Dear Author
Backlog of review books means a lot of reading... which means a lot of headbanging and a few more installments of venting.
Dear Author:
The 1905 census puts the population of NYC at a touch over 4 million people. I haven't looked up theaters, but "more than one" is a very safe bet. Therefore, please to not have everybody meeting everybody else. With that many people, you can go out to three degrees of separation without losing the audience. Trust me.
But even more than that, please to be finding your heroine's brain. She had one once, but it seems to be on an extended vacation. My review is going to be snarky about the first point, but downright nasty about how Encyclopedia Brown could have solved this faster than your heroine, at least until she finally dropped the idiot stick.
Signed,
there's a reason I lose interest in series books somewhere between #5-#7
Dear Author:
There are ways to make a book-within-a-book work. For the record, your following choices are not among them:
1) Making the internal book a generic puzzle with generic characters who speak cliches of profound obviousness: "I fully expect that we're going to have to do a lot of digging to get at the truth." Le duh. Oh, and congratulations for being such an excellent example of Linnea's Law: There's Internet fanfiction better than some professionally published fiction.
2) Interrupting the internal action to describe such pulse-pounding "real-life" moments as the self manicure, the BLT sandwich, the haircut, the second manicure, the spilled nail polish, and the bubble bath.
And bad as those are, there's nothing as flat-out dealbreaking as your worst-of-both-options choice:
3) Having the "real" character spend several pages summarizing the actions of the "fictional" ones.
I am a woman reading a mystery book, and therefore consider it profoundly redundant to be told all about the experiences of a woman reading a mystery book. (Especially if, given the choice, I'd frankly enjoy myself more with the manicures, sandwich, or bath.) Still, if you consider it okay to gloss over the story, I'm going to return the favor, because at this point, the only reason I'm slogging through this dog is the pleasure of writing the negative review.
Signed,
It's not helping that your detective is also holding the idiot stick.
Dear Author:
The 1905 census puts the population of NYC at a touch over 4 million people. I haven't looked up theaters, but "more than one" is a very safe bet. Therefore, please to not have everybody meeting everybody else. With that many people, you can go out to three degrees of separation without losing the audience. Trust me.
But even more than that, please to be finding your heroine's brain. She had one once, but it seems to be on an extended vacation. My review is going to be snarky about the first point, but downright nasty about how Encyclopedia Brown could have solved this faster than your heroine, at least until she finally dropped the idiot stick.
Signed,
there's a reason I lose interest in series books somewhere between #5-#7
Dear Author:
There are ways to make a book-within-a-book work. For the record, your following choices are not among them:
1) Making the internal book a generic puzzle with generic characters who speak cliches of profound obviousness: "I fully expect that we're going to have to do a lot of digging to get at the truth." Le duh. Oh, and congratulations for being such an excellent example of Linnea's Law: There's Internet fanfiction better than some professionally published fiction.
2) Interrupting the internal action to describe such pulse-pounding "real-life" moments as the self manicure, the BLT sandwich, the haircut, the second manicure, the spilled nail polish, and the bubble bath.
And bad as those are, there's nothing as flat-out dealbreaking as your worst-of-both-options choice:
3) Having the "real" character spend several pages summarizing the actions of the "fictional" ones.
I am a woman reading a mystery book, and therefore consider it profoundly redundant to be told all about the experiences of a woman reading a mystery book. (Especially if, given the choice, I'd frankly enjoy myself more with the manicures, sandwich, or bath.) Still, if you consider it okay to gloss over the story, I'm going to return the favor, because at this point, the only reason I'm slogging through this dog is the pleasure of writing the negative review.
Signed,
It's not helping that your detective is also holding the idiot stick.