Thank you for this, this is really helpful! You're an incredible writer, and I appreciate your input. I wrote this one as part of the 5 minute freewrite thing, which has actually been really helpful for getting my fiction brain going--I had hardly ventured into fiction at all before I started writing here. I did some quick edits when I wrote it (can't say I always strictly adhere to the freewrite format), but you know how it goes--you don't immediately notice those things until someone points them out. I really appreciate the constructive criticism and I'll do another edit to cut down on the repetition.

My 9th grade English teacher once gave us an assignment in which she required that we only use the verbs "to be" and "to have" a maximum of three times each, which also meant eliminating passive voice. I can't remember the exact length of the paper, but I want to say it was about five pages, so it required a lot of creativity to stick to the requirement. It turns out that verbs can be even more descriptive than adjectives at times (depending on your writing style, of course). In that case, we weren't writing narrative fiction--I think it was a standard English paper--so we didn't need fancy verbal constructions like "had been."