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- from 30 Minutes Over Tokyo, The Simpsons, Season 10

Saturday, September 6, 2008

My Valuable Husband

This is cross-posted from the Den of Shadows message board.

EverStar wrote:
yttar, I envy the partnership you have with your husband. It must be nice to have someone whom you can share your work with and receive feedback from. :wink:

It's kind of two-fold actually. He's really good with helping me with ideas. Which I decided to scratch the new idea I got because he figured it was too far of a stretch and it probably was which was why I stopped working on that idea, and he tried helping me fix the first couple of ideas I had. That also led to a new idea for another character's backstory and room for character growth for that character, which is always good, plus it makes one of my villains seem so much more evil, not that people will really see that right away.

But when it comes to actually reading and critiquing stories, well, he's not so good. I mean, he can point out logic and continuity errors or things that just don't make sense, but he's kind of slow at reading the story. And I don't really want to be that whole nagging wife with, "Have you read my story yet? Huh? Have you? Why aren't you reading it?"

In college we took a couple creative writing classes together and during the critique of one of my stories, there was a part that was just really bad and no one else in the class mentioned it, but he did, so he said so. Of course all the girls were outraged that my husband would say something so mean about his wife. And the two of us were like, "What? If he always tells me how great and wonderful my writing is [which it usually isn't], than how am I ever supposed to learn anything as a writer? How am I supposed to get better?" But I guess most of the girls in that class would probably dump a guy if he said anything bad about her writing.

The only downside is that he's not really considered a "fresh set of eyes". So he can catch most of the mistakes in the story, but when I finally finish editing it and before I try submitting it to an agent, I'll need to find someone else to read through it for me. I have another friend who's really good with critiques, but he's going to be starting up school again, so he'll probably be busy with his own creative writing. But with how slow I work, I probably won't have my story finished until winter break anyway.

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