Criticize me, but be gentle

There is one big irony in my writing. It may be hard to write, but it's harder to share my writing. Last summer I started writing a manuscript. I worked on it every day for about an hour, and after about four months of toil I finished. The end of the first draft is really what they sometimes call the end of the beginning. I had completed a manuscript that detailed the 2011 NFL season when the 2010 NFL season was about halfway over. The football details, which I didn't really finalize until January, might have been the hardest part. I had to decide when to break from reality into my fictionalized world.

I'm calling this my year of humiliation and pride. I say humiliation because when the world doesn't go my way I will own up to it and move on. Pride means I will take ownership in what I've accomplished. It's an honest way of looking at oneself and it's as scary as it sounds. I have sent part or all of the first chapter of my manuscript to a couple of writing groups and one friend of a friend who is a published author.

I sent the first chapter to an online critique group sponsored by the Atlanta Writer's Club. The four-day wait for the first comments was torture. That's the weird limbo you get in. When you click the send button, it's out there and you can't retract anything. It's on the Web which means it's there for eternity, at least until the zombie apocalypse. I was nervous during the first day. On the second I calmed down a bit. By the third I thought, "did anyone read this?" By the fourth I wondered if everyone on the list read it but decided as a group that it was such poor form that it was not even worthy of comment.

Last night the comments started trickling in. I wrote the opening scene in a rapid-pace point-of-view style and there wasn't room for the usual commas and semicolons. I wanted it to flow quickly. It clearly frustrated my first commenter. She sent me my chapter back, and unlike the middle-school papers that returned with lots of red pen marks, there were lots of comments on the right margin. She did point out the many times that I made statements that would be unclear to the reader. Even if I want the reader to go through this chapter as fast as the guy saying the disclaimers at the end of the commercial, I don't want them to be confused. I would only want the reader to be confused in terms of, "what the hell is this crazy guy going to come up with next" instead of "I like it, but when he said that the guy reached into the bottom right and two sentences ago he said top drawer, where exactly is he reaching?"

The best response I received was "It reads well in spite of the language." I try to keep my blogs relatively clean, but in the fiction realm, I have a potty mouth.