#EXCEPT for Catcher in the Rye which i was not allowed to have until i had to read it for school

[emmy-writes-sometimes]

Attention

You’re Jacob’s twin and always get the short end of the straw, but your dad gives you no choice but to tell him why you’re such a troublemaker.

-

           “Promise me you’ll be good today?” Andy asked, looking over at you. You looked back at him and rolled your eyes as you opened the Audi’s passenger side door.

           “I’ll keep her in line,” your twin sighed.

           “He’ll keep me in line,” you reiterated. Your dad sighed, took a sip of his coffee, and watched the two of you start to walk inside the building. “You really don’t have to watch me, I’ll be fine on my own.”

           “You heard what the principal said, though. You’re one problem away from a suspension.” You walked backwards into the school’s doors, making sure no one was behind you, and watched as your dad pulled away. The two of you used to be close, really close. Actually, you used to be close to both of your parents. And then you started growing up and they picked a side. Jacob’s side. All you really knew was that Jacob was the favorite of the two of you. You were known as the troublemaker, the one who was always doing something wrong even if you thought it was right and nobody would ever listen to you about it. You always got the short end of the straw and you were sick of it. You loved Jacob, he was your best friend, but he was your mind’s worst enemy.

           “I’m really not that much of a bitch, am I?” You asked him. He scoffed.

           “The ninth graders are scared of you, y/n,” he said.

           “As they should be. I’m going to history.” You walked away from your brother and went to the school’s history wing, where your first period was. Jacob did have the same class until about three days in when they decided the two of you shouldn’t be in any classes together because you just talked to one another. You’d ended up in the same English class, though.

           You sat down and looked around to see that none of your friends were there yet. Most of them were usually late since they took the bus – not everyone’s dad was the assistant DA. You and Jacob were some of the luckier ones at Archer, or so you were told, because your parents actually cared. You weren’t sure how true that was, at least about your dad, because he never seemed to unless it was impacting him. Today was going to be an example of that, but it was also going to be the turning point.

           “Hey, little Barber, your daddy put any innocent people away again?” Brett, one of your least favorite people ever, asked from behind you. You turned around and rolled your eyes.

           “Don’t you have anything else to be concerned about? Like your grade or… football or something?” You shot back.

           “Yeah. Like how I’m going to plow the shit out of your brother on the field at flag today.” That was right. It was flag day in gym, meaning they were going to drag your whole grade out onto the field and play capture the flag, which gave an excuse for all of the football players the chance to prey on anyone who wasn’t them. You didn’t stand for that shit, but your brother wasn’t exactly going to stop them.

           “You try that and the only thing getting plowed is your body off the field,” you responded with your arms crossing over your chest. You tried to forget about Brett, and the rest of the people on the football team, as they all sat down behind you. They sat behind you in your other two classes before lunch and you noticed them eyeing you as you went to sit down across from Jacob.

           “Why is half of the football team looking at you like you flashed them in the locker room?” Jacob asked as he drank some milk. You kicked him underneath the table.

           “Because I threatened them.”

           “You know not to…”

           “I’m not going to do anything and they’re not going to do anything, Jake. It’s fine. I promise.”

           “As long as you promise.” You two ate the rest of your lunch and went your separate ways – him going to find Sarah, who he had an insane crush on, and you going to your English classroom. Your daddy issues led you to be good friends with your English teacher, Mr. Marx, and you were supposed to help pass out copies of Catcher In The Rye. You were looking down at some meme Jacob had sent you when you literally ran right into Brett.

           “Whoa, little Barber!” He said. You felt your breath turn to pure fire as you sighed out, kneeling down to pick everything up that you’d dropped. “Better watch yourself.”

           “Yeah, you too.” You rolled your eyes and started walking away, toward the classroom, and for a few minutes you forgot all about Brett. You saw Jacob sit down a few minutes later and went to sit beside him, at least until the bell rang that it was time for the capture the flag game.

           You were lucky. You were on Jacob’s team, thankfully, because the person who was choosing knew that the two of you had some kind of twin telepathy. You were against Brett, which gave you the chance to kick his ass.

           “Come on, little Barber. Daddy’s not here to protect you now. You and your big brother are all alone now, and nothing is going to stop us from stomping on the two of you like a couple of cockroaches.” That was it. You’d had enough of the taunting, enough of the teasing, enough of the fucking bullying. Something just rose up inside of you and your fist collided with Brett’s face.

           “Miss Barber!” One of the coaches yelled, grabbing your hands and putting them behind your back like you were about to be handcuffed. “Miss Barber, that is enough!”

           “No, I don’t think so!” You said loudly, lunging back at Brett. He was laughing, even as his nose was bleeding, and he wiped the blood away.

           “You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that,” Brett said. You rolled your eyes and walked to the principal’s office, right through the double doors and right into the actual office. The coach sat you down in one of the chairs and walked off, leaving the principal to tell you how things were going to go.

           “Who am I calling? Your mom or your dad?”

           “My dad, I guess,” you shrugged. Usually it was him that dealt with things like this since the courthouse wasn’t too far from school. He was also a lot nicer to you than your mom was, and the earlier he came home the later she was able to work. You watched as the principal called your dad and hung the phone up after he said he was coming.

           “So you’ve progressed from acting out in class to punching other students?”

           “A natural progression, don’t you think?” You said, crossing your arms against your chest. You heard the bell ring and not a minute later, your brother was walking in there, still in his gym clothes.

           “What did you do, Y/n?” He asked you. You could tell that he was angry.

           “I punched him because he was being an asshole.” You looked behind you to see that he was looking at the principal.

           “Mr. Barber, you should go back to class. Your father will be here soon too deal with your sister.” Jacob looked at you this time. You nodded and he left, turning and walking out of the office. “Miss Barber, you do realize that this is a suspension?”

           “A suspension? You’re kidding me, right? He provoked me. I didn’t just try to break a guy’s nose!”

           “You did break his nose, regardless of your intention,” the principal said.

           “I’m not saying anything else until my dad gets here,” you replied, sitting back in the chair, arms crossed.

           “Fine by me.” The principal left you in the room, probably to go complain to one of the ladies at the front office who just agreed with everything he said because he was kind of creepy, and you sat there. You texted Jacob back, saying apparently you were getting suspended, and he only responded that your mom was probably going to be pissed. You were counting on your dad being a little less angry at you. He always understood. You just hoped this wasn’t an exception to that.

