Thanks for adding a very bright spot to my day.

You're definitely going to write those guys, definitely. This is the kind of thing you excel at -- almost-ordinary guys in extraordinary circumstances, acting all guy-like.

My werewolf book that I abandoned on page 100 (I used to do that a lot: wait, I still do) involved a sweet bartender who gets implicated in a raft of attacks, and the people who help him figure out who's really doing them and what to do with the person who is doing them.

My friend Jules Jones has written three shape-shifter novels, two about silkies and one about dolphins. (Silkies are Scottish folklore shapechanging seals)

You might like the rest of Jules' books too.

You might think about running the cop book past Loose Id yourself. The audience over there is mostly women, but they pay. Jules is making a respectable amount writing "smut romance science-fiction and fantasy."

Tob

I have read some of Jules stuff -- I rather liked her novella in A Kiss At Midnight. I don't think I ever said. Probably ought to dust off her e-mail address and go all fanboy at her at some point.

Loose-Id's on my list 'o places to submit the cop book to (now tentatively titled "Revenants and Shadows", which works better than Busted) once it's done. Rewrites are a pain, but unfortunately necessary. The thing reads much differently in one go-through than it does in bits and pieces. Better in some ways, not so good in others, but that's fine. I will polish the damn thing up to publication quality, and we'll see where it goes from there. Though as I'm only on the second chapter, I have no idea how long that's gonna take...

Priceless. Utterly priceless. I'm blinking away the tears of laughter so I can see to post this.

You, sir, are a profoundly talented individual, and I remain in awe of your prodigious ability.

hahahaha

...

hahahaha

I have read some of Jules stuff -- I rather liked her novella in A Kiss At Midnight. I don't think I ever said. Probably ought to dust off her e-mail address and go all fanboy at her at some point.

 

Loose-Id's on my list 'o places to submit the cop book to (now tentatively titled "Revenants and Shadows", which works better than Busted) once it's done. Rewrites are a pain, but unfortunately necessary. The thing reads much differently in one go-through than it does in bits and pieces. Better in some ways, not so good in others, but that's fine. I will polish the damn thing up to publication quality, and we'll see where it goes from there. Though as I'm only on the second chapter, I have no idea how long that's gonna take...

Busted is a much better title than Revenants and Shadows. Much better. Much much better. If you feel the need to include a reference to the supernatural in the title, make it with a verb in it, like maybe "seeing things" or something.

When you go all fanboy on Jules, also ask her to tell you a bit about the submission process at Loose Id, and tell her I told you to.

I was going to email you, but since you brought the subject up already...

Revenants... doesn't exactly grab me as a title. I have two suggestions that I came away with after reading through it: "Two-Souled" or something echoing the words "truth" or "real," such as "Truly." Why I picked these names will be evident as I criticize.

There was something odd that occurred to me when I tried to write a fake back cover copy for the book. Your story isn't one story. It is in fact two mystery stories, only one of which gets fully resolved by the last page. Complicating this is that the more central mystery, Alex's, is from the reader's point of view mostly solved from about two-fifths of the way through the story. Now the characters don't know what's up for some time, because they withhold information from each other, but we the reader are able to see the assumptions they all make about Alex and see those assumptions challenged quite early on. Specifically, Joe doesn't know Chris doesn't have a twin, Steve doesn't know Chris and Alex are quite definitely two separate people, and Chris doesn't believe (despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary) that it is possible for other people to interact with Alex. The mystery of the killings is typical of the genre, in that it doesn't really matter except to push the main characters to challenge and change themselves. That said, it is this secondary plot that actually remains a mystery for most of the book. Sadly, the nature of Coyote is not explicitly explained by the last act, so we are still left wondering what the hell is going on at the end. If you were tying it into a sequel, I wouldn't be so worried about that, but the plot pretty much just stops at end of this book, with no real incentive on the part of the characters to figure out what's going on, which implies the reader won't get to find out either.

My suggestion would be to emphasis Alex a bit more, possibly by marginalizing Chris, or at least Chris's introspections. In other words, let Joe with his ability to sense truth figure the whole thing out, rather than have the whole thing spoiled by Chris too early in the story. The other way to go would be to amp up Chris's role in the book at the expense of Joe and Alex, emphasizing the murders. I would be wary in doing that, because it has a great chance in taking the story somewhere you don't want it to go.

Anyways, that's what I came up with. Sorry it took so long.

And I like your werewolf short. The only werewolf story idea I've yet come up with is now the property of White Wolf, Inc, and so I won't ever be writing it. It is nice to have an excuse for my laziness for once.

Those are very good points, and things that had been vaguely nagging at me. (I was doing the readthrough a few days ago and realized that the Alex mystery was resolved far, far too early -- it's clearly the driving force of the story at the start so it shouldn't end where it does)

From a strictly practical standpoint that's because there was no B story when I started -- it was strictly a romance with some odd twists between Joe and Chris. The B story didn't spring into existence until I wrote the part where Joe found Stephanie in the bushes. The scene in the hospital where Joe and Chris have their split is in there because I didn't want to resolve their romance halfway through the book.

Having said that, it's no excuse for leaving things that way. At the end, the two major storylines are Joe and Chris' romance, and the murder mystery. Moreover we know that:

1) Alex is a projection of sorts of Chris'

2) The muderer is killing people at the new moon

3) The targets are all psychic

4) The muderer is the spirit of Chris' grandfather

I'm still thinking having the two stories together is necessary -- the murder mystery is what's keeping Chris and Joe together enough to resolve their issues. What I need to do (I think) is:

1) Get the murder mystery storyline started a lot sooner.

2) The feelings between Chris and Joe needs to be emphasized earlier

3) The thinness of Alex needs to be clear much sooner for Joe to do a compare'n'contrast.

4) The connection between the murders needs to be made clear to the characters earlier, and Joe needs to be seen to be a target sooner

5) The murderer's connection to Chris needs to be made clearer

6) The reason the murderer's so hot to get Joe needs to show up a lot sooner

(Chris's family gets the phantasms, Joe's family makes 'em real, basically)

I'm thinking this thing's going to end up rather long, and I'm going to end up going back and ripping one whole plot out to make it salable. Which is kind of a shame, since I like long books. But I'll leave that until it becomes necessary.

You will not have to rip out a whole plot. You can't, anyway: you need it all or it falls over.

I'm hoping not. Certainly not planning on ripping it out, since it's what keeps Joe and Chris together long enough to work things out, which is kinda important for the A story. (Though I'll grant an awful lot of these things have precious little plot, so it's not strictly necessary. I just don't want to write one of those stories)