Eaten Alive

Okay, so I uploaded the first chapter of 'Dragon's Moon' on fanstory.com and on writing.com. The pickings are pretty slim, but one person read the first chapter on fanstory. That was weird. Actually, I went and checked out his profile and it was a MAN old enough to be my FATHER. Needless to say, he ripped me a new one. No - seriously! This was the likes of which has probably never even been SEEN on fanfiction.net. This was different - he ripped apart every bit of my story - every bit.

At first I was really insulted. I didn't think it was that bad, so I went to his profile to find out why he was such a jerk, and he turned out to be a MAN old enough to be my FATHER! In my opinion, it's a miracle he made it through the chapter at all. If I were him I definitely would have quit.

The major things that he got after me for were that Hitomi is not really introduced as a character and he thought the few paragraphs about Marlene should be pitched entirely - he had no idea why I included it at all. He also thought that the story was really setting heavy.

I wrote him back and told him that fanfiction was not the same as general fiction - at all. That most of my readers are really familiar with the characters and if I were to go on a descriptive tirade about Hitomi's characters - my readers would bolt. Also, that Marlene is not a well established character in the series, and if I don't take the chance to tell a little about her personality now - the chance will never come again. I also told him that the setting is key in this case because it's different than the regular Escaflowne one.

He didn't write me back.

Oddly enough, I had only had to deal with this level of criticism a few times in my adult life and it was weird how I reacted this time. I sorta flaked out.

The first time - I had no respect for the person who decided to subject me to their criticism, so I threw their comments out the window once I got wind of what they were doing. The second person's comments I took to heart. They were a respected author on fanfiction.net, so I really took her words to heart. It was painful, but I got better because it.

The thing is with this release of the first chapter of DM - I'm not following my own advice here. I hate it when people ask me to check out their work when it's old. I wrote the first chapter of DM when I was 17 and I've only done revamps on it since. So, it's too old to try to learn from anymore. It's time to let it die and move onto something else. But that seems hard since I'm still working on MoaG. Blahhh....

I'm still going to release it, but I'm not doing any revamps on it after the first 20 chapters are beta read. I'm just going to post it and see what happens. And if I get eaten alive again - so be it.