Delia Reads the Riot Act

In the early 1990's, I met author/radio host Ellen Kushner who had a radio show on WGBH-FM entitled "Caravan". She invited me on to share some recordings of Saudi women's traditional folk music. Ellen is loads of fun, so doing the show was a great adventure. At some point I mentioned that I had a novel in process. She volunteered to read it, and later said her partner, author and editor Delia Sherman, would be happy to read it. One late summer day in 1995, Delia and I sat down to a sushi lunch and she basically tore my manuscript apart. My reaction was despair. It was so disheartening. I was doing my MBA at night while working as a commercial banker by day, and she was telling me I had a lot of work to do. Yet I knew she was right. Fortunately I taped the whole thing, listened to it a couple of times, took notes, then started on the long road she told me to travel. I started to read a lot more. I took a fiction class at the Boston Center for Adult Ed. And gradually, a whole new draft of the book took shape. She wisely predicted that every word of the draft would be touched and reworked. That version was 66,000 words long. Now it's more than twice that long. Only two or three scenes have survived the process. Many original characters are gone, replaced by much more interesting ones. Last weekend I listened to the tape again, to make sure I'd done what she said. The very next day, Delia e-mailed me wondering what I was up to! She has a new young adult book coming out in June, THE MAGIC MIRROR OF THE MERMAID QUEEN. You can read about it on her LiveJournal Blog. I've always felt apologetic about her having done me the favor of reading that very creaky, problematic first draft. But she says she loves to read those, to help direct people on their way. She was one of my really important guides, a true Fairy Godmother. Visit her blog and you'll see what I mean. Thank you, Delia, for reading me the riot act!