I’m enjoying this critique thingie…

John Miller


I dropped the Ramsey this week because it seemed pretentious all of the sudden. I may put it back, but I don’t ever use it in my day-to-day life. My friends and neighbors call me Miller, and I prefer it to Mr. Miller, John or John Ramsey Miller. Out of a sense of boredom and thinking I should make some money for a new hen house and bullets, I applied for a job as a census worker. It’s really a funny story and I did a truly shitty job on the written test, and I left the testing center (a small county library branch with none of our books in it) laughing because the guy said I could take the test as many times as I liked. I told him I didn’t like taking his test the first time. Long and short is I’m getting trained Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at $15.00 an hour. So I won’t be writing or authoring for a few weeks while I bother my sometimes touchy (and anti-whatever you’ve got) neighbors in the quiet evenings and on weekends, and no doubt will be seen as a gov’ment agent. I like honest work, especially gardening, chicken chasing, and cutting trees, etc… I have always seen writing as good hard work, but I like to get in the ditches, move dirt, rip things apart, and put things together.


Anyhow, today’s page gets very little criticism from me. Other than the first line about 1918, I can live with it and I’d keep reading.




Chapter One


Atlantic City, New Jersey


“The 1918 has gone: a year momentous as the termination of the most cruel war in the annals of the human race; a year which marked, the end at least for a time, of man’s destruction of man; unfortunately a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease causing the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all–infectious disease,” (12/28/1918).


American Medical Association final edition of 1918




He wanted it all to be over; the war in Iraq, the terrorism, the death, the killing. But it wasnít going to stop. Not anytime soon.


Explosions rocked a large market in Iraq disrupting a diplomatic visit by two senior House of Representative leaders. The in-country reporter glanced nervously over his shoulder as he searched for something to say. The scene played out on the plasma television above the bar, caught on tape by CNN cameras. Details on the forty-something U.S. soldiers killed that day scrolled along the bottom of the screen. The image changed. Visiting Representatives Jackson and Levey, draped in body armor, were being rushed from the scene by a tight knot of amour-clad soldiers.


Pete Robinson teetered on the bar stool contemplating the grizzly scene. Those political idiots were probably second-guessing their decision to parade around Iraq in support of the President and his claims that things were improving. The more he thought about the war, the more he drank, and the more he drank, the angrier he got. Heíd been perched on the bar stool for the last two hours. He was hammered and pissed-off. Just nuke the bastards.



Starts off like my kind of book. I’m along for the ride. What do you think?

4 thoughts on “I’m enjoying this critique thingie…

  1. Conflict, conflict, conflict. This submission is dripping with it. I’d definitely keep reading.

    BTW, I already mailed in my census form, Mr. Ramsey, so no need to come a knocking.

  2. I’m replying anonymously to protect the innocent. The book just may have a bioterrorism theme about it. The line could easily be lost.

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