David's Critique

David sent me an email that made me spit all over my touch screen... it was that funny. It was really the comment on Moonraker that pushed me over the edge to saliva-inducing hilarity. You're absolutely correct, David, by the way. Now... I just have to think it over and resolve the matter.

His critique is related to the second Honor book, but I think it can even be appreciated without having read the book:

I finished your second book quite a while ago. Your recent email prompted me to send you feedback.

I liked your second book as well, but I thought the plot lost track of what was trying to be accomplished.

You had two main points to your plot:
1) What is Honor?
2) What the heck is going on in the city? A gruesome murder. Abnormally big bad guys.

I think you did a great job with plot point 1.

I feel like you lost track of plot point 2 even though you feel the solving of the crime is important enough to be the climax of the story.

When the crime was solved at the end of the book, I remember thinking, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that gruesome murder at the beginning.” And I read it over a matter of a week, so it wasn’t just the fact that there was a long wait between when I started and finished the book.

You bring out that murder in the beginning, but then you fail to mention it up until the monologue at the end. The fact that you even bring it up at the end means that it was supposed to be important. The abnormally big bad guys put in an appearance or two, but they also don’t seem like they get the publicity they need to be part of the mystery and the climax – kind of like Darth Maul in Episode I.

It seems like they just accidentally solve the real crime while they were out doing their thing trying to figure out what the heck Honor is and what she has to do with Vampire society.

It seems like they accidentally figure out that the main vampire is the bad guy behind everything when they are really just out trying to figure out why he went AWOL. “What!?! We thwarted your evil plot to take over the world? Oops. We were just wondering where you were.”

Kind of like Moonraker. The world was almost destroyed by a mad man, and James Bond was just out investigating an auto-theft. If Drax had simply built himself another Moonraker or ran his evil plot with one short, nobody would have been the wiser.