Lady Frog and Ludens: Thanks for your comments. It is on the short side (my desperate attempt to fit within the word limitations -- just to see if it could be done), althought I liked the bare feel of it. Leaves more to the reader. Bierce once called the novel a "short story with padding." What I cut out, in the end, was mostly a lot of padding -- the sequence and scenes really didn't change all that much.

A good exercise, though, in learning what you can do without. It started out at about 1600 words, so I lost 25% of it.

Thanks again.

The Shadow One



Life is the ultimate intellectual challenge. Chess is just a game.