I got some feedback from Matt and Patrick recently. It's given me a lot of motivation to reread, proof, and as necessary restructure some of my story. It would have been nice for them to simply say "OMG YOUR WRITING IS AWESOME!1!!!11!1" but that would've been next to worthless in the long run. Thankfully, their comments were mostly centered around a few areas that I wondered about myself. Hearing them critique that part of my writing told me that I wasn't being paranoid.
The biggest piece of critique I received was that I can be overly explicit. Instead of letting the reader infer things, I will sometimes spell it out too directly. The first short story I tried to write was an overloaded description-fest. I made Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books look like haikus (great author btw). I've been reading a lot of writers lately to look at how they structure their sentences and what types of sentences they use. Everyone has a mix of explicit and inferred, but it seems to be a bit of an art form maintaining a spread out balance between the two. Matt also mentioned that I may want to hop views less often in non-action sequences. Once again, this was something I was worried about. I got a comment from the first editor to reject me (in person!).
Every writing site on the internet I've read talked about how writers have to become accustomed to criticism and rejection. It's just part of the field. You need the criticism to get better, and you're likely to face many many rejections until your writing is up to snuff and finds the right audience at the right time.
On a personal note: tomorrow, Carrie and I are going to drive down to Richmond to visit her parents. We'll fly out on Sunday to New York where we'll meet Inger and her boyfriend at Ninja New York! Ninjas make everything cooler, and sushi is already awesome. From there, we'll be going on a five-day cruise for our belated one year anniversary. I'm looking forward to it!
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