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I would like to share a success story!

For the last six weeks I have been in an excellent writing workshop at the University of Pennsylvania, run by Dr. Rebekah Zhuraw. We had weekly "prompt" assignments, but also a "long term" project to work on for the entire workshop. I chose to use my novel for the project.

The feedback from both the professor and other students was invaluable, and made me very aware of my tendency to "over-write" -- give too much information too soon.

Last night was our last session, and so we all read our long term projects to each other, which in my case was "Chapter One" of the novel. Even though everyone had heard and read parts of it over the weeks, last night was the first time they heard the entire chapter in one go, and the reaction to it was overwhelming. The comments were things like "There are so many rich layers here, your main character is so present and believable, the tension between your main character and the King is truly intrinsic, not just shoehorned in..."

With each comment I had to smile, because all of those things came out of my working with Dramatica.

So, thank you Chris and Melanie!

Jeff

Hey Jeff--

Congratulations! That's great news. Any ETA on completion of the book?

Cheers,

Well......

My goal is to have a "polished" first draft done by this fall or early winter. Given that I have several chapters already written (and in desperate need of revisiting) and about 200 pages of notes, sketches, drawings, characterizations, dialog, etc., I'm hoping that is not too ambitious.

Everyone in the class (8 of us) so loved the process that we have decided to form our own writers group and continue on our own, so I hope the interaction will keep me motivated to continue. The professor said last night after the reading that "You have a real novel here." So, my faith in my ability to do this received a tremendous boost!

Jeff

LOL - "real" novel - that's great news - congratulations on all your hard work paying off.

Many thanks

And by the way, once the writers group is up and going, I will be evangelizing about Dramatica to all of them!

Congratulations, and best of success with your writer's group! It will definitely be worthwhile.