           Your dad walked in a few minutes later, obviously not happy, in his suit and tie. He sat down beside you, barley looking at you twice, and the principal walked in behind him. Then he adjusted his seat at his desk, turned his computer monitor the other way, and glared at you. He looked from you to your father and then back again, finally sighing and clasping his hands together.

           “So, Miss Barber, are you going to explain what happened to your father?”

           “Brett kept attacking me, verbally, until I lost my temper. Apparently I broke his nose.” Your father turned toward you, a look of disgust on his face.

           “You what?”

           “Did you even hear me? He was attacking me all day, he always does and he always gets away with it because he’s a linebacker and they get away with everything,” you explained further, hoping that your father would just fucking listen to you. But he wasn’t having any of it. He glared at you, rubbing his temples, and shook his head.

           “I’m proposing a one week’s suspension for her. Her brother can get all of her work for her, but for the next week she is not allowed to step foot on school property. And on top of that, she’s going to write a letter to Brett explaining that she’s sorry for breaking his nose.” You sighed.

           “Un-fucking-believable,” you muttered under your breath.

           “LANGUAGE!” Your father turned to you and grabbed onto your arm. “I need to get you home before your mom starts to wonder.”

           “But I-” You started to say. But your father yanked you up, barely giving you enough time to take your backpack with you, and nearly pushed you out of the school. His car was parked right in front of the doors and you got in, kind of afraid to hear what he was going to say. He drove aggressively, even by his standards, and pulled into the house a little bit father than he normally would. You didn’t want him to talk to you, so you tried to get your key out. But he came up behind you and pressed his palm to the kitchen door. You looked behind you before letting the door swing open.

           “What the hell, Y/n?” Your dad asked you.

           “I don’t want to talk about it. I already tried and you didn’t listen to me.” You started walking up the stairs, trying to prove your point, but your dad wasn’t in the mood for games. He ushered you over to the couch, all but making you sit down, and you could tell that he was absolutely fuming as he walked back and forth.

           “Why would you do that, Y/n? You already knew you were on thin ice with us. You know your mother was looking at boarding schools for you? So we could keep you out of trouble?”

           “If you’d listen to me you would know that I didn’t just punch him to punch somebody!” You said over him. Tears were coming to your eyes and you knew you were about to break down and cry even though you didn’t want to. You wanted to stop being such a crybaby at everything.

           “So you’re telling me you did this, for what? To get attention?”

           “No, I did it because he was bullying me and Jake and he wouldn’t leave me alone! I just got mad and I reacted.”

           “You just reacted. Right,” he said, hands on his hips, shaking his head. “This isn’t a reaction, Y/n, this is assault.”

           “I didn’t do it just to do it! I’m sorry!”

           “Sorry isn’t good enough!” You stood up then, tears in your eyes, and walked away. You knew that wasn’t what he meant. You knew he meant that you weren’t good enough. He never saw the good things you did, only the bad, so why would this be any different? Why would he actually fucking listen to you this one time?

           You slammed your bedroom door and slung your backpack onto the floor, making sure you didn’t hit your laptop, and you took out your phone. You opened up the text messages between you and Jacob – Week’s suspension. Dad still won’t listen to me.

           A whole week? It’s not even that bad!

           That’s what I said! He hates me J.

           He doesn’t hate you.

           He thinks I’m doing it to get attention.

           You are doing it to get attention.

           Not like that! The blue bubble said that Jacob was typing for another few seconds before you got a ping.

           I’ll talk to him when I get home. Mom said she’d be late so maybe everything will be fine when she gets home.

           Thanks. You shut your phone off, knowing that your dad was probably going to do something crazy like log into your account and try to say that you were planning all of this all along, just to get his attention. You kind of were, but not in the way that he thought. You just wanted him to fucking listen to you about this, to listen to why you had punched the guy instead of focusing on the fact that you’d done it.

           You heard the door open and shut in another few minutes and looked at your phone, realizing Jacob must be home. You didn’t even notice you were crying until you wiped your tears away. You were sitting on the floor of your bedroom, crying, and you were absolutely ridiculous. All of this over a stupid bully, but all of it came down to the simple fact that your dad just didn’t listen to anything you said. And if he couldn’t even listen to you about this, what would he listen about?

           You couldn’t really hear what was going on downstairs, but there was no yelling. Of course there wasn’t. Sometimes you thought that maybe things would be better if it was just your parents and Jacob – no you, no problems. That’s what you were, to all of them, even if Jacob didn’t want to admit it. A problem. A big fucking problem.

           There was a knock on your door a few minutes after that and your father walked in, looking at you on the floor, and he sighed. He took a seat across from you, crossing his legs, leaning his back up against your bed. He looked you up and down, noticing that you’d been trying to be quiet and there were little half-moon shapes on your arms from your fingernails digging into your skin. He noticed that you were crying.

           “Jacob told me what that guy said to you.” You sniffled.

           “What, that the kid called us cockroaches? Or said that Daddy wasn’t around to protect us? Or the cracks that he makes all the time and expects me to be okay with it?” Your dad sighed.

           “He didn’t tell me all of that.”

           “I can’t believe that it took him telling you for you to stop hating me.” Your father thought about it for a minute, eyebrows furrowing, and shook his head.

           “I’m sorry. I should’ve listened to you from the beginning. But I’m listening now, so tell me what happened.”

           “I just lost it. And I knew I would be in trouble because he never gets in trouble, for anything he does. And he does this all the time, not just to me and Jake. He does it to everyone. And I just got really really mad. And then the principal didn’t listen to me, and you thought I was just doing it for attention, which brings us back to the fact that you don’t listen to me. You never listen to me. And the only reason you are now is because Jacob is making you, because let’s be honest, everything would be so much better if I wasn’t such a problem.”

           “A problem? Sweetie, you’re not a problem.”

           “Then why won’t you listen to me? Why do you always assume I’m the one to throw the first punch?”

           “I don’t know. Maybe it’s easy to believe that you’d be mad at us instead of some other kid. But that’s our fault. That’s my fault for not listening to you and believing you. But that also doesn’t change the fact that you got physically violent with a kid just because he talked you into it.” You nodded, knowing that he was right.

