I've been trying to write a book. I'd like to know what you think about it so far...

I've been trying to write a book. I'd like to know what you think about it so far. It's somewhat of a therapeutic exercise and I wonder what people think it reflects about the author, but I'm also interested in what it makes you think about. It's not finished by far but I'd like some feedback so I can tell if I'm going in the right direction.

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It was a cold winter morning when a man in his early twenties with blonde hair and a black coat over some simple jeans had just got on the bus from campus to the nearest train station. He looked at the cilindrical box he just picked up, with the logo and name of his university on them. He opened it, took out the paper rolled up within, and read his name, Aeon, and the title Master of Science, and the name of his field, Mathematics. Though that may have been his field of study, Aeon actually always felt like he was more interested in literature, but that this was not a field worthy of studying. He thought back on the years he spent studying for the degree, and felt mostly hate. He had spent 5 years of his life studying mathematics, and now he felt like he was bored for most of it. Sure, mathematics is the king of the sciences, the purest form of knowledge, or at least so he told himself, but he always felt like he wasn't legitimately interested in it. He had met some people in his classes for which this was totally untrue however; they would know all kinds of little details about who came up with what theory and what motivated them, with details about their personal histories. He assumed that when these people got home the only thing they probably did was read more about mathematics and the people who made up the field.
But not him. He wasted a lot of time on video games, and he had a number of hobbies he attempted to pursue. Sometimes it would be something to do with music, other times with a more visual form of art, and now and then he would try to write. But most of all, he read a lot. Not about mathematics or mathematicians, but great literature, existential philosophy and fantasy. He was not much of a geek, or that obsessed with fantasy; but he did like to imagine himself a wizard with enourmous destructive potential.

There were politicians he hated, companies he despised, and there were too many people around anyway. It's not like any of them would matter to him, or to many others at all. Most of them are insignificant in the grand scheme of histories, just worker bees keeping the hive going, and not much more than that.
When he arrived at the train station, as he walked up the stairs, he thought about the future in front of him. He had had a clear identity for most of his life. As a child, you don't really have much of a care. Then of course he was a schoolboy, and then a student. But now he had no such identity anymore, and would have to make one up himself; either finding a job or pursueing even more degrees. After 5 years of studying at a university he did not feel like spending any more time among the people who worked there.

Nor did he find any enthousiasm in himself to return to that area of bleak emotionless buildings which made up the university. A real job sounded better to him, but what? He had a job; and most of the time he was at this job, he was bored with it and calculating the consequences of leaving it, mentally preparing for the day he would tell his boss to go fuck himself. But now, for better or for worse, he had become significantly overqualified. He took the job when he just started university and still had it, working on and off. He didn't make a great amount of money but it felt like enough. Now he had the chance though, to go for something significantly better. From what he knew he imagined it to be possible to double his income. Which he needed to, because the possibility of using student loans to pay for his housing would very soon become unavailable to him, and on top of that he would not be able to stay in his student housing for much longer either, and regular housing would be significantly more expensive.
But what job do you take when you're not enthousiastic about anything? For Aeon, it was whatever he could find that seemed to fit his qualifications and payed well. He had to get money in some way, after all.
Not all was bleak for him though. In his last few weeks at university he had started to regularly run into a girl whom he was quite attracted to. Upon seeing her, even though he hardly knew her, he immediatly got a feeling of pressure upon his throat and chest. She was in one of his classes, he found out shortly after he had seen her for the first time. After a few weeks of wanting to, but not daring, he finally gathered the courage to approach her and ask her out.

To his surprise, the combination of saying hi, introducing himself and talking about school projects was enough for her to respond positively when he asked her for her number. He asked her out a few days later and they had planned to meet in a few days. He didn't have a lot of experience with girls so far, a consequence of being somewhat introverted and not being in a field of study where one would run into a lot of women. The few he did meet were often not really his type, as admittedly most of the guys weren't his type when it came to making friends. People who's main interest had to do with their favorite mathematician in general weren't the most enjoyable to talk to, he found out. Of course not all of the mathematics students were like that, but many of those would be the direct opposite: The cliché students who party more than they study.

