Cathy, please accept my apologies for not responding sooner. It’s nearing the end of the semester, and time is tight between students and garden. I appreciate your comments.

I’ll work on fleshing out the locale. In Boulder County, Colorado, I expect to see at least one peloton a day. I’m betting there’re enough bicycle parts in BoCo shops and garages to keep bikes on the road for a hundred years. But this is indeed local knowledge.

BoCo is dense with horses too, but many have already gone away. Just two years ago, good hay could be had for five dollars a bale. Now it’s ten or eleven—and we’re still better off than most states.

That leads to another comment you made. What if I change “Tom hadn’t seen any elegant girls on elegant horses at the Mall since his sixth trek,” to “After his sixth trek, Tom saw no more elegant girls on elegant horses at the Mall.” Or perhaps “After his sixth trek, Tom never saw another elegant girl on an elegant horse at the Mall.” Would either of those make the point of the declining horse population/standard of living clearer?

I’ll work on the news aspects too. My goal is to sketch the ever-increasing suspicion of news sources of any kind. What you read is a third-fourth draft, so it’s still pretty skeletal. As I’m sure you know eleven’s pretty much industry standard.

You certainly caught a glitch here: “Abandoned buildings, homes and businesses, now housed chickens or squatters." Good catch. How about “Abandoned buildings, homes and businesses, now housed chickens and armed squatters." Better?

I’m not surprised you missed that Max was a pack mule. I used the word “panniers” and had Tom look over at Max on the first page, but most non-horsemen and/or non-bicyclists—many bikes around here sport panniers-- wouldn’t pick up on that sort of detail. Meanwhile, my horsie friends wanted more detail because they hoped I was using their panniers as my model.

Finding a balance is always a difficulty when one writes niche fiction. For example, there’s one post-industrial novel where the author spends most of his time detailing the guns of each of his characters. I’m trying to avoid unnecessary detail, but this is a work about people whose lives center on equines. Too little detail loses the niche audience. For example, I remember reading Evans’ The Horse Whisperer. Every time I thought the novel was getting halfway interesting, Evans turned back to people.

The most crucial point you brought up is style for inner thoughts. I’ve gone over this issue with a good many professionals. Everyone’s got a different take. So far, I’m ambivalent about all the possibilities. Italics would work, but to me, it clutters the text. I’ll try to think of something. I hate to pull the POV too far back, and yet dealing with thoughts is something that’s usually clumsy. Maybe I need to reread Middlemarch again.

Again, thanks for the feedback.