So this past Saturday I hosted the beta readers of Love and Loyalty to a lunch on my dime where they could give me their feedback. This is the fourth such feedback dinner/lunch I have hosted for one of my novels.

For The Mark Of Cain, it instigated a pretty deep re-write of the manuscript.

For Love and Loyalty 2009 version there were moderate edits.

For Cawdor it put the project on hold until I can find a plot that works. ( I love the universe but trying to shoe-horn in MacBeth had failed because I followed the original text too closely.)

That brings me to Love and Loyalty the heavily revised version. What makes this feedback dinner different is that in fact there are two groups of people providing me with a critique of the work. The people at the dinner are friends and co-workers, causal readers and little writing aspiration among them. The second group is my writers group at Mysterious Galaxy.

If I drew a Venn diagram of the two groups critiques, there would be a spot where the two circles touched and no more overlap than that. More interesting is that the two groups have totally different takes on the same subject matter. (I’m not getting into the details of their review as some are still outstanding.) One group might have said I dislike the characters while the other liked the characters.

I’m very curious to see what the remaining readers have to say.