The Compass Will Show the Way
Jan. 13th, 2008 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perfectworrytitle: The Compass Will Show the Way
'verse/characters: alternate reality/ me, "Katherine," Michael
prompt:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
genrechallenge: fictional autobiography
rating: G
word count: 2,793
summary: in which alternate-reality Meep finds God and gets a boyfriend (who'd've guessed?)
notes: when I saw the prompt atgenrechallenge, I decided to think of the two most unlikely events to have happened in my lifetime, and here they are; also, please note that the geekiness in this is through the friggin' roof (and there are some spoilers for His Dark Materials, though this is not fanfiction) and Katherine is a real person whose name I have changed for writing about her without permission
This is the story of how I found God and got a boyfriend. I knew you’d never believe me, so let me tell you how it all began.
I got to the theater early. Katherine had invited me to that advanced screening-slash-discussion of The Golden Compass. I decided to just skip my Japanese culture class, because I knew I had an A and it wasn’t as though I played hooky on a regular basis and I figured that missing one class couldn’t hurt my grade that badly, right?
I’d never played hooky before. I reminded myself that I wasn’t just going to the movies, I was going to an academic theology discussion. I had done the readings and I’d get the notes from my friends.
Class started at 3:30pm, sharp. I didn’t have to be at the movie theater until quarter to five. I read the last few pages of Northern Lights, which I had hastily reread as soon as Katherine invited me. I checked Facebook. I checked LiveJournal. I checked all of the other websites I usually check, feeling guilty the whole time.
I decided that it wasn’t worth sitting alone in my dorm room while my friends were in class without me. I gathered my things – my notebook, pens, the ten year anniversary edition of Northern Lights I bought in Cornwall, my ticket, keys and cell phone – and headed out the door.
It wasn’t a long walk to the Regal 13, which was handily only a block or two away.
When I got there, I still had an hour to kill until the discussion started. I asked the guy at the ticket counter where to go and he waved in the general direction of theater number four, which was still locked.
So, I sat myself down next to the door and tried to think of ways to occupy my time. I fiddled with my cell phone for awhile, but that failed to keep me entertained for very long because I don’t have any games on it. I wished I had thought to bring my iPod or my DS, so I’d have something to do other than reread the book I had just finished rereading. I wondered, not for the last time, if maybe I should have gone to class and just left early. So I doodled. It was what I would have been doing if I’d been in class.
I doodled my character, Meep. I doodled her with a dæmon of her own, a little weasel. I tried to doodle a polar bear but it came out terribly so I crossed it out and moved on to a clean sheet. I was doodling a girl with pilot goggles and a scarf when he came and dropped his bag down beside me.
I scooted over a little bit, then remembered the recent viscomm lecture about socially constructed gender norms and body language and decided to “own my space” and so I wiggled back over to where I had been originally sitting. After all, I was there first.
“Waiting for the Golden Compass thing?” he asked. He sat down beside me. I scootched away again. So much for owning my space, but whatever.
“Yeah,” I said, moving my bag to my other side. This had less to do with socially constructed body language than worry that he might try to steal my wallet. I have no money, but I like my wallet.
I checked the time again. I still had forty five minutes between me and that book discussion, but hopefully only about fifteen until Katherine got there.
I went back to my doodle. The girl with the scarf wasn’t half bad, even if she was derivative and uninspired. I extended the drawing beyond just a head, adding an awkward looking torso and arms.
“You’re pretty good,” he said.
“Uh,” I said. I can just be so damn eloquent sometimes. “Thanks.” I closed the notebook and put it back in my bag. I was too much of a perfectionist to let someone watch me draw.
We sat together in a way only strangers can sit together, in a silence so awkward that the only way to make it any worse was to actually speak, which of course was exactly what he did.
“So,” he says to me, “have you read it?”
Well, it could have been worse. He could have said “so, what’s your sign?” or “so, how’s the weather?” Of all the myriad things he could have said, he chose “so, have you read it?” It was just personal enough, but at the same time, not so invasive that he sent me running for the hills – okay, the lobby – to wait for Katherine.
“I always read the books before seeing the movies,” I told him. “You?”
“When I was like fifteen, maybe sixteen,” he told me.
“Mhm. I think I was twelve or something, the first time I read it,” and I immediately went into storyteller mode and added, “and I was pissed, right, ‘cause the library didn’t have the other two and I had to wait all summer to find out what happened.”