There she was, at the opposite side of the street. He saw her and waved to her, while crossing the street, having just stepped out of a bus. "Hey Lisa, good to see you!" He said to her. Lisa, with a quiet voice, answered back "hi, eh, so where do you want to go?" They had agreed to go for some drinks together, but had not agreed on a specific location. "One of my favorite bars is just a few minutes from here, we can start there and see if you like it". Lisa nodded approvingly.
On the way there the tension grew, at least from Aeons perspective, and he tried to make the situation a bit less awkward by trying to start a conversation, after they had been walking next to each other (though Lisa always seemed to walk 10 centimeters behind him, from his perspective) in silence for a minute or so. "So, how was your week?" Was the best he could come up with. In her usual quiet voice Lisa answered that it had been okay; busy but okay.
Not satisfied with returning to silence, Aeon tried to come up with a new question. "So, how were your last weeks in university?" He asked her, piercing the silence once more. Even though it had been okay; busy but okay; Lisa answered that it was quite hard to keep up with all the course content up to the last moment, and had not expected to actually pass all the courses, which ended up coming true and as such she had not finished her master's. This surprised Aeon; one one level because he had not expected her to still be doing coursework as he had only been writing his thesis for the last few months, but he was also not mentally prepared to handle the sadness of another in that moment.

At this point, to Aeons great relief, they had arrived at the bar he described. It was was quite small, but that made it cosy; it had quite old-looking tables and chairs of a dark-brown variety of wood, with a bar in a similar style with some bar-chairs in a slightly darker but similar tint. Aeon ordered a dark craft beer of the stout variety, while Lisa decided to go for a somewhat fresher, fruitier variety. It was then that Aeon found out that he did not have many ideas to talk about, and found himself in silence once more, until Lisa broke it by asking him how he knew of this place, having just walked to there through less popular parts of the city. Aeon told her the story of when he was just strolling through the city with two friends who he had made in university. This was the last bar of that night, which perhaps explained why it left the biggest impact. Sure, it was beautiful and cosy, but it was definitely not unique in those respects. The city in which they were was one full of students and so it was full of even more bars than one would find in most places. While he was talking to her, he tried to look her into her eyes. Not in an attempt to stare her down or intimidate her, but rather out of fear of seeming like he had to look away. He saw two big blue eyes staring back at him out of the rather pale face of a girl with a rather pointed chin, and hair dyed pink; though the natural blonde color was starting to show at the roots of her scalp. He could not help but give her a look that suggested an amount of love for her that he wasn't even sure he felt, but which certainly did not escape Lisa's attention.

And so they talked about their experiences in university; about hobbies and interests; and about their plans for the future. Lisa told Aeon that she always wanted to do something with music, having played a variety of instruments in her life and having had a broad experience of classical music. She had once had a dream of playing concerts but these days she didn't feel like she wanted a life as stressful as that, and was now thinking of becoming a music teacher. Aeon forgot to ask how it came to be that a girl so into music, including her plans for the future, ended up meeting him in one of his courses even though he majored in mathematics.
After having enjoyed a few more drinks, the conversation became increasingly relaxed, and more deeper questions were put to one another. [examples here]
Then, Aeon felt like it had been enough for tonight and told Lisa that he enjoyed talking to her a lot, but that it was really getting late and he'd like to call it a night. Lisa agreed. Together they walked to the nearest bus stop, where Lisa was supposed to get on. Before they split ways, Aeon felt in that moment that this was the perfect time to be a bit daring. Lisa had obviously enjoyed his company, having smiled at him almost constantly for the last hour, and he could find a suggestive twinkle in her eye. He put one arm around her upper back, and one hand behind her head, and kissed her on the lips. After holding on to that situation for a few seconds he let go of her, and looked upon an even more radiant face then before. They wished each other good night then, and Aeon went his own way, walking back to his small apartment about 15 minutes from where he was now.
This walk gave him some time to reflect. He was a bit in shock from his own choice to go for a kiss at the end of the date.

It had been a good choice though, judging by Lisa's reaction. It was only then that he noticed his own sweaty palms, his heart beating not just in his chest but in his neck and stomach as well. His internal monologue consisted mostly of the words 'yes' and 'nice'. He came upon the front door of his apartment block, opened it, and took the stairs to the second floor where he found his apartment. Upon opening the door he walked to the kitchen, and made himself a late-night snack. A quick glance at the clock revealed that it was just past 12 o' clock, meaning they had spent about 3 hours together. Not bad for a first date, he thought.

