META: Bringing Things Into Focus

[Martin Phipps]

Tom Russell wrote:

>    My prose is vastly different than that of Martin
> Phipps, a compatriot on RACC whom I hold in high
> esteem.  But we both share the same aim: focus.
> Martin's work is extremely tight, told in bare-bones
> dialogue with a minimum of description.  Each scene
> has a point (or a gag), he presents it, and moves on.

I apologize.  I was searching for meaning in your essay
and I thought your comments on focus might have been
directed at what I wrote.  I got overly defensive and I'm
sorry.

Besides you and me, the other major poster his month
was Wil.  Wil, as you say, in #10 left the room, came back
and the reader (me anyway) was confused as to what had
happened in the meantime.  But it was easily fixed.  Leaving
the room wasn't the problem in that case.  The problem was
that he came back and "two hours" had supposedly passed
while the assassins had gotten out of the car and up the
stairs.  Yeah, now that I think about it, Wil did make a mistake
there.  But it was something he could have easily have fixed by
staying in the room and then only cutting away for the amount
of time it would have actually have taken for the assassins to
get up the stairs.  Personally, I liked the reaction of the assassins
to Metal Fire and the reaction of the techs to their reactions and
we wouldn't ahve gotten that if Wil hadn't left the room.

Martin