He laughed. I’m not the sort of person who notices that so-and-so has a nice laugh, but he had a nice laugh. It was the sort of generic, appreciative chuckle that’s nice to hear when you’ve said something you intended to be amusing.
“I read it for class,” he said, “but I read ahead and finished early. Good thing, too. They only had one copy of Subtle Knife.”
I laughed. I realized that I was doing that stupid flirting girl laugh that I hate so much and stopped. So what if he was cute, in a scruffy, geeky kind of way? (My favorite kind.) That was no reason to give in to the Man and act like an airheaded gossip girl.
I won’t bore you with the rest of the details of our conversation. Just picture this: a boy and a girl waiting at a movie theater for a theology discussion about a fantasy novel. I’m sure you can imagine the kinds of things we talked about as time passed and a few other people gathered, lining up behind us.
I looked up as Katherine came in and waved her over. It was a relief to have someone else to talk to. As fascinating as this stranger was, I didn’t know him, and he was male, and he was geeky in a good way, and he was cute and all of that made me feel pretty uncomfortable.
“Katherine!” I scooted over a little, so that she could sit down facing me and him both.
“Meep!” she cried, waving. “Who’s this?” she asked as she settled down on the floor. After all, we still had half an hour to go.
I said “uhm,” and he said “Michael.”
“Katherine,” she said.
“Meep?” he asked.
“Oh, haha, yeah. Kat’s is an internet stranger,” I joked “Meep is my username.”
“Do you have a real name, then?” he asked.
“Leslie,” I told him, “Leslie Ann.”
“Nice to meet you, Leslie Ann,” he said, extending his hand. I shook it.
So our discussion went on, with the added hilarity of Katherine’s insight and internet jokes, which Michael – he insisted on Michael, not Mike – not only laughed at but actually understood, which meant that he must spend as much time online as I do.
Okay, so I know how weird it is to find God at a movie theater during a discussion about His Dark Materials, of all things. I mean, Lyra and Will kill God. Phillip Pullman must be so ashamed.
It wasn’t that quick and easy, of course. If it were, I would have been dating that kid I had a crush on in high school or going to the Kingdom Hall with my überreligious best friend. She had tried for years to save my soul, but to no avail.
I was pretty determined to be damned. They say you go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company, and I had chosen the company.
We continued our conversation after the movie over free breadsticks, coffee, a Shirley Temple and a chocolate mousse. The discussion danced around three central themes: theology, fantasy, and bad adaptations of good books.
I went home later than I’d meant to. I had Michael’s email address written in the back of my notebook and I wanted to get back to my dorm room and email him because we still had things to talk about. I had left when our conversation had come to a temporary lull, but only because I had class the next morning and I wasn’t about to skip another one.
I booted up my laptop and added Michael’s address to my contacts and immediately set about finding him on Facebook. I hadn’t thought to ask for his last name, but it wasn’t hard finding him.
The next morning, he had responded to my friend request and added that we had met at a movie screening-slash-book discussion, which was exactly how he worded it.
Although we didn’t have time to meet in person, our interaction continued over Facebook. I wrote on his Wall, he wrote on mine. He poked me, I poked him. Of course flirting over Facebook is on the pathetic side, but this is the 21st century, and besides, we both had work to do. College, after all, is Serious Buisness™ and despite my opening this story with telling you about the time I skipped class, I am really into my academics and he’s cool with that.
I asked him what he was majoring in, and he said English. I told him that I had considered an English major, but was leaning towards design. Communications, with a focus on graphic design, might not be the best choice of a major for someone with so little confidence in their visual media skills but Michael’s there to help me now, and so is God.
Well, God’s always been there to help me. I just didn’t know it back then.
Michael himself is very religious, but not in the way I always thought of religious people going about it. He’s not into fire-and-brimstone, he doesn’t live in fear of God and he doesn’t go about telling other people what they should and should not believe. Now that’s devotion. He’s so secure in his faith that he doesn’t even have to tell anyone about it. I admire that sort of inner strength. I sure don’t have that kind of conviction. If I did, I wouldn’t be telling you this.
