Twenty Thousand Gold Stars - Chapter 3

[duskpeterson]

Twenty Thousand Gold Stars. White Rose has lived a double life for too long. For too many years, he has struggled alone to determine how he should handle an ethical dilemma he never wanted to face. Now, finally, he has found help online. But is it the right help?

18A for subject matter. Site content label. Tags for this story (with spoilers)

Comments

[duskpeterson]

"Definitely not within my usual scope of topics to read about"

I don't imagine it's within most people's scope of topics. :/

"I respect your choice to backdate the story a bit"

Well, actually, it's dated at the time I wrote it. It just took me a while to figure out what to do with it, and the world's technology changed in the meantime - creating a slight problem later in my plot, if I didn't make clear that this was from an earlier era.

(I hear that mystery writers are going crazy because it's hard to have villains kidnap their heroes, when their heroes are all carrying cell phones now. Apparently the villains have to do the same thing that villains in Star Trek always had to do to Captain Kirk: Knock out the hero and take away his cell phone.)

"I fear that they leave less room for the actual plot."

Darn, you're the third reader to tell me that. I fear that I show how much a cybergeek I am by saying that, when I was writing the novel, I considered the posts and e-mails to be as much a part of the plot as the real-life events. That is, after all, what 99% of my own interactions with this community consisted of. It was the cyberculture that first intrigued me about the community; what I knew about real-life events was very distant and hazy.

Evidently, though, I didn't succeed in conveying to the reader the sort of interest I myself felt at these cyber interactions.

"Your latest Eternal Dungeon chapter was also fantastic! The narrator was unexpected, and reminded me of one of your other stories, 'The Fool,' especially the ending."

Written within one month of each other. :) You should be able to recognize echoes of "Life Prison" too, which was written during that same month. Once my Muse gets on a roll, he tends to play around with the same plotlines in different variations.