Damn it...I swore I wouldn't release my inner fangirl but maybe just a possible slip up wouldn't hurt.

That was...awesome. And even awesome is a clear understatement in what I think of this fic. Reading this story...well, let me put it this way; this is closest to tears that I've ever been in months. And I do mean "tears" that result from laughter, compassion, and downright near-depression from a few select paragraphs.

Well, I'm off to read the sequel. Wonderful job on this one. :]

whe! I love it! realistic LOTR fan falls into realistic middle earth! I really enjoyed this story.

Oh, now I know why this is an official PPC Legendary Goodfic. Excellent work. *claps*

WOW! I have just spent the last 2 days completely lost in this story. Thanks to you my works thinks I am insane due too the times when I was supposed to be reconciling accounts but was actually choking on laughter while reading this! You did an excellent job with canon, characters and descriptions. I think you truly created the character of Penny perfectly and if by some strange twist of fate/pyschiatric breakdown anyone in the LOTR fan-world should end up in ME, they would be hard-pressed to behave any different! It's almost like a Hitchhiker's Guide to Middle Earth. If only she had brought a towel ;)

Anyway, well done and ciao! I'm off to read the sequal.

-Jess

This story is so amazing. I just read it all in one sitting, which took a few hours but it was so worth it. I loved the realism and I loved Penny and Halbarad's relationship. Penny herself is a great character. Very believable, the complete antithesis of a Sue. I cried a few times, too, actually. xD And your vast Middle-Earth knowledge makes me very happy. Your story is not perfect but it is close to it. I enjoyed it immensely and I thank you for writing it! It made an otherwise bland Friday night very pleasant.

A beautiful story; one I enjoyed a lot.
Thanks!

I have discovered this story when it had alredy been completed and the sequel well on the way. I have read each of them many times and found that the more I read the more addicted I got. Penny, as well as all the other characters, have won a permanent place in my heart (and my memory) and I welcome the opportunity to let myself get distracted from mundane tasks or stressful situations by remembering my favourite moments or simply daydreaming of what such experience would have been like. I especially appreciate the fact that you can make me laugh like mad one moment, then bring me to tears with the tender, more emotional scenes. The whole story is very thought provoking, refreshing, simply a treat to read and I can get lost in it for hours, reading those wonderfully long chapters again and again. I feel that I will keep Don't Panic and OK, NOW Panic close at hand and reach for them every time I feel the need to get away from reality with a bit of fabulous fanfic. Thank you, Boz4PM!

I read this fanfic and liked it very much.

I have some critique, however.

1. Why is Penny inclined to think she is in the past? Even if Tolkien intended it to be this way, his work is still a work of pure fiction. If I were to appear there, I would think I`m in a different universe, perhaps, but surely not past. Because, for a start, geology don`t work the way Tolkien described it. All those lands could not sink so fast in our world.

2. Why Gandalf and the rest are so inclined to believe she is from the future? This is UTTERLY UNREALISTIC. There is no way so many fine details could be preserved for so long. If I were to encounter Penny, I would assume she just have a very unusual case of foresight, combined with false memories.

I'm only about 1/4 of the way through but I have to say that this is bloody brilliant story-telling. It's for stories like these that I dredge through all the "stuff" that gets uploaded these days.

Thank you - Thankyou

I didn't have a whole lot yesterday to laugh about. I think your fic was the only thing that brought a smile to my face. Yep, a fic just made my day. Pathetic aren't I?

I didn't think this would be so entertaining.

And to honest I had always wondered how any human lady would cope with ahem - monthlies... I for one would not like to have a discussion with Elrond about it! Or Erestor! (And knowing my stupid luck I'ld be ruddy early - okay, okay to much info!)

Hilarious, loved bunny stew, the sword and Pen-ii going off her rocker... which I might add... is quite realistic. I'm sure you and I would be absolutely freaking if we were left somewhere in the wilds...

Anyway this is hilarious... in case you haven't got the message yet.:)

Illeanah!

Brilliant.
I loved it.
So real.
It knocked my socks off!

Re-reading for the umpteenth time... Lawls, poor Pen-ii. :D

Gah. The site ate half of my review. >.< I’m sorry I have to repost such a long review, but I think it’s possible to delete the other one, right…?

