I have no idea how/when Miss Snark found/had the time or the patience - but she deserves a medal for reading and judging 103 synops from unpublished writers and writing up critiques for all but 4 that she said were just too awful to bother with.
An amazing effort.
Newbies everywhere should read this.
And as part of my New Year's resolution, in my effort to get more people hearing about more books, I'm going to post what I've been reading - as long as I liked the book. Hopefully I'll do a book a week. But certainly I'll manage two a month.
Most recent read: Killing Rainby Barry Eisler. Fourth in the John Rain series. What's not to love about an existential hit man who talks philosophy? Plus Eisler does place as well as anyone I can think of. You aren't reading about Manilla or Tokyo - you are there. Not to mention his rare but rare sex scenes.
And indulge me but the book trailer for my newest novel is now live: The Delilah Complex
MJ, thanks for the kind words about KR. I'm very much looking forward to The Delilah Complex after my Jan 16 deadline. As for the sex scenes, you know Ruth and Jon Jordan dictate those as memoirs, I just type 'em up and change the names...
:-)
Barry
Posted by: Barry Eisler | January 03, 2006 at 12:27 PM
Hypper New Year ...
I look forward to all that buzzy, ballish reading this year.
If nothing else I read I shall read The Delilah Complex ... Your books are making me more aware of the darkness in any bedvour ;-)
What good is a life that doesn’t experience some trace of all possible lives? What’s the point of being only who we are? Indeed, and this is why we read.
Virginia Satir once said: "We connect through our similarities. We grow through our differences." If we weren't so similar, we wouldn't be able to talk to each other. If we weren't so different, we wouldn't have anything to talk about.
Posted by: Jozef Imrich | January 04, 2006 at 06:28 AM
M. J.,
Happy New Year, and all the best for 2006, including success with Delilah. As a good news note for you, I live in Ottawa, Ontario, in Canada, and your books are in our library. I've followed your success story since the beginning, when you first self-published, marketed like crazy, wrote articles for Wired News. Even then, you encouraged other writers, including our small Canadian group, Canadian eAuthors. All of it definitely paid off, and I'm really glad for you.
I love the trailer for Delilah! What a fantastic idea, to combine the visual with the written word. After this, I want to go out and buy the book.
Posted by: M. D. Benoit | January 04, 2006 at 07:05 AM
Happy new year! The Delilah trailer is great.
Mine was one of the 99 (wow!) synopses Ms. Snark critiqued. She is a real gift to aspiring writers.
Posted by: Dr.Sue | January 05, 2006 at 06:41 AM