His belief in God didn’t even come up in conversation – surprising, considering how much of our conversations still centered around His Dark Materials – until I changed my religion on Facebook to “Enigma Babylon One World Faith,” tongue-in-cheek joke about my own damnation. He sent me a message asking what the hell was up with that, and had I even read that series? No, I hadn’t, but I liked the idea of the supposedly Godforsaken religion, which I’d found while wasting time reading Wikipedia.
He told me that there were real religions with similar belief systems, and that I needn’t be damned and that God loved me. I was skeptical at first. Faith does not need evidence, but I did.
Killing the Imposter God would probably not be the most likely place to start if one were looking for a Higher Power™, but that was what Michael recommended.
I had been meaning to read it, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I had finals to do; Japanese vocab to study and a nursery rhyme to illustrate and a six-page reflective essay to write and I just didn’t have time to read anything unless it was going to be on the exam. So I returned home for winter break without having read it. I seriously doubted that some book would convert me when the Good Book itself had failed.
Godless ex-Catholics we may be, but my family celebrates Christmas in the classic, commercialized Dickensian sort of way way. Of the few gifts I got was a B&N gift certificate, which I spent on a couple of manga and of course, Killing the Imposter God, which I read immediately.
It not only gave me spectacular insight into the theology in His Dark Materials, but a starting point about where to start talking about God with Michael, even if I didn’t believe it yet.
I clung to my atheism because I thought I was holding on to my freedom. I saw religion only as restrictive dogma. I thought that believing in God would mean giving up my fantasy novels and my yaoi manga and never playing Pokémon again. More importantly, I refused to be subordinated on the basis of gender and I told Michael that if he thought I was going to stay home and take care of the kids that I was leaving. I hadn’t even been aware that there had been a relationship between us until I called it off. I was angry and defensive, protecting my heathen ways with a sort of desperate ferocity that I didn’t really understand. My world view was being challenged and I refused to let go of it, and so I let go of Michael instead.
I regretted it immediately.
His reply seemed to take an eternity. I paced, I grumbled, I bitched about it on LiveJournal and I obsessively refreshed the page, awaiting his response and regretting my attack. It was too late to call it off now, and since when did I care? I kept asking myself that: since when was some boy more important to me than my sense of self? I’ve always said I had a weasel dæmon for a reason: I was proud of my viciousness, but something inside of me had changed.
You might say that my dæmon had settled, but not as a weasel.
Michael’s response was more gracious than I ever could have hoped for. He was hurt and angry that I had lashed out at him like that, but unlike me, Michael had the grace to forgive. He wanted to know where I had gotten the idea that he thought I was expected to stay at home and raise the kids. He wanted to know where I had gotten the idea of us having kids at all. He wasn’t even entirely sure that we had been in a relationship, before I called it off.
I laughed at that. It seemed that, for all of the things we might disagree on, we still thought along similar wavelengths. Relief flooded through me.
I sat back in my chair the way my mother hates, so that only the back two legs are on the ground and my knees rest against the table. I smiled a little bit. I sent him a message.
I didn’t know we were in a relationship until I called it off, either. I’m so sorry, and I don’t know how to make it up to you. How about we start this off the right way?
Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?
I had thought that believing in God would mean giving up everything I enjoyed, but Michael’s God was not the oppressive Authority that Lord Asriel was fighting. Michael’s God is more like Dust: in love with love and creativity and free will.
His response was a long time in coming, but I was at peace. If I knew anything about Michael, it was that he valued effort more than outcome. If I knew anything about this new God that I had found, it was that if he did not reply, if he never replied, that it was all part of some grand plan. I was, for the first time in my life, truly part of something bigger than myself.
I know how you can make it up to me. Come worship with me when you get back to school. I have a surprise for you.
I responded quickly, for I am still rash and impatient, and asked him what church we would be going to. He never told me what denomination he was, or even really what religion. He told me that it was going to be a surprise, and that I would just have to wait until we got back to Boston to find out.
He still hasn’t told me, but I can’t wait to get back. This time we’re meeting on a Sunday, so neither of us will have to skip class.
This is not the end. This is just the beginning.
Dedicated to Michael, for being understanding when I was being an idiot.
