A few weeks ago, a friend of mine read the first short novel I'd published and told me that she was going to pass it on to her son-in-law who is an editor at a large publishing house. I was skeptical at first, and once again, I allowed my fear to cancel out what should have been joy at knowing that she thought my work good enough to show to this man. When I hadn't heard back from her after a few weeks, I decided that he'd probably taken a look at it, had decided that it wasn't worth his time, and she was just too nice to hurt my feelings by telling me so.
As it turned out, that wasn't the case at all, for about a week ago, I got an email from him that she forwarded to me in which he informed me what he thought the book needed. He also told me that it had promise, was well developed, and well written, and he had just three problems with it: it's too short, and I should expand and elaborate more upon two key sections of it in order to grow it into a full-length novel.
Having nothing to lose at that point, I replied to him directly to thank him for his time and his suggestions and to ask if he'd consider my book again if I were to develop it into a novel. I am now awaiting his reply, as I have other projects to work on in the meantime. I may, however, just go ahead with expanding it, and then seeing if I can publish it elsewhere if I either don't hear from him and I do and his answer is that he wouldn't be interested.
I suspect that I should be seeing this as valuable information, for I doubt that many writers get this kind of impromptu unsolicited feedback from any editor. And if he feels this strongly and actually took the time to share his thoughts with me, then I'd be foolish to ignore his suggestions and just let the project lie there unfinished.
It seems that I have resolved my own dilemma simply by rehashing it out here in this blog. Funny how that works...
https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS/
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