Writing by JKim1@Flickr

In preparation for shipping Suzie’s Nightmare around to different agents, I decided to give it to a few friends and get them to read it over. Get their impressions of the plot, the characters, the storyline. In his book On Writing, Stephen King sends out his burgeoning manuscripts to numerous fellow writers and readers he knows to get their opinion. I wish I could do that, but I just don’t know that many that I trust in the area. I work in web development after all, not writing. So I gave a copy to a friend, my sister, and my mom: all of whom are avid readers and seemed really enthusiastic about my piece. So far the friend has been afk regarding the document, my sister is putting it off until she’s out of “grading mode” from spring semester, and my mom just now finished it.

She called me yesterday and was railing about how good it was. That’s how impressed she was with it.

Claiming it was one of the best written books she’s come across in a long time, and how it was difficult to put down from midpoint to the end. Can you imagine how excited that makes me? Now I’m not getting my hopes up here, and she swears up and down that she’d let me know if it was bad, but I have to still hold her review a little skeptically simply because well… she’s my mom! But at the same time I’m thrilled that the first real feedback I get is one of raving review! She pointed out a few plot holes that need plugging and a few details that need to be added, but that’s certainly not difficult to do.

Now comes the difficult job of shopping it around to a few agents. I’ll probably be doing edits to the manuscript and working on the next book while shopping it around. Hopefully I get a few interested bites here. Still have to write a short synopsis of the book, which is going to be difficult considering how detailed the plot becomes. Still, it might get me primed for writing more on the sequel.