'verse/characters: alternate reality/ me, "Katherine," Michael
prompt:
genrechallenge: fictional autobiographyrating: G
word count: 2,793
summary: in which alternate-reality Meep finds God and gets a boyfriend (who'd've guessed?)
notes: when I saw the prompt at
genrechallenge, I decided to think of the two most unlikely events to have happened in my lifetime, and here they are; also, please note that the geekiness in this is through the friggin' roof (and there are some spoilers for His Dark Materials, though this is not fanfiction) and Katherine is a real person whose name I have changed for writing about her without permissionThis is the story of how I found God and got a boyfriend. I knew you’d never believe me, so let me tell you how it all began.
I got to the theater early. Katherine had invited me to that advanced screening-slash-discussion of The Golden Compass. I decided to just skip my Japanese culture class, because I knew I had an A and it wasn’t as though I played hooky on a regular basis and I figured that missing one class couldn’t hurt my grade that badly, right?
I’d never played hooky before. I reminded myself that I wasn’t just going to the movies, I was going to an academic theology discussion. I had done the readings and I’d get the notes from my friends.
Class started at 3:30pm, sharp. I didn’t have to be at the movie theater until quarter to five. I read the last few pages of Northern Lights, which I had hastily reread as soon as Katherine invited me. I checked Facebook. I checked LiveJournal. I checked all of the other websites I usually check, feeling guilty the whole time.
I decided that it wasn’t worth sitting alone in my dorm room while my friends were in class without me. I gathered my things – my notebook, pens, the ten year anniversary edition of Northern Lights I bought in Cornwall, my ticket, keys and cell phone – and headed out the door.
It wasn’t a long walk to the Regal 13, which was handily only a block or two away.
When I got there, I still had an hour to kill until the discussion started. I asked the guy at the ticket counter where to go and he waved in the general direction of theater number four, which was still locked.
So, I sat myself down next to the door and tried to think of ways to occupy my time. I fiddled with my cell phone for awhile, but that failed to keep me entertained for very long because I don’t have any games on it. I wished I had thought to bring my iPod or my DS, so I’d have something to do other than reread the book I had just finished rereading. I wondered, not for the last time, if maybe I should have gone to class and just left early. So I doodled. It was what I would have been doing if I’d been in class.
I doodled my character, Meep. I doodled her with a dæmon of her own, a little weasel. I tried to doodle a polar bear but it came out terribly so I crossed it out and moved on to a clean sheet. I was doodling a girl with pilot goggles and a scarf when he came and dropped his bag down beside me.
I scooted over a little bit, then remembered the recent viscomm lecture about socially constructed gender norms and body language and decided to “own my space” and so I wiggled back over to where I had been originally sitting. After all, I was there first.
“Waiting for the Golden Compass thing?” he asked. He sat down beside me. I scootched away again. So much for owning my space, but whatever.
“Yeah,” I said, moving my bag to my other side. This had less to do with socially constructed body language than worry that he might try to steal my wallet. I have no money, but I like my wallet.
I checked the time again. I still had forty five minutes between me and that book discussion, but hopefully only about fifteen until Katherine got there.
I went back to my doodle. The girl with the scarf wasn’t half bad, even if she was derivative and uninspired. I extended the drawing beyond just a head, adding an awkward looking torso and arms.
“You’re pretty good,” he said.
“Uh,” I said. I can just be so damn eloquent sometimes. “Thanks.” I closed the notebook and put it back in my bag. I was too much of a perfectionist to let someone watch me draw.
We sat together in a way only strangers can sit together, in a silence so awkward that the only way to make it any worse was to actually speak, which of course was exactly what he did.
“So,” he says to me, “have you read it?”
Well, it could have been worse. He could have said “so, what’s your sign?” or “so, how’s the weather?” Of all the myriad things he could have said, he chose “so, have you read it?” It was just personal enough, but at the same time, not so invasive that he sent me running for the hills – okay, the lobby – to wait for Katherine.
“I always read the books before seeing the movies,” I told him. “You?”
“When I was like fifteen, maybe sixteen,” he told me.
“Mhm. I think I was twelve or something, the first time I read it,” and I immediately went into storyteller mode and added, “and I was pissed, right, ‘cause the library didn’t have the other two and I had to wait all summer to find out what happened.”
He laughed. I’m not the sort of person who notices that so-and-so has a nice laugh, but he had a nice laugh. It was the sort of generic, appreciative chuckle that’s nice to hear when you’ve said something you intended to be amusing.
