>But it's clear from your vehemence that I'm not going to be able to
>explain it to you, so fuck it.

More later, but just to point out something: inspiring passion in your audience is a good thing, and one of the key things successful creative types do. If and when you turn to saleable fiction, if you can keep that going, you'll probably do well enough to earn a living at it. (I think this is something I sort of knew about already, but it was crystallized when Scott Adams wrote about it, in an anecdote about the test screening of the Dilbert animated series -- if you have an audience where 100% like it okay and will watch it if it's on, it'll probably fail, but if it happens that 90% of your test audience hates it with a passion and the other 10% love it to the ends of the earth, you have a success. Because, love it or hate it, they'll talk about it, think about it, tell other people about it.

>If you want to try discussing it like an adult sometime, I'm always
>around, but you'll forgive me if, based on prior performance, I'm not
>overly sanguine about the prospects right now.

I apologize -- I was actually trying to not be confrontational, but it doesn't help that ... well, as you can tell, I'm quite passionate about the topic, for a lot of reasons, and it's already over and done with, so it often feels like the only thing I can do about it is rant. (Hell, the above is extremely mild compared with some of the discussions I've had with other friends about this, who are equally dissatisfied with the latter Symphony and with certain other Eyrie works.)

Anyway, you at least get the gist of my complaint, so... let's discuss like adults. I contend that some bad mistakes were made in the culmination of the arc, as stated above, mistakes that were, for me, fatal.

- Sean
"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true.'"
-- Terry Pratchett, from _The Last Continent_