Oh my gawd...I feel so stupid.
I download the stories and put them on my PDA, so that I can read them in bed (It's more comfortable than sitting at the desk). I get up to reading War and suddenly I reach Chapter 10 and I'm thinking "Huh? What's Brody doing here? And when was this phone call from Marc?" But, I stupidly keep reading, thinking that I must have missed something when I was reading late last night and we've jumped back in time to when we first met Marc. It wasn't till about Chapter 30, when I realise that what I did was that I had somehow downloaded Chapters 1 and 10-39 of War and Chapters 2-9 of Fortress. Urghh. But I kept reading, and decided to go back to Chapter 2-9 after I'd finished.
But, you know what? I'm kinda glad I did what I did. I found War to be really engrossing. It's probably my favourite story after Shadow, because I didn't read those chapters. I know I missed out on how Will first met Marc, but I also missed out on what may have been a fatal flaw in War's construction. I'm not criticising, because I don't know how it reads in its proper way, and it probably wasn't what you had planned when you were writing this story, but I've read a few people saying on this board saying that War is not their favourite Book of the series. Maybe that was to do with people not liking Marc, I'm not sure (personally I like Marc), but the thing I found best about the version that I read was the corporate intrigue side to the story and this became really strong for the sole fact that I had not read Chapter 4, which deals with what Bruce is planning to do. So I had no idea what he was up to until I think when Will found out. The first I knew something was up was when Will had to go to Payroll and found out Bertha had been told by Bruce to take a few days off. So you had this developing romance between Will and Marc and a really strong corporate intrigue tale along side each other, which worked really well together.
I don't know, I'm probably babbling here, but I wondered what you the writer and other readers thought of this. Feel free to shut me down if I've made a fool of myself, which I know I have anyway, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway.