#(he also wants me to submit the first three chapters to a publisher once they’re polished and um. UM. ADJDHDHDH)

[sailforvalinor]

🖋️

[wiseabsol]

3. What is your favorite/least favorite part about writing? 6. Favorite character you’ve written? 14. What does it take for you to be ready to write a book? (i.e. do you research? outline? make a playlist or pinterest board? wing it?) 15. How do you deal with self-doubt when writing? 19. How do you cope with writer’s block? 24. Do you remember the moment you decided to become a writer/author? 33. What’s your revision/rewriting process like? 34. Unpopular writing thoughts/opinions?

3. What is your favorite/least favorite part about writing? 

My favorite part is when you make discoveries about your world and your characters as you write the story down, and when you write something and go, “Oh, there we go, there’s the solution to this problem that was going to come up later.” For example, I recently had an evil mentor toying with a magical item while giving a lecture to his pupils. The magical item was mundane--essentially, just putty that you could mold into whatever shape you wanted, then solidify, then switch back to putty to reshape. And as I was writing that down, I went, “Oh, THAT’S what my protagonist is going to knock him out with down the line. That’s way better than her using a lamp. Excellent.” 

My least favorite part about writing is getting started. Once I’ve cleared the hurtle of the blank page, writing becomes much easier and more exciting. But getting myself to start has become much harder since I developed my editor/critic’s brain.  

6. Favorite character you’ve written? 

In one of the text-based rps I’m writing with my best friend, I’m playing a shapeshifter named Sparrow, who is charming, funny, flirty, politically-savvy, and super vain about his appearance (think a courtesan-type character). He also has one of the most gut-wrenching backstories of any character I’ve ever written, and is struggling with triggers from that backstory. His romance with my best friend’s character is also my favorite romance that I’ve written with her, and it came as a surprise to both of us, since we were just testing out the characters at the time.   

14. What does it take for you to be ready to write a book? (i.e. do you research? outline? make a playlist or pinterest board? wing it?) 

I do a lot of brainstorming and outlining, though my outlines aren’t plot-related ones so much as very detailed character summaries. I’ve honestly been struggling with plot lately, but I’ve been doing better character work, so I’m winging it more now. While I usually have a general idea of how the story goes, the actual writing of it clarifies the details and makes changes to my plans. On the bright side, the results are less stilted than my old work, since they’re not chained to plot outlines, but stem from the characters more organically.  

15. How do you deal with self-doubt when writing?

I’ve started telling myself, “Fuck it, let it be messy, I’ll fix it later.” Letting go of perfectionism is hard for me, but doing so has been helping.   

19. How do you cope with writer’s block? 

Honestly, the best way to cope with writer’s block is to just try something and see if it sticks, or leave yourself a note and skip ahead in the story to something you want to write. However, as I mentioned in an earlier ask, I haven’t been able to do much writing lately. And that’s hard, because I feel guilty for not writing, and I know if I just do it, I’ll feel better. Which is a bad mindframe to be in, especially because this year has been awful. I’ve been telling other writers to be gentle on themselves, because it’s hard to be creative when you’re stressed, but I struggle to take my own advice. So right now, I’m trying to give myself permission not to write, and to instead focus on other things. Editing. Reading. Playing videogames. Baking. Doing house/yardwork. Something to still ticks things off of my to do list, but also things that I can look at and see, “Yes, you did get something done.” It’s not a perfect system, and it does fall into the productivity trap, but it’s what I’m trying. When the stress passes, maybe then I can dive back into writing.  

24. Do you remember the moment you decided to become a writer/author? 

I think it was when I was applying for undergraduate college. I wrote in my application essay that I wanted to write stories that would show my readers that things can get better for them. I was writing as a hobby before then, but I think that’s when I decided that yeah, I wanted making stories to be a part of my future, and I wanted to write stories that I could publish someday. 

33. What’s your revision/rewriting process like? 

Mostly I end up rewriting the chapter or story in question. Draft one is for realizing and getting down the idea of the thing. Draft two is refining it to that thing and losing all of the flab that the story doesn’t need. Often I have another file on the side where I paste in what I’ve cut out, in case I change my mind and want to add it back in later, or in case I can use it in another project. I also save the original messy draft and do the cutting in a copied file. That way, I can reassure myself that the original still exists for me, and I can reread it when I’m feeling self-indulgent, but I’m also only giving the best version to my readers.  

34. Unpopular writing thoughts/opinions?

-- Writing every day is a good idea, and does work well for the writing process, but it’s an unrealistic standard to hold yourself to, especially if you have a day job, kids, and other adult responsibilities. Don’t feel guilty if you can’t write every day. The guilt is just going to make you freeze up instead of returning to the work. Be gentle with your expectations for yourself.  

-- If you’re including triggering or sensitive subjects in your work, and are planning to share that work with others (and ESPECIALLY if you’re planning to profit from that work), you should be doing your research about those subjects, portraying them as accurately as possible, and asking yourself if your story really needs that content to work. It is also a good idea to employ sensitivity screeners for that content, especially if you’re writing from a place of privilege and/or don’t have personal experience with the issues that you’re depicting.

-- Once the work is out there, no one has the right to ban it. They can be critical of it, yes. But not ban it.  

-- Writers of privilege must include diversity within their work, even if they’re scared of getting their depictions of people from other genders, races, classes, religions, and so on wrong. And they will get it wrong. When that happens, just apologize and try to do better in the future. But staying in your lane is a bad idea, for three reasons: 1.) You should be striving to have empathy for others, and you can’t do that if you’re only writing about people who are similar to you. 2.) Writers of privilege have an easier time getting their work published, and so should be trying to push the market/publishing industry into a more diverse direction. And 3.) You should be showing readers of privilege that the world is a diverse one, rather than catering to their narrow worldview.

-- Getting defensive when someone is critical of your work is perfectly natural, but it’s also dumb. It’s so, so dumb. You have made a product, and no product made by human hands is perfect, and every writer has blind spots. So when someone is critical of your work, try to keep this in mind: this is not an attack on you. Let yourself feel the hurt in private, and eat lots of ice cream, and when you’re feeling better, look at the criticism and ask yourself: What led the reader to this conclusion? How can I fix it? What can I learn from this? This is assuming that the critic is working with you in good faith, by the way; sometimes they’re completely off of the mark, or are upset because you didn’t give them the story that they wanted. But if someone is going, “Hey, this is a little racist/sexist/homophobic/ableist/etc.,” sit up and listen. And for the love of god, don’t fight them over it. You’ll make yourself look like an ass. 

-- Don’t workshop your story too early. Try to get a full draft down before you submit something for consideration. For one thing, you’re still figuring out what your story actually is. For another, writing workshops, while useful, have a tendency to pull your work to the middle / make it more acceptable to a general audience. Sometimes this will soften and even kill your bravest writing. Instead, use writing workshops as an opportunity to find writers who understand the themes you’re aiming for and the subjects that you’re discussing. Their input will be what you need.  

-- With the current laws about copyright infringement, getting paid for your fanfic is a bad idea. If you want that to change, then fight to make the laws more lenient. As if it, you’re risking screwing over other fanfic writers by doing that. Does that suck? Yeah. But that’s also the reality we live in right now, and you’re not going to have a good time if a corporation like Disney slams you with lawsuits.

-- Genres like fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance/erotica, and murder mysteries are real literature. Saying they’re not has its roots in classism. 

-- There is no such thing as apolitical writing. 

-- Poets are underrated. Support them. Most of the time, they’re doing braver and more socially-important work than you are, and they’re doing it concisely, too.     

-- Your first draft is going to suck. This is a good thing. You learn a lot more from bad prose than from good prose, more often than not. 

-- Having your work rejected by publishers really is nothing personal. Sometimes it just wasn’t a good fit for them at that moment in time. If they’re interested in seeing more from you in the future, though, keep them on your list and send them something else during their next screening period. They don’t say that unless they mean it.         

[kamihoshi]

Sakura and their assistant (and fellow mangaka) Risapaso were interviewed together for Creator’s Voice by Rikiya Kurimata. I don’t think Sakura’s ever done an interview so this was a surprise. Sakura talks a bit about aiming to become a mangaka and all things Yugami.

As this is a Yugami-centric blog, I’m only going to translate the questions and answers related to either the series or Sakura.

Apologies for any mistakes made (there are bound to be some), they are not my intent.

(Note: The interviewer’s name is listed as his nickname 仕掛け番長 but screw it, I’m just gonna call him by his real name. And since I have no idea what gender either Sakura or Risapaso are I’m just gonna use “they” as the pronoun.)

Jun Sakura ✖ Risapaso Interview: Connected by Yugami-kun

A love of drawing since childhood

Rikiya Kurimata: Alright, first question, what made each of you decide you wanted to become a mangaka? Sakura-sensei, you can start, if you please.

Jun Sakura: There wasn’t a particular event that made me want to do it but I’ve liked drawing ever since kindergarten. That never changed and in elementary school, I’d draw manga all over my notebooks.

RK: You were drawing original stuff from the start?!

JS: It was nothing that spectacular, just stuff like copying Doraemon. I remember doing the same with other manga I liked in my later years of elementary school.

RK: Did you like making your own stories back then?

JS: ............Probably, I guess?

RK: That was a long pause (laughs).

RK: What was it like when you were aiming to become a mangaka?

JS: I worked a side job in my hometown at the time. I’d get home from work dead tired and fall asleep before even drawing manga (laughs). After saving up some money from working, I quit my job and started working as an assistant for a mangaka who was publishing in a monthly magazine in my area. As a monthly assistant, you really need to have another job or else you don’t have many days where you’re actually working, so my living expenses were tight at the time but I figured I’d draw manga while living off my savings.

JS: I submitted my work to a competition and even though I didn’t win, I got a call from an editor at Shogakukan who wanted to work with me. After that I was told, “Draw whatever you want” and what I came up with ended up getting selected. It was decided that I’d debut so I moved to Tokyo and got to draw a number of oneshots while working as an assistant for a weekly magazine but I just couldn’t think of a storyboard for a series no matter how much I tried. I drew my last idea thinking I’d go back home if it didn’t get accepted. That was Yugami-kun ni wa Tomodachi ga Inai.

RK: Alright, thank you! Next, Risapaso-san, please.

[...]

RK: Risapaso-san is currently also an assistant to you, Sakura-san. How’s their work?

JS: They’re very dependable and always draw up these awesome backgrounds for me. It makes my art look so much better (laughs)! They’re a real pro and very reliable.

Risapaso: You flatter me.

RK: I think a lot of people aren’t aware of what assistants do - could you fill us in?

RP: I guess you can say we help give form to the what the author envisions. Sakura-sensei basically gives me a drawing as a rough guideline and using that as a base, I draw in the details.

RK: Ah, so you have to be able to read what the author wants and help them complete the drawing! That takes the skill of a professional!

JS: Yes. I'll ask them to spruce a panel up for me and they’ll give me a draw up a really nice backdrop for me.

RK: Sakura-san, what do you think of Risapaso-san’s series, Garyayama Poyomi no Kataomoi?

JS: The black humor and twists are really great! Whether it’s being comedic or serious, it surprises me, like, “That’s how it plays out?!” It betrays my expectations in a good way and the developments are so engaging. Even when the mood becomes serious, it’s well-balanced so I have nothing but glowing thoughts after reading it. Likewise, even when the story gets dark and heavy, there’s always a bit of comedy afterwards. I really like how it’s able to flip the mood back like that. I’m eager to see what happens next.

RK: And how about your thoughts on Yugami-kun ni wa Tomodachi ga Inai?

RP: I love it. I really like Yugami for how he’s the complete opposite of your typical shounen manga protagonist - acting not for the sake of those around him but for himself.

RK: For sure. When Yugami-kun ni wa Tomodachi ga Inai first came out, there weren’t many protagonists like Yugami. I think as the series got popular, we’ve seen an increase in them. How did you come up with Yugami-kun?

JS: It was born from a conversation I had with my editor. We were talking about people that were oddballs yet could also be strangely likable and that’s when I realized there are actually tons of people like that all around me, myself included. I took a bunch of those different aspects, pieced them all together bit-by-bit and made it into a manga.

RK: Wow, from a random chat like that?! When the first volume (of Yugami-kun) came out, my bookstore colleagues talked about it a lot. They were surprised at how well it sold. I think it really changed our image of a shounen manga protagonist and because you modeled the characters after people you know, that might be why a lot of the characters feel so real.

[...]

RK: And do you use Twitter too, Sakura-san?

JS: I do, but I’m no good at social media. I never know what to tweet. I've been like this since my student days so I’m probably just not suited for it. Yugami-kun is being rerun on Sunday Webry right now so I use Twitter to get the series out there while adding some of my own commentary on it. But I’m so stuck on what to say that it takes about three hours just to write three lines...

RK: Three hours?! That time ought to go to working on your manuscript, no? (laughs) But since you’re serializing in a magazine, you must get some fan mail, correct?

JS: Yes! Getting fan mail is so encouraging. I feel bad that I can’t return the favor with anything but new year’s cards... But I treasure every letter I get. When I’m feeling tired, I read them over again and they cheer me right up. Some senders have been writing to me since they were students and as time’s passed, they’ve sent me letters telling me they’ve gotten married. It feels like I’ve really gotten to know these people through their letters.

RK: Well then, Sakura-san, is there a particular chapter of Yugami-kun that sticks out in your mind?

JS: There was a moment when I was drawing up the draft storyboards and felt like I finally understood the characters. So in Yugami-kun, there’s an arc where the hero and heroine sever ties with one another. I wrote it without deciding how the two of them would make up. All I knew was that it would end with them reconciling and I forged ahead without deciding how it’d happen. But once I started drafting the storyboard, the chapter just wouldn’t go the way I wanted it to. Even if the story ended there, it wasn’t over for the characters. Characters were saying things they’d never say and things just didn’t feel right.

JS: I have a habit of cutting up parts of my storyboard drafts and reassembling them and in that mountain of papers was the heroine’s smile. Suddenly it hit me, “Ah, this is it!” and the somewhat sombre end of that arc did a complete turnaround. Just by picking up one piece of scrap from my drafts, all the other aspects of that chapter I was struggling with started to click as I pieced everything together like a puzzle. Like, “Oh, so that’s what he was thinking?” It felt like the characters were guiding me. It took a while to go through all of it but part of me drew the storyboard wanting to know how they all ticked.

RK: It sounds like the characters came to life in that moment!

JS: I discussed it with my editor beforehand but when I went to draw the chapter, something about the characters just seemed off so I submitted a completely different storyboard from the one I discussed with my editor, rewritten even though I’d already gotten the OK for the previous draft... I’m nothing but grateful to my editor for letting me make those changes.

RK: Thank you for all the work you put into this series! Well then, are there any manga you’d like to recommend?

JS: My friend told me I should read Ousama Ranking (King Ranking) by Sousuke Toka. It’s great; it has a kind of warmth to its style like a children’s story but also has these intense scenes that feel straight out of a shounen manga. A lot of times I’ve cried reading it. I love how multifaceted the characters are. Re-reading it and reflecting on the characters thoughts and actions with that hindsight never gets old.

[...]

RK: Finally, is there anything you’d like to say to your fans?

JS: Yugami-kun was really only slated to run for one volume with five chapters but it received a lot of positive feedback on reader surveys so it was given a second volume, and then the first volume got a reprint... And on and on, that cycle repeated. It’s thanks to all of your support that the series is still going and I’m forever grateful. When I was drawing Chapter 1, I’d thought of the ending by then but writing the story up to that point wasn’t possible so I figured that at its slated end, I’d show how the characters had grown in that time frame. But thanks to everyone, it looks like Yugami-kun will be fortuitous enough to finally have the ending I’d envisioned. I’ll be doing my best to make the rest of the ride enjoyable, so I’d be happy if you stuck with me.

[...]

RK: Thank you for doing this, you two!

Notes

Some of the oneshots Sakura has written in the past (all before Yugami began serialization):

こなた彼��の箒星 Konata Kanata no Houkiboshi

��くらのヒーロー Bokura no Hero / Our Hero

サンスポット！ Sunspot!

＆スマイリー &Smiley

The development Sakura mentions about Yugami and Chihiro severing ties with one another is a reference to chapters 56-58.

[lupismaris]

Illegitemus non carborundum est

Also known as The Chef!AU cat has posted about occasionally. I elt like shit all day and yesterday and somehow words happened. Idk how much of this will be finished but at the very least, have the first chapter or some amusement.

James is a Chef/pub owner, John’s a freelance author and novelist

eventual silverflinthamiltons 

__

Chapter 1

Over the years, the one thing that John Silver had come to appreciate most about London was the multitude of cafes, coffee shops, and pubs that populated the city. Without fail, he had managed to find a little hole in the wall best suited to very possible situation, dates, business lunches, catching up with old friends, the awkward break up. 

Sometimes a cafe was better, the calmer, at times more elegant tone of the place adding to the scolding his sister might be giving him, or making him appear more put together when meeting with a publisher. Other times a coffee shop with old wooden booths and simple menus were best, when the only thing needed was caffeine and quiet. And on nights when writers block and insomnia decided to team up on him, well there was always a pub or ten within walking distance of the tube station. 

The only trouble was, out of all the spots he’d been, a regular haunt had eluded him. Nothing felt quite right, nothing offered the right balance of all three, at least on the list of fifty or so places he tried. And often he and Jack, and their little circle of friends, stuck to their usual routine of places, rotating through them now and then to give the illusion of something fresh and different. But genuine change, a true meander off the beaten path was rare.

So when Jack recommended they meet at a new place for lunch, John was curious. Jack had always preferred The Scarlet Brewhouse on the other side of the river, or The Wolfhound near Covent Garden when he had a bit more change in his pocket. John couldn’t remember if they’d explored the pubs and shops near Boroughs Market before, or at least not consciously- he’d been one one to many pub crawls with Jack and Charles, of which his memory was foggy and limited. Perhaps that had been when Jack had found this new spot, The Walrus.

Who’d name a pub after so random an animal John had no idea, likely an inside joke of the owners. But then in a city with a few dozen public houses referencing cocks and princes, he supposed it was no more nor less suited than any other.

The corporate lunch crowd of the two o’clock hour had thankfully moved along, leaving the entrance to the Market far less crowded than the last time John had visited. It was an easy thing to spot Jack in his violet bomber jacket waiting on the curb with a cigarette in hand. John laughed at the sight of Charles next to him, three butterfly closures on his bruised forehead and a plaster splint on his nose.

“What the fuck happened to you?”

Charles grumbled and rolled his eyes. “Nothing-”

“He’s the reason we didn’t go to Scarlet’s I’m afraid,” Jack said with a put upon sigh.

“Did you get banned?”

“No he knows better than that. He started a fight down in whitechapel last night, with the pair of fellows who run this walrus place.”

Charles sneered, but it was a weak thing, with the bandage on his nose. “They started it.”

“Technically you threw the first punch, and in an effort to avoid them pressing any kind of charges, we are escorting Charles to go and apologize, while you and I enjoy our lunch, john. If that’s alright with you.”

“As if I’d say no to lunch and free entertainment. You realize it’s just as likely that charles will just start round two while we’re there, don’t you?” John asked as they turned down the side street and headed for the bank of the river.

“If he wants to get laid in the next month he damned well better not.”

“I take it Ellie is equally as mad about this?”

The sheepish look on Charles’ face made it clear he hadn’t yet told his occasional girlfriend about it. “She’s busy with exams. Didn’t wanna bother her.”

“No so I’m just left to deal with you.” Jack finished his cigarette and tossed it. “It’s a good thing you’re a good lay, charles.”

John rolled his eyes, it was an old nonsensical performance the two carried on, that they only enjoyed each other’s company for sex. Even a complete and utter stranger could take one look at them and realize they were effectively joined at the hip till the grave, them and Anne of course, Jack’s sometimes girlfriend but always partner he’d known since childhood.

“Anne not partaking in your humiliation?”

“She’s got a photoshoot scheduled up in Cambridge today, won’t be back till after dinner. Otherwise she’d be front row with her camera ready to catch this idiot having to apologize for once in his life.”

“I still say they started it.” Charles insisted.

“What was it even about?” John asked.

“Haven’t got a clue.”

Having been present for more than one of Charles’ notorious bar fights, John could easily believe that the whole point of the argument had been lost in the fray. All it took was a couple extra shots and a poorly timed joke in bad taste and charles was ready and willing to answer it with a right hook.

“Here we are, now behave charles or so help me-”

The Walrus looked, at face value, like every other hundred year old pub in the city, with the worn and re-painted wood framed windows and moulding around the door, a few iron tables and chairs sat outside to look across the street at the river and the opposing bank.

“Did you actually bother reading up on this place before dragging us out here jack?”

Jack huffed indignantly. “Yes I read up on it, I’d not pick a place without at least skimming the reviews. They’ve got nearly four stars on every possible review and the staff is gorgeous.”

“I’d care more about the food.”

“Well they said the food was good too.” Jack nudged Charles inside and waved John in after him.

It was a cozy setting, dark wood and white washed walls, old nautical art pieces hung here and there on the wall amidst old trophies and antiques, like many of the pubs along the river. It had the benefit of large front windows that made the place feel airy, instead of the cave like atmosphere of so many other places. Twenty tables or so were scattered about the room, the large oak bar extended to offer both kitchen side seating and barside.

The man at the bar looked up when they entered to greet them, but the moment he caught sight of Charles his put upon smile faded.

“Uh-”

“Hi we’re looking for a man named Flint?” Jack asked, as John settled into one of the empty tables in the window.

“What for?”

“My friend here caused him a bit of trouble last night and wanted to apologise.”

The bartender seemed to doubt that very much but nodded and turned to the kitchen. “Hey flint! You’ve got a visitor!”

“I’m not here.” came the gruff and uninterested reply.

“I think its the guy who decked you last night.”

John startled when a mountain of a man leaned against the kitchen door frame, apron slung around his hips and a healing split lip turned up with a smile. “Yeah it's him, flint. What do you want then?”

Charles glared at him until Jack sighed and shoved him forward to the bar.

“To apologise, and make sure there’s no hard feelings.” He said, ignoring the sour look Charles gave him.

The mountain blinked in surprise, and looked back over his shoulder, no doubt to where this Flint was debating whether or not to accept. Apparently he was willing to hear the apology, after a muttered reply, the mountain huffed and waved charles behind the counter.

“Flint’s got his hands a bit tied up, c’mon back.” He said and Charles followed after Jack again pushed him forward.

“I swear to god if he starts another fight I’m going to scream,” Jack said on a sigh, dropping into the seat across from john.

“If he does, at least the place’s is pretty quiet.” Aside from them, only two regulars sat at the bar, and half a dozen patrons at the tables further away. Hardy enough to cause a frenzy if a fight broke out.

“No need to worry, Flint won’t start a fight in his own house,” The bartender said, coming over with a trio of water glasses and menus. “If I’m honest I was surprised he got in a fight at all last night.”

“Is he not normally a hotheaded man then?” Jack asked.

“Oh he is, just the type more likely to jump you outside the pub rather than in. Wasn’t there so I dunno what was said but it must’ve been something.”

“I’m normally there but I had a deadline last night, couldn’t go out, thought Charles might be capable of coming home in one piece but here we are.”

“Ah well, we can only do our best with em can’t we? I’m Muldoon, lemme know when you want to order or if you want any drinks.” He was a short, genial looking man, with clever eyes and a well trimmed beard. The heavy brogue in his accent made John smile.

“We’ll take two of whatever cocktails you make best,” jack told him. “I’m going to need a few once this affair is over.”

“give me five minutes, they’ll be right up.”

“Did your deadline not go as well as you hoped?” John asked, when the bartender was back at work.

Jack waved a hand. “Who the hell knows, its submitted and the publication can decide whether or not its fit to run. With my luck I’ll have it sent back to me drowning in red ink and chunks of black out.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t write so many pieces on back door deals the whitehall bastards make, or how fucked the cops are, maybe then you’ll get more work published.” John pointed out, even though he knew the answer he’d receive. Jack was as invested in his journalism as John was in his novels, and the day Jack gave up his life of ruining rich and powerful people’s lives, would likely be the day they buried him.

