Post by kaiden on Aug 14, 2009 2:46:27 GMT -5
Hi Steven,
I bought the Lifewriting Course in November of 2007 and wanted to check if my short story evaluation certificate is still good.
I've been working my butt off this year and have 25 stories out ( I started sending them out in January). I should mail out another five by Tuesday. They're ready to go, I just wait until I have a day off to send them.
I have two reasons for wanting to do this now:
1) You're one of my favorite authors and I waited to make sure I was writing at a level where I felt comfortable with you reading it.
2) I let my mentor (not writing, he's my jujitsu instructor and like a father to me) read a short story of mine.
He, in turn, let his wife read it, who is a former English teacher, and they were both very concerned. She feels I need to take a creative writing course or, maybe, some basic English courses.
They said it was like reading 'an uneducated writer.' Not that I was stupid, but that there were some basic things that I didn't seem to know. Paragraph structure was one of the things she mentioned.
The main reason they were concerned, though, is that I've gotten some good, positive feedback from professional writers. For example, I took a class from Michael A. Stackpole last year, and I did a workshop in June with Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The workshop with Kris and Dean was information on building a fiction career, so they didn't see any of my stories, but Michael read and critiqued two of them and gave me some pointers on how to make them better.
My instuctor seems to be worried that I've been lied to or misled. That, maybe, I need more basic training and that I won't get it because I'm doing the workshops that I am. When I asked Dean if he thought I needed to take some English classes, he said he could tell from my emails that I was fine on grammar and English.
Not perfect, but not getting in my own way.
Dean said the situation with my instrutor and his wife was pretty normal. People think that if a story isn't working it's on the sentence by sentence level and don't realize that, ususally, it's on the story level.
So, long story short, I wanted to send you a short story and get some feedback. It probably won't be the one I gave them, that one has gotten a little old.
Also, I wasn't sure if the email address on the certificate was still vaild, so I wanted to check on that, as well.
Thanks for your time,
Steve
I bought the Lifewriting Course in November of 2007 and wanted to check if my short story evaluation certificate is still good.
I've been working my butt off this year and have 25 stories out ( I started sending them out in January). I should mail out another five by Tuesday. They're ready to go, I just wait until I have a day off to send them.
I have two reasons for wanting to do this now:
1) You're one of my favorite authors and I waited to make sure I was writing at a level where I felt comfortable with you reading it.
2) I let my mentor (not writing, he's my jujitsu instructor and like a father to me) read a short story of mine.
He, in turn, let his wife read it, who is a former English teacher, and they were both very concerned. She feels I need to take a creative writing course or, maybe, some basic English courses.
They said it was like reading 'an uneducated writer.' Not that I was stupid, but that there were some basic things that I didn't seem to know. Paragraph structure was one of the things she mentioned.
The main reason they were concerned, though, is that I've gotten some good, positive feedback from professional writers. For example, I took a class from Michael A. Stackpole last year, and I did a workshop in June with Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The workshop with Kris and Dean was information on building a fiction career, so they didn't see any of my stories, but Michael read and critiqued two of them and gave me some pointers on how to make them better.
My instuctor seems to be worried that I've been lied to or misled. That, maybe, I need more basic training and that I won't get it because I'm doing the workshops that I am. When I asked Dean if he thought I needed to take some English classes, he said he could tell from my emails that I was fine on grammar and English.
Not perfect, but not getting in my own way.
Dean said the situation with my instrutor and his wife was pretty normal. People think that if a story isn't working it's on the sentence by sentence level and don't realize that, ususally, it's on the story level.
So, long story short, I wanted to send you a short story and get some feedback. It probably won't be the one I gave them, that one has gotten a little old.
Also, I wasn't sure if the email address on the certificate was still vaild, so I wanted to check on that, as well.
Thanks for your time,
Steve
