"That's her book?" you ask yourself. "Ten pages of slogging through ugly yellow text for this?" So what is so special about this plot? Well, it's not everything that's happening in the main routine, but rather everything that happens behind the scenes. When Laura created that town called Sweaty Post, she created (instantiated) an object of type Western Town. This object had all the characteristics of a standard Western Town (do you remember the binders?) The same thing goes for the Maurice object and the (pardon me for this) Mary object. While some of the traits of these objects were specified at the time of creation, most of their traits were specified back in the binders, or classes. This allowed Laura to say a good deal while only saying a little bit in her main routine.

So Laura's main plot (routine) turns out to be nothing more than a collection of references to objects, which in turn are references to classes. It is, to mix metaphors again, literary federalism, with everything being dealt with at the lowest level possible.

So what are the benefits of this? Well, imagine that instead of one page, Laura's editor wanted a book of five hundred pages. Or let's say that Laura decided that Maurice the villain shouldn't be so cruel. Instead of going back and laboriously changing all her instances of Maurice eating kittens and tripping old people (or whatever it is that bad folks do), Laura could just make some changes to the Maurice object at the time of instantiation. Or she could change the Villain class to be friendlier. Or she could even create a *new* class, called FriendlyVillain with some aspects of the Samuel L. Jackson character in Pulp Fiction. She's got a lot of options; the point is that she only needs to make the changes in one place.

But that's not Laura's only reason for writing her books in Java. She has a keen idea for the future of Westerns. She sees interactivity. And if, instead of being bound in pages, her characters live in objects and classes, Laura is free to create a Virtual Sweaty Post. Readers (on her website) could be prompted for their own actions and her characters could respond in a variety of ways, according to what was written in their classes. Using Java, Laura could finally bring the Old West back to life. And hey, I'm sure she's not the only one yearning for the days of outhouses, blood, and dust.

So who is this editor fellow?

You've seen many references to Laura's editor in New York. Who is this fellow? Well, he knows the world of Westerns in and out, and he knows that certain things will just not work in a good Western. That is why her editor takes all of Laura's scripts, reads them, and then returns them with all the errors that she has made (remember, we said that he was a bit persnickety). On the computer, this is called a compiler. All Java programs must be compiled before they can be run. The compiler will patiently (and repeatedly) tell you everything that you did wrong. And then you get to go back and do it again. Hey, that's the literary life.