No spoilers within

Finished A Dance with Dragons. It was much better than A Feast for Crows, probably because AFfC could mostly be described as "The story of a bunch of people I mostly don't care about." There were some surprise plot twists, cliffhangers, surprise deaths--you know, the usual. It suffered a bit from taking place mostly concurrent to AFfC (though the last quarter or so of ADwD takes place after AFfC has ended).

Is it worth a six year wait? Well...maybe. It's worth reading, though. I may do a full review after a bit when I can be sure more people have read it and thus won't be writing something that no one can read. :p

Conversation styles

I hate adding new tags because it always makes me think of old entries I should go back and tag.

When I talk to people, I usually (thought not always) tend to listen more than I talk. I'll ask questions at points, to clarify something I'm not understanding or keep the conversation moving along, make various nodding motions and "mmhmm" noises and so on, and occasionally offer my version of what I think the other person is saying so that I can be sure I'm really understanding what they're talking about. I'll offer anecdotes about myself if they're similar to what the other person is talking about, or to keep the conversation going, or sometimes when I have something I really, really want to say, or to maintain conversational parity (as in, not to end up like a void the other person is pouring their life's story into), but generally I listen more than I talk. I'm also content to just sit in silence and not try to fill it just to do so, though this is admittedly harder in a purely text-based conversation because the silence can be caused by any number of things and there's no body language to check which one it is.

In groups larger than one-on-one, I often fade into the background. I'll let whoever else is talking talk, and usually just listen unless someone directly asks me something. I talk more in groups of people I know really well, but even then this still happens a lot. It happens at parties too, where my first instinct is to sit down somewhere and watch the people around me, which does tend to end in the "alone in a crowd" problem. :p

I think that's part of why I still keep an LJ, even if I don't write as often as I once did, and why I kept a written diary all through high school (nearly every day for four years). It's a place where I can just talk, to myself or to the ether, and not think about listening, or worry that I'm interrupting someone, or changing the subject from what they want to talk about, and so on, as odd as that sounds.

So, I'll try something I did a while back--ask me anything. Anything. I'll screen comments (so that ones about the post subject will go through), and ask anonymously if you want, but go ahead and ask. I'll answer it in the next (friends'-locked) post.