“I read it for class,” he said, “but I read ahead and finished early. Good thing, too. They only had one copy of Subtle Knife.”
I laughed. I realized that I was doing that stupid flirting girl laugh that I hate so much and stopped. So what if he was cute, in a scruffy, geeky kind of way? (My favorite kind.) That was no reason to give in to the Man and act like an airheaded gossip girl.
I won’t bore you with the rest of the details of our conversation. Just picture this: a boy and a girl waiting at a movie theater for a theology discussion about a fantasy novel. I’m sure you can imagine the kinds of things we talked about as time passed and a few other people gathered, lining up behind us.
I looked up as Katherine came in and waved her over. It was a relief to have someone else to talk to. As fascinating as this stranger was, I didn’t know him, and he was male, and he was geeky in a good way, and he was cute and all of that made me feel pretty uncomfortable.
“Katherine!” I scooted over a little, so that she could sit down facing me and him both.
“Meep!” she cried, waving. “Who’s this?” she asked as she settled down on the floor. After all, we still had half an hour to go.
I said “uhm,” and he said “Michael.”
“Katherine,” she said.
“Meep?” he asked.
“Oh, haha, yeah. Kat’s is an internet stranger,” I joked “Meep is my username.”
“Do you have a real name, then?” he asked.
“Leslie,” I told him, “Leslie Ann.”
“Nice to meet you, Leslie Ann,” he said, extending his hand. I shook it.
So our discussion went on, with the added hilarity of Katherine’s insight and internet jokes, which Michael – he insisted on Michael, not Mike – not only laughed at but actually understood, which meant that he must spend as much time online as I do.
Okay, so I know how weird it is to find God at a movie theater during a discussion about His Dark Materials, of all things. I mean, Lyra and Will kill God. Phillip Pullman must be so ashamed.
It wasn’t that quick and easy, of course. If it were, I would have been dating that kid I had a crush on in high school or going to the Kingdom Hall with my überreligious best friend. She had tried for years to save my soul, but to no avail.
I was pretty determined to be damned. They say you go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company, and I had chosen the company.
We continued our conversation after the movie over free breadsticks, coffee, a Shirley Temple and a chocolate mousse. The discussion danced around three central themes: theology, fantasy, and bad adaptations of good books.
I went home later than I’d meant to. I had Michael’s email address written in the back of my notebook and I wanted to get back to my dorm room and email him because we still had things to talk about. I had left when our conversation had come to a temporary lull, but only because I had class the next morning and I wasn’t about to skip another one.
I booted up my laptop and added Michael’s address to my contacts and immediately set about finding him on Facebook. I hadn’t thought to ask for his last name, but it wasn’t hard finding him.
The next morning, he had responded to my friend request and added that we had met at a movie screening-slash-book discussion, which was exactly how he worded it.
Although we didn’t have time to meet in person, our interaction continued over Facebook. I wrote on his Wall, he wrote on mine. He poked me, I poked him. Of course flirting over Facebook is on the pathetic side, but this is the 21st century, and besides, we both had work to do. College, after all, is Serious Buisness™ and despite my opening this story with telling you about the time I skipped class, I am really into my academics and he’s cool with that.
I asked him what he was majoring in, and he said English. I told him that I had considered an English major, but was leaning towards design. Communications, with a focus on graphic design, might not be the best choice of a major for someone with so little confidence in their visual media skills but Michael’s there to help me now, and so is God.
Well, God’s always been there to help me. I just didn’t know it back then.
Michael himself is very religious, but not in the way I always thought of religious people going about it. He’s not into fire-and-brimstone, he doesn’t live in fear of God and he doesn’t go about telling other people what they should and should not believe. Now that’s devotion. He’s so secure in his faith that he doesn’t even have to tell anyone about it. I admire that sort of inner strength. I sure don’t have that kind of conviction. If I did, I wouldn’t be telling you this.
His belief in God didn’t even come up in conversation – surprising, considering how much of our conversations still centered around His Dark Materials – until I changed my religion on Facebook to “Enigma Babylon One World Faith,” tongue-in-cheek joke about my own damnation. He sent me a message asking what the hell was up with that, and had I even read that series? No, I hadn’t, but I liked the idea of the supposedly Godforsaken religion, which I’d found while wasting time reading Wikipedia.
