this story was very good, well put together. the ending was where the story was suppose to go. I loved both characters greatly and after the shock of having judy shot it was fitting to see both of them walking hand in hand to the great mouse in the sky as in the dream. well done

I've been following your writing since 'The Oracle of New Delphi' days.  That story was full of grammatical and spelling errors; it had a complex plot which often seemed to lose its direction, but despite those undoubted flaws showed the flame of a potential master (mistress?) story teller.  The difference between 'Mea Culpa' and that early saga is that the style has improved along with the grammar and spelling,  but most of all you created two wonderful, flawed characters, along with a cast of well drawn minority players.

This is an absorbing story which certainly gripped me on an afternoon when really I should have been outside enjoying the sunshine.  Billy was never going to survive just as the growing relationship with Judy was doomed to ultimate failure.  The ending was messy and not the sweet and sentimental ending many people crave, but life isn't all good endings either, and everything finally ends in tears, it's just the route that provides with some ephemeral joy on the way.

My knowledge of Liverpool is limited to catching the 'cattle boats' to the Isle of Man when I visited for the TT in my youth,  but I felt I knew the streets where Billy made his chilling living.  Hypatia provided as good a picture as was needed to enjoy the story.

I feel the that the carping review by 'reader' (obviously not 'writer') was somewhat mean and failed to acknowledge the very many excellent features of the plot.  I see no evidence that Billy and Judy were going anywhere after all that had happened; sadly the ending chosen was self selecting, and I for one thought the reference to 'Butch Cassidy ... ' was perfectly valid.  Because most readers understood the reference and what it meant it provided an excellent shorthand to describe the inevitable ending.

OK there are a few trivial spelling/grammatical errors, and at least one error in fact, but trivial is the word, and none of it detracts significantly from enjoyment of the story.

Hypatia, brilliant - I wish I'd written it.

Geoff

Hi Reader you didn’t leave an email address so I thought I would answer you here,

Vilified should have been vindicated; how I ended up with one instead of the other I don’t know…my mind must have been three or four lines ahead.

Ok down to serious matters…

Billy was never going to be a conventional hero, he was the first to admit that what he did was wrong, but he enjoyed it.  As he also knew that was no excuse, he was an out of control vigilante who took pleasure in inflicting pain and suffering on others.  Had he continued on his merry way without meeting Judy one day he would have come up against a fifteen year old with a nine millimetre and it would have been all over.  Billy was beyond redemption from the start of this; he had fallen to the level of the creatures that he preyed upon.  Judy was a different matter; Judy was the innocent in all ways, though so much more experienced than Billy.  Put the two of theme together and you end up with a beauty and the beast scenario, which has been used again and again.  I couldn’t face the Disney ending, beauty falls in love with the beast and changes him, I couldn’t face the more likely ending of the two of them ending up hating each other as Judy tries to change him and he ends up hurting her.  So I took it a different way.  It was a squalid, messy and unsatisfying ending, leaving most people unhappy with the outcome...that to me sounds very close to real life.

Now for the last scenes.   Yes I know glass, especially at an angle, can interfere with a bullets trajectory, but two other factors are important in this equation, range and power.  When the SA80 was being introduced into the British military about thirteen years ago the word was out that a cars windscreen could be angled enough to cause the bullets to bounce off.  As was explained to us when one night we expressed our concern at losing the more powerful 7.62mm SLR when we were on the gate “if the bugger is close enough it’ll do the job”.  Not that I would have ever liked to put that to the test.

The range of this shot would have been somewhere under a hundred yards though due to the height of the Adelphi and the positioning of the room in the story, the view inside the room from over the road would be fairly limited (possibly 15% of the room visible to a marksman all on the right hand side of the room), working from first person Billy knew none of this of course and cared even less.  All he knew was he was still alive.  As for taking out the window before hand I don’t think the British police will ever be up to abseiling down the outside of a building to blow a window out at that level...so you can take it that a standard three rounds were fired and whatever happened two out of the three should hit their target.  

Though Billy and Judy were the characters in this story the story itself was about the filth and rot that had taken a firm hold on society.  Yes there will be more in this setting, some of them will probably make reference to Billy and Judy, the characters are going to be very different each time examining the city and the time from different perspectives.  Despite what Billy believed, it is going to become obvious that wherever you fit into the social structure there is still the fear, still the hatred and bigotry and still that smell of shit.  Eventually something is going to blow, there is going to have to be a time of reckoning, but until that time it is a time of survival and even those who are called heroes by some are fatally flawed.  After this story the second one, which is brewing, is called “No More Heroes…” a title I have unrepentantly stolen from The Stranglers and is going to be based around one of the ambiboys.

Thanks for your comments and I’ll see what I can do about the punctuation.  I must admit at the moment I just close my eyes and throw them at the page.  I am learning (sort of), but as a dyspraxic who managed to fail English three times (after the third attempt I gave up) and as someone who still can’t understand my own handwriting, I’m not doing too bad…even if I do say so myself ;-)

Hypatia

An interesting yarn but, long enough to develop characters and short enough to be read in one go, I liked it! As a matter of interest, is it possible for anyone to see into the hotel room windows at the 'Adelphi'. Last time I was there you looked down on almost every building nearby!
Don't take too much notice of this person called 'Reader' he/she seems to spend a lot of time criticising just about every story written on other sites.  I wonder how many stories he/she has written and had published!

Hi Hypatia,
          Great story. Interesting world and interesting hero. It's a sad ending in many ways but it's true most endings are unhappy.
Unlike "Reader" I feel no need to criticise as I read your story without pausing and was emotionally caught up in the tale.
Thanks and Hugs,
Chrisl  

Bummer ending.

You created two good characters, a convincingly dystopic setting, and the start of a crackerjack plot. Why the hell did you kill your protagonists off so untimely? The two were good for at least another 30,000 words!

I'm way unhappy with the ending. First, borrowing the ending from "Butch Cassidy" falls way short of what you can do. Your existing story line requires the passage of more than just a couple of seconds between the police announcing themselves, Judy's death, Frank's defenestration, and Billy's psychotic break. From what little I know of police practice in cases like this, anyone holding a gun inside the room would be dead two seconds after they finished speaking. But Billy didn't get turned into Swiss cheese—and even he was at a loss to explain why. As for Judy's shooting, intact window glass makes shots miss, so something would first have to shatter the window—most likely a couple of flash-bangs or stun grenades or "distraction devices," as Janet Reno (infamously) called them. That makes your current ending a bit unlikely.  

You can do better. You can write an ending that isn't "sappily ever after"—better yet, one that keeps your protagonists alive for more stories set in this bleak Liverpool of the year 2016.

You could also develop the concept of the neural interface you used in the story, and work it into more stories even if you don't use the same protagonists (though I'd rather you kept Billy and Judy alive, and saw them through a few personal transitions of one sort or another.)

Finally, you should spell check and grammar check more thoroughly. There are too many clauses not set off by commas, fragments, misplaced apostrophes and other infelicities of usage a volunteer editor could sort out. Then there are spelling errors of the sort that fly under a spell checker's radar, most notably "vilified my mothers' views" where "verified my mother's views" would make more sense.

You can build this story into something much better than it is now. It feels only half-done. I know you can do it.