An unexpected and humbling review.
I discovered this lovely review on Amazon. It made me wonder if I’m a better writer than I think I am. When you’re reading a sweet, tender story of romance, you don’t expect to be on pavements with holes in them, or at bus stops, or held in the routines of the morning’s commute, and you certainly don’t expect that setting to contribute to the story’s charm. That, however, is exactly what Tahlia Newland has achieved here. There are just two characters, each with a self-image that’s far from flattering. The girl thinks she has ‘thunder thighs’ and an expanding waistline and yet she ‘can’t give up eating ice cream’. The man sees her as a goddess and himself as an ordinary mortal. He suspects she finds his bow tie unfashionable but to her, it’s cute. And so the story develops in this world of ‘rusty fences, cracked paths, faded…
Have you ever asked yourself – is it good enough?
At various points in their careers every artist, and probably everyone with an assignment or presentation to hand in, will ask themselves this question and it’s just hit me (again) because I have a story all ready to roll out to the world. I’ve had it professionally edited and I’ve formatted it beautifully using HTML, ( a fun learning curve) so it looks better than a lot of ebooks I’ve read, and now I’m asking myself, is it good enough? This is the quandary of any author whose work hasn’t been picked up by a publisher. In this case, because we’re talking about one short story, I haven’t even submitted it, because no one publishes one short story. An anthology of short stories is coming next and I’m not submitting that to anyone either because no one publishes anthologies of short stories by new authors. So, how do you know…
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