Low Flyer

Not a review as such, but just a reassurance to Gandalf that CJ has not been swallowed by a whale. He is perfectly OK.

There's more than a little of the grammar nerd in me.

You're confusing adverbs and adjectives in the article. Adverbs qualify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs. Adjectives describe nouns. So, when your character is wearing dirty jeans and a ripped hoodie, "dirty" and "ripped" are adjectives. In English, adverbs typically end in "-ly", so it could be raining heavily, or someone could walk briskly. It could be raining very heavily where both "very" and "heavily" are adverbs - "heavily" qualifying "raining" and "very" qualifying "heavily". LF

It was all right for CJ with the vast GA expense budget to cover his travels... ;-)

Congratulations, CJ. Well deserved - so much more so than all those scurrilous rumours about cliff-hangers...

I would not have guessed if you had not mentioned this. Your use of English is considerably better than many for whom it is a first language...

I have been exchanging emails with CJ today and he is fine.

It's got to be quite likely that the cartel might have someone in Carnarvon, though I don't think it's Grundig. It's an isolated port, so ideal, I'd have thought, for importing their product in small boats loaded at sea. Whoever the contact was would be able to pass lots of information on. It's a small town - word spreads.

Why should CJ change his ways now? Surely "the" epilogue will, sooner or later, become at least a three-parter?

I'd like to know when/how often they go back to Australia to see Trevor's family and Shane's friends. Maybe they could live on Kookaburra whilst Atlantis is being rebuilt...?

I forget the exact sequence but I think I posted a comment on one of CJ's stories as my first ever posting and CJ sent me a PM welcoming me to the forum. We swapped PMs for a while and then email addresses and discussed a wide range of things outwith his stories as well as the tales themselves. We agree on almost nothing, as far as I can tell, but we have some great discussions. You can imagine, though, that it can be quite scary arguing with someone like CJ - his level of research is not confined just to his story-writing. Over time, I sent him a few corrections I'd noticed in some of the chapters for which he thanked me. Out of the blue he wrote and asked if I'd take on the proof-reading role as the previous incumbent wasn't able to continue. I was very flattered to be asked and, I have to confess, I was also keen to see the chapters a few days early! I'm reasonably good at grammar and spelling - the result of an old-fashioned education a long time ago. On the other hand, I have no imagination whatsoever. CJ recently explained to me some of the process that led to Circumnavigation and he makes it sound so simple. He's always very generous in his praise for the team but, in my case, you wouldn't really see any difference if my stage were dropped. There would be some spelling mistakes and some misplaced punctuation for sure, but the story would not be fundamentally different. The others - editors, advisers on various aspects of the story - make much more difference, I think. Editing is a very particular skill which I don't have. Proof-reading is much easier. So I don't know how you get to be a member of the team. It just happened to me...

Not to mention catching all those places where "it's" should be "its" and vice versa...

Interesting, Nick. I use both of these techniques when Zeta-reading (whatever that is) the chapters. Firstly, I read through whatever CJ sends me. There are only occasional catches from the spell-checker, which is hardly surprising as CJ also has a spell-checker. Generally, the first read is at normal speed as I, like everyone else, just want to find out what happens next. Secondly, I reformat the whole document to, usually, comic sans. I find it makes the differences between letters more obvious and it also shifts the line breaks to different places. This second read is much slower - I'm trying to consider each word and sentence as a collection of words as much as part of a story. Do the words make sense? Are they the words CJ thinks they are? There can be occasional problems as, being British, I sometimes have different ideas about what is "correct". I have several American friends and relations and, over the years, I've become used to many common Americanisms but there are always new ones to learn. Sometimes I correct, sometimes I add a comment suggesting that something sounds odd to me but that, obviously, CJ's use of US English is better than mine. In the scenes in Australia and the Falklands, I insisted on the UK spellings for words such as Harbour. I ran a few questions past Australian friends where possible to check on their usage - it's generally closer to the UK than the US but it's actually a version to itself. For the same reason, I've "corrected" some of Shane's usages away from obvious Americanisms. After the second run-through, I make a pdf of the document and use Acrobat reader's "read out loud" feature. This almost always catches more errors, especially things like "later" and "latter" where it's so easy just to read what's obviously intended but which sound different. This can also catch repeated words and missing words which are easy to overlook. The reading is quite slow, too, which forces me to slow down as I read along and this also helps. I always try to do this final read-through in one or two sittings to help spot continuity errors. I know CJ always insists that the final responsibility is his, but I get very embarrassed when someone points out something I've missed, especially when it's actually quite obvious...

One thing I think nobody's picked up on is that the title's a quote from Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan. Not sure of the significance, though. Khan came to a sticky end in the film, though.

That was a h*ll of a reading project. Well done!