Looking for serious help with my writing

[Rodney]

Hello,

I hope you guys are well.
I'm 30,000 words into the first draft of a novella I'm writing. It's my first attempt at long form. I don't expect this work or any work I'll do for that manner to be published anytime soon. So, I'm looking for help with my writing.
The description is ok, but there might be too much, I don't know. Dialogue is kind of weak and an intuitive sense of the characters may be missing. I'm not really sure, this being my first try.
But I'd really appreciate some honest feedback. Just email me if your interested in giving it a look. My address is rodneydevane@yahoo.com


Thank you

[s_c_baker]

Hi Rodney,

Nice to meet you! And congratulations--30k words is a solid achievement regardless.

That said, I'm not sure you'll get too many hits for this sort of feedback on this forum (although you may!). You might want to check out online workshops which are more critique-focused, rather than here, where the critiques are tangential at best and usually contest-related.

The online workshop where I started out was http://www.scribophile.com. Scrib really did a great deal for me and brought me from "just starting" to "competent semi-pro author" in the space of a few short years. If you feel like you're at that near-beginning stage in your work, you might want to check them out.

OWW is another good one: http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/index.shtml

These are both paid sites, but both have free trial memberships. In OWW's case, that trial is time-based. For Scrib, you can participate indefinitely for free, but can only post one or two works at a time, and there are other limitations.

You might also want to check out Baen's Bar, which is free and has the bonus of being the submissions queue for a pro-payment magazine as well as a workshop: http://bar.baen.com/ The feedback you get here, while helpful, in my experience isn't quite as thorough as at Scribophile and OWW, though.

Good luck!

[Rodney]

Thanks Baker,

Appreciate the tip Bro. I'll give scrib a try

[Corbin Maxwell]

Rodney,

I'm curious as to where you're going to submit your 30,000 words for publication?

If you've no takers, I'd be willing to look at some of it. I have a little bit of downtime right now.

[FictionMuse]

Try the Critters workshop too. It's free. For a 5000-8000 word story, you might get 10-20 critiques. Not sure what kind of response you'd get for a 30,000 word story.