How many times, I begin to wonder, will I have to study a particular passage in this novel I am finalizing before it comes into focus? I'll get the rhythm right and lose the meaning. I'll work toward explicit and fudge the melody. I'll falsify the tone, and I hate falsifying tone. I'll stop and start again.
When a really fine reader takes a really close look at the work you have been doing—when she takes the time to say, Have you considered this? Could you clarify that?—your only response can and must be to pay attention. To get out of whatever mind space you've been in and to see the book as your reader has seen it.
That's what I've been doing these past many days—reviewing my novel for adults through the lens of my dear friend, who took the time to read it so closely. Her deep enthusiasm for this book has been a powerful tonic following a long, cloistered, knotty, lonesome spell of working within a framework that I could barely explain, or defend. (Indeed, I hardly tried.) Her eye for the small stray detail or the rattling inconsistency, the possible time shift or the unintended red herring has been spot on. Lately, working through my friend's edits in the very early hours, I've had the strange sensation of someone working near. I have been steeped in unloneliness.
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