I’ll tell you now, I’m a fan of critical feedback. In fact, I’m a huge fan of it. Giving it, receiving it, I love getting a good, solid critique on my work.

But unfortunately, I’ve found that quality feedback is rare to come by these days.

I’ve gotten notes back from about half a dozen readers so far, and I’ve still got more pending. Some of them have been great, some of them not so much. It can be a frustrating experience, because often times it involves reading between the lines and finding the nuggets of information you can use to improve your writing.

You can’t expect test readers to give you solutions to the problems with your manuscript, and realistically you shouldn’t want them to, except in special cases. But that doesn’t make it any less irritating when all you get back is something along the lines of, “I don’t like this” or “I don’t understand this” with little or no context as to what the reader had issues with. At that point it becomes a guessing game, unless you can cross reference notes from multiple readers to come up with the points that are unclear.

I’ve mentioned before you have to take all feedback you get with a grain of salt. This is true for both positive and negative feedback. Indeed, it’s probably more important for positive feedback, because even if a test reader tells you the story is perfect, there’s always something to improve. A story is never “finished” in my opinion, you just have to move on eventually. But then again, I’m a neurotic editor and will probably be polishing past manuscripts for the rest of my life.

In any case, I’ve received a good mix of feedback on Penumbra so far. Most of it has been positive, with a few exceptions (in this case, it was the negative feedback that was sparse on details, which makes the situation far more frustrating to deal with). I’ve let the manuscript sit for about a month to stew and now I’m ready to leap back in. In fact, I’m off to do it now. Wish me luck!