>Day of Infamy, WotOR, the disappointments piled up until I stopped.

Points of order:

1. A Day of Infamy is not entirely - or even mostly - my work; I would guess that I contributed no more than 20 percent of the finished product, and much of that was flavor and texture rather than structure. The original draft was presented to me effectively as a fait accompli, following which I had a few weeks to massage things as best I could and work in what scenes I thought of. Some of those scenes I'm rather fond of; others didn't work out so well.

If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't release Infamy when I did; it's too far out of sequence, has already caused me endless wait-I-can't-do-that-it's-not-that-way-in-Infamy headaches, and could stand a lot more buffing and screwing around with. If I thought the Plotstapo would let me get away with it, I'd withdraw it and come back to the War of 2412 in its own time. At any rate, I admit it's not my favorite piece in the canon either (though it's far from the worst), but if it represents a failure on my part, specifically, it's an editorial one, not an authorial one. The distinction may be academic, but I think it's important.

As for the editorial failure, well, all I can say is, a guy made it for me with the thought that he was saving me a lot of work - we had plotted the basic outline of What Goes On in the Galaxy at that spot in the timeline long before, but I figured I was years away from writing it - and I was touched by that, and I didn't want to hurt his feelings. If I have a paramount flaw as an editor, it's that I don't like being the bad guy.

2. Road Movie to Naboo, the first Warriors of the Outer Rim serial - which I presume you're talking about here, since The Fulcrum of Fate is new this year and I'm guessing you haven't read it - came out at the same time as the First Symphony, so your inclusion of it in a list of Things That Disappointed You Following Symphonies One and Two is a mite disingenuous. (For that matter, a good bit of the text in Road Movie is quite a lot older, so that doesn't do much for your "he's just lost his shit" theory either.)

>I was -the- guy
>who stood up for Eyrie whenever the work was criticized in my
>presence, and I got alienated. I'm admittedly a singular sample, but
>that's indicative a major change.

So it is. But on which side of the screen? Can you say for certain? Can I?

Yeah, things have changed, at least on my side of the screen. My life now is a fucking joke compared to what it was when the Symphony train was really rolling. Maybe that's the effect you're perceiving, maybe it's not, but I'll say this: There are things I've released since then that I'm just as proud of as I remain of the First and Second Symphonies, which this discussion seems to be holding up as the benchmark of what life was like in the Good Old Days. And there are parts of all four Symphonies I would probably do differently if I was doing it all again, but For Tomorrow and For Today aren't among them.

Anyway, thanks for having the balls to stand up and be counted, and for speaking for yourself rather than making a bunch of vague allusions to mysterious friends of yours who carry pitchforks in the night toward my tower on the edge of town.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/