Writing is a lonely business. Who can blame Harlan Ellison for trying to make himself a book star in the 60s/70s by traveling with Three Dog Night and writing short stories in the windows of big city bookstores? Writers are performers, but their venue is a composite of all those subways, bathrooms, lunchrooms, airplanes, libraries, and homes where their books are read. Oh, there is that occasional joy of getting to read your work aloud at a convention (if you can stand the things), a library, or a bookstore, but the joy in penville usually comes in the form of mail. (Finding comments on your work in newspapers and magazines is a sort of mixed blessing: you are happy to get the review, but you dread what it actually might say.)

What's that got to do with First Impressions, you say? I write these comments for a large number of reasons, one of which is to remind me of what I read years from now, but the larger reason is to provide something between the personal letter to the author and a formal review. In my mind, these are like discussions with the writer, except I've got a bad phone connection and never get any feedback. And, as a writer myself, it is feedback that I crave.