Ok here's the first 3 chapters. It's not scifi, so it may very well not be your cup of tea. And if it isn't or it's just plain awful just say so. I won't take it personally.

- Krunch

I don't know how you're supposed to ask a stranger to commit at least a year of their life to helping you write a novel, for free. That's how I did it. I don't know if this is a good way to go about it, all I can say is this is how I asked Holly Hart, and for some reason she said yes.

Why did she agree? I don't know. Probably because she loved writing and loved stories. Mostly because she was very kind and generous.

She was also, much to my dread, meticulous and incisive. Her response to that message was a document with changes that she warned, "may appear like a sea of red". Her blanket advice:

They say don't make your sentences too long, and I do, too. But, sometimes they help. You used good sized sentences a lot, but you have fallen in the trap of starting too many sentences with I, he, she, etc. You didn't capitalize them, but too many will start to jump out at the reader. I took the liberty of starting some sentences with the verb, moving the subject to the beginning of your second phrase, often eliminating the word.

That was the blanket advice. The document she sent back, which was full of very specific advice, was indeed a “sea of red”. She warned me that she would "pound on readability," and pound she did.

Honestly, that should have been enough to scare me off from writing anything ever again. Not that Holly was cruel, quite the opposite, she was very kind and very correct. I can't speak for other amateur writers, but each crossed out word or annotated phrase was like an electric shock. Not because I was upset someone had changed what I wrote, but because I got it so obviously wrong the first time.

I like stories. Who doesn’t? I don’t like writing. Writing is hard work, it turns out. Just thinking of a story is very, very different from writing it down. And I cannot find a better word than dread to describe the feeling of receiving each chapter of Being Christina Chase as Holly sent it back for revisions.

But, in spite of how utterly soul crushing it was to re-read every world and swallow every correction and edit, I never forgot that Holly was doing a massive amount of work literally out of the goodness of her heart. For the record, I wasn’t the only person she was helping by a long shot, but I’d given her such a large project and with such an unreasonable timeline that I took it upon myself to get at least better enough at writing to be worth her time.

It did eventually pay off. What got published, while still the work of an amateur, was not the horrendous train wreck that I’d sent to Holly on day one; not even close. And while every chapter she sent back continued to be a “sea of red”, they were always accompanied with words of encouragement. Once she even wrote:

You were one of the two most difficult edits I've ever taken on, and if you hadn't sent me so many chapters that I got hooked, I might have told you to go back and take some courses in basic English. But, to balance that out, you also improved faster than anybody I have mentored since 1992, and you are now one of my easiest edits, and have remained one of the best writers I have worked with.

Did I mention Holly was unreasonably kind? I know this isn’t news to anyone who knew her, and I assure you there are many people who knew her much better than I did, but it bears repeating.

Recently, someone very close to me has been struggling with cancer. Just being adjacent to the struggle is enough to make you stop and think about how the world works. Everyone goes about every day, all while someone else is dying, and it seems like we should all really stop and do something about it. Of course, the tragedy is, sometimes there’s nothing to be done.

At times like this, I remember Holly. We live in a world full of ghosts. The universe is an ocean, and each of us ripples. We emerge and vibrate and cease. And when one ripple passes through another, both are changed forever.

I remember the day when Holly told me she was sick, and she said, “I hope you are going to finish Being Christina Chase relatively soon.” We got it done. Very late, but not too late.

While Holly was an editor, I like to think of that story as our story. She would never claim authorship, but that's not how I thought of it.

So, while we have a moment, I encourage all of you to pick one of Holly’s stories and read it. For those of us that knew her, it will be a reminder, and for those that did not, you can get to know her.