           “I don’t know if I’m doing it for attention or not, but maybe if you’d pay me some I would know.” Your dad reached his arm out for you to come hug him so you did, leaning against him as he hugged you to his side.

           “I’m sorry, sweetie. But you still can’t punch him. Even if he is a stupid linebacker.”

           “I know. I just got mad.”

           “You’ll have to work on that.” You both sat there for a few more minutes before your mom’s car door shut and your dad sighed. “I’ll go talk to your mom. Everything’s gonna be fine, okay?”

           “Okay.” You watched him leave your room and sniffled once again, ready to face your mom the same way you’d faced your dad. Jacob walked into the open doorway, leaning against the frame.

           “I didn’t hear any yelling. Is everything okay?”

           “Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

A/N: I’m sorry this took so long to get out! I’m having a lot of family things going on at once so I haven’t been able to write. I hope you like it still!!

Taglist (if you’d like to be added, send me an ask or a message!): @an-adventureland, @firstangeldragonranch, @ssebstann, @winterreader-nowwriter

[staticscreenwriting]

12 Days of Christmas - [Day 4]

A/N: Day number 4 for the Christmas coundown with @mattysheelies. This one’s almost 6k words. I loved writing this and I hope you like it too. It’s cheesy and cutesy and maybe cliché but it’s Christmas so idgaf. ENJOY ♥

Prompt: Snowed in together.

Pairing: Billy Hargrove x Reader

“I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.”

It happens, every once in a while, that you read a sentence in a book that you’ve read a hundred, maybe a million times before and it suddenly hits you like a punch straight to your gut. Because it’s different now. The book has stayed the same all through the seasons but you realize, you’re a whole new person who’s been through a whole new set of trials and tribulations. And all of a sudden you understand. 

I slump back into the cold, sticky plastic of the bright blue seat and clutch my beat up copy of Catcher in the Rye closer to me. I face the huge windows, looking out into the black of the night and the airplanes, firmly rooted on the ground. There’s a heavy downfall of snow and no sign of it stopping anytime soon. 

Maybe, I realize, this is my reckoning. Isn’t this what I’ve been wishing for ? A white Christmas like the one from the songs and the movies ?

Well merry fucking Christmas, (Y/N).

Every snowflake is a sick reminder of what could have been. Of what isn’t. 

I let my eyes travel around the area. Rows and rows of blue plastic seats. There’s not a lot of people waiting around here. I assume most people have flown home a few days ago to make it in time for Christmas and the few that weren’t smart enough to do that, have resorted to some bar or a restaurant or something. 

In theory, I could do that too. The thing is, spending Christmas eve by myself in an airport restaurant, would just seal the deal for this being the most depressing and downright sad Christmas of my whole life. 

So I stay seated and lose myself in Holden Caulfield's delightful pretentiousness. 

They’re playing Christmas music from a nearby speaker. I wonder if they want to taunt me. Me and everyone else stuck in a fucking snowstorm on Christmas Eve in god damn Indianapolis. They even have a tree set up and where it should make people happy, it only makes me even more sad. I wanna be home with my family, decorating my own tree with all the weird and quirky ornaments we’ve collected over the years. They all come with their own stories and it fills my heart with bittersweet nostalgia.

I’ve never known what being homesick feels like until tonight.

Again my eyes move along the rows of plastic seats. There’s a man in a sharp suit a few rows down. He’s got neatly combed hair and a red tie and shiny shoes and a face that says “ My name is Michael and I don’t allow anyone to call me by a nickname and I have an important job and I drive an expensive car and I probably fuck my secretary. “ 

It’s not a face you particularly want to look at. Except maybe if you’re said secretary. 

A family of 3 sits by the end of the row. They seem — at peace. And for a moment I wish I could be them. I guess it’s different being stuck if you’re stuck with the people you love. 

It makes me bitter to think about it so I avert my eyes and let them travel down the other side of rows. Which turns out to be no better for my mental state because there’s a couple there and they do not seem to care that an airport terminal is not the ideal place for some serious tongue action.

Across from them sits a guy, he’s got a mean mullet. Strands and strands of golden curls. He’s wearing a leather jacket and big black boots and there’s a deep scowl permanently edged onto his face. If he’s aiming for the whole bad boy vibe, he’s really nailing it. 

I can see him shaking his head, as he too notices the couple getting awfully touchy, and I can’t suppress a laugh.

He notices and he looks at me and even across two whole rows of plastic seats I can see just how gorgeously blue his eyes are. 

He doesn’t laugh or smirk or does anything to give me any indication of his feelings. Maybe I’m grateful for it. Maybe I wish he would. It would be quite nice to make a connection with someone right now. Just to make being alone feel a little less lonely.

“ the snow's comin' down

(Christmas) I'm watchin' it fall

(Christmas) lots of people around

(Christmas) baby, please come home”

It’s quite ironic, really,that they would chose this damn song. Of all the Christmas songs in all of the world. 

Mullet boy seems to be a kindred spirit in this regard, I can see him sigh and murmur a “for fucks sake” into to collar of his jacket, as he sinks deeper into the chair.

“They’re singing deck the halls, but it’s not like Christmas at all. “ 

Yeah it really fucking isn’t. 

A smacking of lips catches my attention and I focus back on the couple just to witness the guy’s hand travel straight under the sweater of his girlfriend. It’s a sight I don’t particularly want to see. 

A sight that apparently makes my face screw up in aversion. And as it does, old blue eyes looks back at me and this time, I see a smirk. It vanishes as quickly as it appeared but I know for a fact that it was there. Maybe I don’t have to be all that lonely after all.

I close the bruised and battered orange book that, at this point, is hardly orange anymore, and place it in my backpack. If my life was a John Hughes movie or maybe any other romantic comedy, I’d get off my seat and walk over. There’d be some cheesy some playing in the background, maybe by the Smiths. I would throw him a smile and he’d look at me, an angel’s choir singing wonderous melodies. And tonight would change both our lives forever.

Alas my life is not a movie that Morrissey wrote any songs about. I am a coward and my heart already lies in several little pieces at my feet. So I don’t walk over just like that with no idea what to say, no incentive.

Instead I grab my backpack and walk past him, down a long corridor and end up at a vending machine that sells both, coffee and soup and I secretly pray that they don't come from the same jet. 

