We Look For Light But All Is Darkness

I'm inclined to immediately disregard any criticism of dialogue in books that hinges on "people don't talk like that in real life." I'm a legal transcriptionist. In real life, people interrupt themselves constantly, repeat words and phrases 2-6 times, talk over the ends of each other's sentences, change their mind about a sentence halfway through, and punctuate every damn thing with "like," "I mean," "okay, so" and "you know."

I also think it’s cool when writers use actual speech selectively, for specific characters, to convey something about them. Maybe one character saying “like” a lot emphasizes how young they are compared to other characters, and maybe another one says “um” and “I mean” because they’re uncertain, insecure, nervous.

I am allowed to hold both the concepts of "my country is a nightmare for anyone who isn't rich and the world cup tourists will only see the good parts and that is by design" and "the world cup tourists coming away from this by genuinely falling in love with the good experiences they have here and how there is so much joy even for our weirdest most American shit" simultaneously.

Nor is she a seductress in any kind of negative or manipulative sense - she has a mutual relationship with a powerful man who then breaks up with her, and afterwards she keeps protection against him in the form of evidence that the relationship existed. She HAS blackmail material, she even waves it at him threateningly because he treated her like shit, but she never even uses it.

She's also -- and I cannot stress this enough -- from New Jersey. IMO this is the single most important detail missing from all the adaptations -- IRENE ADLER IS FROM NEW JERSEY.

2007 eBird gem