InBrightestDay

That’s probably what’s going to happen with my story too. I’ve made some progress, but in addition to having a long way to go, the story takes place on Christmas Eve anyway, so it’ll either go up then or on Christmas Day. Super happy to see you joining in! These holiday anthologies are always better the more people are in on them, so the more the merrier. 🙂

Oooh maybe I do need to read all the other stories in this series to read this one. Well…let’s see how fast I can do that. 😅

Alright, now that I have a moment, let me talk a bit here! Well then I think you nailed it. 😁 There’s something I can’t quite describe about the stories, something you can feel about the world of the Hyborian Age, and I got that same feeling from your story. And he actually led with that one! I don’t think he started shit-talking her husbands until after mentioning that he strangled her baby in the womb. That does make me wonder about his goal there. It felt like he was deliberately antagonizing Berta, but I can’t see what that was supposed to accomplish...aside from being the world’s most epic suicide, I suppose. Sorry 😅, I was bad at wording it there. I meant I spent a while trying to work out if it took place in actual Medieval Europe, rather than a fictional equivalent. Aha, so it was a bit of surprise to the author as well as the reader! Writing is kind of an interesting process like that, both creation and discovery, in a way. Apologies for that bit. I actually went back and forth about whether to even put it in the review, as I didn’t want it to sound like I didn’t enjoy the story. Maybe he just didn’t seem that bad compared to other spouses I’ve read in stories like this; I don’t know. I don’t think you did anything wrong as a writer, I promise. Thank you! I’ll do my best!

I’ll try and start writing soon! I want this to be on time. 🙂

It is unfortunately way too late at night for me to post another review or respond to Invidia, but I will get to it tomorrow. In the meantime, please enjoy this dramatic reenactment of @GeorgeGlass’s story.

Dang it… I’m in the middle of something else, and the only thing I have enough of that I could write it quickly isn’t original. I’ll be here for the holiday anthology, though. Meaningful Gifts has waited long enough!

Wow. I didn’t even realize this had happened. I guess in a way it’s kind of a good thing I haven’t had anything to publish.😅

Like Thundercloud, I may be late. Work at the lab is kind of strained at the moment (sometimes a lot of people call out and those of us who are there end up stretched rather thin). As a result, I haven’t gotten much writing done. I have the 31st off, so I’m going to try and spend most of the day writing, but don’t be surprised if this ends up being one or two days late. I am also struggling a bit with what to include. Don’t want to use all of the kinks, since that’ll make all my sex scenes rather similar. Makes the end result a bit tricky. I try and work around that generally by focusing on the emotional context of a scene like this, which is generally somewhat different from story to story, given what leads up to the sex scene. I do worry, admittedly, that the sex scene in a future story might end up looking familiar, but hopefully the stories as a whole will be distinct enough for audiences.

It might also be, to be very generous about this, that the reviewer began with the books or films when the characters were like 11 and has a difficult time allowing them all to grow up in his mind. I know I actually struggled with that a bit when I was watching the films. Granted, that was a rather immature response. I had hopes we were kind of past that as a society when it came to internet reviews. ...I say things now that I never really said before. Odd sentences are becoming commonplace.

I’ve gotten three: two on WitS and one on The Least I Can Do over in Books. I’ve deleted them, and thankfully had the same thought as Bronx when it came to the links. I don’t really want to turn off anonymous reviews, as I’ve gotten several genuine reviews from fans who simply don’t have an account, so I’ll just keep deleting them as they pop up.

Ok, so I looked back to see where I’d last responded to @Sinfulwolf’s reviews, and it turns out I’d somehow neglected to do so since her review of Chapter 9. So I have several reviews to respond to, not just one. First, Chapter 10. I have included this sentence of the review purely for the sake of irony. Thank you! I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this elsewhere in this thread, but I got my start writing Gundam fanfiction, and writing the action scenes has always been fun. I should probably write another space battle one of these days. Not to spoil anything I’ve started reading recently, but you write some pretty intense action scenes yourself, so that’s a serious compliment. I definitely see what you’re getting at. It is a tricky sort of balancing act, and I’m not sure I’ll ever entirely master the “detail versus flow” thing, but I will try! Thanks again! Your comments did make me really think about why I was writing this the way I was, and made me realize that while it’s somehow socially acceptable for a male protagonist to have a love interest who’s a noncombatant, it doesn’t seem to be done the other way around. I guess we’ve gotten to the point where a large segment of the population will accept women as action heroes, but at the same time there are boundaries on masculinity we’re reluctant to push. The Non-Action Guy, as TV Tropes puts it, is often played for comedy rather than just accepted as viable. The traps are another example of me trying to follow stuff @JayDee set up in WoH, expanding on a quick line and working to figure out what “the traps of Hell” might be like. While I like the matter prism from Chapters 11 and 12 is cool in a very “high magic” sort of way, there is something about the aesthetic of the fractal impalement trap that I think works on a visceral level; I may have mentioned The Evil Within as an inspiration before, but that trap is something I can sort of imagine being in the first game, crawling through a maze while spikes grow toward you with metal rasping noise. And once again I am really glad at how popular Luzurial’s “Fine, I’ll let you talk to my boss” moment is. Because, as I said when I read (some of) MRaD, fuck that guy.

I got two more reviews for WitS, though, which I can respond to before work. Well, Cthulhu fhtagn. Note that these aren’t the entirety of the reviews, but the rest are links to...somewhere (I didn’t follow them). As this is rather obviously spam, I’m deleting these.