First, my thanks to all of you who stayed with the story until the punchline, rather than concluding that this newbie writer did not have a firm grasp of Perry's character and abandoning the story mid-read. One of my goals in writing it was to have everyone *be* in character, but to have Perry, at least, *seem* out of character until you got to the very end and realized what was really happening. If you then went back to re-read the story once you had the full context, so much the better.
Labrat wrote:
And...ahem...what was that about your muse giving up on you and there being no more stories in you for a while....?
Well, um, Would you believe that the muse didn't actually come in for a visit? She just threw the special edition onto my porch as she drove on past.
Michael wrote:
The only complaint is that this wasn't posted around April 1st. But then, maybe that worked in favor of the punchline.
I had wondered about waiting until the start of next April to post the story, but I decided against doing so for two reasons:
1) I thought it might be too obvious then. I purposely dropped the hint about Good Friday to indicate the date to any *extremely* attentive reader, but I didn't want to be so obvious as to ruin the punchline for the more casual reader.
2) Frankly, I didn't want to wait for almost a year to post this story.
My thanks to everyone who has left feedback. I'm glad the story appears to have had the intended impact.
Oh, I should give credit where credit is due: I got the idea of having the Planet put out a paper with the "Clark Kent is Superman!!!" headline from Alisha Knight's Kerth-winning (and deservedly so) story "From the Ruins". I did, however, take the idea in a much different direction than she did.
cheers,
Lynn
