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You say that I am confused.
I say that I disagree.
And, unfortunately I may not have the time to carry this discussion with you through.  But you deserve to know that I have not accepted your definitions and instruction.

It's taking me a little time to pick up on Cobber's style so I won't be arguing against it.  This evening is spoken for.  Give me 'til 13:00 Eastern to get something up.

Book 2, of course.

I'm getting more from your story than I'm giving.

I've put two chapters up.  The first jumps two chapters forward from where we are.  The second is a glimpse into the future, several volumes hence.

Book 2, Ch15, The Garden of End and Beginning.  Amy, let's see how I do on description.

Book 1 (by accident; I meant to hang it off B2), Ch 93: A Lesson with Kirsey.

I disagree.

I'll start by way of analogy.  There are many foods and seasonings which I do not like.  My tolerance for vinegar is low, for instance, and I find avacado repulsive or worse.  But I've found that a really good cook####chef can turn these horribles into something I will enjoy, by subduing the worst and making what remains complement the other ingredients in the dish.

It is possible for a work to transcend its genre.  It is possible for a work to avoid the genre's excesses and use what remains as part of a larger whole.  To take extreme examples, compare Tolkien with Craig Shaw Gardener.  Both write 'fantasy', but Gardener writes humorous camp.  Morals tomorrow, comedy tonight!  For a more up-to-date example, Dave Freer's Tom is glorious camp.  If it's not your thing, fine.  Not everybody can taste the difference between Nathan's Famous and Hot Dog Johnny's.  (Both are good, and if you're near Hackettstown NJ, so is Johnny's, on US 46 in Butzville.)  And not everyone likes hot dogs.  Enjoy your omlette, sir.  But I'm sure that if a true cordon bleu chef ever stuffed seasoned meat into a sausage casing and called it a frankfurter you would be wise to try it.

AJ Reid has a story on this site that she styles a Romance (modern meaning).  It's also a period mystery/adventure.  I've been pounding her on the ROMANCE!!! excesses, principally on the puppy-piled participles smothering the subjects and predicates, and I think she's now got a story that can be enjoyed by ROMANCE!!! readers and non-ROMANCE!!! partisans alike.  It's not Ellery Queen, but I've read far weaker mysteries published by major houses.

Then use Tirpitz.

Oh, and I found two errors in my layout for electronic project #3.  When those were fixed the parts in that part of the board were packed too tightly.  It took three hours to straighten that out.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...

Having tantalized us, Corra, will you please tell us what that's from?

What is a strong start?  What does "Most Valuable Player" mean?  Valuable in what way?

A start can be strong in many ways.  It can make us curious about a character.  It can create a personal or global jeopardy.  It can convince the reader that the writer has something to offer.  It can make the reader curious about what is to follow.  It can be the voice of a first-person narrator that makes the reader wonder what sort of story this character will tell.  (Think of the opening of Huckleberry Finn, or of the best of the hard-boiled first-person detective stories.)

Dorothy Sayers does not begin with a knife and a corpse.  Neither does Agatha Christie, nor John Dickson Carr.  I'm thinking right now of the opening chapter of Ellery Queen's Double Double, which sets up a strong (strongly-drawn) character, a strong reaction, and a strong character axis, and thereby creates multiple levels of jeopardy that unfold through the story.

The very literary P. D. James generally begins with her detective character.  So do many 'lesser' genre writers.

Wilkie Collins begins The Woman in White with the description of a woman (not the woman in white).  There's a subtext that runs opposite the written word, and the reader feels it personally rather than judging it.

So do we measure 'strong' by how lurid it is, or the horrors it creates, or by the wonders it promises, or by how well it convinces the reader to invest time and caring in the story that follows?

Last night I couldn't sleep.  I went to finish off project #2, putting the circuit board on the platform, connecting the output, connecting the battery holders.

And then, just as I was almost sleepy, I tested it.  It didn't work, and it was draining the batteries so hard their voltage dropped nearly to zero.  (These are AAAs, so it's not too hard to do that.)  So I had to debug it.  In the process, I disconnected the undervolt circuits, in case something was wrong there--yes, I was getting desperate.   I dismounted the circuit board, still wired in place, so I could get a better look at it.  Eventually a wire popped up--the base (control) feed for the bootstrap transistor.  Somehow I'd torn it loose, and who knows what it was making contact with.  I put it back in its proper place, dodging the transistor's heatsink (mounted over transistor and board like a drooping mushroom cap) to solder it in, more securely this time.  It worked, and I put it mostly back together.  I still have to replace the undervolt monitor connections, and with the board in its present state, I should probably put a thinner tip on my soldering pencil for that.  It's a crowded little sucka.

Anyhow, when that was done, I still wasn't able to sleep.  I got to sleep at about 08:00, so I also got up late on Tuesday ... you get the picture.

I've spent the last few hours reading, doing a little reviewing, and mulling project #3.  Now back to The Garden of End and Beginning.

That's not minimalist.  That's scorched earth.  Are you afraid to devote loving care to your characters, preferring instead to make them into unworthy disposables?

Once again I just get fully immersed in the scenes I have to write when the evening catches up with me!  Anyway, the provisional title for this chapter is The Garden of End and Beginning.  Not The Man Who Was Thursday but it will do.