(no subject)
So, I've been writing this book. It's a new edition of Twelfth Night, designed to help high school students understand Shakespeare better since a lot of teachers don't know how to teach it. Written in novel format, it is mostly written to help a student "see" a production since a lot of schools don't actually take kids to see plays. One of my former grad school classmates was willing to read through some of it for me. She's a teacher and has a great Shakespeare background, so I figured she'd be a good person to look it over for me. She said it was pretty bad. That my writing was bad and the concept wasn't great. She said that she wouldn't assign it to her students and that it was a tedious read. Ouch. I'm not going to stop working on it. I know that there are a lot of ways it can improve and that's the whole point of editing. I know that a lot of bad ideas still make a lot of money (hello, Twilight). But I'm still pretty hurt. I was actually starting to believe I was doing something right. Maybe I am. Maybe, because she's so familiar with Shakespeare, she's not the kind of teacher I'm aiming this at anyway. I don't know. I'm just hurt and disappointed. Like a lot.