The hardest part of writing is actually writing. But waiting for people to read your writing is, at least for me, second on the list.

As I write this, I have two projects out with beta readers:

1. Dreaming of How It Was Going to Be: Several people have copies of this book’s first draft. So far only one person has finished reading it, and while she gave me some nice feedback, she didn’t actually comment on the chapters themselves. (One other person told me the scenes I’d posted were 🥵, and that was nice to hear.) But when I send out the book, I like for people to read it in a reasonable amount of time and tell me what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they think I should change, etc. When someone requests a beta read from me, they usually get the story back in a week or shorter. If it’s a novel, maybe it takes a bit longer, but I still get it to them in less than a month. Right now, people have had Dreaming for more than a month, and waiting for them to get around to it is difficult.
2. Party Plans, the sequel to Weekend Plans, is completely outlined, and I’ve sent the outline to two volunteers so they can go through the story and figure out if I duplicated things, mis-organized things, forgot things, screwed up things, etc. One of them is an engineer so he probably has the right mind for this sort of thing. I just sent it to them the day before I wrote this post, so it’s not like I should be expecting anything instantly, but I’d really like some feedback.

This is why I need to find an erotica writing group. Critiquing others’ work can improve your own, and receiving critiques of your work does the same. The only thing is, you don’t want to be the best writer in the group. I’m a pretty good writer — I know I’m not the best there ever was, but I am very good from a technical standpoint. If there’s a broken grammar or style rule, I did it on purpose. I guarantee it. But I need to find a group of other writers who can critique my content and tell me where I need to improve it. Since I don’t have that, I depend on other readers who might be interested and I wait for them to get back to me.

And, when it comes to critiquing, the waiting really is the hardest part.