Finally free of the WIP...

I finally finished my WIP. I've been working on it since October, so it's taken me the better part of five months to write this thing. That's unusual for me. It's called Airborne at the moment and it involves a new cast of characters, a new universe, tackles new genres (for me) and wanted to be told from a new POV (for me).

Having said that, maybe five months isn't so bad after all.

"Omniscient" POV
I posted a sample scene from Airborne and got a little feedback on it. One of the aspects pointed out to me was that the POV is omniscient. The critiquer mentioned that omni needs to be done "really, really well" to work and didn't care for it in this sample.

OK, she didn't like my omni voice. That's fine. What nagged at me was that is has to be done "really, really well" -- for some reason, I've heard this un-useful bit of advice a thousand times -- and avoided like the plague otherwise.

How in the heck are you supposed to learn to write omniscient if you "can't" unless it's "really, really good"...? We all need to practice. We all need training wheels. And it's not like you have to sound like a 19th-century author if you're going to use an omniscient POV. What does 21st-century omniscience sound like anyways? (I'm willing to bet it sounds like social media.)

I have shelves of "how-to-write" books just like anyone else, though I'll admit I haven't cracked one open in years. The questions of what omniscient is and how it's done is sending be back to the shelves. Should I have done that before I wrote Airborne? No, I don't think so. Better to revise a shitty first draft than to analyze yourself into paralysis before writing it.

Misrepresentation?
The critiquer also pointed out that I billed Airborne as an "urban fantasy medical thriller" but there's nothing medical or thrilling going on in the scene. True. Guilty. But it is urban fantasy, at least. I'm fairly sure I got that part of the novel right though the rest is open to debate.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure where this scene should go in the story but it does need to be somewhere near the front.