“Ah but then, what kinda man am I, to ignore truth in exchange for a fat paycheck?” Jack chuckled. “Besides they’ve enough useless reporters amongst the london press, and when have I ever been one of the flock?”

“Never. They’re still giving you a few articles to work on outside of your pet projects aren’t they?”

“Yeah some nonsense about the men’s fashion expected at the next royal wedding or some shit. This is what happens when you’re the only fucker in the building who knows how to dress properly, they stick you with all the fashion editorials.”

John laughed at the disgusted look on Jack’s face. “To be fair, you have kind of brought it on yourself. How many times have you lectured your coworkers on their lack of fashion sense?”

“Look if these straight men want to get fucked then they need to dress better than a fucking-”

“Drinks, gents. On the house.” Muldoon set the glasses down with practiced ease, timing his interruption well.

“On the house?” John asked.

“To commemorate both Flint’s getting his face broken and your man getting his face broken, and yet being civil enough to apologize.” Muldoon said. “Or because you’re the most interesting part of my day thus far.”

“I may fall in love with you sir.” Jack smiled up at him.

“Sorry love, gonna have to take that up with Billy.”

Jack tilted his head and looked to where Muldoon nodded- The hulking blonde still leaning against the doorframe, his back to them. “Ha! In that case my dear it will be a chivalrous love from afar.”

Muldoon laughed, a bright burst of sound that caught the attention of the blonde, Billy. He glanced over his shoulder, at first with a curious frown, but one that easily melted into a fond smile as he watched them. He glanced back at the kitchen and seemed satisfied that hell wasn’t going to break out, so he turned and round the bar, coming to join muldoon beside their table.

“You’ll be glad to know your man’s behaving himself,” Billy said with that same wry smile he wore earlier.

“Thank fuck.” Jack groaned softly. “You were the other one weren’t you, last night?”

“I was yeah, though to be fair it was just a misunderstanding. Neither of us hold any ill will towards- charles was it?”

“Vane yes, charles vane. I was honestly worried you might press charges.”

Billy scoffed. “Flint would rather fight him ten times over then get the cops involved, don’t worry.”

“What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“A few guys was bothering a couple of kids in the pub, being general shits. Flint had already started getting involved, before I could really stop him. Your man escalated it to a fight, or tried to, Flint tried to stop him, the guys who originally started the fight got a couple shots in and bailed by the time the three of us and finished causing trouble.” billy shrugs. “Like I said, a misunderstanding.”

John laughed softly. “Yeah sounds like charles.”

“Hes otherwise a great drinking mate though, I’d happily end up in a brawl with him again-” Billy looked up at the ding of a bell, the kitchen calling him back. “Sorry, duty calls.”

“Well at least it wasn’t something genuinely awful, I feel a tad bad about being so cross with him.” Jack mused, after muldoon had taken their orders.

“Nah, I’m sure he half expects it these days.”

They swapped stories of the work week, little things they’d forgotten to share via text while they waited for their food. As neighbors and close friends, John was always surprised how much they had to talk about, as he and Jack saw each other nearly every other day, unless work ran them down. Of course it helped that Anne’s girlfriend was John’s sister.

Charles rejoined them just after their food had been set out, looking dazed and uneasy.

“What happened?”

“I… think I got a job?” Charles said after a moment, as if he wasn’t sure.

Jack choked on his drink. “What?”

“He… he said he needed help at the bar, and was willing to teach me kitchen shit if I was willing to learn. And I just… said yeah why not?” Charles currently worked for his so-called father figure, as part of the security detail the company employed after hours. It didn’t take a genius to sort out how unhappy Charles was there. “Teach cut my hours a good bit recently, I’ve got the time, and the pay’s better, actually.”

The two stared at him a moment, before John started to laugh. “Only you could fucking deck a dude and get a job out of it, jesus christ.”

“I- I can’t even begin to process this but- that’s good? I think? Or at least a much better outcome than I’d expected…” Jack shook his head. “Whatever am I going to do with you…”

Charles smiled as brightly as he could with the plaster on his face and snatched the pickle off Jack’s plate. “No doubt you’ll think of something.”

They saw nothing of this Flint during their lunch, though they did get to chat a bit more with Muldoon and Billy before leaving. All John saw was a flash of red hair through the kitchen doorway as the man passed, red hair pulled up in a high messy bun and freckled arms.

But that, and his reception of Charles, was enough to pique his and Jack’s curiosity.

It had seemed they’d found a new haunt after all.

[ayearofpike]

Remember Me 3: The Last Story

Pocket Books, 1995 244 pages, 20 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-87267-2 LOC: PZ7.P626 Rg 1995 OCLC: 31863011 Released February 1, 1995 (per B&N)

In her second go at life, Shari Cooper has become a best-selling young adult author, and her success is confusing her mission to help make things better. They're about to start shooting the movie of her first novel, and as involved as she is in picking the actors she starts to get too involved with her male lead. This starts to drive a wedge between Shari and her life/afterlife partner, who wants her to listen to the words of a wise teacher and how they might resonate with the teacher they had between lives. By the time she finally starts to listen, will it be too late?

Huh, my blurb makes this book seem readable. In real life, it's more of a patchwork crazy quilt of ideas (and whole scenes!) we've already seen, which doesn't take long to get frustrating. This is even worse in retrospect, with the knowledge that Pike never really wanted to write this book and mostly did it out of obligation to his publisher. It's pretty slapdash and sort of lazy, and even where it wants to be deep it's more like stomping in the kiddie pool than diving in (certainly compared to these other stories he's already done).

Remember my white-savior complaint about Remember Me 2? It's back here, and worse because Shari, in the beginning, seems to have totally abandoned her mission to help. Like ... a year of learning from a master in the afterlife, and your strategy for bettering Jean's home culture and community is to write teen thriller novels? And also to adopt as your pen name "Shari Cooper," the most saltine cracker of names, thus totally obscuring your assumed ethnicity when a best-seller by a visible Latina could raise the water level for all of us? When we start, she’s signing her most recent book, the story about herself that she ghost-wrote inside her brother Jimmy's body, which she submitted (against his wishes) because she "needed another best-seller." Again, this is printed under her pen name. Which is SHARI COOPER. Do you really not foresee any problem with this?

Let's be real: there is nothing here that is remotely in service of leveling the playing field or raising up the inner-city Latinx community that Jean Rodrigues came from. In fact, Shari has totally distanced herself from being Jean, aside from using the name when it's convenient. She barely mentions Jean's mother, she doesn’t even think about her siblings at home, she briefly talks about her old friend Carol who is sick in the hospital, and don't even get me started on how Lenny is not Lenny even a little bit anymore, but now totally Peter. He even goes by Peter now; I think they only identify him as Lenny once, again for convenience's sake. (To his credit, Peter appears to have taken on the service bit of his return to a body much more readily: he coaches disabled baseball teams, and later invites one of his homeless blind players to live with them.)

Shari pisses me off so much that I almost quit reading this book twice. But I'd be annoyed with myself if this blog was "reading all of Pike's books except one," so I finished it. Still, I'm going to skip ahead on the summary and probably leave a lot of things out.

The movie they're making is a sinking-boat thriller, where a nerdy kid invites seven bullies out on a pleasure cruise and then sinks it in shark-infested waters, leaving only one lifeboat. The star they've got lined up is a drug addict, but the producer has found someone else who knows all Shari's work and blew him away on a chance audition, so even though they're going to start shooting in just a few days he wants to switch actors. And sure enough, this guy makes Shari feel like he belongs in the role, even though he's cocky enough to suggest script changes before he has it and to kiss her during the reading. Or maybe it's because of that last part. She's very confused.

So Shari gets in a fight with her nerd villain actor not long after, and this dude both stands up for her and takes her away, out for a romantic dinner. Did I mention that Shari lives with a dude that she's been in love with across TWO lifespans? But she still goes with this guy, and he kisses her again, but she does have the good grace to back away and go inside, where Peter tells her all about a meeting she missed with a yogi who teaches meditation for unity.

They fall asleep, and Shari wakes up outside her body, feeling just like she did in the first book when she died only she knows she's not dead yet. She jumps into Peter's dreams, where the yogi is hanging out, and they talk about their feelings and their actions and Shari's headaches, which she still gets, naturally, because Jean fell on her head off a balcony. Then Shari suddenly appears in her brother's bedroom, where he's naked in bed with her best friend. Not Carol — the half-sister from her previous life. It doesn't matter, because even this friend isn't that important in this story. Shari's suddenly whisked to her mom's bedside — but not her birth mom, her switched-at-birth mom, her brother's mom, her murderer's mom — who is crying herself to sleep next to a copy of Remember Me by Shari Cooper. (This doesn't make a lot of sense to me either. Wasn’t this the lady who suddenly jumped to Amanda’s side and hired her a lawyer when she realized she was her birth child? Maybe I'm making this more confusing than it needs to be, but after all, Pike put all the strings into this crazy quilt. I'm just unraveling them.)

Then she hops to the fancy hotel room where her star is sleeping, and she jumps into his dream and sees a creepy space battle where purple ships are blowing up white ones. What does it mean? Shari isn't sure, but she wakes up (confusing her dreams and jumbling them together) and is inspired to start a new story: “The Starlight Crystal,” about a fleet of white ships returning to Earth after centuries of travel, having found golden enlightenment and been told to bring it home, only to be driven away by a vicious attack from a fleet of purple ships. As far as I can tell, this Starlight Crystal has nothing in common with the computer game from See You Later except the name and the fact that there is interstellar travel, and likewise with the novel that'll show up later.

(And let me just take a second to be annoyed that she remembered the dream sequence enough to write it all down for THIS fuckin’ book but acts like it was slipping away from her as she’s writing “The Starlight Crystal.” Like Pike forgot how to acknowledge the present-tense narrator describing the past between the first book and now. It really doesn’t hold up by comparison.)

In the morning, Shari goes to the set they’re constructing for the exterior boat scenes. They’re excavating a pit somewhere in the desert, which they’re going to fill with water and surround with matte paintings of the Caribbean and deposit their rental sharks. Yeah, rental sharks, four of them, and apparently it’s OK to just stick them in a dredged hole with trucked-in pumped water without raising any eyebrows. The new star shows up and asks to take her to lunch, which, sure, he’s supposed to be rehearsing a movie and she’s supposed to be finalizing the script and also she’s WITH SOMEONE, but they can go have a two-hour lunch in a fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills. He tells her that he’s read all her books, including Magic Fire, a shoutout to a Pike novel that hasn’t come out yet. While they’re flirting, he reads her palm and is taken aback by the break in the lifeline that indicates she should have died three years ago. He also calls her both Jean and Shari, which ... fuckin’ sloppy, Pike.

I didn’t mention that Lenny’s body is impotent, right? He’s paralyzed from the waist down, and so Peter can’t get up to much in the bedroom. Plus he couldn’t help fucking around with the chest-burster alien thing in the afterlife when all Shari wanted was to get laid after the prom in their imaginations. Like the one thing she’s constantly wanted is to have sex with Peter, and all she has are memories of the premature ejaculator of her Shari life and of Jean getting pregnant. She’s been celibate for four years, even while she’s been with the one dude she constantly dreamed about. So I get why she’s horny for New Star, even if I still reserve the right to be a little judgemental. It isn’t helping Shari that he has some kind of undefineable it-factor that at least she’s learned to attune to in her afterlife training.

But now Shari wants to know just who this dude is and why he has these compelling effects on her. So naturally she decides to hire a private detective. Specifically, she goes to the detective that solved her murder. She’s pretty vague about why she wants New Star checked out, which makes the detective uneasy, but when she offers to double his rate he takes the case. Then they all go to the yogi’s lecture. Well, not the detective, but New Star tags along with Shari and Peter and her brother, and he’s pretty much a total asshole while the yogi is explaining how to share and communicate and love and help and find unity. Also, the lecture starts and ends with unguided meditation, and Shari finds that her headache is gone without drugs for the first time in months. Basically, it’s the same scene from Sati, except Peter and Shari and New Star don’t let anyone else talk.

She wakes up again in the middle of the night to write, this time adding a description of the pursuit by the purple ship and attempted escape of the white ship. She stops when she runs out of words, and finds that she has startled awake the blind baseball player sleeping on her couch. He tells her all about what a great guy Peter is and how he hopes that Peter’s spine will heal someday so he can walk with her on the beach like he’s always wanted. Shari never knew this was something Peter wanted to do, because she’s a self-centered asshole.

The movie starts shooting early the next day, and Shari and her producer have to immediately fire one of the actors because she can’t handle being in water over her knees. This is a movie about a SINKING BOAT and nobody thought to make sure the actors could deal with water. New Star has a ballsy solution: have Shari play the role. She’s not an actor! The villain points this out! She flubs half the takes! But it’s a low-budget picture, apparently, despite being based on a New York Times best-seller, so they have to go with it.

Afterwards he takes her out to dinner again, while Peter’s at the yogi’s meditation class. Then they go back to her place so he can give her a full-body massage. Then they get naked and make out. (Shades of Chain Letter 2!)  But before his ... uh ... purple spaceship can enter the wormhole to hyperspace, the blind baseball player comes home and walks in on them. He’s blind, so he assumes he’s caught Shari with Peter, and he’s contrite and apologetic and hides in the bathroom. So Shari sneaks New Star out of her house and then asks if the kid wants to go to Disneyland so he doesn’t hear when Peter actually comes in. After nine at night. Yeah, nothing weird about that. But he’s a kid, so he’s excited, and when they get home he asks Peter why he didn’t get out of bed and go with them if he’s awake now. So Shari confesses, and Peter cries, and Shari leaves.

She goes to the same hotel where New Star is staying, but doesn’t seek him out. I guess that’s one good thing I can give Shari: given enough guilt, she won’t immediately go climb on some dude’s jock. Instead, she writes more, about how the white ship jumps through hyperspace but the purple ship follows, and their ship is crippled from the pursuit so all they can do is send the crew off on the emergency escape pods and hope for the best while the captain and first mate hang behind to be boarded by the purple invaders and hopefully set off one last bomb and ruin the attackers’ plans.

During a break in shooting the next day, Shari goes to the detective, who has turned up some information on New Star. Specifically, he is a creep and an abuser who has beaten up his last two co-stars but because they didn’t press charges he’s walked. Shari doesn’t want to believe it, and the detective quickly susses out that she’s got more involvement with New Star than just being his boss. You came to a detective with good instincts, you idiot, what did you expect? At the end of the day, she calls Peter and apologizes again and says that there’s something she has to face, but that she loves him and hopes he’ll forgive her. And then in the middle of the night, her phone rings and it’s the movie’s villain, saying that someone is planning to feed someone to the sharks during the next day’s shoot and that she needs to meet him on the set to talk about it.

So who does Shari call to help her out with this situation, given what she just learned about New Star from the detective that day? That’s right — she’s a stupid idiot! They drive out to the set and find the villain waiting for them with a gun in his hand. He says that a real murderer’s only motivation is wanting to kill, and now he wants to kill. But first they’re going to rehearse. Shari and New Star must each paddle a lifeboat across the shark pond and back, and if they can both make it and come back and neither one bolts, they’ll both live. So Shari gets in the boat, which feels like it’s leaking, and quickly (through/around the panic) does her lap. But New Star refuses, and instead throws the villain to the sharks directly. Uh, no shit.

So the police come, and after hours in the clink Shari finally thinks to call the producer, who comes and gets her out immediately. She goes back to the hotel and sleeps for a whole day, dreaming about a golden being floating to Earth and living a life and dying and being reincarnated, each time hoping to impart a little more knowledge and love into humanity. When she wakes up, she remembers that Peter had wanted her to see the yogi one last time, but by the time she gets there he’s already left for the airport. She and Peter reconcile, but on the way home she gets a call from the detective, who must talk urgently. They pick him up, and he directs them to a certain address. A certain condo near the beach, where on the ground outside there’s a faint bloodstain that has never washed out.

It seems that the detective has read Remember Me by Shari Cooper. Also, he’s a GODDAMN DETECTIVE who was ON THE CASE it was about. Also, his daughter read it, the only one who would actually remember an angel and a devil showing up to scare her straight. He’s pretty freaked out at how this Latina from the barrio could possibly know what happened with saltine-cracker Shari in Huntington Beach, but she’s able to calm him down without actually answering his questions. I guess we have to accept that there are more than just knowable facts in this story, because the detective does and remembers that he’s called Shari because he learned some gruesome details about New Star. Which, so has Shari, first-hand. And they’re about to get some more, because New Star is at the door with a gun.

He pushes the detective off the balcony, I guess because nobody had gone off a balcony in this book yet. Then they drive to Shari’s grave, which he’s already dug up and is going to bury her alive with her old body. He throws her in the hole, and as she tries to climb out he nails her in the head with the shovel right where her headaches start. Like he knew. It seems that New Star is from the other side too, but his mission is to thwart the drive toward peace and unity. You know that dream he was having, the one that inspired Shari’s story? It’s all true, three hundred thousand years in the past, and Roger is one of the purple-ship aliens in a human body. And their grand mission is to ... kill a YA thriller writer because she’s getting too close to home. I don’t know why she has to be buried with her previous body, other than it happened in “Collect Call.”

So Shari looks to Peter for enlightenment and love to be the last thing she sees as she’s buried alive. Only he’s not in his wheelchair. The pain of his love being buried has magically healed his spine, and now he’s behind New Star with the shovel. Obviously they kill him, and then whisk Shari to a hospital, where she knows her brain only has limited time left but wants to get out to finish her story. Which she does: the captain blows up her ship and the aliens’, but only after remembering a fable her grandmother used to tell about a dragon stealing a heart and then being tormented to kill itself because the heart retained the love and desires of its body and wouldn’t stop beating. I don’t know, this seems like a pretty shitty story to kill someone over.

But then she realizes she has to apologize to someone. No, not Peter; that’s done and he’s still walking. No, not Carol, still sick in the hospital as far as we know — why would we be concerned with a bisexual Latina drug addict just because she’s Jean’s best friend and Jean’s body is dying? It’s her mom. NO, not her birth mom. NO, not her Latina mom. Switched-at-Birth Mom. Jimmy’s mom. The one who raised her. Which, OK, that counts for something. But anyway, she drives to her house and tells her that the story is true and that she can’t say why. Then she’s obviously in pain, so Switched-at-Birth Mom invites her to lie down in ... Shari’s bed. Where she dies.

The epilogue is literally Peter handing Jimmy the floppy disk that this story is written on and Jimmy finishing it. Which is maybe why the last little bit is about his mommy. But then again, Shari forced his body to write the first one, so maybe she guided him here too.

This shit is a hot mess, you guys. Let’s leave aside the fact that Pike didn’t really want to write it, and let’s leave aside the fact that all these pieces BARELY line up to form a coherent story, and let’s leave aside how the problems mentioned in the second book TOTALLY WENT AWAY for this one. Let’s even jump over how my Latino heart was stepped on and kicked aside along with the roots of these characters for the ENTIRE BOOK. Here’s the big issue: Christopher Pike wrote a story about an angel (I guess) returning to human form, with a mission to make humanity better ... and the BEST THING he could come up with, the DEEPEST POSSIBLE SOLUTION to our woes that crossed his sexy lizard brain, was that she needed to be a best-selling YA thriller author. Talk about an inflated sense of self-importance.

And with that, I am finally done with Remember Me 3: The Last Story. Which I am not ashamed to admit that I did NOT remember. Hopefully I will remember to NOT read it again.

[hardbacksandcoffeeshops-blog]

Non-Spoiler Review: The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco

Book: The Bone Witch Author: Rin Chupeco Publishing Date: March 7th 2017 Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire Page Count: 411 Age Suggested: 15-17 (personal opinion) Goodreads Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Blurb:

Let me be clear: I never intended to raise my brother from his grave, though he may claim otherwise. If there’s anything I’ve learned from him in the years since, it’s that the dead hide truths as well as the living.

The beast raged: it punctured the air with its spite. But the girl was fiercer.

Tea is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for necromancy makes her a bone witch, who are feared and ostracized in the kingdom. For theirs is a powerful, elemental magic that can reach beyond the boundaries of the living- and of the human.

Great power comes at a price, forcing Tea to leave her homeland to train under the guidance of an older, wiser bone witch. There, Tea puts all of her energy into becoming an asha, learning to control her elemental magic and those beasts who will submit by no other force. And Tea must be strong-stronger than she even believes possible. Because war is brewing in the eight kingdoms, war that will threaten the sovereignty of her homeland…and threaten the very survival of those she loves.

Non-spoiler review:

I bought the book purely for the opening line. I was extremely curious as to what exactly the book would entail. The unfortunate thing was I was not a fan of the way the story was written. The characters were interesting, the plot sounded very intriguing, the problem was that when it comes down to it, there’s not actually a lot of plot, and even less resolution when it comes to wrapping up the story.

Let me try and clarify. Throughout the story we get two different time periods, the character’s present, and the past for the main character. The snippets of the present includes our main character, Tea, telling her story to a man she calls the Bard. They progress the plot forward in their realm, but do not actually add that much to the story. The main bulk of story involves Tea as she goes through how she became the exiled bone witch we see interacting with the Bard. Basically, we see Tea telling her story through the Bard, so we have her story told by her through him. I’m personally not a fan of this form of story telling, and because these flash forwards happened before each chapter of the main story, it took us out to remind the reader that other things were going on. Not only that but we see two sides of our main character, what she is now and what she was then. This makes us stuck with the fact that we know exactly what type of person she’s going to turn into, revealing a lot about the plot without saying much at all or driving the plot forward. We know she’s going to be exiled, we know that something bad will happen, but we are forced to learn it through seeing a future that we know it’s already happened. Any and all of the danger she faces throughout the novel isn’t all that worrying to the reader because we know she’ll survive it. Usually this wouldn’t bother me as much, but I think that’s because usually it’s a prologue to the story and not a lot more. We forget that it’s happening, but because it happened before ever single chapter, it was hard to fully immerse myself in the novel, in the world, I was pulled out of it to be reminded that there were two parallel parts to this story that I had to keep remembering.

Going onto the characters, I’m going to discuss three in depth. Our protagonist, Tea, her brother, Fox, and her mentor, Mykaela. Once I’m finished I’ll go into a little bit of depth for some of the more secondary characters.

Tea is our protagonist. We see her go from a young teen to a mid teen in the main story arc, and see her as a more confident seventeen year old in the flash forwards prior to each chapter. In both different settings she’s stubborn, slightly awkward, doesn’t take no for an answer, and pretty headstrong. In the main bulk of the story we see her growing up, learning who she is and what her powers do, because of this I don’t blame the change in character between the two different times. I think it’s very likely for people to change over time, and I think that’s something that I could understand and was done to a pretty alright extent. The problem with this though, is that because this isn’t a fully finished series, it’s one book, and we don’t see the entire transformation of her from one thing to the next. We see the beginning of it, but not the full picture. I don’t feel as though we get to experience her to the extent that I wanted to. I was curious about her from this extremely strong capable witch from the first pre chapter that starts the book off, and then continuing forward I don’t feel as though we saw enough of that girl, we saw the girl she was prior, the girl who was young and inexperienced and not as well written. Don’t get me wrong, I loved reading the prechapters, but I feel as though this seemed like more of a prequel than the start of a story. We got a taste of what she’s doing now and honestly I wanted more of that than I wanted what it took for her to get there. There was a lot of character building for her with little plot which was rather frustrating.

Next we have Fox. Fox is your generic older brother character, apart from being dead. He’s a soldier, or he was a soldier. When he’s brought back his only job is to protect Tea. There’s a few interesting plot points that are started but not fully explored in this novel, but I’m hoping since the next book comes out this month that they’ll be explored further in this series. The thing is, because he is the older brother, and we don’t get to see him before he dies, there’s no real way to know what he was like. I feel as though the overprotective sibling, though sometimes relative, is often not entirely needed. I feel like because there only seems to be one primary goal for this character throughout this book, we don’t get to see him as a fully realised character. He’s almost like a dog. You could never relate to him fully because he’s not treated as a real human. They honestly treat him like a pet. I understand why, as throughout he’s called her familiar, but I think because personally he was one of the reasons I picked the book up, it was disappointing to see so little thought put into his character. Maybe this has to do with how the author wants to reveal things, but unfortunately it didn’t connect with me.

