Ready for Critiques

I'm ready to send my manuscript for critique (I have 2 people lined up), and I have to admit I have NO IDEA what to expect. I have a pretty good critical eye when it comes to sentence-level issues such as sentence construction, grammar, word choice, etc. But I find it really difficult to critique my own work when it comes to high-level things (plot, pacing, tension, characters, etc) so I hope my readers give me lots of good feedback in those areas.

I decided to limit the number of beta readers to 2 because I don't want to get too overwhelmed with feedback. I'm not sure how other writers approach this. It'll be an interesting learning experience, I'm sure!

Pyxis Book 1 - Draft Done

Last Tuesday I finished the first draft of Pyxis Book 1. It's 70,825 words, which I wrote in 35 days. I never imagined I could write an entire draft in essentially a month, but now that I've done it I know I could do it again. I wrote 33 out of those 35 days, which did wonders for the momentum of the process. When I used to write only one day a week or so, there was no opportunity to build or maintain any momentum. I started with an outline - a list of scenes - but didn't end up sticking to it very strictly. Even so, I never could have written the manuscript in such a short time without that outline.

Next steps include high level plot tweaks, seeding the beginning of the story with things I hadn't worked out til the end, filling in more description and detail, and finally doing a sentence-by-sentence edit.

I have two critique/beta readers lined up, one of which is a professional editor whom I'm paying to do a critique. I've also talked to an artist about doing covers for the series, and she should have mockups ready in the next week or two.