Saturday afternoon I held the beta-reader lunch for my latest novel. I had a pretty good turn out and there was a lively and illuminating discussion.

These sessions are not for me, the author, to defend or explain my choices, prose, or assumptions, but to hear from readers, some who have come totally cold to the piece, what they took away from my work. It can be very difficult not to fall into an explanatory spiral. After all things that seemed so clear to me that I feared I was hitting my poor future readers with clue-by-fours can turn out to the be vague and vaporous hints to my actual readers.

I shan’t go into the details of our discussions. It would be terribly dull for anyone not familiar with the work and for those distance beta readers still working on the project I’d hate to contaminate the process.

I can say that at this moment I have a ten bullet point revision document generated. Some of the changes are rather major – at least one massive plot hole was exposed in the discussion – and several are minor, and some come down to find and replace to make character names more distinct from each other.

Hopefully my distance readers will get me their final feedbacks in the next couple of weeks and I can drop myself fully into revision mode.