Mykaela was always going to be a different type of character in this novel. Mentor to Tea, she’s the blend of kind and stern that you don’t see in many characters. She tried to show Tea how to work as a bone witch, but also had to do her own job as well. She popped in and out of the story with some interesting plots that weren’t fully explained. I can’t go into too much detail about her character without spoiling, but she was one of the kinder characters, and she had some plot points I was extremely interested about. She never seemed to do anything without reason, and even when we didn’t know the entirety of the story, it didn’t feel like she did anything out of malice. She was a kind face in a lot of questionable characters, and honestly a character I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

I feel as though I have to talk about the Bard. Though not part of the real story, his presence is needed. He gave us the narration for everything going on in the character’s present, giving us a glimpse of who Tea is now. To be honest I found these parts of the novel far more interesting than the main story line, and I wanted to know some of his backstory more, as it was hinted at but not fully shown.

Zoya was probably the character I disliked the most. She brought on my least favourite trope in the book, which is when a character goes out of their way to humiliate the main character. This has always been something that makes me cringe, and here it was no different. I don’t think we were meant to like her, and personally she made the least sense to me as to why she was in the story. A lot of the conflict she brought to the book was so unbelievably petty that I thought it took away from the fantasy side of the story.

There are so many characters in this book that it would take a long time for me to go through all of them and explain things I do and don’t like, side plots that don’t get finished, characters who were introduced, but weren’t fully explored, love stories that were explained in the end of the novel to be fully fleshed out, but didn’t even start to take place in the real narrative. So many things were happening in this book and I don’t know how much of it was necessary, there were some plot points that I loved, but they were entirely unnecessary to this specific book. I may do a spoiler filled review to explain in more detail at a later date.

I don’t like being negative about books. Someone has spent a lot of time and energy to write something they’re proud of and put it out to the masses, so I try to look for the positives. My main one from this book was its ending. I had a rough time getting through this book because it’s not my type of book, however the ending of it made me want to preorder the next one. I wanted to know what happens next, and though I did not preorder the next one, maybe in a few months I’ll order it and give it a shot.

To summarise, this is not my favourite book. There were some interesting plot threads that I wanted more out of, and while some of the characters were very interesting, it unfortunately didn’t make this book what I wanted it to be. I think if you want a very different look at fantasy, definitely give it a try though. Just because it’s not to my tastes doesn’t mean it won’t be to yours.

[meeedeee]

Writers, Entitlement, Snark – Oh, My! RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

As busy as I am right now, I can’t seem to move past this article about Dan Thomson, a 68-year-old man who recently filed a complaint against the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, claiming they rejected his application on the basis of age discrimination. The workshop’s current director, Lan Samantha Chang, who has been in the job for over a decade, says that the selection process is based entirely on talent: though other details about the candidates are sent to the graduate school, her policy is “not to look at them and to evaluate candidates solely on the writing sample.”

To be clear at the outset: age discrimination certainly exists in the world, and is just as certainly a problem. I will, however, lay real cash-money that age is not the reason Thomson was rejected, and would have done so even before reading the blurb and first two chapters of his self-published opus on Goodreads. (And oh, goddamn, are we returning to that subject later.)

“It seems like a program just for millennials,” says Thomson. “I would have guessed there’d be a broader range of ages.” As the article points out, the program is held at a graduate school, where the main demographic is people in their twenties: just under half of those accepted since 2013 have been aged between 18 and 25, while the median age for accepted applicants is 34 and a half. The median age of all applicants, however, is only 36 – hardly a difference suggestive of bias.

Thomson, he says, isn’t interested in seeing the program reprimanded: he just wants to get in: “I wanted to make clear that somebody my age has a right to do it.”

To paraphrase The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this must be some strange usage of the word right that I wasn’t previously aware of. While it’s certainly Thomson’s right to apply to the workshop, it is not his right to be accepted. There are only 25 spots available to the thousand-odd yearly applicants: with that sort of ratio in play, even genuine talents will inevitably miss out, not because they’re bad writers, but because there simply isn’t space for everyone.

And then we get to the kicker:

Thomson said he enjoyed his creative writing classes in college in the early 1970s, but found at the time he lacked the perspective on life to offer more than surface finery in his prose.

“It’s not prejudice against young people to say, ‘You don’t have a lot of experience,’ ” he said.

After graduate school in anthropology and law school, Thomson focused on raising his family and living a life worth writing about. Two years ago, he completed his first novel-length work, “The Candidate,” and decided to self-publish it.

He has not sought other options for publication, nor has he applied to other creative writing programs…

“It may be vanity on my part… but I have a fairly high opinion of the two pieces that I sent in,” he said.

Again, for the sake of clarity: I have nothing against self-publishing as an endeavour. I know some amazing writers who’ve opted to take that route, and have fallen in love with many an indie book as a consequence, to say nothing of self-pubbed-gone-mainstream works like Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Nor do I have any bias against writers who start their careers later in life: one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read, The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, was the first and only work of Mary Ann Shaffer, published posthumously after her death at age 74. There are plenty of great writers who never got their start until later in life, or who found success through non-traditional means, or who managed both: because, by themselves, these facts are not cause for any degree of scepticism.

But for fuck’s sake.

Among authors of any kind, a near-universal pet peeve is being told, on revealing their career, “Oh, I’d love to write a book some day!” by someone who admits to not writing now. It’s not that we have any bone-deep aversion to the idea of writing for fun as opposed to writing for money; indeed, a great many of us swim in both waters at once, or else migrated from one camp to the other without quite noticing how it happened. The objection, rather, is to those who reflexively conflate the two – “Oh, you do this as a job? I’d love that as a hobby!” – without realising how arrogantly dismissive this sounds. At best, they’re assuming that writing involves no element of craft or skill that requires refinement over time, no awareness of an ever-fluctuating market and industry, and so can be picked up by anyone at the drop of a hat. At worst, they’re boasting of their own brilliance-to-be: you might be a dedicated professional, but damned if they aren’t confident they can do just as well or better without all the years of work.

Dan Thomson, it would appear, ticks both these boxes. On the basis of no more experience than a single self-published novel, The Candidate – which, at 100 pages long, is more accurately a novella – and participation in a few writing classes forty-odd years ago, he applied to one of the most prestigious MFA programs in America. So, naturally, age discrimination is the only possible reason for his failure to make the cut.

That rumbling you hear is the sound of my jaw grinding bitten-off expletives into grist.

At age fifteen, I opined to my then-English teacher, a woman now sadly deceased, that the reason my story hadn’t won or placed in a contest to which I’d submitted it was genre bias against science fiction. Mildly, she replied that she knew of multiple students who’d won such contests with SF stories. “Oh,” I said, and deflated a little, and then forced myself to acknowledge the possibility that, regardless of my abilities, other people might indeed be better. Thomson’s seeming inability to make a similar deductive leap at age 68, coupled with his stated belief that “young people” lack sufficient life experience to write well, doesn’t suggest to me that he’d do well taking crit from other, younger writers – which is basically what an MFA entails, though I doubt Thomson realises it – even if the Iowa Writers’ Workshop did let him in.

And believe me, he would be subject to criticism. Oh, would he fucking ever.

A brief disclaimer: as someone who works as both an author and a critic, I make a conscious effort to review transparently. If I think there’s a problem in the text, I show my working; if I haven’t read the full book or have skimmed particular sections, I say so; and if a story hits my buttons, whether positively or negatively, I aim to make that fact clear. In the context of writing groups and editorial work, I try to set my stylistic preferences aside and focus instead on the author’s intentions: on providing feedback that helps them make their style better instead of more like mine. As such, I don’t usually weigh in on fragments or blurbs of a random writer’s work unless they’ve said something in public – such as in interview or at a convention – that suggests a direct link between their attitude about the world, or writing, or the world as expressed through writing, and the content they’ve produced.

That being so, and in accordance with his clear belief that his work merits the same respect as the would-be bests in the field, I will treat Thomson as I would any author possessed of such a glaring disconnect between their self-perception and reality: with sarcasm and sources.

According to the article’s author, Thomson didn’t pursue writing in his youth because, “at the time he lacked the perspective on life to offer more than surface finery in his prose,” with Thomson himself quoted as saying, “It’s not prejudice against young people to say, ‘You don’t have a lot of experience.'” This strongly suggests that Thomson has, for whatever reason, conflated life experience with literary skill: that, in his view, the way to improve as a writer isn’t to work on your prose, but to gain more inspiration. This perspective is echoed in the blurb for his novella, The Candidate, which is less a plot summary than a full paragraph of Thomson explaining why his book is important:

Can An Honest Man Be Elected President? I didn’t give the protagonist of The Candidate a face. I didn’t give him a body or a race either. That was not an oversight. I am confident you will do that for me. I did give him a voice and when you hear that voice you will assign him whatever characteristics seem appropriate to you. Listen to that voice. If you don’t know what Norman Telos has to say about life in America then you don’t know where you live. Does a fish know he is swimming in water? Does he know his pond, lake, river, ocean? After a series of wars, recessions and global warming we are wondering where we are and where we are going. There is a fear that rich powerful men have an agenda for America. The Carlisle Group did write a plan for the new American Century. They believe that war is good for our economy and our souls. War is of course older than the Carlisle Group. Eisenhower warned us of the Military Industrial Complex. Remember that a demand for more bombs requires that they be exploded. Mr. Telos also speaks of important economic realities for a democratic capitalist society. He reminds us of an unshakable truth that Karl Marx gave us. “Capitalist societies require a reserve army of the unemployed to keep wages down.” So we keep a pool of unemployed and poorly employed in poverty. This book is written for people who can think and want to think. It is not the Sermon on the Mount or holy writ, but a spark to your own thinking.  

There are, I would submit, three possible explanations for the creation of such a blurb, none of which is flattering to Thomson: pure ego, a lack of awareness that fiction and non-fiction blurbs have different conventions, or a failure to distinguish between a blurb and a review. Either way, his assertion that, “If you don’t know what Norman Telos has to say about life in America then you don’t know where you live,” is suggestive both of hostility to criticism – if you don’t like, agree with or understand this book, then it’s no fault of mine – and a flat conflation of worldly experience with literary merit. It doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that the ethos of the fictional Norman Telos is closely aligned with that of his creator: in exhorting us to value his character’s wisdom, Thomson is, with precious little deftness, hoping we’ll praise him.

Thanks to the preview function on Goodreads, I was able to read the first two chapters of The Candidate. It is not an experience I recommend, unless you like laughing angrily at the sheer bloody-minded entitlement of untalented men.

“The name of Norman Telos’ car was an automatic talk show joke,” the book begins. Thomson swiftly proceeds to describe said car in detail for the better part of three pages, making sure to tell us that it’s the best sedan since the model-T. Only then is it made clear that, rather than being a car that Norman owns, it’s actually one he’s invented. As such, we skip immediately on to the details of his next invention, a silent machine gun sold to the DOD.

And then this happens:

Norman Telos’ next series of inventions were drone cops to solve the Ferguson problems. To Norman Telos the events that happened in Fergusson, Missouri in the summer of 2014 and the shooting of the Black boy with the toy pistol in Cleveland November of 2014 were two problems of trust that could both be solved by a machine. Blacks cannot trust the police because too many police are racists. Police fear for their own lives in confrontational situations. The answer to both problems is to put officer friendly in front of a video game screen controlling a drone that takes all the risks for him. His actions will be documented solving the age old question of who polices the police. Further, the situation was safer for both the police and the policed. The drones were armed with a machine gun for extreme situations where killing to prevent killing would justify its use. More importantly the drones were equipped with nonlethal force; air powered bean bag guns that could knock any perp on his back and if he refused to surrender the bean bags could be shot at him until he had no ability to resist, an arm that carried hand cuffs to the perp and finally the machine itself was powerful enough to push over several men.

RACIST POLICING IS SOLVED FOREVER, EVERYONE CAN GO HOME NOW HAHAHA FOR SERIOUS OH WAIT oh god why.

The description of the drones goes on for several more pages. Comparisons to both R2D2 and Robocop are made – hilariously so, though comedy is clearly not the intent. Crime falls, Norman grows ever richer from his inventions, and the reader’s will to live takes a savage beating. Then, just as I was about to schedule an emergency splenectomy to help inure myself to this nonsense – taking cops out of physical danger doesn’t remove their racism, which is the actual fucking problem here, and especially not when you arm them with machine guns, are you kidding me? – I reached the wonder of Chapter 2, which suddenly introduces a Female Character! And oh. Oh, my god. YOU GUYS:

The beautiful young blond with a face like Ingrid Bergman was a two thousand dollar a day call girl. She was flown to Norman Telos’ yacht anchored in Mobile bay by helicopter. At 4 in the afternoon Norman and Jane Gray were lying relaxed and naked in Norman’s king sized bed sipping martinis. Jane asked, “So what is next for you Norm?”

Norman, “Two hours of latency recovery and then either my 65 year old penis will rise on its own for more loving or I will give it more chemical inducement.”

Jane, “That is a rather crude not too funny joke which makes me feel cheap. I may make a lot of money on this job but I refuse to be treated like or talked to like a whore. Call for your helicopter. You can have a refund.”

Norman, “Sorry. I truly didn’t mean to insult you. Please don’t be so sensitive. I saw it as a joke at my expense.”

Jane, “Ok. By next I didn’t mean here and now between us. I wanted to know what you are going to do with your billionaire career. What is next?”

Norman, “I am going to run for President.”

Jane, “Wow. I never expected to hear a thing like that and take it seriously, but coming from you, of course. So why do you want to be President.”

Norman, “I don’t really want to be President. I want to run. Winning is unlikely and would probably be a bore. Besides I will be running on the Democratic side and  Diebold is likely to sell the next election to the Republicans.”

It’s at this point that I stopped breathing properly and had to wheeze into my cupped hands for several minutes. (Also, lest you think that Thomson is some sort of geriatric savant who accidentally presaged our decent into the darkest timeline, I’d note that The Candidate was published in February 2016, well after Donald Trump announced his intention to run for President. Whatever other similarities lie therein, I’ll leave to a more intrepid soul to fathom.)

Norman and Jane continue to talk for the rest of the chapter. I only skimmed after that, but not distractedly enough to miss Norman posing this serious philosophical query: “Is there a god or a dyslexic dog?” Jane doesn’t answer, but that’s not surprising: she’s pretty much there as a prop to give Norman an excuse to extemporise in detail about Why Religion Is Wrong. Only then, mercifully, did my free sample come to an end.

At a base technical level, Thomson doesn’t know enough about prose writing to include the word “said” and a comma after each character name, or how to indicate the possessive for a proper noun ending in s, or any of the basic rules of pacing, structure or grammar. Even so, no line edit in the world can fix this mess. The prose is didactic and clunky in a way that only comes from being wrongly convinced of the brilliance of bad ideas, while the introduction of Jane Gray is the literal embodiment of How Not To Write A Female Character. Culturally, we spend a lot of time mocking female writers for their (supposedly) thinly-veiled self-insert characters, and yet I can say with authority that I’ve never encountered any such work by a teenage girl that manages to be anywhere near as obnoxiously obvious as the equivalent fantasies written by grown men.

So, yeah: Dan Thomson, whatever he might like to think, did not fail to get into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop because of age discrimination, but because his writing fails to meet even the most basic grammatical and structural standards you would reasonably expect a high school English graduate to know. But let’s by all means keep up the steady flow of editorials claiming whiny entitlement is a millennial problem. Like the proverbial five o’clock, it’s always a slow news day somewhere.

from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows http://ift.tt/2tWuzP9 via IFTTT

[theantisocialcritic]

An Introduction to Orson Welles - The (Belated) 2018 Director’s Marathon

Authors Note: The following novella-length essay on the history of Orson Welles was written to be the December 2018 Directors Marathon as is a tradition for this blog. It was submitted to Geeks Under Grace wherein it was rejected for its excessive length. After several months of consideration as to how to rework the piece into something publishable within the website’s requirements, it is being published now as was initially intended at the AntiSocialCritic Blog. 

"I started at the top and I've been working my way down ever since."

- Orson Welles F for Fake

In the early morning of October 10, 1985, Orson Welles suffered a heart attack and died at his desk. He departed the world he had left such a massive impact upon as quietly and mundanely as a great man could. Just hours before the once superstar artist made his final public appearance on The Merv Griffon Show where he talked about his life. Prior to that in the weeks before he had starred in his final cinematic role while providing the voice of Unicron for Transformers: The Movie. His funeral was a quiet affair at a local hotel, surrounded by his surviving close friends and estranged family members from multiple marriages. You might view this humble affair and fail to understand that the man being eulogized was, in fact, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Across his massive career, Orson Welles became a pioneer of theater, radio, and film that pushed forward and challenged those art forms radically. He was intelligent, charismatic, well-read and alluring with an ability to command an audience through his words and presence. He was a showman, an actor as well as a magician but also a creative mind with a unique understanding and love for art.

Yet for all of his creativity across a half-century of output he's almost entirely remembered solely for two major events early in his career. In 1938, he performed a radio rendition of H.G. Welles' War of the Worlds that supposedly ginned up a massive panic on the East Coast of the United States. Then in 1941, he directed Citizen Kane for RKO Radio Productions which would eventually go on to become the most acclaimed film in the history of cinema. As a result, his public image rapidly declined. He became recognized as a washed up, unreliable filmmaker with obesity problems and a bombastic personality. This version of Welles would become the stereotype so brutally mocked by comedians on television shows like The Simpsons, The Critic and Pinky and the Brain. Despite being pigeon-holed and written off within a decade of the peak of his career he continued to work as a filmmaker and an actor across North America and Europe for decades until his death. As excellent as his inaugural effort was his career has dozens of excellent films and performances that are well worth revisiting. Thankfully there has never been a better time to go back and review the works of Orson Welles than right now.

On November 2nd, 2018, Netflix published what will likely be the last of his posthumous works with The Other Side of the Wind. I reviewed the film for Geeks Under Grace at the time it released and have spent the last month reflecting on the experience of seeing such a culturally significant film. It's not every day that a lost piece of art is drudged up and rebuilt from the ground up. Beyond that, the film carries with it so many beautiful reflections, moments of brilliant and visual poetry. Knowing that it's the inheritor of such a vital legacy adds a great deal of weight to the film.

When I started writing publicly one of the first major article series I worked on was a project I called the Director Marathons. From 2014-2017 I did a yearly dive every December into the full filmography of a famous acclaimed director. Over the first four marathons, I dug through the collective works of Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Guillermo Del Toro, and The Coen Brothers. I also did an additional six-month breakdown on the entire filmography of Steven Spielberg. Now that Geeks Under Grace is my home for writing I want to continue that tradition here. I considered several major filmmakers including Sam Raimi, John Carpenter, George Romero, and Martin Scorsese but with the release of The Other Side of the Wind, it became clear to me that no director more deserve the attention afforded by a total viewing of their body of work than Orson Welles.

What follows are a series of brief historical retrospectives and film analysis's meant to offer a brief look into the seventy-year life of the man of the hour. For every analysis I offer there is a greater and deeper discussion that every subject of his life I bring up can be made. In the name of brevity, I want this series to be largely introductory (12.5 thousand words of introduction...). The secret of great art is that there are always depths to be plumed within it, nuances to observe and details to be discussed. With Welles part of the appeal beyond his incredible eye for detail is his desire to push the boundaries of the art forms he tackled. Every project and chapter of his life could fill a thick book with all the details that go into them. Film improved as an art form because of his embrace of expressionism and innovative use of technology. Filmmakers as vital as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese regularly host his works among the most influential and beloved of the movies that inspired theirs. There is so much immense history and artistry that can be delved into across the full career of Orson Welles.

That being said, as we learn in his inaugural film Citizen Kane, this can be something of a fruitless endeavor. You can never fully know the full life of a man based on what he leaves behind. Much like Charles Foster Kane's home Xanadu, his works stand as an eternal memorial to Welles' incredible creativity. Lost in the ruins of his career is the man that can only be remembered. These works aren't him. They're all we have left of him. There will never be a Rosebud moment where we understand the inner life of Orson Welles. Even so, the life of Welles is a grand one of ups and downs. In spite of the challenges, we shall do our best to look through the art to see the man.

1. The Young Orson Welles

Orson Welles's early life was faced with much splendor and difficulty. Born to Richard and Beatrice Welles in Kenosha, Wisconsin on May 6, 1915, his family was at one point very affluent and wealthy as his father invented a bicycle lamp that allowed the family to move to Chicago. He eventually stopped working and subsumed to alcoholism. Richard and Beatrice would separate in 1919. Orson's mother found work at the Art Institute of Chicago as a pianist performing for lectures. On May 10, 1924, Beatrice would die of Hepatitis, leaving the nine-year-old Welles without a proper family.

Welles lived with his alcoholic father for three years, traveling the world and attending multiple schools. He would eventually settle himself at the Todd Seminary School for Boys in Woodstock, IL where he would set his roots. Later in this life, Welles revealed that Woodstock was the closest thing he had to a home. "Where is home?" Welles replied, "I suppose it's Woodstock, Illinois if it's anywhere. I went to school there for four years. If I try to think of a home, it's that."

The Todd School for Boys ended up being the catalyst for much of Welles intellectual development. His teachers fostered his fascination with acting and the arts and gave the incredibly intelligent young man free rein to expand himself. At age 15, Orson's father passed away from heart and kidney failure. Following High School, the young man found himself awash with opportunities including a scholarship to Harvard University which he declined. After a brief multi-week flirtation with the Art Institute of Chicago, the adventurous young Welles sought a life of travel.

2. Man of the Stage

Welles gallivanted across Europe using the remains of his inheritance. During a stay in Dublin, Ireland the young man approached the manager of the Gate Theater claiming he was a famous Broadway actor that ought to have a position on the stage. The manager didn't believe him yet gave him the job anyway based on his charisma and bravery. His stage debut was on October 13, 1931, in the role of Duke Karl Alexander of Wurttemberg in the play Jew Suss. He would act in several more Dublin productions including an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's The Circle at the Abbey Theater. He would try and seek further work in London but failed to acquire a work permit and thus returned to the United States.

Upon his return, Welles made his American debut as a man of the stage at the Woodstock Operahouse in Woodstock, IL. Welles immediately sought out his Irish compatriots from the Gate Theater to stage a drama festival in Woodstock consisting of Trilby, Hamlet, The Drunkard, and Tsar Paul. During this time he also got his first radio gig working on The American School of the Air and shot his first short film.

After marrying Chicago socialite Virginia Nicholas in 1934, Welles moved to New York City where he performed the role of Tybalt in an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. On March 22, 1935, Orson made his radio premiere on the CBS Radio series The March of Time doing a scene from the 1935 Archibald MacLeish play Panic. Radio would become his primary income as the money he immediately started making with CBS was significant. Welles had moved to New York at the height of the Great Depression and ended up being in exactly the right place to benefit. The Federal Theater Project had been crafted by the Works Progress Administration as a method of helping to bring economic relief to struggling artists. Welles jumped on the opportunity and began funneling money from his incredibly lucrative $1,500/week Radio work into the theater project. President Roosevelt would quip that Orson Welles was the only person in history to illegally siphon money into a government project. The arrangement suited most everyone however and was looked the other way on. Famously Welles became so busy during this time in his life that he hired an ambulance to transport him back and forth across New York City at full speed between his radio performances and his theater directing jobs.

His first work became the incredibly famous and then wildly transgressive production of Voodoo Macbeth. The all-black production recast the traditionally Scottish play and set in against the backdrop of Haiti's court of King Henri Christophe. The production became a nationally recognized and hailed play that toured the country and skyrocketed Welles' name into the spotlight at the ripe age of twenty. The next several years of Welles life became dedicated to this grind of different theatrical productions and radio gigs, culminating his 1937 departure from the Federal Theater Project to create his own theatrical troupe. What would become known as the Mercury Theater opened on November 11, 1937, with an acclaimed restaging of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar set against the background of fascist Europe with himself in the role of Brutus. Here Welles would create many of the lasting relationships and raise multiple actors would follow him through his journey in Hollywood including Joseph Cotton, Everett Sloane and Vincent Price.

