Also, Jesse, if/when I ever finish, I'd trust you to beta me cause we like the same kinds of mysteries and stuff.

erika, you know what I want, and want desperately?

I want you to craft your own detective/s. I want your take on them. I want you to write them, hardboiled and tender and tough and snarky and just the way you're writing the H:LOTS detectives, but I want them to be yours.

Because you do it so very very well, damn it. And you can't publish or get paid using these guys. And anyway, I want to see where your characters go, how they eat and sleep and kill and catch and hump and all the rest of it.

Write me a detective, your detective. Me want now.

I'm crafting as fast as I can, as it happens. Thanks for the vote of confidence.(Still cursing the universe for not making me a twenty-year-old television prodigy, but I think maybe that would not be a kind of writing you could get till life beats up on you anyway.) In which case, I'm qualified now.

Aw, thanks erika. I love to read your stuff! I just don't know that I could give anything constructive, not being a fiction writer.

It's true that writers give other writers different sorts of advice, but I'm going to need a reader to gauge my suspense, tell me if I give the ending away too fast...junk like that. But that might be a year from now.

I'm crafting as fast as I can, as it happens.

Right here for anything needed, bebe.

erika, I would be more than happy to provide feedback on any original fiction you care to write.

Deb, insent with comments.

Cool! Thanks. I've just not been ready to show it around yet...putting in crazy, redball-like amounts of time however.(Although not, of course, around the clock.) Meanwhile trying to convince myself it's not a Big Deal, because my big deals? End badly. Not quite "Congratulations on your nuptials, Detective Munch." badly, but...

Heh.

Anne, received, and backflung.

The thing is, I want the intro to feel a bit distant. It's the only time in the whole story I'm not in the hero or heroine's head, and I feel like I can only get by with it if it's short and different in tone and style from the way I write non-omniscient. If this were a movie, this whole scene would play out while the credits were still rolling (or whatever the credit-like stuff at the front is called), shot from long to middle distance, with no dialogue whatsoever. I don't want to stretch it out because it's only there for two reasons: to kill off the heroine's husband as quickly as possible so readers/editors won't be turned off by having her be married, and to set it up so the reader knows he's dead before Anna does. Since she spends a good deal of the first scene reflecting on her unhappy marriage and how she's dreading seeing Sebastian again because he's going to be angry about X and disappointed about Y, I like having that there.

Anyway. Obviously this isn't quite where it needs to be, because the majority of people aren't reacting to it the way I intend. But to me the brevity and distance of it is kinda the point, so I'm not sure how to fix it.