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THE HARLEQUIN is off to New York. The last bit of it went off today. Because of the deadline being so tight, Jon just sat at one of the other desks in my office. I’d turn to him with the last notes and go, okay, here’s the change I made. Does it make sense? Here’s the editor’s note. Do you agree with it? When the deadlines were looser, books went through my writing group. We’d do the bother factor. Which means you vote and if everyone in the room, all seven of us, don’t understand a point in the book you just change it. If say, three people don’t understand it, well, it’s still fifty percent, so it’s the writer’s call. But with a fifty percent bother factor I usually still try to clarify. If only one person is puzzled, it’s usually a personal preference. So ignore and go on. By the time I finished this rewrite, there would have been maybe, a twenty-four hour window to hand it out, get it read, and get feedback. No one can do nearly seven hundred manuscript pages in twenty-four hours. Okay, not as a critique, and even if you could, the twenty-four hours includes the time to make any changes. So, impossible. I’ve done twenty-four hour turn around critiques for people, but that was between two hundred and three hundred pages, not six hundred or more. What would I do, if Jon wasn’t here to turn to? Well, I had one writer friend who read me his book inch by inch over the phone. Some writers e-mail pieces back and forth. The comic is certainly teaching me that could have possibilities, if you could find someone to babysat their e-mail for you. Some writers use their editors as their sounding board. Some writers truly are solitary creatures and don’t use that much feedback. I certainly did that for years before I found my writing group, but I guess I’m actually a group animal at heart.