Merry Christmas, All!

Have a happy holiday, and may the spirit of the Blessed Lady Serenity touch you all.

(Um, assuming you're a member of the CoS, that is.)

Making Progress

Current word count for chapter 12: 6472.

I'm a little concerned that what I'm putting out now is going to seem rather slow. That's even more of a concern given that the biggest complaint I've had back about chapter 11 is that the opening was rather slow.

The trouble is, once Rei and Setsuna (oops, Itsuko and Sadako) get to talking seriously, there's an awful lot of information to get across — this is the point where I explain quite a few things, at last — and not much in the way of action. I'm trying to break the long talky bits up, but ... well, we'll see how it looks when I have the whole discussion finished. (It's not even close, yet.)

Just to be a bastard, here's a teaser scene fragment:

After a little Sadako said quietly, "I suppose you have questions."

Itsuko gave her a wry smile. "Where do I start?"

Sadako took another sip from her cup. Her cool red eyes studied Itsuko
in silence. Then she said, "Wherever you please. At this point, there
is ... very little I will not answer."

^_^

It's Been a While...

Okay, so it's been a long time since I've posted. Sadly, this is partly because it's been a long time since I've had much to post.

So, to begin: thanks to all of you who suggested fanfics. (Please feel free to continue doing so.) I looked at all the suggestions, and some of them I liked and some of them I didn't. Not sure I should name names beyond that. :)

One comment I would make, to the reader who suggested that stories with more reviews on FanFiction.net are usually better—I have not found this to be the case. I've seen far too many cases of crap stories with literally hundreds of reviews, next to excellent stories with only a few. My feeling is that the average FF.net reviewer is a teenager who's more impressed by surface gloss (e.g. the "coolness" factor) than by any real story depth. Don't get me wrong, gloss is not a bad thing—and I'm perfectly capable of appreciating a shallow, mindless story when I'm in the mood—but typically I want something a bit more substantial. Written by someone who is actually familiar with the source material, rather than just having read other fanfics. Someone who knows something about grammar. And can spell.

But I digress.

As ar as SM4200 goes: I've been pretty stuck for the last few weeks. I've mentioned before that the opening has been causing me a lot of grief, both with the pacing of the story and with trying to get events to go the way I need them to go, without the result coming out reading like…well, something written by one of the authors I lambasted above.

However. To cut a long story short, I've more or less licked it. I rewrote the biggest problem section (a debate between Artemis and one of the 'S' Division people) on Sunday night, and the whole section still hung together okay when I re-read it on Monday night, so I figure I've finally passed the roadblock. I'm now embedded in a rather different debate (between Itsuko and Sadako), which is proceeding nicely.

Chapter currently standing at 5667 words. That may not sound like much more than my previous status report, but I've deleted nearly 2000 words into the omake file, as well…