But anyway, here’s it is again, because the site is silly:

I have a dilemma.

How does one go about reviewing an author’s work, a story that is among the best pieces of literature one has read, and yet manage to leave something which is relevant and helpful and not more than the fangirlish rantings of… well, a fangirl?

Answer: with difficulty.

I’m no great fan of Mary-Sues unless they happen to be in a parody, and it was in search of like stories that I happened across ‘Don’t Panic’. I happen to be of the belief that even clichés can be good if they’re written well, and both this and ‘Okay, NOW Panic’ (which I fully intend to review later) far, far surpass being merely ‘good’. As a response to the number of ‘girl drops into Middle-Earth’ stories which almost inevitably turn out to be MSes, I was very interested to see how this project would turn out… and found myself hooked by the time I reached the end of the first chapter.

I’m very fond of the book’s minor characters (hell, I tend to be fonder of minor characters than major in just about any fandom), and was very disappointed when many of them were cut out of the films, so to see them now in such detail—with such brilliant characterisations—well, you’re a genius, to put it bluntly. XD

Halbarad wasn’t one of my favourites of those—the twins and Glorfindel held that honour—but with this story you’ve managed to elevate him to near the top (just don’t ask me who’s first, I have no idea!). Halbarad officially pwns. Seriously. He’s love.

I loved how he and Penny were always at each other in the beginning, and then he turned out to be her ‘rock’, and how she clung to him… just their entire relationship in general was so sweet. I loved how he was (kind of) defending her in front of Elrond, then she got up and told Elrond off for yelling at him… XD that was adorable. And I loved it when she told him why she was avoiding Boromir—it was beautiful that she trusted him to tell him so, that his opinion mattered so much to her.

Erestor was also one of my favourites in this story. Many authors make him so uptight and… with a stick permanently up his arse… so it was nice to see him reserved and ‘devil’s advocate’, as it were, just like I imagine him, but still compassionate and understanding. And him getting embarrassed with Penny’s woman problems was major lolz. :3

There are too many favourite moments for me to list them all, although the ones I can think of include the time in Bree when Penny finds out who Halbarad is (although she doesn’t believe it at the time), the scene when Penny asks Glorfindel how many Glorfindels there are (the image I had was so flippin’ cute!), the various moments when Penny muses on how the fangirls would react to things like Glorfindel kissing her hand (personally, I’d never wash again XD ) or meeting Legolas (I had the perfect image of him being glomped!) and when she was surrounded by ellon at the meal table only to be overwhelmed (and when she related the story to Mireth it was just adorable). And then, of course, there’s the mental eye-candy of seeing eight shirtless ellon. :D Yum.

I do have to tell you that I cried. Repeatedly. Especially nearer the end. You’ve probably heard that a lot, but I don’t really cry easily, and this tugged at my heartstrings the whole way through. The issue of interference was portrayed beautifully… I loved to see that Penny eventually had to do something about Halbarad, even though she realised it wouldn’t do any good. I honestly don’t know if I could have stood that in her place—to be able to keep her peace about things she KNEW was going to happen and not interfere. That took a lotta guts—and a helluva lot of willpower.

I don’t know if you intended the whole misunderstanding with her ‘liking’ Boromir to be for comedy value—and it was amusing—but I found it more bittersweet than I found it amusing, because it just pinpointed how bad the situation was, how much it was tormenting Penny, and how determined she was not to mess up the ‘timeline’. Boromir was brilliant—everyone was brilliant—but despite the fact that she was trying to avoid him I don’t see how Penny could have possibly not considered him something like a friend by the end.

And Boromir was bad enough, but Halbarad was far worse—Penny didn’t even get a choice whether to be friends with him or not, so to speak, because by then it was too late. I loved that fact that it began and ended with Halbarad. Brilliant and poignant to boot; she came full-circle.

So. Uhm. Yeah. ^.^;; If I wanted to express how much I really loved this story I’d be here all year and still not get it right, so suffice to say that I loved it a lot, a lot a lot.

All that said… I did have some things I wanted to critique… some of them I’ll probably end up repeating when I review ‘Okay, NOW Panic’, because I’m not sure what was in which story, but I’m sure we’ll both live. :3 It might just be better if you assume what I say here is likely to be pertinent there too… but anyway.

