Glass Eye: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective by BenSobieck on Wattpad

Blurb

Zandra is an infamous "psychic" who grifts the gullible residents of her small Wisconsin town using her wits, not anything supernatural. Her skills are put to the ultimate test when the police tap her to help find a kidnapped girl. 

 But there's a catch. The girl's father apparently got away with murdering Zandra's husband years ago. Can Zandra put aside her grudge for the sake of a missing child? Or is this the perfect opportunity for revenge?

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Original (First 500)

She's obviously an undercover cop. What will it be this time? Theft by swindle? An accounting error? A parking ticket? This should be good.

Zandra sniffs out the disguise before the woman is through the door of Sneak Peek, her hole-in-wall "psychic services" business. It's bricked in between a head shop and a defunct coffee joint in downtown Stephens Point, Wisconsin. Just a chair behind a desk in a single room. A glorified closet stuff with too many eccentricities that catch the sunlight as the woman closes the door.

It doesn't take a psychic for Zandra to see her latest client is failing as an undercover cop. Maybe that's because Zandra isn't a psychic. Rather, she's a proud fraud, loving upon the reputation of that incident at Soma Falls years ago. An incredibly lucky guess? Sure. Psychic? No.

But when the masses spray paint the words "go back to hell witch" on the side of your house and stalk your every move, you'll settle for the psychic label. Better a psychic serving entertainment purposes than anything approaching legitimate in their paranoid eyes. Everyone knows psychics are frauds anyway. It's an unhappy middle ground. An uneasy truce.

Stephens Point didn't know what to make of her back then. Still doesn't. But that doesn't prevent people from coming into Zandra's business. Like cops making sure she knows her place as the village crone. That's probably why this latest one is here.  A reminder to not get too uppity about the reputation from Soma Falls. But don't walk away from it, either.  What happened with Zandra and Soma Falls put Stevens Point on the map. The tourism alone is worth millions.

The creases around Zandra's tired eyes life into a greeting. Smize as the kids would say. Not that she's been anywhere near hip for decades, made obvious by the oversized purple gown draped over her shoulders. It's acned with gaudy rhinestones straight off a cheap stripper's ass cheek. It's all for show, just like every other trinket of sparkly nonsense in Sneak Peek. And all for sale, of course. That's the proud in proud fraud. Not like anyone in town would give Zandra a real job anyway. But they'd certainly remind her she should.

The woman takes a seat across the desk from Zandra. As she does with all her clients, the "psychic" performs a mental checklist before saying anything. Zandra's got it down to three seconds. that's all she needs for her act.

Short, blonde hair pulled back tight into a small ponytail. 

Fingernails trimmed to a few millimeters. 

Baggy flannel shirt to cover the concealed pistol in a holster secured inside the waistband of her jeans. Right hand seated on her thigh at the ready to draw. Legs planted firmly on the floor instead of crossed or casual.

These aren't traits exclusive to cops. But playing the psychic, Zandra knows it's an odds game.

My Edit

Zandra is stringing beads for a suncatcher and lamenting the growing number of liver spots on her hands, when the door to her shop opens, setting the ceramic bells a-tinkling. She looks up. An undercover cop. Another one. 

Short, blonde hair pulled back tight into a small ponytail. Fingernails trimmed to a few millimeters. Baggy flannel shirt to cover the concealed pistol in a holster. Blue eyes that case the entire room, checking corners and blind spots. Not that there's much to check. 

Sneak Peek is her psychic shop set in a bricked-in alleyway between a head shop and a defunct coffee joint in downtown Stephens Point, Wisconsin. The center point of the room is a battered wood round table flanked by two comfy mismatched armchairs. A pitcher of water with two glasses are set in the middle of the table. This little tableau is surrounded by colorful wind chimes, dreamcatchers, pillows, blankets, and caftans like the one Zandra wears -- her signature bedazzled purple. All for sale, of course. Baubles sparkle in the sunlight as the cop closes the door, shooting prisms around the room.

The cop stalks to the chair across from Zandra and sits down. Right hand seated on her thigh. Legs planted firmly on the floor. No doubt uncomfortable to have her back to the door.

(Original word count: ~484 → Edited: ~219)

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Critique

I was intrigued by the premise of a fake psychic solving crimes. We've seen this on TV with shows like Psyche and The Mentalist, but I haven't actually ever read a book with this premise. I like that Zandra is female and old, we don't get enough detectives in that demographic, and especially not fake psychic detectives.

