#( i figured they probably have multiple 'bases' they can flit between )

[daybreakrising]

@iniziare: "No, it's nothing; it was just— a bad dream, that's all." (For Bladie of the Blades; first instinct is that this was her having woken up from a bad dream, and so she wanders into whatever area he's in, in whatever the SH HQ is/looks like, but, perhaps creativity leads you elsewhere. But it's a tiny smidgen of one of the ideas possibly, maybe, depends!).

There is often a kind of solace and solitude to be found in the dead of night, when most souls still slumber peacefully. He remembers cherishing these silent hours a lifetime ago, of sitting in the quiet beneath the night sky, feeling the stresses of the day melting away - often alone, but not always. The ghost of a presence at his side, the radiating warmth of another living soul at his shoulder...

Much about him might have changed, but this, it seems, remains a constant. Of course, there is now an element of necessity about his late-night idlings - for when one has little need of sleep, what else can one do but wander amongst the shadows of night? It is not uncommon for his unlikely companions to find him meditating in complete darkness, or lost in thoughts with a gaze turned to the stars.

The difference now is that he is rarely the only one awake. During restless wanderings, he has heard the electronic orchestra of beeps, chirps, warbles - punctuated with explosions, gunfire, or other such familiar sounds of destruction - filtering through the silence: Silver Wolf no doubt absorbed in some all-night gaming session, frantic fingers racing across screens and keyboards alike, oblivious to the time ticking by. There have been occasions where he has found himself with equally silent company: Sam, a quietly looming presence that most would be intimidated by, yet he finds oddly calming. To exist comfortably in a space with another without the expectation of conversation is something of a rarity; not here, though. Not with these people.

Tonight, however, he is alone in the silence. This 'base' of theirs is largely empty: only he and Kafka reside temporarily within its walls, a brief respite before they take up their next mission, ever following Elio's script. It is little more than a safehouse; one of many scattered across worlds that the Stellaron Hunters have access to.

He sits upon the sill of the only window within the room, crimson gaze flitting periodically from the sky beyond to the closed door that sits, partially shrouded in shadow, at the end of the hall. Sleep, after all, is a vulnerable state. It is only right that he should guard her, no? She, who guards him from the demons inside his head; who frees him from their grasp to grant him a sliver of peace.

It is not by chance that he often finds himself nearby throughout his sleepless nights.

There is little that escapes his notice in such quiet - so he hears the gentle pad of footsteps even before the soft click of a handle precedes the opening of that partially-shadowed door. He turns from the window even as she appears from the dark void beyond, that intense crimson gaze immediately seeking her face. What he reads there has him reaching for the sword that is never far from his grasp - but her words stall him. There is no threat. At least, not one that he can fight.

A bad dream, that's all.

Her dismissal doesn't convince him. He knows the power a dream can have upon the mind. He doesn't dream often these days, but he is still haunted by the ghosts of his past, still suffers beneath the weight of everything he has lost, everything he has done. He still sometimes wakes with racing heart (cursed, unstoppable heart) and gasping breath.

"I'll make some tea." He rises from the window sill, crosses silently to the kitchenette he knows is equipped with the basics. He says nothing more until he offers her a steaming cup and a softened gaze that carries within it an unspoken invitation: you can tell me, if you like.

But, if all she needs of him is quiet company in the dead of night, she shall have it. He will sit with her beneath the night sky: a presence at his side, the radiating warmth of another living soul at his shoulder.

[novantinuum]

Intake (SUF one-shot)

Fandom: Steven Universe

Rating: Teen Audiences (TW: brief discussion of mental illness related topics like suicide ideation and intrusive thoughts.)

Words: 2800

Summary: Steven fills out an important form.

This is set multiple months pre The Future, and is a small glimpse into Steven��s journey to find a therapist.

If you read this and enjoy, I’d greatly appreciate your support through reblogs here, or kudos/comments on AO3 as well. AO3 link will be provided in the reblogs. Thank you! <3

____

His leg bounces with a restless fervor as he slumps in the waiting room chair, clutching the clipboard and pencil the receptionist gave him with a white knuckled grip. Gaze hardened, he takes a good long look at the other patients spread across the room, a few of them appearing equally as spent and fidgety as him, and hunches over the intake form so his answers will be conclusively obscured from their view.

He grimaces. Ugh. Why would a place like this lay out their chairs so close, anyways? Why even give people the option of being nosey? He may be stuck seeing this therapist Connie’s mom recommended because he’s all messed up in the head, but it’s not like he wants the whole planet to know about it. Goodness knows all of Beach City and Little Homeworld already does thanks to his little ‘incident’ a month back. That’s bad enough.

His chest almost feeling hollow as he sighs, he scrawls in his name, his birthday, his cell number, address, and an emergency contact (Dad, who left for the car to give him privacy after signing a few forms he can’t fill out as a minor) on the lines indicated. He leaves out his many middle names for once, all of them leaving a bitter taste in his mouth at this present moment. Briefly, he wonders if this will be a problem, as these past few weeks Dr. Maheswaran assisted his dad in finally acquiring legal documentation and health insurance for him, and per those records he’s officially ‘Steven Quartz Universe’ in the eyes of the law.

Eventually he shrugs, figuring the likelihood of there being another sixteen-year-old ‘Steven Universe’ here today to confuse him with is nearing zero.

Okay, what’s next?

He briefly skims over the next few passages— a bunch of legalese about the terms of counselor-patient confidentiality and when they might have to breach that for safety reasons— and signs where indicated so they know he looked over it.

Someone sitting two chairs away coughs. He can’t help but flinch at the sudden noise, and folds himself tighter in his own seat as he flips over the first page of the form and continues to read.

In a few words, explain why you’ve chosen to reach out to us today. How can we help you?

Steven frowns, fingers twitching around the shaft of the pencil as he contemplates how to respond. For whatever reason, the question “explain why you’re here” feels very blunt and antagonistic to him in a way he can’t quite ascertain. Like... in a “give the wrong answer, get booted right out the door” sorta way. He lifts his head, peering at all the humans spread across the room, each and every one with their own story, the central character of their own worlds. Some are texting on their phones as they wait for the receptionist to call their names, others are filling out forms as well. What brought these people here, he wonders? Surely there’s plenty of people having a worse time than him right now. Surely there’s people with real problems, people who are literally struggling just to stay alive from day-to-day. He’s not like that, right? Besides that one little wobble a month back, he’s been handling his problems on his own fairly okay. Hasn’t he? So what makes him selfish enough to think that he’s worth anyone’s time?

In his pocket his phone vibrates, knocking him back into reality. He yanks it out and switches it on to look at the new text splashed across the lock screen:

Dad: Hey Schtu-ball, just wanna let you know that I’m proud of you and love you very much. You’ve got this!

He stares at these words for a good minute, the kind sentiment— despite reading as a little hopelessly over-encouraging— filling the hollow space in his chest partway. Even if his dad’s been a bit overbearing in his affections this past month, it’s clear he means well.

So. Why am I here today, he thinks, reading the question over again. He folds his fingers up into a stiff fist, pulling his thumb across his knuckles. After licking his chapped lips and shoving his phone back in his pocket, he scribbles a hasty reply.

I feel really angry and empty and tense and just want to be better.

The teen pauses, allowing those words to echo over and over in his mind, to truly sink in. It’s such a succinct and to-the-point admission that he suddenly wonders why he ever doubted he was less deserving of aid than anyone else in this waiting room.

His countenance a little lighter now and his shoulders growing less stiff, he moves on to the next section.

To aid our counselors in providing you the best possible care, please rate the following statements on a scale from zero to four, zero meaning “not at all like me,” and four meaning “extremely like me.”

Steven’s eyes dart across the length of the massive table below these instructions, his previous anxiety rushing back into his brittle bones as if it’d never left. Each row is host to a short sentence and five blank boxes, numbered zero to four. Read it and rate yourself, right? Should be simple enough. But as his glance flits over these statements and he understands the sort of personal, probing questions they’re asking through them, he begins to mistrust his previous burst of optimism. Dread floods his system, making his cheeks flush bright pink. Heart pounding at the mere thought of people staring, he drops his head lower, successfully hiding most of his face behind the clipboard until he can coax that betraying glow into fading away.

In the end, this goes to prove that it doesn’t matter if everyone says therapy will be ‘helpful’ for him; reflecting on all this junk is still gonna suck.

Quietly, he takes a steadying breath and forces himself to read on, to crack open the hornet’s nest that is the depths of his crap brain.

1. I am shy around others.

He considers this for a moment. Shy. Historically, this has never been a word people would use to describe him. For years he reveled in the thrill of meeting new people, new Gems. His childhood eagerness to engage in fellowship with those around is half the reason Era 3 even exists. And he’s fine around people he knows. Like, on a rare good day he has no problem playing board games or watching cheesy soap operas with his friends. But to be fair... as of late, his eagerness to meet anyone new feels like it’s all but vanished. Is that being shy? Or is that just him failing to care for anyone beyond his inner circle?

With a small shrug he checks the box for one, and moves on.

2. I don’t enjoy being around people as much as I used to.

Hmm. Probably a three. People are unintentionally exhausting these days. He used to be energized by social interaction, and now it just leaves him sucked dry. Most days he’d rather stick to his room.

3. I feel isolated and alone.

The weight of the diamond embedded in his belly— something he normally barely notices— grows ever more apparent as he marks off a four.

4. My heart often races for no good reason.

Uh, yeah. What happened just a minute ago is a pretty good tell. Four.

5. I have spells of terror or panic.

Another four.

6. I am anxious that I might have a panic attack while in public.

Four once more. He holds his pencil tighter, squirming in his seat as he tries (and fails) not to think about the pale scars spread across his back, hidden in his hairline, and on the underside of his arms, indentations that once marked the base of the crystalline spines that jut out from between his scales.

7. I think about food more than I’d like to.

Steven pauses at this one. For once, he’s not sure he can say this statement applies to him. Truth be told, he only started caring about what he put in his mouth earlier this year, when he cut meat and fish out of his diet. And that’s not... a bad thing? It’s not bad to want to consider the impact your food choices have on the environment? He definitely didn’t choose to do so for self-denying reasons, and that’s probably what they’re asking about. He checks zero, and moves on.

8. I feel out of control when I eat.

He almost checks another zero, but then he remembers that day after the proposal... and the week after his incident. And he decides that even if he doesn’t consciously obsess over the food he eats, there’s still a few occasions where once he starts snacking he finds it difficult to stop. A one it is, then.

9. I have sleep difficulties.

This statement nearly makes him laugh. Does he have sleep difficulties. Hah. He doesn’t think he’s gotten a truly restful night of sleep since he sacrificed himself to Homeworld at fourteen.

A solid four. No question.

10. My thoughts are racing.

Four.

11. I feel uncomfortable around people I don’t know.

Hmm. Two.

12. I drink alcohol frequently.

The only alcohol he’s ever had is a tiny sip of his dad’s with permission at Garnet’s wedding reception, and it tasted terrible. He has no interest in drinking again. Zero.

13. When I drink alcohol I can’t remember what happened.

Zero.

14. I drink more than I should.

Zero again.

15. I have done something I have regretted because of drinking.

Another zero. It almost makes him feel better, just knowing there’s a decent number of lines on this paper that aren’t a carbon copy of his lived experience.

16. I feel sad all the time.

Aaaand back to “the story of his life.” Briefly, he wonders if ‘feeling sad’ is the same thing as feeling nothing at all. But then again, does the difference really matter? He checks the box for three.

17. I am concerned that other people don’t like me.

Three. Although honestly, he’s even more concerned that people continue to like him after everything he’s done.

18. I feel worthless.

Steven nibbles at the inside of his cheek as he reads this statement, memories automatically flashing through the pathetic events of the last few weeks, through all the days he barely crawled out from under his covers, all the days he didn’t even manage to brush his teeth or run his fingers through his greasy, knotted hair, all those awful days he couldn’t so much as play one of his video games without growing tired of it in minutes and taking a restless nap for the rest of the afternoon instead.

Four.

19. I feel helpless.

Two. Everyday affairs are a drag, but at the very least he knows he can fight his way out of danger in a pinch. He wouldn’t call that helpless.

20. I have thoughts of ending my life.

He freezes. Goes back, reads this line again. Reads it a third time to make sure he’s not horrendously misconstruing the prompt he’s been given.

(Tries not to think too deeply about the graphic images that flood his imagination some nights. It’s just stray thoughts, though. He’s fine.)

One, he marks, although his muscles can’t help but twitch as he shifts his wrist, as if deep down he knows he’s underplaying his answer.

21. I feel tense.

Steven gives a small snort under his breath. Yeah, he outright admitted as much earlier in this form. Four.

22. I get angry easily.

His grip tightens.

Four.

23. I have difficulty controlling my temper.

He swallows hard, his mouth feeling abnormally dry. He’s not sure he likes how blunt and probing this questionnaire is becoming.

Four...

24. I sometimes feel like breaking or smashing things.

His knuckles go white around his pencil, and he only barely resists the temptation to snap it in half as he feels a rush of hard light flow the distance from his gem through the veins of his arm. Geeze, it’s not like he means to break things! It’s just that all of his stupid powers are linked with his emotions, and whenever he gets even marginally upset now things start to splinter, crack in half, and inevitably end up broken. Just another sign he’s fated to ruin everything around him forever, and that his intent doesn’t matter. Why do they have to pry into this? He already feels terrible enough for thinking these things.

Three, he checks, his eyes damp, but mostly because he’s too scared what their response will be otherwise.

25. I am not able to concentrate as well as usual.

He takes a deep breath, coaxing his body to return to a baseline state. Eh. He’ll give this a two.

26. I feel self-conscious around others.

His glance skirts over the edge of the clipboard to monitor the four others currently spread out across the room. One’s rhythmically swinging their legs, another is still filling out a form like him, but sitting criss-cross on the chair, and the other two are quietly typing on their phones. Thankfully none of them are pressing an ounce of attention his way, (at least, not right now), but that doesn’t stop him from feeling like an exposed nerve. Three.

27. I am afraid I may lose control and act violently.

The raw memories hit like lightning before he can even think to prepare.

Flashes of Pink. Orange fragments, cold and slick in his palms. Thunder splits the skies overhead, each cacophonous sound manifesting in perfect synchronicity with his erratic heartbeat, with each tidal wave of thoughts gushing like a maelstrom through his head: SHATTERER, I’m a shatterer, I’m—

Feeling almost dizzy from the intensity of his heart’s pulse, he knows with full certainty that his cheeks are glowing bright pink again. All he can do is clench his fists, suck down whatever amount of fresh air his lungs will allow, and pray to the very stars themselves that it’ll fade away before it garners the attention of every last human in this place.

He checks the box for four, pencil marking so hard that slivers of graphite splinter off onto the page, and moves on before he can be cowardly enough to change his answer.

28. I have thoughts of hurting others.

His fingernails claw into the thin denim at his knee, limbs outright quivering as he stews in his seat, as he’s forced to reflect upon all the ugly, ugly thoughts that have flit across his awareness over the past weeks. Thoughts about one Gem specifically. He’s... always been angry, always harbored deep resentment... but ever since his most recent trip to visit Her, he hasn’t been able to shake this awful idea: a vision of him standing over the remnants of her gemstone, shattered, fragments spilled across the otherwise pristine floors of Homeworld. He... he didn’t do it when he had the chance. He wouldn’t do it, would he?

(Orange fragments, cold and slick...)

Would he??

And yet nevertheless, the thought tortures him with its frequency, makes him feel downright nauseous at every turn. He doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to feel this way at all.

Four.

29. I am unable to keep up with my schoolwork.

Stop. Sharp inhale. Staccato, shaky exhale. Repeat, deeper this time. Repeat.

(He can no longer see neon pink reflecting in the smooth metal clasp at the top of his clipboard.)

Okay. Schoolwork.

N/A, he writes in one of the boxes, arm still trembling from the last two questions despite his attempt at cool-down exercises. Not applicable. He hasn’t even been to school, and dreads the inevitability of this therapist asking about that mess.

30. It’s hard to stay motivated for my classes.

N/A.

31. I feel confident that I can succeed academically.

N/A, once more.

And like that, the questionnaire is over. Steven is quick to hide his answers behind the front page, and slides the pencil through the length of the metal clip. He glances around him, drinking in his surroundings with pinpoint precision. Despite his earlier concerns, no one is maliciously staring. No one’s whispering. He internally wrestled with a few challenging subjects and what do you know, it didn’t end in an embarrassingly public meltdown. He— he wipes a stray tear from his eye with the butt of his palm— he took a solid step forward today.

Coercing his body to move, he pulls himself out of the cushioned chair and crosses the room.

“I finished,” he says softly, proudly, as he hands the clipboard and pencil to the receptionist. She smiles and accepts his hard-fought offering.

For the first time in a while, the smile he instinctively flashes back almost feels genuine.

I want to be better, he thinks. I will be better.

____

Notes:

This fic is loosely based on my own experience of the intake process, and the questionnaire I had to fill out. No two intake experiences are the same though, of course. This is merely one possibility. I also take personal liberties on the way I depict Steven’s struggle with mental health, and acknowledge and respect that no two fans’ interpretation will be the same.

Additional notes: -Steven’s still a minor, so he can’t actually sign contracts. I figure Greg signed a handful of forms beforehand as his guardian, and then left to allow his son a bit of privacy with filling out the questionnaire stuff. Since he's a teen, they're still giving him the full confidentiality clauses to look over so he's wholly aware how that works, though.

-To expand on a brief comment made in the midst of this, I headcanon that Steven cut both meat and fish out of his diet, and thus actually slipped up on his vegetarian diet when he was training with Jasper. I interpret this as further showcasing how the poor kid— due to being mentally vulnerable at the time and thus liable to coercion/unwise decisions— began to take actions that went against much of his established morality. He ended up sacrificing his dietary choices during those days, just like he briefly sacrificed his pacifistic views to fight Jasper.

-I also headcanon that the therapist Steven is going in to see after this isn’t the one he eventually sticks with and mentions as “my new therapist” in The Future. It’s totally normal and okay to try a few different people to find someone who you click with, after all.

Thank you for reading!

[writersrealmbts]

Con Amore: Part 3

Bulletproof Melody Sequel

Description: Con Amore– A directive to a musician to perform a selected passage of a composition tenderly, with affectionate emotion, or in a loving manner; an instruction to the player of an instrument meaning ‘with love’ or ‘lovingly’. Three years with all seven of your loves, three years of relative peace. But now everything is threatened as darkness surges from the horizon.

Originally Posted: 07/24/2019

Tags: Superheroes, Ot7

Fluff/Angst: 1,833 words

A/N: Hope you’re excited! Any theories yet? It’s posted early because I have plans for tomorrow and intended to post it then. Probably wait five days before posting the next part, if not a week.

