So a little behind the scenes: this entire series on the Student Six actually came about after I grabbed some Sandbar stories. It was entirely coincidental: I was just going back through my list and grabbing story pairs that fit together. But after grabbing today's two, I realized it felt wrong to do just him and not the rest. 

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IT IS TIME FOR BEST YAK.

YAKS BEST AT STORIES.

EXCEPT FOR THESE AUTHORS WHO ARE NOT YAKS BUT ARE WRITING ABOUT YAKS. SO IS CLOSE ENOUGH.

And we begin with crime. 

Because as Jack of a Few Trades points out, Hot Cocoa is Illegal in Yakyakistan.

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Time to move on to the birbs! Continuing the Young Six series, I'm turning this week towards Silverstream. 

First up: There She Goes! by Miller Minus. 

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So hopping along, the next of the Young Six I'm gonna pull out is Smolder. (This time it's only semi-random: remember me mentioning semillon last week? Yeah, I'm having to actually sort this series to make sure not to feature them twice in a row.) So who am I gonna pull out first for Scoota-dragon?

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Right. A month or so ago I mentioned that I was getting ready to launch some bigger thematic batches of stories, which is why I was trying to clear up my new authors folder. The bigger one of those was a focus series on the Student Six, which I'd planned to start as soon as a month came up with five Wednesdays.

…Yeah I was supposed to start it last week. Bother. 

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Earlier today, I was shooting the shit with Aklinstar about some of the statistics blogs I've done in the past and I noticed there was one I never did an update/follow-up on. I promptly dropped everything to do exactly that, which is because I'm deeply interested in stats and data and not at all because I'm frustrated with the way my current writing project is going because I can't find a character's voice and this is a good way to

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Okay, so changing gears again-again. This time mostly because I have no time. This is one of those weeks where everything happens at once, and I've been positively hopping with how little free time I've got. 

But that's no excuse not to talk about how absolutely cool stories are, and honestly I've made it this long without missing an update so I'm hardly going to start now. 

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And now back to our regularly scheduled program and my attempt to clean out my rookies shelf. (I've only got a few, I'm determined to at least catch up to this month with them.)

Which brings me to the oldest story I've got on that stack: The Anchor by jphenix.

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Okay, so there's still new people to get through but you gotta remember that this blog series is mostly reliant on my whims. And I'm a little bored on that front, so I'm gonna switch gears and do a different pair of stories. Because I can. Also because I was reminded of one of these stories this last week and they're pretty damn funny.

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Probably the hardest genre to get right is mystery. Not only do you need to craft a solid narrative that fulfills all the requirements of a good drama or comedy (because without that it's just a trumped-up logic puzzle), but you also have to create that mystery itself. It can't be too obvious - otherwise why bother - but you also can't make it rely on bullshit and information the reader is never told. 

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