( continues...) meet him?” Shimmer asked.
“Twice. He busted me once, sent me under the sea. Never saw it coming, man, he was just…bam! There, you know? And I just…Hemlock tried her power on him, but I just stood there and looked at him and…I gave up. What can you do against…?”
“Yeah. Saved my life once, he did.”
“No shit?”
Shimmer refilled my glass and we silently toasted again. After we drank, he said “Yeah. When we held the Empire State Building hostage, me and Alpha Dog and Jericho Jim. I was doing my thing, hiding us, when the Virtue Brigade crashes the party. Turned out the Insidious Nine’s take-over of the Mons Olympus observatory got taken care of pretty quick and they’d hitched a ride home on a nearby I’kularr cruiser.”
“When was this?”
“’85. So, we think we’re home free, nobody but second-rate capes in town and goddamn if Pallas herself didn’t come busting through the wall. Jericho blows his damn horn, walls are crumbling, glass everywhere, that weirdo StarTracker had blown through my illusions like fucking nothing and I ran for it.
“Just as I’m headed out the door, Jericho gives another toot and I’m blown out onto the observation deck. Except the barricades are rubble and on their way to the street below and half a second later, so am I.
“Man, I screamed like a little girl. 86 stories up, that deck, and I’m headed down without an elevator.”
“I’d scream too. Probably shit myself.” I shuddered, thinking about it. I hate heights.
“Anyway, all I see then is a quick blur of red, gold and blue and then there’s something hard around my middle and I’m going up. And he’s got me. He even says that: ‘I’ve got you.’ And I felt okay. You know? Like when you’re a kid and you get scared and your dad says ‘I’ve got you.’ Safe.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember being a kid.”
“Oh. Sorry. Anyway, I knew I was going to be okay. Not great , because once He’s got you you’re got , man, and I knew I was gonna do time, but I wasn’t going to die. Not that day.”
“Yeah."
“Yeah.”
The red light over the door blinked. Shimmer checked a monitor behind the bar and buzzed the door open. King Kraken lumbered in, his scales rasping against one another. He blinked his yellow slit-irised eyes at us.
“You guys hear?” he rumbled.
Shimmer nodded toward the TVs. Kraken grunted and shambled over to the bar.
“What are you guys drinking?”
“Glen Garioch, ’58,” Shimmer answered.
Kraken whistled through his gills. “Heavy stuff. You celebrating…?”
“No,” I said, curt.
Kraken nodded his heavy head. “He took me out in ’93,” the fish-man rasped. “Defused a bomb I had no right using while he was at it. Probably saved my life, not to mention…”
“Yeah,” Shimmer said. And he produced another tumbler.

So it's ... sci-fi? I mean, it's not my kind of thing, but it seems like a decent hook for opening a novel like that.

It's...comic books. And sci-fi.

I don't know.

I love it! It's got a very Kurt Busiek feel, like that alternate perspective on the superhero world that he does in all his comics. Which I dig muchly.

One minor criticism: I think the paragraph that starts "Shimmer’s Place, the bar in which I sat and hoped for a gig...." runs too long. I mean the writing is terrific, but it's too much exposition, and adds very little to the scene. But that's just my opinion.

How about...

Shimmer’s Place, the bar in which I sat and hoped for a gig, ran a wall of TV’s, all of them constantly tuned to the various news outlets. Shimmer had become a true info-junkie after he busted out of St. Lawrence Meta-Medium; he was convinced that Maximan was able to find him through data-mining all the news sources in real-time using Professor Highbrow’s Ultimac computer. His wall was his way of seeing if he was being tracked. Which was stupid, because it was more likely that Shimmer's own incompetence was what had got him busted.

Yes, perfect.

Hey Joe-- I thought it had an interesting beginning-- I really liked the opening line-- gives a very immediate feel, like you're about to be dropped right into some very interesting action.

Thing is, though, with respect to your actual question, "would I buy it something that starts like this?" is that you put it out there too baldly. Since on just a pure read, it seems sort of like a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic piece and those aren't genres I'm familiar with-- for me to want to read it, I have to have some idea what it is.

So you has to give at least a little context before anything else, the same way anyone going into a bookstore or an editor looking at a proposal would have context. Make sense?

Yeah, I guess.

I was just feeling tentative about continuing with it and was hoping for a "AWESOME! I will give you four million dollars to finish it!". Well, not really, but you know.

I'm just gonna go ahead and keep writing and see what happens, I guess. As usual.

Honey, we ALL want awesome and I will give you four million dollars to finish it. *g*

FWIW, I think it's really engaging, I just have to know WHAT I'm reading in order to give a fair assessment.

By all means, keep writing-- see what happens. It's what we do, babe. I swear.

It's...comic books. And sci-fi.

Like, you want it to be a comic book? Or it's using comic book-like characters?

Either way, nothing to do but write if it's interesting you right now, you know? You need to let it grow, figure out what the plot is, all that.