Hi Josephine,
I have read the first three stories of your anthology so far. I enjoy how the stories have an easy flow and almost hypnotic mood. Nice consistency of voice throughout too. For me, though, stories were a little long on set-up and short on plot development, and the gender of characters tends to be stay ambiguous too long. Is that intentional? I will continue to read and add my thoughts as I go.

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Just started reading this and I'm hooked! Goes down like butter. Funny as hell! As a reader I feel like you're talking to me face to face.
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Hi Ian,
The previous commenters are right. This is a very good work. It is clear that you have put a lot of effort in making it precise and involving. That being said, I still want to offer some thoughts about some parts. First, though, the good.
- I like that the main character narrates her own story through the actual physical device of the recorder. It brings an immediacy to the telling. It also creates suspense. I want to know where she is telling the story from when it opens.
- The detail of her hair knots. So simple, yet it says a lot about Christy.
- When she simplifies a whole paragraph of jargon into one succinct sentence I think I actually laughed out loud. Other parts where I did same were: when she writes MUTE and tapes it to her door, and later when he writes DEAF and tapes it to his door. (I really thought their involvement would last the whole book so I was surprised when he vanished from the story. But then again, this is just the beginning). When she imagines Mark and John as Comedy and Tragedy from the way they are staring at her in the bookstore. There were many other parts where I saw that Christy has a great sense of humour, but the above ones were where, like I said, I "lol"ed.
- Other parts that really struck me: the analogy of thoughts to scattering roaches. It encapsulates Christy's frame of mind so well. What she says about good friends being ones with whom no afterthought/forethought is needed highlights her loneliness and the beauty of her mind. The contrast between Christy's speaking voice and her writing voice is really sharp, and again is a window into her mind.
- I like the subtlety with which you handled the connection between her growing interest in "David" and her decision to stray from habit and engage with the panhandler. Don't know if that is what you intended, but it seemed like she started to reach out to her world, which in turn led to her stumbling on her gift. That was a very smooth and plausible way to introduce the gift.
- Such visually evocative physical descriptions galore! Ashtray, Rabbit, John, Adam, Jesse - each of these are so individually "drawn". My favourite was the physical characterization of the bookshop owner, which said so much about what kind of guy he was. I could literally see him as I read it. Fantastic.

Now for the icky part. And of course I make these comments after reading only a fraction of the book, which is what was available.
- This is hairsplitting, and I'm not sure if it's a character tick or not, but there are parts where you repeat the same word or phrase in the space of Christy describing something, for example when she says "watched" over and over while she's sitting by her window (Chapter 1), or "he was wearing" when Christy is describing Adam (Chapter 3). There were a few other instances of this. Not a major issue, but was slightly jarring. This tendency to repeat is not a feature of Christy's character that we see elsewhere.
- As others have said, you evoke a lot with your choice of words, but some parts had me wondering if any of it was significant. Case in point: when Christy talks about the house she lives in (Chapter 1). It is so specific in its detailing of the architecture, using the exact names of things, that I began to wonder if you'd done a lot of research into this and felt the need to include it. What is the purpose? Does it become significant later? It was one of the rare times where I saw the author poking through the narration.
- Maybe it went by me too quickly, but I completely missed how Christy losing her gift and her choosing to become a vagrant are connected in terms of cause and effect. Certainly characters need only to make sense to themselves, normal is relative, but I couldn't help wondering if it wouldn't be other way around, if her losing her gift wouldn't make her retreat from the world even more, not go out and immerse herself in it in an extreme way.
- Between that (Christy leaving home) and her reviving John, the story stalled with lengthy descriptions of Christy's adventures with Rabbit and Ashtray. The writing was great, of course, and it was the saving grace that kept me reading, but all along I was wondering where the core story went. It briefly reappears when Christy wonders if the witch book might help her get her gift back. But other than that, how did those episodes move Christy's story forward? I wanted to assume that Rabbit and Ashtray make a comeback later, but Christy says that she never saw either of them again. So then why dwell for so long on them?
- Christy says she didn't go back to her apartment because she was afraid of stagnation and the complacency and comfort that come with it. yet this was exactly what her life was like before, a life she was satisfied to live.
- Also in Chapter 3, she expresses a fear that she would never do her works again. But that is exactly what has happened. If she has been trying to do her works again all along and failing, there is no mention of that.
- The gift comes back suddenly when she gives John warmth. I'm confused. She lost it when she did the same thing, when she helped another human ("David"), and she regains it when she helps another human too. The "rules" of this supernatural element aren't clear. (Then again, maybe Christy herself doesn't know either?)
- re: the above point. Was living on the street some kind of atonement she had to do for having helped "David"? Did she know that's what it would take to get her gift back? This all goes back to what I consider the main glitch: her decision to leave home and the rationale behind it.
- When she is getting ready for her job interview in the motel room, you have her clipping, filing and polishing her nails twice within three paragraphs. Since she says "I had worn my nails jagged" (paraphrasing!) before the second mention and since she already said that she clipped and filed and polished them one paragraph before, I think you repeated it by accident.
- While I like how her life at the bookstore evolved, from a character point of view I don't understand how someone who took a job specifically because it allowed for privacy and being a recluse would become so involved in making it a neighbourhood hotspot and attracting as many people as possible. There's a contradiction between her desires and her actions. If that's what you intended, great. If not, then eh?
- The scenes with John begging her to tell him what she did were striking because here was a secondary character whose need was so much stronger, or at least was expressed with so much more clarity and drive, than that of the main character.

Well, all that being said, thank you for an enjoyable read and I hope some of my comments were useful. I have made all of them with the utmost respect and awareness of what it takes to create something and put it out there for strangers to handle.

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