Welcome to Thunderdome

Finished. Have to decompress it before posting a review. Here's a preview though:
"I haven't dumped this many loads while reading since Penthouse Forum."
(Are we still making sex jokes about this?)

I like your writing style. Recently read someone else's short story and it was annoying because you could tell most of the words were grabbed from a Thesaurus. I hate that. Just write how you talk.

I had a couple of minor quibbles here and there, but overall I enjoyed it.

Don't let my delay in finishing it fool you into thinking I didn't like it. I realized why I'm so adverse to reading right now. It's because I'm forced to read so much lately due to school.

Thank you for the kind words, I appreciate it. I had a lot of stress over "putting it out there," and encouragements helps alleviate that.

My writing style is, indeed, "how I talk." You notice how much I enjoy coming up with the best words for the thing Troy is trying to describe, on D&D night? That's me enjoying the side affects of writing. But one thing I've noticed is that I think in run-on sentences, and that comes out in my writing when I'm deep into my trance, and just spilling out the story. I go back and can't believe I have paragraph-long sentences, and I thought that was ok. There might still be a few in the next book... my beta readers will let me know. But I fixed at least 50 of them.

But, as they say, one is supposed to eschew obfuscation. I sometimes pause to think of the perfect word that I'm looking for, but in the entire 330k word story, I think I hit the thesaurus twice. My writing style is more Hemingway, than Faulkner, that's for damned sure. I couldn't even wrap my head around Faulkner, in high school.

Did you just put yourself in the same sentence as Hemingway and Faulkner?!

No, I said my writing style was closer to one than the other.

I can't describe a meadow in such a way as to make you think you're in a dream, but I can tell you that beer was cold, and make you believe it.

Speaking of the thesaurus, what's a word that means "frightened, but daring to hope?"

Gay?

I tried that, and I didn't like it in the cadence of the paragraph.

GORDON wrote: "frightened, but daring to hope?"

Trepidation?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

GORDON wrote: Speaking of the thesaurus, what's a word that means "frightened, but daring to hope?"

Is there such a word? I cannot think of one.

I've made up words before. I will again.

Except this time I won't have an English teacher telling me to stop being creative.