I stayed awake long past my bedtime yesterday powering through this story, and I ... might have shuffled some work around so that I could finish it this morning ;) It's made me think of lit class and Dickens and so forth, in that you are very skilled at ending each chapter on a sort of mini-cliffhanger, as if it were a serialized novel needing the extra "hook" to make people come back next edition. Well, I guess LJ is kind of the modern equivalent of the 19th-century literary periodical xD but I'd never thought of it like that before. There are a lot of fics that I follow because I want to know where they go, but not many that are structured so I feel the need to go to the next part right this instant, you know?
Also like Dickens, you (or maybe just Eva, because although your name seems vaguely familiar, I can't remember reading anything else of yours) have this tendency to go on at great length, details and tangents that usually don't work for me. I have a tendency to skim past that sort of thing with a sort of "okay, get to the plot progression already" attitude. Oddly enough, though I several times asked myself "why am I not irritated by this?" I didn't feel that impatience. Maybe it's the way it's broken up, with Eva addressing the reader from her "hindsight" point of view as a red flag that the younger, more naïve Eva's mental rambling is relevant; maybe it's just my current fascination with outsider-POV stories and the observers' mental processes. Maybe it's been too long since lit class for me to figure it out xD but either way, I wanted to commend you on it.
I've been quite enjoying Eva, among other reasons because our opposing points of view really tickle me. You've set her up with this nearly-unshakable (and, given the information she had, totally justifiable) position that Xander is a corrupt and unstable individual, doing bad things out of either malevolence or psychosis or possibly both. I, on the other hand, came into the story with the nearly-unshakable position that Xander may be doing bad things, but he's Xander and therefore he's got good intentions, even if he's inadvertently paving the road to hell with them. (This has also made it very interesting to read some of your pre-chapter comments, obviously :) ) It's been fun to watch Eva struggle to fit the evidence into her preconceptions, because this is something I'm very aware that I do myself -- of course, all I have to do is hit the back button when I reach that snap-point where I can't fit the Xander I want to see into the Xander on the page. Eva isn't that lucky xD
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Also like Dickens, you (or maybe just Eva, because although your name seems vaguely familiar, I can't remember reading anything else of yours) have this tendency to go on at great length, details and tangents that usually don't work for me. I have a tendency to skim past that sort of thing with a sort of "okay, get to the plot progression already" attitude. Oddly enough, though I several times asked myself "why am I not irritated by this?" I didn't feel that impatience. Maybe it's the way it's broken up, with Eva addressing the reader from her "hindsight" point of view as a red flag that the younger, more naïve Eva's mental rambling is relevant; maybe it's just my current fascination with outsider-POV stories and the observers' mental processes. Maybe it's been too long since lit class for me to figure it out xD but either way, I wanted to commend you on it.
I've been quite enjoying Eva, among other reasons because our opposing points of view really tickle me. You've set her up with this nearly-unshakable (and, given the information she had, totally justifiable) position that Xander is a corrupt and unstable individual, doing bad things out of either malevolence or psychosis or possibly both. I, on the other hand, came into the story with the nearly-unshakable position that Xander may be doing bad things, but he's Xander and therefore he's got good intentions, even if he's inadvertently paving the road to hell with them. (This has also made it very interesting to read some of your pre-chapter comments, obviously :) ) It's been fun to watch Eva struggle to fit the evidence into her preconceptions, because this is something I'm very aware that I do myself -- of course, all I have to do is hit the back button when I reach that snap-point where I can't fit the Xander I want to see into the Xander on the page. Eva isn't that lucky xD