The work uses quoted e-mail conversations in an interesting way. Also, the subtext Jam adds to the RPG SwordQuest reflects her moods and hopes.

The romance in this work leaves a lot of lose ends, but it is a good example of a type of support relationship can form on the 'Net. The story sometimes uses flashback, as in this passage from Jam's younger days:

Jam was nineteen, living on a commune in rural British Columbia, when she heard the piano player in the woods. She was alone in the cabin. Her friends were in town, running errands. She was supposed to be with them, helping, but she had been crying or something so they went without her. She was a very difficult person to live with at this point in her life. She was often crying or screaming or hitting her head against the wall or falling on the floor in a fit. At first Jam's friends had suggestions for how she might improve her behaviour.

"Pull yourself together," they told her. "Don't be self-indulgent. Act like a grown-up. We do." They did. They had bad times too, but they didn't have falling down fits. And if they cried, it was because something really bad happened, not five times a day for no reason, not in the car on the way to town, not when there were guests.

When she first heard the piano player in the woods, Jam thought it was a radio. But it didn't have a radio sound. It had a live sound like someone was practising. Some kind of jazz. Jam was more of a rock 'n roll gal, but she liked the dissonant crash under the high, sweet melody, and she went outside to see where it was coming from. She walked down the little dirt driveway to the road, but there was no one, no cars even. Usually if there was a car it was someone coming to visit the commune. There was nowhere else to go on that road. There were no other houses where someone might be practising piano, nothing but woods. The music was coming from the woods. Jam followed it.

It was spring, with soft ground and tiny leaves, skinny paths crisscrossing in a network of tunnels through thick salal; cedar, douglas fir, maple knitted overhead, on and on, to the Arctic Circle maybe. Jam looked around, but there was no piano. It seemed close though, maybe down that path, over the next rise, past that ridge.

Jam realized it was a hallucination around the same time she realized she was lost. "Damn," she said, waiting for the panic wave. But there was no panic, just a matter-of-fact calm, as if one problem cancelled out the other. Why worry about hallucinating when you're lost in the woods? Why worry about being lost when you're going crazy?

She kept following the piano. It was a direction, the most interesting direction because it had chaotic and lovely music in it. She walked through the spring, young ferns unfolding, last year's leaves turning to earth underfoot, aspens like ghosts in the fading light. Before it was full dark, she reached a road, a paved road, a road to somewhere, and the music stopped. The piano player led me to this road and then left, Jam told herself. I need to be on this road. She started walking, toward wherever the road went, away from her life. I'll just go, she told herself. I'll walk into a new life somewhere, with $7.32 in my pocket and nothing else. Where will I sleep? How will I find a job? Everything will be strange and difficult, but I'll be where I'm supposed to be and I won't be crazy anymore.

Jam walked down the road in the gathering dark, and when she saw headlights she stuck out her thumb. It was an old pickup truck, red, familiar. Her friends coming back from town. "Hey, Jam! Hop in," they said.

The next morning she looked in the yellow pages under Psychiatry, under Counselling, under Mental Illness.