Feedback Requested

This isn't part of the story. If you haven't read to the end of the story yet, don't read this.

A note from the author...

Today is the first Friday in four months that I haven't woken up and had to decide what happens to Chris today, how to move toward the ending, and how to include elements in a story that tend to make any story they appear in seem completely ridiculous. The first step in the story of Chris Baker's life is complete now, as I see it.

If everything I have written here were to be printed in a standard sized hardcover book in standard font with standard spacing, it would be approximately 378 pages long. It's 130,000 words, about nine times the length of the average novella, or about one times the length of the average novel. At the beginning I wasn't expecting this to end up at book length, but once it became clear that it would be I decided it should be. A book, that is.

Getting a book published is a serious accomplishment, and a very trying one. The whole publishing industry is designed now for filtering out the thousands and thousands of people who think they can write, people the internet age has given a voice to when they probably shouldn't have one.

Before I start sending this thing out to literary agents or publishers, I'm going to take some time to look it over and see if it really is book-worthy. For that, I might need your help.

For those of you who have read the story from start to finish, I'd like your semi-detailed, honest opinion about it.

You can do so as a comment to this post, or by emailing me.

I'd like to know what you thought of everything. "It's really good" is encouraging but not super helpful. I'd like to know what you thought of the characters, if they were believable and they were all described well enough. What you thought of the pacing, does it start out too boring or have too many times where a whole lot of information is dumped and there's no time to recover from it? How about the secrets, mysteries and revelations, was there always enough motivation to keep reading to find out more or were there times when you didn't care? Did you care enough about the mysteries/secrets that you were surprised/glad/excited when they were revealed?

How about the narrative voice? Did Chris' internal babbling annoy you, or did it help you associate with the character? Could you tell that, as the story progressed that Chris' mind and voice were changing; that he started making fewer jokes and began to take things seriously? Or hadn't you noticed before reading that sentence? How about the underlying theme, the thousands of times when the difference between the mind and the body were mentioned? Did those seem tacked on, did they seem to be too frequent, did you not care or notice? Did anything make you think?

Does it interest you or do you even care that, except for a very small number of things, every technique, technology, weapon, medical term, element of psychology, and geographical description were entirely accurate? Did you think, "Hey, maybe this guy is actually doing research,"?

Did you notice that the first sentence of the first chapter and the last sentence of "Ask Questions" are the same?

Was anything funny? Was anything scary? Was anything tense, or shocking?

Did you learn anything?

Was it worth your time?

Answering any of those questions will help me out in a tremendous way. As I can tell, there are about 150 people reading this story and only about 5 or 6 who post comments. I'd like if those who don't comment could still contribute. Comments can be posted anonymously, or if you'd rather it be private you can email me.

Your feedback will be used as I go back and fix grammar and possibly re-work scenes or even re-write entire chapters.

Thank you very much for reading, and thank you in advance for any feedback. This has been quite an experience for me.

The sooner I get this published, the sooner I can start the next branch of the story. It's already bouncing around in my head, replacing the one I'd finally let free.

-Aaron Dunlap