B+ for Story-telling, D- for Editing

One of the things I harp about constantly is independent authors who don't take pride in their finished product. Independent publishing is a booming business these days and, for many of us, it is a constant struggle to gain credibility. Those authors who put out badly written, badly edited, badly formatted work are a disgrace to all of us and contribute to the skepticism a lot of readers have for indie books. I'm sort of on a personal campaign to get them to shape up which is why I want to give Eric Wilder a kick in the pants.

Wilder is a new author to me though he has a lot of titles listed on Amazon. I bought one, The Big Easy (Wyatt Thomas French Quarter Mysteries) on the recommendation of someone whose taste I trust and I have never had such conflicted feelings about a book. There is no doubt that even one read-through by a competent editor would have elevated this rating considerably. The simple truth is Eric Wilder can write – he tells a good story, he creates really interesting characters, and his descriptions of life in New Orleans' French Quarter is just wonderful but his book is an absolute mess.

In the past I've said that when editing and formatting is so sloppy it interferes with my reading enjoyment, I give up on the book. That didn't happen here. I really, really liked the story. I loved some of the characters. Wyatt Thomas, the screwed up but persistent, private detective is very likeable. The cop Tony Nicosia is terrific. I loved Mama Mulate, the voodoo mambo, and I actually loved the bad guy – or at least found him interesting. There are quite a few really enjoyable minor characters as well. But where Wilder really shines is in his skill at creating atmosphere, which is easy to do when you know New Orleans and the French Quarter as well as he obviously does.

So what's the problem? There are some lesser ones – I won't go on about the messed up formatting because that is hard to get right and, since it is a new technology a lot of writers haven't caught on to it yet. And the punctuation and grammatical errors are there but not terribly annoying. Then there are the BIG mistakes that even a moderately competent editor would have caught. Things like praising her “shoulder linked hair” and reading “Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets, From The Portuguese,” and typos that change the meaning of words. I started making a list but then gave up.

Wilder does a credible job of capturing the curiosities of dialect, New Orleanian, Cajun, etc. (“How you are?”) but he can't make up his mind about the use of contractions in speech – sometimes he uses them and sometimes he doesn't, often in the same paragraph. And he gets carried away with certain concepts. It was pretty obvious he was in love with some of his female characters (which I have no problem with because I fall in love with my characters, too) but sometimes it was hard to tell one from the other because all of them had “ample bosoms” which were constantly popping out of their “transparent” clothing. He used “transparent” three times on one page – for two different women.

So this is what I want to say to Eric Wilder, “Hire a good editor, my friend, because you can write – you can make good characters, you can tell a good story! Just get a damn editor, please.”

The Big Easy is a very enjoyable story and an outstanding escape to the French Quarter. In many ways Wilder's skill with characters reminds me of one of my favorite writers, James Lee Burke. But Eric Wilder needs someone to read his manuscripts and point stuff out before it goes live. He has a lot of books out there and I don't know whether the rest of them are full of the same errors or not but, please, Mr. Wilder, heed my advice. You are a very talented story-teller, now clean up your work and make us indies proud.

Thanks for reading.