He told me that there were real religions with similar belief systems, and that I needn’t be damned and that God loved me. I was skeptical at first. Faith does not need evidence, but I did.
Killing the Imposter God would probably not be the most likely place to start if one were looking for a Higher Power™, but that was what Michael recommended.
I had been meaning to read it, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I had finals to do; Japanese vocab to study and a nursery rhyme to illustrate and a six-page reflective essay to write and I just didn’t have time to read anything unless it was going to be on the exam. So I returned home for winter break without having read it. I seriously doubted that some book would convert me when the Good Book itself had failed.
Godless ex-Catholics we may be, but my family celebrates Christmas in the classic, commercialized Dickensian sort of way way. Of the few gifts I got was a B&N gift certificate, which I spent on a couple of manga and of course, Killing the Imposter God, which I read immediately.
It not only gave me spectacular insight into the theology in His Dark Materials, but a starting point about where to start talking about God with Michael, even if I didn’t believe it yet.
I clung to my atheism because I thought I was holding on to my freedom. I saw religion only as restrictive dogma. I thought that believing in God would mean giving up my fantasy novels and my yaoi manga and never playing Pokémon again. More importantly, I refused to be subordinated on the basis of gender and I told Michael that if he thought I was going to stay home and take care of the kids that I was leaving. I hadn’t even been aware that there had been a relationship between us until I called it off. I was angry and defensive, protecting my heathen ways with a sort of desperate ferocity that I didn’t really understand. My world view was being challenged and I refused to let go of it, and so I let go of Michael instead.
I regretted it immediately.
His reply seemed to take an eternity. I paced, I grumbled, I bitched about it on LiveJournal and I obsessively refreshed the page, awaiting his response and regretting my attack. It was too late to call it off now, and since when did I care? I kept asking myself that: since when was some boy more important to me than my sense of self? I’ve always said I had a weasel dæmon for a reason: I was proud of my viciousness, but something inside of me had changed.
You might say that my dæmon had settled, but not as a weasel.
Michael’s response was more gracious than I ever could have hoped for. He was hurt and angry that I had lashed out at him like that, but unlike me, Michael had the grace to forgive. He wanted to know where I had gotten the idea that he thought I was expected to stay at home and raise the kids. He wanted to know where I had gotten the idea of us having kids at all. He wasn’t even entirely sure that we had been in a relationship, before I called it off.
I laughed at that. It seemed that, for all of the things we might disagree on, we still thought along similar wavelengths. Relief flooded through me.
I sat back in my chair the way my mother hates, so that only the back two legs are on the ground and my knees rest against the table. I smiled a little bit. I sent him a message.
I didn’t know we were in a relationship until I called it off, either. I’m so sorry, and I don’t know how to make it up to you. How about we start this off the right way?
Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?
I had thought that believing in God would mean giving up everything I enjoyed, but Michael’s God was not the oppressive Authority that Lord Asriel was fighting. Michael’s God is more like Dust: in love with love and creativity and free will.
His response was a long time in coming, but I was at peace. If I knew anything about Michael, it was that he valued effort more than outcome. If I knew anything about this new God that I had found, it was that if he did not reply, if he never replied, that it was all part of some grand plan. I was, for the first time in my life, truly part of something bigger than myself.
I know how you can make it up to me. Come worship with me when you get back to school. I have a surprise for you.
I responded quickly, for I am still rash and impatient, and asked him what church we would be going to. He never told me what denomination he was, or even really what religion. He told me that it was going to be a surprise, and that I would just have to wait until we got back to Boston to find out.
He still hasn’t told me, but I can’t wait to get back. This time we’re meeting on a Sunday, so neither of us will have to skip class.
This is not the end. This is just the beginning.
Dedicated to Michael, for being understanding when I was being an idiot.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-14 09:41 pm (UTC)intriguing, but different. the language seems unpolished somehow...
no subject
Date: 2008-01-14 11:09 pm (UTC)The wording isn't the best, I agree, but I was trying to make it sound more ... real(?) as though I were actually telling someone.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-15 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-15 05:07 pm (UTC)*wins*
no subject
Date: 2008-01-15 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-16 01:42 am (UTC)I'm glad you liked it, though.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-20 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-20 05:03 pm (UTC)I would suggest a little tightening up and editing, just to make the story flow a little better. I would definitely not lose that "realistic" voice though.