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Great to see the first council votes cleaned up. (originally they were all over the place and seemed unlikely -Rich:Teresa, Kathy: Teresa; Gretchen: Ethan, Ethan: Richard, Colby: Richard, Alicia: Teresa, Michael: Teresa, Teresa: Kathy)

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How the !@&(# do you even remember that??

Stalker!

Yep.

The general rule is that I'd flip a coin to see who won immunity, and then at that point I'd decide some sort of challenge the winning tribe would realistically be able to win. I did this all the way up through Alaska and Hawaii. In Greece I dropped the random immunity about 3 episodes in. Basically because I realized one tribe would never be able to win hardly anything, and also because I had some really kickass Greek mythology challenges I wanted to use. Greece was the first story where I really decided to just write the storyline I wanted, and leave almost nothing up to chance. With Hawaii and Alaska, I didn't really have that much control over who the winner was going to be. In fact I usually didn't know who was going to win until around day 38.

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Gee whiz that was long! I don't think I can continue reading if it takes that much time to read your upcoming episodes! I loved it though. You put so much work into it, and I really enjoyed the characters you chose.

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There's a really long (ha!) explanation as to why the episode is so long, but I'll try to give you the short version instead. The reason episode 1 is so freaking huge is because I had a lot of exposition I had to squeeze in. Remember, this story was originally written in 2002, and all I am doing now is going in and fleshing it out. There are certain events that HAVE to happen in episode one. If I take them out, or change them around in the new version, I'll end up with a butterfly effect where everything down the road winds up altering just a little bit. And since I'm trying to keep this rewrite as simple as possible, I didn't want to mess around too much with the first episode.

Long story short, everything that happens in episode one HAS to be there. I would have liked if it was about twenty pages shorter, but if I had done that, a lot of things later wouldn't make sense.

The remaining episodes WILL be long (all my stories are long because they're so detailed). But episode 1 and maybe the finale are the only two that were 90 minute episodes. Everything in between should be much more manageable.

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I completely hated the person that got the boot, meaning I hated the event not the character. I really liked your story up until that point. Then when he/she was really booted I felt very robbed. It was all right there, the whole reasoning behind it and all, but I felt like it was way too straight forward. I think I would've liked a little bit moer suspense.

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You didn't like it because you wanted the story to go a different direction? Or you didn't like it because I didn't hide the eventual bootee at all? There's a difference between those two statements. Which one is more true?

Regarding why the person went in episode one, and why you probably felt cheated, wait until you read my episodes notes before I answer that one. Trust me, once my notes go up, you'll look at the whole situation a little differently. I should have the episode notes up by the end of the night tonight.

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Just my personal opinion. It took me so long to read it though. A little bit shorter episodes and maybe giving us a little suspense would be my only wishes. And I did read your post about not liking the suspense on the tv show. Sorry, I know that that is your choice as a writer.

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Just keep in mind two things: A) I don't end ALL my episodes that blatantly. I do try to mix it up a little more than that. And B) If I had tried to build some sort of false suspense, it probably would have added about 15 more pages. The reason it ended as abruptly and as unsuspensefully as it did was because I already knew the episode was freakishly long. It was just as much an instance of me not wanting to write any more as it was about anything else.

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I felt bad for the character because I really felt for him/her and his/her efforts to stay in the game!

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Good! That's what I was intending. In the original draft of this episode, none of that was there. In fact, when the bootee read this episode back in 2002, that was the first thing he/she said to me. "Why couldn't at least I have fought back!" I never forgot that comment, so I went out of my way this time to give them some backbone. And if people only remember one thing about this episode, that's what I was aiming for. I wanted their exit to be a little bit more memorable.

(By the way, the person who was booted first in Hawaii ended up being one of my best Survivor resources when I sat down to write Alaska. He/she spent countless hours on the phone or writing emails to me, in an attempt to give some insider tips on what these characters are really like. So he/she never held a grudge over it. But I did feel that in the rewrite, I sort of owed them something.)





And thanks, Anti and Yrik!

Yes, according to Burnett's book. Colleen Haskell sat on the beach all by herself for most of the first day of Borneo. And she did the same thing again the first day after the merge. She was so shy around everyone that they had to invite her over to camp or she wouldn't even talk. All of that is almost word for word from Burnett's book.

Actually, a more accurate description of Colleen (at least as of the summer of 2000) was that she doesn't think of herself as a grownup. Most of her character is fairly accurate, at least according to the sources that were available in 2002. Although we might want to ask Colleenlover to verify this for sure.