Fay, I'll read yours in half a mo-- I just want to deal with connie's first.

Wow. These characters speak and move, apparently all on their own. All one has to do is provide them an opportunity to do so by reading. One small tiny thing, when young Ethan returns with the books, "A voice was cleared (in/from--I'm remembering incompletely) the doorway." Wouldn't that be "a throat was cleared"? I think we all know where wee Rebecca came from, and it's a sweet wonderful homage. Warm, real characters, speaking as themselves. Masterful, as usual. Thank you.

Oh, Fay!

This:

Words imprisoned upon paper were not words to the Rohirrim: words lived on the wind or they died unmourned.

Is the heart of it, for me, the culture he came from, the culture he was misfit in, the culture he learned to circumvent and eventually use to his gain. You've made me see him, if not truly sympathetically, because I really don't like him, at least with more illumination than intimation, and given him weight and human motives. Without a word of dialogue!

Just "wow" to both pieces.

Connie, Fay, they're both lovely.

BTW, deborah, if you're around -- as I'm no longer tipsy, I've added The Avengers to the posting interface over at BfA.

Connie, only one thing made me blink a moment, and that's that Ethan thought, and so did I, that he was teaching the baby to say Cthuhlu, and then she called the spinach that. Where did she learn it, then, in a household where the father doesn't approve?

I absolutely loved that. I want to visit that family and let our little raptorgirls play together.

Fay, I don't know LotRs, so I'm not qualified to comment, and yet... it's beautiful and if it were all I knew of a novel, it would make me buy it.

Wow, morning, what a way to wake up.

Connie, that is bloody wonderful stuff. There's not an ounce of cuteness in there, and cuteness is the only thing that would or could have harmed it.

Fay, as you know, I'm generally Tolkein-allergic. But this:

Eowyn's breasts weighing in his palm

is exquisite under any circs. Just delicate and gorgeous. Brava, sweetie.

shrift, you rock, and mightily. I have a bunny, BTW, courtesy of Evil Roz in AIM: Steed, and his bit of history with Spike and Dru. That's going to bubble a bit, since we're out in the bright Cali sun today and anyway, I'm in a groove on novel, but it's bubbling.

Deena, my goddaughter stopped calling her maternal grandmother "Gaggy" (pronounced GAH-gee, hard gee) and transferred it to her dummies (sorry, pacifiers) when she was about 18 months old. I had no trouble with the spinach/tooloo transference, really.

The only thing that made me hesitate about the spinach transference was that everyone else seemed to already know that she'd done that transfer -- which meant she already knew the word and had started calling spinach "Tooloo" before Uncle Ethan taught it to her. That could be because her brother already taught her the word, and would even fit the circumstances, as well as being a brotherly thing to do (I believe my brother taught me the word "maggot"). I had to think about that a nanosecond, though, before going on, because I really thought it was new to her when Uncle Ethan was teaching her words. It really was only a little hesitation though, and I don't think it's a drawback, just the only thing that might be out of place in an otherwise incredible story.

I am excited about Steed/Spike/Dru backstory.

Ah, timing issue? That makes a lot of sense. Deena has good eyes.....

(tooloo!)

I am getting such a giggle over that: "One of these days, it's going to work..."

I mean, baby girl sitting there waving a plastic fork with a Donald Duck head on the top end, and whammo! there's one the Elder Gods, smack in the middle of the roast parsnips....