He came, he read, he gave a 30-minute critique. He then gave 15 minutes of building the author back up by showing what he did right.

Joshua Bilmes of JABberwocky Literary Agency stopped by on his way home from Bouchercon in Anchorage. He had earlier asked to see the entire m/s of Firestar. Somehow he found the time to read it all (and I thought I read fast!).

We had lunch, and he went through the problems he found in Firestar. There were a number of things:
1) What was the central problem Corey has to solve? That should be evident by the end of the first chapter (if not much earlier in the chapter).

2) There were too many viewpoint characters. He counted 5 in the first six chapters (I counted 8 overall). The story (see #1 above) can get lost with all of those viewpoints.

3) Corey was passive at the wrong points, being acted upon rather than acting. Some of this will happen in a military organization, but the leader and/or main character will attempt to dominate the situation. Those places where she was the active, dominating character were well-written and showed what I should be doing.

4) There was a lack of visuals (you mentioned the same thing). The reader should take a mental picture away when they put the book down for any reason. This was made worse because I had a marvelous opportunity to describe the Firestar Nebula on more than one occasion, and didn't do it.

5) I set up several conflicts: men vs. women; connected Family vs. small one; junior officer vs. superior officer just to name three, but I didn't follow through on any of them.

6) I had a number of annoyances for Corey, but either she bypassed them, they didn't pan out as anything other than minor, or somebody else solved them. From time to time Corey would solve one, and those were well done.

7) I made some use of the conflict between Family obligation and Navy obligation, but that didn't square with what I was setting up earlier. I sort of popped it up, and then resolved it. Corey didn't struggle against it, getting deeper and deeper into trouble until she changed the parameters.

8) The whole bit about their missing kin seemed mythic rather than a driving element.

There were a number of things I did right.
a) Overall the writing was clean and crisp. It wasn't outstanding except in a few places when Corey was being clever.

b) The dialogues were all well-done. I managed to convey a lot of information in those dialogues without being preachy or doing an info-dump.

c) I got the story going quickly and established some of Corey's character very early in the story.

d) the best scenes had a combination of rising tension, good conversation, and a punch at the end that advanced the plot and showed off character. Examples were the massive debrief and the court-martial investigation.

e) I put in enough techno-babble to show off the rules of this story without being too over the top.

Bottom Line: Firestar is in the shop for a major rewrite.