Foreword

Hi! Welcome to the fifth book in the Variation on a Theme series!

We’re two million words in at this point. As you’d expect, Book 5 continues the stories from the first four books. If you haven’t read them, please do so first. If you don’t, you’ll be horribly lost and you’ll spoil things in the previous books for yourself.

As with Book 4, I’m starting out posting this one with comments enabled. The rules are the same: Highly inflammatory comments will be deleted, as may things that are significantly off-topic. Anything touching on current politics is strongly discouraged; direct political comments will be deleted. I’m not sure how a spoiler might get in there, but those might get deleted, too. My hope is that I never have to delete anything (except occasionally my own comments, to fix my typos), so we’ll see. Better to over-warn than not.

If you have a comment that you would like a personal reply to, please use ‘Feedback to Author’ and not the comments section. I tend to read and participate in the comments, but I may also miss things there. Also, the way SoL comments work, I cannot reply to a comment with a personal note unless you’ve already written to me and your email is handy (or you’re an author, etc). There’s no ‘reply via SoL Mail button in comments, in other words.

As always: I greatly enjoy feedback. I like story suggestions, too. They might not make it in, or I might use them somewhere else, but it’s nice to hear from engaged readers.

I am greatly indebted to the editors who have contributed so much to Variation on a Theme: Robin Pentecost, Steve, Gerrit, Pixel the Cat, Sam Spam, and two mystery editors. I am particularly thankful to Steve for tireless work on improving my writing style and pointing out weaknesses in the story, and to Pixel the Cat for many collaborative assists along the way. This story would be considerably poorer without their efforts; the errors that remain are all mine.

If you find messed-up grammar, punctuation, spelling, any of that, let me know. I try hard to avoid those mistakes, but they slip through. Sometimes it’s just that the words fly forth faster than the fingers can keep up. Sometimes I’m still writing when I should have gone to bed hours ago.

Please rate, please review. Please, please be mindful of spoilers in your reviews. There are some big spoilers here. I’m hoping people can experience them as they were meant to be experienced.

As I’ve said before and will say again: if you think you have a story in you, let it out, or at least try. Sit down in front of that blank screen and just start telling your story. If it goes nowhere, that’s fine. Maybe you can figure out how to improve your craft. There are many resources out there to help. If it goes somewhere, all of us will be richer for having it in the world.

On that subject: while it’s not how I got started, I support NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and their various projects. If you’re new and need help with motivation (and, possibly, with peer reviews, though I’m not sure how friendly they are to some SoL content), give it a try!

I apologize for the errors, typos, clunky phrases, or whatever you find. I appreciate comments, corrections, questions, criticisms, and what have you from readers (along with praise, of course), and I try to write back to everyone who takes the time to write to me.

Thank you for reading.

Grey

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. This includes real people who enter the story (a slowly growing cast of characters - some famous, some not at all). The universe Steve and Angie and friends live in is not our universe, and those people might be very different in that universe.