Feeling sorry f’ y’self, won’t get y’ anywhere!
Grow up! Be a man!
Oh, I’m not complaining. I’m just saying I don’t need anyone else to move in. 
Wait. Then why did I pack all my stuff into this shipping container?
…0…n…omE…t…ho…now
.r…no…c…the…E…rig…
…G…Ca…t…o…p…n…ht…
pLea
s3 le
eve a
meesa
ge fter
tha b3
ep
Oh dear me!! I don’t think I’d fancy standing on the crumbling edge of the Abyss that’s your brain, when Choronzon the demon of the Abyss and jaysen are in joint occupation/co–residency! 
Seems right to me, too, Beth. And this is really interesting to think about in relation to NiaD. Maybe we could roughly split these expectations into two kinds: expectations about a) the nature of the fictional world and what happens there and expectations about b) the sensibility of the narrative and so, in part, the manner in which things happen.
A) The World and the What
Some of these expectations about the world and what happens are broadly framed out by Rog, but the chapter authors certainly also have a hand in this also from closer-in. But it seems to me that the NiaDs thus far have been rather carefully crafted so as to have a firm foot in reality – even the superheroes don’t actually have superpowers.* (* 3 Ghosts is an exception and a cautious foray outside that basic boundary.) So, I feel like I do know a great deal about what are the expectations of this sort when working. Gremlins are out. Nice suits are in.
B) The Sensibility and the Manner
There are most definitely (unintended) shifts of style, and styling of details and character, between chapters. But far from being a deficit, I actually think this is one of the most interesting and entertaining things about reading these NiaD books – style shifting from gritty to glass-and-steel; the main character shifting from action to contemplative, from smooth to taciturn. One day the main character is a scruffy loner in a down and out flat, and tomorrow is a landed urbanite with actual friends.
But there certainly are other shifts of manner that are not so happy. In my own experience as a reader of NiaD books, the jags in sensibility/manner that stand out for me as negatives are jaggy not because they are genre-breakages, but because they offend my own sensibilities. It seems some authors will relentlessly f-bomb their chapter no matter what it is about. And one could be excused sometimes for suspecting that some authors write because they feel they don’t get enough opportunity in real life for cussing and bawling and leering. I won’t even mention the still-unforgiven spreadsheet masturbation scene. But I am pretty sure a genre tag would not kerb any of that. And so I guess I have (for good or ill) just chalked it up to the nature of the beast, because there are all kinds of people writing in all kinds of ways. So this sort of expectation is one I just expect will be flouted.
One of the interesting effects of the growth of NiaD is that there are now almost always multiple versions of chapters and so, as in my own web version of the books, I can by navigation put together a version of the book that tends this way or that in style, and, I might add, can choose to navigate around that egregious outlier chapter I don’t think my delicate sensibilities can tolerate.
In Conclusion
NiaD is the Portsmouth Sinfonia of literature! It works not because the voices magically blend so well that you get the greatest symphony performance ever. It works because it doesn’t really fit together like that but everyone is working so hard at it that it becomes something else, something you haven’t heard before – and you have to keep listening.
And just like the Sinfonia it really only works if the participants are earnestly trying to do the thing – to really play their part in the symphony. So, paradoxically, though we need to earnestly try to blindly collaborate, what makes the result “work” is not that everything did in fact fit together.
[[Disclosure: Having said all that, I feel I must confess one of my all-time favorite chapters in a NiaD is a complete, self-conscious genre buster. It was that rare exception that you can’t bring yourself to mentally reprimand though you know you should – because it was just so well done, so dead funny in the context, so unexpected and taken farther and just far enough that the lid came off.]]
Ha! Well, I can’t tell you that, because of course the bet is already on again for 2018!
Grrrrr, I hope I’m not one of the f bombers. If so I do apologize.
I do wonder if part of the proliferation of swearing in current written works is directly proportional to the proliferation of swearing in the “real world”. I do know that it is much more prevalent in today’s professional world than it was 10 years ago.
I’m obliged to make the world as easily understood as possible. “It’s just like reality” is an incredibly convenient short-cut for that. I hoped that such a well established alternate reality as the Dickensian Scrooge/Marley would’ve been as close to ubiquitously understood as “real life”, but I totally get that some would prefer that I was more adventurous in this regard.
PS did people notice our first “re-used” character?
Personally, I thought it was a pretty genius way to test the waters outside that box.
I assume the Rog character doesn’t count, b/c he was ripped from the pages of real life. Obviously. But after that I am flumoxed – guessing this is a character from the pre-GR era.
gr
Are you taking bets this year?
That is exactly our plan! But I won’t be able to share any particulars, of course, for fear of tipping the scales.
I can be persuaded to propose genre/plots to ensure they will NEVER be selected.
Okay, wife and I have run our genre analyses and our bets are laid in. I am so going to win this time!
Vic-k has dibs on shape-shifting aliens being hunted and eaten by cats then a final confrontation with “mom and dad” shape-shifter. You know he’s a lock for this year…
Hey!!! That wasn’t me, y’ muffin-brain. That was Lunk, the Scandi knucklehead. He seem to be veering t’wards a Startreck-Star wars-Alien-Bladerunner amalgamation. He already inhabits his own Universe.
Probably goes late-night Wormhole cruising … the guy’s weird!
Lunk only started the “cat roams a building” part. I added the shape shifters. You had the parental confrontation. You own it now.
One of yoos two, had the cat, eating child/alien inhabitants of all the rooms, en route to the last room, wherein resides Mom&Dad Alien. I only pointed out the inescapable fact, that it had terrible potential for 'Mom&Dad slaughter kids in cat … or, kids in cat slaughter Mom&Dad, scenario, but purely from the emotional and psychological perspective … unlike yoos two sickos, all out for blood and gore
That would be me. But you took it to a dark place… a very dark place.
Not if the cat is now an alien-kid-cat , and Alien Mom is a cat lover. Could turn into a Intergalactic Easey Rider Road Trip Story
Dad-Mom-Catkid; youtube.com/watch?v=egMWlD3 … gs=pl%2Cwn
With this level of creativity I still hold that the last chapter is all yours.