murder.booklocker.com

I’ve been holding my breath for weeks now it seems, waiting for someone to give me feedback on my novel. Well, at long last someone has. Unfortunately her comments are anonymous (I was told it was a “her” and that she’s the exercise instructor at the Park Ridge Senior Center).

I appreciate the time she took to type her remarks and pass them on to the center director. But I’ve definitely got mixed feelings about what she said. I’ve posted the full text of the review on my website, but since she did say one nice thing, I thought I would include it here:

“A Senior Center Murder was a fast read, held my interest and was cleverly written.”

The rest of her comments highlight those negative thoughts that come pounding fast and furious once you put something out there. “What if they don’t get it?” is perhaps the most prominent. I would think that with anything of a psychological nature, where you try to get into someone else’s head and capture that in language, there’s a lot of room for getting it wrong. I don’t think that I did. I do think that judging by her response that I just might have gotten it right. For instance:

“The characters were fictional and yet … I did not care for the feeling it left me about them.” (ellipsis mine).

Since my Stetson-wearing detective is as charming as can be and the center director is as caring, etc. blah blah blah — it can’t be that the reader didn’t like them. No, she didn’t like the seniors. I think this is particularly interesting because she is one. Which means, if I understand her feelings correctly, that she hopes to high heaven that no one in actuality is like these people I wrote about. They are not like anything that she sees in the mirror or around her.

This, of course, was my dilemma. No one likes to think that the people they sit across from while playing cards would be capable of murder. Nonetheless people, including seniors are capable. I certainly never said that all seniors were like this, or even that I knew of any in real life at the Park Ridge center or anywhere else. But I’ve heard the grudges and resentment muttered here and there. Using those, I leaned on them a little harder and in the novel it came out as murder.

It would be interesting to know how she felt about the portrayal of the victims: Gordon Williams, an average nice guy, a bit too enthusiastic for some people’s taste; Sheila Marshall, long-time activist, darned independent, fiercely loyal to the center; Ben Wilson, computer guru, baritone in the chorus, master of ceremonies for the variety show; Leonard Zabo, retired union carpenter and leader of the woodcarving group; and Sophie Wagner, imaginative artist and teacher.