Jimin stroked your hair, watching your every movement as you sipped some ginger ale. “Better, chubs?” You nodded. “It was probably the artifact Tae and I recovered combined with my worry. Nothing to worry about.” “Of course we worr—” Jimin broke off, dropping his gaze, “Worry. I’m sorry, y/n. You were already worried about me, and Joon-hyung, and…and you—” You put a finger to his lips. “You should try to sleep.” He looked a little like a kicked puppy. “But—” “Jimin-ah, I really don’t want to talk about this right now. Please. I get that you don’t like conflict to remain, but there’s going to be even more if you push me right now.” He slowly nodded. “Okay, chubs. Cuddle with me?” You nodded, laying back and lightly holding onto Jimin. It was a good way of knowing that he was just worried about you instead of being upset with you. He craned his neck to get his kisses, then lay back with a slight smile when he received it. You matched his breathing, waiting until he had fallen deeply asleep, then glancing back. Yoongi nodded, climbing over and carefully taking your place. You slid off the bed, checking on Namjoon, who was half-asleep on the other bed. He caught your hand, squeezing it and pulling it so he could get a kiss. “Feel better?” “Yeah, you?” He nodded. “Hoseok gave me some herbs and painkillers.” “Good. Rest up,” You whispered, giving him a second kiss. Taehyung and Jungkook were eating in the next room, the one you sent Taehyung to get. Whatever they were eating smelled…absolutely terrible. You gagged a bit and closed the door, plugging your nose. “You okay?” You wrinkled your nose. “What the heck are they eating?” “Grilled chicken alfredo,” Hoseok answered, still looking concerned. “Your favorite. You must be really sick. You don’t like ginger outside of ginger-ale, so maybe catmint or peppermint…” He started muttering, feeling your forehead. “I really don’t want to consume anything right now, Hobi.” You tucked into his chest grateful he had come from taking a shower. He didn’t smell like anything but Hobi, and his chest had a comforting warmth to it. “I was planning on sleeping in there.” He hummed softly. “What smells are okay?” You shrugged, then sniffed your hand. “Citrus. I think peppermint.” He nodded. “Let me and the other two try and clean out the smell. If we can’t, are you okay sharing with Joon?” You nodded. You had told Jungkook that you wanted to have your own bed. You just needed space. Space to calm down. Space to worry. Space that should be filled by Jin. Space to punish yourself for not protecting your loves better. You had put off finding more protections for them, thinking they might find it a little overbearing and worrying that your love for them might cause you to overstep the bounds of your duty as an archivist. What if you used an artifact to protect them, and ended up hurting others because of it? But now Jin was missing, and even if you didn’t think he was in danger…Namjoon said Jin had been hurt. And who knew who had taken him, and for what reason. For all you knew it could be like what happened with your father. Oh God. “Tinny? Is your stomach bothering you that badly?” Hobi slouched to meet your eye, gently wiping your cheeks. You wiped a tear from your own face, staring at it. “No. It isn’t. I’m just…” You shook your head. “I don’t even know. I mean, I’m crying. Again. I’m broken. Why am I broken?” “Your voice just squeaked and it was adorable—no wait, don’t cry more!” “It’s not cute, it’s annoying and wrong and ugh!” “Sshhh,” He hushed you gently. “Jimin and Namjoon are asleep. We don’t want to wake them.” You pressed your face into his shoulder. “What’s wrong with me?” You asked, unable to push back the tears. “You’re sick and stressed, and I’m sure you’re tired and worried. I think you should just try and sleep, Tinny. Okay? Yoongi and Namjoon can help you figure out the songs you need in the morning. Do you want pajamas or are you okay in Jungkook’s t-shirt?” “I’m okay.” He guided you to the other side of Namjoon’s bed, helping you lay down under the covers. “You want me to hold your hand until you fall asleep?” You nodded, feeling calmer. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why….” He kissed you gently when you didn’t continue. “It’s okay. We’ll be okay. Just try and sleep, baby. Cuddle Joon if you feel sad again.” You nodded, closing your eyes. You were tired, and crying always gave you a headache. Maybe sleep was a better choice. You wiggled over so that you were next to Namjoon, squeezing Hobi’s hand. You opened your eyes as light shone brightly through your eyelids. You were in some sort of stone room, cold air greeting you where you had been warm next to Joon just seconds earlier. It felt foreign and familiar at the same time. There were no lights or windows, but the room was mostly lit. You looked at each blank wall, but the only thing that you really noticed was that the walls were the light source, and some other part of your brain was saying that you already knew that. “Nightingale,” A voice called behind you. You froze. “Nurya Cohen.” “You may face me, Archivist.” You slowly turned to her. “Working with that artifact you swore would stay locked up?” She looked to the floor, the glow about her dying down slightly. “Slicha, ani lokeakh et mlo ha’achrayut.” “I still don’t speak Hebrew.” “Sorry, I take full responsibility,” She translated, dipping her head. “But I should hope you know I would not go back on my word unless circumstances called for it.” “As a light priestess, I would hope not.” She turned, gesturing for you to follow. You fell in step with her, out into her sanctuary. Last you had seen her was when her healer friend had, well, healed you after your crash from the top of the building three years ago. She had come to you, so the last time you had been to the sanctuary was when you had dropped the artifact with her. Too big for you to move around, but perfectly hidden in her sanctuary. Which was a temple of light and healing, a place where some astronomy students also conducted their studies. It had surprisingly strong security despite being a pacifist group. “We have a metupal in our infirmary. One of yours, I believe.” She folded her hands in front of her, similar to how an opera singer might. “Actually, we are mostly certain.” “Oh?” You frowned, trying not to get your hopes up that it was Jin. “He keeps rambling about dorchadas and something about an oasis. He also said that the kids were in danger and he had to tell you, Nightingale.” “Dorchadas? Are you certain?” You frowned. “You know what it is?” “It’s Irish. For darkness.” She looked more troubled. “And the oasis mentioned?” You shook your head. “Not sure. Not even sure what kids he could mean. I keep an eye on multiple children’s homes.” “Well, he wouldn’t lay still until I assured him I would pass the message to you. But I also contacted you because of the rumors that we heard just before his arrival. Rumors of a dark organization that works to remove the powers of supers, one that had been disbanded, but are now active again. And that they had found a former patient.” She paused, glancing at you as you froze. “Nightingale?” “The Oasis Initiative,” You breathed. Both of you were silent, but she looked at you as if waiting for further response. “Cursing is a little inappropriate here so you better continue.” “Quid pro quo.” You made a slashing gesture, making a face as you tried to think of how to explain it. “After you finish.” “Very well. One of our watchers got the pictures and information of the patient. It’s Siphon, or Laguz as you know him. However, another group also got the information—” “The Conservatory,” You guessed. Everything made sense now. They probably sent rookies because they thought it would be a basic abduction followed by an explanation that it was for his safety. They probably only heard whispers of a threat and given their penchant for watching out for their own (one of the few points you couldn’t find fault with) went to make sure that the whispers couldn’t be carried out. She nodded. “I know you dislike the place—I don’t blame you—but if this Oasis Initiative is functioning again….” “Then we all need to be ready for the worst. And we’ll need a strong base of operations, like the Conservatory. I trust you to send a representative as well?” She dipped her head. “Of course, Archivist. I will give you the head-start. Be advised, though, you should put distance between yourself and this fight.” Everything was getting blurry and the panic—that was a side effect of the artifact—started rising in your body. “Why? And who’s in the infirmary?” You managed to choke out. Her gaze flit to your midsection before the dream shattered like glass. Strong arms had you pinned down. “Y/n!” You finally opened your eyes, almost throwing up, but somehow managing to choke it down long enough to free yourself and run to the bathroom. Someone pulled your hair back. “Maybe she should see a doctor,” One of them said softly. You sat back, panting a little. “Tae, can you get me my makeup bag?” “Yeah.” “Makeup? Honey, I don’t think that’s—” “You’re right, you don’t think of me having anything else in my makeup bag, but I do. Now, Hoseok, I love you, but get out. Same goes to you, Kook, and you, Yoongi. Nothing to see here.” You got to your feet, reaching to flush the toilet before shakily stepping over to the sink to brush your teeth. You scrunched your nose, frustrated with yourself. “I’m sorry. I just…I need a minute.” “Okay,” Jungkook said. “We’ll keep the food in the other room. Do you want some toast?” You nodded. Tae handed you your bag. You closed the door behind him, taking a couple deep breaths to steady yourself before going to the bottom of your bag and pulling the pregnancy test out. “Please be wrong,” You muttered. You waited the appropriate amount of time, trying to count how long it had been since you had had your last visit from Aunt Flo. This would be the worst timing ever. You didn’t want to be sidelined. Not if the Oasis Initiative was active again. You glanced at the time on whoever’s watch you had found sitting on the counter, then looked at the test.

~~~~~

Part 2.   Part 4.

Masterlist.  ~  Series Masterpost.  

[eddycurrents]

When they said that the event calendar for the release dates of House of X and Powers of X would feature major events that recontextualize and change how you think about the entire event, they weren’t lying. If anything, based on House of X #2, it was an understatement. As much as the first issues of both series have already changed the landscape of Marvel’s merry mutants, changing the characters, and changing the rules, House of X #2 makes you wonder about everything that you’ve seen previously.

This issue also sets in stone that House of X and Powers of X are inseparable. You need to read both, not one or the other, in order to get the full story. They play off of one another more like one continuous narrative, with notes flitting back and forth between the two books, than two discrete stories. The differences are really just a matter of perspective and scope. One book looks at the story from one particular angle, and the other zooms out, looking at a different composite. The way the two play off one another, even this early into the event, is very impressive.

Jonathan Hickman and his collaborators already set a new standard with the first issues of HoX and PoX, House of X #2 takes it a step further and fundamentally changes the rules of the Marvel Universe even. It takes an already existing high water mark and raises it further. 

Pepe Larraz and Marte Gracia continue to be a shining light in this story, especially when it comes to permutations. And this issue may well have one of the most pored over and inspected infographics yet.

It is truly astonishing what Hickman, Larraz, Gracia, Cowles, and Muller are doing here.

There will be spoilers below this image. If you do not want to be spoiled on House of X #2, do not read further.

SPOILER WARNING: Below I’ll be discussing the events, themes, and possibility of what’s going on in House of X #2 and beyond. There are HEAVY SPOILERS beyond this point. If you haven’t read the issue yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. You’ve been warned.

PREAMBLE | First Impressions

All I can really say is holy crap. I’ve been highly impressed so far with what House of X and Powers of X have been doing so far, but this one blows all expectations out of the water.

House of X #2 is a truly incredible story that completely reinvents the character of Moira MacTaggert, retcons decades of X-Men continuity in the process, but does so in a way that opens up endless possibilities, new stories, and more, rather than being any kind of forced insert. It’s brilliant. And it makes you wonder about all of the X-Men stories in the past, especially reading interactions with Destiny and Magneto in new contexts, and those that we’re currently reading.

Basically, Moira’s a mutant with the power of reincarnation. She keeps coming back and attempting new solutions and experiments to solve the human-mutant problem like a mutant take on Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon’s Daytripper.

It also makes a lot of the speculation that many of us, myself included, about what’s going on in the first couple issues possibly entirely wrong. Because it changes the rules. I love it. It’s amazing and ballsy for a series as potentially dissected and analysed as this to just outright break the standard framework entirely.

Also, in regards to Pepe Larraz’s art this issue, it shifts depending on the life that’s being discussed. While Moira and the people around her are mostly the same, the panels shift and take on different shapes and angles per period. It’s a very nice and easy way to show visually that we’re seeing a different life being lived with minimal confusion or reliance on the text.

Marte Gracia continues to deliver exquisite colour art. Like Larraz’s layouts, the colours shift and change, in some ways subtle, in other ways explosively, across the different lives. It’s also impressive whenever a colourist can make an apocalyptic landscape feel dark without it looking like mud.

And Clayton Cowles and Tom Muller remain the cherries on top with letters and design respectively. 

ONE | Time After Time

Throwing that spanner in the works of every theory, assumption, and possibility of the first two issues is Moira’s reincarnation abilities. It is a huge retcon that makes you question everything.

It starts out unassumingly enough with an ordinary life, lived to an ordinary span. in an ordinary way. Life One is an interesting way to lead us into this radical change to Moira’s character because it’s ordinary. It’s brilliant to present such a huge shock to the system through such a simple, unexpected life story.

And it spirals out from there as we’re taken back to Moira’s discussion with Charles in Powers of X #1, given more details and explanations of here different lives. From simple destruction chance of Life Two being cut horrifically short to the far flung length of joining with Apocalypse in Life Nine. Some lives an elements are familiar, others radically different from what we know, each apparently giving Moira a different piece of the puzzle in order to figure out the solution to the extreme division between humans and mutants.

I find it somewhat funny, given the text piece in Powers of X that sending mutants into space isn’t one of the primary proposed ideas through any of these lives, but maybe that’s something we’ll see when and if she finally gets things right.

I also find it interesting that one of the lives that gets the most attention is when she picks man over mutant in Life Three. It’s one of the ones that goes horrifically wrong as she decides that mutants are a disease needed to be stamped out, coming up with a cure to eradicate them. It establishes Destiny as an arbiter of justice to temper if Moira decides a similarly destructive path.

The various differently lives briefly shown throughout the story are also fascinating. They beg to be expanded upon through a series of specials and mini-series mining the different possibilities of these alternate existences. They feel rich and well-realized with interesting events informing on Moira’s decisions through her lifespans. 

Although they can be left as throwaway ideas within the larger framework of the House of X/Powers of X event, there’s fertile ground here to expand upon in time. Moira VII Assassin could be an interesting, dark, and cynical thriller, especially as compromises to morals and ethics become hollow as the machines manifest anyway. A new Age of Apocalypse in Life Nine practically screams to be explored. It’s fascinating how all of these lives combine, recombine, and mix different common elements and themes across X-Men history and spin out something new.

It also makes you wonder about those time periods in Powers of X #1. We think that X0 through X3 are the same timeline. This issue opens up the possibility that that may not be the case. The futures might be from one of Moira’s previous lives. We don’t know yet what exactly we’re seeing and that uncertainty adds a fair amount of excitement to see what’s coming next.

What we’re seeing in House of X and Powers of X could be Life Eleven, since there are already some radical departures in how Krakoa seems to work, and all of the people who are now alive that were dead. I’ve gone through thoughts as to how it could be messing with time, but Moira’s reincarnations seems to eliminate that theory entirely. It’s also easy in story terms since it would essentially give a blank slate to establish the rules of this new reality, but I think that’s too simple.

I think, however, that we’re currently witnessing Life Ten. For one, we’re referring to Moira often in these series as Moira X, which would seem to infer more that this is her tenth life, rather than necessarily X as in Xavier or X-Men or even as a placeholder X for her multiple possible surnames (Kinross, Cowan, MacTaggert, Xavier). It also potentially rewrites the meaning of the title Powers of X as being more personal, not just referring to the time periods, but these being the “Powers of [Moira] Ten”. It takes all of the huge, reality and time-spanning ideas and humanizes it, making it a personal tale of one woman’s struggles.

I think Life Eleven is triggered at the end of House of X/Powers of X and is the seed for the “Dawn of X” titles spinning out of this story.

TWO | Entanglements

The wider implications of Moira’s powers are felt in how long you’ve been reading X-Men comics and whether or not you want to do a deep dive into the past. It could be fun, it could be maddening, and ultimately the story in House of X and Powers of X doesn’t necessitate it. You can read this still without having ever read a single X-Men comic and enjoy it.

But over-complicating things is a pastime of longtime X-Men readers. These books were written for a long period of time by Chris Claremont, after all.

One of the major things that this shows in various permutations throughout the story is redefining Moira as one of the primary movers throughout history. She serves now as a catalyst for events and direct causes for divergence points creating alternate timelines. In some ways subtle, in others profound.

I’ve stated and speculated previously that Xavier seems different through the first issues of both series, in terms of the X1 Xavier potentially exhibiting telekinetic powers he never had and his kind of creepy character affectations (that could have been continuing on with X’s behaviour from Astonishing X-Men) and the seeming oddity of not knowing who Moira was in X0, which I thought could have been put down to time travel shenanigans, but that seems moot with House of X #2. It’s probably just a new reality that we’re dealing with.

It raises questions as to whether or not Xavier is really a puppet master as previously believed, or just another cog in the Moira Machine, figuring out that possibly the only way to answer the Man-Mutant conundrum is to get Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse (and possibly the machines) all working together.

And then there’s Moira’s run during the ‘80s. The Muir Island X-Men. Magneto’s rehabilitation. Working with the New Mutants. Aiding Xavier throughout. It takes on an entirely different element knowing that she was knowledgeable of various events beforehand. It takes working with Freedom Force in an entirely different light. There’s undoubtedly a lot you could dive deeper into in order to figure out how things stack up in this new light.

THREE | Number Six

Curiously missing from the infographic giving Moira’s timeline is Life Six. There’s a gap between Life Five and Life Seven that remains unaccounted for. Nor does it come up when she’s talking to Charles Xavier explaining to him who he is.

For a story that is built on detail and complexity, the omission has to have a reason. And because it’s missing, we can potentially get endless speculation as to why it’s missing. 

Personally, I think it could be because it’s actually the baseline Marvel Universe that we knew. Life Ten would appear to be that, being consistent with what we know, but there’s doubt. We’ve been told through Moira’s conversation with Destiny that she has a limited amount of reincarnations, ten, with possibly an eleventh if she got things right.

Or I could be completely wrong and it’s something else entirely.

CONCLUSION | I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

It’s taken me a while to put fingers to keyboard on this one for a number of reasons, one of the primary ones being that this story just left me gobsmacked. It presents so many different possibilities and reinterpretations that you’ve practically got to tear up the script as to what you thought was going on. It makes you question whether or not anything at all that you’ve read before is in a particular frame or even relevant to a particular frame.

It’s incredible.

Hickman, Larraz, Gracia, Cowles, and Muller have managed to take an already impressive new approach to the X-Men and elevated it further beyond imagining. It’s very exciting. House of X #2 represents an even greater sea change than we were led to believe.

d. emerson eddy is fairly certain he doesn’t reincarnate into the same life if you kill him, so please don’t try.

[polarishpd]

All Of The Stars Chapter 3: When I Grow Up

Word Count: 3871

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15378726 (HunterWizard, All Of The Stars)

"Rise and shine, Pidgey!"

No answer. Lance knocks again, louder.

"Rise and shine, Pidge!"

Still no answer.

Dang. Does she always wake up this late? How the hell does she get to work on time? Even Lance, who adores his beauty sleep, wants to be punctual. Totally not afraid of Allura. Totally.

Pidge still isn't responding at all. Fine. Last chance. Lance relentlessly bangs the door with all the strength he's got, ignoring how the hinges squeak and door bends slightly under his force. He's forced to continually bang the rapidly-weakening door, nails biting palms and fist shaking, praying there's no pissy neighbours in the building. And finally, finally, the elusive hermit makes some sound;  Lance hears a little shuffle, a muffled groan, the rubbing of slippers on bare floor.

The door clicks, and opens a crack.

"Lance? What are you-" Pidge yawns mid-sentence, blearily looking up, "-what are you doing here?"

The door opens a little more. Everything about her screams 'night owl that hates morning'; untidy hair, hastily-worn glasses, dark circles hanging under half-opened eyes, dry face. Something about her little yawn, sleepy smile, and the childlike way that she rubs her face just strikes Lance as so, so cute.

But the thing that stood out most to Lance could only be the jacket Pidge is wearing. Large, swallowing her small frame, a vague smell of sandalwood. His jacket. Something tells him that she woke up exactly like this, too, wearing his jacket. Is he flushing?

"Lance?"

"Oh, sorry." Sobering up, he thrusts a paper bag and drink in her direction. "For you. Just thought a morning perk might be good."

Pidge takes the paper bag, opening it and peeking inside. The smile that grows on her face makes Lance glow.

"You remembered I like peanut butter," she says softly. "Thanks, Lance."

"No problem. Coffee?"

"Definitely."

~~~

"So no assignments yet?"

Lance's menu of conversation topics hasn't exactly grown. He still doesn't know what she likes, the short list looking something like this; punk rock, peanut butter and figure skating. Not very expansive.

Pidge shakes her head, sipping the black coffee.

"I know I'm getting two, but that's about it."

"Which are you hoping for?" Lance asks, picking up the pace a bit. Pidge sig, needing to take double the number of steps to keep walking beside him. Heh.

"Skate America, of course. Cheaper, home country...and NHK. I love Japan," she says, the hint of a wistful, nostalgic smile appearing on her face. Lance adds the fact to his mental list: 'loves Japan'. He also starts a new mental list; 'Things Pidge and I have in Common', and adds Japan to the list.

"Can I guess...anime?" he jokes. Pidge scoffs dismissively, as if saying 'hell no', but the little smile that she can't hold back makes Lance think otherwise.

"Sure, whatever you say," she answers, "but more for the video games."

Wait.

What?

"You like video games?" Lance manages, a bit too stunned to be coherent, coming out breathy. His expression, the epitome of enthusiastic disbelief, makes Pidge raise an eyebrow and adjust her glasses.

Who would have guessed? After all, she had seemed to be the poster child for 'straight-laced', only skating to classical music and warhorses, giving perfectly articulated answers in interviews and being perfectly polite to fans. And now, apparently, poster child might possibly like violently taking down enemies and cutting off heads.

Brilliant.

"Well, yeah. I mean, I've been playing Killbot Phantasm and pretty much every game like it since I was what, six? I kind of blame-I kind of blame my brother. He was the first geek in the family. He got me into video games, in fact."

Why does she suddenly look so wistful? She bites her lip, furrowing her brow and looking down, kicking at the pavement a bit. Lance wants to scream, because Katie Holt could probably beat his ass at any of the fifty games in his current collection.

"What?" she suddenly says, narrowing her eyes. "You like gaming too, or you think girls can't play or something?"

"N-nonononono, not at all, I love video games, and I just got the Mercury Game Flux-"

Pidge yelps, nearly knocking her own glasses off.

"-No way! How the hell did you afford that on a coach's salary?!"

Lance smirks proudly at the wide-eyed, stunned Pidge.

"I only ate bread and margarine for a month. No joke. Would have died for garlic knots, but it was totally worth it." Lance puffs up his chest, laughing at a gaping Pidge. Anything for the newest consoles.

"Ohhkaayyy..."

~~~

Castle Rink's main, enclosed office-small, but functional-is starkly quiet in comparison to the buzz of the public outside.

Each coach has a small desk, immediately identifiable; Shiro's desk possesses military-like organisation, the stacks of papers perfectly lined up, a small picture of Shiro and a man in glasses right on top. Allura's is equal in organisation but twice as aesthetically pleasing, toned in pinks and purples and marbled whites.

Lance notices how Keith's desk is completely empty, imagining Shiro yelling at Keith for not doing his paperwork. He could totally see Mullet doing that. Hunk's is decent, not the tidiest, with occasional burger wrappers strewn around.

But Pidge's.

Oh, god.

Pidge's.

Her papers cover the entire desk, an incoherent mess, multiple open pens and empty coffee cups strewn around carelessly. Crumpled papers surround her chair, which happened to have a broken leg, two little fluffy plushies acting as rudimentary paperweights.

"I know, right?" Allura laughs, noticing Lance staring at Pidge's desk. "I've tried to get her to clean it up for two years now. Doesn't work at all."

"Hey!" Pidge protests, crossing her arms and pouting. "I know where everything is. Test me."

"Your class attendance records from last year."

Pidge takes one second to stick her hand into the mess and pulls out a set of stapled papers.

"Here!"

Holy shit. Last year's class records.

"Anyway," Allura says, looking impressed, "Let's get down to business. Along with the private classes, you'll teach a joint intermediate group class. Just work improving the kids in all areas. You should have all bases covered between you two. Simple enough?"

Kids! Lance's favourite to teach, because they normally liked him and respected him-okay, more of saw him as a friend that they listened to. But it was undeniable that his unorthodox methods usually worked, his students progressing faster than most. He'd always liked kids.

"Yep! No problem." Lance reaches for Allura's papers, flipping through the student profiles. Hmm...no double jumps, probably needs some help with spins...should be fine.

He only now notices how Pidge looks, less than happy, lips pursed and eyes squinted.

"Allura? Can I talk to you for a moment?"

Allura shrugs behind Pidge's back, her silvery hair bouncing after her.

The two ladies at the side speak very quickly and very quietly, their eyes flitting between each other and Lance, the only words he could catch being 'Lance', 'ship', 'seriously?!'.

But finally, after Allura finishes hissing, Pidge relents, heading back over to Lance and holding out her hand.

Handshake?

Lance slaps it. Like a bro.

"What the hell, dude?" she yelps. "I just wanted the papers!"

Lance feels his cheeks burn.

~~~

It's almost adorable, watching a bunch of tiny, overeager, sugar-high kids surround the cartoonishly tall and lanky Lance; some wave their hands, begging for attention, others yelling for 'teacher to start class!'. It's almost a relief, having Lance; she's never been good with kids, more with teenagers. Pidge leans on the sideboards, sipping water and watching from the side.

"Nice to meet you all! I'm Coach Lance, the gal drinking water over there is Coach Katie. I'll learn your names as we go along? Okay, kids, we'll begin with some basic stroking, and work on our back crossovers!" Lance says, bending down to their level. "And if you're good, and you work hard, Coach Lance here might just teach you something cool." He claps his hands together loudly, standing back up. "You ready?"

"YEAH!!!!!!!"

"Let's go!"

Pidge skates forward to join Lance as the children start speeding in large loops around the rink, scaring off the other public skaters who slip and slide on their blue rental boots.

"You're good with kids," Pidge remarks, gently correcting the posture of one of the little girls.

"Thanks. I grew up with a lot of them-one second-" Lance quickly calls the children, splitting them into two groups and setting them off into practicing crossovers, finally rejoining Pidge after yanking one happy boy off his shirt. "Yeah, I've got a really big family. Two sisters, two kid nieces and nephews, a brother. You get the gist."

Pidge blanches. How does one survive in such a large family? She can't honestly say she can understand, considering her suburban four-member family. "Sounds nice, with-with so much...company."

She leaves the conversation hanging, skating to one of the groups and demonstrating the back crossovers. Children-scratch that, most skaters-never bend knees enough. Arms must be in the right position, lead hand slightly lowered, back hand raised. Eyes always to the back. Pidge's philosophy has always been that little details need to be attended to, should be drilled in from young.

Maybe that's why Allura assigned her the class. Her military mentality does complement Lance's concept of being 'Tio Lance' to the kids. Maybe it wasn't all about the shipping or whatever...Allura usually tried to set her up with the guest coaches to no avail, usually jokingly. Hopefully different this time.

"Yeah, it's pretty great, but you don't get much space or privacy," he yells out from the other side of the rink. Pidge thinks about how much of her free time was spent holed up in her room, alone, binging animes and doing work.

"Sounds great!"

"Coach? Why do you keep yelling to Coach Lance?" asks one of the little girls, looking up curiously. Pidge, slightly taken by surprise, jolts, but bends slightly.

"We were just talking. About...stuff."

"Stuff."

"Do you like Coach Lance? Like in a like-like way?" She tilts her head to the side. The girl couldn't have been older than eight, nine, with little plaits, the biggest brown eyes, and a little knit cap, the very picture of innocence. And she's asking about romantic attraction.

Pidge sighs.

"What's your name?"

"Lorelai Kaltenecker!" she answers with surprisingly strong diction. "But you can call me Rory."

Cute name. "Look, Rory, it's not very nice to ask about people's personal li-"

"-what's going on over here?" Lance asks, slinging an arm on Pidge's shoulder, around her neck and leaning on her. Shit. Pidge is startled to realise that he's somehow gathered all the kids in the center.

"Nothing really." Lance doesn't need to know.

"See! He does like you!" Rory pipes up, pointing at the arm. Lance winks exaggeratedly, making Rory giggle.

"Only between you and me..." He winks again, nodding. "Go on, go join your friends." Lance gestures, Rory still giggling as she quickly skates off to join the gaggle of children in the center. Pidge turns to Lance incredulously.

"Lance!"

"Can you blame me, Pidgey Poo?" He mockingly bats his eyelashes, making a kissy pout right in her face. Pidge rolls her eyes, making the same face back, ignoring how the children laugh at their stupid antics. Maybe they would like her better if she played along.