The last coffee I had, I think as the warm liquid fills the paper cup, I bought at the little cart by Kelvin’s dorm room. It was a good coffee, had Hazelnut sirup in it. I remember the warmth of it in my hand. I remember the taste on my tongue. I vividly remember the sound of the cup hitting the floor and the stains on my pants and the feeling of my heart as it broke in two.

I don’t want to remember that though, so I will myself to ignore it. To push the thoughts away. I fill the second cup, grab it, put lids on them and then carry them back towards the row of seats.

Mullet boy doesn’t as much as glance at me as I drop down in the seat next to him. Only shows me that he notices me as I hold one of the coffee cups out to him.

“ Sorry it’s not booze. I know that would make looking at these two a little more entertaining. “ 

For a second he just looks at me in confusion, contemplates whether or not to trust me. In the end he takes the drink so I take that for a good sign.

“ Thanks. “ 

His voice is deep and raspy and I really really like the way it sounds. 

“ I wonder if they even realize there’s other people around “ I say, watching the dude’s hand travel down the girls back, as they dreamily blink at each other like the main characters on a romance novel. Maybe those two get the romance and the the Smith song in the background. Maybe I’m just a sad side character in their story.

Mullet boy scoffs, takes a sip of coffee then speaks up. “ Don’t even think they’d notice if we joined in “.

He smirks at that. There’s an absolute underappreciation for people who laugh at their own jokes. I think it’s charming, endearing even. If you can’t laugh at your own joke, how do you expect anyone else to do it.

“ Least they’re not alone on Christmas fucking eve “ 

I don’t know why I say it. I don’t necessarily want to share my sob story. Sometimes my words just move faster than my head does.

“ Christmas is overrated anyway “ blue eyes says and shrugs his shoulders in a way that’s supposed to look casual. Only you can’t say shit like “Christmas is overrated” and be casual about it. There’s always more to a statement like that.

“ You think ? “ 

“ I know. “

“ How come ? “ 

He turns to face me and raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow. It’s like he’s straight from the cover of one of my mom’s romance novels. I think it’s quite unfair that he gets to look like this on a day like today and I — I look just the way I feel. Sad. Exhausted. 

“ It’s none of your business. “ 

“ Oh geez, and here I was thinking we were bonding over our shared distaste for PDA. Guess not. “ 

“ You guessed right. “ 

For a moment, we fall into silence as another song plays over the stereo that has entirely too many obnoxious jingle bells in the backing track. For a moment I feel very lonely again.

It’s then, that the universe seems to have pity on me. It sends me a sign. A gift. A little Christmas miracle if you will.

That comes in the form of the couple getting more touchy, more — obnoxious. So obnoxious that the girl leans back, presumably to lay on the seats, only that’s not what happens. It seems to happen in slow motion when really it’s probably only the blink of an eye. She leans back and back and back and suddenly tumbles off the seats and onto the cold linoleum floor, her mister holding onto her so tightly, he falls right down with her.

My mama always told me not to laugh at other people’s misfortune. But at 18 years of age, I feel it’s time to break some rules my mama set. And this is one of them.

I can’t help it. I laugh. It comes from the deepest corner of my belly and fills my entire being. Then I catch those gorgeous blue eyes looking at my and I notice he’s laughing too. A hearty laugh. I think it’s a good one. No halfway laugh. No bullshitting. It’s a proper laugh and, as we lock eyes, our laughter only seems to increase.

The magic bubble that, until now, has surrounded the couple, seems to have been popped. It’s vanished. For them at least. Because as our laughter rings in unison, a proper harmony of joy, I feel like maybe me and mullet boy have been given a tiny spark of magic ourselves.

“ I’m (Y/N), by the way “ I say, trying to hold in more chuckles.

“ Billy ” 

“ No no, you got it all wrong. His name is Michael and he’s on a business trip that he tells his wife he couldn’t postpone but actually he just wanted to get away from his family for the holidays. “ 

“ Michael ? nah. This dude’s not a Michael. “ 

“ So what’s his name then, Billy ? “ 

He thinks for a moment, face scrunched up in a way that is absolutely adorable. It makes him look way younger than he probably is. Very boy-ish. Very cute.

“ Edward “

“ Edward ? “ 

“ Yes. Look at him, he looks so boring. And can you think of a more boring name than fucking Edward ? “ 

I have to admit, he has a point. So I shrug and nod. “ You have a point. “ 

The little family from earlier, passes us and, as the mom glances towards us, her eye linger on Billy just a moment too long for it to be accidental. And he notices, the cocky bastard. He notices and revels in it, letting the corner of his lips lift up in a teasing smirk.

“ What the fuck was that ? “ I asked, flattened by the sheer audacity for both of them.

“ I got that effect on women of all ages. “ 

“ Wow, your ego is really tiny, huh. “ 

When he looks at me, grin widening and eye filling with mischief, I know I just said the wrong thing. I set myself up with this one, I admit that.

“ That’s the only thing tiny about me. “ 

“ Aaaand that’s my cue to leave. “ I pull myself halfway out of my seat when his arm shoots out and his hand grabs onto mine. The mischief in his eyes in gone, completely replaced by a pure and unfiltered honesty.

“ Stay. Please. “ 

I sink back down and we fall into a silence. He knows that I saw it in his eyes, the fear of being left alone and I know that he knows and so we’re stuck in this weird limbo of whether to ignore it or spill our sorrows to one another. And maybe it’s because today is Christmas and on Christmas you tell the truth, even if it to a stranger at an airport, but he suddenly breaks the silence and starts talking.

“ I don’t wanna be alone. “ 

“ Yeah me neither. “ 

“ I uh — I was supposed to be in California, to visit my mom over Christmas. I haven’t seen her in — in years. This was supposed to be our first Christmas together since I was 8. I called her earlier, from the payphone. I thought she might be devastated. She’s not. I don’t think she cares very much if I’m there or not. I’m still debating whether or not I wanna get on the plane if it ever goes. “ 

“ I came to visit my boyfriend for Christmas. Surprise him, you know. He’s going to college here in Indiana. We’re both from California and we haven’t seen each other since the summer. I thought It was the ultimate proof of my love to him. Well — turns out he’s been fucking his way around campus while I’ve been busy making plans on how to rearrange my life and all my dreams, to come study with him in Indiana after I graduate High School. “

Another silence fills our hearts but this one isn’t thick with anticipation and tension. It’s one that settles deep in our bones as we realize, that sometimes there’s comfort in shared misery. 

