... it's off my back.
Yesterday I completed a working draft of my second novel that I'm not ashamed to start showing to people for critique. I promptly sent it off to Guy to read. He put up with me the whole time: he gets to see the whole thing first. Many people have seen the first chapter or two already, and a few have seen up to Chapter 7, but nobody has read the whole thing.
It's not ready to shop around yet, but until now there were so many issues with it (length or lack thereof, plot problems, motivation problems), that it wasn't really worth showing to anybody. I could still see all the problems.
I'm finally too close to it to see the remaining issues. In a future post I'll talk about why this was such a heavy monkey.
To celebrate, here are a couple of pictures of a tree that served as inspiration for an important part of the book:
Nice tree