Validation!

It's everybody's best friend.

No seriously.

I was validated yesterday when I came home from school and my husband told me he read the latest version of the first chapter of my novel.

I have to interject here and say that this poor novel of mine has undergone the equivalent of human teenage years. It laughed, it cried, it was horrible, it was great, and most of all if didn't know what it was. (It didn't help that I came up with the idea when I was fresh into high school.)  It has undergone many drafts, and the furthest I've gotten with it was chapter 9... until I scrapped it again.

BUT! This time I have something. Any my husband validated me and said it was AWESOME. Not perfect, but ten bajillion times better than what I've done in the past.

That's almost intimidating- I almost don't want to keep going on it, so that I don't destroy the awesomeness.

I've discovered that in my writing I tend to "tell" instead of "show". Here's the difference:

 She felt her face grow warm. versus Her face was warm. or even Her face grew warm.

You know which one is better. (That's a horrible example but that's what I pulled out of thin air.) Anyways, I tend to do the first part, telling, instead of letting the reader be in the story. By the time I finished reworking what I had of my first chapter, I had narrowed it down from seven pages to about three. I had four pages of useless junk! Four pages!

Needless to say I've fallen in love with my novel again. I wish I didn't have homework to do so I could just work on it.

But NaNoWriMo is coming up next month, and it's a great excuse to get a good chunk of it down. And I've been getting quite a bit of it done in my basic English class (ugh- let's not talk about that) while my teacher tells stories. Overall I'm excited. Validation! Woohoo!