These look nice. Have you watched Stan's boot demo? He shows a nice way to get your general layout started so that your subject fits nicely on your page. Kind of an oversimplified bounding box shape to start and then work into more and more detail.

Good improvement. I recommend trying it out without as visible of an outline, so you can pencil it in softly and then build your values over it until it's no longer standing out. This will help you practice value and edge control, and improve the 3D illusion of your drawing. I think the 2nd pear gets pretty close, though. And with the last pear, it's a good breakdown of the 5 values, I would just suggest darkening the 2nd darkest value (the one on the left edge of the pear) so it's closer to the darkest value than the light values. That way, the shadow area is more unified, but still has two separate values.