"Flirt."

~~~

Pidge holds her edge, sailing backwards at a fast, controlled speed. Shiro watches on the sidelines, observant eyes never leaving her as she cuts across the rink.

One.

She takes a breath in, relaxing her upper body.

Two.

She sends her left leg back, left arm following, right knee bending deep into an outside edge.

Three.

Pidge slams the toepick into the ice, tiny shards shattering, shimmering around her as she sails upwards into the air, pulling effortlessly into a tight air position. One, two, three rounds;  Pidge lands solidly, exiting with just as much speed as she had entered with, running edge strong and secure, free leg swinging back into a high-held position.

Triple lutz. Done. Hopefully she's done by now, she's honestly lost count of how many times Shiro made her jump, skate a circle, jump, skate a circle, jump...her head now spins even faster than when she's jumping in the air.

Slowly, Pidge drags herself over to the side, needing to restrain herself from gulping down her entire water bottle. Sip. Sip. SIP-

"Not bad, Pidge." Shiro nods approvingly, arms folded and leaning on the side casually. "Remember to keep your upper body position in check while entering."

"Can I take a break?" she asks.

"Mmm...."

Desperate times call for desperate measures; the very-tired girl puts on the puppy eyes, pouted mouth, clasped fists shaking.

Shiro swallows. Mouth thins into a fine line, shaking his head in mock disapproval.

"...fine."

"Thanks!"

Pidge catches sight of Lance coaching a small new kid, just getting on for the first time, clearly nervous. And it's adorable how patient and joking Lance is, distracting from the fear and bringing a smile on the kid's face.

It's...cute.

"Hey, Shiro, wouldn't it be so weird if someone else choreographed my programs this year?" Pidge laughs, eyes still glued to Lance. She swipes sweat from her brow. "Ha, imagine if it were someone like Lance."

Shiro's face is unreadably calm, eyes traversing upwards in thought. Pidge really can't tell what he's thinking, but that's normal anyway, isn't it?

"That was random. What, are you bored of me already?" Shiro squints, poking Pidge's forehead. Pidge laughs, poking him back.

"You know it!"

Shiro sighs, pushing Pidge back to the centre of the ice and retreats to the edge, twirling his finger three times. Triples again, of course.

Over at the side, Pidge can just barely hear the chuckle of a familiar guy-

"-stop drooling over Lance and focus!"

"Okay, okay!"

Pidge almost swears she can see Shiro smirking.

~~~

"WHAT THE FU-"

"HAHAHAHA!"

Pidge and Hunk roll on the ground laughing non-stop at Keith, screaming and slamming his head into the DDR machine. The cheery, hyper music seems to taunt Keith as he complains that the game was "TOTALLY RIGGED BECAUSE NO ONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO LOSE BY TWO POINTS-"

Pidge and Hunk, still in peals of laughter, run off to the basketball game and leave Keith to vent his anger at the punching bag. The arcade is thankfully empty at the odd hour after dinner, leaving them with practically free rein of the place that Pidge could call her third home.

"You know, he might score so many tickets that I can get that big green lion plushie," Pidge hums, gleefully flicking through the tickets she'd gotten by absolutely destroying Keith at DDR.

"We've never gotten enough. We stockpiled and never got enough," Hunk points out. It definitely is a gorgeous plushie; Pidge had been seriously lusting after it since it had been put up, admiring the fluffy spring-green fur, a hint of sparkle shining where the light hit it.

Pidge slips in two tokens, rubbing her hands and taking a ready stance. Hunk twists the bandana on his head, punching his fists together.

"5,4,3,2...1!!!!!"

"AAAAAAAHHHHH!"

Hands fly furiously, grabbing ball after ball and sending it right through the hoop, never resting. Hunk and Pidge fall into a simple rhythm, ball after ball after ball sailing in without collision.

After racking up a beautiful number of points, the number still steadily going up,  Pidge's brain starts to wonder.

"Hey, Hunk?"

"Yeah?"

"What happened with you and Lance?" Pidge questions, quickly knocking her glasses back in place before grabbing another ball. "You looked like you recognized him yesterday..."

"He's famous. You showed him to me how many times before? Of course I recognized him."

Hunk suddenly misses his shot. Eyes travel upwards, fingers fiddle, feet tap.

Pidge squints.

Liar.

"Hunk..."

He scrunches up his face, grabbing a ball and carelessly tossing it at the hoop. Bounces off.

"It was a long time ago. I don't even know if it's worth bringing up, you know? He probably doesn't even remember," he sighs, whole body slouching in the process.

How many anecdotes did Lance throw at her about his 'best-friend' Hunk? Always defended him from bullies, dried off his tears when girls rejected him, suddenly became super good at cooking, and so on, and so on.

He definitely remembers.

"Oh, I think he does," she says, anticipating disbelief.  

Pidge tosses in a final ball, the game coming to an end straight after.

"Really?" Hunk's eyes widen, eyebrows raising slowly. Skeptical. Surprised. Worried. Annoyed. Almost pleased. All words Pidge can used to describe Hunk's mish-mash of facial expressions. "He used to forget everything. I'm telling you, man, he'd forget the quadratic formula two seconds after memorizing it."

"What happened?"

Hunk looks away. Pidge bends down, squinting at the string of tickets flying out of the basketball game machine. A lot, but not nearly enough. Oh well.

"He's a figure skater. He had to train to get this good, right? " Hunk shakes his head. "I used to research skating camps, because I liked hockey and he liked figure. That's how we became friends from kindy through middle school. So I happen to stumble upon some famous skating program, and me being me just shows it to Lance. And what happens?"

Hunk's frown deepens.

"He just left. Without a trace, no goodbye or explanation. I was his best friend...unless he didn't really care."

"Oh..."

 "Look, Pidge, I don't want any pity, it's something I've accepted a long time ago. I mean, I also wondered if it was my fault, I also wondered maybe if I didn't show it to him...but we just went our separate ways, and that's all."  

Hunk breaks out into his characteristic sunny smile again, ditching the melancholic tone, waving a sassy hand in Pidge's face. She giggles, slapping it away and shrugging nonchalantly. Sure, she'll forget about it now. Hunk obviously doesn't want to talk about it any more.

"One more round?"

He smiles.

"You're on."

Even with the steady rhythm and sound of the ball whooshing through the flimsy net, Hunk by her side and scoring faster than ever, Pidge can't focus, only wondering-

What the hell is Lance's side of the story?

¬¬¬

It's at least slightly scary, seeing both Shiro and Allura grin at him conspiratorially from behind Allura's desk, glancing between each other, bright eyes glinting with glee.  Lance closes the door of the office hesitantly, toeing into the room as if the floor were littered with mines. It's very strange being at work after-hours, the office ominously dark without the outside lighting. Now that he thought about it, Shiro and Allura both looked like they were right out of the Godfather or something.

"Sit, sit!" Allura ushers, dragging his chair from his desk and plopping it opposite of her own. He plops down, gaze bouncing between the two head coaches.

"So...we've had this amazing idea recently. Involving you!" Shiro grins. "Pidge brought it up in class, and I thought-"

"-cut to the chase, Shiro!" Allura pipes up, smacking his shoulder, making a metallic clang. Right. Metal arm, Lance tends to forget.

"-okay, okay..." Shiro nudges her, both turning to grin at Lance.

"We want you to choreograph Pidge's programs for the next season!"

Wait.

What?

"Wait, what?" Lance raises an eyebrow. "Pidge doesn't want me to. I offered already, actually."

"Wow, proactive," Allura compliments. "But we don't really care that she said no."

Wait.

What?

"But-"

"-Look, Lance, I'm pretty sure all three of us know Pidge is relatively...safe with her programs," Allura cuts in, quite effectively shutting up an argumentative Lance. "She's had classical programs ever since she started singles and I don't think that's going to change."

"Phantom Of The Opera?" Lance tries, weakly. Shiro shrugs.

"I don't know why she decided on that, but come on, even that's a warhorse. She just happened to do it very...dramatically," Shiro says, "but Lance, I think even you, only knowing her for two days, can see she's not going to change. And frankly, the judges aren't liking it."

Definitely. Lack of variety, even with traditionalism, doesn't exactly lead to the best PCS. Pidge's hadn't been rising despite a few years in senior ranks now, even with stellar consistency. If she could just skate like she did that day...so much potential.

And Shiro's right that Pidge certaintly seemed very stubborn and fixed since the beginning. Everything military precision, like the crafted notes of a classical song. Nothing free, nothing loose, like a string pulled taut.

Time to cut that string.

"As her coaches, we want you to choreograph for her. We think that you can get her to come around," Allura says. Lance crosses his arms, leaning back in his chair.

"And what exactly makes you think that?"

She winks.

