Whew! What A Relief!

[Keith Raffel]

My agent has read the manuscript of Book 2. I will not be doing any bridge-jumping this week.

When I was in business (i.e., up till two weeks ago), I regularly did written performance reviews for the people who reported to me. For the best people, the reviews would run three pages, the first 2-and-three-quarters of which would be praise. There would be one paragraph, maybe two, near the end, mentioning one or two areas that could use improvement and providing suggestions on how to attain it. Needless to say, in our discussion, the employee would focus on those few sentences containing (what I hoped was) constructive criticism and not the extensive praise.

With Randi's comments on Book 2, I am turning this procedure upside down. I am focusing on a few words at the beginning of her comments rather than the longer constructive criticism that follows. Those few beginning words: the novel "is really well written and compulsively readable." Something to hang on to during the days and weeks of rewriting ahead.

[J.D. Rhoades]

When i got the editor's notes for GOOD DAY IN HELL, I loved the first few paragraphs about how the editor really liked it, they always worry that the second book won't be as good as the first but they thought this was was even better, I had a great career ahead of me...then six pages of "you might want to change this."

So yeah,. it's a little different.