Read my friend's novel

Most recently, I read a NaNovel written by a guy who hung in the same NaNo forums I did. Since I’m LDS, he was kind enough to put all the explicit parts in teal ink for me to enable me to skip them (his idea). There were a LOT of teal parts and I found myself having to skim some of them to make sense of things, but in the end I felt like he had a good seed of a story in there, if not exactly the story he’d written. It was fun to post my thoughts to him and find he’d heard essentially the same thing from another first-reader. He, for his part, read my LDS chicklitty NaNovel and was quite excessively complimentary about it.

I’ve also had the opportunity to read the published novels of a friend, which is even more fun (and the only romance I have ever voluntarily read!).

I’ve done this, twice, for two different friends.

In both cases, I felt there was a lot of proof reading involved, and neither one really wanted honest feedback, but still worth doing.

On November 3 2005, someone I work with e-mailed me two chapters of his novel. It’s been sitting in the bottom of my inbox ever since.

I remember when I gave my novel to my friends how it felt to wait - and wait - and wait for them to read it.

So… my target is, by May 16, I’m going to have read the two chapters. If I like it, I will ask for more.