Blog

TL;DR: They loved it.

A while back, I backed a Kick­starter for Augur Mag­a­zine, a Cana­di­an SF/F zine. I select­ed the lev­el that would get me an edi­to­r­i­al review of a 5,000-word story.

When con­tact­ed, I real­ized I’d like a review of one of my cur­rent WiPs, a prob­a­bly-novel­la-length piece titled “The Slow Apoc­a­lypse”. I asked if it would be accept­able to send the first 5,000 words of a longer piece, and was told that would be fine. So I pol­ished it up as best I could and sent it off.

Last night I got the review, and…phew. I mean, I’m pret­ty proud of the sto­ry so far—though it’s still in about the 1½th draft—but I was­n’t expect­ing the rave reviews I got from the editor.

I’ve asked per­mis­sion to include some of their com­ments here, and they said “Sure!” as long as I did­n’t name names. So here’s some of what you can expect once I final­ly fin­ish this piece and start send­ing it around for those of you that pre-read my work.

I think the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is excel­lent here. It is what I loved the most. I got strong sens­es of who each of the peo­ple were…

Anoth­er aspect I loved was the lan­guage. I’m a poet as well as a fic­tion writer, so I like to pay atten­tion to dic­tion in the pieces I read—the images and the tones that are invit­ed in and revealed. I high­light­ed a few instances of phras­es and words that I felt stood out to me in a very arrest­ing and reflec­tive way. This is one of the rea­sons I felt this excerpt was very polished.

The world­build­ing here was excel­lent, too, both of New York, and of the mag­i­cal ele­ments. The infor­ma­tion was woven seam­less­ly into the lives, dia­logue, and pri­or­i­ties of the char­ac­ters, and none of it felt stilt­ed. Of course, I do have ques­tions[, but n]othing of what you revealed here made me frus­trat­ed, or like you were hid­ing some­thing from me.

Every time I read The Slow Apoc­a­lypse, I smiled.

Every time I read these notes on my sto­ry, I smile.