Cheers to both of you! It's been such a great experience so far to interact with you guys here on SM, and I hope that you will continue to leave insightful commments on my work if you happen to read it. Also, keep me posted on the colllaborative project! Hope the reviewing process is going well :)

Incredible. Love it. This is what I call "engaging the reader", I mean come on! I need to learn to suprise the reader a little bit more like this, you definitely have crafted something amazing here.

I think unless someone is being absolutely ruthless, critisism can be very helpful. Like Persephonie said, it is a neccessary evil. I mean, "constructive critisism" is always the way to go, with something positive along with the negative, but whose ego hasn't been bruised once in a while? It's good for us, reminds us that we are but human beings who type black characters onto a screen.

So I added in the oldest son (didn't see him in the previous chapters) since three kids are mentioned in the origial story. And their ages are older than what is implied later on, so I wasn't too specific on their ages in this one. Whomever takes it from here can decide on if and/or how to tackle this minor issue..go back and read all the chapters and see if you can figure something out. Maybe I'm just anal about stuff like this. It doesn't make the quality of the work I've seen you guys put forth so far any better or worse, but it's something I had to handle when writing my chapter.

Hope someone will continue on from here :)

Everything everyone else said and more! Love, love, love this chapter. I was lucky enough (or unlucky, depending on how mine is received) to be the one to write the chapter following this one. Hope chapter five fits into the story and someone continues on after me. Kudos to everyone who has contributed so far, very cool stuff guys.

Thanks for thinking of me! Really, I am honored. It is a fun idea to do something like this on here. I just posted my contribution (Chapter Five) today. Hope it goes well with the others. The story is really taking shape, I love how up and down it has been so far. Really cool stuff by everyone so far. You gave us a great peice to work off of, thanks!

Okay, so I had to comment on my own material just so anyone else who reads this doesn't think I'm a complete moron. I realize there are several errors (spelling, grammatical, and even punctuation) in this, as well as the continuation of this chapter. I was editing this in Word, and then trying to copy and paste it into SM at the same time, and I see now that some of the paragrahs that made it in were the un-edited versions. Also, the formatting got all weird in the last paragraph of this first part of "Launch" for some reason, but the continued chapter is fine. ~Sigh~ I'm learning as I go, here. Heh.

This is incredible! I only wish I could capture the reader's attention the way you do. I need to start forcing myself to involve more fantasy in my work...I'm sort of stuck in the "draw from your own experience mode". Ha.

Oh, and you aren't joking about the formatting when you copy and paste. I recently saw what SM did to something I submitted, it messed up all the spacing like in yours, but only in one paragraph, so that one stands out now. Bizzare. Annoying, haha.

Keep it up, I love your stuff :)

You are so right on about it being too lengthy. I have always struggled with editing my own work and "tightening up" as you put it. I haven't even attempted to write like this in over five years, so I am probably a bit rusty! Hahaha! Thank you for the compliments and also for the advice, honestly, I appreciate it.

Thanks so much! I feel honored to have gotten the 5 star vote from you :) Really, thank you for the encouragement...I'm going to make a point to check out some of your work on here soon.