So this was amazing. You're probably the best writer in A1900, your conveyance of complex machinations and - simultaneously - live action sequences with guns and bombs and what-have-you is second to none. Far superior to the loquacious rambles I produce.
While I'm utterly humbled by this, I have to admit I certainly don't feel this way about my own work. Looking it over again I feel like the whole project was overly rough, and that there's a real gap between what I wanted to say, what I pictured in my head and the final project that came out. And while I've spent probably too much of my life reading pulp detective novels which have rubbed off on my writing, I'd much prefer to aspire to your own work. A story about people is IMO always preferable to guns and gore.
Particular highlights included the gradual emergency of the monster that was Lin the Younger, as well as the clever - almost filmic - brief introduction of Zhang as a somewhat pathetic, doomed, but totally unsympathetic figure (because of his past actions), and then the use of that same figure to illustrate that the purges have in fact begun. That could have come from a screenplay.
And here I was afraid I was shoehorning the start of the Purge and the elimination of various characters and cheapening it.
The use of Deng as a minor viewpoint character - which I commented on when I started reading this the first time around - really paid off, in a way I hope Peter Mandelson's appearances in Lavender were effective.
Now I wont try to act polite on this: Mandelson's appearances in Lavender were utterly fantastic. You built a man in a handful of sentences. My use of Deng as a sidelined loser was nowhere close to that. No, no, no. They were no where close to each other, I made, like I did with most of the characters in this, a caricature.
And - of course - Zhou's final moments. There was a smile on my face, too.
It would have been better if I'd talked about the hope that radio messages got out / that the orders to find "proper" prisoners to bring out would work better / Memories of the "Bad Old Good Old Days".
I've been meaning to read this for a long time, and I'm glad I finally did. Well done, Japhy. Or should I say 'Well Shit'?
I'll be totally honest, I don't know why anyone reads the stuff I write here or elsewhere. But it is nice to know you do, and that you get some enjoyment out of it.