The first batch of feedback has arrived from my readers, half a dozen thus far, and already a few bells have gone off. Some, I expected, because they echoed my own thoughts -- stuff I knew I needed to fix. Others called to attention things I hadn't thought about much, and some of those are already being incorporated. (Rather than wait for every report to come in, I am rewriting on the fly, plugging things in that I know need to be done regardless of what else shows up on my doorstep. My method of doing this is to address the material in a stand-alone scene, which I will later meld into the manuscript where it needs to go, with some revisions to smooth the edges and all. One joy of a computer file is that you can cut-and-paste, way better than a having to completely redraft stuff as in the old typewriter days. When those are done and entered, another pass to repair and polish things and then it's off to my agent.)
I won't get too specific yet with what I'm hearing in the private emails, I'll wait and offer a posting later that explains those, what makes sense, and what doesn't. But be assured that I have read all the input so far with as open a mind as I can manage, and that I'm considering all the opinions.
Given the number, I will bundle them up here rather than try to respond to each reader by email.
Having been in a book club, and a few writing workshops over the years, I've learned that no two people read the same novel. That what turns one reader off will sometimes be what delights another; that if you scratch five experts and ask them a question, you are as apt to get five different responses as you are unity. It's always interesting to see what works for some and doesn't for others.
Gun, guitar, knife, and computer porn are all being evaluated and reconsidered. Amusing to see, when you have an audience of martial artists and computer geeks, what revs their engines ...
Stand by ...
So we have gun porn, knife porn, guitar porn, silat porn, and computer porn. Oh yeah, and a sex scene...
ReplyDeleteBTW, if you put in a knife training scene, don't forget the red silicone spatulas.
If only we had cut in paste back when writing term papers in college, eh?
ReplyDeleteUpdate:
ReplyDeleteGotten more responses -- about half of the readers have responded thus far, which is a pretty good rate of return -- probably not everybody who got a copy will get back to me, if experience holds true.
I'm getting some good stuff, which I am incorporating as it shows up. Another week or so, I expect I'll have enough in that there won't be any surprises left.
As a general FYI, if I put something that is historically recorded into a book -- like the trek over the mountain passes from Tibet into India, it is as accurate as I can make it. I stretch some things for fiction, such as what Jampel did on the mountain, of course.
To the reader who pointed out that there were surveillance satellites that might have spotted the lamas, not as far as I can tell. The only countries capable of lifting stuff into orbit in '59 were the U.S. and the U.S.S.R -- and between the two of them, they had only put five up by then, not counting the moon flybys, and those sats didn't do much of anything but go round and round and beep and count cosmic rays. No optics capable of picking up a bunch of folks traipsing about in the mountains to say, Oh, look, it's the Dalai Lama ...
(Of those sats, all but one had already dropped out of the sky by 1959. And the Chinese didn't get anything up until 1970.)
The rewrites are progressing -- some things have been added, others trimmed, and bits here and there explained perhaps a bit better.
I'll wait a bit and then do a posting with a final update explaining what I did and why, for those who might be curious.