You seem to be writing the story from the third-person limited perspective, from multiple point of views, which is fine (it’s my favourite perspective(s) too). It’s just that, I noticed that in the earlier chapters in particular, you would call a character by name when the character whose perspective you’re writing from doesn’t know it. For instance, when you’re writing from Penny’s point of view, you would call Halbarad ‘Halbarad’ even though Penny doesn’t actually know what his name is. If you were writing in third-person omniscient I’d say it was fine, but since you’re following the individual characters’ thoughts so closely, it kind of clashes if you’re identifying a character they’re not supposed to know the name of. Plus, if you make sure you don’t call a character by name if the other person doesn’t know it, then it makes it even clearer whose perspective you’re writing from, because once you name a character then the readers will know—‘oh, it’s from Halbarad’s point of view, because his name was just used and Penny doesn’t know his name to use it’.

Did any of that make sense? >.< Hope so.

That said, I know how annoying it can be when you constantly find yourself saying ‘man’ or whatever and have no synonyms to break up the monotony, but maybe she can give him a mental nickname or something…? Or he could do that same to her?

But enough of that, onto some spacing issues… I’m guessing it was deliberate because you’ve used the line-space thing to cut off your author’s notes (so you clearly know it’s there) but there have been times when I feel like there should be a scene break… and then there isn’t. I don’t know whether it’s because the site kept eating them or what, but maybe when you edit it you could fix that. Also, a minor spacing issue, but sometimes when you hyphenate words you leave a space between the word and the hyphen… such as here (wish we could quote stuff):

[QUOTE] Penny was amazed that garments such as these, hand- stitched, could survive such abuse. [/QUOTE]

That should really be ‘hand-stitched’, without the space.

Uhm, I also wanted to point out some of your word usage. One was ‘water sac’, which kidn of annoyed me, possibly because I’ve never seen the usage before. Granted I’m not an expert, but to my knowledge the appropriate name is ‘gourd’ or ‘water gourd’… I believe I’ve also seen ‘water bladder’ used. That might just be me, however.

The one that really kept on drawing my attention was that you consistently used ‘discrete’ instead of ‘discreet’. According to ‘discrete’ means ‘constituting a separate thing’, whereas ‘discreet’ means ‘subtle’. That should be fairly easy to take care of using the MSW replace function, though. :)

Next, there were some consistency issues. For instance, I’d notice that you’d say ‘water sac’ and then ‘water-sac’; one’s hyphenated, one’s not. No, it’s not really a big issue, but consistency matters and it makes your work seem just that little bit smoother. :)

Also on a finer level are the ellipses: (…). I’ve seen you use two fullstops to indicate an ellipsis, but it’s not—it’s just two fullstops. For instance:

[QUOTE] This wasn’t funny. This was.. this was... what the hell WAS this? [/QUOTE]

That first ellipsis… well, like I said, it’s just two fullstops in a row, so it’s incomplete.

Also, the sentences around your dialogue are a little off. Such as here:

[QUOTE] “Forgive me, but ..” he sighed once more. [/QUOTE]

Aside from the not-ellipsis (winks) the ‘he’ should be capitalised. These should be two separate sentences, see: ‘Forgive me, but… he sighed once more.’ This way it sounds like Halbarad’s asking forgiveness because some random male person sighed again, in comparison to: ‘Forgive me, but… He sighed once more.’ They’re two separate actions, so they should be two separate sentences.

In contrast, here:

[QUOTE] WON’T HAVE ANY GOOD FOOTAGE OF ME TO USE YOU BASTARDS!” She shouted this last bit out into the room for the benefit of hidden microphones. [/QUOTE]

The ‘she’ is capitalised and shouldn’t be. Why? Because she’s in the process of performing an action—the action of shouting—which is directly connected to the dialogue itself. ‘[…] won’t have any good footage of me to use you bastards! she shouted’.

I know, speech is annoying. >.< When it comes to connecting the next sentence, it really doesn’t matter what the dialogue’s ending punctuation is, I don’t think. The way I learned is that as long as the character is saying something—whispering, murmuring, shouting, screaming—it should be lowercase. If they’re not, and the sentence after the dialogue is a completely new action, then it should be capitalised.

