Since I started Frostbite, I’ve dug through writer and agent sites and even some writing books, and I took their advice to heart.  Here are the fundamental lessons I learned:

• Have reasonable expectations.
• Don’t be naive.
• Stay optimistic.

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So, my dad talked to this girl at his church who heard that writing fantasy isn’t appropriate for a Christian.  She writes fantasy.

Putting aside my gut reaction of an eyeroll, sigh, and “Oh hell,” I decided it was worth a blog post.

Now, I don’t want to be one of those people that acts all superior and knowledgeable because they’ve been writing longer or took more classes, or who looks down on people who aren’t writers as bourgeois morons with no sense of art.   I feel confident about my abilities but I don’t want to (ever) become the kind of arrogant self-important twit who talks down to others.  Because of this, I will always take a simple “Stop acting like a jerk” to heart.  So in this post, I’m going to lay out all the sides before I state my own viewpoint.

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I’ve popped my Frostbite manuscript into the hands of three friends to ravage.  This is the mostly-finished version, the version I already had a critique group go over.

One of the interesting parts of the critique group I belonged to were the different reactions people had to my manuscript.  Several offered intelligent and thoughtful feedback on the story itself.

Others focused on things that didn’t actually matter to the story’s overall well-being.  These people found it important to lecture me about spaces between sentences or paragraph breaks or the word “damn.”

Those of you interested in writing, listen to me and listen well.  Don’t waste all of your time obsessing about every single minutiae you’ve heard.  Don’t stress about whether it’s one or two spaces between sentences (most say one, I use two and don’t give a “damn” about something so insignificant).  Don’t freak out about whether you need to center your title or how to align text or if it should be one or two spaces between scenes.  Concentrate on writing before anything else.

As Miss Snark, literary agent, said over and over and over again before she retired her blog: Stop obsessing.  Write well.

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