Wow! This is so awesome! May I cheat and link to this so I don't have to type any of my own notes? :)

I must say that those girls upstairs sound like real party girls. They must have been a BLAST to hang around with! And such moochers too, with all of the car trips.... :)

It was so much fun getting to know you guys. Reading this, I miss VP all the more.

And for the record, while I see now that the other peeps in your critique had good points (and I knew nothing about noir as a genre, so I went in horribly unprepared), I would urge you not to revise out the soul of the piece--the cool bits that make your story special. And there's a lot of special there.

You and anyone else may link to my VPXI blog entry all you want.

The "upstairs gals" had the Official VP Party Room and lived up to it by working hard and playing hard and having a great collective sense of humor. They were the best upstairs neighbors any set of geeky SF writers could have asked for :-)

Since my "Killer Dog" story is mainly a mystery, it needs a lot of restructuring to make it a *good* mystery - I pretty much have to start over with respect to the plot. But many of the pieces of the story and the world itself will remain intact and carry right over and hopefully deepen the character motivation and theme.

If you want to get more into noir, check out "Maltese Falcon" (the movie) along with anything by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. It's a fun genre, especially for the brevity of its prose and style. The noir writers really knew how to make a little do a lot.

And thank you for the kind comments. I do like the story, the world and the characters and it's nice to know that other people with discerning tastes like it as well.

- yeff