“ Merry fucking Christmas to us. “ Billy murmures.

“ Do you wanna go see if we can get a drink at the bar ? “

“ That’s the best idea I’ve heard in a while. “ 

“ I can not believe your fake ID says you’re name’s Ricky Hardman. “ 

“ If you’re mocking me I can just drink this myself, you know. “ 

“ Oh come on. It’s just — that sounds like such a porn name. “ 

“ So what. “ 

I have to snort at his complete lack of self reflection. He knows I’m right but he’s so stubborn. Again I find myself thinking it’s endearing rather than annoying.

To come back to a statement I made earlier, I also think we don’t appreciate the people enough, that make us snort-laugh. Is it a bit embarrassing and cringy? Sure but it’s a laugh either way and I don’t think we should ever take that for granted.

“ Put the cups down so I can spice it up a little bit “ Billy instructs me and I do as he says. This is probably our 4th refill of coffee for the night, my mom would have a go at me for all the caffeine but whatever.

Billy opens the bottle of booze he just purchased at the airport store and pour us both a decent amount into our coffees. Might as well have our own little Christmas celebration if we’re stuck here with nothing else to do.

Cups clutched in our hands we roam around the airport, cheeks warming up from the alcohol. I feel more at peace now and yet my heart is ever as heavy with the longing to be home. 

A sign directs us towards the visitors terrace where families usually gather to watch the planes take off and land. It’s deserted now but that’s not really a surprise. It’s cold, it’s snowing and there’s no flights going anyway. It’s just a dark, snowy night and a lonely runway illuminated by small lights that, if you believe hard enough, almost look like fairy lights in the distance.

“ I know it looks pretty, “ I say as I lean against the banister of the terrace “ but I really don’t find snow all that great.” 

“ I fucking sucks, “ Billy replies. “ It’s cold and wet and turns into gray slosh in the matter of a few minutes. “ 

“ I always dreamed of a white Christmas, now I can’t wait to never see snow again. “ 

“ Me too. I hate it. Snow. Indiana. At least you get to stay in California once you make it there. I have to wait until graduation to finally move back home. “ 

I don’t want to pry, I really don’t but there’s something about him that intrigues me. Everything he says and does in scrowded in some kind of mystery. Some hidden meaning in all of it. 

The way he looks and the way his words hold a certain softness to them, is a whole enigma in itself.

“ You wanna come back to Cali ? “ 

“ Fuck yes. I can’t stay here longer than I need to. I miss the sun and the beach and — my home. “ 

“ Oh god yes, the beach. “ 

“ See, and you wanted to give up on all of that for a guy called Kelvin. “ 

“ I — he’s nice.” 

“ Oh I’m sure he is. And secure and smart. “ 

“ He is. We’ve been together since my sophomore year in Highschool. He was my first — everything. He studies business and is gonna take over his dad’s company one day. “ 

Billy blows a raspberry before turning to me with his perfect eyebrow raised in mockery. 

“ That is so dull. “

“ It’s not “ 

 “ But it is ! Tell me honestly, do you really love this guy or is it just — comfortable. Being with him ? “ 

And once again, something that I’ve considered so many times in my life, suddenly affects me in a completely different way than I am used to. I understand all of a sudden. 

I get it.

“ I mean, maybe you have a point. What makes you the relationship expert though ? “ 

“ Nothing. I’m not saying I am. But I know I never plan on spending my whole life with someone because I am comfortable with them. It’s your goddamn life, you should live it for yourself. “ 

It hits me light a freight train. Straight in the heart. He’s right. Whether I want to admit it or not, Billy is right. I don’t let him know that though, it’s hard enough admitting it to myself. I think he knows anyway, by the way I look at him. By the way he looks at me. 

“ Have you decided whether or not you wanna get on the flight ? “ I ask. It’s still not my place to ask those questions but it feels like something has shifted between us. Like tonight is ours entirely. A night of truths. Of heart opened and unguarded.

“ The alternative is spending Christmas with my dad and his wife and my stepsister. “ 

“ Sounds alright to me. “ 

“ Yeah, only my dad is the biggest asshole on the planet. He’s not a nice guy. His wife is a fucking nutcase, obeying his every will. She has the backbone of a jellyfish. And Max — Max hates me. That one’s my fault though. “ 

I want to hug him. It’s a strong urge that overcomes me. A sudden rush. His words are soft and sad and frustrated and I can see in his eyes just how much this hurts him. And god, it’s Christmas Eve. I just want to make him feel a little less alone.

So I do. I hug him, rest my head on his shoulder and together we look at the snow falling around us, covering the world in a thick white frosty blanket. 

“ I’m sorry about that. Just so you know though, I’m glad we’re stuck here together. “ 

“ Well yeah, I’m hot and fun and I have great hair. “ 

“ Oh there we go again with the ego. “ I laugh. He makes me me laugh. Like genuinely laugh. I can’t remember the last time I felt like this around Kelvin.

“ What’s that book you’ve been reading. “ Billy asks as the laughter settles down again.

“ Catcher in the Rye. It’s one of my favorites. “ 

“ Uh-huh. What’s it about ?” 

“ This boy, Holden. He gets kicked out of prep school and runs of to New York City and yeah it basically chronicles his days in NYC. It’s about loss of innocence and isolation. “ 

“ Sounds absolutely — “ 

“ Wonderful “ 

“ Boring. “ 

Here’s the thing about interests and hobbies. They’re a very personal, very individual experience. They’re yours. And yes, maybe it’s nice to share your passions with another person who feels the same. But let’s be honest: It doesn’t really matter. I am not hurt by Billy’s disinterest. Not even by his mocking scoff. Because it in no way lessens my love for the book. The story it tells and the nostalgia it brings me.

It also doesn’t lessen the affection growing inside me, towards Billy. An affection that both scares and excites me at the same time. By all means, it is delusional to fall for a stranger at an airport, who doesn’t even live in the same state as me. Someone I’ve only spent a few hours with.

