Miss Snark's feedback

Finally got an email this afternoon (3pm-ish) from the literary agent, Miss Snark (not her real name). It said, "Send 750 words." This may sound to some as an invitation to retrieve, say, the middle sections of a treatise on the carnivorous habits of the household tree frog, extract 750 words at random, and lob them as one in her direction. But in actuality, it means that she liked my hook and wanted to see the first 750 words of my novel.

Unfortunately, I was rather hoping for some detailed feedback so I could see specifically what worked about the hook and what didn't. But there were no further entries to her blog. I spent several hours hitting the refresh button so my hook would appear, to no avail. Then at 7pm-ish, it finally appeared, showing my hook and the following feedback from Miss Snark:

This is great. What makes it work is the vivid imagery, that it's funny, and that I am absolutely willing to believe it's possible.

This isn't as tightly honed as it could be but it works.

What an absolutely positive, invigorating, and yet insufficiently detailed response! It has left me raring to go, which is fortunate since I have to get those 750 words out soon.

I am under the impression that the "isn't as tightly honed as it could be" refers to my efforts to cram as much plot, character description, and humor in as I could and yet not breach the 250 word dam. I have a couple of sentences that could be split into shorter sentences, I think, but in some cases that would probably mean adding more words and, at last count, I was right at 250 words.

So I will take it as a very good affirmation of my work so far. Now on to fine-tuning those first pages.


A special thanks for Miss Snark's superhuman efforts to get through what is apparently going to be about 680 hooks. Phenomenal.