My story of a young reporter at a dying Southern California daily newspaper is pretty close to done. I would like to get a couple of critiques of it before I “publish” it. If you have a sense of what makes or breaks fiction, either from your experiences as a writer or as a reader, and would like to critique my story, please send an e-mail to “howard at hbo3.com.” The first three people who volunteer to critique my story will get a copy of it via e-mail. I’ll send it as an RTF (rich text format) file. The story runs to about 12,400 words.

UPDATE: Three requests to critique the story have been received and answered. So I won’t be sending any more stories out at the moment. Don’t worry, if you want to critique it later, you’ll have an opportunity. That’s it for this round.