Over the last few days Aeon had not just been planning dates and making bus rides, but he had also been looking for a job. He was not really sure what he was looking for, so he just browsed through the long lists of jobs posted on various websites, filtering only for his qualifications. Data analyst, various programming jobs, research projects at various tech and financial companies. One of the jobs offered the opportunity to lead a team, which seemed like a bit much to Aeon; not really being comfortable leading a team while not having a lot of relevant work experience himself. But then again, the pay was good, the location close to his apartment, and it seemed to him that during his career progress would probably mean progress through the layers of the hierarchy, becoming somewhat of a manager anyway. So he called and agreed to meet a few days later, which by now is today.

When he arrived there he came upon a closed door, so he walked inside. He walked up to the only person in view, and asked for Mr. Dawson. "You're speaking to him" the person who now appeared to be Mr. Dawson answered. "You must be Aeon", to which Aeon found no reason to answer anything other than "Yes I am" which for some weird reason seemed to amuse Mr. Dawson intensely. He told Aeon to follow him, and now that Aeon had walked all the way to this building he thought he might as well follow the person who had just informed him to be the person he was expecting to be talking to. So he wasted no more time and followed the alledged mr. Dawson to the first room on the left.
"Have a seat" Aeon was told. Aeon did not really like to follow instructions but felt like perhaps this would be the right time to make an exception to his rule. After all, sitting on the floor did not seem like a significantly better option, and standing on mr. Dawson's table also did not feel like a good opportunity to get himself the job he wanted. Or rather, the job he thought he might as well take because after all he had to pay rent, he had to buy food, and he even had to buy drinks now that dates with Lisa seemed like they could be a regular occurance. He stared out of the window for a second, where he saw children playing on the street. This struck him as a rather dangerous enterprise as there was no real shortage of cars. Now to be exact, the children were not exactly playing on the street, but rather on the sidewalk, but the difference between those is only about a meter and so if any child wanted to get rid of another he would have plenty of opportunities to cause an unfortunate accident.

To his relief then, a police cruiser was just driving by, making the chance that such a unfortunate accident could be not so accidentally caused when one of the children decided he wanted to play maffia gang member considerably less. Or 'she' of course; it was 2018 after all so the time to be as sexist to suggest that only men should be in positions of power was over, and a female child could very well be just as likely to push someone in front of a car as any other child. Now that he was thinking about it, there was even the possiblity of some rather ambiguously gendered child pushing people in front of cars. Sure, transgender mafiosa weren't the norm, but their contributions to the pushing of people in front of cars are just as significant as anyone else's. So Aeon took the chair, pulled it back about a meter, and sat upon it. Mr. Dawson engaged in a rather similar activity, except he chose to use another chair, namely the one behind the desk, while Aeon had had the good sense of taking the one in front of the desk. Perhaps he would some day lead this company, but to start acting like that before he had even gotten the job seemed to be a little bit on the early side. In the conversation that followed, Aeon left a good impression on mr. Dawson and was told that he could start next week. The new year was just around the methaphoric corner, so he thought of telling mr. dawson that he'd rather start next year, but thought better of it. After all, this was a serious meeting and not a proper time for jokes. After all, it was barely past 10AM and that's far too early for jokes.

The year after that, Aeon went on off on his first day to work. He had gotten a position as the manager of a recently started team of 9 members, which were mostly concerned with developing software for other companies that would visualize the data their were collecting in a nice dashboard. This was seen as a rather simple project, so the relatively little work experience was no problem; at least Aeon had a semirespectable degree, whilst the others were either hobbyists or were educated but not to the leven that Aeon was. None of them seemed particularly experienced anyway, so it wasn't like any of the other team members deserved his position more than he did. For most of the day he stared out of windows. Now and then one of the team members would ask for help with something. Aeon did not really know more about it than the person asking for help, usually, but the task of explaining things to Aeon often had the magical effect of having it suddenly dawn on the colleague in question what the problem probably was and both parties to continue their work. It did get boring after a rather short while though. When lunch pause had arrived, Aeon already was more occupied with strange jittery feelings of restlessness than any work he might be doing. Not that there was much to do, his team had just started after all, and the more hands-on people were studying what exactly to do. He was supposed to help with that, probably, but as long as no one complained it was probably fine to just have the stack of paper in front of him and his eyes on something else. The cars seemed awfully red today, for example. What had motivated so many people to buy red cars recently? Or had these people always had red cars but did they, by some weird coincidence, suddenly all decide to use a rather limited and specific space on the road, namely that piece of it that was in his sight? People who own a red car are a bit weird, Aeon was sure.

