This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
I've been writing and re-writing my query ad nauseum for about a month and a half, and in the process developed what feels like a genuinely new skill: the ability to take a sentence, and determine what sentence should logically follow. That might sound like table-stakes literacy, but it genuinely feels like I've turned on my mangekyo sharingan. Before, I would look at my writing-- now I can see it. I can consciously identify what elements of a sentence demand elaboration, put them together with explicit goals for where I want the succeeding sentence to take me, and finally identify possible sentences that satisfy all relevant criteria.
Right now, I'm very slow at applying this skill. It takes me about an hour to edit 100 words, and frankly the cognitive load is so high I don't think I'll ever get more than a 2x or 3x speedup. Whenever I get back to actually writing (as opposed to editing), I'll need to retrain my brain to think in flow-state vibe-coder first-draft mode. But whenever I reach a particularly high-stakes passage, I'll have my dojutsu waiting in my eye sockets.
If anyone wants to copy my technique, I would suggest briefly focusing on a type of art that's hyper-constrained in word count. Flash fiction, light novel titles, slam poetry (but not the irritating kind), song lyrics, elevator pitches, and of course query letters. Write and re-write as many times as it takes to be perfect-- and get iterative feedback.
Props to /u/FtttG for introducing me to qtcritique, I wouldn't have gotten here without that.
Happy to help! FYI if you want to tag a user, just put an @ before their username.
On QTCritique, the feedback on the latest draft of my query has been fairly positive. Over on /r/pubtips, it's been very harsh, with people coming away saying they have no idea what my novel is even about. I was tempted to dismiss this as just typical Reddit behaviour; on the other hand, many of the users and mods of that subreddit are (or at least claim to be) published writers and other people working in the publishing industry, which suggests that their feedback ought to carry more weight than the feedback from my fellow unpublished novelists over at qtCritique.
Given that a consistent criticism is that my novel is too long (even after chopping out a good 20k words from the first draft), I reckon I have no choice but to create a fourth draft, aiming for it to be at least 8k words shorter than the third.
Such a thing exists?
I thought your query largely made logical sense, with its main problems being misplaced emphasis-- both spending words on things that didn't really matter, and and not spending words where they'd count the most. I am particularly genre-savvy so it have an easier time extrapolating compared to more naive readers, but I think the same is true of agents so you should weight my advice higher. (Do the opposite if I ever review your actual text, though-- that needs to be intelligible to everyone except the bottom 10% of your target audience.)
In general, pubtips seems to have more variance than qtcritique since more of the qtcritique people are regulars. You'll get some really good advice from veterans, but also some really clueless (though well-intentioned) advice from total noobs. In comparison, the main problem with qtcritique seems to be that the star rating system encourages sycophancy, so there are a few power users that give lots of fairly middling advice while visibly making the same errors over and over again in their submissions.
I would suggest looking at the profiles of the people who gave you feedback to survey the other queries they reviewed. Without reading their reviews, identify what you think are the biggest problems with the 3rd party queries. Then, compare those things to what the reviewers said. If you're largely in agreement with them, then their complaints are probably accurate. If you disagree with their points, it might be a difference in genre preference that you can take into account. If you think their overview is facile, you can safely ignore them. If they surprise you with the depth of their insight, cut out their eyes and transplant their kekkei genkai.
This is all great advice, thanks a lot.
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