3. Voice on the Radio

Though famously a devotee of the Baird, Welles' recognition was earned by his incredible command of the airwaves. Welles' famous baritone voice became a regular mainstay across America as he became the regular voice for many of the country's most popular radio dramas of the time.

At the age of 21, Welles produced an acclaimed and often criticized version of Hamlet he did for the Colombia Workshop that shaved the four-hour play into a two-part 59-minute audio drama that cut the story of the Shakespearean tragedy to the bone. His presentation was noticeably more emotive than most presentations of Shakespeare at the time which set him apart. The bread and butter of his work throughout the 1930s was his work on pulps and radio dramas. Throughout 1937 over the course of a year, Welles provided the voice for the pulp icon The Shadow. At that point, the vigilante pulp hero in question was one of the largest entertainment properties of the time with novellas and regular radio dramas dedicated to him every week. Having Welles take up the mantle for a time put the fledgling star in the seat of a pop icon.

The moment that shot Welles into the spotlight came on October 30th, 1938 when Orson performed what would become the greatest media scandal of his career with the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast. The adaptation he conceived was fascinating. He took the broad events of H.G. Welles famous science fiction novel and interpreted them in the form of a series News broadcasts as though the events of the book were happening in rural New Jersey and New York City. The following events aren't clear. Welles himself inflated the reaction to the broadcast as though hundreds of screaming civilians scurried across New York City and attempted to flee head first into the Hudson River. More than likely the reaction caused nothing more than a minor stir compared to the massive nationwide reaction that the broadcast was implied to have caused. The broadcast itself did advertise itself on the pretense that it was a radio drama so any disturbed civilians would've tuned in later into the broadcast without the knowledge that it was a radio play. The incident was taken seriously by the United States government and Welles was forced to own up to the brief chaos. Next to his first film, this incident would become the most widely remembered moment of his career and one he took a perverse pride in. Beyond the angry government officials, it caught many an important eye of the day. Among the people who took interest in Welles were the producers at RKO Radio Productions in Hollywood.

4. Sought by Hollywood

Welles initially had no interest in film or Hollywood. Hollywood wanted Welles because he was an exploding star with exactly the sort of talents and celebrity that could transition into a film career. RKO Radio Pictures approached him with enormous monetary offers but the disinterested Welles was already wealthy. Money was no object to him. If he was going to be dragged into the film industry he was going to do it on his own terms. Thus he sent RKO an over the top ridiculous offer demanding full creative control over whatever he produced with them. To his surprise and the surprise of the enter Hollywood establishment, RKO accepted. He was offered a multi-picture deal with full creative control, upto and including hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on each film and the right to reserve showing the picture to the studio executives until it was completed.

This has to understood in context. The late 1930s was the height of the studio system in Hollywood. Filmmakers worked at the behest of cutthroat corporate masters who had the right and gumption to control every facet of a film. They frequently re-shot segments from acclaimed films before they're released on a whim based on what they thought worked/didn't work/was marketable by their standards. Even industry greats like John Ford and Frank Capra didn't get to control this much of their films. Given that creatives had so many restrictions the results were stunning. This was the moment in cinematic history when films like Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind were emerging and defining the Golden Age of Hollywood as a time when storytelling and craft were at their creative peaks. For Welles to gallivant into Hollywood and take over the town single-handedly was unheard of. To paraphrase Welles, he had been given the greatest train set a kid ever received and he was looking to use it.

Without knowledge of what he was even doing Welles immediately turned to the greats of the industry of the time to start building his team. His two most important collaborators would be screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and cinematography Gregg Toland. Mankiewicz was a veteran screenwriter who had had his hand in writing and producing dozens of films since 1926. Toland was fresh off of working on multiple critically acclaimed films like The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath, both of which he shot with John Ford.

Welles had the best talent Hollywood had to offer at his fingertips and near infinite power to do as he pleased and began working on different pitches for ideas for his first film. The first idea he conceived was ultimately too ambitious to achieve. He considered shooting an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness done in the first person perspective. The project ultimately fell apart as Welles eventually couldn't make his vision work on RKO's budget. Decades later there was a proper if highly altered adaptation of the book with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Heart of Darkness would be the first of three pitches Welles initially made to RKO to fill his two film contract. His second idea was a political thriller/comedy called The Smiler With a Knife based on a novel by Cecil Day-Lewis. This project stalled by December of 1939. Welles was uncertain of a plan and didn't want to drag starting production on something indefinitely. He was already behind schedule. Welles and Mankiewicz began brainstorming and eventually, the two started on an idea for a film titled American. Welles approached Mankiewicz during the writing to find that the script he'd written out was hundreds of pages of messy but serviceable ideas. Taking his excellent ability to cut down stories to the bone that he had used on Hamlet, Orson crafted what would come to be known as his first masterpiece Citizen Kane.

5. Citizen Kane (1941)

I recently did a full-length breakdown of Citizen Kane for Geeks Under Grace and don't wish to relitigate much of what I produced for that article here. What I do think is necessary is understanding how the world reacted to and would ultimately go onto understand the film.

The reaction to the film was both immediate and faltering. The film was met initially by mixed reviews that sited the film's awkward structure as a fault. It wouldn't be years before the film would be released after it's initial run that the film would be subsequently analyzed and relitigated as one of the greatest films of all time.

Well before it's release, the film's satirical target William Randolph Hearst heard the wind that the film was a rather overt critique of his person and attempted to buy the film outright from RKO Radio Pictures to prevent it from seeing the light of day. When that didn't work, he turned to his newspaper network which proceeded to lambast the film in the public eye. The film's release was delayed and by the time it released to the public the reaction was nothing more than a whimper. Citizen Kane bombed in the box office.

The half-century of after it's release brought much rabid discussion and reevaluation of the film into mainstream discussion. In a famed piece of now hotly disregarded film criticism, New Yorker Film Critic Paeline Kael wrote Raising Kane. The essay lambasted Orson Welles, the film in question and called into question the very authorship of the film, claiming that screenwriter Herman Manchowitz deserved more credit for his role in writing the film.

Mind you Pauline Kael's criticism wasn't totally irrational. Kael is one of the most influential critics in history and tends only to be remembered nowadays by her gaffs like her public disdain for Clint Eastwood films like Dirty Harry. Her coming out against Orson Welles is remembered as an enormous artistic mistake on her part but people take the book-length essay she wrote very seriously. As a point, it's worth noting that Welles fundamentally agreed with her on many points. He felt that the director was an overrated position in filmmaking and that film was a collaborative process between the writers, actors and crew that the direct guided and oversaw. Even so, it's not surprising one of the antagonist characters in The Other Side of the Wind was a female film critic.

The most cynical read on Citizen Kane is that it's the film that introduced the concept of ceilings to the cinema. Prior to Citizen Kane, most film productions didn’t film ceilings because they needed open air sets to fit audio equipment. Many proclaimed fans of the film tend to adore it's superficiality more than it's actual storytelling chops as a film. As it stands the most remembered aspect of the film is the Rosebud twist at the end that Welles himself considered as gimmicky. Welles himself had a very conflicted relationship with the film. Welles disliked some of the films minor mistakes and ultimately came to consider the film a curse on his career that he could never live up to. How can anyone build a career off of an instant masterpiece? Even the man who made Citizen Kane couldn't manage to answer that question.

Yet in 1982, Steven Spielberg paid $55,000 for one of the surviving Sled props. Every filmmaker from Martin Scorsese, to Richard Linklater, to Tim Burton, to George Lucas and the aforementioned Steven Spielberg has sited Citizen Kane not only as one of their favorite films but as their inspiration for much of their work. In addition to most every respected film critic from Roger Ebert to Jonathon Rosenbaum has offered their endorsement of the film's strengths. Its legacy is undeniable. Is it overrated? Perhaps. While it's placement in the canon of Orson Welles is certainly hotly debated, there is no denying that Welles began his filmmaking career with a masterpiece for the history books.

6. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

There is a scene in Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles where the titular character and his apprenticing young actor Zac Effron that the Welles family was once close to Booth Tarkington. Though not widely remembered today, Tarkington would've been a huge deal to people at the time much how writers like Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace are lionized today. His masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons would go on to be the subject of Welles’ second major film for RKO. 

As Welles continued his work after the debacle of Citizen Kane's release he quickly moved on to fulfill the second film in his RKO contract. His team continued to dig through numerous options and ideas. The most notable idea he didn't end up going with was a pitch for an adaptation of the Bible called The Life of Christ which would've been a strictly adhered adaptation that ultimately fell through twice. Instead, Welles turned to the contemporary masterpiece that was close to his heart. Welles' initial cut of The Magnificent Ambersons is said to have been a masterpiece that rivaled Citizen Kane in quality. He translated the sad story of an old American family's decline into poverty and irrelevance to the cinema and delivered the second masterpiece RKO paid him to. Unfortunately for Welles, it wasn't the masterpiece RKO wanted. The studio shuttered at the bleak film Welles had produced and quickly began underhanded plans to change the film.

Welles was shipped off to Brazil as part of a US Government deal with their government. He was to shoot his third feature for RKO called It's All True which would've involved documentary footage from various festivals and events. While he was out of the country, RKO pulled all of the actors and crew back to the studio lot, cut out the third act of the film and reshot it with a happy ending that completely changed the story of The Magnificent Ambersons. Several cast and crew attempted to warn Welles but he didn't find out until it was too late. By the time he was back in Hollywood, he would lose his rights to change the film. Late in his life, Welles would find himself watching the theatrical cut of The Magnificent Ambersons late one night on television. His then mistress Oja Kodar recalled the experience of nearly walking into the room and catching a reflection of the late 60s Welles sobbing as the movie that clearly meant the most to him was presented on late night television. While the cut we have today is largely excellent, it's far from the vision that Welles had intended for it.

7. Fired from RKO

Welles had already been fired from RKO Radio Productions by the time he returned from Brazil. The studio that had once promised him free reign to produce masterpieces for them didn't like the controversy associated with his films and couldn't figure out how to market what he did film. For them, it was smarter to go into damage control mode and boot out the wunderkind to the streets. The cut of Magnificent Ambersons with the happy ending they did produce didn't do well in theaters and the preferred cut of the film was eventually destroyed. Thus began the air of bad luck that would surround Orson Welles' prolific career. Despite churning out two masterpieces, Hollywood now hated him. As time would go on he would become more and more of a pariah in filmmaking circles.

His last film for RKO which he was producing and directed several scenes for Journey into Fear ultimately saw him being stricken from the credits. His co-director Norman Foster would receive directing credit but later Welles scholars have often retroactively credited Welles as a director too. Welles immediately began damage control for his reputation by prostrating himself over the next several film projects he produced. He started taking acting jobs for films starting with an adaptation of Jane Eyre to try and repair his public image. Interestingly enough the latter film would end up being one of his only romantic performances as that film had been produced to capitalize off of the recent success of historical romances like Gone With The Wind.

8. The Stranger (1946)

Welles needed to jump back into Hollywood and prove that he was capable of producing something normal that he could sell. With that in mind, he conceived of The Stranger. The film would go on to be his least artistic and therefore most financially successful film. It had been four years since he'd been in the directing chair and he was desperate. He was approached by producer Sam Spiegel after director John Huston couldn't take the job. The result is easily the most Hollywoodish film of his filmography and the one that really represents the director at his most obedient. Despite the darker story, that being about a Nazi holocaust perpetuated being hunted by an investigator portrayed by Edward G. Robinson, the movie was a great deal less artistic and revolutionary by the standards of the time. It was merely a conventional noir thriller. To paraphrase Welles, he did the film with much stricter regulations as a means of proving to Hollywood that he wasn't a toxic director and that he could make money. While the film wouldn't succeed in fixing his reputation it at least made him slightly less toxic. Unfortunately, the film wouldn't lead to any additional career help for Orson. He originally signed with International Pictures to do a four-picture deal after the film as complete. The company backed out of the deal the just weeks after the premiere when it looked initially like the film wouldn't make it's money back.

9. The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

The life of Orson Welles has often been described as an illusion, an incestuous juggle between fact and fiction that the ever impressive Welles maintained as a kind false mysticism to increase his legend. While it did give his persona a larger than life appearance it's made tracking the history of Welles into a nightmare. This can be clearly seen in the case of Welles' third masterpiece The Lady from Shanghai. He's told the story of how he pitched the film to Hollywood producer Harry Cohn of Colombia Pictures. After his recent failures Welles turned back to his previous loves of radio and theater and began producing new shows and dramas. His biggest stage production at that point was a play version of Around the World in 80 Days which closed almost immediately within weeks after opening.

Supposedly, as the production was preparing for it's Boston premiere, Welles found himself strapped for cash and in desperate need for $50,000 to move the costumes from the train station to the theater. Desperately he pitched a fake book to the president of Colombia Pictures using the name of a paperback book a young woman was reading next to him, got the money, performed the show and then went back to Hollywood to write and direct the film. It's a great story but it likely isn't true. Whatever truth is in it is questionable as he's told different versions of the same story to different interviewers, each with a different amount of money and circumstance. It's likely that Welles just got called out of the blue by Harry Cohn to direct a thriller and he took the gig. Naturally of course half of the appeal of Orson Welles is the blur of fiction and reality the surrounds the myth of his life. It's fun to speculate but having a historically accurate read of Welles' history is a frustrating knot to untie for scholars.

That film he produced The Lady From Shanghai would become one of his most respected films and widely regarded as one of the weirdest movies. That's not hyperbole either as David Kehr of the Chicago Reader was quoted as saying it was one of the "weirdest great movies ever made". While more conventional by the standards of his previous two masterpieces, The Lady from Shanghai is far from your run of the mill Noir thriller. Welles had initially shot the film in the style of a documentary. That's a strange choice but it grounds the otherwise outlandish story of a sailor being asked to help fake the death of a wealthy man in a kind of distant visual style. Harry Cohn hated the result. Like his previous two films, large segments of the film were reshot to add traditional close-ups and conventional shooting. These shots clashed with the film's already strange visual style and made the film more surrealistic than it already was. The film's most notable contribution to cinema, of course, was the finale in the mirror maze. Without spoiling the story context, the final shootout is mesmerizing and visually bizarre and left an imprint on generations of filmmakers. The trope has returned in numerous forms from action films like Enter the Dragon and John Wick 2 to comics like The Dark Knight Returns. Yet again though, the film flopped in the box office.

As a quick aside, the film also stars his then second wife Rita Haworth with whom he divorced shortly after the film completed production.

10. Macbeth (1948)

It's strange that Welles' first attempt at a Shakespearian film would come about in such a modest fashion yet his selection wasn't surprising. Being that Voodoo Macbeth was the stage play that put his name on the map, a traditional Scottish production on film made sense to be his Shakespeare film.

Republic Pictures at the time was a subpar studio by the standards of the Big Three. It mostly produced B-Pictures and serials. For Herbert Yates, as the president of the studio, Welles' pitch for a Shakespeare adaption gave him high hopes that he might be able to make his fledgling Hollywood operation into a prestige studio with the right success and went all in on the idea. Welles produced the film on cheap sets and finished the film in just 19 days of production with two additional days of pick up shots. Yet despite being rushed and inexpensive, the film managed to produce something qualifying as a definitive vision of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies. That speaks highly of the production given that the play has been adapted dozens of times in cinematic history including versions by Roman Polanski, Akira Kurosawa and most recently Justin Kurzel. Yet Welles' film was benefitted by Welles' unique expressionist take on filmmaking. The cheap stagey sets were masked in beautiful black and white film stock, lit with precision to highlight it's character's emotional state and performed to perfection with Welles in the central role.

Welles had bet that the film would go a long way to repairing his reputation and unfortunately this wouldn't help it. The film was savaged by American critics who despised the over-the-top Scottish accents in the initial release. Welles rerecorded the dialog with American accents for a 1950 rerelease but that version didn't do well either. Both versions were flops and outside of Europe where the critics appreciated it more, there wasn't much support for it. It didn't help that the film was released in close proximity to Laurence Olivier's acclaimed Hamlet which became one of the most celebrated Shakespeare adaptations of all time. It would take years for critics to start appreciating its strengths.

11. The Third Man (1949)

Of all of the films in the Welles filmography, maybe none is more vital to understanding the Celebrity of Orson Welles than The Third Man. Like Jane Eyre, this wasn't a film that he produced or directed in so much as he is remembered for his excellent performance. At that, he's barely in the film at all. The leading man is his frequent collaborator Joseph Cotton. The film was directed by legendary director Carol Reed, famous for films like Odd Man Out, Night Train to Munich, The Fallen Idol, and Oliver! While somewhat obscure now, the director became famous for being one of the most skilled directors in British history. In addition, the film was produced by legendary golden age producer David O'Selznick (Gone With the Wind, King Kong). Welles was asked to play the role of Harry Lime in the film and was offered one of two options for payment for a small role. He had the option of reviewing a portion of the film's profits down the line or a lump sum of money immediately. In a moment of deprivation, he jumped on the money immediately in a financial decision he would come to regret. The Third Man would go on to become the most financially successful film he was ever associated with. Had he chosen profit sharing he would've become immensely wealthy as the film in question has remained one of the most popular noir thrillers of all time.

Welles would later go on to express his opinion that his performance was the greatest "Star" role an actor could've ever asked for. Harry Lime is mentioned dozens of times in the film prior to his first appearance so when Orson Welles finally makes his surprise splash of an appearance the film there is a great deal of weight to his screen presence. His few scenes in the film and his improvised line are usually sighted as the high points of an otherwise widely regarded film. In some ways, this is sadly prophetic of much of the way culture remembers Orson Welles. People think of him as a flash in the pan and we see this in the way culture idealizes individual moments from his films as opposed to his films overall. Most people don't remember the side characters in Citizen Kane but they remember Rosebud. The same is true of The Third Man. People remember Welles' few scenes but they frequently forget Joseph Cotton and Carol Reed's accomplishments with the film outside of Welles. The mere size of his personality creates expectations. First-time viewers familiar with Welles might be surprised to notice he doesn't appear until well after the first hour of the film. Welles is just one turning gear in a much larger story about post-war corruption and profiteering set against the hurt and ruin of Vienna, Austria. His chemistry with Joseph Cotton adds an air of history two the two characters whose lives were once tied together being torn apart by circumstance. His deep baritone voice exudes an air of malevolence as he stares contemptuously on the small people below him. It's a small but vital performance built up to by one of the greatest thriller stories of all time.

12. Othello (1951)

No film would come to break Orson Welles' reputation more than Othello. Despite earning the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival, Othello would become a curse on his reputation that he would never overcome. Welles had conceived of doing an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello prior to Macbeth but ultimately chose to go with that play when the concept seemed unfeasible. Welles was approached by an Italian film production company to star and direct a film version of the famed play based on his recent theatrical work which the production company thought would translate over well into the stage play. Welles quickly got to work assembling a team of European filmmakers and actors that he took to Italy. The production was immediately stymied by the surprise Bankruptcy of the production company meaning that the subsequent three years of production necessary to get the film finished had to be self-financed. Though not Orson's fault as the factors were out of his control, this would prove to be the final nail in the coffin of his public reputation. The fact that the film took three years to finish and went over budget put a stigma on his name that he never escaped.

The result was a convoluted production shot across multiple countries including Spain, Italy, Morocco and Turkey that created a mismatched pan-Mediterranean look to the film. The final cut was an atmospheric masterpiece. Welles scholar Jonathon Rosenbaum described the tone as almost that of a horror film more than anything else. There's is an immense dread hanging over the film as we see the unfolding story of interracial love and racial bigotry play out against the backdrop of war and political strife. While a clean cut is available today thanks to the Criterion Collection, early distribution of the film didn't go well. The film received several cuts in different countries and many of the versions distributed had massive audio problems including audio drops and syncing issues. The film was also distributed with multiple soundtracks. Once again the hard work that went into an Orson Welles film was lost to circumstance and failed to materialize until much later.

13. King Lear (1953)

In the second of Welles' exoduses to Europe, the director fled the United States for England following the McCarthy hearings and as a result put him on bad terms with the IRS. Orson Welles wasn't a communist but he was a Roosevelt Progressive democrat and disliked the air of paranoia in the United States during the Cold War. Welles was asked to perform the titular role in a CBS Omnibus production of King Lear for television in 1953 which he accepted the role of. The television film was a severely truncated 73-minute version of the play with most of the subplots and extraneous stories outside of the main plot cut out to focus on the main character's descent into madness. Though cheaply produced for television, his performance as Lear is the standout of the film. While he was in the United States to film the production, he was escorted every by the IRS who confiscated his earnings from the production to pay off outstanding taxes being sent back to England.

14. Mr. Arkadin (1955)

After the immense success of The Third Man, the movie that had taken Hollywood by storm became a hot ticket item and it's producers wanted to franchise it. Thus in 1951 was born The Lives of Harry Lime. The radio drama starred Welles in his most popular and deplorable character over the course of 52 episodes that represented a prequel to the film. Welles himself was involved in the process of developing the series given that the character was so directly tied to him. This included an episode called The Man of Mystery. This episode would go on to become the primary influence of Welles' newest thriller.

Though lower in budget, Mr. Arkadin was ambitious in its scope. The thriller sought to be a massive thriller set across multiple countries where the stakes of the questions it raised could change the fate of nations. In terms of story, this thriller was one of his most grand and globe-trotting adventures. Mr. Arkadin is a veritable tour de force of settings and European cultures.

Whereas Othello was shot over multiple countries meant to portray the same place, Mr. Arkadin was set across multiple countries in Europe and portrayed the variant beauty of many of it's finest interior sets. Cramped as much of the film looks from a visual standpoint the film did tour Europe across the scope of its production from London, Munich, to multiple places in France and to Switzerland. The story's central mystery involving the investigation of a man with no memory of his past can be difficult to follow but builts to an excellent final race wherein the lead character and the titular Mr. Arkadin must race to Spain to find the same person before the other.

Once again he lost control over the final cut. The postproduction became a trainwreck worthy of Orson Welles' reputation. As scholar Jonathon Rosenbaum discussed in his famous 1991 essay Seven Arkadins, there are no less than seven public cuts of Mr. Arkadin. Welles lost control of the editing process and rights to the film when he missed his deadline and as a result, the producer recut the film multiple times, novelized it, and gave it several releases across Europe in multiple languages. Welles had been reshaping the story and structure during the editing process to improve it and without his guiding hand, the final edits that made theaters were fare from his wishes. Welles would go on to consider the film the greatest disaster of his career. He was a man who suffered many indignities but the utter loss of Mr. Arkadin to multiple cuts was one of his most brutal defeats.

15. Touch of Evil (1958)

Welles had just finished acting in a thriller for Universal Pictures when he was asked by the producers to perform in another film for them as "the heavy" in a crime thriller. Universal was already far underway in developing the story concepts and casting but hadn't settled on a director or a script as of yet. Charlton Heston was already picked to play the lead role in the film. During a cross-country phone call, the film's producers mentioned the casting offer for Orson Welles when Heston made the offhand comment that Welles ought to be the one they sought out to direct the film based on the quality of his previous films. The line went dead for several seconds.

Welles was just getting back to Hollywood after a decade away in Europe. While he hadn't gotten over the pain of his bad breakup with RKO and his previous failures he was eager to direct a Hollywood picture again. Welles signed up to Touch of Evil at Heston's behest on the stipulation that he would get to rewrite the script. Over the course of several weeks of late nights, Welles and his secretary chugged out a new script based on the book Badge of Honor that Universal approved and set to work on.

As with many Welles films, Touch of Evil is rather depressingly remembered primarily for its opening shot. The several minutes long tracking shots at the beginning of the film is legitimately excellent in its pace and scope as we see several minutes of a car with a ticking time bomb in the back seat slowly drive across the US-Mexico border through crowded streets knowing the car could explode at any moment. Naturally of course when I was shown the film in Film School this is where the film was stopped. Many filmmakers worship the tracking shot and then forget to watch the remaining film. What they miss out on is a dark tragedy of corruption and falls from grace. The murder we see play out in real time at the beginning of the film is merely the beginning of a much larger conspiracy as the bombing rouses the attention of a Mexican police officer in the area at the time on his honeymoon and the local police legend Hank Quinlan. The film is one of the starkest examples of contemporary film noir, making the most out of Welles' expressionist love of shadow and darkness. While the opening shot is excellent it's not even the only tracking shot in the film. There are several long tracking shots, several of which we see during the investigation scenes that are just as technically impressive considering how deeply we follow the camera and swing in, out and around the conversations at play.

