Rather bad trend here, josepp, which I don't think the Mudelves or Max are going to take to kindly or allow to go too far.

I have a personal retrospective on the folk music world in the Pacific Northwest, starting with my first involvement with it in the very early 1950s on up to the present, and right now, the first draft is over 150,000 words, with more to go. I know it needs editing (mainly to take out extraneous material and my sometime tendecy to go off on tangents. For example, if someone who is interested in the subject reads it, how interested are they going to be in the antics of Fred Melberg's pet skunk?).

This is why I belong to a monthly writers' group. We get together and critique each others' work. And when I get the memoir/retrospective finished, I have two published writer friends--in addition to my wife, who worked for several years as an editor in a publishing company--who have agreed to read it and critique it. One of these friends recently finished a novel which I read and critiqued for him, and it is currently in the hands of a literary agent.

I suggest that, rather than usurping vast quantities of bandwidth here on Mudcat, which is mainly dedicated to folk music and peripheral subjects, you do as I am doing:   join a writers' group and/or have knowledgeable people critique it for you.

Don Firth