ISO manuscript readers for romance novel

wordsmith

Thu, Oct 24 2019, 8:18 am

Congrats for being brave enough to write a story and ask for feedback. I just read your first chapter. You have a nice sense of who your characters are and what they want. It's also interesting that you chose to make your heroine multi-ethnic. That will give you some great story weight and scenes I'm sure. One thought I had as I was going through the chapter is that you might try and start your story in a different place - for instance, maybe with Shevi on her date with Ben and getting dumped. This way, the reader is immediately in Shevi's head and seeing how she's facing it without her telling the other characters. You can build up to the rest of the family. Plus, it's an active scene - where does Ben break up with her? Does he uses her ethnicity against her? Does she put that doubt in her own head when he dumps her? Does she still have to get home? Does she sneak into her family's apartment? Etc. Just a suggestion, but it'll be interesting to see where you go with the story.

Good luck. BTW, November is NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - you might want to check it out as there are a lot of writing events and advice/tips on writing online surrounding this event.

amother

Honeydew

Thu, Oct 24 2019, 8:32 am

Only skimmed cuz don't have time to read fully now but proceed with caution re ethnicity, I don't know if you yourself are a person of color but white women writing black characters may not end well. Do a lot of research, speak with frum black women and get them to beta read because you could be getting absolutely everything wrong. Good luck!
Also research terms like African American which depending on the day may not be PC https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0......html

The experience of living as a frum black woman may be completely different then what you think it is.

shaqued_almond

Thu, Oct 24 2019, 4:31 pm

wordsmith wrote:

Hi so, I thought about that but Ben doesn't really appear again in the novel and their relationship was not really important but it just serves to get her to the realization that she's been undervaluing herself. So I figured that showing what kind of a household she lives in is more important. Their family is very much in each other's business. Thank you for your feedback! I really appreciate you took the time!

shaqued_almond

Thu, Oct 24 2019, 4:51 pm

amother [ Honeydew ] wrote:

Yes definitely. I am not black but I grew up outside of the US where race is generally not even asked about and I've had a multitude of friends from different cultures. I don't have the audacity to assume what it's like to be black, that's why the focus of the story is rather about dealing with being Jewish when you don't really look like the ashkenazi stereotype. I also wanted to avoid overly describing her physically in order not to fall into cringe-territory.