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I can haz it!

I wanted to write down the main points. The two things that I found most important, because they were unalloyed goods, were:

• Laughing out loud happened. I assume it was in appropriate places.
• “I want to know what happens next.” Mission Accomplished!

What I consider the two most important bits of constructive criticism:

• I need to trust my dialog. The text around it repeats what’s clear from what was said. I agree – because I do not trust my dialog. (And it means I’m writing decent dialog, yay!)
• I need to loosen my grip. There’s too much stage direction, for lack of a better term. Save the detailed descriptions for when they matter, which is much much less often than they are given. This is classic new-author. You MUST see MY WORLD!!! No, actually, you do not and it’s distracting. This is going to hurt to fix, but it is a “fix” not a “change”.

And one that I agree exists, but about which I’m not sure I’m going to do anything. I will check to be sure that I’m doing it on purpose.

• The omniscient narrator has a voice. It’s not always and “trust my dialog” will get rid of some of it, but it is definitely there. I need to re-read from this perspective before forming an opinion.

Next step: Version control. I’m not making vast structural edits without the ability to compare and revert.

Although, there would be some value saving what I’ve got, dumping it all to text, and pasting it into new, clean documents. I’ve mangled Libre’s template system.

Embrace the power of “and”.