Mine came back with lots of comments, but not all in the same place. The funniest one was that one of them got so confused in the beginning about who died that she wasn’t sure who was who anymore. The other reader didn’t have that problem, so I’m presuming that isn’t a general problem in the script. However, some legalese that I had in there, was a problem, so that is something I need to work on.

It’s only the first eight chapters, which is mainly letters anyway, but it can be painful and disheartening to read through the comments at first, until you give it a day, and remember that it is MY story, and I can take what they said to heart and accept it, or I can just flatten out those mistakes and move on.

I’m choosing to fix the mistakes and move forward – otherwise no one will ever get to read Finding Sam Healey.