I’ve been reading the Evil Editor for the past few months, and have loved the snarky but useful comments. The comments from the Evil Editor and the Evil Minions on writing query letters has been especially useful as I prepare to send FlameWar to agents.

So when EE offered to post the first 150 words of novels and let the minions comment on those, too, I sent in the first 150 words of FlameWar. That was only this week, and with the backlog I didn’t expect to see FlameWar show up until next month at the earliest. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it in the Evil Editor’s RSS feed this morning.

What’s really funny (to me, anyway) is that Evil Minion’s joke continuation is distressingly similar to a follow-up that I chopped. As I recall, the word I used was even worse than half-hearted: the patrons’ actions were “desultory”. I’m feeling vindicated for dropping that paragraph.

The egoboo in the comments are nice to hear, too, as this rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

And yes, I’ll be looking at the sentence about the owl banner.