I don’t want to analyze the hell out of this, but it really is an intriguing story. It has been on my mind all day. I will most likely be pondering this for a few more days.

Thanks again for writing this.

HistoryGoddess: all hail to the kind of loyalty that Palin inspires… so long as we can leave Palin out of it. One of the really fascinating things about getting comments from readers is when I find things in my own story that readers find, that I hadn’t really thought about. In this case, that the in-group/out-group behavior in this story fits the metaphor of “Cold” & being frozen out.

The full novel is an “in progress” thing, so unfortunately I’ve got to finish writing it first. Life stuff has tended to get in the way — but other than the necessity to hold a full-time job, it’s full steam ahead nowadays. I’m hard at it. Thanks again for reading.

I read “Cold” out of some hard-to-describe loyalty- the kind arrived courtesy of that Palin woman. I don’t usually read science fiction since I have enough trouble understanding this world as it is. That being said, I found I truly got sucked into your story. I really did start questioning the larger idea of experiencing Cold and being frozen out of a larger group.

As I did my usual morning chores, I kept thinking of the idea of words being lost and then re-found through experience, and how difficult it would be to share our feelings with others who have neither the experience nor the words to understand something that profoundly changes us. Such isolation is both physical and mental, and we are truly blessed if we have someone in our lives willing to try to understand.

I really did like this story. Truly. I hope the full novel gets published because I will certainly read it. Kudos!