Reads as if written by a teenager. I got halfway through and gave up.

Don't waste your time reading this.

You need a lot of stamina to get through the middle of this book. I did not possess it!

He’d taken to checking his online reviews daily, just on the chance their tone might turn around, that some wonderful, sensible person would deliver him five stars.

And three readers did last week.

His joy knew no bounds. He liked that cliché; made him think of kangaroos, the ones that box people. In his mind he saw them punching critics and those sour-reviewers.

Happiness was short-lived, seemingly like his career. One reader had mistakenly placed an opinion for an entirely different novel on his book’s page. The other was hardly encouraging, because despite the five stars, he’d written.

I'll never get the time back I spent reading this crap.

And some pea-brain claiming to be six years old left him five stars but wrote …

Even though i am only six i love horror storys and all of the killing. i sound like a cycopath but i am really not.

That one he’d pondered for days, clicking through and checking the kid’s other reviews. Could he really be six? Certainly, he spelled as if he’d received no education. He took the score though. Five stars helped bump up the overall ratings from two stars to two and a quarter.

William kept refreshing the book’s Amazon page on his phone browser whenever he thought of his predicament, just in case his ratings improved or new positive comments appeared.

He almost convinced himself his book’s rating was okay, that he was only a quarter off an overall three stars.

Three wasn’t terrible, right? In an exam that meant a pass.

But that little filled-in quarter of a star was so close to two that a few more bad numbers and the sliver would disappear. Then his book would be back at two.

Two was a fail in any test.

The reviews, the publisher cancelling his contract, or his agent developing diarrhea during their call, weren’t really why his heart had turned black. This was simply an appalling moment in his career. It would get better.

As a writer he had tough skin, although in his imagination this sturdy hide now flaked across his keyboard in dried, salty tear-drop specks.

No, another reason curdled his stomach and made him scream, causing him to smash a hole in the wall of his rented apartment. Said damage, which he could ill-afford because there wasn’t money in only one best seller or a canceled contract. All these deals were loaded at the backend. You needed to sell a lot of the third book to really make your money. In the publishing world a million dollars wasn’t necessarily a million.

He sat in his gloomy kitchen staring at his damaged wall, in which he’d stuffed pages of what had once been a perfectly lovely book. The only image in his mind was that of Orelia Mason.