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BWFoster78
Myth Weaver
I guess we should make sure we're talking about the same thing (as you said, there are threads on this). From the standpoint of technical proficiency, your writing is there. It's ready. If you spend a lot of time making sure you have the perfect world, or adjusting sentence ever so slightly to see if they can't read better than they already do, I think you're spinning your wheels, personally. You may disagree. But I still look at story-telling a bit differently. How do you put together the sequence of events in your story; how do you make the reader actually care what happens to the reader; how do you make the reader get to the end of a chapter and instead of going to bed say "OK, one more." Those things are the keys, in my view. To mention Connelly again, he's a master at it. You don't want to put his stuff done. Same with Robert Crais, who also writes detective-style stories set in Los Angeles.
At this point, I think I'm pretty much where I want to be technically (though I think I'll continue to learn and improve for the rest of my life). I spent a lot of time getting there, and I think the people on this board helped a lot by patiently (mostly anyway) answering my questions and debating me. I had to go through that process to move on.
At this point, I'm more focused on what I think you would consider story elements - making the characters relateable, injecting (hopefully) the right amount of emotion, adding tension where it's lacking, etc.