Three things I've found extremely helpful as I've been polishing WIPs into something actually ready to share with the world.

1: Alpha Readers outside your genre (and support group)

- I have a few die hard readers who read everything I write and I love them! They help me spot major issues, give me a barometer reading of the character likability, the plot's believability and integrity, ect. They however had read 30+ of my projects over the years and they will always find something to love. 

- Readers who don't pick up my stuff on the regular offer a perspective that helps to shift my thinking. They ask questions like 'why?' the story is written the way it as or should a character act or say the things I've made them do. What I find is there are some decisions I've made that I'll fight for because I know they are important to the story. 'He talks like that because he's from South Tennessee and it's the only reason his ex-roomate recognizes his voice over the garbled phone call that queues the police to save him from the time-traveling nazis'. There are plenty of other times when their feedback helps me take a step back from the story I've bonded with and assess it with clean eyes, and usually sure enough there is a way to tighten, trim, refine for a better product.

2: When you get stuck, don't just keep bashing it.

- This might seem somewhat intuitive, but not to me. I'll be reworking a piece of diologue or a description and it just doesn't come out how I want. For years I've kind of knuckled down and kept at it until I was usually extremely frustrated or I vivisected the pages to the point it wasn't worth reading anymore and went back to the previous version anyway.

- Editing is HUGE, but when you get stuck just mark it to come back to and keep going. There is a good chance you'll find something a chapter or two later that sparks a sudden inspiration to correct the problem.

3: AI isn't the devil

- While generative AI to put pages out is about as useful as trying to paint a Monet with a blind cat as your brush it does have some huge time saving uses.

- I like to feed it my chapter, book, or series and have it looks for things like dropped sub-plots, weak characters, inaccurate science. I also love using it as a tough editor. I'll feed it a chapter and say something like read this like you're a publishing house editor and tell me what doesn't work, what isn't as good as the last chapter, and how would I need to fix it? THIS IS NOTHING NEW - Same thing you'd ask a good friend and or yourself as you self-edited, but it makes it about 100% faster to go from a completed WIP to something that just might be marketable.

Just wanted to share a few tips that have really helped me over the last couple projects!

- KD