Melissa Grant Writes

I thought about just starting this one off with a line of ha-has, but that’s not very literary, is it?

Throughout my short process of writing Cloudia for the first time (foreshadowing), I showed it to a few people, and they all thought it was fabulous! After YEARS of writing about city council meetings and little Jimmy’s accomplishments in the state finals of some sport I knew nothing about, did I allow myself to be completely rizzed up by a few compliments from well-meaning friends?

I absolutely did.

I have a friend/ex dog-walking client/author who told me about Submittable, “an online platform that thousands of organizations use to collect and review submissions and applications,” saying she had used it to submit her finished manuscript to writing contests and had won one.

She told me I should too, and maybe someone would see how fabulous it was and I would be discovered! So I did and had some early success: 2nd place in my first contest, longlisted in another, a semifinalist in one and a finalist in two more!

I was going to be the next JK Rowling! Without all that virulent anti-trans nonsense. Look at me!

Coming back down to earth, I realized there was some serious editing to do and that I wanted more people to read it. So, I started looking online for beta readers, a new term to me.

Some felt VERY snooty and made me feel like I had just wandered in off the street (Melissa, you ACTUALLY kind of did in this context); some felt very cliquey and high school (not a great memory for gangly, dorky me), and some felt like literary Reddit (if you know, you know), but eventually settled on one.

Scribophile is a writing group that is “focused on getting you feedback for your manuscript.” I think it’s about 15 bucks a month, doable, so I joined and started critiquing others to earn karma points, which then allows you to post your own work.

It was hard work. In order to post around 4,000 words, you need 5 karma points, which meant critiquing maybe three to four other works of around 2,000 words, and then you could post one chapter at a time.

I had 32 chapters.

F*ck.

I still had a website to run, 65,000 people to inform, an ailing 96-year-old father-in-law to help care for, a dog, a husband…

A life.

I thought someone else would do all this…stuff.

Au contraire, Melissa.

I posted my first chapter in September 2025 and my last in May 2026. It took me nine long months. I joined a middle-grade group (I always want to slip and call it middle age, which is decidedly NOT correct) for consistency in my readership and connected with two people I really like.

I got some really good feedback, but at approximately one chapter a week (it’s all I could handle), it was difficult to get a flow going with my fellow group members’ chapters (I’m old, I forget things), and it was clear they had the same difficulties with mine. It wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped.

I mean, here I am critiquing their work and who the heck am I? Someone who wandered in off the street. Who are they? Do I take their advice? Is it correct? How do I know?

Meanwhile, I was getting a ton of ‘hybrid’ publishing offers from Submittable, which made my BS monitor go ding-ding-ding.

I still didn’t know if Cloudia truly was good or if, again, I was being rizzed up and wasting my time.

I don’t like wasting time.

I finally decided that if I was investing all this time, I needed to make sure it was worth it and talk to someone who hadn’t just wandered in off the street, an actual professional.

That’s where Tiffiny came in.