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With my query letter to agents hoping to gain representation for my paranormal horror novel Outrageous Fortune failing to entice interest, I turned to some help getting a review and feedback on the letter and the first 5000 words of the manuscript.

I have never been one of those writers who is terribly precious about their work. I want people to like the stuff, and I sincerely hope that people who read my work are entertained, perhaps moved, and maybe even come away thinking about the world in a slightly different manner, but critiques and criticisms are a part, an unavoidable part, of any creative’s journey.

That said, one should not blithely ignore feedback, nor should one accept it uncritically either. There is a skill, a vital one, in interpreting feedback and knowing what it might be saying about the work and just what might not be successfully coming across to a reader.

When I got this particular piece of feedback, I could see what the person had in their mind and why in their professional opinion the pages were just barely below the threshold that they would need to have more requested for an agent’s review. They read the character as having no immediate goal, no forward drive. Which is fair, the character at the start of the story is floating in a charmed and blessed life where everything goes their way. Their dice rolls always comes up ‘sevens’. the story is the disruption of that life and what it reveals to be the truth behind it to the character. I can’t say that were wrong, their opinion seemed valid and their concern genuine, but I also saw difficulty in implementing any revision that might address this perceived shortcoming. Mind you they made no specific suggestions as to specific revisions, no goal for the character to chase or inner conflict that might be driving them, only what they saw as feature lacking that agents required.

Then, while playing Dominion online with my sweetie-wife Tuesday evening, a possible solution exploded in my noggin. It would not require a new scene but an alteration of an existing one very early on in the first chapter, it would bequest to the protagonist some forward momentum with a concrete goal for him to strive for, expand a little more on the environment of 1984 San Diego, and expound on the character’s moral grounding. All with what promises to be just a few short paragraphs. Between an A.I, powered search and a KPBS article from a decade and a half ago, I found the information I required to execute the idea. Fixing this issue and possibly breaking through to the next level of interest from agents would make a terrific birthday gift to myself.