February 22nd, 2015 at 08:51am
I'm here as a judge from the Magazine's contest. I'm a bit late, though, so I do apologise for that!
How annoying James is can really be felt in the first chapter, with how Robbie tells how there's no pattern or rhythm to it and that it's just tap, tap, tap. I have to admit, I'm James - or at least, was - and was always tapping my pen and when I wasn't tapping my pen, it was being chewed in my mouth, or if it was a ballpoint pen then I would be constantly clicking it. I can imagine how I annoyed people.
Giving up smoking is so common but is also probably one of those resolution that are broken most often, too. It's easy to say "oh, I'll quit" but most people don't take into account that it takes willpower to get over the nicotine craving. But it's good that James is attempting to get out of that bad habit, even if he does annoy Robbie in the process!
Ah, haha. Robbie tries to be kind, both to his sanity and James, but it only ends up working a short while. I guess that's what happens, though. I like how this had a bit of humour in what could easily be a real situation that any of us could deal with. I loved reading this, so thank you for writing it.
The tapping of the pen seems very relevant to why James does it and it mentally shows a good picture of what the character looks like while doing this in a time for a very bad craving of a cigarette. Agitation is a huge symptom of nicotine withdrawal and it got me curious to how the other, Robbie, was going to figure out how to solve this for his good friend in order to get the guy's mind off of a single cigarette.
And...then comes the lollipops! Very clever to keeping the mind off of cigarettes. But then I let out a small snort of a laugh when James went back to pen-tapping haha. I sure hope it gets better for those two.
Well done with this short story! It was enjoyable c: