Edward_or_Ford

Like ForgetMeNaught, I wanted to address the reviews to "Fistbump", and to thank those who wrote them. Speaking of the above-mentioned author, ForgetMeNaught please feel free to re-post your review that you left. Yours was the first I got back, and I only deleted it because it had a big spoiler of the end. Other than that half-sentence, it was a tremendous lift to my self-esteem to get such a positive review so quickly after posting my first story. (By the way, this was my *first* story: I'm a 43-year-old sysadmin who despised creative writing in school 25+ years ago. I've never written anything other than technical documentation for decades. Wish they had a class that included animated-underage-incest back in the '80s!) Now, on to the others: Belfry had also posted spoilers to the ending, but the previous version of the review also mentioned the desire for sequels to the story. This is what got me thinking on those lines. I've now got an outline for a follow-up story. Don't know how long it will take: Fistbump took me about 2 weeks to write, following about a week of fleshing out ideas in my head. But I'm pretty sure it's going to happen. The only spoiler xXDasXGoochXx wrote was that it was "sad": Oh, and that it was "faptastical" :-) And he posted another review! Thanks! As you can see from its current state, Fistbump is now a 10-chapter story. GrayNeko, you are absolutely correct that this makes the story far easier to swallow if you can't devote a couple of hours to a single sitting. Also, releasing chapter-by-chapter (see ForgetMeNaught's thread for my "Evil Bastard Technique") is a good way to keep a story at the top of the Cartoon Archive page, and to keep the views coming. Beyond that, very hearty thanks for the kind words. I now have quite a number of thoughts invested in the Fistbump "universe", so I'm fairly sure I'm going to just keep that same story going. Hey, it gets me off, too. I think there will be more. Thanks for the encouragement. Zoel, the dialogue was the biggest challenge for me, trying to make it sound authentic to the Dipper and Mabel we all know and love, only a year or so older. I had to draw on memory of my own awkwardness at that age, and supplemented with what my wife has told me about her own puberty years, and mix it into the completely non-experience I have with incest. I *do* have a sister, but she factors not at all in my own fantasy thoughts. I was drawn to the Pines because of their near-perfect brother-sister relationship. ____ Thanks again, all. I will respond here with any more reviews I get. Please feel free to discuss. Edward_or_Ford

You're welcome, ForgetMeNaught. The use of the "flashforward" section at the beginning of Sea of Time certainly gave a hint that this chapter would be more than a touch darker than the previous two. I don't know if you were trying to make us think that it was Mabel who was coercing Dipper into using the eraser gun, but that's who I was immediately dreading. Quick question: did you intend this to be a trilogy after "My North Star"? It seemed to be a complete story. I ask this because I completed "Fistbump" entirely as a one-off, self-contained story, but (in the past few days) realized that a sequel or two is definitely possible. Did the same thing happen to you? Also, can you at least tell us when part 2 is coming? And is it completed? I don't know how these people can write the start of a story and release it, if they don't know the end of the story itself. I constantly was going back and changing little things in my earlier sections as I continued to write. Whereas I can certainly see the appeal of completing an entire long story, splitting it up into chapters, then releasing the chapters one-by-one (the "evil bastard technique", I shall call it). Wish I had done that with Fistbump, and I will definitely be following that on any future sequels. Thanks again for your stories. Edward_or_Ford