"Let's just say I have a feeling."

~~~

Pidge is literally drained once she reaches her apartment, stumbling through the cracked glass doors, legs and arms aching from pro skating and very pro basketball.

Green lion still seems so far away.

"Fancy meeting you here, milady!"

Startled, Pidge squeaks, spinning around to see Lance bowed in the style of a medieval knight. She laughs, the sight just too ridiculous but seeming ridiculously Lance at the same time.

"Oh, good Sir, have you come to escort me to my palace?" Pidge trills, curtsying. He straightens up, clearly surprised at the cooperation.

"Indeed, milady, that is my charge. Unfortunately, I lack my noble steed, so we must make this perilous journey uphill on foot."

Indeed, the walk up to their apartment after a long day was definitely perilous. Together, the two drained skaters drag their aching legs up the stairs, one by one.

"Dear heavens, whatever shall I do!" Pidge slaps a dramatic hand on her forehead, leaning on the railing. "I may simply faint at this unladylike exertion!"

Suddenly, Pidge's foot catches on the cracked cement, nearly flying backwards-

"Oh dear heavens, milady!" Lance yelps, lunging forward and grabbing Pidge's hand.

"Holy shit," she breathes out, heart beating painfully fast. An injury would have been a total bitch right now, right before the start of the season. Actually, an injury would be a bitch at any time in her life.

"No longer 'milady', huh?" Lance smiles.

"I guess not. Literally 'tripped up', didn't I?" she laughs, letting go of Lance's hand and straightening up. "Thanks."

"No problem."

In that silence, for a moment, just a tiny split-second, Pidge thinks about asking him everything she's wanted to for the whole day. It seemed strange that Lance would ever be so cruel to Hunk, even if it was as simple as never having closure. But something tells her it's not the time, it's not the place to try. Maybe it's how Lance grins right at her, doing that thing where he rubs the back of his neck, that stops her.

Hesitantly, almost regretfully, she reaches for the door of her apartment.

"Goodnight, Lance."

He waves, saluting.

"Goodnight, Pidge."

As he turns around, she catches the briefest of glimpses at his phone, left on the music player app.

Hmm.

Why is he listening to 'This Is Gospel?'

I hope you enjoyed! Check my blog for the next chapter soon :)

[witchfall]

the silver lining still remains: ch. 2

SUMMARY: “Connor read somewhere that 3 a.m. is “the magic hour” -- a concept still out of his purview. But the wide open dark gives him a feeling without a name; if it is all an illusion, as he’s wondered, it’s started pulling new tricks.

It feels like there’s a hole in one of his key biocomponents, slowly leaking. Like thirium could pool in the bottom of his abdomen, and no one would know until it’s too late.”

A Connor x F!OC fanfic. Read on AO3

---

[...RECHARGING…]

[...RECHARGING…]

[...100%]

[ALL SYSTEMS NORMAL. VISUAL FEED NORMAL. TIME: 3:09 A.M]

‘Yea, the diplomats are doing their thing.’ Hank, eating a burger. ‘But they aren’t here with us. Doing the work on the ground, you know? It’s never gonna be...quite the same.’

‘Here with us.’

‘Life’s that way.’

‘You’d miss me.’

[RUNNING DIAGNOSTIC…..ALL SYSTEMS NORMAL.]

Androids do not dream. Connor understands this. But the thoughts circle, endlessly. He processes and scans the color, texture, and sound of his memories until they are a grainy nonsense of variables that shouldn’t be there. Voices stop sounding right. Freckles are in the wrong place. Lips are the wrong size. The recollection is perfect; his sensor scans are absolutely complete.

The wrongness persists.

[ALL SYSTEMS NORMAL.]

He opens his eyes. Moonlight and the white glare of streetlamps shine through the dusty windows of Hank’s spare room (“You live here, you live like a civilized human man. Android man. Fuck it, you know what I mean.”). Sumo snores softly in the hallway and his owner snores louder still in the bedroom across the way. All things normal.

Don’t tell me you were working this whole time.

I was at Dan’s.

A smile, and a strange look in Hank’s eye -- uncategorizable. No statements of clarification. Continues to watch television.

Connor could get up and work. Read one of the books Hank suggested. But the thoughts spin on, so many of them, and he’s not sure he’s willing to leave them be.

She’s interfacing again. Stress level: 55%. Monitor your life signs.

Incorrect prioritization. Monitor her life signs.

Mouth open, face uncharacteristically inexpressive. Eyes (dark brown -- dark dark brown, where do they go?) out of focus. Extremely minor shivering.

Why?

His eyes fly open and he focuses again on the chilling brightness of the moon, if only to stop this thought cycle before it can begin. The street is silent. He read somewhere that 3 a.m. is “the magic hour” -- a concept still out of his purview. But the wide open dark of the sky gives him a feeling without a name; if it is all an illusion, as he’s wondered, it’s started pulling new tricks.

It feels like there’s a hole in one of his key biocomponents, slowly leaking. Like thirium could pool in the bottom of his abdomen, and no one would know until it’s too late.

[TIME: 3:15 A.M.]

--

Emma steps out of the client’s house, wiping sweat and grit off her forehead with the back of her glove. Clouds obscure the weakly setting sun, casting the neighborhood in a downcast gray. Materials she’d need for tomorrow’s drywall installation cycled through her head, hammering out all curious thought. A litany of the most boring items imaginable.

Nothing like exhaustion to beat the worry out of you.

Sleep or stagework? She hesitated outside her Taurus, testing the tires with her boot. If she had to ask, maybe she should just go home...

Her phone softly chimes.

Who could possibly want to call me now ?

She digs it out of her thick coat with a furrowed brow, suppressing a sigh. The number was “unknown,” but that was hardly unusual in her line of work. Androids were buying their own phones, but the savvy ones were understandably wary of tracking.

She clicks it over. “Emma Ibori.”

“Emma. Are you free?”

She blinks at the voice on the line. “Speaker Markus?” Well, that explains the blocked number. “...how’d you get my number?”

“It’s in the Corps files,” he says. “I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.” His voice is warm but straightforward, plodding along pleasantries as if by rote.

She raises a brow in interest, but her gut sinks. The leader of the preliminary Android government probably didn’t just call people to chat. “Sure, no. What can I do for you?”

--

Hank taps his empty coffee cup on his desk and stares at Connor. He checks his watch...he’s been staring for a good three minutes now. Connor doesn’t even seem to notice.

Hank leans back in his chair, making it creak, and sighs heavily.

“I think we’re off the clock,” he finally says.

Connor is staring at his computer like he’s Atlas, holding the world up. His brow is furrowed as he scans through files that Hank knows too well will reveal nothing new, not even to a top of the line prototype detective. Connor has a single hand on his forehead, fingers reaching up through his hair -- a curious gesture of humanity that makes him seem much younger than he pretends to be, even if he is still sitting up ramrod straight.

“You can go home if you want,” Connor says politely. His eyes don’t leave the screen.

Hank frowns. He’s too well-worn to know how to break through the miasma gathering around the young man. He just tries to be there.

Tough being a prototype.

A rough guitar riff plays -- Hank’s phone. He pulls it out of his pocket and stares at the number. An opportunity.

“Anderson.”

“Hey, it’s Emma. Does Connor have a direct line to Markus, you think?”

“Emma, I'm at work.”

Lo and behold, Connor finally looks his way. Hank stifles a smirk at Connor’s attempt to make it look nonchalant by casting his gaze lazily to the side a moment, but Hank doesn’t buy it for a second. They had to get Connor his own phone soon.

“I got a weird call from him. He said he had a job opportunity come up at the old East Yard Elementary for me but, uh...the number he used won’t work.” He can hear the wind crackle through her phone speaker.

“Markus called you?”

“Maybe.” He can hear her shuffling with a door. “One reason I wanted to confirm with him. I’d just demo this place.”

Hank leans forward. Connor does too. Hank gives him a look -- eavesdropping is rude, how many times do I gotta tell you that? -- but his detective instinct yammers like a mad dog. “Go back to your car.”

A long pause. “...all right then.” He can hear her breathing as she begins to walk. “I didn’t go in far.”

“You really shouldn’t be on that side of town,” he says quietly. “Are you alone?”

She doesn’t answer. His gut clenches. The girl was tough, a wicked good contractor who’d fixed up a number of things in his old house, and a presence that flitted in and out like a fly he couldn’t chase away. But she, like a lot of the youth around these parts, was both too stubborn and too trusting. Connor was nearly out of his seat trying to listen in now, dark eyes intent upon Hank, all pretense gone.

“I have a gun.”

“Emma--”

“Look, can you just ask Con if--”

A loud, unmistakable bang.

“Emma?” He pulled his phone back and looked at the call connection.

The line was instantly dead.

“Oh, fuck. Connor--”

Connor was already running full speed toward the exit. Hank grabs his radio and follows, fast as he dares.

“Dispatch, we have a situation. Door! Connor, use the door!”

--

Emma’s ears ring. Fear blooms in her stomach like an orchid. In a thoughtless moment, she reaches up to touch her ear to check for bleeding, but her hand is embedded with glass and already slick so it’s useless. She can feel the blood trickling down her jaw. It’ll probably stain her coat, she realizes with a bizarre amusement.

All she can really think about is running, away from her car where they'd ambushed her, zigging and zagging between vehicles, between houses, through any path that could break up their beeline on her. She expects them to shoot again at any moment -- a thought that keens bright as lightning. But they don’t, despite the fact that they had the wherewithal to shoot her phone from her hand.

What was stopping them?

She chances a look back. Two figures in nondescript dark clothes chase her with stocky, athletic movements and a uniformity that felt too exact to be human.

Fear bottoms her out. All her breaths feel like flame.

Her bag drags down on her shoulder, even as she tries to keep it from smacking her side too much with her left hand. But it’s no use. It’s slowing her down and they clearly aren’t tiring. While she hears sirens wailing in the distance, she decides to buy time by -- God and Universe please fucking forgive me, I’m never gonna be able to buy tools again at this rate -- throwing the bag as far as she can at her pursuers.

But not without grabbing her gun first.

--

“It was a mistake to let you drive!” Hank wheezes, but Connor knows the man can’t mean it. At the speed they are going, only an android could have prevented their untimely death via crash.

[FIND EMMA FIND EMMA FIND EMMA FIND EMMA]

Text flashes red in his eyes, constant, and he blinks hard to try and erase it. There is no erasing it.

[CIRCULATION ELEVATED. RECOMMEND DEEP BREATHS FOR SYSTEM COOLING.]

The dispatch chatter was up. Connor only slowed when he saw the flashing lights of other patrol cars in the distance, parked on some abandoned street where single-family housing met the blockier apartment units of inner Detroit. Police were exiting their cars, guns up.

He nearly slams the car into park. Hank grumbles something obscene but they both near tumble out of the car. They bolt toward what the other police are examining.

A bag…

Instantly, he enters analysis mode, the mind palace thrumming to life. Contents spilled out of the bag as if it was thrown for distraction. A measuring tape and a Laserlite level flung a few feet out of the bag from the force of the toss. One hammer, a smattering of nails and screwdrivers [multiple head types] are scattered on the pavement in an arc akin to spraying water.

Specks of fresh blood.

[MISSION: FIND EMMA.]

She loves this bag.

[PROCESSING: PROJECTING RUN BASED ON BAG LOCATION, THROWN ITEM DISTANCE, EAST YARD SCHOOL.]

“Connor, we’re going to find her, you just gotta--”

[RE-CONSTRUCTING]

“--take a second to breathe--”

[POSSIBLE DIRECTION: NORTHWEST?]

“--listening?”

Connor can hear Hank saying something in the background, but his processors burn too hot. He has a mission to do. He doesn’t have time for anything but analysis--

Two gunshots, 467 feet northwest.

His mission parameters squeeze his chest. Something lances his core biocomponent.

[DIAGNOSTIC UNDERWAY.]

He runs, fast as his feet will go, but the neighborhood is starting to blur around him. He leaves the other officers in the dust, not weighed down by patrol gear or a biological need for aerobic exercise. He vaults over parked cars and old trash bins and rounds the corner of an alleyway--

[RECONSTRUCTING PRECONSTRUCTING RECON--]

Two dead bodies litter the ground.

[THIRIUM -&*^&*CORRUPTION.]

What?

And Emma stands at the alley’s end, gun outstretched.

He stumbles to a stop at the sight. His entire vision shakes a moment.

Blood stains the side of her face, and one of her hands claws unnaturally around the gun, clearly injured. She stands with feet shoulder-width apart, arms straight. A near perfect shooting stance. One pursuer was downed with a shot to the head, the other with a shot to the chest. Executioner style.

Something hot burns in Connor’s ribcage. She had been cornered. A chainlink fence blocks the alleyway behind her.

She suddenly takes in a sharp breath.

“Emma!” The word feels torn from him as he skitters across the alley. Now he can see she’s close to tears, teeth barred, breath coming in shaky waves. “You’re all right,” he says, hands up. The softness of his voice comes at a shock considering the magma filling his midsection. “You’re safe now.”

[MISSION SUCCESS]

She takes in another sharp, shaky breath and the tears finally roll down her face. Her whole body near vibrates with stress. He moves until he is close enough that he can whisper.

“Give me the gun,” he says softly.

“No.”

His chest compresses further. “Please. You are not in a state to hold a weapon.”

Even if her shots were perfect.

She hesitates, but then thrusts the gun into his palm with her good hand -- much to his surprise. He sticks it in his extra holster on his waistband and then leans down slightly to level with her gaze. Without thinking, he tentatively rests his hands on her shoulders. His fingers wrap around her shoulders and his palms settle against her collarbones. Only then does it feel like she’s real.

Alive alive alive alive.

He scans her face, unwilling to miss a single detail. A gunshot wound to her right ear. Thick, coiled hair caking against the sticky blood. Scratches along her jawline from glass shards. Old smears of makeup under her eyes, now just black specks thanks to time and tears. But the constellation is still there -- a single smear of blood disrupting the map of freckles on her face…

“Connor!” Hank and the other police finally arrive, feet loud against the pavement. “Shit...”

Connor doesn’t turn to look back at them. He’s watching Emma’s dark brown eyes, waiting. Waiting. She stares at the middle distance between them, as if rebooting -- until suddenly she blinks and she isn’t. She’s looking right back at him. Searching his face.

“I’m--” A hiccup disrupts her sentence and she takes in another rough, shaky breath.

Another lance through his core biocomponent. He suddenly can’t bring himself to say anything at all. Something in him rumbles and roars -- a creature that he’d not witnessed since he broke the command to Stop Markus.

“Emma, hey, it’s gonna be alright.” That was Hank, breathing hard.

“Wh...why the fuck were they chasing me?” Emma looks between Connor and Hank, breaking eye contact finally. “They were by Tulio.” Her car.

“We’ll figure it out,” Hank says, stepping up next to them. He taps Connor’s shoulder once, a signal to move. Connor’s systems feel sluggish; he finds he doesn’t want to let go. But after a moment, he takes a step back, releasing her shoulders.

Hank places his scarf around her neck. “You said you could shoot but you never said you were a goddamn Olympian.”

She squints, looking away. “I dunno.” She gestures outward. “Got lucky, I guess.”

Luck?

Two programs go to war.

Analyze the variables: Markus’s involvement. Did someone use his voice? The supposed job. How did they obtain her number? Why did they chase but opt not to shoot her again? How did they find her? What did they want? Who are these androids and what was their purpose? Why was the reading of the blue blood returning corrupted data? Why is she shy about her gunshots? Find more information. Solve this now.

If you look away from her something else might happen you never know there are no proper odds for this anymore not in this city where nothing has a precondition another shooter could appear anything could come out of thin air so keep your eyes on her at all times don’t you dare let her leave your sight how did she shoot them like that was it luck was it just luck that left her alive was it just luck that she’s here at all--

“Connor?”

Emma is staring at him, moisture on her face glinting blue and red as the last of the backup arrives.

“He’s fine,” Hank says with his usual gruffness, placing a hand on her shoulder as if to turn her away. “Owes me some new tires. Drives like a maniac.” His tone is heightened. He’s trying to obfuscate something, but Emma doesn’t break her stare. Hank bites his lip, concerned.

Connor looks down. The pavement flashes red. He tucks one hand behind his back, as if that can stop the feeling building inside, and another to the coin in his pocket.

What if what if what if what if?

[DIAGNOSTIC COMPLETE. ALL SYSTEMS FUNCTIONING.]

But that can’t be right. Because his vision is blurring -- breaking into prisms of light as all the magma in his chest finally reaches his optical components.

He turns away so Emma won’t see.

[blkpnkwriting]

a different kind of famous

part i. / part ii.

BLACKPINK x Reader, heist!au

Rated: M

Warnings: blood, violence, guns, swearing

Word count: 3,571

     You are on the brink of infamy. This heist proved it wouldn’t be as simple as once thought.

     “Okay, one last time ---”

    A set of twinkling eyes met your own in the rearview mirror.

    “Y/N, you’re leading the heist. Enter through the front, watch the operation, and lock down for the off chance you’re immediately compromised.” The gaze in the reflection shifted to the person beside you, Lisa, whose nails clicked restlessly on the door handle, a rhythmic pattern. “Lisa, apprehend the security. Fire if you have to, but only for the legs --- we’re not trying to kill anyone. Once you have them down, secure the panic button, and assume your position on the counters to help watch the operation.” Again, the stare settled on the other side of you, where Rosé sat silently until she was addressed. As cued, she swept her subtle ginger locks off her shoulders, gathering it up to twist with nimble fingers into a tight bun at the crown of her head. “You, Rosie, are the stitch for this entire heist. Lisa and Y/N will have taken care of your guard duty, so all you have to do is make sure you can crack the vault and grab as much as you can. Don’t overburden yourself, it’ll make escaping difficult. Once you’ve filled everyone’s bags, disperse them evenly.”

    Finally, Jennie turned from the mirror to her passenger. Jisoo didn’t bother looking up from her laptop computer to know that she would be briefed next. “Lastly, Jisoo is our eyes and ears. She’ll only relay the important details via your earpieces if needed. Once you’ve secured the money, we’ll know, and she’ll guide you out the best possible exit where I’ll be waiting. Remember not to get too comfortable once we have you, because it’s only a short distance until the trade-off. By then, police should be onto us.”

    Jennie twisted to face you all, an expression only worn during these missions in place now: serious, calculating, and all business. “We have to be quick, but we have to be rational. No room for mistakes or for screwing around. This is our biggest heist yet. We can’t fuck up.”

    The incessant tapping abruptly stopped as Lisa picked up her ski mask from her lap, pausing just before her face. “Yeah, and just so we’re all clear, I’m totally going to be making Snapchat worthy ugly faces at you guys the entire time I’m wearing this scratchy mask.” With that and a snicker, she pulled the material over her features, hair already drawn up.

    There was a smirk on your face as you followed suit, donning the mask and fixing it until it no longer bothered you... as much. You looked down at your garb, pleased with how well it cloaked your figure to the point that it was difficult to even assume what gender you were. Which was the whole point. A bullet proof vest, not only for safety, also served to pad your curves beneath the baggy zip-up. And if you weren’t about to rob a bank, you could wear your sweatpants to a hip-hop dance practice. As far as anyone could tell, you and your partners could be women, or you could be slender men, especially with Lisa and Rosé above average in height. After all, this wasn’t your first burglary.

    There was a roll of her eyes from Jennie, though you could see the fondness behind it, and then she was facing around again. Slender fingers started the engine, the expendable “get-away” car rattling to life. You weren’t about to spend more money than you were about to steal on some fancy escape car. A junker would do. Especially for what you planned to do with it once you were safely out of the bank. It was your favorite part, but you couldn’t focus on that. Not when the ball hadn’t started rolling on your operation yet.

    The particular bank that you all had in mind was one that was open after-hours. By “after-hours” they meant a couple hours after traffic died down from the rush home at the end of the work day, making it accessible for those too busy to make the trip during the regular times. It was your prime target: an establishment that wouldn’t conflict with traffic, person and car, while allowing you all to easily slip into the cover of the oncoming nightfall.

    You played with the safety on your semi-automatic rifle, situated between your legs, pointed downwards. The black duffel bags provided enough cover that any passersby close to the car would have a hard time spotting the weapons. You’ve never shot anyone before, and desperately hoped you never would, but you certainly felt comfortable holding someone up on the other end of it. There was a power that overcame you, and you were scared of becoming drunk on it. Probably why you’ve never even fired the thing. Lisa has, on multiple occasions. You might even say she enjoyed the rambunctious quality of guns. Fitting. But you would happily leave all the firing to her, and she was happy to do so.

    The city flitted by, Jennie’s expert driving maintaining a low profile as you neared ever closer to the location. Jisoo hadn’t looked up once from her laptop, multiple windows sifting continually through her watch on the screen. This wasn’t some spontaneous decision. This was very much premeditated, going so far as months prior to where you sat now. It gave Jisoo enough time to safely insert herself in the bank’s security system, as well as the local police department’s dispatch broadcast, and other technologically inclined bases that you yourself weren’t privy to. All that time spent playing video games really paid off, nourishing the eldest’s interests until she became somewhat of an impressive hacker.

    The whole time, Rosé sat quietly beside you. There wasn’t a bit of movement or noise from her, and she stared straight ahead. You knew better than to disturb her. It was her way of preparing herself, attuning herself so that when it came down to the pressure of being the one who would get you inside the vault, to your cash, she wouldn’t crack. Beside the rifle at her feet, all she was equipped with was a stethoscope. It sounded mundane and altogether too simple, but it worked. You’ve seen it happen. Like some sort of diabolical doctor, she would crouch at the door, chestpiece pressed beside the dial. The job would be done within minutes. She had to have good hearing or something, because that was also another job to this whole heist you could never do.

    The car rolled to a stop, and you knew it was game time. Jisoo’s fingertips hardly paused on the keyboard as you arrived, teeth worrying into her lip. The coast was clear, signaled by a two-fingered gesture. With the slightest of nods from Jennie in the rearview mirror, Lisa threw open the door and jumped out. You followed, Rosé close behind, and together, you charged the front doors to the bank you had pulled up in front of. You didn’t have to look to know that Jennie and Jisoo were already gone.

    Your gloved left hand dug into your hoodie pocket, producing a portable voice distorter that you raised to your mouth just as Lisa and Rosé burst open the doors to the lobby. The butt of your rifle rested in the crook of your shoulder and aimed at the small gathering of innocents, eyes widening in shock at the sight before you were shouting into the mouthpiece. “I need EVERYONE to get on the ground NOW!”

    Like clockwork, your hostages lowered themselves to the ground, some collapsing rather awkwardly. There had been plenty of instances for you to practice ignoring the cries of fear that began to muffle against the marble floor. Instead, you had bigger fish to fry, and having memorized the blueprints Jisoo had drawn out, you knew exactly where to look for the guard detail. As suspected, three security officers were stationed systematically through the lobby, and as Lisa motioned for the bank teller who appeared to be attempting a swipe for the panic button, a guard rounded the corner for her. You couldn’t reach her in time, seeing as you stared down the barrel of your own rifle at a lady guard who visibly shook in front of you. She reluctantly lowered her handgun to the floor in surrender.

    “Drop the weapon!” a guard’s voice hollered in the large open space. A Glock quivered in Lisa’s direction. You glanced at Rosé, watching in mild surprise as she kicked the second guard’s gun away from reach and withdrew zip ties from her duffel bag on her back. It prompted you to do the same, but ---

    A gunshot echoed off the walls, several screams bleeding into the noise in a disorienting din.

    “The next time won’t just be her foot,” Lisa’s warbled voice threatened. One hand held a voice distorter to her mask, the other pointed for what you could guess was the bank teller on the ground. There was a short pause as the last guard hesitated. Then, with a few choice swears beneath his breath, he shuffled to the floor, sliding his gun to Lisa’s feet. You finally bent to zip tie your guard, distracted by the lame start to your operation. Lisa disappeared behind the stations once you had moved near enough to apprehend her opponent, and you slid the tie into its tightest notch on the man’s wrists.

    Things were going almost as planned. With the security patrol sloppily captured, you returned to the front doors. An imaginary scene played before your eyes, of the police arriving and storming the building, but you pushed it out of your mind. Just because the bust hadn’t gone as cleanly as previous heists didn’t mean this one wouldn’t succeed. Instead, you seized the security gate and dragged it along, locking it at the other side. Behind you, you could hear Lisa climbing atop the counter, and once you turned around, saw her cradling her rifle, gazing out upon your hostages. Rosé was nowhere to be seen, but the vault Jisoo explicated was just down a barred corridor where you could see if an unaccounted guard attempted to thwart her proceedings.

    Now, you wait. It made your skin itch, but you paced in a nonchalant manner about the hall, hoping to appear as though none of it didn’t bother you. Of course it bothered you, but this was the way things had to be. You were the leader of your little crew, and it was your duty to hold it together. For Lisa and for Rosé.

      You counted the guards: one, two, three. Still on the ground, still handcuffed, and you ignored the young woman crying softly in a corner. The bank teller would live. Lisa’s aim was true, and you had yet to ever see a news report about your infamous heists having any casualties. All you had to do was stick to the plan. Jennie and Jisoo’s plans always worked.

    It felt like forever, but the clock above read it had been all of three minutes when Rosé’s figure came jogging back into view, dropping her duffel full of cash on the counter Lisa perched on. Lisa slipped hers off, tossing it to your vault robber, and she was gone again. Just a couple more minutes.

    You could stomach this.

    Rosé returned, headed for you. You met her halfway as you removed your duffel strap from your shoulder, trading the bags between you two. Your eyes met, Rosé wordlessly searching for something in you. You turned away before she could surmise anything, throwing your bag onto your back. The weight of the money was a little more than unwelcoming, and you were already sweating through your damn clothes, but it would be worth it. Literally.

    Your earpiece crackled. Lisa jumped in your peripheral as hers did the same, but Rosé’s back continued retreating to her task. Jisoo’s voice came, sounding oddly automatic.

    “Five minutes left. Police have been alerted to suspicious activity. Suggested point of exit: back of building, through service entrance. We’ll be waiting.”

    Lisa hopped off the counters, stooping to lift the bank teller. The gun in her hand was enough to frighten the woman from doing anything but obeying. They walked from around the counters so she couldn’t reach the panic button, and dropped her off on the floor with the rest of the hostages. Then she motioned for the direction Rosé had gone, and you followed suit. You tread backwards so that your eyes remained on your hostages, counting the guards once again, and as Rosé joined you with the third and last duffel bag, you lifted your voice distorter to your lips. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

    Then you broke into a sprint together. The sound of leather combat soles slapping the marble floor reverberated with you the entire way as the three of you snaked along halls that you pictured in your head. Jisoo’s blueprints were surprisingly coherent and accurate, and you turned a corner, aching to be free of this place. The service entrance was in sight.

    A figure darted into view. A target painted on your chest. The first round struck your vest, but the power behind it was enough to knock the wind from your lungs. You nearly tripped and fell at the shock and fear that riddled you. The second gunshot hurt a lot worse.

    A series of rapid reports deafened your ears, a cacophony in the small hallway. Time slowed, your legs sluggish. God, could you run any slower? Suddenly, you didn’t want to anymore. Before you, the omitted guard crumpled to the ground, red leaking onto the floor. Was that blood? A shocking amount. You wish you hadn’t looked down, but you did, and as you passed over his prone body, you saw the light of the scones reflecting in dead eyes.

    Dead.

    The air inside had been so heavy and thick that when you rushed out into the night, it was like a completely different climate. You breathed deeply, thankful for the fresh air, but your breath only went so far before stopping short. It came back out in a rush of pain, a gasping grimace, your free hand flying up to your shoulder, and when you pulled your fingers away, you saw them coated in sticky crimson.

    “Shit!” Rosé spat, a tender hand on your arm as she forced you to face her. Acknowledging it only made it hurt worse, and you felt tears spring to your eyes. In pain? In fear? You weren’t sure, but it wasn’t the worst of it just yet. Between the adrenaline and the pressure to conform to your duty, to complete your task, the predicament sat patiently at bay. At any second, it would cripple you. For now, you were still standing.

    “We have to go!” Lisa snapped, already jogging down the alley, thick soled boots kicking debris. In the background sat a nondescript car you knew to hold Jennie and Jisoo, waiting for you. Rosé’s hand never left your elbow as you ran. You didn’t need the support, but you definitely wanted it.

    “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know he would be there!” Jisoo apologized the moment you had stepped foot inside the cabin. There were tears in her eyes, a lip quivering. You couldn’t hear the rest of what she had to say, a ringing beginning in the back of your skull. Jennie peeled off, the momentum throwing you against the back of your seat, tires screeching. Rosé was quick to yank down your zipper to open your hoodie, and stretched the collar of your shirt to the side. The gasp that came didn’t make you feel any better about the damage, and you counted your breaths again to make sure you didn’t start hyperventilating.

    “The bullet went right through you,” Rosé reported, ripping off her mask now. Seeing her naked face expressed all the concern she was feeling for you. “All we have to do is close up the wound. I can do that for you once we’re clear.”

