Ryan Call of <HTMLGIANT> stayed up late to write “an intelligent post to temper all of the madhouse raving” for “Under the Table.”

Unfortunately, the story itself is fairly boring and overdone, which I suppose you can justify with the argument that those little spreadsheet cells don’t have room for subtlety. But one would hope that restriction could create some really odd and mysterious language. Also, this is a first draft, which David emphasizes in his post, so apologies for my taking it as finished product. But really, people, I don’t see what’s so “brilliant” and “nicely done!”

I don’t agree with all of his comments, but I do think Ryan is correct in criticizing the language of the “Thought” columns.  It is in these columns that the real story is taking place, and I too don’t really like the way they’re currently written.  I feel like there are two options here:  either make the thoughts more like raw data (bullet points?), which may be appropriate for the spreadsheet form, or else try to make the language a lot more artful.  Instead, what I’ve done in this first draft is end up somewhere in the middle.  That’s not going to work.  I might have to try both of the extremes to see what reads better.

In any case, I’ll certainly include Ryan’s name in the list of contributors in the final draft, if he permits it.  But I suspect he won’t.

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