Then again, life is never a straight path. I used to think it was but after tonight, maybe I can let myself take some backroads. Take a road less traveled. See where it leads me and if it brings me to a dead end, turn around and try again.

Maybe sometimes it needs a boy with a leather jacket and gorgeous blue eyes, to make you realize that life can be so much more if you just let yourself live it.

“ Okay sure. What are your interests then ? I’m sure there’s something you like doing, something you care about. “ 

“ My car. “ 

“ That’s such a guy answer. “ 

“ Pff, whatever. “ 

“ What else ? “ 

He takes a moment to answer. Contemplates. Mulls his answer over in his head. There’s a vulnerability in his eyes I haven’t seen since he talked about his mom earlier tonight.

“ Music. “ 

“ Music ?” 

“ I really care about music. Not — not playing it but just music in itself. You can’t tell anyone this, okay ? It’s a bit ridiculous and It’s not really realistic, but I would love to work at a record label. Or maybe have my own music venue. To help discover bands and find new, awesome music. Whenever I’m sad or angry or frustrated, or even happy, there’s a specific songs for any emotion, any situation. I want everyone to be able to have that in their life. “ 

There’s something undeniably sexy about someone being passionate about something. He only just started but I could honestly listen to Billy talk about music for hours and hours and hours.

“ So who’s your favorite band then ? “ 

“ I’ll sound pretentious as fuck but my favorites are probably some local bands from my hometown in California. “ 

“ Maybe when you’re back home after graduation, you can take me to a gig. Show me some of those bands. “

My heart beats faster as I realize this is the first time either of us has mentioned there being a future. More than just one magical night at the airport. 

It slipped out but I’m glad it did. The idea of more nights together, more time spent listening to him talk about his music. Experiencing that music with him. It doesn’t scare me. In fact, it excites me so much.

“ Yeah. Sounds like a plan. “ 

“ A good plan. “

“ A great plan. “ 

I don’t know if he notices that I notice, but his hand drops to the small of my back, so gently it’s but a whisper of a touch. It warms me up more than our boozy coffee ever managed to.

Airports have a weird energy. A specific mood that transcends through every corner in every room. It’s loaded with the arrival of change. It might be good and exciting or it might be sad. But something is about to change and you can feel it sizzling in the air.

As I stand next to Billy in the softly falling snow, I know that the girl that arrived at the airport earlier today, heartbroken and without purpose, is not the same girl that’s gonna get on that flight home. Something has changed. I think I like this new girl better.

“ They’re singing deck the halls … “ 

“ Oh Jesus, what is it with this fucking song ? “ 

“ What, you don’t like it ? “ 

“ Do you ? “ 

“ Totally “ 

I don’t know what hits me. Maybe it’s the fact that the future is so awfully unknown. I don’t know if after tonight I will ever see Billy again. Or maybe because it’s Christmas. 

Or maybe because I’m a little drunk and half in love.

But I start to dance and sing along. With the snow falling down on me. Snowflakes dropping onto my hair and melting, leaving it wet and streaky. But it doesn’t matter right then. All that matter is the music and the night and him and I.

“ Come dance with me. “ 

“ I don’t dance. “ 

“ It’s Christmas Eve, Billy. It’s my Christmas wish. Come on. There’s no one around. “ 

Here’s some piece of advice from me to you: If you’ve never had a guy in a leather jacket and biker boots twirl you around while the snow is falling and Christmas songs play over the stereo, then you’re missing out.

Billy’s hand is warm, his smile is gentle. It’s all so vastly different from the way I felt when touching Kelvin. Everything that comes with Billy is an enigma, a surprise. Nothing is certain and yet I am sure that I’ve never felt more alive than I do right now.

The last chord of the song echoes through the night as Billy pulls me close to him, I can see his breath in the cold, accumulating in little clouds. I can feel his skin in mine. 

“ You’re gonna get on that flight, Billy Hargrove. “ I say, my voice but a sigh. A whisper

“ I’m gonna get on the flight. I’m gonna graduate and then come back to California. Permanently this time. I’ll find you and take you to all the underground clubs and show you all my favorite bands. And I’ll even listen to you talk about your books. “ 

“ Even if you think they’re boring. “ 

“ Uh-huh. “ 

“ Hey Billy. “ 

“ Hmm ? “

“ I think I wanna write a book. I think that’s what I want to do with my life. “ 

He’s so close now, our noses touching, our breaths touching, our lips touching. Warm and soft and gentle.

“ Write about us, so you don’t forget me. “ 

I kiss him then. Or he kisses me. I don’t know for sure but really what does it matter. In the grand scheme of things it’s irrelevant who initiated the kiss. It matters that it happened. And by god I will never be able to forget this kiss or the boy that gave it to me. 

“ Dear passengers, we are delighted to announce that the runway has been cleared. The sky is blue and free of any downfall. Flights will resume shortly. More information about departure times will be available shortly. Feel free to turn to our staff for guidance or additional information. 

“ Billy. Hey, Billy. “ I say, and shake him awake. He looks so peaceful and boyish while sleeping, it breaks my heart a little to interrupt his sleep. 

“ Hmm.. ? “ 

“ I think our flights are gonna go soon. Snow’s stopped. “ 

“ Oh. “

I don’t have to ask to know what he’s feeling. What he wants to say. “ Oh. this is it for us. “ 

We gather our stuff, stretch our limbs and get off the uncomfortable plastic seats. The board on the wall shows us that our flights go in just two hours. His to San Diego, mine to LA. 

Our time is numbered and we finally have an expiration date. My heart breaks once again though this time I try to hold onto the fact that we both want a future of whatever it is we’re sharing. Even if it’s just a friendship, I want Billy Hargrove in my life.

“ Hey uh — “ Billy speaks up and takes my hand in his “ let’s make a deal. “ 

“ What deal ? “ 

“ To see each other again. Maybe — maybe next Christmas Eve. “ 

“ Where ? “ 

“ I don’t know. Let me — let me come to you. “

“ Santa Monica pier. “ 

“ Okay sure. “ 

“ Cool. “ 

“ Cool. “ 

He kisses me again and this one too, will stay with me forever. In my heart and in my head.

“ Here I’ll give you my phone number. Call me if anything changes. If my dad answers just ignore his stupid comments “ He says, fumbles around in his backpack and come up with a pen and — a cassette tape ?!

