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This is for CJ Driftwood, a proper reply to his two reviews.

On Temporary Reprieve/The Long and the Short Cut

There will be both male and female protagonists.  And they will make a lot of mistakes.  Some will be arguable.

Regarding "Mother Hem"--I've already changed the preceding chapters, so there are continuity problems.

I'll have to work over the conversations that follow, and your notes will be helpful.

The 'because I have to' for adventuring:  that opens an interesting point.  There are adventures of discovery and adventures of adversity.  It would be good to hint at the point without making it.

I'm attached to my commas, generally.  I stand between the modern usage and the usage I was taught in high school.

It's possible that your square brackets won't show up here because the BBCode interpreter refuses to ignore what it doesn't understand.

I think loss is the right feeling.  You have a young woman leaving home behind.  Yes, she's leaving responsibilities as well, but she has no idea when she can come back, and thus no concrete expectation of return.  She's leaving her life behind, and, as you correctly note on the next chapter, her mother makes things worse by slipping away in silence--and I should play that up more.

There's a lot of detail stuff to think about.  I'm not as averse as most to repetition of words.

On Arrival at the Home of Harsan and Glasias:

First, I should tinker with the chapter name.

Well, yes, I'm trying to introduce the whole household in short order, and I use Merran's confusion as an excuse to repeat things.

Yeah.  That dream sequence is a nightmare (so to speak) and I have to cut it.  I don't want to get rid of it, but it's at least six times too long.

Merran's troubles come from unfamiliarity, at least as I see it, leading to a very reasonable insecurity.  And Glaselle did make a mistake, too.  Sorcerous families tend to be socially isolated.  You might look ahead to the last part of Chapter 35. 

I have to completely redesign this whole training sequence and cut it better with Melayne's journey.

Jamen and pack--good point.  I have to go back and look this over.  He should have had time to pack something.

I'm trying here to carry us along with Merran's experience as she learns all these people at once.  Maybe I need to do a better job of cueing the reader?

At the time they called for Jamen, he had not yet explained, so  the use of a relative clause, whether restrictive or not, is inaccurate here.  Only after the explanation was given could it be accurate--but he was called first.

Yes, people often write without regard for this nicety.  Since I'm carrying the reader along with the experience of the characters, I don't think I can or should get away wth it.

As before, I'm not afraid of repetition.  And here I want to stay close in with Merran's experience, especially her experience of the Gem.

You're right about 'College'.  I don't want to go conspicuouly to Latin, but I do need to use another word.

I had wanted to have Merran asking herself this question often, and haven't done so.  It occurs to me as I write now that I could use that question to indicate a step in the improvement of her judgement.

More cast adrift, and she doesn't come fully to terms with it until she's about to leave.  Again, see later parts of Chapter 35.

Working on Erevain now.  Have some household stuff to work on.  Desperately need to work on the voltage level detector.  Haven't had much time lately.

With one person at a time, it's still possible to allow back-and-forth comments and replies.  Is that also something you'd like to be able to shut off?  It would mean shutting off the ability of a reviewer to put up additional, no-reward reviews.

When you have replied to a review, the original writer NOW can add another review, answering your reply.  Would you like that capability removed?  If not, would you like the original reviewer to be able to attach hiers counter-reply to your reply?  And would you then like to be able to respond in like fashion to hiers counter-reply?

Is that one-on-one, one time, or one-on-one with replies and re^n-plies?

Even now the inline system allows third parties to weigh in on a reviewer's comments.

Oh, don't lead with opinions.  Lead with facts.  The original paper was a fraud, the journal retracted it, the authors were prosecuted, they were trying to sell their own vaccine without thimeresol, and the increase in autism diagnoses are matched by a decrease in diagnoses of mental retardation.

Then you can say what you think of the con artists--but don't insult the marks.  You're trying to gain their confidence, remember?

Other parents, or other people?

Amy, I'm still trying to do something decent with Erevain.  I hope that the effort I'm putting in won't be another false start.

There are some other pulls on my time as well.  Nothing as severe as what you have every single day.

More precisely, the 'data balloons' for speech are used when the speaker is a machine, is embodied in a machine, or is speaking through a machine.

Oh, and I got the Spark's name wrong.  It's Valkerstorfer.

So long as the permission issue is dealt with and it is possible to link multiple works to one place, it seems useful.  For multi-chapter works, it would be good to have links for both chapter and whole work.  (And what of multi-volume series?)

One thing that a tighter connection would allow is the automatic placement in the forum article of a link back to the review, so that the thread could be followed backward.

Amy, have a look at the character who is speaking in data balloons.  I don't mean to make light of a serious matter, but what do you think of him?  (If you hadn't noticed, the authors specialize in going over the top often without ever going off the deep end.)