    Jisoo was still wound around in her front seat, gaping in horror at your shoulder. It was evident the guilt she felt, written on her features, and while you didn’t feel the slightest bit of anger to blame her with, it didn’t help your panic. Your teeth grit together, warding off whatever you felt building up inside, when Lisa spoke.

    “We’re being followed.” Her voice, even without the distortor, sounded hollow. It occurred to you then that she was the one who shot the guard in retaliation. Not once, or twice, or even three times. The amount of gunfire you heard couldn’t be numbered, and wouldn’t be until the autopsy.

    It broke her stare, and Jisoo turned back around in her seat to glance through a couple pages. A finger pressed on her earpiece. After a few seconds, her voice returned, eerie. “It’s a squad car. They’re tailing us because they aren’t sure if we’re the right car... they’re calling reinforcements.”

    You sank lower instinctively, wincing at the movement sending lances of pain through your arm. It was already starting. Rosé held a hand over your wound, pressing in a way that made you want to push her off, but knew better. She was staunching the flow. She didn’t care for what was happening around her, only that she was taking care of you. You met her eyes again, and again, she tried to find something in yours. You were too weak to fight it away this time, and her fingers curled possessively over your shoulder, palm still levying the blood.

    Simultaneously, gunfire erupted from behind you and beside you. Glass shattered, raining down on your head in a glistening curtain, just as Rosé dove to cover your body with hers. You could see out of the corner of your eye Lisa, crouched on the cushion backwards, rifle seated on the headrest. Her finger pulled again and again and again on the trigger until tires screamed. At first, you thought it was your car down, the way Jennie whipped to the side abruptly. Instead, a glow of orange whirred past you, a police car skidding off the road into a series of parked cars. You thought you saw it flip, but it was merely a glimpse, and Rosé had yet to remove herself from above you. Lisa sat back down beside you, hands still assuming position on her rifle, and she stared blankly ahead. You couldn’t possibly understand what she was feeling right now.

    It seemed the crash caused a distraction, as no other cars followed you. Jennie sped through the streets, knowing. It felt like hours had passed, but you knew it couldn’t have taken that long. Your perception was warped, and you wondered idly just how much blood you had lost. Rosé's hand was inked in your blood, running down her wrist to beneath her sleeve. It didn’t seem to bother her. Only that you were okay. If her hand wasn’t on your shoulder, you felt like you would have fallen apart.

    When the car slowed, you felt the panic rise in the back of your throat like bile. You weren’t sure what for, but she stopped beneath an overpass, in the shadows of the side of the road. Rosé helped you from your seat, slinging the extra duffel onto her back, while the rest filed out of the car with all their personal effects. At least you had made it this far. And now it was time for the best part. 

    Parked in a Dumpster lot was your next car, ready for the taking. You were in a sketchy part of town, where no one would second guess a random car in some dank alley. It even fit the role, dinged and with tinted windows. A hand now circled your waist for extra support as you approached the vehicle. Jisoo took a set of keys from her pocket, unlocking the passenger side to toss her gear onto the seat. Lisa’s movements were robotic, setting herself on the hood of the car, looking suspicious with her gun out in the open on her lap. Gone was her will to care, as well as the usual light in her eyes. You didn’t know what to say to her to make it better. Lisa wasn’t a murderer. The world would soon think differently.

    Together, you all faced where Jennie still remained beside the original car. From the depths of her backpack, she revealed a weapon of her own. A simple tug of the pin, and she tossed the low-grade grenade into the seats. In the streetlight, you could see your blood smeared on the back cushions. Jennie didn’t bother returning to you at a pace faster than a walk. Her eyes were cast down as she joined you all at the car. No one said anything as you piled inside, and she took off out of the alley, squealing on stagnant drain water. 

    The grenade detonated. You didn’t even flinch as an eruption shook the street like an earthquake. It was a plume of dark smoke, roiling from under the overpass, exuding debris that fell in increments upon the road, striking buildings. The car was demolished, and with it, any traces of your crime.

    All eyes were on the rearview mirror.

[1d-sexualdesires]

Part 1

Based off of: You can't ask me to do that - - - Y/N is a simple girl. She's pretty and a bit shy and definitely limited in her social interactions. But when she's with her friends she's a totally different person. She's opinionated and confident, and even a little too sarcastic' it's quite amusing actually, especially to Harry who is quick with humor and is wittier than 80% of the population. He tries his best to hold back a laugh as Y/N holds eye contact with Niall, trying to convince him that today is actually Thursday not Wednesday, and he's growing more convinced as her eye contact with him doesn't waver. "Is it really Thursday?" He asked and Y/N nodded fervently. "Yes!" "Fuck, alright I'll see you guys later!" He called as he ran off and the remaining two turned to each other giggling. "You're quite mean, you know?" Harry chuckled and she shrugged. "He ate all my powdered donuts and did not replace them, so payback." She elaborated and Harry agreed at her personal justification. There was just something about her that mesmerized him completely, he was under her spell and he really believes that she has no idea. Well, it's not like he goes out of his way for her to figure that out, he lets his feelings linger behind them all the time, a few of their friends know, but they never push him to do anything about it because he'd rather have her as a friend than entertain his affection for her and then have it not work out. He doesn't think he can handle not having her around and it really bothers him; she's just a bloody girl. *** "You're both dicks." Niall says walking straight past them as he arrives to their friend, Sophie's flat. Y/N sniggers at his irritation and shrugs it off, there's no way he'll stay mad at her for long, no one can and Harry understands why when she turns to him, an amused smile curving her lips upward and her eyes crinkling as the smile morphs into a small fit of laughter. He wishes he could just lean in and kiss her. He's genuinely curious about the taste of her lips and how his would feel pressed to her own. He wants to know if she's the type to go for the hair at the nape of his neck straightaway, or if she'll take her time and hold right beneath his jaw, or maybe she'll slither her hands down his arms and intertwine their fingers in a hold that he thinks he'd never allow her to escape from, because if she does hold his hand he would never be able to erase the feeling of her fingers fitting nicely between the gaps of his own. "Hey." He flits out of his daydream and sees her right in his face, "food's ready." She says and he nods, following her into the kitchen where there's a small spread for them to choose from. In a short while the rest of their friends have joined them and they're all sitting on the sofas chatting and enjoying their food and shouting because Taboo is a very interactive and intense game. After about an hour they're all helping load the dishes in the washer and getting ready to go and Harry smiles as he sees Y/N talking to Niall. "Mate, go for it." Louis says, patting his shoulder gently. "What if she doesn't like me?" He asks honestly, this is a huge concern he has. "You've got nothing to lose, do you?" Louis inquires Harry sighs, he wishes it were that simple. "Just try, you don't know how she's feeling, maybe it a similar feeling." And Harry tries to shut that out of his mind, he doesn't want to entertain the idea that maybe she likes him, he doesn't want to torture himself that way. "Okay." Is all he says before walking off to grab more dishes. Once they're done and saying their goodbyes to Soph, Harry walks over to Y/N and she smiles up at him. "Do you need a ride?" He asks her and she smiles. "That would be lovely, thanks H." She says and he smiles, they're calling out their goodbyes as they walk out the flat. "Thanks again, this is really sweet of you." She says, letting her hand rest over his for just a moment. "Anytime, Y/N. You know that." He assures her and she nods. "So you apologized to Niall?" He asked and she rolls her eyes playfully. "Well yeah... and I also made him promise to never mess with my pastries again, because I obviously am very sensitive about them." She explained and he chuckled. "You know what I was thinking, Haz? We should make our taboo team a competing team, we would knock everyone out of the water." She exclaimed. "You really think so?" He inquired and she nodded. "That's why I'm always on your team, Haz... you're good with words." She admitted and he laughed. "You're something else..." he chuckled. So eventually she was home and they talked for a few more minutes before she headed into her flat. *** "So....." Sophie stated leaning on Y/N's counter. "So what?" She asked and Sophie rolled her eyes. "Harry! He totally likes you." She said and Y/N tried her best to hide her smile. "Oh my god, stop. We're just friends..." she said looking back down at her laptop, avoiding eye contact. "Oh my god, and you like him too!" Sophie squealed and Y/N's eyes few wide with shock. "Why can't anyone be discrete!" She whined covering her face with her hands. "So you do..." she smirked and Y/N sighed. "We're friends..." "Are you scared or something? Harry's nothing to be afraid of, girl." "Yes he is. He's... experienced... and me? Not so much... you that, Soph." "He would never judge you about that, Y/N! C'mon, you know him better than that." "I guess, but I just- let's just finish this, yeah?" She diverted and Soph nodded. - - - The weekend had gone terribly. Soph and a few other girls convinced Y/N of going to some party and well she did meet this guy who was sweet and good looking but she was a little too drunk trying to wash away worries about her crush on Harry and this guy was a little too persistent and after her putting off his advances he figured it out... she was s virgin. She recalls him laughing so hard he fell off his seat and she's sure he hurt himself badly, but her feelings were even more hurt and she called Niall and she sobbed without an explanation the whole way he drove her home and swore to her that he wouldn't ever tell anyone about this ride. So she was still in bed at noon on a Saturday and she was not going to guilt trip herself about it. She needed a little quiet and comfort. She did feel better when Soph texted her asking if she was alright and also when Niall gave her a call. That gave her enough energy to get into the shower and do some cooking and homework. When Sunday rolled around she realized that she had eaten something expired and was sick for most of the morning. Then she realized she turned in the wrong assignment online and that the rough draft was so bad she would surely get an F. She emailed her teacher and never got a response... there was so much stress in one weekend that she was anxious for school to start and for her afternoon to evening shifts at a book store and she was just ready for it to end. But then things only got worse. She was just casually walking from class to class with Soph and Harry, making some plans when she saw an all too familiar face and he became beet red before he burst into laughter once more. She felt anguished to even see him again and in a matter of seconds half the quad was chanting 'virgin' and without any idea on how to deal with it she just printed off into the women's rest room and locked the door. She was choking on her tears and her body was shaking and she wanted to scream because that's no one's business. She jumped when she heard multiple bangs on the door and Soph and Harry calling her name. It was consistent for about fifteen minutes, but then it stopped... she pressed her ear to the door and heard Soph Amy through the door. "Babe, I've got a test I need to go." She was relieved when she heard her walking off. Harry had probably gone before that and after another ten minutes of silence she washed her face and unlocked the door. She pulled it open with all her mustered up strength and jumped a bit when she saw Harry pushing himself off the ground from beside the door. "Hey." He said softly and she sighed, looking up into his eyes. "Hi." She whispered. "Lets get you home." He said, pulling her to his side and guiding her to the car lot. - - - "Do you want food? Tea? Water?" Y/N asked as she let Harry and herself into the small school apartment. "Y/N, maybe you should just relax for a bit. Just tell me where the tea is and I'll get something going." He implored and she nodded, plopping down onto the couch. Just calling out some direction when Harry wasn't too sure about something. During these few moments Y/N was deep in thought about her situation. She felt embarrassed about something she was always quite proud of. She felt judged as like a prude and she hated feeling that, it was just that she was simply not ready for that. It's not like she had never dated or kissed someone... she just didn't feel prepared. She had had two relationships before these past few years of being single and she was always relatively shy about these things. It wasn't her thing... with the first guy she dated he was much too self absorbed to care about her once that part of t heir relationship began so she ended it. Then the last one cheated on her because "she wasn't giving him what he needed as a man". She didn't want to be shy about these things, but bad experiences lead her to just avoid anything sex related altogether. Everyone was always something great thing and she had never experienced that... maybe it was time she sought after a great experience. "Okay, here's the tea." Harry suddenly made himself present and she stood to grab the tea cups to relieve him from the thirty things he had in his hands. He set down the tray with the tea, cream and sugar, then a packet of biscuits, then some spoons and napkins and she smiled up at him before he took his seat beside her. "Thanks so much, Harry. Really... I feel like you and Niall are always helping me out of messes." She half-chuckled, it was a bit bitter though. "You guys are the best people... I feel like there's nothing you lot wouldn't do for me and I just want to say that I feel the same way. I'd donate a kidney for you, swear it." She said and he wanted to kiss her right then because she was so sweet and caring. "Are you alright though?" Harry inquired as he poured tea into the cups and she nodded. "Are you sure? If you want to...talk about it you can." He said and she sighed, putting her tea cup down, where he proceeded to take a sip. "I just... I've never been embarrassed about being a-" she hesitated for a moment, "virgin." She mumbled. She occupied her hands with fringe of one of the pillows in her lap. "I was always proud that I hadn't given in... it's not that I never wanted to, I just didn't feel like I was ready and now I just feel... inadequate and inexperienced." She confided and he nodded in understanding. "Well Y/N, you don't need to have sex with people to be experienced" he informed, making air quotations around the e-word. She sighed in defeat, not really sure if she wanted to discuss the past with him, but for once she wanted someone to understand her and why she chose to be this way. "It's not like I was- or am a total prude... like I've seen a cock... I just... don't feel comfortable because of a previous relationship is all." She whispered. "Y/N, did someone hurt you?" He asked with concern and she shook her head. "No, no, s'nothing like that... I guess I don't really have anything to complain about then, do I?" She snorted and he shook his head. "Problems are problems... maybe they're small for me, but big for you, and vice versa and that's how it is. There's no comparison, we all have different levels of tolerance to the things we face, don't undermine yours to another persons." He enunciated. "So continue." "Well it was a long time ago, I was like 16. I was dating this guy and he was a really great guy... after around a year of just kissing he wanted more and I did too and I was scared... but he said we could start small. So he showed me how to get him off properly, but after that one time it was always about that, always about him, and I just felt so used. Everything changed from then on, he was always trying to persuade me and and so we broke up when I didn't want to go further and that was that. That was the one thing that did it for me, it's when I decided that I didn't want that feeling of obligation. Everyone says it's s beautiful wonderful thing, but I've never felt that, y'know?" She confessed. Well this was terrible because these aspects of life are some of the most amazing in his opinion and it really does allow you and your partner to build a certain level of trust. Or at lest this is what Harry believes. She's breathing a bit hard, probably shocked that she even expressed these things, and he lifts his tea cup to take another sip. He loves earl grey... the tantalizing taste has him ready for more and he takes another sip before Y/N speaks up. "Help me." She says softly and Harry glances to her. "With what?" He asks, going in for another sip. "Gain experience." She appealed and he sputtered out his tea and coughed loudly, eyes wide as the tea traveled down places it shouldn't be and when he caught his breath he looked st her like she had completely lost every bit of common sense. "You're barking mad, Y/N. You don't need experience because some cock doesn't understand the value of virginity." He contended. "Haven't you heard anything I've said? I want to enjoy these things because they are important... but I just- I trust you, Haz, so help me." She asked once more and well... he wants to say yes n\because he likes her... but he doesn't want to just use her. "Y/N, you can't ask me to do that." He practically whined. It was as if she was asking him to murder his family or something that horrible. He would surely fall for her if he went through with this, and clearly she sees him as someone who she relies on, not someone who has piqued her interest far more than any other person. He would fall for her and she would go on with her life. "At least think about it, Haz. Please?" He sighed, remaining quiet for some time, finishing his tea and then glancing up at her. "I'll do it. But, we need to establish some boundaries." "Yes, yes whatever you think is good. I'm just tired of feeling like the crazy unreasonable person because of a bad experience. I've let my fear of failure and rejection just take over this part of me and I'm sick of it." "Alright, well I'll bring by a list of stuff tomorrow and we can go over it." He said and she nodded before throwing her arms around him. "Thanks Harry. I swear to you, you mean so much to me and I'm not just using you. I asked you because I trust you the most." She confessed and he nodded, rearing her back and offering a smile, "And it doesn't hurt that you're kinda' cute." She said towards the end, finally showing a part of her true self and he let his smile mold into a smirk. "Kinda'?" He grinned and she blushed. "Y'know what I mean." - - - Y/N knocked on Harry's flat door, waiting patiently for him to open it up, Finally he opened it up and let her in. To say she was nervous was definitely an understatement. She had never felt such a strong urge to throw up. They weren't going to do anything but go over a few guidelines in order to not cross boundaries and such. Y/N followed Harry down the hall and giggled and he turned quickly. "What?" He asked smiling. "I just love hoe you can tell which room is Louis." She explained and he chuckled. "So who's your favorite roomie? In or Lou? I promise I won't tell." She said as they walked to the last door. "Honestly, I hate them both. Louis never cleans and he stinks the house up with weed and Niall eats all my food- note that this is after he says I eat gross healthy stuff- and borrows my clothes, then shrinks them when he washes them. So I guess if I had to choose one... I would rather live alone." He said and they both laughed as they made it into his bedroom. It was definitely bigger than the other two, had its own bathroom and all, it looked so tidy and aesthetically pleasing. "Lucky for them they're such great friends.... otherwise I would've evicted them after the first month." He finished as they both sat on the edge of the bed. Now she felt even more nervous; a silence had taken over and he pulled a folded paper from his back pocket. "So... I thought a few things up, you tell me if they're okay, or need revision." He said sand she nodded, getting ready to listen. "One. Went don't tell anyone, I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea about this, you know? Two. Full disclosure is a requirement if we are gonna do this. If you're nervous, scared, unsure, not ready for something, you need to tell me. I don't want to hurt you, Y/N." she really liked that one, "Three. If there's anything you're curious about or want to...try? Or dabble in just tell me, don't take me by surprise, if it's something I'm not familiar with I'd like to educate myself on the matter, you know?" Her nod was the response he was looking for before he continued. "Four is quite basic... these things might occur on the random or we might plan a time or something. If you're looking to feel good it's better that we dedicate some time to it though. Five... uhhh okay this is more for my benefit, you can't moan things like "fuck me, Harry" or summat that'll just do things to me. You're the one who is supposed to be feeling her way through this, not me. And when I hear something like that I might get a bit carried away and again, I don't want to push you or hurt you. And last, we're not going to have sex. I thought about this for a while and I think that you should be s virgin for as long as you want. I just want to help you see that physical parts of relationships can be great, but you should save that for someone you're in love with, you know?" Despite the slight hurt in his chest upon saying that, he needed to. That wasn't something for him to take from her, especially not in this situation. "Does this sound good?" He inquired and she nodded. "Yeah, perfect." She said and he smiled, he was a bit taken when her arms wrapped around his neck. "Thanks, H. I mean obviously I'm super nervous about this... but I did want to throw one more thing in." She said pulling away from him a bit. "What's that?" He asked, eyes not leaving hers. "I demand some cuddles. Niall told me you're a great snuggle and I believe him." Harry chuckled and nodded. "Fine, we can add the cuddling." He said rolling his eyes/ "Don't act like you're not excited about it." She interjected and he smiled. Maybe this would work out in his favor... he was a pretty damn good cuddle.

[iyarpage]

RWDevCon 2017 Inspiration Talk: Creating Community by Sarah Olson

Note from Ray: At our 2017 RWDevCon tutorial conference, in addition to hands-on tutorials, we also had a number of “inspiration talks” – non-technical talks with the goal of giving you a new idea or some battle-won advice, and leaving you excited and energized.

We recorded these talks so that you could enjoy them even if you didn’t get to attend the conference. Here’s one of the inspiration talks from RWDevCon 2017: “Creating Community” by Sarah Olson. I hope you enjoy it!

Transcript

When I attend a tech event, one of the first things I do—and I don’t know that I really even think about it—is I count the number of women I see in the audience. Usually I can count them on my two hands. I’ve noticed at this conference I had to use my feet too, which was great, but it’s still nowhere near where we should be.

I wonder to you guys if you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be a woman in tech, to walk in to a conference room and immediately feel out of place, not sure if you’re welcome or if anyone’s going to talk to you. It’s alienating to be different, to look around the room and wonder why there’s no one there that looks like you or comes from your background.

What Does Different Feel Like?

It’s a really hard feeling to describe. I think most people have had those moments, maybe your first day of school or college. It’s hard to put that into words, but the fact is: 41% of women leave tech within 10 years. That’s almost half.

I’ve nearly doubled that with my career, but I have to tell you there were times that I almost left. Multiple times. I get so excited when I see other women developers because it’s really rare—especially, I’ve noticed, in iOS—and it’s actually getting worse. I probably worked with twice as many female developers when I started my career than I do now.

When I tell people about the issues women face they’re usually shocked and they’re very concerned, and they want to know how to fix it. But it’s not a problem that’s easy to fix. It’s little things here and there, death by a thousand cuts. There are lots of seemingly insignificant signals and choices and language that can create a culture that feels hostile and unwelcoming.

It doesn’t feel like my kind of space. Do I belong here?

I’ve moved around from corporate to startups, from small companies to large companies, and I’ve struggled to find a place where I felt like I really belonged. I’ve been searching for my community.

Finding a Community

Now my story here today begins with a conference.

Two years ago, Apple opened up their WWDC scholarship program to marginalized groups in tech. Previously, this had only been available for students, but now they were opening it up to developers with experience. They listed a group of diversity organizations that would qualify you to apply for a scholarship. I looked at this list and I’d never heard of any of them, but I didn’t actually know these groups existed. They didn’t have these kinds of things around when I started.

I was fairly new to iOS development at this time. I spent most of my career on backend Java, database, middleware. A few years prior, I had started at a software development shop that was technology agnostic and when they ran out of work in Java, they would say, “Well, what do you want to learn now?” And I said, “Well, iOS sounds fun.”

I would do an iOS project and then they were like, “Well, no, we don’t have those. How about Android?” So I do some Android and I did WordPress sites for friends, so they had me do some WordPress. It was great, but I was the jack-of-all-trades and master of none. You can’t keep up in all those different technologies and I’ve always felt like I was struggling to stay up to date.

I felt like if I got into WWDC, it would give me a whole week full of really great technical expertise that I could go back to my employer and say, “Look, I can do this full time. Make me a primary member of the iOS team and not the person who flits around between projects and technologies.”

I wanted to apply for a scholarship, but I wasn’t actually a member of these groups yet, so I looked through them and there were two that looked promising that I could qualify for. One was Women Who Code and the other was Girl Develop It, which goes by GDI typically these days. GDI was the only one that was in my area at the time.

Girl Develop It

GDI is a group that offers coding classes to adult women. They do it on nights and weekends so more women can attend. They’re very inexpensive, and it’s a great group that’s helping bring more women into tech.

This particular group in Minneapolis already had a pretty large leadership team, which I joined, but I struggled to find my place within their group. I couldn’t figure out what exactly I could give them to help them with their mission, but I loved helping women find a passion for technology.

Now GDI, like many of the other diversity groups out there, focuses on the pipeline.

They want to bring more women into tech. They especially want girls to become interested in tech. There’s a lot of science and research out there that shows that especially in middle school, girls lose interest in STEM. There are a lot of reasons for that, but there are also many programs out there to help them. Plus, kids (especially my kids) love their iPads and iPhones, and anything they can do to play with them. They’re so excited.

It always felt to me like this is a little easier of a problem to solve. They already love technology. It’s just letting them know that they can do it. Fixing retention, keeping women in tech—that’s super hard, but it didn’t seem like anybody was actually tackling that problem, that death by a thousand cuts. We are just handing out band-aids. That’s not helping.

Women face so many problems with culture and benefits, flexibility, promotion. Sexism is systemic and it’s everywhere, and it’s hard to address all these things that are coming at you from so many different places. But what good is fixing the pipeline if it just ends up in a sewer?

Not a great place to end up.

Back to WWDC. I won a scholarship. Yay!

It was great. We flew out to go to Moscone, and they had the scholarship program the day before with events and some of the leaders talking. It was a little strange. I don’t think people really knew what to do with the experienced developers in the room. It was mostly high school students, so we felt really out of place, but I’m like, “Well, free ticket, WWDC. I can’t complain.”

While I was there, though, I met with a bunch of different leaders from Women Who Code and they shared my vision of, “Let’s fix retention. Let’s work on those problems that are really hard. That’s what we need to solve.”

Women Who Code

Women Who Code is a global non-profit dedicated to helping women excel in their technology careers, whether that’s technical expertise or getting them into leadership positions. We’re trying to help them create the career that they want.

I applied to start a network in the Twin Cities and I became a director. Creating a community was completely new to me and I had no idea how to do it. Do I just throw an event out there and hope people show up?

I decided to look at some of the other organizations that were already in our area and I found a ton of other groups that were doing this work, and I had no idea they were even there.

Most of them at this time were actually focused on gender. They were all reaching out to women, and I was a little sad that there weren’t any groups out there reaching out to other marginalized communities in tech, based on race or sexual orientation or gender identity, disability, anything else. Thankfully, that has changed in the last year and we now have some of those groups, but at the time, there were a lot that were trying to help women.

I reached out to all their leadership teams and said, you know, “Hey, I want to find out more about you. What is it that you are doing that’s unique? What kind of events are you holding? Who are you specifically focused on?”

Once I talked to them I realized that they didn’t really know that other groups existed either. They didn’t really talk to anyone else. They didn’t collaborate at all and they weren’t really interested in collaborating. They mostly just wanted to do their thing, so I had to find out what their thing was.

Once I had clarity on who they were and what their mission was, I could then see where the gaps were, so now I knew what was missing from our tech community.

One of the great things about joining an existing organization is that a lot of things were kind of given to me that I didn’t have to worry about, so they already had branding and logos, and they had a website that I could point people to for more information. They took care of all the taxes and finances that go along with being a non-profit. They had an online donation page all ready for me so people could help fund our new network. They also had a person who helped get us press, which was huge.

Most importantly, they had a vision and mission, so it was very easy for us to know what we should be doing in the community.

In August of 2015, I created our first event in Meetup. Originally I had booked a room for 25 people, and I really thought that would be more than enough. I thought two or three people would show up and that would make me really, really happy, but two weeks before the event, I had to go find a larger venue, which was great. It’s a really awesome problem to have.

We ended up having, I think, 34 people show up. Women Who Code also had some guidelines on the sort of events to have, and one of those is called a Hack Night, which is what we did for our first event. It’s just a night where women can come in and connect with other women. They can ask questions, they can work on projects, and it’s a safe space.

Safe Spaces

Ash yesterday talked about psychological safety and that’s exactly what we’re doing here. We’re trying to provide a place for women to go and not be afraid to fail or to look stupid. Sometimes these women, they’re the only women on their development team. They’re alone and that can feel really isolating and lonely.