Obviously there are exceptions, but… that’s about the gist of it. Hope it made sense. ^.^;;

And, uhm, yeah. So those are the general problems… I’ve got a number of specific ones left to do too… ^.^;; Only for the first five chapters, though, and not including instances of the general problems I noted up above. The first time I read it I was just focussing on reading it… then I started reading it again almost as soon as I finished ‘Okay, NOW Panic’ (yes, I am a weirdo re-reader. Now you know how much I liked it. :3 ) and realised I had some stuff to include in the review… but the review’ll be finished before I finish re-reading the story, so… yah. ^.^;; Buckle in, ‘cos… there are a few…:


[QUOTE] She sat on the opposite side of the fire from him, watching him nervously and with not a little disgust, as he scraped the inside of the rabbit skin. [/QUOTE]

That comma after ‘disgust’ shouldn’t be there. Read it out loud; the sentence flows better without it. A comma equals a pause, and you just used one, so you don’t need another one so soon. Plus, you don’t really need to distinguish those parts of the sentence from each other. She’s not sitting at the same time that he’s scraping the inside of the rabbit skin, she’s watching him at the same time that he’s scraping the inside of the rabbit skin, so those parts of the sentence shouldn’t be separated by the comma.

…did that make sense? O.o


[QUOTE] She stood, hesitatingly. [/QUOTE]

You don’t need the comma in that first sentence. Since it’s so short, there’s no need for pauses.


[QUOTE] Halbarad undid the bandages, inspected her feet, which were healing, smeared some of the balm from his pack over the soles and then retied the strips of cloth. [/QUOTE]

The ‘which were healing’ bit kind of clutters up the sentence a bit. It’s kind of an aside—if you say the sentence without it it makes perfect sense, so that bit’s just a bit of extra information, perfect for putting between dashes. It would make the sentence less clumsy, then.


[QUOTE] These were white caucasians but not speaking anything that sounded even vaguely European. [/QUOTE]

I’m pretty sure ‘caucasians’ is supposed to have a capital.


[QUOTE] He didn’t think he would get very far with her, but he was going to try and he didn’t want ‘the world and his wife’ hearing this. [/QUOTE]

Why is ‘the world and his wife’ in quotes? It’s an every-day phrase, but we don’t put ‘til the cows come home’ in quotes when it’s used in dialogue, so I’m not sure why you did so here.


[QUOTE] Round here he was called ‘Strider’ and no-one knew him as Aragorn. [/QUOTE]

That should be ‘around’ or ‘ ’round’, with an apostrophe, because you’re cutting off the beginning of a word. Normally it probably wouldn’t matter, but since ‘round’ is a separate word all to itself with a different meaning, it would be better to distinguish them.


[QUOTE] He stared at her. Not quite believing what he had heard. [/QUOTE]

A couple of cut-off sentences here. ‘He stared at her’ is fine on its own, but ‘not quite believing what he had heard’ feels like there should be more to it; who’s not quite believing what he had heard, and/or what’s he doing while he’s not believing it? You could easily combine them.


[QUOTE] “Hey. Now. Ok,” she stammered. [/QUOTE]

‘Ok’ is the contraction; it should be spelt out as ‘okay’, which is the full word and more appropriate to use in novel writing.


[QUOTE] Good. Good for you. Ok. Good. You’re Halbarad. [/QUOTE]

Ditto for above.


[QUOTE] He nodded. “Penny.” She pointed at him, “Halbarad.” Then back to herself, “Penny.” [/QUOTE]

Not quite sure on this one, but I don’t think ‘then’ should have a capital. Even though there’s a fullstop there, if you take out all the speech marks it’s all one sentence: ‘she pointed at him, Halbarad, then back to herself, Penny.’ You could say that it’s two separate sentences, I suppose, except that ‘Then back to herself, Penny.’ doesn’t sound complete on its own. So it’s similar to that issue I was trying to explain before… she’s still in the process of performing an action—pointing to him and her—it’s just that it’s not connected to her dialogue, as such.