Also, the idea of not helping to find a missing child because the girl's father murdered Zandra's husband is unhinged in the best way. It really makes you question -- who the hell is Zandra? What is her deal? Of course you help find a missing child. If you need to, expose the father as a murderer, that's a totally separate issue. What's wrong with you? Like, yes, it adds tension to the scenario, especially if Zandra has to work with the man, but to purposely choose vengeance instead of helping a child? I'm sorry, but that is hilarious. I love it.

Regarding action in this excerpt, all that happens an undercover cop walks into Zandra's shop and sits down across from her. This isn't a criticism, that's plenty interesting enough. The author definitely covers setting, characterization, and conflict in this one excerpt. However, the author does spend too much time in Explain Mode, emphasizing the fact that Zandra is a fake psychic. Most people will walk into even a fictional a psychic shop with a certain amount of skepticism, especially when the blurb and the title alert the reader to the fact, so all of this isn't needed. 

And I don't love the half-description of Soma Falls. Just wait and give us a decent intro to that whole deal. The author is trying to cram so much information into the first few paragraphs that it just feels like a revving car that keeps stalling out (I'm not a car guy, did that analogy make sense? Maybe flooding the engine? I don't know. I never got my driver's license.).

Setting

A psychic's office that feels more like a gift shop -- which it is. Zandra sells replicas of her signature caftan, which is a beautiful way to combine setting with characterization. I was intrigued by the location "between a head shop and a defunct coffee joint". I love the specificity of the coffee shop being closed, especially with the juxtaposition of it being one shop away from a head shop. This location feels small and seedy with just that tiny bit of information. 

I also like the "sparkly trinkets", but Zandra is described as sitting behind a desk, which I thought was weird for a psychic shop. Maybe that's supposed to play up the detective angle but if the shop is full of gaudy, "look-at-me-I'm-a-psychic" stuff, I'd think we'd have a round table for the psychic to sit at with her clients. We didn't get a location of the desk, either, so I just took my own liberties and gave her a table in the middle of the shop. I think it fits the vibe better.

Characterization

Zandra is an asshole. She is super proud of herself for being a fake psychic, she's bitter about the townsfolk who wouldn't employ her but wouldn't excuse her being unemployed either, she speaks derogatorily about sex workers, she thinks that kids say "smize". Kids don't say smize. A middle-aged former model wants kids to say "smize" so that she can get residuals every time a kid says "smize". 

Anyway, it's all good detail if you're trying to build an unlikable character, but for me, it was too much, too soon. Like, it's hard to tell if the character is cringy or if the author is. So, I took all of that out of my version and zoomed in on the undercover cop. The way that the cop is described in the original excerpt shows Zandra's attention to detail and her cynicism but it's all drowned out by all of the unlikable stuff. As a reader, I didn't know what to focus on, so I focused on how much I didn't like Zandra.

One thing that throws me off is that this is supposed to be a really small town, so I'm not sure how undercover a cop could be, unless she's new to town. Especially with Zandra already having been harassed by cops pretty frequently, I would think she'd be pretty familiar with the local cops.

Conflict/Tension

Oh, yes, there's plenty of conflict. We have Zandra's conflict with the townsfolk, the inherent conflict with be a fake anything, let alone a psychic detective, the fact that she's being visited by an undercover cop, and whatever happened with Soma Falls. It's a little too much conflict for the amount of action, though. 

An undercover cop walks in to a psychic shop in a seedy part of town and sits down from a fake psychic. This is not an occurrence that is out of the ordinary for the psychic. This is INTERESTING. Let's focus on this. Zandra's fraught relationship with the townsfolk, and what happened in Soma Falls can wait (especially since Soma Falls is brought up almost immediately after this excerpt).

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Final Thoughts

I wasn't really sure, based on this excerpt, if this story would be worth continuing, because of the lack of focus on the immediate scene and the insecurity that the author is showing here. But the premise is interesting enough, the setting, characterization, and conflict are all here in Chapter One, so I read onto Chapter Two, which is much more focused on introducing Zandra to her conundrum and on her ancient bitterness. I actually thought that Chapter One could probably be deleted and we could just start with Chapter Two. 

That's the thing about the beginning of the story, though. It's really hard to know how to start, how much information to give up front, especially when you as the author already know everything that happens. It's hard to have the confidence that the first thing you say to a reader will convince them to keep reading, so the instinct is to try to cram as many interesting ideas into the first few paragraphs as possible, as a promise that the whole story will be good, even if this part is boring. The answer to that is, if you're starting with a boring part, don't.

Start with an interesting part, and trust that your reader will want to find out how and why we got here and where we're going next. I will give this story credit for not starting with a really interesting part and then walking directly into back story and infodumps. I'm glad that Chapter Two is better than Chapter One. That gives me confidence as a reader that the story will only get better and better.