One of the things mentioned yesterday was these series of tweets in which developers were kind of owning up to when they were stupid. There were a series of tweets from women talking about how they didn’t feel comfortable being that vocal on Twitter, that people might use this against them, because it already happens to women a lot.

I thought that was really important to highlight: not everyone has the ability to look stupid. Women feel a lot of pressure to be perfect all the time, so it’s really important for us to provide a safe space.

We also want to reach out beyond that, so we have lots of different types of events. One event we did that I thought was really helpful was a talk about how to deal with sexism and harassment at professional events, because unfortunately that happens a lot.

Things we talked about included does this or that conference have a code of conduct, and if it doesn’t, do you want to go? Maybe you shouldn’t. What if something happens to you and you report it? Lots of women face backlash for reporting things; is it worth it to you?

We talked about some horror stories, things like Gamergate, things that have happened in other communities, and gave advice and information to make decisions.

Another thing that we do is coding with your kids, where members bring their children in. It kind of seems like we’re trying to address the pipeline issue by doing that, but what we’re really doing is giving women the ability to attend meetings if they can’t find childcare. A lot of women struggled to make events on evenings and weekends because they’d say, “What am I going to do with my kids?”

Recently, we did a series of events on emerging technology, so we toured a 3D printing factory and I used some of the funds that were donated to buy a 3D printer (a very, very cheap one) and let our members play around with it and see how it works.

We also did a meet-up on virtual reality just before the PlayStation 4 VR came out, and we had all the different VR companies come in and show off their technology. We had a member talk about a game that she created on the Samsung Gear VR platform.

Next week we’re doing a screening of a new documentary called She Started It, which talks about some of the problems women face as entrepreneurs, and we’re having a local panel of female entrepreneurs talk at the event about some of their experiences as well.

What I’ve Learned About Building Community

Throughout all of this, what have I learned?

There might already be communities you don’t even know about, so it’s really important to do some research and figure out who’s out there. Think about the communities you’re already involved in, and what you like and dislike about them.

The best way to figure out what you want from a community is to see what’s out there and go, “Mm, I like that thing, but I don’t like that.” Think outside the box a little bit. For example, here’s my family on our trip to Florida:

We were like a tiny, little community. We have lots of great feelings attached to that community, love and inclusion, and feeling welcome. Can I extend those feelings to my other community somehow?

There are a lot of really strange communities out there. One I found out about last week on Reddit is a subforum called Birds with Arms where people Photoshop arms on to birds.

It’s amazing and you should go look at it.

Even with all these communities out there, sometimes you can’t find what you’re looking for and you need to create it yourself.

One of the events I attended last year was Collision Conference and they offered free tickets to women in technology, but they didn’t have any way for us to actually connect once we were there, so it still felt really isolating. So we made our own event. We basically flagged down any women we could find at the conference and said, “Hey, we’re meeting at this time.”

We actually made an activity where we put up boards with post-its and said, “Okay, how can we help improve this in the future?” We gave that to the organizers at the end of the conference. Then someone actually wrote up something on Huffington Post about us going rogue.

When you’re creating your own community, it’s really important to be deliberate about what you’re doing. Really think about your mission and your vision. Think about who is included in your community, but most importantly who is excluded.

With Women Who Code, you can kind of tell from the name that we’re focusing on women, not not-women. Then we’re focusing on people who code, but we wanted to make sure that we were being very inclusive with the term women, so we had to put some language in our meet-ups to make sure that anyone who identifies as a woman felt comfortable and welcome attending. We really wanted to make sure that that was as inclusive as possible.

Sometimes members contact us and they’re like, “Well, I don’t know how to code yet.” We’re very open about that too, so sometimes those names can get in the way, but it’s really important to put that out there as, “Yes, please. You’re included as well.” Still, you have to draw a line somewhere. Someone is going to get excluded from your community, so think about the language you use.

Think about the location that you’re meeting in. Are there transit options so people can get to your meeting if you’re doing something in person? Is there access for people in wheelchairs? What ages are you targeting? We’re only looking at adults, but there are lots of groups for girls too. What experience level? We get lots of questions on that.

As a leader, it’s really important to keep things manageable. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. There’s a lot of work (or there can be) to being a leader, so grow slowly to make sure you can keep up with things. I have tons of ideas and I get really excited about them, but I have to keep in mind that I really can only commit to one a month.

Eventually, you’re going to have to grow your leadership team if your community is successful. I’ve recently added another leader to help me out with a lot of the work that I’m doing.

It’s important to know when to ask for help, but it’s also important to be careful about who you’re adding to your team. Lots of leaders or potential leaders have reached out and said, “I’m really excited about doing this,” but they never actually attended an event, or they’ll show up once and then not come back, but still really want to be a leader. It seems like some people are more interested in the title than actually doing the work, so it’s important to vet people. Find leaders with strengths where you have weaknesses. Make sure you’ve got everything covered.

Alignment is very critical. Having a shared vision and a plan forward will help save you a lot of drama. I’ve seen this happen in other groups where they’ve got a huge leadership team and no one can agree on what they should do or where they should go, and it’s really difficult to get anything done.

Community is about sharing. I mean, that’s the whole point. A community has a common goal or interest and you want to share that with other people, so it’s important that if you see another community that your members would benefit from, even if it kind of overlaps with yours, tell them about it.

Don’t be territorial. You’re trying to help people find a place where they feel like they belong, so give that to them. Collaborate with other communities when you can. I try to do as many events with other groups as I can to try and offer a larger community and make a bigger impact.

Remember that diversity makes you stronger. Even though you have this shared common interest, make sure that you’re getting differing opinions in there. You don’t want to focus it too small and miss out on some of the great diversity you could have in our group. Being inclusive is really hard work. There are lots of different opinions on how you should do things and the right terms you should use, and it can feel really daunting to misspeak or use the wrong term. Just focus on being respectful and listen to people when they point things out, and apologize if you did something wrong.

Everyone messes up. It’s okay.

An important thing to think about is what you’re going to offer your members. If you look at the Hierarchy of Needs:

At the bottom, you’re pretty sure most of your community has food and water and shelter. Hopefully you don’t have to worry about that; maybe you do, but at our community the next level up is about safety. That’s something I’m already pretty concerned about, so the first thing I care about is making sure we have a safe space.

One of the things I’ve done is to ask recruiters not to attend our events because it can make some people uneasy, and I’m doing all I can to make sure people feel comfortable attending.

It’s also important to think about your own needs. What are you getting out of this? Is it making you happy? Are you fulfilled?

The one thing I struggle with most is feedback. People don’t want to tell me anything, so it’s like pulling teeth. “Is this good? Do you like this? Would you like something else?” People don’t really know. They know what they don’t like, but it’s really hard to schedule around that, so we’ve had to come up with some creative ways of gathering feedback.

One of the things we’re doing this year is we have a challenge, like New Year’s resolutions. As in, do all these things and earn points, and at the end of the year we’ll give out really cool prizes. Part of the challenge is when they submit the entry to get points, we ask a few questions like, “Did you like this event? What more could you see?” We’re starting to get a little bit more feedback that way. It seems like the more you ask, after a while people will finally start offering up little tidbits.

The most important thing to me is: how do you want your community to feel?

How do you want your members to feel? As Ash said, feelings matter. How would it feel to be a new member, and walk in the door and not know anybody? Maybe you’re brand new to coding or maybe you’re really experienced. How do all of those different members feel?

Try and put yourself in their shoes.

This Maya Angelou quote really stands out to me. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

This, I think, is why feelings are really so important.

I’ve got a lot I could talk about on this subject and I just have a short time today, so if you want to talk any more about it or have any other questions, feel free to contact me. My Twitter is @saraheolson, and then Women Who Code Twin Cities is @WWCodeTC.

Thank you.

Note from Ray: If you enjoyed this talk, you should join us at the next RWDevCon! We’ve sold out in previous years, so don’t miss your chance.

The post RWDevCon 2017 Inspiration Talk: Creating Community by Sarah Olson appeared first on Ray Wenderlich.

RWDevCon 2017 Inspiration Talk: Creating Community by Sarah Olson published first on http://ift.tt/2fA8nUr

[sandranelsonuk]

13 WordPress Plugins That’ll Save You a Ton of Time

Running a blog requires an insane amount of time.

In fact, there’s not enough time in your day to do everything (especially if you have a full-time job, too).

From learning new ways to get traffic and scheduling social media posts to building your email list and managing comments, you feel stretched to your limit.

And the more you learn and grow, the more you have to keep up with — it’s exhausting.

So what if I told you that you can add a squad of tools to your toolbox that will eliminate a ton of time spent on the more tedious aspects of blogging?

These 13 WordPress plugins are like having a full-time employee that shaves hours off of your blogging work week, so you can get back to doing the important things: writing and connecting with your audience.

Plugin #1: Beacon

If you’re committed to building your email list, content upgrades can increase your subscribers substantially.

My sitewide opt-in offer converts at a rate of around 10% while my content upgrades convert at closer to 25%-30%.

That means that for every 100 visitors to my blog, I can collect 15-20 more emails.

Impressive, right?

But adding content upgrades to every article you publish seems like a daunting task, right?

Not if you use Beacon.

Beacon allows you to create ebooks from your existing articles automatically, right on your WordPress dashboard:

If you have several blog posts that could go together in one cohesive ebook, or if you have a long piece of content that could do the same, Beacon can do that for you …

Without having to fiddle around with designing it yourself.

I made an ebook with Beacon for my guide on Instagram marketing in five minutes flat, and it converted at over 20% of visitors.

Massive results in a quarter of the time.

Plugin #2: Pretty Link

With Pretty Link, you can create shorter, more memorable links to any page you refer to a lot. This keeps you from having to hunt down their URLs all the time.

For example, affiliate links can be quite complicated and contain random sequences of numbers that are hard to remember. So if you refer to the same affiliate product a lot, you can create a simpler link like “http://yourdomain.com/productname.”

And you can do the same for any post or page to which you refer often. You can bring each URL down to a memorable keyword and won’t have to spend any time hunting down links.

Just compare:

You can see how the second URL would be easier to remember, can’t you?

And that’s not all. Pretty Link also saves time whenever you have to replace a link you’ve used a lot.

Say you were to change your username on Twitter. You’d have to hunt down every link to your Twitter account and replace them …

Unless you created a Pretty Link that says “http://yourdomain.com/twitter.” You can just go into your dashboard, edit the target URL, and you’re done.

Plugin #3: SEO Smart Links

When you publish a new article on your blog, do you visit all your previous articles and link them to the new one?

It’s good for SEO and will boost your page views by helping more readers find your content.

But it’s way too time-consuming, right?

Enter SEO Smart Links, which is a plugin that automatically links keywords or phrases in your articles based on rules you set.

For example, I have an article about one of my coaching clients who built a $10,000/month business through one method I teach of finding clients. I set it up so every time phrases like “freelancing clients” or “find freelancing clients”  come up on my blog, they’re automatically linked to this article.

This makes it so I’ll never have to dig through my older posts to create internal links.

Note: This also comes in handy with affiliate links. You can make sure you never miss an opportunity to earn affiliate income by setting an SEO Smart Link.

Plugin #4: Yoast SEO

Let me guess …

When somebody says “SEO,” you want to run for the hills.

For new and even experienced bloggers, search engine optimization is like Mount Everest for beginner climbers. It’s the “holy grail” of traffic generation strategies, yet it’s daunting to execute.

So you could spend the next several months learning about SEO.

Or, you could save yourself hundreds of hours reading case study after case study, researching best SEO practices, and trying to decipher Google-ese by installing Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that guides you through optimizing each of your posts through a handy checklist to “grade” how well you’ve optimized your post:

You should know the basics of SEO (so you don’t piss Google off), but with Yoast SEO, you don’t need to spend hours studying.

Plugin #5: MonsterInsights

Checking stats is as addictive as Candy Crush and just as unproductive too. When you break your focus from what you’re working on (i.e., important things like writing articles), you sacrifice about 20 minutes of productivity — even if you were only distracted for two minutes.

This is called “task switching” and it’s a huge time suck.

Cutting back on obsessive stat-checking is difficult once you’re hooked, but you can reduce the time you waste with MonsterInsights.

It’s a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that shows you the most important stats right on your dashboard.

You’ll no longer have to leave your site to check analytics (and get drowned in the ocean of distracting figures). You can stay inside WordPress, get your quick fix, and move on to writing your post.

Plugin #6: WP Performance Profiler

The speed of your website directly impacts your search engine results.

Meaning that if your blog is slow, Google will penalize you. And often, when your blog is slow, it’s one or more of your plugins that causes the issue.

This is a huge pain to fix.

First, you have to pull up Google’s PageSpeed tester. Then you have to begin disabling your plugins one-by-one. And after every plugin you disable, you have to test the speed again to see if you found the culprit.

That is, unless you let WP Performance Profiler do all the heavy lifting for you.

This nifty plugin costs less than ten bucks and saves you having to dig for problem plugins by reporting the activated plugins that are making your blog lag the most.

It even tells you the impact your plugins have on your site’s front end, which affects how speedy it seems for your readers:

This saves you the time of having to test your site to try and find the offending plugins.

So activate WP Performance Profiler on your blog, deactivate those problem plugins, and get back to doing the important work of a blogger.

Plugin #7: UpdraftPlus

If your blog has never gone down, it probably will at some point, whether it’s because of hosting issues or a broken plugin or theme.

These issues can often be fixed quite quickly, but sometimes it’s not that simple and it wipes some of your blog’s history clean. Worst case scenario: You lose a ton of content.

Unless you install UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin that backs up your blog and stores your backup files in DropBox, Google Drive, or whatever remote storage solution you use.

This essential plugin will save you time in two ways:

You won’t have to spend hours on the phone or in online chat with your web host trying to restore the last backup of your site.

You won’t have to backup your blog manually. UpdraftPlus will run automated backups on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do so yourself.

Trust me, when your website does inevitably break, you’ll be glad you had the foresight to install this plugin.

Plugin #8: Akismet

Have you ever logged onto your blog’s WordPress dashboard and seen comments like this?:

Thanks for the compliment, “Petite Clothing.”

These are spam comments that are a huge time waste.

There’s nothing quite as mind-numbing as sorting through comments to identify what’s real and what’s left by robots.

Which is why all bloggers must use Akismet – WordPress’s most popular anti-spam plugin which filters out all spam comments with remarkable accuracy:

Plugin #9: WP Broken Link Status Checker

Broken links hurt your SEO and your reader’s experience of your site.

So you need to make sure your links are all in good order, right?

Except that would take hours upon hours. You’d have to go through your posts periodically to check for broken links, testing each one as if you were a reader.

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Instead, use WP Broken Link Status Checker.

This plugin runs scans which will check all of the links on your website on autopilot based on your own parameters. You can check for internal links, or make sure that your reader won’t bottom out when they click on a link you placed to another blogger.

Plugin #10: ManageWP

When you have more than one blog, you can get even more overwhelmed keeping track of everything.

You have a million tabs open on Google Chrome, you waste a ton of time each day flitting between each tab (often to bring up the wrong one), and you can hardly keep up.

Well, look no further, because ManageWP will make your life a whole lot easier.

ManageWP is a WordPress management system that connects your blogs to a single dashboard.

I have three blogs, and this plugin saves me a ton of time going from one to the other. It provides me easy access to each one with a single click, and also provides an easy overview of the security, performance, and analytics of each one.

ManageWP is a must-have for anyone who manages multiple blogs.

Plugin #11: Enable Media Replace

About a year ago, I hired a web designer to overhaul my blog, Unsettle.

When the design was finally done and pushed out to the world, I began to notice little problems:

I needed to replace my old logo on all of the pages it still showed up on. My headshots were out of date on my old content and pages, and a lot of the blog images I had created were no longer relevant.

I had some work to do.

First, I had to upload the new logo, headshots, and blog images to WordPress.

Then, I had to comb through the pages of my blog to update these images, eating up hours of time (and a lot of patience, too).

But then I stumbled across Enable Media Replace: a WordPress plugin that lets you replace the piece of media (in my case, the images) rather than uploading new ones and hunting them down.

Plugin #12: Appointments+

You’ve been there.

You’re trying to book a coaching call, or a time to meet with a potential freelancing client, or maybe just trying to set up a call with a reader, but you can’t find a time that works for you both.

So you spend what feels like hours in your email inbox proposing, rejecting, and rescheduling.

If this sounds familiar, this plugin will give you huge relief. Appointments+ is a plugin that allows you and your clients or readers to book appointments right on your WordPress website …

Allowing you to get out of your email inbox and save time, frustration, and back and forth.

Note: This plugin is only available as part of a larger package which costs $49/month. On the other hand, you won’t need this plugin until you have enough clients to afford it. (And the package includes other useful plugins as well!)

Plugin #13: CoSchedule

You know the feeling …

You have a million ideas for blog posts (or maybe, like me, you have a million half-written drafts), and you’re overwhelmed. It’s hard to keep everything organized and keep yourself focused.

Sound familiar?

Then try CoSchedule. It will help you manage your editorial calendar and your social media promotions all in one spot, saving you the time of having to flit between different apps.

Plus, you can post to your Facebook Group right from your WordPress dashboard, and it shows how well your social media posts did, saving you from having to find your analytics in a different app.

CoSchedule is another paid plugin, but it’s a huge time-saver that will leave you feeling far more organized and put together.

Get Off the Blogging Hamster Wheel

Sometimes, blogging feels like you’re on a hamster wheel.

You’re busy all the time, but you’re not getting anywhere fast.

My guess is that’s because you’re spending time on some tasks that, while crucial, won’t propel you forward.

So get off the blogging hamster wheel. Automate the boring stuff with these 13 WordPress plugins so you can get back to the meaningful work: the work you thought you were getting into when you started your blog.

And watch your productivity soar.

Sarah Peterson writes insanely useful guides on marketing and entrepreneurship at Unsettle.org. Get her report, 10 Free Tools That Reveal the Product Your Audience Is Begging For to finally start making money from your blog … the right way.

  from Julia Garza Social Media Tips https://smartblogger.com/time-saving-wordpress-plugins/

[alanajacksontx]

13 WordPress Plugins That’ll Save You a Ton of Time

Running a blog requires an insane amount of time.

In fact, there’s not enough time in your day to do everything (especially if you have a full-time job, too).

From learning new ways to get traffic and scheduling social media posts to building your email list and managing comments, you feel stretched to your limit.

And the more you learn and grow, the more you have to keep up with — it’s exhausting.

So what if I told you that you can add a squad of tools to your toolbox that will eliminate a ton of time spent on the more tedious aspects of blogging?

These 13 WordPress plugins are like having a full-time employee that shaves hours off of your blogging work week, so you can get back to doing the important things: writing and connecting with your audience.

Plugin #1: Beacon

If you’re committed to building your email list, content upgrades can increase your subscribers substantially.

My sitewide opt-in offer converts at a rate of around 10% while my content upgrades convert at closer to 25%-30%.

That means that for every 100 visitors to my blog, I can collect 15-20 more emails.

Impressive, right?

But adding content upgrades to every article you publish seems like a daunting task, right?

Not if you use Beacon.

Beacon allows you to create ebooks from your existing articles automatically, right on your WordPress dashboard:

If you have several blog posts that could go together in one cohesive ebook, or if you have a long piece of content that could do the same, Beacon can do that for you …

Without having to fiddle around with designing it yourself.

I made an ebook with Beacon for my guide on Instagram marketing in five minutes flat, and it converted at over 20% of visitors.

Massive results in a quarter of the time.

Plugin #2: Pretty Link

With Pretty Link, you can create shorter, more memorable links to any page you refer to a lot. This keeps you from having to hunt down their URLs all the time.

For example, affiliate links can be quite complicated and contain random sequences of numbers that are hard to remember. So if you refer to the same affiliate product a lot, you can create a simpler link like “http://yourdomain.com/productname.”

And you can do the same for any post or page to which you refer often. You can bring each URL down to a memorable keyword and won’t have to spend any time hunting down links.

Just compare:

You can see how the second URL would be easier to remember, can’t you?

And that’s not all. Pretty Link also saves time whenever you have to replace a link you’ve used a lot.

Say you were to change your username on Twitter. You’d have to hunt down every link to your Twitter account and replace them …

Unless you created a Pretty Link that says “http://yourdomain.com/twitter.” You can just go into your dashboard, edit the target URL, and you’re done.

Plugin #3: SEO Smart Links

When you publish a new article on your blog, do you visit all your previous articles and link them to the new one?

It’s good for SEO and will boost your page views by helping more readers find your content.

But it’s way too time-consuming, right?

Enter SEO Smart Links, which is a plugin that automatically links keywords or phrases in your articles based on rules you set.

For example, I have an article about one of my coaching clients who built a $10,000/month business through one method I teach of finding clients. I set it up so every time phrases like “freelancing clients” or “find freelancing clients”  come up on my blog, they’re automatically linked to this article.

This makes it so I’ll never have to dig through my older posts to create internal links.

Note: This also comes in handy with affiliate links. You can make sure you never miss an opportunity to earn affiliate income by setting an SEO Smart Link.

Plugin #4: Yoast SEO

Let me guess …

When somebody says “SEO,” you want to run for the hills.

For new and even experienced bloggers, search engine optimization is like Mount Everest for beginner climbers. It’s the “holy grail” of traffic generation strategies, yet it’s daunting to execute.

So you could spend the next several months learning about SEO.

Or, you could save yourself hundreds of hours reading case study after case study, researching best SEO practices, and trying to decipher Google-ese by installing Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that guides you through optimizing each of your posts through a handy checklist to “grade” how well you’ve optimized your post:

You should know the basics of SEO (so you don’t piss Google off), but with Yoast SEO, you don’t need to spend hours studying.

Plugin #5: MonsterInsights

Checking stats is as addictive as Candy Crush and just as unproductive too. When you break your focus from what you’re working on (i.e., important things like writing articles), you sacrifice about 20 minutes of productivity — even if you were only distracted for two minutes.

This is called “task switching” and it’s a huge time suck.

Cutting back on obsessive stat-checking is difficult once you’re hooked, but you can reduce the time you waste with MonsterInsights.

It’s a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that shows you the most important stats right on your dashboard.

You’ll no longer have to leave your site to check analytics (and get drowned in the ocean of distracting figures). You can stay inside WordPress, get your quick fix, and move on to writing your post.

Plugin #6: P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

The speed of your website directly impacts your search engine results.

Meaning that if your blog is slow, Google will penalize you. And often, when your blog is slow, it’s one or more of your plugins that causes the issue.

This is a huge pain to fix.

First, you have to pull up Google’s PageSpeed tester. Then you have to begin disabling your plugins one-by-one. And after every plugin you disable, you have to test the speed again to see if you found the culprit.

That is, unless you let P3 Plugin Performance Profiler do all the heavy lifting for you.

P3 Profiler saves you the time of having to dig for problem plugins by reporting your activated plugins that are making your blog lag the most.

It even tells you the impact your plugins have on your page load time:

This saves you the time of having to test your site to try and find the problematic plugins.

So activate P3 on your blog, deactivate your top problem plugins, and get back to doing the important work of a blogger.

Plugin #7: UpdraftPlus

If your blog has never gone down, it probably will at some point, whether it’s because of hosting issues or a broken plugin or theme.

These issues can often be fixed quite quickly, but sometimes it’s not that simple and it wipes some of your blog’s history clean. Worst case scenario: You lose a ton of content.

Unless you install UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin that backs up your blog and stores your backup files in DropBox, Google Drive, or whatever remote storage solution you use.

This essential plugin will save you time in two ways:

You won’t have to spend hours on the phone or in online chat with your web host trying to restore the last backup of your site.

You won’t have to backup your blog manually. UpdraftPlus will run automated backups on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do so yourself.

Trust me, when your website does inevitably break, you’ll be glad you had the foresight to install this plugin.

Plugin #8: Akismet

Have you ever logged onto your blog’s WordPress dashboard and seen comments like this?:

Thanks for the compliment, “Petite Clothing.”

These are spam comments that are a huge time waste.

There’s nothing quite as mind-numbing as sorting through comments to identify what’s real and what’s left by robots.

Which is why all bloggers must use Akismet – WordPress’s most popular anti-spam plugin which filters out all spam comments with remarkable accuracy:

Plugin #9: WP Broken Link Status Checker

Broken links hurt your SEO and your reader’s experience of your site.

So you need to make sure your links are all in good order, right?

Except that would take hours upon hours. You’d have to go through your posts periodically to check for broken links, testing each one as if you were a reader.

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Instead, use WP Broken Link Status Checker.

This plugin runs scans which will check all of the links on your website on autopilot based on your own parameters. You can check for internal links, or make sure that your reader won’t bottom out when they click on a link you placed to another blogger.

Plugin #10: ManageWP

When you have more than one blog, you can get even more overwhelmed keeping track of everything.

You have a million tabs open on Google Chrome, you waste a ton of time each day flitting between each tab (often to bring up the wrong one), and you can hardly keep up.

Well, look no further, because ManageWP will make your life a whole lot easier.

ManageWP is a WordPress management system that connects your blogs to a single dashboard.

I have three blogs, and this plugin saves me a ton of time going from one to the other. It provides me easy access to each one with a single click, and also provides an easy overview of the security, performance, and analytics of each one.

ManageWP is a must-have for anyone who manages multiple blogs.

Plugin #11: Enable Media Replace

About a year ago, I hired a web designer to overhaul my blog, Unsettle.

When the design was finally done and pushed out to the world, I began to notice little problems:

I needed to replace my old logo on all of the pages it still showed up on. My headshots were out of date on my old content and pages, and a lot of the blog images I had created were no longer relevant.

I had some work to do.

First, I had to upload the new logo, headshots, and blog images to WordPress.

Then, I had to comb through the pages of my blog to update these images, eating up hours of time (and a lot of patience, too).

