Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

Your posting is:

Offensive (subject line)
Selfish (what you want is the only thing that matters)
Ungrateful ("this story is my right")
Cowardly (anonymous)
Completely unfunny (so don't bother with that excuse)

Would you like to give Rachel a positive reason to post another chapter?

If it were me, I would stop posting chapters right at this point, if that's the way you are going to react.

I for one took it in the lighthearted spirit in which I'm sure it was meant.

There's just a brief delay. I inserted a scene recently that comes next. That scene is about done, but it's not well joined onto the scenes that follow, and some more writing needs doing to make good the join. (May actually need one or two extra scenes.)

But I'm tired and headachy and busy at work at the moment. :-(

You wrote:
>I inserted a scene recently that comes next.
>That scene is about done,

So what we are seeing is not your actual NaNoWriMo output?

Where I come from that's called 'cheating'. :-P

>... making a better story

It was just that it was not what I had understood, from what you said, that you were going to do.

We have to take your word that it's better, since we aren't seeing the raw race-against-time material for comparison. But I have no problem with acceptng that. (If it were possible for 'lack of problem' to go negative or into imaginary numbers, that's the zone I'd be in.)

It is very much to your credit that I happily believed that I was reading the raw writing (RaRaWriRel?); ie that it was entirely credible to me that you could write as accurately, lucidly, and interestingly as the material posted, "on the fly".

Probably we shall never know how much the product we see is better than "what she wrote" - but IMHO what we are seeing is as good as, or better than, most everything being released elsewhere at this time.

I too look everyday for new scenes... probably only twenty times or so. Hooked? Me?

And post-inserted scenes are most welcome, because otherwise by my calulations we're already three-quarters of the way through.

*****

There's a story that, during the war, Army cooks would put one smashed up whole egg into a battalion-sized batch of scrambled egg made from powdered egg; the presence of occasional shell fragments being intended to convince the soldiers that the whole was made from fresh eggs.

I was fooled by the typo at word 80 in the very first paragraph into believing that what was posted was unedited...

... if they're not right.

There hasn't been that much changed until now. I'm not too interested in the purity of the NaNoWriMo output. Doing NaNoWriMo was just a catalyst, an excuse, if you like, to get around to writing a story that's been bouncing around but which I felt was too silly and trivial to spend proper time on. But ideas that had been fixed in my head for ten years changed when I started writing it. I needed to fix the discontinuities.

That said, I released 1.01 on December 1, the day after NaNoWriMo finished. So the further we go, the more chance I've had to fix things up. Apart from rewriting the former 1.19 to a new 1.19 and 1.20 - and even then some of the original was retained - the changes have really just been of the order of typos and the odd paragraph tweaked or inserted or deleted here and there.

I've had a bit of a heavy work week, and am still not really feeling well, which is why I ran out of time to finish this new work. I hope to have 1.25 out today sometime.

I'm really enjoying this - I like the pace.
Minor point, as you may have been borrowing the universe from an RPG, some of us aren't familiar with that universe, so hopefully as the story develops, you might evolve more detailed explanations of the limits of the powers of the various characters and the races from which they are a part. I would gather that the game group themselves know to a degree, which is why one doesn't read a mental narration of each character by either Taniel, Samila, Kerilas or Lotan.
It would be interesting to see that if Kerilas or Lotan were killed, they end up as another character in the universe. A sort of gamers real time re-incarnation...

I'm confused... how did you lose that bet? We haven't learned anything new about what happened to Simon in recent installments. (Kerilas's theory, as far as anyone in the story knows, is just a theory...)

I know what's happened to Simon, but I ain't letting on yet...

Good Ghu, that's dethpicable! This man needs independent net access STAT!

Wouldn't a filter that blocks mention of weaponry be a problem for someone working in a museum? (Actually, that's an unwarranted assumption; where are you working now?)

I am insanely curious as to what your theory was. (As long as it isn't so much better than what I've got planned that I'd wish I did it that way.)

I await the email. The gmail address you found works (I received your Merry Xmyth message), or my usual address is, rather predictably, my first name and the domain of this site.

Rachael,

I normally sit on the sidelines when reading this type of fiction, but I have to say that you are definitely as good at story writing as Larry Niven or any of my other favorite authors.

Your use of imagery, feelings, and dialog are great. :)

Keep up the fantastic work.

-- John