Read Online Holmes & Moriarty 02 - All She Wrote (MM) by Josh Lanyon - Free Book Online

and then Anna and Rudolph gave us their feedback.”

    The others concurred.

    “Okay, that’s fine by me.” I hastily dusted pastry crumbs from the stack of manuscripts.
    “Who wants to go first?”

    “I’ll go first,” Nella offered.

    “No, no,” Rowland said. “Save the best for last.”

    Nella blushed. The others looked less enchanted but tried to be pleasant about it.

    “I’ll go first,” Poppy said, clicking keys on her notebook. Everyone settled back, coffee cups and pastries in hand.

    Twenty shell-shocked minutes later no one was eating and Nella faintly excused herself to go to the washroom.

    “You’ve got balls, I’ll say that for you,” Arthur said. “Unlike that poor bastard in your story.”

    Poppy laughed heartily. She looked inquiringly around the table.

    Victoria said in her mild way, “Of course, I’ve read it before. I think this draft is cleaner, crisper.”

    “It seemed florid to me,” Rowland said, with unexpected aggression. “Too many adjectives and adverbs. Too many dialog tags. Too many exclamation points and italics. And I didn’t like the main character at all. If you’re going to start with something that violent and gross, you’ve lost me as a reader.”

    “You’re not my target audience.”

    “Who is your target audience?” Sara asked.

    Nella returned from the bathroom. Her face looked bloodless. Rowland smiled at her and she smiled weakly back.

    “My target audience is women readers and mystery readers.”

    Sara replied, “That’s too broad.”

    No pun intended? I held my tongue.

    “I get the feeling you don’t like men very much,” Arthur said, maybe reading my mind.

    “I’m not my characters or my story.”

    “I liked it,” Nella said faintly. The kid had courage.

    Poppy beamed at her.

    Sara stated in her precise way, “I think it’s violent, self-indulgent and unrealistic. The characters sound like characters in a book. And the entire book can’t be a flashback.”

    Poppy turned to me. “Can the entire book be a flashback?”

    “Uh…if you can make it work.”

    She turned away, satisfied.

    At that point the Asquith Circle took their gloves off, metaphorically speaking, and the critique began in earnest.

    In the end Rudolph merely had to say a few diplomatic generic comments, although when pinned, he straightforwardly admitted it was not a book he would buy.

    That left my turn. “It’s not a comfortable read,” I said, “but I don’t need a comfortable read so long as you make me care about the characters or tell a story so interesting I have to know how it all turns out. To be honest, that didn’t really happen for me here. I have to agree that the characters didn’t seem recognizably human.”

    I felt that was a gracious compromise to I’d prefer to claw my eyes out rather than read your work again. Poppy, unimpressed, curled her lip.

    “I don’t believe that woman would kill her husband,” Sara said. “I think she would talk about it and fantasize about it, and never do anything about it.”

    “That’s how much you know.”

    Sara raised her brows. Victoria said staunchly, “Well, I like it. I think it’s your best work yet.”

    We hastily moved on.

    Afterward I didn’t remember much of the morning. Everyone read, everyone got their feedback. Nella got rave reviews pretty much all around. Even Rudolph seemed fondly paternal in his comments. Sara, by far the best writer in the bunch, went last. She was treated with scrupulous politeness and a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Even Anna hadn’t bothered to make notes on her manuscript, which seemed more than tactless. I’d have been interested in hearing Rudolph’s thoughts—I was surprised he didn’t make Sara an offer then and there—but Sara herself cut him off by suggesting that we break for lunch.

    I suspected that she couldn’t take one more chilly kiss of death. Anyone who wrote as well as she did was obviously passionate about the work and