Unless it's a Ferrari perhaps, but why would you want a red car?
As his workday was nearing its end he had a short conversation with Mr. Dawson, who wanted to know how things were progressing. Aeon assured him that his team was doing well in his eyes, and they were making a lot of progress. Mr. Dawson said he'd just leave them to do their thing, and if Aeon could report on their progress in detail at the end of the week.
So Aeon told Mark, one of his colleagues, to please keep track of how things were going and to make sure that friday morning there would be a report on how things were progressing so far that was at least up to date to include ievents until next thursday. Thereafter Aeon felt it was time to call it a day. It was half past four after all, so he stepped outside and got in his car. He lived quite close to his work, within walking distance even, but he had recently bought the car and had hardly used it, so when he felt the itch that morning to drive his rather old red Ford Fiesta to work, he did not find any power in him that prevented him from taking this radical decision.
When he got to work the next day, he was surprised at what he saw. Some of the tables were turned on their sides, with the computers that used to be on top of them now placed next to them on the floor. Aeon talked to one of his colleagues about what that colleague's tasks were for the day, and then he decided to make himself useful by finally giving the client a call, with the intention of informing the client of how things were progressing. So he took his phone and rang up the client. On the other side of the line he heard a squinty voice, to which he had no other choice but introduce himself anyway.

Perhaps the client could've guessed who he was if he just started describing the various things he wanted to communicate but that did not seem like a good idea. After all, the client is not there to solve your riddles. He could've started by saying something like "it's on my desk and driving me to suicide", at which point the client, hopefully still ignorant of who Aeon was, would perhaps have answered with something vaguely along the lines of 'huh?' or 'what?' or perhaps even 'sorry?' even though there would be nothing much to be sorry for because of course the riddle was so ill-posed, but at that point it would probably have amused Aeon to loudly exclaim 'your project, haha!'. At that point he would've already gone too far, but he could go even further. He could pose as someone completely different. Perhaps as a police officer, telling the client that their child was just involved in a car accident and to quickly come to some hospital nicely far away from their current position. A cherry on top would be to, when the client could be expected to almost be at the specified location, suddenly give another call about how he confused the hospital with another and it is actually another hospital that the client should come to visit; in a hurry of course.

But Aeon wasn't looking for trouble today so he just properly introduced himself and talked about how things were going. Things weren't going well, but he didn't talk about that. After all, his job was to talk about how things were going and not about how they're not going well. So rather than tell the client things like "We're having some trouble figuring out exactly how to connect to the data source and we're not sure how to interpret the stated requirements about the final model" or "we already expect, after having spent one and a half days on this, that this will go far over budget and we probably won't hit the deadline either" he instead told the client that they were "learning a lot" and "making steady progress" and even though "there are always minor issues" these were "nothing to worry about".

Aeon felt like it was perhaps time for another date. After all, one should not wait too long with things like these. Why, he didn't really know. After all, if she was interested in seeing him again then she could just give him aa call instead of him having to give her a call, you'd think. But Aeon failed to understand that love is like a game of baseball. There's a number of opportunities thrown at you, and you just have to go for them as hard as you can, whilst trying to run around quite some area because of the eventual boyfriends and bouncers you'll attract with that kind of behavior. In that sense love may not be like baseball after all, as of course in baseball one is generally not chased by angry people who want to beat you up. In that sense love may be more like a martial art, though it is generally not advisable to beat a girl up if you want to go for a long term relationship. But Aeon felt like even though a long term relationship was what he ultimately desired, a hookup was fine as well. So whether that's really advisable or not is not really relevant at this point. Rather than finding her and beating her up, Aeon gave Lisa a call.

