Multiple people have commented that the book moved quickly and kept them interested. Part of that, I have to admit, was dumb luck. Originally the first draft of the manuscript weighed in at 112,000 words. In order to match industry standards for the genre (80,000-100,000 words) I needed to scrap about 10% of what I had written. Not an easy job, to trash what you worked hard to write. I made numerous passes through it, each time throwing out the least valuable or most boring parts, so that what was left was tight compact prose. Furthermore, nothing is more irritating as a reader, than to encounter long boring stretches of nothing that go on for fifty pages. When I am reading, I like short chapters that deliver the action compactly and in discreet passages, and end with a hook that draws you into the next chapter. Each chapter of FINDING EILEEN, is short averaging about 8-9 pages, and has one or several scenes, each with important action which moves the story forward. If it didn't move the story forward, it went into the trash bin. That way it's easy to pause your reading without being left in the middle of a long chapter. This, I think, makes the book much more reader friendly.
As part of a marketing campaign for FINDING EILEEN, I placed some promotional material in the facebook group, 'Teaneck, then and now.' There I was messaged by a gentleman who not only grew up in my hometown, but also in my neighborhood, and knew many of the people that I knew. Many of whom, I had forgotten about. It was a great blast-from-the-past, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to this man and learning things from him. More important than that, he knew the previous owners the house that I grew up in, the people who sold it to my parents in 1966. In fact, he had dated one of the daughters who lived in that home, which would later become my family's home. The incredible part, is that the last name of the family who lived there, was Gigante (which also happened to be my grandmother Connie's maiden name, and the name I used for the last name of Connie's family in my book (No known connection). And the woman of the house, the mother of this man's girlfriend—her name was Eileen! 😳 And I had no prior knowledge of any of this when writing my book.
