cherydactyl

A friend gave me a manuscript copy of his first novel (heh) to read, so I can be a first reader. I'm the only non-relative he has given it too. I feel pretty honored by that, though partly I wonder whether it isn't that he trusts my big fat mouth to tell him what I *really* think. ;-) I haven't gotten far, only to page 9, but I'm hooked. It has some similarities to Karl Schroeder's Ventus, and has hints that it may later remind me of Kiln People by David Brin as well. I enjoyed both of those. Er, well, *mostly* enjoyed in the case of Kiln People. The ending of that one was just a little off for my tastes. Anyway, I'm really geeked about reading the rest of it. I wonder if I'll try to blow through it this weekend, like I did HP7. Probably, but I can't devote a solid block of time to it and nothing else, it's too busy a weekend coming up.

My little copy-editing gene or whatever is egging me on to make nitpicky notes on the manuscript, but the vast majority of them can and probably should be ignored. It's more that I'm writing down all the stuff I usually think about when I read, ephemera about typos and clarity and brevity and stuff as well noting things that may be foreshadowing or may be distractions, depending on what comes later. There are two or three notes in the margin that could translate to "awesome!" about particular bits about the world or some wordplay. We'll see if my penciled thought-regurgitations are of any use, I guess.

BTW,