Book?

I’ve probably said before that it’s a good thing I can’t respond to reviews on Amazon. Otherwise, I’d probably have one of those late-night incidents where I’m fortified by liquid courage and say something I shouldn’t. There’s a review from earlier this week about Next Time that isn’t bad and if I could respond, would actually be thoughtful and not a rant. The gist of the review was that Next Time was too long, could have been a short story, and didn’t need some of the characters. That part about being a short story is something I really do ask myself when it comes to writing a book: is this story worthy of being a book? Is it worth several months of my life to write, rewrite, edit, and publish? In the case of Next Time, the answer to those questions was a resounding yes. When I got the idea for the story I knew I had to write it, and it wasn’t going to be short. Besides, if I wrote a short story, how many people would end up reading it? Hundreds? It’s not like the short story market is any easier to get into than finding an agent or publishing with one of the big houses. Was the book too long? First clocked in at 125,000 words, while Next Time ended up around 85,000. Heck, I thought writing a book that concise was a major achievement. Useless characters? Again, those were deliberate choices. I used the Boston detectives in the first part of the story as an on-ramp for the later, more serious Federal investigation. It would’ve been jarring to have a Fed show up out of the blue and raised the question of why nobody else had previously investigated Miriam’s disappearances. And William’s deadbeat brother-in-law added color to the different timestreams - while William lived a stop-and-go life with Miriam, his sister Addie had the off-camera drama with Luke. Their turmoil provided contrast to the main love story with the message that other people lived a normal life and even without the challenges experienced by the main characters, sometimes that life and love weren’t pretty. William was mostly oblivious to the growing gap in his sister’s marriage, which helped illustrate his character and single-mindedness when it came to Miriam. I don’t normally respond to reviews, but I found this one interesting because the disagreements are things I consciously planned and executed, and I’d do it the same way again.