I got the call from Muse Margaret and knew instantly there were problems - I can read her voice after all these years. So, first she wanted me to tell her again what the second half of the book is going to be - I did, and she loved it and knowing that helped her clarify what her problems were with what she'd read. And as it turns out it all had to do with her not liking certain things about the lead character of the first half of the book and as it further turned out, it was really minor stuff. She in fact spent most of the rest of the conversation talking effusively about what she loved. So, I wrote down stuff to make sure I'd look at each thing that bothered her. And most of it was in the first twenty pages, and most really in the first five pages.
So, after I got off the phone I went right to those pages, read through them, and pretty much agreed about all of the stuff she'd mentioned. She's just really good about knowing when something isn't quite right. And of course I was feeling my way at the beginning of the book, trying to find the character, which she sensed was the case. In the end, the fixes were extremely simple and quick to do - cutting a handful of words and/or lines, adding some dialogue, and making one character a little more disagreeable, which I did easily in about five lines of dialogue in two different sequences. After that, it was literally just losing a word or two occasionally to keep the lead character really likable. I'll read her all those changes this evening and I'm hoping they did the trick, which I think they did. It's much better with those fixes. Otherwise, she liked pretty much everything, especially some of the humor and some history she didn't know.
