My Army Rangers and Special Forces guys and my exotic dancers and my general readers got back to me with their crits a while ago. But my cop readers didn’t, and I was thinking that I’d be flying blind on the police procedural part of the book. Until I got a very good technical crit back from one police detective this morning.
God, I’m grateful he sent back his crit. I’ve spent the whole morning fixing "fruit of the poisoned tree" issues (evidence gathering and admissibility), and sexual harrassment issues, and "this would shut the case down right now" issues, some of which involved significant replotting.
Some of it remains to be worked into the book, but I think I’m now on solid ground with the military aspect, the stripper aspect, AND the cop aspect of this book, as well as the psychology-of-a-serial-killer aspect.
And I swear I’m never doing another serial killer story, because getting inside the head of this one has kept me queasy for the whole time I’ve been writing the book.
And I’m never going to write another book in which I have to do simultaneous deep research on three professions about which I know nothing while working on a time budget that is starting to give me nightmares.
I’ll limit myself to one area of total ignorance per book from now on, dammit.