[QUOTE] This man was clearly several sandwiches short of a picnic. She had been right to think he was a pyschopath: [/QUOTE]

That should be ‘psychopath’. ;)


[QUOTE] “Whatever! I don’t give a monkeys where you are, frankly. Good riddance!” [/QUOTE]

This sounds like there should be something after ‘monkeys’—like ‘a monkey’s arse’. If that’s so then ‘monkeys’ needs an apostrophe… and if it’s not so then it still needs an apostrophe. :)


[QUOTE] Bastard. Pyschotic, ** bastard. And trying to pretend like he was all nice about it afterwards. [/QUOTE]

I think you wanted ‘psychotic’.


[QUOTE] Two nice, non-absorbant pieces of linen to dry yourself with. Delightful. [/QUOTE]

I think that’s supposed to be ‘absorbent’—or at least, according to my spellcheck… and I’m working with the UK language spellcheck, since I’m assuming that’s yours, yes…?


[QUOTE] “Pen-ii. My clothes. You will need to wash them.” She looked at him incomprehendingly. [/QUOTE]

That’s supposed to be ‘uncomprehendingly’.


[QUOTE] A washing well had been built round it. It consisted of little more than a roof stood on pillars that were ranged on either side of the bank. [/QUOTE]

That ‘round’ should be ‘around’, unless you want an apostrophe before it… like I said before, ‘round’ is a separate word to ‘around’, so you should be distinguishing between them.


[QUOTE] Halbarad was sat in one corner by the window smoking an evil smelling pipe. [/QUOTE]

‘Was sat’? :P That should be either ‘was sitting’ or just ‘sat’. Plus, ‘evil smelling pipe’ makes it sound like the pipe is a ‘smelling pipe’ and it’s evil. :3 If you hyphenated ‘evil’ and ‘smelling’ that would indicate that it’s the smell that’s evil.


And… I’m done. ^^ Sorry for the hellishly long review, but once I started talking I guess I couldn’t stop. I hope it helped some, though, and stand by for a review for ‘Okay, NOW Panic’.

I have a dilemma.

How does one go about reviewing an author’s work, a story that is among the best pieces of literature one has read, and yet manage to leave something which is relevant and helpful and not more than the fangirlish rantings of… well, a fangirl?

Answer: with difficulty.

I’m no great fan of Mary-Sues unless they happen to be in a parody, and it was in search of like stories that I happened across ‘Don’t Panic’. I happen to be of the belief that even clichés can be good if they’re written well, and both this and ‘Okay, NOW Panic’ (which I fully intend to review later) far, far surpass being merely ‘good’. As a response to the number of ‘girl drops into Middle-Earth’ stories which almost inevitably turn out to be MSes, I was very interested to see how this project would turn out… and found myself hooked by the time I reached the end of the first chapter.

I’m very fond of the book’s minor characters (hell, I tend to be fonder of minor characters than major in just about any fandom), and was very disappointed when many of them were cut out of the films, so to see them now in such detail—with such brilliant characterisations—well, you’re a genius, to put it bluntly. XD

Halbarad wasn’t one of my favourites of those—the twins and Glorfindel held that honour—but with this story you’ve managed to elevate him to near the top (just don’t ask me who’s first, I have no idea!). Halbarad officially pwns. Seriously. He’s .< Hope so.

That said, I know how annoying it can be when you constantly find yourself saying ‘man’ or whatever and have no synonyms to break up the monotony, but maybe she can give him a mental nickname or something…? Or he could do that same to her?

But enough of that, onto some spacing issues… I’m guessing it was deliberate because you’ve used the line-space thing to cut off your author’s notes (so you clearly know it’s there) but there have been times when I feel like there should be a scene break… and then there isn’t. I don’t know whether it’s because the site kept eating them or what, but maybe when you edit it you could fix that. Also, a minor spacing issue, but sometimes when you hyphenate words you leave a space between the word and the hyphen… such as here (wish we could quote stuff):

[QUOTE] Penny was amazed that garments such as these, hand- stitched, could survive such abuse. [/QUOTE]

That should really be ‘hand-stitched’, without the space.

Uhm, I also wanted to point out some of your word usage. One was ‘water sac’, which kidn of annoyed me, possibly because I’ve never seen the usage before. Granted I’m not an expert, but to my knowledge the appropriate name is ‘gourd’ or ‘water gourd’… I believe I’ve also seen ‘water bladder’ used. That might just be me, however.

