Back in April, I posted about and linked to Mary W. Walters, the writer who couldn’t find an agent and considered them all horse-riding snakes who were ruining publishing for everyone else.
Well, last night I upgraded to WordPress 2.8, and it promptly pinged her website. She posted in the comments, putting up her query pitch and first chapter for my comments.
Maybe it was the shock of seeing an actual comment on my website (as opposed to my LJ), but I thought I’d give it a swing.
I don’t write this note because I want folks to rush over and give her advice. She asked me, specifically, and while I suspect it was as much of a “let’s see what you’ve got” request as “how could this be better” I hope I was useful. If you want to post a comment disagreeing with something I said, that’s great (in fact, I really really want people to disagree with me–if we can be polite to each other, I may learn a little something). But please don’t offer a crit unless the author specifically requests one.
No, I write this note because damn, that took a long time, and I didn’t even clean up the crit after I wrote it. I keep forgetting how much energy those take. I don’t think I’m going to be doing a lot of that in the future.