But then I stumbled across Enable Media Replace: a WordPress plugin that lets you replace the piece of media (in my case, the images) rather than uploading new ones and hunting them down.

Plugin #12: Appointments+

You’ve been there.

You’re trying to book a coaching call, or a time to meet with a potential freelancing client, or maybe just trying to set up a call with a reader, but you can’t find a time that works for you both.

So you spend what feels like hours in your email inbox proposing, rejecting, and rescheduling.

If this sounds familiar, this plugin will give you huge relief. Appointments+ is a plugin that allows you and your clients or readers to book appointments right on your WordPress website …

Allowing you to get out of your email inbox and save time, frustration, and back and forth.

Note: This plugin is only available as part of a larger package which costs $49/month. On the other hand, you won’t need this plugin until you have enough clients to afford it. (And the package includes other useful plugins as well!)

Plugin #13: CoSchedule

You know the feeling …

You have a million ideas for blog posts (or maybe, like me, you have a million half-written drafts), and you’re overwhelmed. It’s hard to keep everything organized and keep yourself focused.

Sound familiar?

Then try CoSchedule. It will help you manage your editorial calendar and your social media promotions all in one spot, saving you the time of having to flit between different apps.

Plus, you can post to your Facebook Group right from your WordPress dashboard, and it shows how well your social media posts did, saving you from having to find your analytics in a different app.

CoSchedule is another paid plugin, but it’s a huge time-saver that will leave you feeling far more organized and put together.

Get Off the Blogging Hamster Wheel

Sometimes, blogging feels like you’re on a hamster wheel.

You’re busy all the time, but you’re not getting anywhere fast.

My guess is that’s because you’re spending time on some tasks that, while crucial, won’t propel you forward.

So get off the blogging hamster wheel. Automate the boring stuff with these 13 WordPress plugins so you can get back to the meaningful work: the work you thought you were getting into when you started your blog.

And watch your productivity soar.

Sarah Peterson writes insanely useful guides on marketing and entrepreneurship at Unsettle.org. Get her report, 10 Free Tools That Reveal the Product Your Audience Is Begging For to finally start making money from your blog … the right way.

    A helpful reader has informed us that P3 Profiler has not been updated in some time. We are in the process of researching an alternative and will update our recommendation shortly. Thanks for your patience!

  from Internet Marketing Tips https://smartblogger.com/time-saving-wordpress-plugins/

[laurendcameron]

13 WordPress Plugins That’ll Save You a Ton of Time

Running a blog requires an insane amount of time.

In fact, there’s not enough time in your day to do everything (especially if you have a full-time job, too).

From learning new ways to get traffic and scheduling social media posts to building your email list and managing comments, you feel stretched to your limit.

And the more you learn and grow, the more you have to keep up with — it’s exhausting.

So what if I told you that you can add a squad of tools to your toolbox that will eliminate a ton of time spent on the more tedious aspects of blogging?

These 13 WordPress plugins are like having a full-time employee that shaves hours off of your blogging work week, so you can get back to doing the important things: writing and connecting with your audience.

Plugin #1: Beacon

If you’re committed to building your email list, content upgrades can increase your subscribers substantially.

My sitewide opt-in offer converts at a rate of around 10% while my content upgrades convert at closer to 25%-30%.

That means that for every 100 visitors to my blog, I can collect 15-20 more emails.

Impressive, right?

But adding content upgrades to every article you publish seems like a daunting task, right?

Not if you use Beacon.

Beacon allows you to create ebooks from your existing articles automatically, right on your WordPress dashboard:

If you have several blog posts that could go together in one cohesive ebook, or if you have a long piece of content that could do the same, Beacon can do that for you …

Without having to fiddle around with designing it yourself.

I made an ebook with Beacon for my guide on Instagram marketing in five minutes flat, and it converted at over 20% of visitors.

Massive results in a quarter of the time.

Plugin #2: Pretty Link

With Pretty Link, you can create shorter, more memorable links to any page you refer to a lot. This keeps you from having to hunt down their URLs all the time.

For example, affiliate links can be quite complicated and contain random sequences of numbers that are hard to remember. So if you refer to the same affiliate product a lot, you can create a simpler link like “http://yourdomain.com/productname.”

And you can do the same for any post or page to which you refer often. You can bring each URL down to a memorable keyword and won’t have to spend any time hunting down links.

Just compare:

You can see how the second URL would be easier to remember, can’t you?

And that’s not all. Pretty Link also saves time whenever you have to replace a link you’ve used a lot.

Say you were to change your username on Twitter. You’d have to hunt down every link to your Twitter account and replace them …

Unless you created a Pretty Link that says “http://yourdomain.com/twitter.” You can just go into your dashboard, edit the target URL, and you’re done.

Plugin #3: SEO Smart Links

When you publish a new article on your blog, do you visit all your previous articles and link them to the new one?

It’s good for SEO and will boost your page views by helping more readers find your content.

But it’s way too time-consuming, right?

Enter SEO Smart Links, which is a plugin that automatically links keywords or phrases in your articles based on rules you set.

For example, I have an article about one of my coaching clients who built a $10,000/month business through one method I teach of finding clients. I set it up so every time phrases like “freelancing clients” or “find freelancing clients”  come up on my blog, they’re automatically linked to this article.

This makes it so I’ll never have to dig through my older posts to create internal links.

Note: This also comes in handy with affiliate links. You can make sure you never miss an opportunity to earn affiliate income by setting an SEO Smart Link.

Plugin #4: Yoast SEO

Let me guess …

When somebody says “SEO,” you want to run for the hills.

For new and even experienced bloggers, search engine optimization is like Mount Everest for beginner climbers. It’s the “holy grail” of traffic generation strategies, yet it’s daunting to execute.

So you could spend the next several months learning about SEO.

Or, you could save yourself hundreds of hours reading case study after case study, researching best SEO practices, and trying to decipher Google-ese by installing Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that guides you through optimizing each of your posts through a handy checklist to “grade” how well you’ve optimized your post:

You should know the basics of SEO (so you don’t piss Google off), but with Yoast SEO, you don’t need to spend hours studying.

Plugin #5: MonsterInsights

Checking stats is as addictive as Candy Crush and just as unproductive too. When you break your focus from what you’re working on (i.e., important things like writing articles), you sacrifice about 20 minutes of productivity — even if you were only distracted for two minutes.

This is called “task switching” and it’s a huge time suck.

Cutting back on obsessive stat-checking is difficult once you’re hooked, but you can reduce the time you waste with MonsterInsights.

It’s a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that shows you the most important stats right on your dashboard.

You’ll no longer have to leave your site to check analytics (and get drowned in the ocean of distracting figures). You can stay inside WordPress, get your quick fix, and move on to writing your post.

Plugin #6: P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

The speed of your website directly impacts your search engine results.

Meaning that if your blog is slow, Google will penalize you. And often, when your blog is slow, it’s one or more of your plugins that causes the issue.

This is a huge pain to fix.

First, you have to pull up Google’s PageSpeed tester. Then you have to begin disabling your plugins one-by-one. And after every plugin you disable, you have to test the speed again to see if you found the culprit.

That is, unless you let P3 Plugin Performance Profiler do all the heavy lifting for you.

P3 Profiler saves you the time of having to dig for problem plugins by reporting your activated plugins that are making your blog lag the most.

It even tells you the impact your plugins have on your page load time:

This saves you the time of having to test your site to try and find the problematic plugins.

So activate P3 on your blog, deactivate your top problem plugins, and get back to doing the important work of a blogger.

Plugin #7: UpdraftPlus

If your blog has never gone down, it probably will at some point, whether it’s because of hosting issues or a broken plugin or theme.

These issues can often be fixed quite quickly, but sometimes it’s not that simple and it wipes some of your blog’s history clean. Worst case scenario: You lose a ton of content.

Unless you install UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin that backs up your blog and stores your backup files in DropBox, Google Drive, or whatever remote storage solution you use.

This essential plugin will save you time in two ways:

You won’t have to spend hours on the phone or in online chat with your web host trying to restore the last backup of your site.

You won’t have to backup your blog manually. UpdraftPlus will run automated backups on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do so yourself.

Trust me, when your website does inevitably break, you’ll be glad you had the foresight to install this plugin.

Plugin #8: Akismet

Have you ever logged onto your blog’s WordPress dashboard and seen comments like this?:

Thanks for the compliment, “Petite Clothing.”

These are spam comments that are a huge time waste.

There’s nothing quite as mind-numbing as sorting through comments to identify what’s real and what’s left by robots.

Which is why all bloggers must use Akismet – WordPress’s most popular anti-spam plugin which filters out all spam comments with remarkable accuracy:

Plugin #9: WP Broken Link Status Checker

Broken links hurt your SEO and your reader’s experience of your site.

So you need to make sure your links are all in good order, right?

Except that would take hours upon hours. You’d have to go through your posts periodically to check for broken links, testing each one as if you were a reader.

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Instead, use WP Broken Link Status Checker.

This plugin runs scans which will check all of the links on your website on autopilot based on your own parameters. You can check for internal links, or make sure that your reader won’t bottom out when they click on a link you placed to another blogger.

Plugin #10: ManageWP

When you have more than one blog, you can get even more overwhelmed keeping track of everything.

You have a million tabs open on Google Chrome, you waste a ton of time each day flitting between each tab (often to bring up the wrong one), and you can hardly keep up.

Well, look no further, because ManageWP will make your life a whole lot easier.

ManageWP is a WordPress management system that connects your blogs to a single dashboard.

I have three blogs, and this plugin saves me a ton of time going from one to the other. It provides me easy access to each one with a single click, and also provides an easy overview of the security, performance, and analytics of each one.

ManageWP is a must-have for anyone who manages multiple blogs.

Plugin #11: Enable Media Replace

About a year ago, I hired a web designer to overhaul my blog, Unsettle.

When the design was finally done and pushed out to the world, I began to notice little problems:

I needed to replace my old logo on all of the pages it still showed up on. My headshots were out of date on my old content and pages, and a lot of the blog images I had created were no longer relevant.

I had some work to do.

First, I had to upload the new logo, headshots, and blog images to WordPress.

Then, I had to comb through the pages of my blog to update these images, eating up hours of time (and a lot of patience, too).

But then I stumbled across Enable Media Replace: a WordPress plugin that lets you replace the piece of media (in my case, the images) rather than uploading new ones and hunting them down.

Plugin #12: Appointments+

You’ve been there.

You’re trying to book a coaching call, or a time to meet with a potential freelancing client, or maybe just trying to set up a call with a reader, but you can’t find a time that works for you both.

So you spend what feels like hours in your email inbox proposing, rejecting, and rescheduling.

If this sounds familiar, this plugin will give you huge relief. Appointments+ is a plugin that allows you and your clients or readers to book appointments right on your WordPress website …

Allowing you to get out of your email inbox and save time, frustration, and back and forth.

Note: This plugin is only available as part of a larger package which costs $49/month. On the other hand, you won’t need this plugin until you have enough clients to afford it. (And the package includes other useful plugins as well!)

Plugin #13: CoSchedule

You know the feeling …

You have a million ideas for blog posts (or maybe, like me, you have a million half-written drafts), and you’re overwhelmed. It’s hard to keep everything organized and keep yourself focused.

Sound familiar?

Then try CoSchedule. It will help you manage your editorial calendar and your social media promotions all in one spot, saving you the time of having to flit between different apps.

Plus, you can post to your Facebook Group right from your WordPress dashboard, and it shows how well your social media posts did, saving you from having to find your analytics in a different app.

CoSchedule is another paid plugin, but it’s a huge time-saver that will leave you feeling far more organized and put together.

Get Off the Blogging Hamster Wheel

Sometimes, blogging feels like you’re on a hamster wheel.

You’re busy all the time, but you’re not getting anywhere fast.

My guess is that’s because you’re spending time on some tasks that, while crucial, won’t propel you forward.

So get off the blogging hamster wheel. Automate the boring stuff with these 13 WordPress plugins so you can get back to the meaningful work: the work you thought you were getting into when you started your blog.

And watch your productivity soar.

Sarah Peterson writes insanely useful guides on marketing and entrepreneurship at Unsettle.org. Get her report, 10 Free Tools That Reveal the Product Your Audience Is Begging For to finally start making money from your blog … the right way.

    A helpful reader has informed us that P3 Profiler has not been updated in some time. We are in the process of researching an alternative and will update our recommendation shortly. Thanks for your patience!

  from Lauren Cameron Updates https://smartblogger.com/time-saving-wordpress-plugins/

[stevenshartus]

13 WordPress Plugins That’ll Save You a Ton of Time

Running a blog requires an insane amount of time.

In fact, there’s not enough time in your day to do everything (especially if you have a full-time job, too).

From learning new ways to get traffic and scheduling social media posts to building your email list and managing comments, you feel stretched to your limit.

And the more you learn and grow, the more you have to keep up with — it’s exhausting.

So what if I told you that you can add a squad of tools to your toolbox that will eliminate a ton of time spent on the more tedious aspects of blogging?

These 13 WordPress plugins are like having a full-time employee that shaves hours off of your blogging work week, so you can get back to doing the important things: writing and connecting with your audience.

Plugin #1: Beacon

If you’re committed to building your email list, content upgrades can increase your subscribers substantially.

My sitewide opt-in offer converts at a rate of around 10% while my content upgrades convert at closer to 25%-30%.

That means that for every 100 visitors to my blog, I can collect 15-20 more emails.

Impressive, right?

But adding content upgrades to every article you publish seems like a daunting task, right?

Not if you use Beacon.

Beacon allows you to create ebooks from your existing articles automatically, right on your WordPress dashboard:

If you have several blog posts that could go together in one cohesive ebook, or if you have a long piece of content that could do the same, Beacon can do that for you …

Without having to fiddle around with designing it yourself.

I made an ebook with Beacon for my guide on Instagram marketing in five minutes flat, and it converted at over 20% of visitors.

Massive results in a quarter of the time.

Plugin #2: Pretty Link

With Pretty Link, you can create shorter, more memorable links to any page you refer to a lot. This keeps you from having to hunt down their URLs all the time.

For example, affiliate links can be quite complicated and contain random sequences of numbers that are hard to remember. So if you refer to the same affiliate product a lot, you can create a simpler link like “http://yourdomain.com/productname.”

And you can do the same for any post or page to which you refer often. You can bring each URL down to a memorable keyword and won’t have to spend any time hunting down links.

Just compare:

You can see how the second URL would be easier to remember, can’t you?

And that’s not all. Pretty Link also saves time whenever you have to replace a link you’ve used a lot.

Say you were to change your username on Twitter. You’d have to hunt down every link to your Twitter account and replace them …

Unless you created a Pretty Link that says “http://yourdomain.com/twitter.” You can just go into your dashboard, edit the target URL, and you’re done.

Plugin #3: SEO Smart Links

When you publish a new article on your blog, do you visit all your previous articles and link them to the new one?

It’s good for SEO and will boost your page views by helping more readers find your content.

But it’s way too time-consuming, right?

Enter SEO Smart Links, which is a plugin that automatically links keywords or phrases in your articles based on rules you set.

For example, I have an article about one of my coaching clients who built a $10,000/month business through one method I teach of finding clients. I set it up so every time phrases like “freelancing clients” or “find freelancing clients”  come up on my blog, they’re automatically linked to this article.

This makes it so I’ll never have to dig through my older posts to create internal links.

Note: This also comes in handy with affiliate links. You can make sure you never miss an opportunity to earn affiliate income by setting an SEO Smart Link.

Plugin #4: Yoast SEO

Let me guess …

When somebody says “SEO,” you want to run for the hills.

For new and even experienced bloggers, search engine optimization is like Mount Everest for beginner climbers. It’s the “holy grail” of traffic generation strategies, yet it’s daunting to execute.

So you could spend the next several months learning about SEO.

Or, you could save yourself hundreds of hours reading case study after case study, researching best SEO practices, and trying to decipher Google-ese by installing Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that guides you through optimizing each of your posts through a handy checklist to “grade” how well you’ve optimized your post:

You should know the basics of SEO (so you don’t piss Google off), but with Yoast SEO, you don’t need to spend hours studying.

Plugin #5: MonsterInsights

Checking stats is as addictive as Candy Crush and just as unproductive too. When you break your focus from what you’re working on (i.e., important things like writing articles), you sacrifice about 20 minutes of productivity — even if you were only distracted for two minutes.

This is called “task switching” and it’s a huge time suck.

Cutting back on obsessive stat-checking is difficult once you’re hooked, but you can reduce the time you waste with MonsterInsights.

It’s a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that shows you the most important stats right on your dashboard.

You’ll no longer have to leave your site to check analytics (and get drowned in the ocean of distracting figures). You can stay inside WordPress, get your quick fix, and move on to writing your post.

Plugin #6: P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

The speed of your website directly impacts your search engine results.

Meaning that if your blog is slow, Google will penalize you. And often, when your blog is slow, it’s one or more of your plugins that causes the issue.

This is a huge pain to fix.

First, you have to pull up Google’s PageSpeed tester. Then you have to begin disabling your plugins one-by-one. And after every plugin you disable, you have to test the speed again to see if you found the culprit.

That is, unless you let P3 Plugin Performance Profiler do all the heavy lifting for you.

P3 Profiler saves you the time of having to dig for problem plugins by reporting your activated plugins that are making your blog lag the most.

It even tells you the impact your plugins have on your page load time:

This saves you the time of having to test your site to try and find the problematic plugins.

So activate P3 on your blog, deactivate your top problem plugins, and get back to doing the important work of a blogger.

Plugin #7: UpdraftPlus

If your blog has never gone down, it probably will at some point, whether it’s because of hosting issues or a broken plugin or theme.

These issues can often be fixed quite quickly, but sometimes it’s not that simple and it wipes some of your blog’s history clean. Worst case scenario: You lose a ton of content.

Unless you install UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin that backs up your blog and stores your backup files in DropBox, Google Drive, or whatever remote storage solution you use.

This essential plugin will save you time in two ways:

You won’t have to spend hours on the phone or in online chat with your web host trying to restore the last backup of your site.

You won’t have to backup your blog manually. UpdraftPlus will run automated backups on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do so yourself.

Trust me, when your website does inevitably break, you’ll be glad you had the foresight to install this plugin.

Plugin #8: Akismet

Have you ever logged onto your blog’s WordPress dashboard and seen comments like this?:

Thanks for the compliment, “Petite Clothing.”

These are spam comments that are a huge time waste.

There’s nothing quite as mind-numbing as sorting through comments to identify what’s real and what’s left by robots.

Which is why all bloggers must use Akismet – WordPress’s most popular anti-spam plugin which filters out all spam comments with remarkable accuracy:

Plugin #9: WP Broken Link Status Checker

Broken links hurt your SEO and your reader’s experience of your site.

So you need to make sure your links are all in good order, right?

Except that would take hours upon hours. You’d have to go through your posts periodically to check for broken links, testing each one as if you were a reader.

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Instead, use WP Broken Link Status Checker.

This plugin runs scans which will check all of the links on your website on autopilot based on your own parameters. You can check for internal links, or make sure that your reader won’t bottom out when they click on a link you placed to another blogger.

Plugin #10: ManageWP

When you have more than one blog, you can get even more overwhelmed keeping track of everything.

You have a million tabs open on Google Chrome, you waste a ton of time each day flitting between each tab (often to bring up the wrong one), and you can hardly keep up.

Well, look no further, because ManageWP will make your life a whole lot easier.

ManageWP is a WordPress management system that connects your blogs to a single dashboard.

I have three blogs, and this plugin saves me a ton of time going from one to the other. It provides me easy access to each one with a single click, and also provides an easy overview of the security, performance, and analytics of each one.

ManageWP is a must-have for anyone who manages multiple blogs.

Plugin #11: Enable Media Replace

About a year ago, I hired a web designer to overhaul my blog, Unsettle.

When the design was finally done and pushed out to the world, I began to notice little problems:

I needed to replace my old logo on all of the pages it still showed up on. My headshots were out of date on my old content and pages, and a lot of the blog images I had created were no longer relevant.

I had some work to do.

First, I had to upload the new logo, headshots, and blog images to WordPress.

Then, I had to comb through the pages of my blog to update these images, eating up hours of time (and a lot of patience, too).

But then I stumbled across Enable Media Replace: a WordPress plugin that lets you replace the piece of media (in my case, the images) rather than uploading new ones and hunting them down.

Plugin #12: Appointments+

You’ve been there.

You’re trying to book a coaching call, or a time to meet with a potential freelancing client, or maybe just trying to set up a call with a reader, but you can’t find a time that works for you both.

So you spend what feels like hours in your email inbox proposing, rejecting, and rescheduling.

If this sounds familiar, this plugin will give you huge relief. Appointments+ is a plugin that allows you and your clients or readers to book appointments right on your WordPress website …

Allowing you to get out of your email inbox and save time, frustration, and back and forth.

Note: This plugin is only available as part of a larger package which costs $49/month. On the other hand, you won’t need this plugin until you have enough clients to afford it. (And the package includes other useful plugins as well!)

Plugin #13: CoSchedule

You know the feeling …

You have a million ideas for blog posts (or maybe, like me, you have a million half-written drafts), and you’re overwhelmed. It’s hard to keep everything organized and keep yourself focused.

Sound familiar?

Then try CoSchedule. It will help you manage your editorial calendar and your social media promotions all in one spot, saving you the time of having to flit between different apps.

Plus, you can post to your Facebook Group right from your WordPress dashboard, and it shows how well your social media posts did, saving you from having to find your analytics in a different app.

CoSchedule is another paid plugin, but it’s a huge time-saver that will leave you feeling far more organized and put together.

Get Off the Blogging Hamster Wheel

Sometimes, blogging feels like you’re on a hamster wheel.

You’re busy all the time, but you’re not getting anywhere fast.

My guess is that’s because you’re spending time on some tasks that, while crucial, won’t propel you forward.

So get off the blogging hamster wheel. Automate the boring stuff with these 13 WordPress plugins so you can get back to the meaningful work: the work you thought you were getting into when you started your blog.

And watch your productivity soar.

Sarah Peterson writes insanely useful guides on marketing and entrepreneurship at Unsettle.org. Get her report, 10 Free Tools That Reveal the Product Your Audience Is Begging For to finally start making money from your blog … the right way.

    A helpful reader has informed us that P3 Profiler has not been updated in some time. We are in the process of researching an alternative and will update our recommendation shortly. Thanks for your patience!

  from SEO and SM Tips https://smartblogger.com/time-saving-wordpress-plugins/

[felixdgreen]

13 WordPress Plugins That’ll Save You a Ton of Time

Running a blog requires an insane amount of time.

In fact, there’s not enough time in your day to do everything (especially if you have a full-time job, too).

From learning new ways to get traffic and scheduling social media posts to building your email list and managing comments, you feel stretched to your limit.

And the more you learn and grow, the more you have to keep up with — it’s exhausting.

So what if I told you that you can add a squad of tools to your toolbox that will eliminate a ton of time spent on the more tedious aspects of blogging?

These 13 WordPress plugins are like having a full-time employee that shaves hours off of your blogging work week, so you can get back to doing the important things: writing and connecting with your audience.

Plugin #1: Beacon

If you’re committed to building your email list, content upgrades can increase your subscribers substantially.

My sitewide opt-in offer converts at a rate of around 10% while my content upgrades convert at closer to 25%-30%.

That means that for every 100 visitors to my blog, I can collect 15-20 more emails.

Impressive, right?

But adding content upgrades to every article you publish seems like a daunting task, right?

Not if you use Beacon.

Beacon allows you to create ebooks from your existing articles automatically, right on your WordPress dashboard:

If you have several blog posts that could go together in one cohesive ebook, or if you have a long piece of content that could do the same, Beacon can do that for you …

Without having to fiddle around with designing it yourself.

I made an ebook with Beacon for my guide on Instagram marketing in five minutes flat, and it converted at over 20% of visitors.

Massive results in a quarter of the time.

Plugin #2: Pretty Link

With Pretty Link, you can create shorter, more memorable links to any page you refer to a lot. This keeps you from having to hunt down their URLs all the time.

For example, affiliate links can be quite complicated and contain random sequences of numbers that are hard to remember. So if you refer to the same affiliate product a lot, you can create a simpler link like “http://yourdomain.com/productname.”

And you can do the same for any post or page to which you refer often. You can bring each URL down to a memorable keyword and won’t have to spend any time hunting down links.

Just compare:

You can see how the second URL would be easier to remember, can’t you?

And that’s not all. Pretty Link also saves time whenever you have to replace a link you’ve used a lot.

Say you were to change your username on Twitter. You’d have to hunt down every link to your Twitter account and replace them …

Unless you created a Pretty Link that says “http://yourdomain.com/twitter.” You can just go into your dashboard, edit the target URL, and you’re done.

Plugin #3: SEO Smart Links

When you publish a new article on your blog, do you visit all your previous articles and link them to the new one?

It’s good for SEO and will boost your page views by helping more readers find your content.

But it’s way too time-consuming, right?

Enter SEO Smart Links, which is a plugin that automatically links keywords or phrases in your articles based on rules you set.

For example, I have an article about one of my coaching clients who built a $10,000/month business through one method I teach of finding clients. I set it up so every time phrases like “freelancing clients” or “find freelancing clients”  come up on my blog, they’re automatically linked to this article.

This makes it so I’ll never have to dig through my older posts to create internal links.

Note: This also comes in handy with affiliate links. You can make sure you never miss an opportunity to earn affiliate income by setting an SEO Smart Link.

Plugin #4: Yoast SEO

Let me guess …

When somebody says “SEO,” you want to run for the hills.

For new and even experienced bloggers, search engine optimization is like Mount Everest for beginner climbers. It’s the “holy grail” of traffic generation strategies, yet it’s daunting to execute.

So you could spend the next several months learning about SEO.

Or, you could save yourself hundreds of hours reading case study after case study, researching best SEO practices, and trying to decipher Google-ese by installing Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that guides you through optimizing each of your posts through a handy checklist to “grade” how well you’ve optimized your post:

You should know the basics of SEO (so you don’t piss Google off), but with Yoast SEO, you don’t need to spend hours studying.

Plugin #5: MonsterInsights

Checking stats is as addictive as Candy Crush and just as unproductive too. When you break your focus from what you’re working on (i.e., important things like writing articles), you sacrifice about 20 minutes of productivity — even if you were only distracted for two minutes.

This is called “task switching” and it’s a huge time suck.

