Folks, first of all, I want to genuinely thank everyone for the kind encouragement. I really did appreciate it. I was pretty upset last night not because of criticism of my work (though it can be hard to take at times, I understand it's part of learning to write better) but because someone on a different forum insinuated that from my writing I must be a child pretending to be an adult.
In any event, I believe I had an epiphany this morning on my way to work. I was focused on the negative comments and it suddenly hit me to look at what people didn't comment on. It seemed virtually all the negative comments that I've heard revolved specifically around my present day time lines in my writing. People didn't specify that was where they saw a problem, but invariably, when people would say that there was a problem, it was part of those pieces that was quoted. No one quoted the future time line as being a point of weakness. Mind you, I'm not saying it couldn't improve also, but it was very telling that it was specifically the present day stuff people kept pointing out.
Especially telling for me was that someone pointed out to me that my MC refers to his principal always as principal Cheevy instead of Mr. Cheevy. When I thought about that, I realized where my problem likely lies.
The character of Kevin in my novel is based on me as a 12 year old boy. When I was that age, I was in this really crappy private school where we had a real life principal cheevy who really was incredibly one sided in his views and who always came down on me like I was evil incarnate. He was you will pardon the expression a nasty SOB and someone who I'm very glad to say had a nervous breakdown and died a few years ago.
For those who saw the earlier version of my first chapter, this principal threw me down a flight of stairs when I refused to turn over my walkman to him, just like the story I'd written of Kevin getting thrown down the stairs. With the exception of the story with Jeff, the incidents that happen to Kevin were incidents that happened to me as well.
When it occurred to me that those were the areas people were focusing on as weakest, I suddenly didn't feel as bad.
It wasn't so much that my writing as a rule is not well done or unbelievable (not that I don't think I can learn more and improve mind you). It was that I was still angry at this principal and angry at my parents for forcing me to go back to that school (my father even made me apologize because he was so desperate for me to be in that school instead of public school) and so the whole piece came out as my anger at these people instead of pure dispassionate writing. The thing that tipped me off was the Principal Cheevy thing. In real life, the principal who did these things called himself Rabbi. So when I translated that into my story and Kevin was in a secular school, Rabbi became Principal and of course, I'd never think to have called him mister because I'd never have thought at that time to refer to this guy as mister instead of rabbi (it's one of those things that just ingrained on you).
OK, so I'm getting into a bit of psychobabble here, but bottom line, it made me realize that if I can rework those pieces to make them more like what a normal person would be like, not like my nut-ball principal of the time, I'll have fixed the most pressing concerns. . .
Anyway, my thanks for everyones thoughts once again. I'm taking a week off from the project and then will come back with a fresh set of eyes to try to tackle it again and fix the problems.
Eric
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