This was originally intended as a post to the Writer's Market group, in response to a posting by someone else...but I found that the "post reply" button didn't work.  And, after checking a bit, it looks like none of the "new thread" or "new posting" buttons seem to work.

Is anyone ELSE having similar problems?

[quote author=14699507 post=126650377]

OK, I'm coming in really late to this discussion, but I want to share this. When I was in ninth grade, I was serious about a contemporary novel I was writing. I was excited about it, and I shared each day's work with my friends, the next day in school. The problem was that they would give me feedback (the right kind, the one that helps) and I'd spend so much time revising previous work that I didn't get to tackling the harder parts. Asode from that, afetr the first two chapters, they said, "So tell us what happens already!" I did, and that made me feel like I had already written the book, so I didn't feel the "push" to continue writing. That novel is languishing somewhere among all my papers. I doubt I'll ever finish it. I'm much more close-mouthed about my projects now. I might tell my family and friends that I'm working on something that excites me, or something that's going well, but I never tell them more than the genre and the very basics of the plot.

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Perhaps the trick is to wait until you have a first draft more or less completed, before trying to get feedback.  That way, you're already into revisisions...and are probably ready to begin the task of smoothing out the flaws in what you've written.

Of course...doing it this way blindly may lead  to writing yourself into a cul-de-sac, since you may not be able to see the flaws in your plot line while they're still not fully developed.  I guess the trick is to avoid letting yourself get distracted by details while you're still in the creative stage.

One approach I learned at a legal brief-writing seminar (of all places) was to conceptualize the various phases of writing into four main stages:  madman, architect, carpenter, and judge.  Your Madman phase is when you're jotting down ideas furiously, trying to tie together all the madly firing neurons that are giving you your ideas.  The Architect is when you're organizing your ideas into something resembling coherence.  The Carpenter is when you're actually doing the writing...quickly, without pausing too much for polishing your work, since you don't want to get in the way of getting it all set down.  And the Judge is the editor...who dispassionately chops and cuts and polishes your work. 

I think getting too much feedback before you're mostly done with the rough carpentry work is probably a mistake.

I'm not sure whether this qualifies as a "poetry book" by me, since I'm not exactly the author (I just play one on the radio), but I recently published this book on Shakespeare's sonnets, and thought I'd share the news with the group. 

I designed the cover myself...handicapped by a complete and utter lack of natural artistic ability.  I am a passably mediocre amateur photographer, though, and have learned to photoshop images from some of my pictures, so I've had a bit of luck making book covers for myself.  I've uploaded the photo to the website.

Writing this book was actually a lot more fun than I'd imagined when I began the project.  I learned a great deal about Elizabethan England, even quite aside from Shakespeare.  And it got me starting to write poetry again myself...which I'm starting to send off, now that I have a few that pass my own internal "wince" test (but more on that later...if and when I have anything positive to share with the group).