> The resulting effect made for an interesting read. I was just wondering if it was intentional or not.

Absolutely intentional. One of the things I love about fantasy is the magnitude of possibilities for world building. I love thinking up new worlds, even if they don't make sense, and throwing characters into them to see how they fare. One of my favorite approaches to writing is to think up a premise and/or environment that may not make any sense whatsoever and putting characters into the situations that arise from such a premise and/or environment. What I *don't* do is spend time trying to explain how such a premise or world is suppose to work: as writer, I make the blanket claim that it does, and from there, my interest and attention goes to the characters, to see how they deal with it. Some of my favorite movies follow this pattern, too. My attitude is, the story is in the characters, not in the world, and the best narrator would be one comfortable with that world in the first place, therefore not trifling with such details about explaining what seems foreign to us.

So, yeah, Strong Woman is a result of that perspective of mine. Never do any of the characters or the narrator of the story itself question the coherence of the world -- it's just there: western and fantasy, mashed together.

Fenwick Glumber's stories sort of take the same approach, although with less depth of thought. (The Strong Woman stories were written in 1997 with no puzzle tie-in goals at all, while Fenwick Glumber was created purely for use in Story Hunt.) His world is sort of a mishmash of Renaissance Europe, turn of the century England, and just a smidgeon of fantasy. I wasn't particularly paying attention to what established genre settings I was drawing from, I was just looking to create a certain mood and blended the settings that would help me create it.

My writing is one love of mine that doesn't manage to get exploited as much by RinkWorks as I'd like. Most of my writing I feel reluctant to publish on the web anyway -- I feel somewhat obligated to find a magazine or anthology to get them published in rather than slapping them on the web. With "Story Hunt," I managed to reconcile my reluctance to publish my writing on RinkWorks by adding the puzzle element and excusing it that way. That at least got a couple of things I'm happy about out there, but I have more mostly unseen short stories (and my novel, of course) than you can shake a stick at.