Universal had loved much of the footage that Welles was sending them at the end of every shooting day. Right up until they saw the rough cut of the film it seemed as though the two parties were on the same page. Alas, Universal Studios did what Hollywood always did to Orson Welles films. The final cut scared Universal with how dark it was. They cut out half an hour of footage and reshot segments of the plot to make it more palatable. By studio contracts, they had to present Welles with a cut of the film before the film went to print and shipped off to theaters. After seeing the new theatrical cut, Welles was distraught. The perturbed Welles skipped out on his daughter's wedding to write a 58-page memo to Universal Studios begging them to make needed changes to the film.

The film was released as the second billing of a double feature and subsequently bombed. In Europe, the film received a surprising level of acclaim, support from major film critics and won two awards at the 1958 Brussels World Film Festival but without American success the film as considered dead on arrival. This was the last straw for Orson Welles. Hollywood had betrayed him for the last time. With this last indignity dealt to his creative vision, Welles packed up and moved back to Europe again.

There would thankfully be something of a re-edit of the film. In 1998, acclaimed film editor and sound designer Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Trilogy, American Graffiti, The Conversation, The English Patient, Jarhead) recreated a special cut of the film based on the Welles memo that represents the closest version of the film to Welles' vision that remains the definitive way to watch the movie today.

16. Exile to Europe

Immediately after the debacle of Touch of Evil, Welles began to work independently on one of his most ambitious and personal projects to date. Don Quixote would go on to become one of the great obsessions and failures of his life, never seeing a proper cut released. He started accruing footage immediately after finishing his work with Universal by doing some shooting in Mexico. He would continue this process over the course of the next two decades, doing what meager shooting he could across multiple countries in Europe. Unfortunately, time dragged on and the loss of actors to death dragged the film's post-production well into the 1980s without having completed principal photography.

As Don Quixote continued to meld and atrophy, Welles began the next stage of his life by beginning something of a new chapter in the history of cinema. Without the backing of Hollywood money or big investors behind him, Welles began a personal journey as what we would be known as the first truly independent filmmaker. His subsequent series of European films, though cheaper looking and rough around the edges, represented some of the only items of his career that he felt truly proud of in their totality. They were totally his films, unedited by intrusive producers seeking a buck and all celebrated across the European arthouse film scene. Of these, in his later years, he was the proudest of.

17. The Trial (1962)

Literature was, of course, the love of Welles' intellectual life. He was well read by anybody's standards by the time he reached New York City in his twenties and started adapting Shakespeare better than Broadway was at the time. He understood these great works of literature greater than almost anyone else that had the bravery to take a straight edge to them and crave new versions of them for viewing audiences. Often that meant that his versions diverged from the ideas inherent in the text while still staying true to the spirit of the literature. In the case of Franz Kafka's book The Trial, the story of an innocent man trapped in a bureaucratic cycle of hellish corruption and repetition becomes a different kind of nightmare. To borrow Welles' quote, "He's guilty as h***!"

Welles' monologue at the beginning of the film refers to the story as having the logic of a dream. Seeing the film one can recognize that immediately. The setting, production design and moment to moment logic of the story shifts with surreal precision from moment to moment as the lead character Joseph K. is dragged through a strange inquisition, blamed for a crime that is never explained to him bursting with fear and guilt the whole way through. The film looks and acts like a nightmare, as the scene to scene flow arbitrarily jumps from scenes of stark visuals, tense chases, and heavy shadows. Never before or after has Welles' overt love of expressionism been put to such beautiful use. Then again it's hard to tell where the movie begins and the budget ends. Much of the film is shot against industrial blight as we see buildings lined with electrical wires and technology. It's a strange look that contrasts with the sleek, fast-paced cinematography at times. It's never clear that Welles isn't just shooting this at the first industrial park he could find that was available or if these flourishes of ugly utilitarian electronics are part of the point. Maybe they're expressions of the bureaucratic machine that is chewing K alive.

Of all his successes, The Trial is the one that Welles has gone on record as saying was the greatest thing he ever created. Beyond the constraints of a low budget, everything we see on screen is Welles' vision. Given the years of hardships that incurred his previous productions, it's not surprising he'd hold a film that represented his own vision in such high esteem. That said, The Trial wasn't the film that he considered his favorite.

18. Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Welles once said in an interview that if he ever had to argue his way into heaven based on his work, he would try to do so with Chimes at Midnight. Originally titled Falstaff in some regions after the central character, Chimes at Midnight represented the most loyally produced and loving adaptation of Welles' own career. It was based primarily on William Shakespeare's Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 with elements of Henry V added. For Welles, the book's central character of Falstaff, the jolly, rotund and disgraced nobleman was one of Shakespeare's greatest creations. Naturally, Welles saw a great deal of himself in Falstaff. The character was by his nature a good man, albeit a lusty, cowardly slob and a liar with a heart of gold. He was innocent and naive in the manner of a child. To Welles, he was the representation of Merry Old England and the fictionalized nostalgia for the past that imbibed so much of English literature from Shakespeare to Chaucer. He was an implicit rejection of the notion of modernity. Welles had tried before to stage a version of what would become Chimes at Midnight earlier in his life called Five Kings that ultimately proved too technically complicated and slow-paced to work properly. With Chimes at Midnight, Welles finally achieved a lifelong dream in portraying his favorite Shakespeare character in all of his exhaustive glory.

Much like The Trial, there is much to be desired about Welles' vision for medieval England. The claustrophobia and tension of his previous film gave way to vast open spaces, joyous celebrations in wide open inns and regal grandeur of the Royalty. Henry IVth is the story of the aged father passing down his title to his namesake son and forcing him to grapple with leadership and responsibility. For the young Prince of Wales, King Henry and Falstaff are the literal representatives of his duality between responsibility and youth. It's a kind of tragedy of maturity wherein Henry must put aside Falstaff and grapple with the brutal realities of the real world. Naturally, Welles goes on in on that brutality. Chimes at Midnight comes with one of the most brutal and influential battle scenes in cinematic history. The carefully shot battle scene incorporated dozens of extras, horses, and grime to produce one of the least romantic depictions of battle yet put to film. Welles said the battle scene was meant to be intentionally brutal to emphasize the idea of the death of chivalry in battle. We see that clearly as swords clash and bodies pile up. Visually speaking it's hard to deny that the battle wasn't hugely influential on generations of filmmakers, being referenced in everything from Kenneth Branaugh's adaptation of Henry V to Mel Gibson's Braveheart and even in the Battle of the Bastards in Game of Thrones.

Naturally, a shoot of this size and scope proved to be greatly difficult on Welles' budget. Europe is naturally awash with castles so locations proved to be available for the film's striking scenes set against the Royalty. Most of the shooting in the Inn was done on a sound stage that Welles had built specifically for the production. Unfortunately, the film lacked proper audio recording technology requiring nearly all of the audio to be rerecorded in post-production. Despite the limitations, the final product is staggering to behold. It's a loud, boisterous and joyful tragedy right up until the bitter emotional end. Many critics consider Chimes at Midnight to be Welles' greatest achievement above and beyond Citizen Kane. Welles would be inclined to agree.

19. The Immortal Story (1968)

Of all the films in Welles' filmography, none represents quite as massive of a digression as The Immortal Story. Immediately the viewer notices that the film is his first film up until this point that was shot in color. As Welles discussed with his protege and biographer Peter Bogdonvich, he always preferred to shoot his films in black and white as he felt that the format did more to help present performances better than color did. With The Immortal Story, he seems to have broken his rule for reasons that aren't quite clear. The results offer some hints as to what was going through Welles' decision-making process. The film is bizarrely alluring to look at. Considering his visual style was more receptive to surrealism and stark visual symbolism, a cursory review shows the film to be one of the most luscious and beautifully shot films in his filmography.

With an understanding of the story, the logic of this seems to come into focus. The story follows the life of an ancient European nobleman who in his older years has sought to make a story that he once heard come true. In the story, an old man pays a sailor five guineas to have an affair with his life before sending him off to sea. Fulfilling the story and making it a true story becomes the old man's obsession. Paying an older fellow Noblewoman and a young sailor he meets on the street, the man observes from a distance as the scenario he contrived into reality forms as the Noblewoman and the sailor bond and intimately perform their task before they're forced to part ways.

While sexuality does technically exist in several of Welles' films like Citizen Kane and The Trial as plot points, The Immortal Story holds the bizarre position of being one of the only Welles projects wherein sexuality is a major theme of the story and one rooted in its story's ideas and anxieties. One can almost look through the allure of its technicolor dreamscape and intimacy to see a depiction of Welles' vision for what the very nature of storytelling is. Through the shrouds of more traditional filmmaking, Welles seems to be using this story as a kind of metaphor for the drive and anxiety that forms storytelling itself. At its core, Welles seems to suggest that the core of art is a perverse need to reproduce and express one's innermost anxieties on display. Though unconventional and likely overly sexualized for some viewers, The Immortal Story presents us with a disturbingly honest sort of autobiography of the artist's soul.

20. F for Fake (1974)

Orson Welles' final completed film represents one of the most avente-garde and experimental pieces of filmmaking in his filmography. F for Fake is technically a documentary but it's a very fast paced, tangential and esoteric piece of filmmaking that jumps across multiple boundaries and stories to explore multiple facets of a central theme. That theme is the idea of "fakeness". The central story follows a pair of famous frauds. The first is Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian painter that made his living as an art forger recreating hundreds of the most popular pieces of contemporary artists including Pablo Picasso. The second is Clifford Irving, Elmyr's biographer who was caught forging an interview with the mysterious media mogul and recluse Howard Hughes.

While the story focuses primarily on their accomplishments and controversies the entirety of the piece is extremely tangential and jumps across the lives of dozens of people including Orson Welles himself. Welles takes time in the piece to discuss his history with lies, the War of the Worlds broadcast that he played up the legend of, how he got his first acting job by lying, and what the actual effect of lying means to the art world. Welles muses on the consequences of every one of the personalities he profiles and comes to many fascinating insights about the nature of their dishonesties. While he makes no bones about the fact that they were frauds, plagiarists and charlatans he also finds a great deal of sympathy to be found amongst the tragedies of their lives.

Then at the moment of most brutal honesty, he pulls back and asks what it all means in the scheme of things. Merely by observing a beautiful European church lined with hundreds of year old statues and garments of stone. He calls it a monument to human dignity and to God's grace and power. Yet this monument has no author or name to it. It merely stands the test of time as an expression of humanity's greatest desires and hopes. As essayist Kyle Kalgren noted in his excellent analysis of the film, Welles seems to come to the opposite conclusion of his seminal film Citizen Kane. "We'll always have Xanadu, so who cares about Rosebud?" Maybe the film's final conclusion is that art is greater than the individuals or money involved and that fake art is still art. Maybe a fake painting that matches the quality of the real thing is as valuable as the real thing. Then again maybe it doesn't. Welles ends the film with a beautiful story told by his then-mistress Oja Kodar detailing her family's lineage and the untold history of a great unknown art forger that represents one of the most exciting and beautiful moments of the film before Welles pulls the rug out on the audience with the film's final moments.

21. The Final Years and Unfinished Projects

The final years of Orson Welles' life can reasonably be described as a sad march into oblivion. Welles returned to the United States in 1970 hoping to find a home among the greats of New Hollywood and quickly set about trying to produce new films. What followed was fifteen years of financial breakdowns, gradual periods of acting in films for money and then turning around and investing it in his film productions. After 1978, Welles never completed a project for the final seven years of his life. Yet he still continued to work, taking acting and commercial jobs and desperately attempting to finishing his outstanding projects. His final completed projected was Filming Othello. The film is nothing more than a conversation of Orson Welles discussing the production history of his film Othello that he produced for German television. The film was included with the 2017 Criterion release of Othello and is well worth observation for fans of Orson Welles. If it impresses anything upon its viewer it would be Welles' strange sense of late-period melancholy and modesty. He states early in the film that nothing he's produced is worthy of the art that he's attempting to adapt and that he was merely a filmmaker. He would try to produce a second documentary called Filming The Trial but didn't complete it before his death.

He shot footage for multiple films in this time including an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, a thriller called The Deep, segments of Don Quixote and finally his recently completed film The Other Side of the Wind. The latter of these he started on as early as 1970 and proceeded to shoot and editing throughout the remainder of his life. The film would go on to become the greatest legend of his filmmaking career. Despite six years of on and off production, nearly a decade of legal red tape following the Iranian Revolution (the film's financier was the brother in law of the Shaw of Iran) and years of faltering post-production, the film was never completed in Welles' lifetime. Prior to his death he discussed taking on directing several additional films including The Cradle Will rock, Ada or Ador: A Family Chronicle, Saint Jack (which his protégé Peter Bogdanovich would direct) and a full adaptation of King Lear.

There is a great deal of speculation about why many of these films never got done in the final seven years of Welles' life. Some consider Welles' final years to be too self-destructive and purposely unproductive but by all indications, Orson spent these years grappling with crippling financial troubles and red tape between his sparse moments of being able to film.

In a desperate move to try and garner sympathy and attention, Welles used an appearance during the AFI festival meant to offer the aged Welles with a lifetime achievement award for his work as a chance to promote his newest film. During the acceptance speech, he proceeded to show off footage from The Other Side of the Wind which was suffering from a lack of funding and wouldn't be finished and blatantly hinted that the film was short on funding. The incident was interpreted plainly as a moment of panhandling and desperation.

Welles wasn't a religious man and told two conflicting thoughts on his beliefs late in his life. On one occasion he stated that he was an atheist when asked to perform a prayer. On another occasion when asked he said that he believed in God but didn't think God would be interested in his prayers. In any case, Welles was apathetic to faith. His sole drive seemed to be his desire to create and act out the stories that inspired him and no one at this time wanted to respect or enable his talents. Unable to accomplish that which drove his life, his final years were spent in relative despair.

22. Transformers: The Movie (1986)

Orson Welles' final cinematic role was portraying Unicron in Transformers: The Movie. If there were any more of a modest place for the one time giant to descend, I cannot think of one. Granted this probably didn't represent his most serious compromise. During the production of The Other Side of the Wind, he spent several evenings with his cinematography editing softcore adult films so that the two of them could get back to work and keep him financially solvent. He recorded his audio for the film just five days before his death. Regardless of his opinion on working on the animated film, these final years of Orson Welles' life represent him at his lowest point. He was forced to take any gig he could book himself for. Famously he took an enormous amount of commercial work, which included an infamous Champaign commercial in which an inebriated Welles attempted to give an elegant speech about the mystique of Paul Masson wine only to slur his sentences to a depressingly hilarious degree. In his late period speeches, you really sense the desperation and melancholy of his station in life. As Welles performed his final voiceover on Transformers, his aged and decrepit voice proved too rough even to fill the role. The audio designers were forced to augment the voice-over performance to improve it.

Welles perished less than a week after performing his lines for the film from a heart attack at the age of seventy. He died at this desk while typing up stage directions for a project that he and his cinematographer Gary Graver were going to shoot the following day at UCLA. In a sense, he died doing what he loved. His body was cremated and a small funeral was held for him where in his closest friend and three daughters attended. This was the first instance that the three children of different marriages ever met. Two years after his death in 1987, his wishes were respected and his ashes were buried in Spain at the home of a friend and bullfighter Antonio Ordonez.

23. Don Quixote De Orson Welles (1992)

The years after Welles' death brought a great deal of pain and hardship for the people whose lives he most affected. It also brought a great deal of division and indecision. Depending on who you ask the following two decades after his death brought an enormous amount of hostility and contention between the inheritors of the Welles legacy. Multiple people sought claim to Welles' history and tried to make his works available. Since multiple studios owned the rights to his various films, rereleases of his movies became contentious. Universal was sued by Beatrice Welles when it attempted to reconstruct Touch of Evil only for his to settle out of court with the studio. She later claimed her suit was caused by a lack of communication that wouldn't have happened had she understood their plan to follow Welles' famous memo. Beatrice additionally caused a great deal of controversy in 1992 when she attempted to fiancé a restoration of Othello that many Welles scholars have come to scoff at for it's incompetent and sloppy restoration.

Cinematographer Gary Graver spent much of his life following Welles' death mourning the loss of his creative partner. Welles was his primary source of income and one of his closest work associates and friends for fifteen years. Graver would spend many of the final years of his life attempting to build a cut of The Other Side of the Wind that ultimately never came to fruition before his death in 2006.

Orson's mistress and creative partner Oja Kodar inherited the Welles estate and attempted to do everything in her power to preserve the memory and works of her lover. In 1995, she co-wrote/co-directed a documentary called Orson Welles: The One-Man Band. While she has settled into a comfortable life in Croatia working as an artist and an innkeeper, she's stayed notable through her association with her late lover. Depending on who you ask, she's responsible for some of the legal troubles that kept The Other Side of the Wind out of the spotlight, however, her role in preserving the later works of Welles is contentious. By any regards, Oja is a worthy inheritor of the estate and did everything she could to bring his films to the public light.

In 1990, she sold the rights to some of Welles' remaining footage from Don Quixote to Spanish producer Patxi Irigoyen, desiring to see some sort of version of the film come to fruition. Working with director Jesús Franco, the filmmakers stitched the decomposed footage shot across multiple formats into a semi-coherent two-hour film that they showed at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival under the title Don Quixote De Orson Welles. Without proper audio, the crew rerecorded dialog from new actors. The result is a rough looking, rough sounding and merely academic exercise that barely registers as a completed film. There was a rough cut that Orson Welles himself had finished that film critics Juan Cobos and Jonathon Rosenbaum have seen that according to them looks nothing like the hodgepodge of a film that Irigoyen and Franco assembled.

 24. The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Like with Citizen Kane, I don't wish to relitigate the entire history of The Other Side of the Wind. Having already reviewed the film and shot a series of interviews with Welles scholars Josh Karp and Jonathon Rosenbaum, I've thoroughly discussed the history of Welles' so-called "final film". What I would like to emphasize is just how the film finally came to fruition after nearly fifty years of litigation, red tape, and creative challenges.

After Welles' death, the footage from his shooting was locked in a French vault awaiting decision making and legal red tape. Under French law, Welles still technically had the rights to the film but the Iranian government had a claim on it as financers. In addition, there was a great deal of contention as to how to move forward. The surviving legacy holders of Welles' work Oja Kodar, Beatrice Welles and Peter Bogdanovich all had differing desires that needed to be respected. In order to get finished the film would need an enormous amount of diplomacy and money.

Following several faltering offers to finance the film, polish filmmaker Filip Jan Rymsza stepped in with a bid to take over the film's post-production. Teaming with producers Jen Koethner Kaul and Frank Marshall, the team began to work on acquiring the film and by fall of 2014, the prep work had begun. By early 2015 the group had gained access to the workprint of the film and had gotten Peter Bogdanovich on board the project. They garnered enough money to get access to the film's workprint by selling distribution rights to the film. Filip began the careful dance of reaching an agreement between Beatrice and Oja and by spring of 2015, the gears were turning with the hope of turning the film around in time for Orson Welles' 100th birthday that year. On May 7th, the team began a forty-day Indiegogo campaign to attempt to raise the necessary funds to finish the film's postproduction. Despite extending the campaign an additional month and lowering the funding goals, the $406 thousand that was accumulated while inspiring wasn't enough to complete the film. Towards the end of 2015, it began clear the film was going to require additional help from a new distributor.

The campaign stayed quiet for nearly two years as behind the scenes discussions went underway until March 2017 when they finally announced that Netflix had purchased the distribution rights. Within weeks, the footage was moved from Paris to Los Angeles and the nearly year-long production process was underway. An enormous amount of work was needed to processing the hundreds of hours of footage into a manageable process. Editor Bob Murawski (The Hurt Locker) worked with a team to transfer the footage shot over multiple formats into digital, painstakingly matched the hours of audio to the footage and started slowly editing the film using Welles' mismatched notes and script. Welles problematically evolved his vision for the final film throughout the process of shooting the film. The result of this was that editing the film became a difficult process of making executive decisions as to what to keep and what to send to the cutting room floor.

By January 2018, a rough cut of the film had been finished. At this point, the producers held the first screening for the film to a group of Hollywood insiders including Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and Rian Johnson. The screening also included John Huston's son Danny Huston, Crispin Glover, Peter Bogdanovich and the surviving crew of the film. The next several months brought about the final aspects of post-production which included composing the film's original soundtrack. French composer and musician Michel Legrand, who had previously composed the soundtrack for F for Fake, was brought in and started recording the soundtrack in March 2018.

The film's initial premiere had been planned for the Cannes Film Festival however that festival changed the rules arbitrarily in regards to its willingness to premiere digital films from online distributors like Netflix. Subsequently, the premiere was pushed until August 31st at the 75th Venice International Film Festival. Naturally, the premiere that was most important was it's vaunted premiere on Netflix which was eventually announced for release on Friday, November 2nd, 2018. Generations of Welles supporters and fans finally were afforded the opportunity to view Welles' final theatrical premiere that day. Additionally, several movie theaters across the United States premiered the film the same weekend including the Music Box Theater in Chicago where I personally attended the Saturday morning premiere.

25. Conclusion: The Legacy of Orson Welles

We are now living in the greatest time to be an Orson Welles fan. The old truism is that artists are never appreciated until after they die but now in 2018 the full lot of his estranged filmography is finally starting to make its way into the public eye. Welles is beloved as one of the filmmakers in history and his work is regularly mentioned in the same breath as the masters like John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Jean Luc-Godard. 

Every year the studios that own the rights to Welles' films go out of their way to restore and re-release more of his films. Just in the past few years The Criterion Collection has gone back and released Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story, Othello, Filming Othello and The Magnificent Ambersons on Blu-ray. Chimes at Midnight's release on home video coincided with its first public touring in the United States in decades as the film's restoration was displayed on dozens of movie theaters across the country in 2016. Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Touch of Evil and Macbeth all have excellent Blu-ray transfers. His lesser known and regarded films like The Stranger and The Trial are in the public domain and are available for free online.

It's a shame that the late director's work has for long been relegated to the dustbins of history. Many of his best pieces of film were left to rot for decades in vaults with no public viewing or demand. Now almost all of his work is available to buy on the most up to date home viewing format. Fans of cinema ought to seek these films out. Though obscure and often rough around the edges, Orson Welles produced one of the finest outputs of work in the history of cinema. He persisted against a lifetime of odds and gave the world everything he had in him until there was nothing left to give. In the end, he was a more modest, fragile and melancholy soul than the bombast, ego and strength of his personality let on.

As Jonathon Rosenbaum discussed in during our FVTV interview this November, once he'd met Welles in person he no longer fanaticized the idea of wanting to be him. Even so, Welles was everything he was sold to be. He was kind, intelligent if a bit rude but he was always himself.

Resources/Sources:

Previous GUG Reviews: Citizen Kane, The Other Side of the Wind Documentaries: Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles, The Battle Over Citizen Kane, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, Filming Othello Books: Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker's Journey by Harlan Lebo, Orson Welles' Last Film by Josh Karp, The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles by Chuck Berg and Tom Erskine Video Essays: MovieBob: Citizen Unicron, Kyle Kalgreen: F for Fake, Kyle Kalgreen: Chimes at Midnight, Razorfist: The Third Man, Cinemologists: Mr. Arkadin Online Researches: Wikipedia, When Radio Was

[scarletjedi]

My wife, gentlepersons

Brig was already aboard the boat when Gimli and Legolas arrived, attending the rigging for the simple sail and making ready to depart.@brydylcai​: All of the writing asks because I worry you don't have enough to do

so. 

all the ones I haven’t answered yet. Behind the cut because long

1. Tell us about your WIP!

Heh, which one? I’ve started writing chapter three of We Are Made Wise because I’m finally getting over my block (I think there was a little burnout). I’ve just updated Old Man Luke, and Pineapple 2 is next. I’m almost finished with my next original short, I’ve figured out where to go next in my novel, and...yeah. :)

2. Where is your favorite place to write?

Where it’s quiet and I can focus. Sometimes that’s the living room. Sometimes it’s my office. Sometimes it’s the Starbucks on the corner. 

