All of Zhu Shu's flashback to her childhood should be writen down for your
reference to keep the story straight, but it isn't necessary to dump it all
at once. One of the pleasures of a well thought out story is picking up the
backstory as the main plot develops. 

***Agreed.  Jenny and I got into a major discussion over that when she read
the email in her box, and for that matter, so did Harold during the original
revision.  I took the entire original prologue and dumped it back in and I
really need to reduce it considerably, and work it through the rest of the
story.  One of the advantages to having other people read and comment on it. 
Because I know all of Zhu Shu's history, I forget and take it for granted
that everyone does, and when I deleted the original prologue I neglected to
add in enough of the back story in flashbacks, and as Mr. Taylor pointed out
rather eloquently, that leaves a lot of people who haven't read the original
hanging in the dark. 

Jenny also rather firmly pointed out that this should be the first CHAPTER
asopposed to the Prologue.*** 

  

I'm finding a lot of joined words that would be caught by a spell checker. I
suspect that whatever wordprocessor you are using is making that mistake
while it wraps the paragraphs. 

***Actually, I think it might be an artifact introduced when I cut and
pastedit into Hotmail's RTF editor.  I work on the main doc in Word2002 then
I cut and pasted to Hotmail, at which point, for some unknown reason, it
ripped out the first indents and pragraph spaces until I switched it to the
RTF editor.  When I read the doc over in Hotmail, it came through fine, with
all my formatting and italics, then when I mailed it, it came back to my
inbox in plain text with the joined words, and no formatting.***   

  >Here's the revised Prolouge. Thank you for the commentary and please let
me >know if this works better. I will be making a list of those of you who
have >volunteered for beta reading, and will hopefully be sending out the
revised >chapter one later this week. It's going to require a lot more
revision than >this one. I apologize for the RTF format, but plain text
strips out all the >italics and line breaks. 

  

RTF is managable. Do you mean Chapter 1 will be RTF? This section came to me
as plain text. 

***I thought it was when I sent it out.  Somewhere along the line, it got
stripped to PT*** 

  

  >Shu's style was so fast and furious it was like fighting an octopus.
She'd>gone through eight {bonburi : bon bori} in the course of the sparring
match and still >wasn�t sure Zhu Shu had pushed to her maximum speed yet.
Shefocused as she >descended and concentrated on moving faster. 

***This I do need to ask.  Is it two words, or one?  And is it BoMburi or
BoNburi?  I've seen it both ways and I'm not sure which is proper.  Also,
should I use Shampoo's Chinese variant, i.e. Ko Lon  Shan pu Mu Tse etc.
whenspeaking in Chinese?  I'm reluctant to use Xian Pu, as I don't want
Shampoo confused with Xian Chi (Zi an Chee) or should I just put the
apostrophe back in Xi'an?*** 

  

  

My email client is rendering your "--" as a black box ("�"). 

***I'm assuming you mean the quote marks?  That seems to be one of the
biggest problems with Word2002.  Even if I tell it not to use "smart quotes" 
it makes them all that anyway.  And it's really annoying to have to convert
to txt, open in wordpad, change everything to a system font and re-edit it
before sending it out.  That adds almost two hours to sending out a single
post.  I wish that I could just default eveything to RTF and not have to go
through and change every italiczed word to _whatever_  or *whatever* just to
send it out to be read.  I use plain Times New Roman, with italics and auto
indented paragraphs, but I can't send that out to email, because it doesn't
come through that way.*** Mac :}) Give a hobbit a fish and he eats fish for
aday. Give a hobbit a ring and he eats fish for an age.   That's actually
rather funny as I'm responding to this email while listening to the LOTR
soundtrack.   LSMcGill

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