Alright, kids, gather 'round. It's that time again, Story Discussion Time! Yay!

It's been a while since the last time we did this, and a few readers (one in particular) have raised some style/theme/plot questions that I'd like to address, and at the same time, open up for wider discussion.

First, I want to address a challenge I'm facing, and this will tie into some of the questions/comments I've gotten from some readers.

Since making the commitment to tell the story in very-long-form weblit format, the pace of plot movement has necessarily slowed way, way down. This is inherently part of the trade-off.

Most stories here on RR are violent fantasies of one sort or another, and basically amount to 'and now here's the monster/pit trap/obstacle I have to deal with, immediately after dealing with the last one. When I beat this one, I'll have to deal with the next'. I'm not slamming the basic format- I quite enjoy a fair number of these stories. The one I've just recently stumbled upon (and I'm now caught up) is about a guy delving a dungeon by himself to take revenge on said dungeon's soul. It's a perfect example of the 'unending string of monster/trap/obstacle' story, but enjoyable.

The reason I mention this, is that the prevalence of these stories sets a sort of expectation for what to expect on this site.

This story was NEVER going to be that. When I first imagined the story, it started out with two characters- one a pampered princess who wishes for a normal life, and the other a normal kid who envies the easy, privileged life the first one had. It evolved from there into the story it is today, by the time I wrote my outline and major plot beats.

The story is still following the outline closely, just a whole lot more slowly than I'd imagined it would (and started out writing). The plot points are still being hit, but now, thanks to the commitment to ALL.THE. WORDS. a whole lot of detail and development is sort of smothering Chekhov's gun in a sea of other wall hangings.

I really don't want to give any spoilers, so I'll talk about an example that sort of doesn't matter, but has come up in reader questions. People have asked about what ever happened to Grace- it seems she just vanished from the story.

Well, that's sort of true- she has, for now. The thing is, from the time Grace packed up to go to Flagstaff to the current moment in the book, it's only been three and a half months story time (Late June to mid September). In real life, that's just not a lot of time. In real life, things don't come at you one after another like clockwork. In real life, we experience long stretches of humdrum daily grind, punctuated with brief periods when a whole lot of stuff happens.

As a reader, you have to remember that Leah only narrates the things that she thinks relevant, either at the time or in retrospect. Some things just have no importance as far as her recollection of the overall story are concerned, so Grace settling in to her new apartment, new job and later, starting her freshman year in college just happen off in the universe somewhere and only matter if things go wrong. We'll see her again soon, when she comes to visit for Thanksgiving, but in the meanwhile, she's leading her own life just fine and we'll hear about it when she does visit. This is also true of Donny and Sana- they have their own life, and until it intersects back with Leah and Emmy's life, they're off-screen.

I guess all this is my way of saying that the plot is still moving forward in the same (in-story) time frame I'd outlined back before I started. Now, I'm just filling in the gaps in between a whole, whole lot more.

The positive aspect is that the ALL. THE. WORDS. format gives me more time to breathe details into the whole thing in a way that I couldn't in a normal book-publishing schema. An example is the inordinate amount of time discussing the New York house. Instead of simply saying "It was a classic Midtown East townhouse mansion, in one of the snobbier districts" and expecting everybody to fill the details in their own mind, now I have the flexibility to make it more real, more concrete for the reader. Now, when Angela says, "It's just the way I imagined a New York Mansion to be,", well, the reader can understand.

Another positive is that I get to really hammer home certain aspects of character that would otherwise be exposited. By now, the reader KNOWS that Leah is almost all work and no play, except for her car thing. In a normal book, I would have had Emmy complain, "All you ever do is work and train. You're no fun!" and that would have been that, but building it this way, the reader understands that Leah is very task-oriented, and unusually focused well beyond normal. The car stuff, too, illustrates those aspects of her personality- she's driven (pun intended. Sorry, not sorry) by a sense of competition and a need to beat others, whether she realizes it or not. And she probably doesn't, because she isn't very introspective.

So, in other words, the ALL. THE. WORDS. format is a bit of a curse, but mostly a blessing for me as a writer. I've given up any thought of trying to find a publisher for Emmy And Me in its current form- I'll have to edit the ever-loving snot out of it to get it pared down enough for that, and anyway, it will probably not find a publisher, since it's simply not able to fit nicely in the genre categories they like.

But that's OK. This is my first attempt at long-form fiction, and I'm learning by doing. A huge part of that learning process is from the feedback that you, my lovely and talented readers, give me. I appreciate it all, even when people tell me I write sex scenes like a middle-aged guy from Ohio. Even better, though, are those readers who ask questions or make comments that cause me to sit back and evaluate what it is I'm doing, and why. Generally, I think I have a good handle on where the story is going and how it's progressing, but a few times now somebody has raised a hand and asked, "Um, why is this like this?" and I've had to take a minute or two (or more) and ask myself why, and is that the best way to write it.

I guess what I mean to say is that this story is my fumbling attempt to tell a somewhat complicated story in a certain way, and your questions, advice and help is immeasurably important to my growth as a writer.

Writing this story in the first person from the point of view of a flawed narrator was always intentional, and was, again, a big part of the challenge I set myself. It would have been far, far easier to have written from an omniscient third-person, but it would have dumbed the story down quite a bit. I know that there are a lot of so-far unanswered questions, such as "OK, WTF isn't Leah asking about where Emmy disappeared to?" or, "OK, WTF isn't Leah asking more about Emmy's 'moon kissed' short lifespan thing?"

But here's the thing. She hasn't asked. So we, as readers, don't know the answers. Why hasn't she asked? We don't know that, either, because she hasn't told us.

Some readers seem to have found this frustrating, bordering on infuriating, judging by some of the PMs I've gotten. Well, sorry. Life isn't neatly wrapped up and explained all that often. Leah only tells us what she tells us, and the rest we have to piece together, infer, or wait for answers later. "Later" means a whole lot later than I'd originally planned, since shifting to the really-long-form format. I'd expected to have the whole thing finished by now, but that isn't happening. At the current rate of plot progression, I think we'll wrap it all up sometime in the Fall, maybe October or November.

All right- enough from my side of things. Now it's time to open the floor to you guys, and please, tell me what you think.

Gen