One word too often

Nothing new to play here. This is more of the same quiet line by line work, this time a proper full pass over the first story, and a lighter one on the third.

The first story got the longest look. There was a phrase I had reached for over and over to point at the feeling she carries, a fixed little handle for the one thing that is supposed to resist being named. Once I counted them I could not unsee it, so I let most of them go back to being described rather than labelled, which is closer to what the story is actually about. A few endings that stated their own meaning out loud now simply end. And a small slip near one of the endings, where a single decision got described two different ways a page apart, is set right.

The rest was the same repeated phrase hunt as last time: a handful of images and gestures that were doing good work the first two or three times and turning into wallpaper by the seventh. Same gesture, same image, just varied enough that they land again instead of blur. The third story got a gentler version of the same pass.

Small release, same reason as always. The story does not change. It just reads a little more like itself.