Just Took an Important Step

I live on the East Coast, but was born and raised on the West Coast.  I just came back from a week-long vacation, where I visited my relatives.  While there I recruited my family members – three to be exact- as beta readers for the fifth draft of the tentatively titled Nemesis.

I am nervous and excited.  They like it so far.  I’m worried that there’s too much rape and violence in it, although they haven’t shied away from that sort of stuff before.  Then again, that was the work of other people – not me, the person they watched grow up into a thirty-something woman.  What would they think of me?

Anyway, despite the fact that I still want to make more tweaks to the story, I’m proud of it.  I’ve been working on it for three years now.  It’s already super long, even though I cut out a huge section of it.  It’s time for a new pair of eyes to examine it.  I am going to try to just stay away from Nemesis and work on Wormwood and Seven Stars.

Once my family members are finished with it, I will probably recruit beta readers elsewhere.  In other words, strangers or near-strangers, which is even scarier.  It’s also a little exciting at the moment because it’s like, whoa, this is real.  I just might actually publish a novel!

There’s also a lot of politics I could be talking about right now, but I just don’t want to.  Not at the moment anyway.