Now, a daring person would perhaps have said something like 'hey beautiful', where the risk is high that the conversation would get awkward immediatly. But Aeon was not good at handling awkward situations; and if he could resist telling his client to basically travel for hours looking for the hospital where he would find his wounded child, then he definitely should have the self-control to not have those two words be the first words said in this conversation. So instead he just said hi and told her he was speaking to him, which Lisa believed of course. It was his voice, and his number after all, and it would've been a rather weird coincidence if his phone was just stolen by someone with exactly the same voice, though admittedly it's harder to recognize a voice over the phone than it is in person, but Lisa disregarded that fact. Aeon basically just asked Lisa to go out for dinner together. Lisa, generally in the habit of eating at least daily, agreed. And thus it happened. Lisa was not someone who generally made people show up for dates that she did not intend to attend herself, at least not if she liked the other person and wanted to pursue a relationship. Lucky Lisa, because Aeon was not in the habit of trying to establish relationships with people who made him show up for dates that they would not themselves attend. In that sense they were the perfect match for each other; they had so much in common. For one, Aeon did not like burning his own house down and miraculously, Lisa did not have that habit. Lisa generally inhabited a house without setting it on fire. And Lisa did not like people who were totally obsessed with their own psyche and conscious of it. And it just so happened that Aeon was not conscious of his obsession with his own psyche.

It should be no surprise to anyone that both parties enjoyed their next date, as it seems that they were made for each other in many respects. The evening was going quite well, until Aeon asked Lisa about her plans for the next few years. Lisa thought it would be a good start to finish her education, but she did not have any plans for after that. That was when the mood got quite a bit worse. One could feel it hanging in the air, like a kind of mist that you could grab at but of course wouldn't be able to catch, except it left your hand somewhat damp giving rise to the philosohpical question of what exactly it would mean to have caught mist, and Aeon did not like that kind of philosophy. Aeon had read his fair share and was familiar with the fact that most philosophers up to the start of the 19th century had basically just been an unconcious and involuntary biography; and this just seemed like such a biographical note and he would not have it. He confessed to Lisa that he was himself in a similar predicament. He had just found a job but he did not enjoy it a lot. It was nice to be a manager and to be a kind of leader, but the people he ruled over as a sort of benevolent dictator were all basically idiots in his eyes. Lisa was not sure what to think of that, which should not come as a surprise as Lisa was generally a rather doubtful person, never really sure of anything. This had not resulted in much good for her, as people often found it easy to persuade the already confused Lisa, never really on solid ground, never with any arguments at the ready.

What then, would the right way be for Aeon to proceed? Lisa was adorable, in his eyes, but a bit lacking in character. After having shared a great many anecdotes they had arrived at 2 in the morning. Time of course goes forward and not backwards so these were some hours both of them were never going to get back. Why not though? In the end, is the entire ordering of the laws of nature not symmetrical in the axis of time? If things were as the are now, but with all momentum reversed in direction, would we not be traveling back in history, every particle traveling to where it had once been? Is the futility of our existence thus not too great to bear? Always we merely experience, we merely live. We do not create our lifes, we are totally incapable of doing so. We hardly control our own thoughts. More and more it seems like we are not really making any conscious decisions, or consciously paying attention. We are merely coming up with post-facto interpretations of what has already happened to us. We do not even live in the present, as when we observe the world, that state which we observe is already a memory. Is it not so that the photons by which we see objects bounced of a location that this object, if in motion relative to us, does no longer occupy? Is it not so that the soundwave we perceive has started traveling before we perceive it? It must have! It is in this sense that our entire view of the world is merely an illusion. You never hear the bird's song, but merely how his song was just a moment ago. It was when Aeon became aware of this that he asked Lisa if he wanted to come over to his place; and from one thing came another.

Whether it is really advisable to do so Aeon did not know, but he had to come to work so he had no other choice but to put one foot in front of the other. So he did. And then he did once more. Then he gave up. He stared across the water that ran in front of his apartment, just behind where the street ended from his view. There he saw a rather old building that he wasn't sure what to make of. He had lived here for years, but he had never really found out why that building was there in the first place. Of course a building like that does not just appear out of nowhere. A lot of people payed their taxes to pay for it, probably, as this seemed more like some old public service than any kind of regular house. It had surely cost a lot of money, but also required quite a lot of effort on the part of those who built it. Trees had been cut down for it. Stone had been quarried for it. Iron and copper had been mined for it. And now it stood there, a testament of all this input from all kinds of sources. Years of work by all those people who were all raised for nearly two decades by their parents, who themselves evolved from lesser beings, a process of billions of years. Had one small thing been different in the laws of physics, then this building would not have been here, for if one small detail changed years ago its effects would propagate through time, ever increasing probably, as at least many systems on the face of the earth have such a chaotic tendency. So surely then, all the parameters of the laws of physics would have to be in inconceivably small error margins for this building to end up there. Why was the universe fine-tuned for this particular building? What was so great about it? Why this building and not some other building? There could've been a building like the Eiffel tower, or one like the the Empire State building. But apparently the universe chose to have this one instead, and at what cost? None of it made any sense at all.

