No Mongoose in the Mimosa

Writing is not a team sport. Like other sins, its practitioner often insists on lonely surroundings secure from distraction. Yet we write to be read, never sure what the reader will bring to the table, never sure how the words will trip from their tongue, never sure if the story actually works. So before we release a literary beast into the unsuspecting market wilderness, we impose upon our writer friends to be first readers and advise us--in other words to critique--but seldom do we ask our non-writer friends for such advice because they usually offer meaningless praise to make us feel good, but seldom give worthwhile suggestions to doctor a sick story. For background, a literary trope is a figure of speech or figurative language in which words assume a different sense than their literal meaning. Writers usually warn other writers that reusing old tropes is bad practice likely to be labeled as cliche, yet they often use critiquing tropes to identify problems in others' manuscri