Cutting back on obsessive stat-checking is difficult once you’re hooked, but you can reduce the time you waste with MonsterInsights.

It’s a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that shows you the most important stats right on your dashboard.

You’ll no longer have to leave your site to check analytics (and get drowned in the ocean of distracting figures). You can stay inside WordPress, get your quick fix, and move on to writing your post.

Plugin #6: P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

The speed of your website directly impacts your search engine results.

Meaning that if your blog is slow, Google will penalize you. And often, when your blog is slow, it’s one or more of your plugins that causes the issue.

This is a huge pain to fix.

First, you have to pull up Google’s PageSpeed tester. Then you have to begin disabling your plugins one-by-one. And after every plugin you disable, you have to test the speed again to see if you found the culprit.

That is, unless you let P3 Plugin Performance Profiler do all the heavy lifting for you.

P3 Profiler saves you the time of having to dig for problem plugins by reporting your activated plugins that are making your blog lag the most.

It even tells you the impact your plugins have on your page load time:

This saves you the time of having to test your site to try and find the problematic plugins.

So activate P3 on your blog, deactivate your top problem plugins, and get back to doing the important work of a blogger.

Plugin #7: UpdraftPlus

If your blog has never gone down, it probably will at some point, whether it’s because of hosting issues or a broken plugin or theme.

These issues can often be fixed quite quickly, but sometimes it’s not that simple and it wipes some of your blog’s history clean. Worst case scenario: You lose a ton of content.

Unless you install UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin that backs up your blog and stores your backup files in DropBox, Google Drive, or whatever remote storage solution you use.

This essential plugin will save you time in two ways:

You won’t have to spend hours on the phone or in online chat with your web host trying to restore the last backup of your site.

You won’t have to backup your blog manually. UpdraftPlus will run automated backups on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do so yourself.

Trust me, when your website does inevitably break, you’ll be glad you had the foresight to install this plugin.

Plugin #8: Akismet

Have you ever logged onto your blog’s WordPress dashboard and seen comments like this?:

Thanks for the compliment, “Petite Clothing.”

These are spam comments that are a huge time waste.

There’s nothing quite as mind-numbing as sorting through comments to identify what’s real and what’s left by robots.

Which is why all bloggers must use Akismet – WordPress’s most popular anti-spam plugin which filters out all spam comments with remarkable accuracy:

Plugin #9: WP Broken Link Status Checker

Broken links hurt your SEO and your reader’s experience of your site.

So you need to make sure your links are all in good order, right?

Except that would take hours upon hours. You’d have to go through your posts periodically to check for broken links, testing each one as if you were a reader.

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Instead, use WP Broken Link Status Checker.

This plugin runs scans which will check all of the links on your website on autopilot based on your own parameters. You can check for internal links, or make sure that your reader won’t bottom out when they click on a link you placed to another blogger.

Plugin #10: ManageWP

When you have more than one blog, you can get even more overwhelmed keeping track of everything.

You have a million tabs open on Google Chrome, you waste a ton of time each day flitting between each tab (often to bring up the wrong one), and you can hardly keep up.

Well, look no further, because ManageWP will make your life a whole lot easier.

ManageWP is a WordPress management system that connects your blogs to a single dashboard.

I have three blogs, and this plugin saves me a ton of time going from one to the other. It provides me easy access to each one with a single click, and also provides an easy overview of the security, performance, and analytics of each one.

ManageWP is a must-have for anyone who manages multiple blogs.

Plugin #11: Enable Media Replace

About a year ago, I hired a web designer to overhaul my blog, Unsettle.

When the design was finally done and pushed out to the world, I began to notice little problems:

I needed to replace my old logo on all of the pages it still showed up on. My headshots were out of date on my old content and pages, and a lot of the blog images I had created were no longer relevant.

I had some work to do.

First, I had to upload the new logo, headshots, and blog images to WordPress.

Then, I had to comb through the pages of my blog to update these images, eating up hours of time (and a lot of patience, too).

But then I stumbled across Enable Media Replace: a WordPress plugin that lets you replace the piece of media (in my case, the images) rather than uploading new ones and hunting them down.

Plugin #12: Appointments+

You’ve been there.

You’re trying to book a coaching call, or a time to meet with a potential freelancing client, or maybe just trying to set up a call with a reader, but you can’t find a time that works for you both.

So you spend what feels like hours in your email inbox proposing, rejecting, and rescheduling.

If this sounds familiar, this plugin will give you huge relief. Appointments+ is a plugin that allows you and your clients or readers to book appointments right on your WordPress website …

Allowing you to get out of your email inbox and save time, frustration, and back and forth.

Note: This plugin is only available as part of a larger package which costs $49/month. On the other hand, you won’t need this plugin until you have enough clients to afford it. (And the package includes other useful plugins as well!)

Plugin #13: CoSchedule

You know the feeling …

You have a million ideas for blog posts (or maybe, like me, you have a million half-written drafts), and you’re overwhelmed. It’s hard to keep everything organized and keep yourself focused.

Sound familiar?

Then try CoSchedule. It will help you manage your editorial calendar and your social media promotions all in one spot, saving you the time of having to flit between different apps.

Plus, you can post to your Facebook Group right from your WordPress dashboard, and it shows how well your social media posts did, saving you from having to find your analytics in a different app.

CoSchedule is another paid plugin, but it’s a huge time-saver that will leave you feeling far more organized and put together.

Get Off the Blogging Hamster Wheel

Sometimes, blogging feels like you’re on a hamster wheel.

You’re busy all the time, but you’re not getting anywhere fast.

My guess is that’s because you’re spending time on some tasks that, while crucial, won’t propel you forward.

So get off the blogging hamster wheel. Automate the boring stuff with these 13 WordPress plugins so you can get back to the meaningful work: the work you thought you were getting into when you started your blog.

And watch your productivity soar.

Sarah Peterson writes insanely useful guides on marketing and entrepreneurship at Unsettle.org. Get her report, 10 Free Tools That Reveal the Product Your Audience Is Begging For to finally start making money from your blog … the right way.

    A helpful reader has informed us that P3 Profiler has not been updated in some time. We are in the process of researching an alternative and will update our recommendation shortly. Thanks for your patience!

  from IM News And Tips https://smartblogger.com/time-saving-wordpress-plugins/

[cherylxsmith]

13 WordPress Plugins That’ll Save You a Ton of Time

Running a blog requires an insane amount of time.

In fact, there’s not enough time in your day to do everything (especially if you have a full-time job, too).

From learning new ways to get traffic and scheduling social media posts to building your email list and managing comments, you feel stretched to your limit.

And the more you learn and grow, the more you have to keep up with — it’s exhausting.

So what if I told you that you can add a squad of tools to your toolbox that will eliminate a ton of time spent on the more tedious aspects of blogging?

These 13 WordPress plugins are like having a full-time employee that shaves hours off of your blogging work week, so you can get back to doing the important things: writing and connecting with your audience.

Plugin #1: Beacon

If you’re committed to building your email list, content upgrades can increase your subscribers substantially.

My sitewide opt-in offer converts at a rate of around 10% while my content upgrades convert at closer to 25%-30%.

That means that for every 100 visitors to my blog, I can collect 15-20 more emails.

Impressive, right?

But adding content upgrades to every article you publish seems like a daunting task, right?

Not if you use Beacon.

Beacon allows you to create ebooks from your existing articles automatically, right on your WordPress dashboard:

If you have several blog posts that could go together in one cohesive ebook, or if you have a long piece of content that could do the same, Beacon can do that for you …

Without having to fiddle around with designing it yourself.

I made an ebook with Beacon for my guide on Instagram marketing in five minutes flat, and it converted at over 20% of visitors.

Massive results in a quarter of the time.

Plugin #2: Pretty Link

With Pretty Link, you can create shorter, more memorable links to any page you refer to a lot. This keeps you from having to hunt down their URLs all the time.

For example, affiliate links can be quite complicated and contain random sequences of numbers that are hard to remember. So if you refer to the same affiliate product a lot, you can create a simpler link like “http://yourdomain.com/productname.”

And you can do the same for any post or page to which you refer often. You can bring each URL down to a memorable keyword and won’t have to spend any time hunting down links.

Just compare:

You can see how the second URL would be easier to remember, can’t you?

And that’s not all. Pretty Link also saves time whenever you have to replace a link you’ve used a lot.

Say you were to change your username on Twitter. You’d have to hunt down every link to your Twitter account and replace them …

Unless you created a Pretty Link that says “http://yourdomain.com/twitter.” You can just go into your dashboard, edit the target URL, and you’re done.

Plugin #3: SEO Smart Links

When you publish a new article on your blog, do you visit all your previous articles and link them to the new one?

It’s good for SEO and will boost your page views by helping more readers find your content.

But it’s way too time-consuming, right?

Enter SEO Smart Links, which is a plugin that automatically links keywords or phrases in your articles based on rules you set.

For example, I have an article about one of my coaching clients who built a $10,000/month business through one method I teach of finding clients. I set it up so every time phrases like “freelancing clients” or “find freelancing clients”  come up on my blog, they’re automatically linked to this article.

This makes it so I’ll never have to dig through my older posts to create internal links.

Note: This also comes in handy with affiliate links. You can make sure you never miss an opportunity to earn affiliate income by setting an SEO Smart Link.

Plugin #4: Yoast SEO

Let me guess …

When somebody says “SEO,” you want to run for the hills.

For new and even experienced bloggers, search engine optimization is like Mount Everest for beginner climbers. It’s the “holy grail” of traffic generation strategies, yet it’s daunting to execute.

So you could spend the next several months learning about SEO.

Or, you could save yourself hundreds of hours reading case study after case study, researching best SEO practices, and trying to decipher Google-ese by installing Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that guides you through optimizing each of your posts through a handy checklist to “grade” how well you’ve optimized your post:

You should know the basics of SEO (so you don’t piss Google off), but with Yoast SEO, you don’t need to spend hours studying.

Plugin #5: MonsterInsights

Checking stats is as addictive as Candy Crush and just as unproductive too. When you break your focus from what you’re working on (i.e., important things like writing articles), you sacrifice about 20 minutes of productivity — even if you were only distracted for two minutes.

This is called “task switching” and it’s a huge time suck.

Cutting back on obsessive stat-checking is difficult once you’re hooked, but you can reduce the time you waste with MonsterInsights.

It’s a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that shows you the most important stats right on your dashboard.

You’ll no longer have to leave your site to check analytics (and get drowned in the ocean of distracting figures). You can stay inside WordPress, get your quick fix, and move on to writing your post.

Plugin #6: P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

The speed of your website directly impacts your search engine results.

Meaning that if your blog is slow, Google will penalize you. And often, when your blog is slow, it’s one or more of your plugins that causes the issue.

This is a huge pain to fix.

First, you have to pull up Google’s PageSpeed tester. Then you have to begin disabling your plugins one-by-one. And after every plugin you disable, you have to test the speed again to see if you found the culprit.

That is, unless you let P3 Plugin Performance Profiler do all the heavy lifting for you.

P3 Profiler saves you the time of having to dig for problem plugins by reporting your activated plugins that are making your blog lag the most.

It even tells you the impact your plugins have on your page load time:

This saves you the time of having to test your site to try and find the problematic plugins.

So activate P3 on your blog, deactivate your top problem plugins, and get back to doing the important work of a blogger.

Plugin #7: UpdraftPlus

If your blog has never gone down, it probably will at some point, whether it’s because of hosting issues or a broken plugin or theme.

These issues can often be fixed quite quickly, but sometimes it’s not that simple and it wipes some of your blog’s history clean. Worst case scenario: You lose a ton of content.

Unless you install UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin that backs up your blog and stores your backup files in DropBox, Google Drive, or whatever remote storage solution you use.

This essential plugin will save you time in two ways:

You won’t have to spend hours on the phone or in online chat with your web host trying to restore the last backup of your site.

You won’t have to backup your blog manually. UpdraftPlus will run automated backups on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do so yourself.

Trust me, when your website does inevitably break, you’ll be glad you had the foresight to install this plugin.

Plugin #8: Akismet

Have you ever logged onto your blog’s WordPress dashboard and seen comments like this?:

Thanks for the compliment, “Petite Clothing.”

These are spam comments that are a huge time waste.

There’s nothing quite as mind-numbing as sorting through comments to identify what’s real and what’s left by robots.

Which is why all bloggers must use Akismet – WordPress’s most popular anti-spam plugin which filters out all spam comments with remarkable accuracy:

Plugin #9: WP Broken Link Status Checker

Broken links hurt your SEO and your reader’s experience of your site.

So you need to make sure your links are all in good order, right?

Except that would take hours upon hours. You’d have to go through your posts periodically to check for broken links, testing each one as if you were a reader.

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Instead, use WP Broken Link Status Checker.

This plugin runs scans which will check all of the links on your website on autopilot based on your own parameters. You can check for internal links, or make sure that your reader won’t bottom out when they click on a link you placed to another blogger.

Plugin #10: ManageWP

When you have more than one blog, you can get even more overwhelmed keeping track of everything.

You have a million tabs open on Google Chrome, you waste a ton of time each day flitting between each tab (often to bring up the wrong one), and you can hardly keep up.

Well, look no further, because ManageWP will make your life a whole lot easier.

ManageWP is a WordPress management system that connects your blogs to a single dashboard.

I have three blogs, and this plugin saves me a ton of time going from one to the other. It provides me easy access to each one with a single click, and also provides an easy overview of the security, performance, and analytics of each one.

ManageWP is a must-have for anyone who manages multiple blogs.

Plugin #11: Enable Media Replace

About a year ago, I hired a web designer to overhaul my blog, Unsettle.

When the design was finally done and pushed out to the world, I began to notice little problems:

I needed to replace my old logo on all of the pages it still showed up on. My headshots were out of date on my old content and pages, and a lot of the blog images I had created were no longer relevant.

I had some work to do.

First, I had to upload the new logo, headshots, and blog images to WordPress.

Then, I had to comb through the pages of my blog to update these images, eating up hours of time (and a lot of patience, too).

But then I stumbled across Enable Media Replace: a WordPress plugin that lets you replace the piece of media (in my case, the images) rather than uploading new ones and hunting them down.

Plugin #12: Appointments+

You’ve been there.

You’re trying to book a coaching call, or a time to meet with a potential freelancing client, or maybe just trying to set up a call with a reader, but you can’t find a time that works for you both.

So you spend what feels like hours in your email inbox proposing, rejecting, and rescheduling.

If this sounds familiar, this plugin will give you huge relief. Appointments+ is a plugin that allows you and your clients or readers to book appointments right on your WordPress website …

Allowing you to get out of your email inbox and save time, frustration, and back and forth.

Note: This plugin is only available as part of a larger package which costs $49/month. On the other hand, you won’t need this plugin until you have enough clients to afford it. (And the package includes other useful plugins as well!)

Plugin #13: CoSchedule

You know the feeling …

You have a million ideas for blog posts (or maybe, like me, you have a million half-written drafts), and you’re overwhelmed. It’s hard to keep everything organized and keep yourself focused.

Sound familiar?

Then try CoSchedule. It will help you manage your editorial calendar and your social media promotions all in one spot, saving you the time of having to flit between different apps.

Plus, you can post to your Facebook Group right from your WordPress dashboard, and it shows how well your social media posts did, saving you from having to find your analytics in a different app.

CoSchedule is another paid plugin, but it’s a huge time-saver that will leave you feeling far more organized and put together.

Get Off the Blogging Hamster Wheel

Sometimes, blogging feels like you’re on a hamster wheel.

You’re busy all the time, but you’re not getting anywhere fast.

My guess is that’s because you’re spending time on some tasks that, while crucial, won’t propel you forward.

So get off the blogging hamster wheel. Automate the boring stuff with these 13 WordPress plugins so you can get back to the meaningful work: the work you thought you were getting into when you started your blog.

And watch your productivity soar.

Sarah Peterson writes insanely useful guides on marketing and entrepreneurship at Unsettle.org. Get her report, 10 Free Tools That Reveal the Product Your Audience Is Begging For to finally start making money from your blog … the right way.

    A helpful reader has informed us that P3 Profiler has not been updated in some time. We are in the process of researching an alternative and will update our recommendation shortly. Thanks for your patience!

  from SEO and SM Tips https://smartblogger.com/time-saving-wordpress-plugins/

[richardrobertsimsuccessblog]

13 WordPress Plugins That’ll Save You a Ton of Time

Running a blog requires an insane amount of time.

In fact, there’s not enough time in your day to do everything (especially if you have a full-time job, too).

From learning new ways to get traffic and scheduling social media posts to building your email list and managing comments, you feel stretched to your limit.

And the more you learn and grow, the more you have to keep up with — it’s exhausting.

So what if I told you that you can add a squad of tools to your toolbox that will eliminate a ton of time spent on the more tedious aspects of blogging?

These 13 WordPress plugins are like having a full-time employee that shaves hours off of your blogging work week, so you can get back to doing the important things: writing and connecting with your audience.

Plugin #1: Beacon

If you’re committed to building your email list, content upgrades can increase your subscribers substantially.

My sitewide opt-in offer converts at a rate of around 10% while my content upgrades convert at closer to 25%-30%.

That means that for every 100 visitors to my blog, I can collect 15-20 more emails.

Impressive, right?

But adding content upgrades to every article you publish seems like a daunting task, right?

Not if you use Beacon.

Beacon allows you to create ebooks from your existing articles automatically, right on your WordPress dashboard:

If you have several blog posts that could go together in one cohesive ebook, or if you have a long piece of content that could do the same, Beacon can do that for you …

Without having to fiddle around with designing it yourself.

I made an ebook with Beacon for my guide on Instagram marketing in five minutes flat, and it converted at over 20% of visitors.

Massive results in a quarter of the time.

Plugin #2: Pretty Link

With Pretty Link, you can create shorter, more memorable links to any page you refer to a lot. This keeps you from having to hunt down their URLs all the time.

For example, affiliate links can be quite complicated and contain random sequences of numbers that are hard to remember. So if you refer to the same affiliate product a lot, you can create a simpler link like “http://ift.tt/2s0Q530;

And you can do the same for any post or page to which you refer often. You can bring each URL down to a memorable keyword and won’t have to spend any time hunting down links.

Just compare:

You can see how the second URL would be easier to remember, can’t you?

And that’s not all. Pretty Link also saves time whenever you have to replace a link you’ve used a lot.

Say you were to change your username on Twitter. You’d have to hunt down every link to your Twitter account and replace them …

Unless you created a Pretty Link that says “http://ift.tt/1A53Oo3.” You can just go into your dashboard, edit the target URL, and you’re done.

Plugin #3: SEO Smart Links

When you publish a new article on your blog, do you visit all your previous articles and link them to the new one?

It’s good for SEO and will boost your page views by helping more readers find your content.

But it’s way too time-consuming, right?

Enter SEO Smart Links, which is a plugin that automatically links keywords or phrases in your articles based on rules you set.

For example, I have an article about one of my coaching clients who built a $10,000/month business through one method I teach of finding clients. I set it up so every time phrases like “freelancing clients” or “find freelancing clients”  come up on my blog, they’re automatically linked to this article.

This makes it so I’ll never have to dig through my older posts to create internal links.

Note: This also comes in handy with affiliate links. You can make sure you never miss an opportunity to earn affiliate income by setting an SEO Smart Link.

Plugin #4: Yoast SEO

Let me guess …

When somebody says “SEO,” you want to run for the hills.

For new and even experienced bloggers, search engine optimization is like Mount Everest for beginner climbers. It’s the “holy grail” of traffic generation strategies, yet it’s daunting to execute.

So you could spend the next several months learning about SEO.

Or, you could save yourself hundreds of hours reading case study after case study, researching best SEO practices, and trying to decipher Google-ese by installing Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that guides you through optimizing each of your posts through a handy checklist to “grade” how well you’ve optimized your post:

You should know the basics of SEO (so you don’t piss Google off), but with Yoast SEO, you don’t need to spend hours studying.

Plugin #5: MonsterInsights

Checking stats is as addictive as Candy Crush and just as unproductive too. When you break your focus from what you’re working on (i.e., important things like writing articles), you sacrifice about 20 minutes of productivity — even if you were only distracted for two minutes.

This is called “task switching” and it’s a huge time suck.

Cutting back on obsessive stat-checking is difficult once you’re hooked, but you can reduce the time you waste with MonsterInsights.

It’s a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that shows you the most important stats right on your dashboard.

You’ll no longer have to leave your site to check analytics (and get drowned in the ocean of distracting figures). You can stay inside WordPress, get your quick fix, and move on to writing your post.

Plugin #6: P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

The speed of your website directly impacts your search engine results.

Meaning that if your blog is slow, Google will penalize you. And often, when your blog is slow, it’s one or more of your plugins that causes the issue.

This is a huge pain to fix.

First, you have to pull up Google’s PageSpeed tester. Then you have to begin disabling your plugins one-by-one. And after every plugin you disable, you have to test the speed again to see if you found the culprit.

That is, unless you let P3 Plugin Performance Profiler do all the heavy lifting for you.

P3 Profiler saves you the time of having to dig for problem plugins by reporting your activated plugins that are making your blog lag the most.

It even tells you the impact your plugins have on your page load time:

This saves you the time of having to test your site to try and find the problematic plugins.

So activate P3 on your blog, deactivate your top problem plugins, and get back to doing the important work of a blogger.

Plugin #7: UpdraftPlus

If your blog has never gone down, it probably will at some point, whether it’s because of hosting issues or a broken plugin or theme.

These issues can often be fixed quite quickly, but sometimes it’s not that simple and it wipes some of your blog’s history clean. Worst case scenario: You lose a ton of content.

Unless you install UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin that backs up your blog and stores your backup files in DropBox, Google Drive, or whatever remote storage solution you use.

This essential plugin will save you time in two ways:

You won’t have to spend hours on the phone or in online chat with your web host trying to restore the last backup of your site.

You won’t have to backup your blog manually. UpdraftPlus will run automated backups on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do so yourself.

Trust me, when your website does inevitably break, you’ll be glad you had the foresight to install this plugin.

Plugin #8: Akismet

Have you ever logged onto your blog’s WordPress dashboard and seen comments like this?:

Thanks for the compliment, “Petite Clothing.”

These are spam comments that are a huge time waste.

There’s nothing quite as mind-numbing as sorting through comments to identify what’s real and what’s left by robots.

Which is why all bloggers must use Akismet – WordPress’s most popular anti-spam plugin which filters out all spam comments with remarkable accuracy:

Plugin #9: WP Broken Link Status Checker

Broken links hurt your SEO and your reader’s experience of your site.

So you need to make sure your links are all in good order, right?

Except that would take hours upon hours. You’d have to go through your posts periodically to check for broken links, testing each one as if you were a reader.

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Instead, use WP Broken Link Status Checker.

This plugin runs scans which will check all of the links on your website on autopilot based on your own parameters. You can check for internal links, or make sure that your reader won’t bottom out when they click on a link you placed to another blogger.

Plugin #10: ManageWP

When you have more than one blog, you can get even more overwhelmed keeping track of everything.

You have a million tabs open on Google Chrome, you waste a ton of time each day flitting between each tab (often to bring up the wrong one), and you can hardly keep up.

Well, look no further, because ManageWP will make your life a whole lot easier.

ManageWP is a WordPress management system that connects your blogs to a single dashboard.

I have three blogs, and this plugin saves me a ton of time going from one to the other. It provides me easy access to each one with a single click, and also provides an easy overview of the security, performance, and analytics of each one.

ManageWP is a must-have for anyone who manages multiple blogs.

Plugin #11: Enable Media Replace

About a year ago, I hired a web designer to overhaul my blog, Unsettle.

When the design was finally done and pushed out to the world, I began to notice little problems:

I needed to replace my old logo on all of the pages it still showed up on. My headshots were out of date on my old content and pages, and a lot of the blog images I had created were no longer relevant.

I had some work to do.

First, I had to upload the new logo, headshots, and blog images to WordPress.

Then, I had to comb through the pages of my blog to update these images, eating up hours of time (and a lot of patience, too).

But then I stumbled across Enable Media Replace: a WordPress plugin that lets you replace the piece of media (in my case, the images) rather than uploading new ones and hunting them down.

Plugin #12: Appointments+

You’ve been there.

You’re trying to book a coaching call, or a time to meet with a potential freelancing client, or maybe just trying to set up a call with a reader, but you can’t find a time that works for you both.

So you spend what feels like hours in your email inbox proposing, rejecting, and rescheduling.

If this sounds familiar, this plugin will give you huge relief. Appointments+ is a plugin that allows you and your clients or readers to book appointments right on your WordPress website …

Allowing you to get out of your email inbox and save time, frustration, and back and forth.

Note: This plugin is only available as part of a larger package which costs $49/month. On the other hand, you won’t need this plugin until you have enough clients to afford it. (And the package includes other useful plugins as well!)

Plugin #13: CoSchedule

You know the feeling …

You have a million ideas for blog posts (or maybe, like me, you have a million half-written drafts), and you’re overwhelmed. It’s hard to keep everything organized and keep yourself focused.

Sound familiar?

Then try CoSchedule. It will help you manage your editorial calendar and your social media promotions all in one spot, saving you the time of having to flit between different apps.

Plus, you can post to your Facebook Group right from your WordPress dashboard, and it shows how well your social media posts did, saving you from having to find your analytics in a different app.

CoSchedule is another paid plugin, but it’s a huge time-saver that will leave you feeling far more organized and put together.

Get Off the Blogging Hamster Wheel

Sometimes, blogging feels like you’re on a hamster wheel.

You’re busy all the time, but you’re not getting anywhere fast.

My guess is that’s because you’re spending time on some tasks that, while crucial, won’t propel you forward.

So get off the blogging hamster wheel. Automate the boring stuff with these 13 WordPress plugins so you can get back to the meaningful work: the work you thought you were getting into when you started your blog.

And watch your productivity soar.

Sarah Peterson writes insanely useful guides on marketing and entrepreneurship at Unsettle.org. Get her report, 10 Free Tools That Reveal the Product Your Audience Is Begging For to finally start making money from your blog … the right way.

    A helpful reader has informed us that P3 Profiler has not been updated in some time. We are in the process of researching an alternative and will update our recommendation shortly. Thanks for your patience!

  13 WordPress Plugins That’ll Save You a Ton of Time