For the love of god, stop. You don’t need to copy paste your whole book. Jow Forums posts are not a good format for this sort of thing. Next time have a link to a document with your writing, or have screenshots of the document.

This is all I have right now.

Sorry I did not expect this to take this many posts, I'll just use pastebin or something next time.

3 or 4 posts would’ve been enough to get a feel for your writing. It’s a bit of a chore to get through this without paragraph indents, but I’ll reply what I thought of the whole thing when I’m done reading

Oh cool, I had expected just negative comments and 'do you expect me to read all that shit by you' memes; nice that someone wants to take the time to generate a helpful response.

Okay, so I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert at creative writing so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I hope this helps somewhat.
First of all, whenever you write anything, you should go over it again. Read it out loud to yourself. And use a spellcheck. There's no excuse for spelling mistakes.
Generally, the story is alright. You're not a bad writer but this is very amateurish. A lot of unnecessary and clumsy detail, especially in the beginning regarding Aeon, and ungraceful asides. I feel the parts with Lisa are the weakest. You don't seem to be confident about writing dialogue, or generally any scenes with characters interacting. My favorite section was where Aeon was just by himself lost in thought.
Anyways, not a bad first draft. I'm not down to edit this line by line but feel free to ask for clarification on anything I said. Also I get the sense that this story is at least semi-autobiographical and Aeon is you?

I feel like I'm hit with a bunch of extraneous information that gives me little context about what this person does. Your writing is very flow of thought and it isn't necessarily bad but quite honestly what the fuck is going on. You go from talking about a cold winter morning to who he is to his major to general interest to fantasy to a girl he likes.
Do you know when you skim books and you get random tidbits? That's what I'm getting. Have a specific goal in mind, encourage growth. Your character is going through so many situations so fast that I have no investment. It's just content that's there. Have an experience that helps them grow and by golly don't force it. I feel like I'm hit with indiscriminate information. Also spellcheck.

Also I know this is relatively poorly written but I'm trying to quickly convey that your pacing needs work as well as the details you include. Keep at it though. There's something there, it just needs to be refined a bit.

The story starts with Aeon in the position that I'll soon be in. I originally intended him to be a nihilistic character who takes the 'will to power' approach to it's logical extreme. I had thought out a plan of how to write this story, but along the way I found that I liked my own writing a lot better when describing what's going on in his head than actual events, which is why you see this split halfway between very explicit dialogue (which I indeed am not confident in writing about) and the more rambly, lost in thought kind of stuff.
You're right about the spelling mistakes, I just read it through again myself and spotted quite many.

I'd love some advice on how you'd recommend guiding the story along more interesting lines without forcing it. I kinda know where I want the story to go but I feel like describing dialogue and situations at work will always end up boring or cliche, and so I resort to filling it with his absurd intrusive thoughts. (I'd like to keep those there but not have them be 80% of the story.)

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it

you started off on the biggest cliché in writing and skimming this it just sounds edgy. also you don't have to narrate every thought the character has, trust your reader will fill in the dots sometimes

Yeah to be honest when I started it was hard to write anything that didn't immediately made me feel shame for having written something so bad. I feel like it got better over time though. Perhaps I should just keep writing and then delete all the early stuff, I feel like my last post would make a good start.

>I'd love some advice on how you'd recommend guiding the story along more interesting lines without forcing it
I'm the user you replied to, but not the one here who was talking about pacing. But a lot of the problem with pacing in your story comes from all the extraneous detail you put in. Try a draft with a lot of that stuff cut out. It may also help to write a basic outline of where you want the story to go so you keep your writing focused. And always think about whether certain scenes are necessary. For example, do you need to have Aeon being interviewed by Mr. Dawson? Does it say anything important about either character? You could potentially just jump into Aeon working here without having the interview scene. Or play around with the sequence of events. You could try
>Aeon walking to the interview thinking about his life, then he meets Mr. Dawson
>new scene, date with Lisa
>new scene, already working

You know, there are writing critique threads on