[REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #45 - September 2007 [spoilers]

[Tom Russell]

On Dec 8, 8:37 pm, Martin Phipps <martinphip... at yahoo.com> wrote:

> In the end, Tom, I think you probably plot your stories out too far in
> advance and are then forced to have your characters behave a certain
> way and do certain things in order to advance the plot.

Yes and no.  Yes, in that I had outlined some basic character points
to display/evolve, and I had some vague ideas-- prison break!,
Apelantis!, duel on unicycles!-- and no in that I kinda made up the
actually nitty-gritty of it as I went along.  Plotting might not be my
strength.  If anyone out there in RACC-land disagrees, my plots would
appreciate a better defense than I could provide. :-)

>  Time and time
> again, I've felt that Martin's actions didn't make sense or that he
> made a tremendous leap of logic to solve a case or that his reactions
> didn't seem genuine.

Well, I'm sorry you feel that way.

>  Everything about Speak seemed more genuine,
> although you have to admit you did cheat by skipping over the bank
> robbery scene.

If the robbery scene was important, I would have shown it.

>  I grant you that because you were focusing on one
> single character for eleven issues (plus the annual) that readers got
> to know this character very well and were starting to anticipate his
> behaviour and this might have worked against you in that readers may
> have felt they knew Martin Rock as well as you did and, every once in
> a while, maybe a bit better than you seemed to. :)

Thank you for the compliment part of that.  About the other-- I
dunno.  I don't really mind my readers anticipating how the character
acts.  I think (as Saxon pointed out) Martin's pattern of bottling-up
and then really making a mess of things when things do get out was
established enough that readers might be waiting for the other shoe to
drop, and that's fine.

> Oh and, yeah, come to think of it, having Martin have a lawyer screw
> up and have him sent to (or remanded to, if you prefer) jail would be
> much, much better because I would have ended up feeling sorry for him
> and I wouldn't have felt that the situation Martin got himself in was
> due to his own overconfidence.  You could even through in a line where
> Martin tells the public defender about Fisk but the public defender
> doesn't believe him and so he doesn't bring it up at the bail hearing.

Well, it won't be so much that the defender screws up, but rather that
it's a really hard case.  But that's actually a really good suggestion
and I'd be more than happy to incorporate it in the collected/final
edition.

> Martin

==Tom