I’m not calling you a liar. I’m actually just curious.

I lament your leaving because I was enjoying your story. But when you say,

“The next post would have shattered these vulgar fantasies. Marriage is a sanctified union between a man and a woman. One man and one woman. Unfortunately I was deprived of the opportunity to take a moral stance.”

It makes me glad I didn’t get to read more! Apart from disagreeing with you, which doesn’t matter, at no point in reading your story so far did I enjoy it because I suspected I was about to be inflicted with a moral stance. If you really believe that this would have changed everything, I wonder why it wasn’t hinted at earlier, so that we the readers would know what kind of story we were really reading: not creative erotica but a slow-revealing morality tale. I realize this contest is largely about fulfilling the challenges presented by the Host, but I thought it was also about getting a taste of the author and her story.

It seems like you’re being pretty well fileted here in the comments and so I don’t want to add to that. But I did want to say that I do lament last round’s result, it isn’t true that all of the readers are giving charity votes, and I also wish your parting challenge for the next round hadn’t been toned down, whether it was viciously intended or not. It’s certainly the most challenging yet.

Well Nora you leave me with mixed feelings! I sense a degree of bitterness in your farewell statement, which makes me wonder if Host was indeed right in his decision to modify your final challenge. Was this challenge more than just a challenging idea? How devious are you?
What I have found fascinating, as this reality show has proceeded, is the degree to which one’s conceived characters of the authors enter into assessment of their contributions. In your case, Nora, this started to interest to me with my interpretation of your last contribution, when I understood that your content was not about ‘real fictional characters’ but rather about content of the mind – a subtle but significance difference. I felt that there was a strong sense of conflict, perhaps testing is a better word, going on within you, in your mind. Perhaps a suppressed intuitive you (or your literary concept), struggling against implanted beliefs and trying to make sense of not just reality but also of fantasy. What I don’t know is the extent to which this relates directly to you as an individual; it seems to me that there may be two extreme possibilities, at one end there is you and at the other an experimental literary concept of your making; the two are, of course, inseparable because both exist in your mind. The extent relates to the position your novella occupies between the two extremes. I definitely wanted to know more and I am sorry you are not still in the competition for that reason. If I am right your novella had a significantly deeper meaning than the content gave it the appearance of having. In which case perhaps your mistake was to dwell far too long on the sexual content, which while retaining a degree of stimulation, for the male mind at least, was tending to lose its significance if the intent was to explore deeper meanings (of course my whole assessment may well be totally wrong!).

Your final challenge, when seen in the light of your farewell statement, indicates to me that it was very probably a premeditated move to oust Coco in the event of your demise. The question is, and it relates to what I have previously written,:- ‘Is this you or is it a very deliberate ploy designed and initiated, as is so often the case with game shows, to deliberately stir the public?’

It all comes back to ‘thinking’ – it is a dangerous activity!! Thinking, on its own, is unbridled by the constraints of reality and has, as a result, a potentially very low probability of actually containing more than a smidgen of truth. Creations of the mind must be continually tested in reality if they are to be representative of truth; to complicate things, truth itself is a dimension, not an absolute.

How many times have you chastised a commenter here for calling you “kinky” or “twisted”? Week after week, you’ve asserted that we not get you, Nora, mixed up with your story or characters. Heck, you’re even saying it with your final words here, telling us that you’re not a swinger, that you believe in the sanctity of marriage, and so on.

And then you go and blatantly take a swipe at another (more popular) contestant – because her writing doesn’t use commas??

In other words, you’ve asked us all (repeatedly) to suspend our judgment about you based on what you were writing – and then, you yourself make assumptions about Coco – based on the form of language in which she chooses to write?

That seems so hypocritical, coming from you, of all people. The one who was always insisting to keep the text and the contestant completely separate.

All we, the readers, know about you guys is what you choose to tell us. You might tell us the truth, or you might lie.

For all any of us know, the real Coco’s English may be flawless, and the lack of commas and so on is just a feature of her (powerful) writing.

But, even if that’s not the case – so what?

Just for the record, I’m a strong believer in the importance of grammar. I’m not saying I always get it right, but I make an effort. There’s nothing that makes me rant more than the sight of a sign reading “apple’s” in a greengrocers. It makes me CRINGE.

I love grammar. It’s important that we all wield it well – especially as writers.

But part of loving grammar is knowing that it’s okay to let it go sometimes. Knowing the rules is one thing – it’s just as important to know when to break them.

(And, for the record, it’s also highly impolite to criticise the English skills of someone who’s told you repeatedly that English isn’t their first language! How good’s your Ukrainian?)

Err…sorry about writing a novel-length response, guys (c: