I didn't do any analysis of PT in my LLLT postscript, I'm not there to critique unless it's important to the story behind the story ... so I don't know if your memory is correct.

There are a group of crabby fans who seem very unhappy with me for publishing anything that is not what they want out of a LL novel, meaning a Western. It's ridiculous because I KNOW THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT and that is why I pretty much gave them all the LL Westerns in existence in the 1990s! Now when they see a new LL book that is not a Western they complain ... some seem to buy the book without looking and then carp about that it wasn't what they expected.

So I get mail from people acting like I've ripped them off for daring to publish NTR. They bought it, ship on the cover and all, hallucinating it was a Western because LL's name is on it. I got some angry letters about the Law of the Desert Born Graphic Novel saying that they bought it then discovered it "was just a comic book" ... well it SAYS "a Graphic Novel" on the cover. There's also the people who blame me for writing the LL novels they simply didn't like, sometimes books that were published years before I was born or believe I wrote more than I did on, say, the Hopalong Cassidy novels.

In my opinion there is, so far, are only stories where I put in elements that were sort of out of style.

1) The character development of the female protagonist in By the Waters of San Tadeo. The ending needed some work and the best way to resolve the story was to have her transform herself into a bit more of a "shoot first" bad ass than Dad probably would have done.

2) The resolution of With These Hands where the protagonist returns from the wilds and is still haunted by his experience ... he's sort of not yet over it, not ready to return to his normal life. It created something more poignant than simply surviving. I think that Dad intended an ending like that but didn't figure out how to write it at the time.

There are PLENTY of times I've cut and written and added and subtracted but truly I couldn't tell where my voice started and his stopped, or where his resumed ... except for those two because, like I was saying about Skyring Water, it is my opinion that his STYLE was getting in the way of his INTENTION, and I went with what I hope was his intention. On the big moves (note that the two examples above were both endings) intention is the more important factor.

This is even true with The Diamond of Jeru where Most of the words (like 95%) are mine. Even though I changed the style of how the original story's plot was told (to something less campy) I was still able to keep it in a style that was very similar to LL and was able to stick with his intention for the story as a whole pretty well. I don't consider that one to have gone off the style reservation like the two short stories I mentioned did.

With NTR it was a different situation. Dad and I were co-authors. My name is on it. That said I did everything I could to stay consistent with his style and with his intention for the book. It was easy because in that case, as in many others, the two did not conflict. There's a LOT more LL detail in that book than LL put into it.

An extreme example (that no one but my mom or sister would catch) is the lights of the car coming up the hill on the ceiling of the Hollywood Hills bedroom on Dennis McGuire's last night in LA. That image is directly from my parents bedroom when we lived in West Hollywood. The lights of cars crawling up the steep hill would shine through the foliage outside and the shutters inside the house and make these great arcing patterns on the ceiling as they moved past. There are other bits but that's the most personal to me and to our lives. It's actually a very Los Angeles detail but I'm not sure why but that's why it's in the story, Dennis McGuire is leaving a life he could have had in LA ... a life Louis and my mother DID have.