4. Do you have any writing habits/rituals?

Depends on where I am. I have to have some sort of ritual to get focused. In my office, I light candles. In the living room, I put on music. At the coffee shop, I have a snack. 

6. Favorite character you’ve written?

My original character, Jamie, from my book is a HOOT. He’s a gay Jewish teen whose convinced that *he* will be the one to capture definitive proof of the Jersey Devil. He’s the non-magical pov in the fic, and his voice is fun. 

7. Favorite/most inspirational book?

Well, on the one hand, I re-wrote the Hobbit, so that’ book is clearly an inspiration. 

8. Do you have any writing buddies or critique partners?

@brydylcai is my in-house sounding board, the same way I am for her. I don’t have a regular beta, but I’ve worked with several depending on the project/story, and they’re all lovely people. 

9. Favorite/least favorite tropes?

I love revelations/coming out stories. I hate deliberate misunderstandings. 

10. Pick an author (or writing friend) to co-write a book with

@brydylcai and I have discussed writing a book together already, so Imma go with her :)

11. What are you planning to work on next?

I have the doc with We Are Made Wise open, so either that or my next short, depending on if I write more tonight or wait until tomorrow. 

12. Which story of yours do you like best? why?

Comes Around Again is the one that earned me what little notoriety I have, and Old Man Luke is doing the same in Star Wars, but I’m most proud of Drowned in Moonlight. That fic was written to excise some grief over Carrie Fisher, and I think I did her proud. 

13. Describe your writing process

I’m tempted to say “Incoherent screaming into the void” but that’s a joke that’s been made before. My process. Hmm. 

I tend to write by the seat of my pants. I like to see what develops and grows naturally. Once I get to a certain point, I’ll stop and make a plot sheet/note page, but I usually have the rough shape figured out before I start to write. 

Once I have a draft, I’ll edit. Sometimes I’ll print and edit on paper. Sometimes I edit online. My original works tend to get more editing than my fanworks. 

14. What does it take for you to be ready to write a book? (i.e. do you research? outline? make a playlist or pinterest board? wing it?)

ha ha ha ha - My original novel has been 15 years in the works, and has gone through many drafts. It’s working now, but I need familiarity. So, I think what I need is research for context and an outline for plot, and a good enough knowledge to feel like I’m winging it. 

15. How do you deal with self-doubt when writing?

I put it down. If I’m not confident on one project, I’ll put it down and turn to another. (This usually means putting down my original work in favor of fanfic, because I’m more confident with that overall, but...). I know what sounds right to my ear, and if I’m not hearing it, there’s usually a reason. Distance/time often lets me see it. 

17. What things (scenes/topics/character types) are you most comfortable writing?

I’m a Jersey Girl, so I tend to set things in Jersey. I love dramatic conversations, so I’m comfortable there. Queer characters. 

18. Tell us about that one book you’ll never let anyone read

That I wrote? Or that I read? Twilight/50 Shades. 

19. How do you cope with writer’s block?

I beat it with a hammer unitl it’s writer’s pebbles. 

20. Any advice for young writers/advice you wish someone would have given you early on?

Write what you love. Write the truths that you know, and research to write the things you don’t know. Don’t be afraid to break your characters; you can put them back together in new and interesting ways. You’ll be given a lot of advice over the years--read enough to recognize what you like. Develop your taste. Take the advice that helps taylor your work to your taste. Reject the advice that changes it away. 

21. What aspect of your writing are you most proud of?

Subtle meanings and implications. 

22. Tell us about the books on your “to write” list

Here are 3:

a) The Lesbian Werewolf Romance Novel. 

b) The Teenage Zombie Novel. 

c) The American-Teenager-Falls-Into-Fantasy-Realm-and-there-are-also-dragons novel

23. Most anticipated upcoming books?

Jer Keene’s next book. I read the first as fic, and then read the novelization, and now I REALLY want to know what comes next. 

The Kingkiller Chronicles book 3

25. What’s your worldbuilding process like?

Seat. Of. My. Pants and flailing. Seriously, I write something because it sounds right, and then figure out how it works after. 

26. What’s the most research you’ve ever put into a book?

I wrote parts of CAA with the hobbit, the lotr, the unfinished tales, and the moves on and open in front of me. 

I became a pagan, and my research for that has influenced my writing of my book. 

27. Every writer's least favorite question - where does your inspiration come from? Do you do certain things to make yourself more inspired? Is it easy for you to come up with story ideas?

I mentioned I was pagan? My patron, Brigid, is among other things, a muse. She pokes, and I start thinking (or I think, and she eggs me on. I’m not sure of the order. could be either or both). But, most of my ideas come from things I read. When I want inspiration, I read. 

Ideas don’t come as easily as I would like, but the fact that I have several projects at once means that it comes easily enough. 

28. How do you stay focused on your own work and how do you deal with comparison?

I have a hard time focusing period, so that’s a challenge. I have put effort into being less jealous because it’s ultimately a useless exercise. 

29. Is writing more of a hobby or do you write with the intention of getting published?

I want to be published like JK Rowling or Stephen King - one thing that gives my financial security, or with enough frequency to do the same. 

30. Do you like to read books similar to your project while you’re drafting or do you stick to non-fiction/un-similar works?

tbh, i read mostly fanfic these days. Most Genre fic makes me angry because there’s something missing from the text. it’s usually women/gay people. 

31. Top five favorite books in your genre?

scifi/fantasy

a) American Gods - Gaiman

b) Foundation/Elijah Bailey mysteries - Assimov

c) The Hobbit

d) Guards!Guards!

e) Years of Rice and Salt

32. On average how much do you write in a day? do you have trouble staying focused/getting the word count in?

Depends. There are days i can’t get a word out. There are days I’ve written about 10k. It depends on if I’m having a good focus day. 

33. What’s your revision/rewriting process like?

long. 

34. Unpopular writing thoughts/opinions?

....like what?

35. Post the last sentence you wrote

““The things I do for the greater good,” Gimli grumbled, his frown softening as Legolas’s laugh rang out to echo through the cavern. “

36. Post a snippet

from Old Man Luke, chapter 11 (probably):

Obi-Wan stood just to the left of the closed door, hand stroking his beard ad the sight of those assembled. It took all of his focus to keep his eyes from growing wide, or let his hands tremble the way they wished to.

Before him, sitting at a conference table, was Asajj Ventress (scowling at the table like a chastised Padawan, though she had submitted to the indignity of the locking cuffs easily enough), and the adult twinned children of Anakin Skywalker.

Luke sat much as he had before, calmly and with no outward signs of concern, reminding Obi-Wan uncomfortably of his own master. Leia sat back from the table, her arms crossed and her expression sardonic. She, too, was apparently unconcerned, if outwardly exasperated, and Obi-Wan knew that if hadn’t already been told, he would be able to see the resemblance between father and daughter in a heartbeat.

Still, Obi-Wan had the distinct and uncomfortable sensation of not quite living up to her expectations.

The bulk of her resentment, however, was aimed directly at the only other occupant of the room—Anakin.

Their father.

Obi-Wan needed a drink.

37. Do you ever write long handed or do you prefer to type everything?

I write long-handed when I’m having focus issues. It’s slow enough to make me focus. 

38. How do you nail voice in your books?

I talk to myself. Out loud. Constantly. 

39. Do you spend a lot of time analyzing and studying the work of authors you admire?

When I read, I’m known to stop and think “that was a perfectly crafted sentence!” or “How did they do that?” 

40. Do you look up to any of your writer buddies?

all of them. They’re all awesome, though in different ways. 

41. Are there any books you feel have shaped you as a writer?

Harry Potter. I’m not sure how, but I’m sure it has. 

42. How many drafts do you usually write before you feel satisfied?

Depends on how fully formed the story was in my head before I started. Fanfic gets 2 - rough and beta. Original fic gets rough, first, second, etc

43. How do you deal with rejection?

Badly at first. Then it evolved into a desire to prove them wrong. 

45. First or third person?

Third. 

46. Past or present tense?

Past. 

47. Single or dual/multi POV?

Depends on the needs of the plot. 

48. Do you prefer to write skimpy drafts and flesh them out later, or write too much and cut it back?

the first is what I do. The second is what I’d like to do. 

49. Favorite fictional world?

A Galaxy Far, Far away. (Then Middle Earth). 

50. Do you share your rough drafts or do you wait until everything is all polished?

depends on the fic. I like to show things to @brydylcai, but only in the fandom’s she’s in. I have been known to invite friends into docs as I’m writing, so...

51. Are you a secretive writer or do you talk with your friends about your books?

I’m more open than I used to be about fanfic. I’m less talkative about my original works. 

52. Who do you write for?

She knows who. 

53. What is the first line of your WIP?

Of this chapter: “Brig was already aboard the boat when Gimli and Legolas arrived, attending the rigging for the simple sail and making ready to depart.”

54. Favorite first line/opening you’ve written?

my book begins with a ghost hunt. that’s fun?

55. How do you manage your time/make time for writing? (do you set aside time to write every day or do you only write when you have a lot of free time?)

I try to set aside time while not working, but i also tend to write in whatever little moments I have. Between classes, standing in line, etc. 

[bevioletskies]

20 questions [6/20]

characters: peter/gamora, guardians-centric

fandom: avengers academy/marvel cinematic universe

summary: wasp has a new competition in store for the students of avengers academy, and there’s money involved. so obviously, peter and gamora have to pretend to be a couple in order to win. wait, what?

chapter preview: the nominee list comes out, mantis has some romantic ideas in mind, and peter and gamora continue to learn about each other.

word count: 3572 | total word count: 118k

a/n: i’ve never been to new york, so i hope there aren’t any glaring inaccuracies over the next couple chapters that they’re there!

ao3 | previously | next | masterpost

Thankfully, the rest of the week had gone by quickly - no life-threatening events or earth-shattering catastrophes, just a build-up of school commitments that had left all the students physically and emotionally exhausted. Even Elektra seemed tired after her practical weaponry exam at the Blasting Range, and likewise with the usually composed T’challa, who nearly had an incident during his explosives lab with Professor Pym.

Peter barely had a moment alone with Gamora, but eventually did find the time to tell her of Mantis’s plan. She agreed to the trip, though she had other concerns on her mind - she had apparently spent Wednesday evening with Adam at Club Galaxy, where he had helped her fix her equipment, which had made Natasha suspicious.

“Adam laughed it off, told her that you and I were happily together,” Gamora had said. “It’s ridiculous - am I not allowed to spend time with other people?”

Peter had sighed in response. “She’s a spy, she’s suspicious of everybody. If anything, she might eventually sniff us out.”

On Friday afternoon, the teachers took pity on the students and let them out early, allowing Janet to make her announcement in the quad. “Hello, Avengers Academy,” she hollered, her tone and words not unlike Gamora’s opening lines when she played at Club Galaxy. “Just letting you all know that I have posted the nominees for the yearbook superlatives contest on my blog and the school website! There's also a copy here at the bulletin board and a few posted up around campus. Remember that voting starts in two weeks, you have one month to submit your vote, and then one month after that, the yearbook will be published!”

Everyone began pulling out their phones and tablets, scrolling and letting out exclamations of joy, surprise, and occasionally, disgust. Gamora stared down at “Cutest Couple - Peter Quill/Gamora”, the words still looking rather foreign to her.

“Babe, we should go pack,” Peter said, gently wrapping his hand around her elbow to get her attention. “We finally have the chance to be tourists in New York!”

“You two heading somewhere?” Janet had somehow popped up by their side despite being on the other side of the quad thirty seconds ago.

“We got permission for an off-campus weekend trip,” Gamora said, leaning into Peter slightly, suddenly unsure of what to do with her hands. “We need to stock up on supplies for the Milano anyways, and it will certainly be more relaxing than last weekend.”

“Oh, how sweet,” Janet gushed, clapping her hands together. “Send me pictures? I’d love to get some cute couples selfies for a little collage I want to put together for the yearbook.”

“We can do that,” Peter replied, sliding his arm around Gamora’s shoulder. He turned to kiss the side of her head, a light pressure that she wasn't used to. His stubble was itchy, even through her hair. Janet let out another ‘aww’ before letting them go. Turning back to Gamora, he began to list things off his fingers, though his other arm remained around her as if he’d forgotten it was there. “So we've got a shopping list, an itinerary from Mantis, hotel booking thanks to Pepper, and one of a million of Tony’s cars.”

“And apparently you still need to pack,” Gamora said dryly. “I finished yesterday.”

“Aw, crap.”

______

It turned out, packing took a while. Saying goodbye to the Guardians took even longer. Peter put Drax in charge which made Rocket angry, Gamora lectured Nebula and Yondu about playing nice, and Groot, predictably, pouted and asked them to take him along (or at least, that's what Mantis had interpreted. Rocket snarkily told them he was tears of joy that they were finally leaving).

Eventually, they drove off, both in sweatpants for once instead of their uniforms or training duds. Gamora, in particular, had her hood up, feeling self-conscious about her skin in a way she never had before. As expected, Peter found an oldies radio five minutes after they were on the highway and got excited at a Jackson 5 song he'd never heard. After about ten minutes of attempting to sing along to songs he didn’t know the words to, he eventually gave up and allowed Gamora to switch to the traffic report.

“We should finish that game of 20 Questions tonight at the hotel,” Peter said. “I think we maybe only got through six each.���

“Why only at night? Why not now?” Gamora asked, peeling her eyes away from the skyline. She never realized how isolated the school was until they were here, in the actual city.

“People tend to be more honest at weird hours. Plus it makes it more fun,” he replied, his eyes flickering over to her for a moment. “Besides, I wanted to ask you something now, but I don’t want it to be part of the game.”

“Go ahead.” Gamora steeled herself for the inevitable - a question about Adam, most likely. Peter had been oddly calm about Natasha’s accusation and the fact Gamora had been with him in the first place. He had pried so much during that night in the medbay, almost like he was instructing her to date Adam, was he really gonna let that go?

“That outfit you wore to the funeral, I don’t think I’ve ever seen those clothes before. They yours?”

Oh. That was unexpected, though pleasantly so. It was an easy question to answer.  “The top and skirt are Janet’s, the cape is mine. Why?”

“It wasn't what I thought - honestly, I assumed you were going to wear your usual, since it's all black anyways,” Peter admitted. “You looked really nice. I mean, not that you don’t usually look nice, I’ve just gotten so used to your normal clothes that - ”

“Quill,” she interrupted. “I understand. Thank you.” He nodded, looking abashedly grateful she had stopped his word vomit. “So, we get to the hotel at six, and then what are we doing for dinner?”

“I was just gonna order pizza, to be honest. I figured you wouldn’t really want to eat in public for this trip?” he guessed.

Gamora looked down at herself for a moment. Sweatpants, an oversized hoodie, gloves, sunglasses, a baseball cap. She had regular clothes for their impending “dates” in public spaces, but Peter had cautioned her against dressing the same way for when they were just walking around or going into stores.

“People get...weird about different skin colours,” Peter had told her. “In places like the art galleries and museums, we have special Academy passes, so people’ll know we’re from the Guardians, but I just think it’d be safer to cover up if we’re just out and about.”

She couldn’t really fathom what he spoke about - many planets far beyond Terra, though they had their issues, took little notice when it came to physical appearance, only putting stock into strength, knowledge, wit, and possessions. “I don’t really think being out in public in general is a great idea,” she said carefully, “but if it helps boost our reputation as helpful, reliable members of Terran society, I will do it. Having pizza in our hotel room does sound more enjoyable, though.”

Peter hummed in agreement, and they fell silent for a moment as they listened to the traffic report, helpfully informing them that were a couple car accidents that were thankfully nowhere near their route. “By the way, I feel like I should warn you - obviously, since I didn’t book the room, we have one king size bed, not two doubles like I was thinking of.”

“WHAT?!” Gamora exclaimed loudly, causing Peter to jump and almost hit the horn in the process. “Could you not have told Pepper that we aren’t at the bed-sharing stage yet?”

He looked guilty. “I was talking to Pepper about getting reservations, Stark was there, so he asked about how we were doing. I may have told them the story we came up with about how we started dating, and I may have exaggerated and added on a bit about how we fell asleep in my room together that night because wow, emotional talk, and I am really glad I’m driving right now and you can’t hold a knife to my throat - gah!” Gamora had prodded him in the side with a sharp fingernail instead.

“You are unbelievable,” Gamora hissed. “You couldn’t have told me this before?”

“Would you believe me if I said it slipped my mind?” Peter said, chuckling nervously. “It’s just three nights, Gamora. Besides, it’d look kinda weird to people if they found out we had separate beds.”

“We could have made a believable story about why we did if you had told me,” Gamora grumbled, reluctant to admit he was kind of right. Peter was definitely more right than she wanted him to be sometimes.

The rest of the drive was somewhat tense, though Peter managed to joke his way back into Gamora’s good graces as he usually did. They arrived on schedule, in which Peter checked in, batting eyelashes at the middle-aged receptionist while he asked about their complimentary breakfast, Gamora hovering behind him with their bags, her hood and sunglasses still firmly on her head.

“Is your girlfriend alright, Mister Quill?” the receptionist asked kindly, glancing over Peter’s shoulder. “She looks...nervous.”

“We’re from the Guardians of the Galaxy, ma’am,” Peter said confidently, and Gamora could practically see him puffing his chest out a little as part of his declaration. “She’s just a bit worried about being stared at or attacked in public.”

The receptionist nodded, satisfied with his answer, and handed him two sets of room keys and their receipt, along with a map of the city. “Enjoy your stay!”

“We will, thank you,” Peter said cheerily, pointing Gamora in the direction of the elevators.

Their room was relatively nice, as Pepper had managed to talk Fury into letting her book them one of the fanciest Best Westerns in the city (“Don’t waste our budget on extraneous nonsense, Potts!”). There was a full kitchen, a leather couch and a flatscreen TV, and yes, one king-sized bed with an excessive amount of pillows and a towel folded to resemble a zoo animal (today was an elephant).

Gamora wandered out onto the balcony, finally pushing her hood down and removing her hat and sunglasses. She let her hair out of its ponytail and allowed the breeze to rustle through her hair. Although the air wasn’t particularly pleasant, it was better than the muggy air of the highway. “We should take a picture for Janet right here,” she decided.

Peter joined her on the balcony, fussing over his hair for a moment until Gamora slapped his wrist, telling him he looked fine. “So I’m not terrible-looking?” he joked, and she rolled her eyes in response. He wasn’t going to let that go, was he?

They awkwardly rotated in one spot for a few moments to find the best angle to avoid sunlight, before Gamora held up her phone, arm outstretched as far as possible (Peter was too tall in comparison when she was going barefoot). They took a few different ones, trying to be as close as possible without literally being back-to-chest.

“We have arrived at our hotel room. Quill already wants pizza,” Gamora texted to her girls’ group chat. “I smell like car exhaust.”

Peter chuckled as he read her message over her shoulder, moving back into the room to strip off his jacket and shoes. “This’ll be fun,” he called to her. “Like a team-building exercise without the rest of our team here. You’re practically the co-leader of the Guardians with me, so maybe we’ll be better at the job afterwards.”

“We still have so much time left to keep up this ruse,” Gamora said as a series of “OMG CUTE” messages flooded in from Janet and Kamala. “I would hope we’re better teammates after this.” She turned, only to realize Peter was also changing into a more relaxed T-shirt, unlike the training undershirt he had on before. Her eyes flickered briefly over his abs (how the hell was he so well-defined, he avoided the gym at all costs) before turning away again. “Pizza?”

______

“So what did you have planned for ‘em, bug-girl?” Yondu was in his usual spot on the couch, dirty boots on the coffee table, chewing thoughtfully on a toothpick. It was the first night without their leaders, and despite them all putting on a brave face, it was weird without Peter’s humour and background music, and Gamora’s brisk efficiency and deadpan nature.

“I searched up ‘romantic date ideas in New York City’ and have picked some of my favourites that I think Peter and Gamora will like,” Mantis said. Groot was sitting on her forearm, attempting to scroll through her list. “After getting supplies tomorrow morning, they will go for a walk through Central Park tomorrow afternoon, a musical in the evening, and then the museum and a light show on Sunday.”

“Sounds like a bunch of cliches t’me,” Rocket said, setting aside one of his blaster guns to grab the tablet out of Mantis’s hands. “You really think Gamora’s gonna go for this kinda stuff?”

“The museum they are going to has a large exhibit on weaponry and armour that I have directed them to,” Mantis said, snatching it back so she could open up pictures on The Met’s website. “And the musical I chose is based on a movie that was recommended to Peter, and he quite enjoyed. It will be a good mix for them both.”

“Is this a movie that Quill and Gamora have watched together? What is it about?” Drax approached her, curious.

“It is about love,” Mantis said, her eyes growing even wider in excitement. “I am not sure if they have watched it together, though. But I think it will be a good first step in getting them to think of each other in a romantic way!”

“Ugh,” Nebula groaned from the corner. She couldn’t believe she was thinking this, but things might have actually been better when Gamora was around. At least they wouldn’t talk about this stuff so loudly if she were near.

______

Peter tossed the last of his crust into the greasy box with a groan. He couldn’t possibly eat any more. He and Gamora were seated on the floor of the living space with their backs against the couch, the pizza box on the coffee table, their shoulders pressed together, both already changed into their sleep clothes. It had been a relatively short drive, but they were already physically drained from being cramped in the car, unused to traveling in a vehicle that wouldn’t allow them to walk around freely.

“I think I’m only awake enough for two questions of twenty tonight,” Gamora admitted, taking a swig of water.

“Are you awake enough for a movie? I was gonna show you Groundhog Day, since we’re watching the musical tomorrow,” Peter said, holding up the flash drive Stark had loaned to him.

“Movie first, two questions, then sleep,” Gamora decided. When Peter didn’t immediately react, she turned to look at him, and that odd smile of his was back again. “What?”

“I like this better than us fighting all the time,” Peter grinned. “You actually want to spend time with me.”

She turned away for a moment, shy. “Well, I have decided that you’re my best friend, too.”

“That’s awesome,” he murmured, his eyes crinkling at the corners as his grin deepened. “I’m uh, glad you feel that way.”

She nodded, smiling tentatively back. “Just start the movie, Quill, before I fall asleep on you.”

______

Two hours later, Gamora managed to drag herself to her feet and clean up their garbage, then collapse onto the bed where Peter was already lying face down. She poked him to double check he hadn’t suffocated in the mountain of pillows.

“Argh - oh hey.” He had shot up like a rocket and nearly hit her in the face on the way. “Two questions, then bed. But first, lights off.”

Gamora watched him carefully as he sluggishly moved around the room to turn everything off, the only light source being the city life twinkling through the window. It felt intimate at first - though her body modifications gave her quite good night vision, there was something about the surrounding darkness that made everything feel more...significant. “I want to ask a question similar to your last,” she decided. “Are you happy being the leader of the Guardians? And I don’t just mean for our team specifically, but also just...being a leader in general. Does it feel like something you’ve always wanted to do?”

He settled back down on the bed, and though there was a relatively decent amount of space between them - and they had stood much closer before - the feeling of lying down next to someone, falling asleep next to someone, and trusting nothing would happen in the night, was a foreign feeling to Gamora. It felt like an eternity ago that she was living in Sanctuary with the other children of Thanos, afraid to fall asleep at the risk of being murdered the moment her eyes fell shut. She and Nebula especially seemed prone to targeting from the others, being the most outwardly strong and beloved (if you could call it that) by Thanos.

“Not something I ever thought I would do,” Peter said, his eyes flickering up to the ceiling. “But my mom, she was always scolding me for picking fights with people who hurt the little guys. So maybe being a leader came from that? Wanting to be the first to help people? And, y’know, in the context of the Guardians, I'd say I’m team leader because the rest of you are terrible with people.”

“I'm getting better,” Gamora protested. He reached over to pat her hand.

“You totally are,” he agreed. “Especially since you're like Groot’s mom or something - it's good practice.”

“We’re practically raising him together,” Gamora said. “He calls us his parents.” For some reason, Peter found himself thinking of he, Gamora, and Groot in some odd version of the American Gothic painting. But instead of Peter holding the pitchfork, Gamora would be holding her Godslayer (Groot would be sitting on the handle).

