At 07:07 PM 8/9/2002 -0500, you wrote:

"Oh, God, Setsuuna. I thought he was a monster."

And she thought right.

Yup. Nice bit of an applied ethics lesson for Rei here. I'm a sick guy, but 
I really liked putting her in the situation where she had to save the youma 
from the human.

"No, Ytterbium!" Tin pleaded, biting her thumbnail. "Please!
I'll change! I'll be--"

Okay, I'll admit, I was mildly surprised by this little revelation. I
vaguely suspected Ytterbium might be against Cobalt, but I'll be honest when
I say I was expecting the robed figure to be someone different entirely.

I bet I caught a few people with that.

The interesting problem here for me was to decide how long to leave this 
revelation. Since the story is planned to be six chapters (2 more at this 
point), I decided to not stretch it out as long as I could have and play 
more on emotional overtones than impact.

It depends on how it's executed, but I'm rapidly coming to believe that the 
'twist ending' is a somewhat overused tool. It's not quite cliched, but I 
see a lot more authors emulating the style of M. Night Shaylaman. 'The 
Sixth Sense' was quite good, but in 'Unbreakable', you knew that there was 
going to be some sort of strange, story-defining twist at the end. I'm 
certain that when I watch 'Signs' for the first time, I'm going to have 
guessed the twist by the beginning of the second reel just because I'll be 
looking so hard for it.

I'm not saying that authors shouldn't use it, if they feel like they can 
pull it off and use it to good effect. They shouldn't do it just for the 
sake of doing it, however.

Of course, THIS way is much better than what I was expecting.

Thanks, Lurker. That means a lot.

C.


             .---Anime/Manga Fanfiction Mailing List----.
             | Administrators - ffml-admins@anifics.com |
             | Unsubscribing - ffml-request@anifics.com |
             |     Put 'unsubscribe' in the subject     |
             `---- http://ffml.anifics.com/faq.txt -----'