No Pain, No Gain

Here are my two critiques from the ABNA contest I entered my book in. One is from Sue Monk Kidd, the other from Sue Grafton.

...The excerpt from "The Garden" is a bit uneven at times, but it is very, very promising. I had the impression that the author is very talented, but just in need of a little polish and seasoning. "The Garden" is a first person narrative about Leta, a young, bipolar college student as she navigates through life. The writing here is very good. Leta's voice is particularly strong, clear and consistent. The piece is also generally smartly written. In certain instances, however, I felt that sentences could be strengthened and tightened. Sometimes the phrasing was a bit meandering, sometimes a better word choice would have been more approrpriate. There is good use of detail--enough to make it interesting, but without too much to bog the narrative down. While the plot has not yet been developed in full in this excerpt, the writing and the narrator's voice are so unique and compelling, that I wanted to keep on reading...

...To be a writer one needs to have an overlarge ego. This is a given. If you don't, there's no need to write. The ONLY reason for writing (outside of writing in your own diary), is your belief that somebody else will, not only read what you've written, but, more important, WANT to read what you've written. Moreover, they will see in your writing something that will, in some way large or small, change their life. It can be as small as giving the reader a brief respite in an otherwise dull, troubled, problematic, life. It can be as large as changing the reader's life for good and all. Most likely, it will be between the two extremes. "The Garden" (a title that, deliberately or not, evokes Sylvia Plath's unpromised Rose Garden) gives us a picture of a bi-polar personality that, I am perfectly willing to assume, is accurate. Further, I'm willing to assume that it is a portrait of its author. Hence its accuracy. It is written (quite well, in fact) with the authorial egotism that says we readers will be interested because the author, symptoms, both, are so interesting that we'll want to keep reading. They aren't. We don't...

Okay, so on one hand, yay. On the other hand, OUCH.
Because I received two reviews from the actual author judges, this shows that I was in the top 1000 novels, which means I was 500 novelists away from making the cut... out of 10,000! Not too shabby.
Still, OUCH.