8FOLD/ACRA: Jolt City # 2, There Was a Crooked Man!

[Martin Phipps]

Tom Russell wrote:
> Martin Phipps wrote:

> > I do appreciate the fact that the solution to Martin's problems, as it
> > turned out, depended more on his fighting skills than on some cheat
> > that the lab guy came up with.  It did however, come across as a "Star
> > Trek ending": with only a few paragraphs left, we knew that Martin was
> > going to defeat The Crooked Man right there and then and this spoiled
> > the surprise.
>
> Point taken.

"Star Trek ending" is the analogy most people use but there's a cruder
analogy I could make.  Here, you were building up excitement: it was
building, it was building and them, suddenly, the issue was over.  My
wife hates it when I do that.  And, no, I'm not talking about my
writing. :)

(To put it another way, I saw the story as having two logical breaks
resulting in three distinct parts and the third part was the quickest.)

Sarcastic Lad it said.  Sarcastic Lad?  How the hell am *I* like
Sarcastic Lad?

Anyway, I was thinking that you had peaked with Speak because Green
Knight had a lot of flashbacks that didn't advance the story and the
Nostalgics is thematically very similar to Speak.  (The stories told by
Gas Man, on the other hand, were not simply exposition in the sense
that the story was about Gregory falling in with the wrong crowd and
all the character interaction between the two of them, including the
storytelling, served to advance that plot.  The stories didn't even
turn out to be true anyway.)  But maybe the best is yet to come.  Jolt
City #2 was good enough that I took the time to go back and read
Journey Into #3, even though stories about
a-speedster-who-is-also-able-to-vibrate-his-molecules-and-move-through-dimensions
is not inherently interesting to me.  But Jolt City has Martin
interacting with characters that could exist in real life.  (None of my
advisors at McGill seemed to care that I was "secretly" Deja Dude.)  So
it has the potential to be very interesting.  You might have noticed
that I am interested in that sort of character interaction. :)

Martin