“What did you want to be when you were a kid?”

She hummed softly. “I don't think I ever saw life that way, even before Thanos,” she said thoughtfully. “I didn't grow up wealthy, so I didn't think I had a lot of prospects on my homeworld. I probably assumed I would own a shop or be a teacher at most.”

“Never had dreams for anything bigger?”

“There was no bigger to begin with,” she said, her voice tinged with sadness. “Being a Guardian - it’s a whole new dream altogether.” They had somehow shifted closer between questions, their arms and hands grazing each other casually. She could see freckles forming on Peter’s nose, a result of exposure to the sun. Peter had been bragging to a few girls a couple months ago that he liked spending summers working on the Milano with his shirt off. At the time, she had rolled her eyes as the other girls giggled and said they'd like to watch. Now, she was vaguely curious if he was going to follow through. “You must've had some interesting dreams as a child, then.”

“Same question again, huh? I was a typical kid - cop, astronaut, pirate. I guess in a way I'm kind of a combination of all of them. I mean, Ravagers are straight up space pirates. And the Guardians of the Galaxy is just a super fancy name for space cops.”

“I suppose it is,” she said. Her voice was near a whisper now, as sirens and car alarms sounded outside, flooding the otherwise dull hum of the AC working its way through their room. “Your turn.”

He stared at her consideringly, contemplating his next question. Even in the darkness, his grey-green eyes were still bright with the sort of frenetic energy people had come to expect of Peter. “If you had to change one thing about me, what would it be?”

She supposed he thought it would be difficult, yet funnily enough, she found it one of the easiest to answer. “Your discipline,” she replied. “You are good at focusing on things - sometimes to the point of fixation - but you still let other things distract you from the goal. It's something to work on, I think.”

“Interesting,” Peter said softly. “I thought you were gonna say something about how annoying I am.”

Gamora huffed. “You are annoying, but it doesn't mean I'd change that about you. Who else managed to confuse Ronan and the Chitauri and Ayesha and - ”

“Alright, I got the point.” He reached over to squeeze her hand again, and Gamora really shouldn't be getting used to the feeling of Peter’s hand in hers. “Hey, I’m glad you like doing this with me. I know you aren't the most talkative person in the world, but I like that we're getting to know each other like this.”

She smiled, squeezing back. “I'm enjoying it, too. Just don't tell anyone. Or - ” She was interrupted by Peter’s gentle laugh, as he pulled his hand away to bury his face in a pillow. It was an endearing sight. “I really should stop saying that,” she admitted with a chuckle of her own. “Goodnight, Quill.”

a/n: i’m a sucker for bed-sharing. also, it’s really hard to headcanon anything about gamora’s childhood when literally the only thing known about zen-whoberi is that it’s “moderately advanced” ;_;

[something-wicked-sims]

What if? Sims OC Tag

Chosen OC: Laney Kerrigan

You can find the story here: Life and Times | Pastel Pink | Charcoal Grey

I was tagged by @dinaswimmer and @lovelychooser three years ago, and pestered by @pixeltrashcan. This is the only Laney you’re getting for a LONG time heaux.

WHAT

What is your character’s favorite memory?: Okay, one, you can not have a favorite memory, come on. This question is terrible. Anyways, I would say that the thing she loves most about growing up was how incredibly close her family was (her mom, dad, and her). They would spend the summers at the family cabin, and so she learned to like being on the water. She liked those trips the most, making pie iron pies with her mom and listening to her dad tell her stories he ripped off Unsolved Mysteries about Big Foot and Skunkape. 

Who and what would your character give their life for?: She would sacrifice a lot for anybody she cares about, even though she’s never really been tested. So, I think the list would be long. Laney does a lot of hurting people childishly, but if she could look past her own selfishness she’d realize how much those people mean to her. So, her parents, Scotti, Klein, Isla :) 

What is your character’s greatest fear?: Being alone. And, coincidentally, being in charge of her own life, because she is afraid of responsibility. 

What is your character’s proudest accomplishment?: To date, getting a publishing contract for her first manuscript. 

What is your character’s #1 insecurity?: Her lack of self-confidence, which in turns makes her fear every decision she has to make. She’s constantly afraid that she’s making the wrong move, or saying the wrong thing. 

What will/can break your character completely?: Oh, I mean, a lot of things? She just doesn’t fucking know it yet? Her first big break came when she realized how her poor decision making came to hurt other people. It totally destroyed her confidence. I wouldn’t say that her confidence is gone, per se, it’s just kind of laying dormant, and she doesn’t remember how to wake it up (or she’s too afraid to). Right now, she would get pretty broken if a certain someone were to leave her completely, but for all the wrong reasons. 

What would your character make a scene in public about?: Generally anything. The high price of cupcakes, lack of Toaster Strudels at Kroger, Peter Pan Peanut Butter Alerts, Pixar Same-Facing. You know, worldly problems. 

What can drive your character to do criminal acts?: I don’t know. I think her moral compass is too overclocked right now. 

What Pet (mythical or not) would your character want to have?: Unicorn. Mermaid. Probably the unicorn though, because she’d want to ride it. But maybe the mermaid, because those seem pretty self-sufficient, but I think maybe that’s also called slavery. So, we’ll go with the unicorn. 

What is the cutest thing your character has ever done?: Um? This is Laney. How about the LEAST CUTEST THING SHE’S EVER DONE. We all know what that fucking was.  

HOW

How does your character feel about sexual intercourse?: I’ve always thought that Laney spent the majority of her adult life snickering behind her hand at the mention of human genitalia, and using sex scenes in movies as prime opportunities to refill her snacks. Laney in a relationship was actually pretty gung ho about it, but that has mostly changed. Now it’s something she does but doesn’t talk about. 

How close is your character with family and friends?: Super close. Uber close. Her parents are her biggest support system, and she loves her best friends more than anything. 

How does your character react to pressure?: Quite literally emotionally collapses. 

How religious is your character (if they believe)?: She doesn’t think too much about it. She’s not religious, but she is spiritual in the sense that she believes there’s someone watching over us, she’s just not sure who or what and she doesn’t mind, but she does find comfort in them. 

How does your character’s personality change when someone gets uncomfortably close (relationship wise)?: She thinks she’s figured this problem out by keeping relationships in boxes, and only poking enough holes so that they can breathe, but very much is forcing that relationship to behave the way she wants it to, and when that doesn’t work out, she gets really anxious. I’d say her personality changes big time. She’s pretty smothering, and kind of like one of those mean neighborhood kids that stands at one end of a garden hose and makes a big kink, and just waits for some unsuspecting creature to come along to fall for her trick. 

How does your character’s living space correlate with their personality?: I think it’s a pretty good reflection of who she is deep down, when it’s not covered up with noxious behaviors and self-loathing. It’s cluttered, kind of dusty, and cute, but mostly it’s a giant collective of all the things she loves and all the experiences she’s gathered. 

How well does your character act around with unknown and different people?: She’s fine, mostly. Her social awkwardness covers up the fact that she gets uncomfortable, because she’s pretty good at making other people just as uncomfortable as her. 

How much does your character value money?: She doesn’t, really. 

How would this character cope with losing someone extremely close to them? I would really hate to see this. I think Laney is at a point in her life where if something like that happened, she could never come back from it. 

How long does it take for your character to trust others? That depends. If it’s like a business or professional setting, then it’s a much lower threshold. I still think she’s too trusting in general. 

SCENARIOS

If your character could change one thing about themselves, what would they want to change?: Her inner strength. I think she does really want to get back to a place where she’s okay relying on herself. She’s always looked up to her mother and Scotti, and women who are sort of “one woman armies”. There was a time she thought she was like that, but it wasn’t the person she was meant to be. Now she’d be happy with being a quarter of that.

If your character could go back in time at any point in their life, what would they do to change the present?: I think the single most important moment for her, was when she started working at the Weekly. It symbolizes when she stopped doing things for herself, and lost control of her life. If she could go back in time, she would have skipped the whole city living chapter and gone straight for following her heart, and done the Sims of San Myshuno project straight out of college. 

If your character was given a chance at fulfilling their dream, can they drop everything they have now to go pursue it?: Yeah, she did that already.

If your character’s current spouse or partner cheated, would they try to make it work or leave forever?: Right now, she forgives her “current partner” for a lot of things. They’re non-exclusive, so I guess the cheating part is just emotional, but I’m pretty sure Klein could commit murder and she’d still wash the blood off his knuckles. Desperation is very motivating. In a hypothetical future sense where she was in a healthy relationship? Yeah. She’d probably try to work it out, only because she was the one to cheat, once, and she has to believe that cheaters can be forgiven, and also because a small part of her would think she deserved it.

If a zombie apocalypse begun in the town your character currently lives in, what would they act like?: She’d go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for it all to blow over.

What if your character suddenly woke up to an unfamiliar place, and realize the life they lived was all a dream. Their family, friends, home.. all gone but still crazily vivid in their head. How would they react?: Well, she’d be really sad? I have no idea LOL. How could anyone react to this. She’d put on a fucking trench coat and find the nearest operator. 

If your character was thrown in jail, what would they be guilty of?: Creating a public disturbance. 

Rewind 10 years from now, what is your character currently doing?: Finally comfortable with herself after years of bullying in school, she’s just managed to eek out of her awkward phase, lose the braces, embrace the glasses, and fashion, and will soon be graduating top of her senior class. 

Your character is in the movie SAW, facing their worst fear. What is that fear, and how does he/she react?: She’s in a room full of shelves filled with those unsightly Victorian porcelain dolls and they all have voice boxes. Cue The Joker-esque transformation.

We regret to inform you that your character is dead. Where do they end up? Heaven? Hell? And how the heck do they react?: She’s stuck somewhere in regretful purgatory where she gets to sit, confused, drifting between hysterical laughter and uncontrollable sobbing for the rest of eternity. 

I’m tagging no one because this meme is super old and I don’t even know. It took me like an hour so I’m not going to submit others to this torture. I hope you’re happy, Nicole. You better read every fucking word, too. I’ll know if you’re lying. Pop quiz at 8PM sharp.

[duckbeater]

Arbitrary Comparison: Sontag and Batuman

This business of waiting for celebrated essayists to produce their first novels should have ended by now. In the first, there exists no material or aesthetic contest between the forms: neither lends respectability nor solvency to its practitioner. In the second, this is obviously the age of essays—or, perhaps, at least the age of opinions. Attaching a personality to the opinion seems to produce the essay. That and fact-checkers. Also brevity. 

Essays are things you can scan on the train, share among friends, and credibly lie about having read in their entirety. You can even manage lying about having read the savvier responses to the original essay—my brother calls this the “meta”—and so absorb and reflect on whole ecosystems of expression through muddled précis, vivid sub-headlines, mean tweets, and abstruse hashtags alone. 

Essays, particularly those that produce sensations, do the important work of shoring up intellectual economies. Interpreters, commenters, bloggers, reposters, recappers, analyzers, pollsters, wonks—a generation’s vitality restored by its ability to call-out or call attention to whatever urgencies its essayists prefer. We used to have public intellectuals and now we have guest columnists. Analogously, our latest capitalism is defined by its precarity. Writing gigs feel very fly-by-night.

I want to suggest, by way of comparison, one inheritor of our outmoded expectations for the magazine writer. I mean, the essayist.

Like Susan Sontag, Elif Batuman is primarily known for her personal and literary essays. Always at a remove, Sontag nonetheless made her presence felt in places as disparate as Hanoi and Sarajevo; she scrutinized the morality of photography, and parsed the aesthetics of pornography. She delighted in difficulty, and yet, through a queer kind of autoerotic extrusion technique, mangled what was most difficult, least seemly, the silliest, the most somber—she took all of the patience-taxing seriousness of high art (many movies, many dances, many “happenings,” and many, many long novels), and fashioned of it these beautiful, brisk essays.

Part of that briskness, of course, is a matter of Sontag’s reductions, her love of aphorism and epigram—the effects of pendant lights hewn from the material they shine upon. Batuman has a similar fondness for these rhetorical devices, and she often dazzles the reader, paragraph by paragraph, in a repertorial style that synthesizes high and low—that looks at disarray and disconnection—to find great elegance. Batuman situates her romances in Erdoğan’s Turkey and then Samarkand, she appreciates Russian authors like Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, and playfully comments on such cultural trends as awkwardness, the brontosaurus, and Gone Girl. A recent stint in Istanbul, where she taught writing at Koç University, has always struck me as a move motivated in part by the need to absolve herself of the critique sustained in “Get a Real Degree,” a rather notorious assault on American creative writing programs.

Comparing Batuman and Sontag may seem unproductive at this stage in the former’s career. At 40 years old, Batuman has not, in any way, cultivated a leonine majesty or moral superiority. Indeed, she regularly submits, on Twitter and elsewhere, amusingly awkward portraits of herself, such that would undercut ambitions toward glamour. So we see Batuman: doleful, holding a koala; blank, in a “transcranial electrical stimulation selfie”; overhead cropped, to emphasize her cat Friday, who is helping her to “edit.” Whereas Sontag seemed to regard the camera with a heat that bordered on contempt, Batuman, even in press photos, is alight with reservation. (Realize, too, that for several decades, Sontag had Annie Leibovitz taking her goofy snapshots; if you google their names together, you will quickly find Leibovitz’s emotionally overwhelming collage of Sontag’s corpse.) Batuman’s beat has never been the absolutism of a given artist or artwork; she does not enshrine the pieties of a recondite vanguard; the world remains open and strange to her, alight with hilarity. When she’s exploring the stunning archaeological weirdness of Göbekli Tepe, she’s breezy about the multitude of erect penises to be found in the Early Neolithic figurations of man and beast. (Sontag’s review of Flaming Creatures comes to mind.) When she ever does lecture, she’s self-deprecating, warm, and witty. Batuman’s genius—when she recognizes it—seems to fluster and depress her.

Superficially, Batuman publishes in the same arenas as Sontag once published. Where Sontag staged her early salvos in the Partisan Review, Batuman made her name in n+1, a magazine perhaps two or three generations removed, though surely its noisome spiritual inheritor. Both published in the New Yorker (Batuman remains a staff writer there), and they’ve variously contributed to the New York and London Review of Books. Their tendencies as journalists, critics, polemicists, and memoirists, apparently at the behest of editors, prevented both writers from their first inclinations as novelists—steered them off course, as it were.

Both writers studied masters of the European novel and continental philosophical thought; the seriousness and attention they paid to these masterworks, they repaid again in serious attentiveness to reporting on our popular culture. We get this in Sontag, gleefully, when she vivisects b-grade sci-fi in “The Imagination of Disaster,” allowing the detritus of Eisenhower-era Hollywood to speak to a world’s fears of nuclear annihilation: “The films reflect world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction which I for one find haunting and depressing.” Much more recently, we see this impulse repeated in Batuman’s take on the Ghostbusters reboot: “If the original Ghostbusters was about the thrill of the free market, the new one is about its consequences—about the people it disenfranchises, and the possibility that they will try to take violent retribution.”

This is why we encounter, in “Under the Sign of Saturn,” Sontag’s moving account of the life and work of Walter Benjamin, a sprinkling of astrology, and likewise among Batuman’s tender reflections on Dante, in a long article for Harper’s, a shout-out to “all the thousand and one douchebags of Florence.” Neither of these essays is academic. They are robust evocations of the peculiar, melancholic personalities these geniuses attract in their orbits (the authors included), of passions abrogated by exile, and it is difficult to finish either essay with dry eyes. I can, besides, point out where my breath catches in the essays—when I realize my goose is cooked.

In the first pages of his small book on Susan Sontag, Philip Lopate is quick to dispatch his subject’s fiction: it is, “in the main, poor,” he notes, qualifying that Sontag “lacked broad sympathy and a sense of humor, which are usually prerequisites for good fiction.” I have such an abiding reverence for Sontag’s essays, that I’ve not made it past her novels’ first chapters (although I have read their last pages—Lopate recommends this). It’s difficult enough to find them stocked in bookstores (hardcovers of The Volcano Lover do turn up in resale shops; I picked up my copy in Vancouver), and too depressing to excavate from off-site, remote-access stacks of university libraries, that I’m satisfied in the opinions of my betters: they’re best enjoyed as anecdotes.

Unlike Sontag, Batuman is very funny. I recently finished her novel The Idiot, and I think it’s tops. But I’m grateful that she’s always been an essayist, and that I’ll always have her essays at hand, and that they already constitute, to me, the memories and comforts of great novels.

[theeddiewarnerstory]

IndieView with Larry Baum, author of Bo, Go Up!

I didn’t want to write another story that parents read to children, because there are already hundreds of thousands of wonderful books like that. I wanted to write something that could help children read at a younger age, or with less struggle.

Larry Baum – 27 December 2019

The Back Flap

The first step in learning to read is a big one: from single letters to whole words. That’s a lot to ask of young children. To make the transition to reading as simple and easy as possible, why not use the shortest words possible, at least in the very first books that children read? How short can words be and still make a story? Three letters? Two letters? “Bo, Go Up!” uses words no longer than two letters to tell a very simple story, with characters, action, and humor, to help young children cross the threshold into the world of reading.

About the book

What is the book about?

It starts with children playing with a ball and ends with a much larger ball, because one kid’s mom runs a hot air balloon company and gives them a ride. The aim of the book is to teach reading more easily by using only very short words, no longer than two letters, which children can learn quickly. Reading this book by themselves will give kids confidence in their reading ability and encourage them to read other books.

When did you start writing the book?

June 2016

How long did it take you to write it?

​Revising the text took a bit of time spread over several months. The pictures took far more work, and Joanna Pasek, the illustrator, finished in May 2019.

Where did you get the idea from?

I’ll use this answer to give a longer version of the story behind the book. The idea came in 2009, when I was teaching my own children to read. Thinking that long words would trip up my kids, I looked for books with only short words. But I had trouble finding books like that. Could I write one myself? If I limited word length to 3 letters, could I write a story? Sure. What about 2 letters? That would be a challenge. There are so few 2-letter words to work with. But I juggled them until I came up with a story, with characters, action, and even humor.

The story gathered dust on my computer for several years until I decided to start ticking items off my bucket list, starting from the easiest ones. A children’s book using only very short words should be easy, right? I thought so, but it took several more years to reach publication! First, I found Joanna Pasek, who beautifully illustrates children’s books in a semi-realistic style I liked (http://akwarelki.net/), so we set to work, eventually producing our book, WE GO TO BO: https://www.wegotobo.com/.

“Wait,” you say, “that’s a different book!” You’re right. What happened was that teachers who saw WE GO TO BO told me it would be even easier for children to read if I used only the simplest sounds, and consistently used one sound for each letter. That started me wondering whether I should write another 2-letter word book following that advice. Meanwhile, at a public reading of WE GO TO BO, I asked the children if someone could write a book with only 3-letter words, and they said yes. 2-letter words? Again yes. And then one smart aleck said “1-letter!” My first impulse was to ignore him, but then I thought, “Why not 1-letter?” If I use the letter “C” to mean “S-E-E” and the letter “U” for “Y-O-U”, maybe. And if I write both a 1-letter word book and a new 2-letter book, maybe I can add a 3-letter book for a 1-2-3 series. Joanna and I finished the 3 books: Y, BO, GO UP!, and Cat Egg. They comprise “The Bo Books” series: https://www.bobooks.org/. You can get the e-books for free and the paperback books at about my cost.

The 1-letter word book is about a curious kid, asking her dad “why?” about things in the park. Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? He doesn’t know, but she opens his eyes to the world. With only 1-letter “words”, Joanna’s illustrations do the heavy lifting of telling this story. The 2-letter word book is BO, GO UP! Using all capital letters avoids confusing children about when to use upper case or lower case. In the 3-letter word book, one kid has a cat, and when her friends play with it, they think it’s laid an egg.

Once children can read the alphabet, they can read the 1-letter word book, Y. That accomplishment gives them pride in reading a whole book, and gives them confidence to continue reading. Then they can read the 2-letter word book, BO, GO UP!. I used very simple vocabulary: less than half the alphabet, and only 11 different words. That makes it easy for kids to feel good that they can read a real book. Next, the 3-letter word book, Cat Egg, teaches 39 words, including 17 of the 100 most common words.

Millions of people worldwide take a long time to learn reading, or never learn. I hope these books help remove obstacles to reading.

Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?

No. It’s such a short book that the whole story came to me at once. It took much more time and effort to do everything else: study how to produce a children’s book, look for publishers, investigate how to self-publish, compare illustrators, discuss and produce the illustrations, assemble the book, upload and adjust the e-book and print-on-demand versions, and publicize the book. It wasn’t very difficult; it just took a long time to figure out everything because it was the first time I did it.

What came easily?

Once I assembled the extremely limited palette of suitable words, actually writing the story was fairly easy.

Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?

They’re fictitious.

Do you have a target reader?

Children who are ready to learn how to read. Other targets could be adults who hadn’t learned how to read and children with reading difficulties.

About Writing

Do you have a writing process? If so can you please describe it?

I listed all the common two-letter words that are easy to pronounce, sorted them into parts of speech, and considered some of the few possible combinations to build sentences and construct a story. There was only one verb, go, so the combinations were very limited!

Do you outline? If so, do you do so extensively or just chapter headings and a couple of sentences?

No. The story was too short to need an outline.

Do you edit as you go or wait until you’ve finished?

I did both.

Did you hire a professional editor?

No. I’m in a group of children’s book writers that help each other by critiquing our writing. They were very constructive and supportive.

Do you listen to music while you write? If yes, what gets the fingers tapping?

No.

About Publishing

Did you submit your work to Agents?

Yes. I tried several agents for my original children’s book, WE GO TO BO. But they all rejected it.

What made you decide to go Indie, whether self-publishing or with an indie publisher? Was it a particular event or a gradual process?

The rejections of publishers and agents led me to self-publish.

Did you get your book cover professionally done or did you do it yourself?

Professionally. Joanna Pasek, who illustrated the interior of the book, also designed and painted the cover.

Do you have a marketing plan for the book or are you just winging it?

I made a spreadsheet listing a variety of places to publicize the book. I had conducted a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, more to publicize the Bo Books than to fund them. Although that campaign gained generous support from several friends, family members, and strangers, it didn’t reach my goal. But it did start to spread the word about the books. I’m now writing to many bloggers to ask if they’d like to review my books.

Any advice that you would like to give to other newbies considering becoming Indie authors?

Talk with other indie authors to get their advice. I joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and their local critique group of authors, who gave very helpful suggestions, as well as companionship in the lonely work of writing and publishing. Don’t pay to print a batch of your first book; instead, use a print-on-demand service so that if you don’t sell many copies, you won’t lose money on the printing.

About You

Where did you grow up?

Los Angeles.

Where do you live now?

Hong Kong.

What would you like readers to know about you?

I like to do things that are different, to try to make a big difference. Almost always I fail, but it’s worth an attempt. With children’s books, I didn’t want to write another story that parents read to children, because there are already hundreds of thousands of wonderful books like that. I wanted to write something that could help children read at a younger age, or with less struggle.

What are you working on now?

Publicizing the Bo Books

End of Interview:

Lie the series Facebook page.

Get your copy of Bo, Go Up! as a free ebook from Smashwords or as paper books from either Amazon US or Amazon UK.

source http://www.theindieview.com/2019/12/27/indieview-with-larry-baum-author-of-bo-go-up/

The post IndieView with Larry Baum, author of Bo, Go Up! appeared first on The Eddie Warner Story.

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[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Richard L. Tierney, Diana Gabaldon, Jirel of Joiry, Stan Lee

Conventions (Pulp Flakes): If you have been following my pulp convention reports for over the last 10 years, then you know they all have appeared on Steve Lewis’ excellent MYSTERY FILE website.  He has published and encouraged me to report the activities for Pulpfest, Windy City, and PulpAdventurecon.

  Authors (DMR Books): I saw that old movie The Silver Chalice when it first came out, and enjoyed Jack Palance’s portrayal of the sorcerer, Simon Magus. In about 1960 I wrote my first Simon of Gitta tale, “The Ring of Set”, picturing Simon as Jack. I never intended it as the start of a series. It lay around in manuscript for about 16 years, till my friend, Kirby McCauley, submitted it to Andy Offutt for his first Swords Against Darkness anthology, which appeared in 1977.

