Preface

This story uses some peculiar techniques. First, I chose to apply certain archaic terms: fore (i.e. before), and morrow (meaning either tomorrow morning or sometimes ‘later time’ today)—there’s a reason these archaic usages were abandoned.

The other technique I use and have used before, is switching between past and future for different sentence fragments—it’s a valid usage, since the tense is consistent for each fragment. Though many readers dislike it, confused by its usage. So don’t say you weren’t warned.

These are mainly used by the narrator, though the protagonist often uses it too (who knows, the two might be the same person, friend or an associate).

In addition, this story is a time travel story, to the stone-age on an alien planet, hundreds of thousands of years in the past, thus there’s no chance of they’re ever returning, so a plot point (introduced later in the story) is that he was trained specifically as he knows the languages/culture/phrasings.

The last detail is I’ve been learning and applying new ‘body beats’, where the ‘action’ attributions are based on the physical responses of the speakers. The writing is much richer and well-written, though likely just as distracting and annoying too.

If you hate/despise either, please log your objections as I’d like to gage how effective the techniques are (and yes, if they fall flat, I’m open to abandoning any of them all).