Rami Ungar The Writer

So good news, folks: as of around 6 PM today, I’ve received feedback from both of my beta readers for Rose, which means I can start the fourth draft of the novel! Why is the fourth draft so significant, you may be asking. Well, this is the last draft I plan to do until I get an agent and/or publisher! And I think that is significant enough to write a blog post (which would’ve been written earlier this evening, but I was at my dad’s for Hanukkah dinner).

Now if you have no idea what Rose is, it’s a novel I wrote as my thesis in college, which I started working on again earlier this year and finished editing back in October. The story follows a young woman with amnesia whose body starts going through incredible, magical changes. The only person she can rely on for help and information about these changes and about herself is a young man who says he’s her boyfriend, but he’s keeping things from her, and things are not at all what they seem.

Yeah, it is not a fun story. Not by a long shot. But I think it’s a good story, made even better after the most recent draft, which fixed a few issues with the story and doubled the word count (don’t less that scare you, it’s shorter than the second Harry Potter book).

Of course, before you start submitting it to publishers or agents, you want to make sure your novel is actually good. Not just good in your opinion, but in others’ opinions, and that’s where beta readers come in. They take a look at stories you write, and let you know what works, what doesn’t, and give you feedback on what can be made better.

One of my beta readers for Rose was my dear friend, Joleene Naylor.  She read the novel in about a month, and got back to me with a ton of notes, as well as plenty of feedback. Overall, she enjoyed the novel. She thought my characters and their development was deep and reminded her of anime characters, which are often complex and never completely good nor completely evil, but often a mix of both (you can now tell who inspired that post about why writers should check out anime). That made the characters within Rose not only multilayered, but often very surprising. For one particular character, Joleene hated him at first, but then she found out some things about him and actually became kind of sympathetic towards him. Then she learned some more things about that character, and her feelings changed again. It’s very hard to do that in fiction, to have your emotions about characters change that rapidly, and Joleene liked that.

However, she did have some thought about a few things, including grammar and word usage, and she thought some things could be fixed, changed, or worked around in order to make the novel that much better. Her feedback makes a lot of sense to me, so I’m going to be incorporating a lot of it into the story.

My other beta reader got back to me earlier today, and I was very glad to see his feedback. Who is this beta reader? Believe it or not, he’s my chiropractor. As many of you know, I have back problems, so I’ve been seeing Dr. Black since June to remedy them (and the progress has been amazing!). You see someone so much, you get to talking, and it turns out Dr. Black is a huge horror fan, so obviously we got to talking about Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, and my writing. When I was getting close to finishing Rose, he offered to read it as a horror fan, and I said I’d like that.

Now, Dr. Black is not a writer, but a reader. However, it is important to have the feedback of readers, as they are who we write for. And Dr. Black did give his reader approval. He thought the novel kept his attention throughout, and that he especially enjoyed the flashbacks in the novel. I’m glad he told me that, because those were parts I actually worried about. Flashbacks are difficult to do, and different readers and writers react to them in different ways. I’m glad Dr. Black enjoyed them, and what they added to the story.

He also mentioned one issue he had in the story while reading one chapter, which I hadn’t realized was a problem, so I’ll make sure to fix that up so that the end result won’t have that same problem.

So I have both of my beta readers’ feedback, and I can start on the fourth draft. To be honest, I’m really glad I finally have all that feedback. I haven’t really been in a writing mood lately, waiting on getting that much-needed feedback. Sure, having my laptop in the shop for over a week didn’t help, but even when I had it, I just wanted to work on Rose (even if I was working on a great story in the meantime. A story I’ll have to put on hold for now, but whatever. I’ll get it done eventually). When you put this much work into a novel, and you think it has so much potential, you really want to see that potential fulfilled, I guess.

And now that I’ve gotten my feedback, I’ll put out a couple of blog posts I’ve been meaning to write for a while, and then I’ll get to work. I doubt it’ll take very long to get through this time, so hopefully that means I’ll have some good news soon.

Thanks to Joleene and Dr. Black for their valuable feedback. It means so much to me that you took the time to do this for me.

And thanks for keeping in touch with me, my Followers of Fear, and following my progress of this novel. I hope that if it comes out, that you decide to pick up a copy and that you enjoy it. Until next time, pleasant nightmares and Happy Hanukkah!