The one that really kept on drawing my attention was that you consistently used ‘discrete’ instead of ‘discreet’. According to ‘discrete’ means ‘constituting a separate thing’, whereas ‘discreet’ means ‘subtle’. That should be fairly easy to take care of using the MSW replace function, though. 

Next, there were some consistency issues. For instance, I’d notice that you’d say ‘water sac’ and then ‘water-sac’; one’s hyphenated, one’s not. No, it’s not really a big issue, but consistency matters and it makes your work seem just that little bit smoother. 

Also on a finer level are the ellipses: (…). I’ve seen you use two fullstops to indicate an ellipsis, but it’s not—it’s just two fullstops. For instance:

[QUOTE] This wasn’t funny. This was.. this was... what the hell WAS this? [/QUOTE]

That first ellipsis… well, like I said, it’s just two fullstops in a row, so it’s incomplete.

Also, the sentences around your dialogue are a little off. Such as here:

[QUOTE] “Forgive me, but ..” he sighed once more. [/QUOTE]

Aside from the not-ellipsis (winks) the ‘he’ should be capitalised. These should be two separate sentences, see: ‘Forgive me, but… he sighed once more.’ This way it sounds like Halbarad’s asking forgiveness because some random male person sighed again, in comparison to: ‘Forgive me, but… He sighed once more.’ They’re two separate actions, so they should be two separate sentences.

In contrast, here:

[QUOTE] WON’T HAVE ANY GOOD FOOTAGE OF ME TO USE YOU BASTARDS!” She shouted this last bit out into the room for the benefit of hidden microphones. [/QUOTE]

The ‘she’ is capitalised and shouldn’t be. Why? Because she’s in the process of performing an action—the action of shouting—which is directly connected to the dialogue itself. ‘[…] won’t have any good footage of me to use you bastards! she shouted’.

I know, speech is annoying. >.< When it comes to connecting the next sentence, it really doesn’t matter what the dialogue’s ending punctuation is, I don’t think. The way I learned is that as long as the character is saying something—whispering, murmuring, shouting, screaming—it should be lowercase. If they’re not, and the sentence after the dialogue is a completely new action, then it should be capitalised.

Obviously there are exceptions, but… that’s about the gist of it. Hope it made sense. ^.^;;

And, uhm, yeah. So those are the general problems… I’ve got a number of specific ones left to do too… ^.^;; Only for the first five chapters, though, and not including instances of the general problems I noted up above. The first time I read it I was just focussing on reading it… then I started reading it again almost as soon as I finished ‘Okay, NOW Panic’ (yes, I am a weirdo re-reader. Now you know how much I liked it. :3 ) and realised I had some stuff to include in the review… but the review’ll be finished before I finish re-reading the story, so… yah. ^.^;; Buckle in, ‘cos… there are a few…:


[QUOTE] She sat on the opposite side of the fire from him, watching him nervously and with not a little disgust, as he scraped the inside of the rabbit skin. [/QUOTE]

That comma after ‘disgust’ shouldn’t be there. Read it out loud; the sentence flows better without it. A comma equals a pause, and you just used one, so you don’t need another one so soon. Plus, you don’t really need to distinguish those parts of the sentence from each other. She’s not sitting at the same time that he’s scraping the inside of the rabbit skin, she’s watching him at the same time that he’s scraping the inside of the rabbit skin, so those parts of the sentence shouldn’t be separated by the comma.

…did that make sense? O.o


[QUOTE] She stood, hesitatingly. [/QUOTE]

You don’t need the comma in that first sentence. Since it’s so short, there’s no need for pauses.


[QUOTE] Halbarad undid the bandages, inspected her feet, which were healing, smeared some of the balm from his pack over the soles and then retied the strips of cloth. [/QUOTE]

The ‘which were healing’ bit kind of clutters up the sentence a bit. It’s kind of an aside—if you say the sentence without it it makes perfect sense, so that bit’s just a bit of extra information, perfect for putting between dashes. It would make the sentence less clumsy, then.


[QUOTE] These were white caucasians but not speaking anything that sounded even vaguely European. [/QUOTE]

I’m pretty sure ‘caucasians’ is supposed to have a capital.


