Saturday, May 21, 2011

Vicki's Game Over Progress Part 1

Vicki's now read the first four chapters of Game Over. I'm realizing just how different an experience this is for me from any of my previous books - where Vicki knew the gist of the material before she ever read the first word - as well as from having Julie reading the chapters as I produced them. In that latter situation, we had discussed the plot and characters at length and so, for Julie, it was more a matter of seeing what we'd talked about transformed into words, along with the occasional surprise when I'd go in a direction that had occurred to me in the process of writing a chapter. I knew that she'd be comfortable with the plot on account of having helped create a fair chunk of it!

In all of those cases, then, I was almost exclusively focused on what my early reviewer thought of the writing style, since the actual material was well-known to her. With Vicki and Game Over right now, however, she has no idea at all where this book is going, what it's about, how it'll end, etc. It's entirely possible she won't even like the story in it, although she's usually pretty easy-going in that regard (much more so than me!). So I'm actually a little more anxious about this than I'd expected to be, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. This will be the first real test for my first novel: how does it play to someone coming into it cold?

It should be interesting...

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