Waiting for Feedback

I completed the first copy of the manuscript of Norton the Third around the beginning of March, 2017 -- after working on and fiddling with it since roughly 2001. I hesitate to use the phrase "first draft" because in the course of all that time, I've done a considerable amount of editing. In my humble, if amateur, opinion, it's to the point that I would be willing to publish it on Amazon without further tinkering.

My three grown children have agreed to provide feedback, and my daughter-in-law, a certifiable commercial artist, has agreed to take a crack at a designing a cover. They've had it in their possession for about half a month.

At this point I realize an aspect of fiction-writing that is inferior to theater performance: it takes time for the consumer to, um, consume the work. My kids are in their 20s and 30s, which means, unlike their father, they actually have lives, deadlines, obligations, that have nothing to do with reading N3. Most of my hopefully legions of readers will also be like this.

At the end of a theater piece, the actors and artistic staff receive one of only a few choices: a standing ovation, dead fish and rotten fruit tossed across the curtain line, clammy silence or some combination thereof (and in my life as an actor, I've experienced all of them). But, whatever the reaction, you have it within a few seconds of speaking the apologia, or singing the last notes.

I'm stalwartly resisting the temptation to email them and ask, "so, whadya think?". Putting my audience under time pressure will not enhance their reading experience, after all.

Maybe they'll see this post.