[QUOTE] He didn’t think he would get very far with her, but he was going to try and he didn’t want ‘the world and his wife’ hearing this. [/QUOTE]

Why is ‘the world and his wife’ in quotes? It’s an every-day phrase, but we don’t put ‘til the cows come home’ in quotes when it’s used in dialogue, so I’m not sure why you did so here.


[QUOTE] Round here he was called ‘Strider’ and no-one knew him as Aragorn. [/QUOTE]

That should be ‘around’ or ‘ ’round’, with an apostrophe, because you’re cutting off the beginning of a word. Normally it probably wouldn’t matter, but since ‘round’ is a separate word all to itself with a different meaning, it would be better to distinguish them.


[QUOTE] He stared at her. Not quite believing what he had heard. [/QUOTE]

A couple of cut-off sentences here. ‘He stared at her’ is fine on its own, but ‘not quite believing what he had heard’ feels like there should be more to it; who’s not quite believing what he had heard, and/or what’s he doing while he’s not believing it? You could easily combine them.


[QUOTE] “Hey. Now. Ok,” she stammered. [/QUOTE]

‘Ok’ is the contraction; it should be spelt out as ‘okay’, which is the full word and more appropriate to use in novel writing.


[QUOTE] Good. Good for you. Ok. Good. You’re Halbarad. [/QUOTE]

Ditto for above.


[QUOTE] He nodded. “Penny.” She pointed at him, “Halbarad.” Then back to herself, “Penny.” [/QUOTE]

Not quite sure on this one, but I don’t think ‘then’ should have a capital. Even though there’s a fullstop there, if you take out all the speech marks it’s all one sentence: ‘she pointed at him, Halbarad, then back to herself, Penny.’ You could say that it’s two separate sentences, I suppose, except that ‘Then back to herself, Penny.’ doesn’t sound complete on its own. So it’s similar to that issue I was trying to explain before… she’s still in the process of performing an action—pointing to him and her—it’s just that it’s not connected to her dialogue, as such.


[QUOTE] This man was clearly several sandwiches short of a picnic. She had been right to think he was a pyschopath: [/QUOTE]

That should be ‘psychopath’. ;)


[QUOTE] “Whatever! I don’t give a monkeys where you are, frankly. Good riddance!” [/QUOTE]

This sounds like there should be something after ‘monkeys’—like ‘a monkey’s arse’. If that’s so then ‘monkeys’ needs an apostrophe… and if it’s not so then it still needs an apostrophe. 


[QUOTE] Bastard. Pyschotic, ** bastard. And trying to pretend like he was all nice about it afterwards. [/QUOTE]

I think you wanted ‘psychotic’.


[QUOTE] Two nice, non-absorbant pieces of linen to dry yourself with. Delightful. [/QUOTE]

I think that’s supposed to be ‘absorbent’—or at least, according to my spellcheck… and I’m working with the UK language spellcheck, since I’m assuming that’s yours, yes…?


[QUOTE] “Pen-ii. My clothes. You will need to wash them.” She looked at him incomprehendingly. [/QUOTE]

That’s supposed to be ‘uncomprehendingly’.


[QUOTE] A washing well had been built round it. It consisted of little more than a roof stood on pillars that were ranged on either side of the bank. [/QUOTE]

That ‘round’ should be ‘around’, unless you want an apostrophe before it… like I said before, ‘round’ is a separate word to ‘around’, so you should be distinguishing between them.


[QUOTE] Halbarad was sat in one corner by the window smoking an evil smelling pipe. [/QUOTE]

‘Was sat’? :P That should be either ‘was sitting’ or just ‘sat’. Plus, ‘evil smelling pipe’ makes it sound like the pipe is a ‘smelling pipe’ and it’s evil. :3 If you hyphenated ‘evil’ and ‘smelling’ that would indicate that it’s the smell that’s evil.


And… I’m done. ^^ Sorry for the hellishly long review, but once I started talking I guess I couldn’t stop. I hope it helped some, though, and stand by for a review for ‘Okay, NOW Panic’.

This is one of the best girl-drops-into-ME stories I have ever read. I love your accurate portrayal of ME, canon-wise and the lifestyle. The ending had me in tears! Thanks for writing this!