  Authors (Goodman Games): Gary Gygax named H. P. Lovecraft as one of the immediate influences in the Dungeon Masters Guide’s Appendix N. Lovecraft is best known for the creation of the alien god, Cthulhu, from the short story “The Call of Cthulhu” published in Weird Tales in 1928 (and be sure to check out our collection of reprints featuring Lovecraft’s works). Cthulhu is but one of many alien creatures that are perceived as gods by men; some writers that followed in Lovecraft’s footsteps have even tried to organize the gods into a pantheon.

  Authors (Frontier Partisans): There’s this thing called The Outlander Effect. It refers to the massive impact the Outlander series of books by Diana Gabaldon and the STARZ series based on the novels on the economy and culture of Scotland. Over the past quarter century, the books and show — largely set in the Highlands at the time of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, then moving to the North Carolina backcountry in the run-up to the American Revolution — have created a measurable increase in tourism in the Scottish Highlands.

  Fiction (DMR Books): The seventh and final installment in the serialized version of Tros of Samothrace is titled “Messenger of Destiny” and consists of what would become chapters 82 – 96 of the novel published in 1934. Set in the summer of the year 54 B.C., this story tells of the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s invasions of Britain and was first published in three parts in the February 10th, 20th and 28th 1926 issues of Adventure magazine.

  Book Lists (Hi Lo Brow): Seventy years ago, the following 10 adventures — selected from my Best Forties (1944–1953) Adventure list — were first serialized or published in book form. They’re my favorite adventures published that year.

  Writing (Monsters and Manuals): A lot of the violence in Tolkien’s work happens “off camera”, so to speak, or is described in very broad brush strokes. Even when we get a “live” account, as in the scene above, it tends to be a sketch or a few edited highlights – the only blow-by-blow fight we really get in The Lord of the Rings, at least as far as I can recall off the top of my head, is the scene just after this one when Frodo gets stabbed by the orc captain’s spear.

    Ian Fleming (M Porcius): In Casino Royale and here in Live and Let Die, Fleming does not limit himself to presenting only Bond’s point of view or to only writing scenes in which Bond himself appears.  In Casino Royale there were a few scenes with M and S (head of the division of the British Secret Service devoted to the USSR) and Moneypenny in which Bond was absent, and a scene inside Le Chiffre’s automobile while Bond was pursuing him in his Bentley.

  Gaming (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): So, I’ve been wanting to brush up my 1st edition AD&D knowledge, which I find has gotten overlaid with bits and pieces from other iterations of the game during all those years I spent working on 2nd edition (over forty modules, books, and boxed sets) and editing 3rd edition (about another twenty works, including co-editing two of its three core rulebooks).

  Fiction (Hillbilly Highway): Devil’s Call is one hell of a story, a bloody weird western propelled by protagonist Li Lian’s remarkable voice.

Li Lian is the mixed race daughter from a family where witchery runs on the female line.  She follows her husband, a former army doctor, to the Nebraska frontier.  It is there that something goes terribly wrong.

  Fiction (Tip the Wink): The Liaden universe is the setting for an ongoing series of science fiction novels and stories written by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. The series covers a considerable time period, some thousands of years in all, although since it also covers more than one universe the exact chronology is…difficult. However the main timeline extends across only a few generations.

  Writing (Pulp Archivist): In 1947, Stan Lee, then editor of Timely Comics, which would later be rebranded into Atlas, then Marvel, wrote in Writer’s Digest that “There’s Money in Comics!”, explaining how a writer could adapt to the comics medium. As a result, Lee also explains many concepts of selling writing that are universal to all media before applying them specifically to the visual medium of comics. Many a pulp writer made the transition.

  Fiction (Jon Mollison):  Back in the bad old days when I only rarely dipped my toes into NYC publishing waters in search of a rare good read, a brother recommended the First Law books by Joe Abercrombie, and so with the trepidation of a man burned once too often, I grabbed a copy of Red Country from the library and proceeded to get burned once again.  As a novel it failed to clear every bar set before it.  It failed to deliver adventure.  It failed to deliver heroism.  Worst of all, it failed to deliver fun.

  Doc Savage (Black Gate): Doc Savage was not created so much as he was assembled in much the way Victor Frankenstein stitched together his infamous monster from unconnected charnel parts.

The year was 1932. At the Street & Smith publishing company, they had a surprise runaway success in a magazine called The Shadow. Inspired by a creepy radio voice used to promote their Detective Story Magazine, the mockingly laughing Shadow captured America’s imagination in that dark Depression year. The magazine kept selling out. S&S pushed author Walter B. Gibson into producing two novels a month so they could release the pulp periodical every other week. The Shadow Magazine kept selling.

  Art (Adventures Fantastic): Artist Darrell K. Sweet was born on this date, August 15, in 1934.  He passed away in 2011.  When I was in junior high and high school, if  book had cover he’d done, I always picked it up and gave it a look.  I didn’t always buy the book, but based on positive experiences with some of the first books I read that he’d done the cover art for, I always gave it a look.  I had the privilege of meeting him a couple of times, and I had the opportunity to tell him that at the 2006 WFC.

    Firearms (Tom McNulty): As most Clint Eastwood fans know, the famed actor first used the famous snake grip Colt Single Action Army (SAA) revolver in the first season and second episode of Rawhide. The air date was January 16, 1959. The episode was titled “Incident at Alabaster Plain.” Eastwood would use that same gun again in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1966), both directed by Sergio Leone.

  Fiction (Pulp Rev): Mention the words ‘Strong Female Character’ and immediately a visage of a tigress fills your head. She is powerful and fearless, unbeatable in combat, sexually alluring, takes no nonsense from anyone, and can best any man in any masculine pursuit. It’s a trope solidified over decades of repetition on the silver screen and the printed page. And then there is Jirel of Joiry.

      Sensor Sweep: Richard L. Tierney, Diana Gabaldon, Jirel of Joiry, Stan Lee published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[wakingwriter]

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I didn’t think of myself as a writer until I swept the awards at San Francisco State University. I was denied admission into the MFA Program before this unprecedented achievement, with the majority of tenured professors voting against me. So, I waltzed into the Creative Writing office and knocked on the Chair’s door, who happened to be Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun). I told Frances I had an appointment with SFSU’s president to discuss me being denied, and she suddenly said I was worthy of being admitted. That’s when I realized how much of getting ahead as a writer was political and that the majority of professors didn’t know their butt from a hole in the ground.

Why did you choose to write in your particular field or genre?

I think creative nonfiction is an interesting crossroads between fiction and nonfiction, one in which my narrative voice helps shape a historical setting with a focal character in the middle. I usually stick to third person but will be exploring first person in my next book. Creative nonfiction is an excellent way of documenting the lives of family members who have made a difference in your life. Now I don’t mean writing down sugar-coated commercials about relatives for posterity. That’s boring. I mean, who wants to read a brag book? I challenge myself to capture the psychological underpinnings of character by exploring the deep dark interior world of a particular relative, then attempt to gaze out at the world through his or her eyes. Try it. If you can see their parents and siblings through their unique vision, you’re on to something important.

Are you a full-time or part-time writer and how does that affect your writing?

I write full time but have to work part-time as an accountant to pay the bills. There have been times when opportunities opened up overseas. I lectured with the poet Gary Snyder at the Hong Kong International Writers Conference and they paid me the equivalent of what a Hong Kong bank VP makes. My latest journey was to Finland as an Artist-in-Residence, where I explored Helsinki, Stockholm, and the Finnish Archipelago.

What are some day jobs you have held?

In Hawaii, I built lagoon walls, planted coconut trees, and did pick-and-shovel construction in Waikiki. Yes, I wore a hard hat. My work background in San Diego includes car sales at Team Nissan in Encinitas and Rancho Olds on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard. I was also the PR Director for the Carlsbad Inn, where I ran the Great Mercedes Benz Giveaway as a promotion. I am a Current Writer at the San Diego Reader. I’m best known for my gonzo journalism, particularly my take on the First Day of the Del Mar Races. Occasionally I do freelance work and have been paid for pieces in Writer’s Digest, Green Magazine, and Southword Journal out of Ireland.

What have you written so far?

I have written thirteen books to date in various genres, including flash (micro stories), poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. I have been published in over three-hundred university literary journals, including Harpur Palate, 580 Split, Reed Magazine, Blue Mesa Review, Artful Dodge, Moon City Review, Hawai’i Review, Honolulu Weekly, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and SDSU’s Pacific Review. I also write plays and screenplays. I won the 2018 Las Vegas Screenplay Contest and a stage play set in the Deep South took Third Place at the 2018 Caanes Screenplay Contest. Sometimes I harvest material from my stories when crafting plays such as HOUDINI, which was performed at the Actors Alliance Festival in San Diego. Cross-pollination is a great way to get a lot of material out there fast. My first book of poetry took First Place at the San Diego Book Awards. My most recent play is As Big as a Dallas Cowboy, which opens in downtown Honolulu on April 13th, 2019. The play’s opening coincides with my Honolulu book tour for The Queen of Moloka’i.

How do you feel about indie/alternative vs. conventional publishing?

I’m supportive of writers and poets who go the indie route because of the difficulty landing a publishing contract and/or finding an agent. It’s brutal out there for literary writers because the big publishing houses are mostly interested in making money, not promoting literature. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but generally the big publishers evaluate a manuscript by first considering its monetary value as a mass-marketed commodity. It sucks. I think the editors in New York who work for those houses should be ashamed of themselves. And to top it off, the biggies have many of the top newspaper reviewers in their pockets and can get them to say almost anything about a book they want promoted. Some publishers even go as far as contacting Hollywood celebrities to obtain one-line blurbs. I doubt those stars seldom read even two pages of books they’re touting. Very sad. I fear greed is destroying good literature by discouraging deserving writers and poets.

Is there any marketing technique you used that had an immediate impact on your sales figures?

Getting author interviews is terrific. It’s a way to share your interior world with people interested in you work, which is something most readers are interested in. And if you have an affinity for a writer you’re going to want to buy his or her book right? Another technique that works is to contact libraries directly and ask them to buy the book. Since I am a regional writer of the South Pacific, I focus on the libraries in the islands. It’s also not a bad idea to get on your local TV talk shows, particularly the weekday morning news. I noticed an increased turnout at my signings after my appearance on Fox News in Honolulu.

What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

Read other writers but develop your own voice. Always remember the term “Best Seller” doesn’t necessarily mean the book possesses any literary value. I checked out some of the most popular books on The New York Times Best Seller List and they were filled with horror and gore because the big publishers think that sells. Sad. Those books may be popular now, but they will not stand the test of time. Did you know that The Great Gatsby sold less that 5,000 copies after it was released? Look at it now.

Submit your work to university literary reviews and journals. Get rejected? Submit again and again. Submit multiple times to increase your chances of publication. Take rejection with a grain of salt. Say out loud, “It’s their loss.” If you must choose between online and hard copy publication, I’d go with online because more people will read it. Edit like crazy. Take the advice of editors and keep revising until you have polished jewels. Don’t try to be the next Hemingway, Plath, or Fitzgerald. Just be yourself. Bring your own unique vision into this world by sharing it on paper.

Five chapters from The Queen of Moloka’i manuscript were published online during the writing process. These acceptances gave me momentum. I have found that, by submitting chapters as stand-alone stories, you soon find out if your chapters are worthwhile. My advice to any wannabe writer is to get his or her work in the pages of respected magazines. Yes, it’s great to strive for The New Yorker like Salinger, but there are many other important publications as well. Once my chapters were online, I hunkered down and re-edited them to make them even stronger. I also think it’s important for people to get down the stories of their elders before they pass. Just remember to get down both sides of the coin—the good with the bad.

Can you share with readers a little bit about your latest book?

We are on the verge of the Roaring Twenties in Honolulu. Julia Wright and Sue, her big sister, have met a pair of dashing English brothers sent to Hawaii by a wealthy father to avoid the draft in their home country. Sue strikes gold, receiving a marriage proposal from her overseas beau. Sixteen-year-old Julia has a passionate affair with the younger brother but must fend for herself after he leaves her pregnant. Julia’s rebound affair with a Portuguese sea merchant gets her pregnant again and she now has two infant sons to raise. Luckily, her mother allows her to live at the family home and they raise the half-brothers as best as they can. Then local boy Chipper Gilman returns a hero from the Great War. He’s seven years Julia’s senior and has admired her since her girlhood days. He secures a job at a ranch on the island of Moloka’i and invites Julia to join him, but without her sons. He says they will get married and she can send for her boys if she adapts to the rural lifestyle. Julia leaves her sons behind for her mother to take care of, convinced she can become a country girl. She’s tested every step of the way on the rural island and begins doubting Chipper ever intended to marry her at all.

What made you decide to sit down and actually start writing this book?

Remembering my grandmother and deciding her life should be recorded. Julia Wright was one of six children that grew up in Palolo Valley. Julia was a party girl in Waikiki. She made big mistakes in love, especially after meeting a blond Englishman at the Moana Hotel. He left her hapai (pregnant) after promising he’d send for her once he got settled in San Francisco. Julia never heard from the Englishman again and gave birth to my father the first day of world peace. Then she met a Portuguese sea merchant at the Young Hotel downtown and soon she was hapai again. Julia was forced to raise both sons in her mother’s tiny rental in Kaimuki. Her third love interest was Chipper, a decorated war vet. Chipper asked her to accompany him to the Molokai Ranch, where he’d secured a job as a paniolo (cowboy). Julia said she would. Chipper told her she couldn’t bring her sons along until she proved she could handle the rural lifestyle. She was caught between the fear of becoming an old maid raising two half-brothers or the possibility of marrying her teenage crush.

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?

I believe that honor would be shared by Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. Both writers were extremely influential in my growth as a writer because their coming of age stories resonated with me. In Our Time tracks the maturation process of Nick Adams, particularly his changing relationship with his doctor father and with Marjorie. I love that zone between childhood and adulthood because I feel that’s where the person you become is formed, and both Hemingway and Joyce are masters at revealing the psychological undercurrents of their boy characters. In his story “Araby,” Joyce examines an Irish boy’s crush on Mangan’s sister and his journey to a distant carnival to bring her back the Holy Grail as a sign of his undying devotion.

Want to know more about Kirby?

Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Goodreads | Amazon Author Page | Smashwords | Book Link

  Kirby Michael Wright, author of The Queen of Moloka'i @kibs33 When did you first consider yourself a writer? I didn’t think of myself as a writer until I swept the awards at San Francisco State University.

[natakova15-blog]

IndieView with A.M.H. Johnson, author of Midnight Over Moores

However, the idea started two or so days before the drive at my mom's birthday party as my sister and I shared stories of our boarding school experiences, and my dad shared stories about being a teenager on the island we vacation at, and my mom commented that “Someone needs to write a book!”

A.M.H. Johnson – 20 September 2018

The Back Flap

Jenna Sheffield is an average girl from Savannah, Georgia. However, this year her life is about to change. She's starting at a new, all-girls boarding school in the middle of high school. She's having to learn how to deal with a roommate who seems more inclined to torture her than be friends. And on top of all that, she learns she has inherited her family's ability to communicate with the dead, when the ghost of Christine Wedge starts to haunt her. All Christine wants is her body to be found, but this mystery is shrouded by 60 years of local legends and feuds. Can Jenna crack this cold-case, or will Christine drive her insane, or worse, kill her chances at getting into a good college?

About the book

What is the book about?

Midnight Over Moores follows Jenna Sheffield, a young girl from Savannah who goes to Maine for boarding school and finds out she can talk to the dead after a prank gone too far. She starts being haunted by a local ghost, Christine Wedge, a victim who disappeared 60 years before, and has become a local legend on Moores Island.

When did you start writing the book?

Officially, I started writing it in early June 2011, coming back from a family vacation up in Maine driving back to Georgia. However, the idea started two or so days before the drive at my mom's birthday party as my sister and I shared stories of our boarding school experiences, and my dad shared stories about being a teenager on the island we vacation at, and my mom commented that “Someone needs to write a book!” I agreed then, but that 23 hour drive a few days later gave me enough time to hammer out the plot details and bounce ideas off my dad, and get the first two chapters written.

How long did it take you to write it?

Three years, but that was due to being in school at the time and not having a solid schedule and crazy homework. The summer I started writing it, I cranked half the book out in a month and a half once I returned to Maine later that Summer. Once I graduated, it took a me a few months to finish it.

Where did you get the idea from?

At my Mom's birthday party, after the whole group had a couple drinks, my dad, my sister and I got to talking about our teenage experiences. My sister and I were talking about going to our boarding school and all the shenanigans we'd get into. My dad, who was surrounded by many of his childhood friends at this party talking about their shared high school summers and all the shenanigans they got into. And by the end of it, we were all laughing so hard we were crying, and my mom said, “Someone needs to write a book!”

Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?

There were many places I struggled, but one of them has a funny story with it. My writing had started to go through an evolution at the time, because I'd started taking Creative Writing classes at my university, and some of the chapters I'd previously written when reread were very very rough. At the time, I was dating the man who would later become my husband, another English/Writing major who had already published a few short stories. I asked him to look at my roughest chapter. When he returned it, he had circled every “smiled” and “nodded” I'd written in, and it was truly too much. I promptly went home and rewrote it, and sent him a message once I did. His response was a gif of Jack Nicholson nodding and smiling like a madman “In memory of my unedited chapter.”

What came easily?

Most of the scenes in Limbo (at least that's what I call it. Purgatory and the Spirit World also works). The drama in those scenes are a lot more palpable, and most of them came out good the first time. And a good portion of the scenes with Jenna and Nate.

Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?

They're kind of both. Jenna isn't anyone I know in particular, but some of her experiences are built off of experiences I've had and my family and friends have had, with a twist. Same with all of my characters, except maybe one or two side characters. Although, I did throw a character based off my high school self in. But I've even changed her from being 100% like me.

We all know how important it is for writers to read. Are there any particular authors that have influenced how you write and, if so, how have they influenced you?

J.K. Rowling and John Berendt are obvious influencers as they and their works are mentioned in the book. Rowling because Harry Potter was a big part of my teenage years as well as many of my friends, and everyone going to my boarding school noted striking similarities between our school and Hogwarts. We had four main dorms with the same colors as the houses (Yellow dorm and Green dorm were on the lowest level, Yellow closest to the kitchens. Red dorm and Blue dorm were upstairs, and even had loft dorm rooms, if you think I'm kidding). Even many of our teachers had direct parallels to the Hogwarts professors that many of the students agreed with (Yes, we had a Snape, and he was one of the best English teachers I ever took. We also had an annually changing faculty member, although I'm 98% certain a curse was not involved). The only big difference was Hogwarts was not All-Girls. So, to not even mildly reference it just wouldn't give my high school experience justice.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was where I got the idea for my book's title. Doing research on Savannah (I also didn't live far from there at the time), I was told this book was required reading.

I'd also add Richelle Mead, Kelly Creagh, Edgar Allen Poe, and Stephen King (especially later in the series).

Do you have a target reader?

It's a solid Young Adult novel, but it's a book horror buffs and murder mystery readers will enjoy as well. It has modern Paranormal Romance written all over it, however its plot is steeped with Classical Gothic tropes and modern horror and mystery themes. It's a mystery surrounded by ghosts, demons, magic, and young love.

About Writing

Do you have a writing process? If so can you please describe it?

Not really. I always have fun writing, so when I can, I do.

Do you outline? If so, do you do so extensively or just chapter headings and a couple of sentences?

I used to only do a skeletal outline, like 2-3 pages noting the whole plot and background. I still do that now, but I've added preformatting each chapter and adding a chapter summary, so I know what goes where when I've written excerpts, which saves me a lot of time now.

Do you edit as you go or wait until you've finished?

Primarily, I edit as I go. Then once it's done, I do another final edit based on my own notes as well as my beta readers' notes.

Did you hire a professional editor?

I do not, but this is because I have almost 5-years-experience in editing in some capacity. For a year (and even now) I proofread/line-edit for the company I work for, and the last four years I was moved up to Document Specialist, which added formatting/copyediting to my proofreading duties.

That also doesn't mean I'm the only person with editing experience looking at my writing before publication. My husband, who took the same editing courses as I have for our degree, takes a look before it's sent out. My mother, who also had a job proofing/line-editing documents for a company for almost ten years, takes a look as well. Not to mention several others who may not have professional/educated experience like my husband and mom, but who I trust to give me sound advice on readability.

However, I would suggest to most authors to get an editor.

Do you listen to music while you write? If yes, what gets the fingers tapping?

Absolutely. If I'm not listening to music while writing, the music is definitely blaring when I'm conceptualizing each scene, so when I write it down later I've seen the scene over and over and over again.

As for my tastes … they're kind of all over the place. Usually some metal/modern rock is in there as well as classical (Beethoven is great!), pop, hip hop, early 2000's/'90s soft rock, classic rock, and even 2000s emo/punk rock (which was my jam then, not going to lie), to even Disney and Broadway soundtracks. I think the important thing for a song to help me write a scene is the message/emotion of the song has to fit in a place in my writing. So, I listen to different types of songs for different scenes. For example, if I'm writing a bombastic fight scene, 'O Fortuna' or The Hunchback of Notre Dame's 'Sanctuary' are both great. If the scene is more of a mellow internal struggle about love, I'm sifting through my early 2000's soft rock ballads.

About Publishing

Did you submit your work to Agents?

Yes. I can't even remember how many, but after the first several “We're too busy at the moment,” rejections, I started really looking into self-publishing.

What made you decide to go Indie, whether self-publishing or with an indie publisher? Was it a particular event or a gradual process?

It was gradual, but I always had an idea I might go that way anyway. I'm a little too controlling of my book, and how it was supposed to look, cover design, everything. As far as waiting for an agent to pick it up, I'm just not a patient person. Starting out, I figured I could go ahead and self-publish, then be taken on by a major publisher, but I found that doesn't usually happen. So unwittingly, I plunged head first into Indie communities, and the people there gave me invaluable information that led me to want to set up my own indie publisher, which is what Midnight Over Moores is now being published under.

Did you get your book cover professionally done or did you do it yourself?

Yes, for both the old cover when I first self-published and the new. But again, it was because I'm very controlling of how my book is to look. Each design detail I made had a specific reason behind it. I changed from the old cover, because I realized with it being a series the first cover I designed wouldn't work for branding reasons. The second book's cover in no way was going to look like the original cover, which is crucial with series works. So, I redesigned it with the rest of the series covers in mind.

Do you have a marketing plan for the book or are you just winging it?

The first time I published it, I just winged it, which after a month of selling 30 copies I realized was a big no no. I just unleashed it on the world, told my friends and family, some of who bought it and shared it. After a few months of putting those Amazon sales on it, and getting a few reviews, all of which were positive, but not seeing anything in return, I started asking myself, “What am I missing?” One of which was editorial reviews, which is obvious, but at the same time trying to find editorial reviewers that didn't cost an arm and a leg was difficult. Amazon suggests Kirkus, which is too expensive for people paying out of pocket. Eventually I did find some that were budget friendly, and that my book applied for, but by then it was too late.

So, what am I doing different now? I've submitted it to a couple book awards, which so far it's doing pretty well, but it's still early. One of the big things is I've switched my main distributor to Ingram, which opens up a lot more doors. I've submitted for reviews and have already begun using those in my marketing. I've posted about my book on more than just Facebook, since I now have an author twitter, Instagram, Foodreads, Facebook, Linkedin … you name it, I've posted about my book's re-release on there.

Any advice that you would like to give to other newbies considering becoming Indie authors?

Give yourself ample time and budget to market your book. I've learned over the last couple years marketing is an investment that more often than not pays in some way.

Another thing a successful indie author told me was to write and publish as much as you can. It builds your name, which builds your brand.

About You

Where did you grow up?

I'm from all over the East Coast. Born in Newburyport, Mass., mostly grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians in Virginia just outside of DC, and went to school in Pennsylvania in the middle of Amish country. But Acadia National Park in Maine is probably the most constant location in my life.

Where do you live now?

I live just outside of Atlanta, Ga. with my husband, daughter, and two dogs (both rescues).

End of Interview:

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Get your copy of Midnight Over Moores from Amazon US or Amazon UK.