Trish's Second Assignment

[Dragon's muse]

Thank you kindly Muse!

There's enough red on this one that I think I might rewrite the story to take into account your corrections and post below. It helps me make sure I read and understand each comments.

I see you've given me a good comma spanking. I went to grade school in the freewheeling 70s (my school actually paid somebody to knock out the classroom walls and we all sat on rainbow colored 'smile cubes'). English teachers thought of punctuation as one more oppressive tool of the 'The Man', so i tend to underuse commas, reserving mainly to separate sentences clauses. With dialogue, punctuation is about the only way to give readers a sense of the natural pauses in speech, so I really ought to take some commas out of the back corner of my desk drawer and dust the off.

i am a bit of a comma/semicolon bitch. The nuns at St. Anne's did that to me.

You've also given some good dialogue hints here that break up the awkwardness of ".....," said Tom swiftly. ".....," she answered wryly. I'll work through those.

Yes, azure is a shade of blue. In college, I was a little sister at a fraternity whose colors were azure and silver. When I was thinking about the rose stained glass window, I tried to model it on the rose window at the real Notre Dame, and I think there are lots of reds and blues in it. Somehow reds and blues didn't just seem exotic enough for this marvelous window that I was trying to get the narrator to pay attention to, so I went for 'azure' and 'crimson'. I guess I take your point that 'azure' itself a shade of blue.

Sadly, for a alumni of catholic schools, i have not really seen a lot of pictures of that, so i will bow to your memory of the colors.)

Oh and there's one small mistake that I got away with. I noticed it right after I posted, and have been kicking myself for it. In the second to last paragraph, I use 'hear' instead of 'here'. I'm sure if H Dean had read it first, he would have blistered my bottom for it. *s*

i never claimed to be perfect, just painfully close

If it was a stand-alone story, I'm not sure I would have named the character 'Rose'. Because of the assignment, I put the character name in there as a bit of a red-herring to make you think that maybe I cheated and didn't use a literal rose bush. (I honestly didn't think until just now about the possibility of having "Rose's bush" play a role in the story *s*). Perhaps that was a little too cutesy.

i did wonder about that. i like that device. and interesting that my name is rose

Thanks again.

Anytime at all