( continues...) in the advice department…I wouldn’t feel right.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a fatherless child. And she’s not exactly barely legal…she’s twenty-two.” Raylan lied.

“Ok, what am I worried about? You like your pyromaniac mental patients squarely above the age of consent…well I might as well spit it out. Your girl Buffy was once charged with murder.”

“No! Who of…”

“Mother’s boyfriend. But this is the weird part… and you know how folks in police stations like to talk,so, take this with a grain of salt, but not only weren’t charges filed but this Ted fella was found never to exist.”

“Schroedinger’s vic…interesting."

“Raylan, be careful.”

“You know it.”

It seemed like simple advice, back in the barracks, but it was a different thing watching her stand in line in the student union, chocolate smearing her wrists…he had to admit, he’d thought of her so much the night before, he’d barely slept, and some part of his brain said “ Hell with it,” At least he wouldn’t be the only one with a secret anymore.

“I’m going over there,”

“Fucking finally,” his Initiative brethren said.

Can't help you on the Southern part. But I like it. Flows well.

Thanks...glad to hear it...maybe my Leonard impression is coming on well, at that.

My father's family are from the part of the South that leads us to sound like Larry the Cable Guy. I'm not sure that's quite what you want.

Not quite the same, I expect, but you could probably keep me from "y'all" abuse. Art said "might could" last week...let me tell you, my inner anthropologist and inner grammarian had quite a discussion about that...the anthropologist won. Still kind of hurt to hear that, but if the anthropologist had not prevailed, I might be thinking of Art as a yokel, and that would be wrong. Interestingly enough, given where he comes from on both the moral line and the economic spectrum, Boyd Crowder has kind of a pretty vocabulary(If sometimes more than the situation requires, a la most of the cast of "Deadwood", sans f-bombs.) and I think his grammar is quite good, too. I worry about getting lost in one of his sentences and not finding the other side.

On that basis, this "stuff y’all secret soldier boys took" does not sound quite natural to me - out of my aunts or cousins, it would more likely be "yew". Then again, there are subtle regional differences and I don't know that character at all, so I don't know if it would be right for him. I'm almost completely certain no one in my family ever said "might could" - that sounds more westerly to me. I can hear Sheldon's mom saying it; whereas I'm pretty sure my gramma would have asked where the hell I learned to talk if I ever called her "meemaw".

I do know at least one ex-Texan that did have a Memaw, but I don't know where she is from. ETA: to the extent, that using "y'all' as a modifier is a real thing, I either got it from Wire cornerboys or hip-hop, in which case it would make sense that a middle-aged white man from a different region might use it differently. I just switched it "your soldier boys," because I've already slipped in "kinda" and "dyin"...no need to dialect people to death.

I just switched it "your soldier boys," because I've already slipped in "kinda" and "dyin"...no need to dialect people to death.

Good call. I had not been sure whether you intended for it to be Raylan's soldier boys or soldier boys including Raylan. Possessive of "y'all" that I have heard is "y'all's". But now that I think about it, that wasn't so much from my family as from neighbors in Cleveland who had migrated north.

I don't know if I should ask this here or in Natter, so let me know if I should move this:

Broken/bruised ribs.

I have a character who gets in a mild car accident. Bruised ribs. Then days later, suffers a shove to the chest/abdomen and falls. Leading to more bruising or cracked ribs. Not broken, no puncturing of lungs. What is the hour to hour pain like? Physical limitations? Breathing? I'm imagining hours upon days of difficulty breathing in addition to the pain of bruising/fracturing. Is this overdramatic? (This is one of those sort-of contrived situations where the character refuses to go to the hospital). I'm imganing the character in such a state of pain as to be unable to sleep, having to sit up to be able to breathe, and being exhausted from the not-sleeping and just living in a hellish state of not enough oxygen or sleep.

As I recall from when Paul had this happen, the bruising hurts like a mothertrucker, but breathing didn't require sitting up and mostly, he was just cranky and in extreme pain.