I suspected it was you early on, but what sealed it was "His three-hundred plus pound frame didn't exit the car so much as get spat out." -- the line is reminiscent of the father in "November, 1978." It's very much a CRwM observation. And there's the way you describe people and their clothes, which is completely different from the way that ana does the same thing.

That said, if I haven't made you too self-conscious by now, there's also a certain confidence in your writing that always comes through. A sureness in your narrative stride from beginning to end. Stories that are well put-together, but not so much that they feel constructed.

In short, your stuff is good and it shows.

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"Late to the party" is the new "ahead of the curve" -- CRwM
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... but I think with my current level of Husi activity my current one is more appropriate. It's tempting to get this printed and laminated to tack up above a desk, though.

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"Late to the party" is the new "ahead of the curve" -- CRwM
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Point of view -- I guess that's part of it, but not just because you usually write in first person. I did note that "Bird" was the only entry in the third person this round, and it struck me as a poor choice for this challenge. I thought the theme cried out for a really subjective POV, and I think one of the things that made "Country Manners" so successful was just how strongly that POV comes through.

What really didn't seem like "you" though was what I mentioned in my review -- the way the characters are generically referred to as "he" and "she" in the beginning, without giving the reader any handles on who they might be or how to begin to grasp them, reads (to me) as the kind of thing that happens when a writer doesn't know exactly what they've got yet, or where this is going, or hasn't fully committed to the characters, or doesn't have enough of a sense of the characters to even give them provisional names or identifiers -- which is odd given that fanfic comes with prefab characters. (Possibly due to this in addition to my cultural illiteracy in not recognizing what the titular bird alluded to, I didn't actually tag this as fanfic until after your comment, so that didn't influence my impression of it.)

Also, based on the conventions of the "hard-boiled" genre I initially expected the setting to be "his" (the private eye's) office, but that turned out not to be the case. And again, my prejudice made me want to read him as the POV character, though it's actually her, but not strongly so -- in places it can almost be read as omniscient.

I've never had that sense of disorientation, of not knowing who these people were, where they were, what was going on, or even who was the protagonist in any of your other stories. This is probably just an utter failure of my reading (for which I apologize), or it might be a product of how you played against the source story, in which case your own review is right on: maybe it works as fanfic, but not standalone.

As for "Dream Dagger," yes, you did mention you had another beginning to a novel, but still. Novels have smaller points of closure within them, and this isn't even a first chapter. I didn't come away from "Spike" feeling cheated out of the "real" story, for instance -- it could easily have gone on, but I liked the slice that we got to see. "Dagger" was a cliffhanger over a bottomless pit (I almost typed "cliffhangover" for a sec there).

Anyway, it's true I'd rather read a novel set in the "Spike" world than "Dream Dagger"'s. A lot of the elements that make "Dagger" appealing are present in "Spike" and yeah, I winced just a bit when the narrator saw all his gaming sessions come to life. But, somehow, the coyness of the opening worked better for me in "Dagger" than in "Bird." Each sentence, even though I couldn't quite put it in context yet, told me something about the characters and how they related.

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"Late to the party" is the new "ahead of the curve" -- CRwM
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