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This (https://www.writermag.com/improve-your-writing/revision-grammar/critique-partner/ ) is an excellent piece on being a good Critique Partner: "A huge part of your job as critique partner is to help the writer answer a crucial question, which even the most talented author cannot answer alone: What is the experience of reading this like for someone who did not write it?" It also says, "Keep your criticism honest, warm, respectful, and direct."
I want to know a reader's first impressions--what may be confusing, where more (or less!) information seems necessary. I want to know about that sentence that had to be read twice, that awkward paragraph, or even a whole section that just doesn't work. I want to know about characters that seem to be acting inconsistently or characters that you just don't like or don't care enough about. I want to know if the story matters to you.
I can address these kinds of things--but only an interested reader who appreciates good stories can reveal them to me.
My circumstances are such that I cannot get any quality feedback. My wife does a great job, but she is only one person and may be too close to the author's mind. /8^>
I'd like someone to give quality feedback on the opening of my current work (four pages, 1600 words) and, if interested in continuing, the next seventeen pages (6300 words). These are good drafts. (See below, "What to you write?")
I would happily reciprocate in kind.
I tend to write imaginative fiction that feels real. I've had published a long, short story that I describe as Historical Fiction / Modern Fairy Tale. (See https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/finding-christopher/ .) I'm currently working on a frankly weird book-length fantasy (a military organization of intelligent mantis based in an alternate reality that connects with ours). At its core are relevant themes of deception, betrayal, recovery, and restoration. Writing it helps me work through life in the real world. Perhaps reading it will help others, but we'll see.
In the spirit of transparency...
1. Although I have a very broad background, we'd better limit genres to those in the range of speculative fiction. No horror.
2. Nothing rougher than PG-13.
And see "more about myself" below.
I've read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings more times that I can count (or want to admit)--including three times aloud (to children, not to myself) and three times in Spanish. --The Harry Potter series (multiple times in several languages). --C.S.Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia (ditto). --Michael Scott's Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. --Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle (although I've only read the first three). (That ought to be enough.)
A. Despite modern claims to the contrary, I am convinced that human beings are inherently and inescapably "religious." I use that term broadly and simply mean that every rational mind is founded on assumptions (faith) about what reality is like. Those assumptions--often unconsciously held--are a person's real "religion"--which sometimes (dare I say, often) is contrary to what they profess.
B. Stories shape us--whether they are books, movies, TV shows, or "narratives." Stories are also built on underlying assumptions about reality, and so are always part of human "religion" (broadly defined). Some people do not value stories, saying things like "fiction is not true," but the superficial events of a story are secondary to the underlying assumptions about reality--which may be true (or not), even if the events are not.
C. We all prefer stories that support--or at least do not challenge--our assumptions about reality, our "religious orthodoxy." I am a "funny mix" of Analyst and Mystic--convinced that reality is primarily Personal and Meaningful (and not just a big dead Machine) and a deliberate and devout disciple of traditional Western spirituality (that is, centered on the torturous execution and subsequent restoration for our sake of a Personal Creator-Artist incarnate).
All that to say that partnerships with the like-minded would be most fruitful for both.
