Today I learned that 'my voice' is not bad.

As some of you may have seen me mention, I play a lot of World of Warcraft. Part of the reason I do is because of the people I play with--my guild is as close to me as my family; we are family, albeit distantly located. I've known some of them longer than anyone else I talk to anymore. I started playing with them in 2010; that's eight years that I've known these people. I've seen their best days; I've seen their worst days. They've been with me since I was a naive, straight-laced 18-year-old, through my marriage and learning to cuss properly (unrelated incidents), learning to give and take teasing. When my mother in law died, it was to my guild that I turned for comfort. When my guild leader's cousin died (and then the next week, a friend, and then the next week, another friend), it was to the guild he turned for comfort.

I preface with this not because you should care, but because you should understand why I do. So when my guild leader (called Ransue) happens to have a background in English, I have every reason to trust his opinion.

I asked him to read the first...oh, third or so, of my novel. That's all I've got so far, but hey, I'm proud of it. I had some grammatical questions, sentences I wasn't sure I cared for. He could, and did, help, so I wanted the opinion of someone I care greatly for.
He was kind in his appraisal, because it's only a first draft, but there was one comment that bothered me. A lot. He couldn't have known that it would bother me. He told me that he could hear my voice as he read it. He could recognize my voice in it.
Here's why that bothered me. The very, very first version of my first chapter was written while I was still trying to find a voice to write in, to figure out who Malchoir was as a person. It was written much with the cadence of my natural thoughts: slightly comical, light, and a little too much stream-of-consciousness for a 'good' novel. In short, it was bad. The way my brain presents concepts to itself naturally is not acceptable for a novel. Which is fine, that part doesn't bother me. Ransue's words bothered me because I spent the next year and a half trying very hard not to sound like that. To not sound like me. Because my speech pattern, my thought pattern, was not acceptable, I tried very hard not to sound like that.
When he told me that he could hear me in what I'd written, it bothered me because I'd clearly failed.

Then I talked to my buddy, who has the patience of a saint, I swear to God. I'm calling the Pope when she dies to have her canonized. She told me that really, that wasn't a big deal. Her examples included Brandon Sanderson, Paul *mumbles something*, C.S. Lewis, and Tolkien. She said, (and I'm paraphrasing here) "If I gave you an excerpt from an author you're really familiar with, could you tell me who wrote it? If I gave you a part of Return of the King, or Prince Caspian, or [whatever Sanderson wrote], would you be able to recognize the author?"
I said yeah, I guess I would. It had never occured to me, as she explained, that I can't divorce 'the sound of Mathi' (me) from a book I'm writing. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Just because my thought cadence doesn't work, doesn't mean the way I structure sentences in general is bad. Doesn't mean I can't sound like me, and sound good at the same time.

As far as revelations go, it's got nothing on John of Patmos, but it was still a big deal to me. I can sound like me, and sound good. I'm good enough. That's a big deal to me; I was so afraid of sounding like me. The people I work with and around tend not to appreciate my linguistic style the way my guild does. The way, I'm hoping, my future readership will.

tl;dr, i've lost my goddamn mind and Cayss is a godsend and Ransue likes to tell me nice things about my book.