After fourteen years of writing fic, am I really as awful and underdeveloped as EQD tells me I am?

[obabscribbler]

Another day, another EQD rejection. :( This time up for the chop is Friends and Enemies, a rather long fic I'm only ten chapters into.

Comments

[sam_cc]

I've been reading this story for a while and really enjoying it. And I can honestly say that I don't agree with their accusations that the world-building you're presenting doesn't work, because it does. To me, it reads like a story. I don't know everything that's going to happen yet, but I wouldn't expect to until the final chapter. And isn't "not reading like a story" the issue they took with your first submission there?

Really, I'm baffled at how high the quality control for fic posting is there when some of the stuff I've read that's been posted on EqD's blog hasn't been very good at all.

Part of me wishes that the biggest website in the MLP fandom wasn't so... snobby.

[iki_teru]

SECONDING EVERYTHING IN THIS COMMENT BECAUSE UGH. THESE PEOPLE

[tamerterra]

My knee jerk response to 'not giving the reader a chance to develop any real understanding' and the sentance after it is 'perhaps the reader should be reading slower'.

[myaibou]

I have a friend who's a professional writer, and he calls critiques (even ones that are on the mark and worded kindly) "death by a thousand cuts." It never gets any easier to be critiqued or rejected. I haven't read your Pony stories, but given your other work, I think you're probably right about which comments to consider and which to ignore (the reader not given time bit.)

Trust yourself. You're a good enough writer to know when a critique has a valid point and when their subjective opinion is just that, or even when they don't know what they're talking about.