>

> That sounds like good advice. I know I should;nt
> take the rejection personally but I do anyway.

> I would also like to know: do you phase out
> characters if you feel they are not working out,
> or readers are losing intrest like a TV show? Some
> of the characters disappear, and I wonder if its
> because their ratings were bad and they didn' get
> enough hits on the website.

> I have to say that The Company Threapist is
> a very ingenius idea. I would like to know more
> of what goes behind the scenes. It would be a good
> subject for a documentry.

Whee! A Documentary!

Writers discontinue their own characters when they no longer wish to write them. We've never discontinued a character for low ratings...sounds like shades of "Network". Writing a character each week is a LOT of work--sometimes writers don't realize how much when they start. And some writers just run out of steam. We've had some writers who found that they didn't like their own character, and thus found it hard to continue. Someone else on the board bemoaned the lack of truly unlikeable characters--but those are hard to write, week after week.

As editors, we try to be as unobtrusive as possible to the content while being ruthless on believability (i.e. the Doctor's voice), grammar, style, and spelling.