As readers of this blog know, I’ve been posting regular updates of the writing and editing process of my novel Not Famous. I’ve recently had a beta-reader give me her thoughts, and following her comments and input, I made some tweaks and trimmed out more than 10,000 words from the manuscript to tighten things up and address certain issues.

Bestselling author Jon Rance, who follows me on Twitter, has noticed my updates and kindly offered to check out the first few chapters.

After some recent tweaking (I moved some backstory from Chapter 2 to a new prologue) I sent him a sample last night, and this morning he sent me back some comments and a marked up Word doc.  His comments and insight were great, and I’ve begun taking his advice into improving the first few chapters, and will be spending the next week revisiting the rest of the manuscript.

Like my beta-reader, he found that I hadn’t made the main character likeable enough. I had made a point to put him in a pretty bad place in order to give him a starting point for significant growth, but apparently went too far in that I made him someone readers couldn’t root for. Obviously that is still something I have to work on before I send the manuscript off to the next beta-reader.

Rance was sure to clarify that despite the extensive markups, he told me he liked what he had seen. “You can write and it’s clear you have a story to tell.”

So, I’ve got work ahead me in the next round of edits. Hopefully I’ll be done within a week.

Thanks again to Jon Rance for taking the time to not only read the first few chapters of my novel, but to mark them up and write a detailed review for me.  I look forward to making this novel worthy of publication!