Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-4843510-20171001165151/@comment-32461413-20171003155102

StevieGLiverpool wrote: Revision #2

My dad isn’t himself anymore, and I appear to be the only one to notice this.

The physical changes were all too sudden. He shaved his facial hair entirely, despite being against the clean shaven look for years and only really trimming it from time to time. My mum was thrilled and my sister didn’t really care, but if he was happy then I was too. He also stopped wearing glasses despite being extremely short-sighted. For some reason, he’s able to see clearly now whether it be reading a headline from across the road to a street sign even I’m unable to read, despite never telling us about any sort of surgery or contacts, yet my family seems to brush past this fact. The one change that really got to me was his height. Despite him previously being only slightly taller than me, he’s now around two inches smaller. My parents claim it’s a growth spurt, but I’m still the same size compared to literally everyone else I know - so that’s that theory out of the equation.

Then there are his behavioral changes. For instance, he quit his very successful job at an engineering firm out of the blue, even though he was on good terms with everyone there as well as being well paid. He says he now has a job at another successful company but doesn’t disclose any information on what they do. They’re called “Harvest Dev”, but despite their so-called global enterprise, they don’t have a contact number nor a website. I’ve never seen my dad leave for work before, leaving me to assume he works from home, but searching on his PC shows nothing of the sort. Where’s our money coming from? These are some details that everyone’s missing for some reason. He also threw away his walking stick despite having a bad leg for what seemed like forever. He got into salsa dancing classes with my mum which would’ve been an impossibility before - not to mention he had two left feet in his prime as my mother would always tell me.

I feel like I need to tell my family, about everything, but why would they believe me? I know I wouldn’t in their shoes. But then again, unlike me, they haven’t seen whatever claims to be my dad taking off his skin.

I like this version a lot better. It's really whimsical and silly, but I think you play it off well.

Just a couple nitpicks, "short-sighted" should be "near-sighted" in my opinion. I just feel "short-sighted" has a couple different meanings compared to "near-sighted" which just has one.

Rather than "two inches smaller" it should be "two inches shorter" because I feel that better mirrors the word "taller."

"So that's that theory out the equation," I think should be reworded to "so that theory is out of the equation" to improve the flow. The extra "that" slows things down.

Otherwise, I think you have a pretty good story here. Nice work!