You have outdone yourself with this story, my dear. I love it on so many levels--on the sheer fangirl level, the team love and Rodney angst and Rodney/Ronon and John/Rodney interaction are wonderfully satisfying, especially after a hard week's work when relaxation and getting lost in another world are much needed. On the writing level, this is up there with your best. The capture of Rodney's personality and the nuances of his thought processes, the pacing, the tension, the incremental revelations about what is happening, the description of Rodney's descent into confusion and hopelessness--and the blending of all of these into a perfectly choreographed action sequence--are breathtaking.
Tired as I am, I was already falling asleep when I started reading this, and I wondered at the beginning whether it wasn't making sense because it wasn't supposed to be or because I was too tired to grasp it. But by page two it had captured my attention enough to keep me awake and reading, and the building tension and slow reveal of what had happened and was happening served to keep the adrenalin that has sustained me these last few days pumping 'til I reached the very satisfying conclusion.
And finally, on the gut mother's "my daughter wrote this very fine piece of work!" level, this is yet another achievement that reaffirms my opinion that I have a quite brilliant, very talented child of whom I am rightly proud. I hope the comments you've gotten on this--filled with superlatives as they are--will help convince you that you really DO write as well as many of the writers you admire and think are better than you (when they aren't). Because whether you get the same BNF audiences or not, pieces like this---and you have many of them--demonstrate that you really are as creative and talented a writer as anyone I enjoy reading in the sci-fi/fantasy field, even if you don't believe it. Whether you are writing fic or original stories, you make your worlds and the characters in them believable; you do it with beautiful, well-crafted prose; and you bring the characters' thoughts, feelings, and interactions so alive that as readers we know and love and care for them enough to get lost in their stories and laugh and cry with them. What more can one ask of great fiction!
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Tired as I am, I was already falling asleep when I started reading this, and I wondered at the beginning whether it wasn't making sense because it wasn't supposed to be or because I was too tired to grasp it. But by page two it had captured my attention enough to keep me awake and reading, and the building tension and slow reveal of what had happened and was happening served to keep the adrenalin that has sustained me these last few days pumping 'til I reached the very satisfying conclusion.
And finally, on the gut mother's "my daughter wrote this very fine piece of work!" level, this is yet another achievement that reaffirms my opinion that I have a quite brilliant, very talented child of whom I am rightly proud. I hope the comments you've gotten on this--filled with superlatives as they are--will help convince you that you really DO write as well as many of the writers you admire and think are better than you (when they aren't). Because whether you get the same BNF audiences or not, pieces like this---and you have many of them--demonstrate that you really are as creative and talented a writer as anyone I enjoy reading in the sci-fi/fantasy field, even if you don't believe it. Whether you are writing fic or original stories, you make your worlds and the characters in them believable; you do it with beautiful, well-crafted prose; and you bring the characters' thoughts, feelings, and interactions so alive that as readers we know and love and care for them enough to get lost in their stories and laugh and cry with them. What more can one ask of great fiction!
Kudos on a fine piece of writing, my dear!
Love you.