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week. I didn’t do a lot of dating what with my busy schedule of playing video games and going to class.
    The cursor blinked at me from the end of the chat window. And there was a long pause. So long that I started to worry that maybe I’d said too much. Maybe I downloaded too much right at the get-go. I’d just met this guy after all. I didn’t really know him all that well. Or at all.
    Great. I meet a somewhat nice guy, a guy who can turn a phrase with the best of them, and already I’d chased him away venting about all of my problems and insecurities. Good job Jessica. Great fucking job!
    “I know how you feel,” he said.
    I blinked. “You do?”
    “I don’t know if you can tell, but I do a little bit of writing myself,” he said.
    I smiled. He didn’t know if I could tell? As though it wasn’t obvious he was good at this sort of thing from the way he spun that scenario last night. From the way he put words to the screen so effortlessly.
    “Oh no, I had no idea!”
    I made sure to put in an eye roll emoticon so he would know I wasn’t being completely serious. Meaning and tone could be difficult to convey in text.
    “I do a lot of writing actually,” he said. “A lot of it for my job, and I always worry that it’s never going to be good enough. Everyone tells me it’s great, but as I’m writing I always have this little voice in the back of my head telling me that everything is crap. That everyone’s going to hate it this time. That this is going to be the one where everybody realizes that I just got lucky with the other stuff.”
    I blinked. “You write professionally? Like novels or something?”
    “Probably nothing you’ve ever heard of,” he said. “Technical writing and that sort of stuff, but still. I have that gnawing doubt. Heck, for awhile now it’s been hard for me to write anything. I’ve been coasting for awhile. Trust me. I know exactly what you feel like, and I get paid to do this stuff!”
    I smiled and felt warmth spreading through my body. Here was a guy who understood me. Here was a guy who knew exactly what I was going through! And the admission that he was a writer, even if it was just technical writing which was something of a four letter word in creative writing circles even though most people I knew who graduated went on to do it because they quickly discovered they couldn’t pay the rent with their literary fiction.
    “So you’re saying that feeling never goes away?” I asked.
    “Nope. Never does in my experience. All you have to do is learn to take that voice and squash it. Listen to it from time to time to make sure you’re not actually turning out crap, but I figure if most people around you tell you that you’re doing a good job then that’s good enough,” he said.
    “What about bad reviews?”
    And then I realized I was probably being ridiculous. Like he would get a bad critique when he was doing technical writing!
    “Everyone’s a critic,” he said. “You just have to learn how to let that roll off of you. I can get nine people out of ten telling me what a wonderful job I’m doing at my work, and the still that number ten who had a problem is going to get more attention than the nine people who told me how great I was!”
    I smiled and actually laughed. I was amazed at how easily he could put me at ease. I was amazed at how quickly all of my worries from class washed away. I was actually starting to feel kind of foolish for walking out of class like that, for getting so emotional. And yet at the same time I was glad I’d gotten so emotional because it meant I came home to Conlan. It meant I had this pep talk to cheer me up.
    “So you write fantasy stuff?” he asked.
    I blushed again. “Mostly. Lately I’ve just been writing stuff in Elassa because that’s where I spend most of my time, but it’s always been my favorite genre. The Elassa books have been my favorite ever since the first one came out!”
    “Oh? You’ve been reading them since