“ Something to remember me by “ he points out as he scribbles his number onto the little slip of paper. “ Some of my favorite songs on there. “ 

“ If you give me something, let me give you something too. “ I say and pull out my old worn out copy of Catcher in the Rye, scribble a message on the first page, then hand it to him.

“ There’s a bunch of notes in the margins. I never got to share them with anyone, I’ll gladly share them with you. “ 

Then I kiss him. Again and again and again, until it’s all I can think about and all I can feel.

“ Flight 207 to LAX boarding now. “ 

And that is it for us, at least for now. The magic of last night is broken. It’s Christmas Eve gone, replaced by Christmas day. No snowstorm. No magic. Just the brutal truth that real life awaits.

So we part. With more kisses and a promise.

“ Until next Christmas. “ 

The plane is already high up in the air when Billy Hargrove pulls the book from his pocket. It’s old and worn out and what looks like it used to be orange once upon a time is now a washed out beige.

He opens it up to the first page and can’t suppress a smile. A real one. Not one of those he fakes for his dad and susann. A real smile that reaches his eyes. One he feels in his heart.

“ Meet me at the Merry-Go-Round! “ 

His heart soars as he thinks about next year. A future that suddenly looks much brighter than ever before. 

There’s a lot of notes and scribbles and highlighted sentences. He skims through it until one passage catches his attention.

“ Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do. “ 

And so he thinks back to the overly touchy couple and their magnificent tumble from the plastic seats. And he remembers her laugh and his ringing up in unison.

He understands. That Holden guy has a point. Maybe it’s worth reading the book after all.

A year later.

I’m rushing through the crowd of people, a vibrant clementine sky the backdrop for my misery. God, why can I never be on time.

My heart hammers in my chest. Please don’t leave. Please don’t leave.

His eyes meet mine across the way as he leans against the banister by the Merry-Go-Round and I feel like I am back at the airport. The magic is back.

“ Sorry I am late. I am so so sorry.  “  I say and can’t help myself but pull him into a kiss. One filled with passion and longing and a promise kept.

“ Ah If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late. “ He replies.

“ You read the book. “ 

“ I read the book and all your notes. “ 

“ That’s good, I uh — have something else for you to read. “ 

It’s a bundle of papers, no cover art or fancy pictures on the front page. All it says in big bold letters is “ A white Christmas - a story of girl meets boy. “ I hand it to Billy and he looks at me in confusion.

“What’s that ? “ 

“ That’s the first draft of my book. “ 

“ You wrote it! “ 

“ You believed I could so I did. “ 

“ What’s it about ? “

“ Oh you know, just a girl and a boy and a magical night at the airport. Lots of snow. Lots of kissing. Little bit of magic. “ 

“ Can’t wait to read it. So, you wanna go see a band ? “ 

“ They any good ? “ 

“ Pretty fucking good!” 

Darlene Love’s voice echoes through the stereo and for the first time I have to disagree. This feels like Christmas more than any moment before ever did.

And my baby is finally home.

 Taglist; [I copied this from @mattysheelies​ and just added a few new ones, if you wanna be added or deleted from the taglist please let me know]

@sebastiansloserclub ; @killer-queen-xo ; @william-hargroves ; @billysgodcomplex ; @daisyxbuckley ; @allabouthargrove ; @mcrmarvelloki ; @charmed-asylum ; @1998--js ; @naiomiwinchester​ ; @hargrovesprincess​ ; @mystrangerfics​ ; @teafrompari​ ; @staybruuutal​ ; @colourado​ ; @higher-further-faster-bb​ ; @ayybtch​ ; @carlaangel86​ ; @baebee35​

[imaginedisish]

We Don’t Deserve Love (Stefan Butler x Reader) (Bandersnatch)

A/N: MY FIRST SMUT EVER OMGGGGG!!!! GAAASSSSP! So this is based on a request someone made a short time ago. The title and parts of the imagine are based on an Arcade Fire song of the same name. Go check it out its a BOP!  I figured you all deserved some smut so I WROTE ITTTT!!! I hope it’s okay. Colin fluff and Stefan fluff will be released soon! And then Donnie Darko, and then Catcher in the Rye. (Unless a request REALLY speaks to me, then things may change) Okay... ENJOY!!! 

Summary: You and Stefan have your first real fight, but it ends rather well...if ya know what I mean...(aka MEGA smut AHEAD!)

Warnings: SMUUUUTTT! angst, LOTS OF LANGUAGE, au...

Word Count: 2,053 ;)

The sun sets peacefully over South London as you walk back to your flat. Oranges, purples, yellows and reds stretch across the sky, each color fighting for dominance, yet failing to do so. Instead, the colors smoothly blend together, coexisting despite their differences. Soft, thin, clouds dance in front of the vibrant colors, some trailing behind, taking on the appearance of the sky behind it, others continuing on, remaining white. 

It had been such a stressful day. People in your office bothered you constantly, critiquing your most recent work. You worked as an author for a company. You loved your job, it had been your dream ever since you were a child. Unfortunately, your co-workers loved to act as though they knew everything about literature. 

“I mean, this is a joke right? Come on, (Y/N), you’re practically plagiarizing Austen!” That was just one of the comments you received today. 

And it was a compliment compared to all the others. You try your best to shake off the events of the day as you approach the steps to your building. 

You rush up the stairs to your flat, wanting to get inside and forget about all your troubles. 

Maybe Stefan is making me dinner, you think to yourself, trying to see the bright side of your terrible day. 

You approach the door to your flat, and push down on the handle. The door opens, which means that Stefan must be home.

Sadly, there’s no delicious scent coming from the kitchen. The lights are off, and you see Stefan standing by the huge, open window opposite the door, staring down at the city below him.

“Stefan?” You whisper softly. You know that he gets like this sometimes, depressed, angry, filled with guilt, but something felt off. Something felt wrong this time. 

You walk over to him slowly, stepping through your living room. You avoid hitting into your maplewood coffee table, and successfully make it past the large, navy couch. You step closer to the window. 

Stefan’s reflection shows in the window. His eyes are bloodshot and puffy, most likely from hours of crying. Worry fills your gut. 

“Stefan, are you-,” He cuts you off, whipping around to turn towards you. 

