Meilin Miranda is just the sweetest thing ever

Okay, so the "drastic measures" I was talking about a few posts down? I emailed the first four chapters of GBatB to a fantastic web author known as Meilin Miranda (her site is linked to in my sidebar) to beta. The whole time she kept telling me how she would say exactly what she thought and wouldn't hold back.

So I got the manuscript back today and I read through all of her comments. If that's how she thinks, she must be just about a saint because none of it was harsh in anyway.

I was kind of disappointed though because the chapters I thought sucked the most she had the least to say about. So I did suck, I just didn't suck where I thought I sucked.

Anyway, she was all worried I'd hate her or whatever, and that couldn't be less true. I'm positively excited to get to work.

Off to dinner

Thanks to Ms. Miranda's beta skills I now have a much firmer grasp on where I need to be for these intro chapters. I've spent the entirety of today taking apart the first chapter and making it better. Tomorrow will probably be chapter two, and I have a whole two pages of exposition that I have to turn into a dialogue somehow. I'm not sure two professionals would stand around a dead body and have this conversation, but I don't know how else to do it. Besides, readers expect and accept a certain amount of exposition, so long as it's not in a huge chunk of text like mine was. *headdesk*

Anyway, cutting it off early today because I'm going to dinner with a friend of my aunt's. Then I get to come home and enjoy softbluebuddy's new update to Hello Kitty. Hell yeah!

Also, the new "undead journal" menu bar is really annoying, isn't it?