On Wed, 12 May 1999, Patrick McClanahan wrote:

	Yay! This chapter definitely showed some anime roots. I was a little
concerned after the first chapter, since it struck me as a Western story
with Japanese-named characters; somehow, I don't think there were very many
acid-droppng hippies in 1960's Japan. Maybe in the 70's, if we hypothesize a
5-10 year culture lag. Waaay off the subject.

In both my Japanese History (a couple years ago) and my Sociology class
(last term), there were mentions of a few small counter-culture groups in
Japan in the late sixties-early seventies that did a little drugs and
protested Vietnam (and Chinese Communism, etc.).  Yeah, the group was
small, but it makes Kenji's excuse all the more clever... or is that
desperate?

	Gorgeous prose throughout. Many writers turn tedious when writing about
writing, but you've avoided that pitfall. Fresh imagery, clean dialogue. I'm
not going to point out all the little touches that make the difference. At
least not now, anyway, as you seem to produce them well enough without
anyone's help. Well, maybe one...

I decided early on to never show what the writers in the story were
writing (doing so sets an author up for disaster).  I think that kept it
from being tedious more than anything I wrote (or didn't write).

glass that he realized how long the thoughts had been running.  He
looked at the clock on his desk; it poured an electric green 23:28
into his eyes, and then his eyelids.

Perfectly simple. Simply perfect. Maybe one more...

Thank you.  I did get help with that one (from Jiro Maeda, I believe) --
the electric green was his suggestion.

     "Paper."  Before he dressed, Kenji threw himself at his desk,
ripping a piece of paper from its brothers in his desk drawer.

	Indeed. Ye Gods.

	And after all of that, your standard anime romantic comedy hijinks. Not
that they don't fit - quite the opposite. If I may be permitted a wretched
metaphor, they're the tomato in this salad. With the rest of the fresh,
bright prose as the spinach (I like spinach salads). The best part of this
salad? The mushrooms, suitably psychedelic. These fungi are the wonderful
dream sequences, of course, running at odd angles to reality. Not entirely
unlike the dream sequences in Boku no Marie, episode 3, one might note.

At the risk of sounding self-serving, there are going to be quite a fe
dream-sequences, though not in the same overtly psychadelic vein as MBA.
Caravan's world works on the level of dreams and subconscious, and to
access that world one needs to... But I say too much.  ^_^

	Stupendously good as always, Matt. How many parts can we look forward to
savoring?

Savoring?  Wow.  Thank you.  Umm.  I have 9 episodes plotted in the first
major arc.  After that, I'll take a bit of a break to collect myself and
reset a 3-episode buffer.  There needs to be at least 9 after that, and
probably nine more after those for good measure.  So, 27 episodes in all
-- one season.  ^_^

After that, who knows?  There seems to be no small amount of momentum
going for it, so, if the stories are flowing easily, then why stop?

Patrick

--Matt


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