“We need to talk, (Y/N)” Stefan croaks. His brown, fluffy hair is a mess. His pale skin lacks the shine it usually holds. He’s disheveled, and looks sleep deprived. You look into his deep green eyes, searching for some sort of an answer, but there is none.

“I’d sure say so.” You wanted, no needed to know what was going on his mind at that moment. Stefan moves over to the navy love seat adjacent to the couch. He sits down, placing his head in his hands. 

“I-I, I don’t d-deserve you,” Stefan says, refusing to look up at you. 

“That’s impossib-,” 

“Let me finish!” Stefan shouts, cutting you off, staring angrily at you. You furrow your brows. Where the hell was this coming from? “You would be so much happier without me. I’m a burden to you.”

You shake your head. How could he actually believe that? You think to yourself. Stefan makes you happier than anyone else can.

“You’re not a burden, Stefan. And you never will be,” You say calmly, trying to keep your cool. “You make me so amazingly happy. Why are you thinking like this, what happened?”

Stefan pulls at his earlobe anxiously. You want nothing more than for Stefan to calm down. Yet, he doesn’t. He begins to shake his leg up and down, staring into the beige wall behind you, saying absolutely nothing.

“I love you, and I can guarantee to you that I will love you forever.” Your voice is reassuring and warm. You stare up at Stefan lovingly, and you two meet each other’s gaze for a second, until he quickly turns his head away from you, avoiding your eyes. 

“B-but I don’t deserve to be loved by you, (Y/N). I don’t deserve love at all,” Stefan states matter of factly, looking back out the window. You look out as well, noticing that the once vivid colors of the sunset faded into a grey mess. The once small, thin, white clouds grew large, dark and menacing. 

“This is ridiculous, what are you trying to say?” You shout this time, turning back to look at the brown haired boy, completely irritated with everything that he is saying. 

“You’re too good for me. Don’t you get it? Don’t you see it?” Stefan stands up now, his voice is wild with emotion. “I’m holding you back. You should be some best selling author already. Bloody hell, you should be married to some fucking rich bloke by now!” Stefan’s face is bright red from all of his screaming. Tears begin to fill your eyes. You try your hardest to fight them back. 

“Bullshit!” You yell at the top of your lungs. “If I wanted that, I’d have that. I want you, Stefan, open your eyes!” The tears free themselves from your eyes, and slide down your cheeks. 

A moment of silence falls upon the room. After a few seconds, Stefan quietly chimes in.

“I-I don’t know what to say,” he says, sitting back down on the couch. 

“Well I fucking do.” God you’re mad. You can’t comprehend the idea of not loving Stefan, or not being with him. “Stefan, I want to-, no I need to be with you. You are all I need in my life. You deserve all the love in the world.” You pause, putting your head in your hands for a second, trying to collect your thoughts. 

“No, you deserve more than that,” you continue on, looking back towards Stefan. “I’m not leaving you, I refuse to leave you. Don’t ever think you aren’t enough for me! It’s bullshit, and so is this damn argument!” 

You storm out of the living room, tears streaming down your cheeks at free will. You make a line for your bedroom. 

Is this really it? You think to yourself, reaching your hand towards the door to your room. 

What if he…what if he breaks up with me?

Suddenly, a set of hands grab your waist, spinning you around. Stefan stares down at you.

“Fine, (Y/N)! You win!” Stefan shouts, holding you in place for a second, not allowing you to move. “I’m deathly afraid… t-t-to…” He trails off nervously. 

“To what?” You whisper firmly. You wanted to know why he was acting this way.

“T-t-to lose you.” Stefan’s voice is hoarse. His emerald eyes shine, even in your dark apartment. There’s something so spectacular in those eyes of his, yet also something so torn and damaged. 

Then, you quickly realize what all of this is about. Stefan had lost his mother, the one thing he loved more than anything else in this world. 

Now, he fears the same thing will happen with you, that he’ll lose the very thing he loves more than anything else in the world. The universe, even. 

Stefan steps closer to you, closing the gap that separated you from him. He rests his forehead down against yours. You bring a hand to his cheek. 

“You never will,” You say back to him. Stefan’s eyes light up with a jolt of intensity that you had never seen before. 

His lips come crashing down on yours. The kiss is languid and passionate. You feel every muscle in his once tense body relax. Slowly, his tongue swipes across your lips, asking for permission to enter. You let him in, enjoying the sensation of his tongue dancing with yours. 

Stefan’s hands drift up and down your body as he pushes you up against the wall behind you. He grabs at your waist, slowly making his way down to your bottom, squeezing softly. 

The tension of the past few minutes replaces itself with warmth and a longing that no one else could ever make you feel. 

You wanted Stefan.

No.

You needed him. 

You hum in desperation, and Stefan quickly picks up on this. Without breaking the kiss, he lifts you while your back is pressed up against the wall. You wrap your legs around his waist, and he carries you into the bedroom. 

Stefan places you on the end of the bed and crouches down. He unzips your jeans, and slowly peels them off of you, right leg, and then left. He pushes your panties to the side, but looks into your eyes for permission before going any further. 

“Please, Stefan,” You whimper. He smirks, knowing the hold he has on you. Stefan begins to toy with your clit, speeding up with each second that goes by. Then, to your dismay, he stops. 

“Wha-,” But before you can say anything, he slips a finger into your opening. “Oh my g-god.” 

“Y-you like that?” Stefan says, slipping in another finger. 

“Y-y-yes,” You whimper, writhing under his touch. Stefan picks up his pace, his fingers going in and out of your wet lips quicker and quicker. 

You grind against his touch, wanting more of him. Stefan brings his thumb to your clit, adding more and more pressure. You were going to come any minute now, as the combined stimulation was far too overwhelming to bare. 

And that face, that sexy smirk, You think to yourself, could send you over the edge by itself.

You feel your orgasm building in the pit of your stomach as his fingers reach deeper inside you. “I’m going to…”

“Let go, love,” Stefan coos. You do as he says, your walls fluttering around your fingers, coming undone. 

Stefan seemed incredibly soft and innocent, but it was moments like these that proved to be the exception to that rule. 

“S-stefan,” You whine, looking down at the bulge in his jeans, wishing that he’d just take you already. He stands up, undoes his belt, and then slips out of his pants. 

You stare at him, your core aching for his touch. Stefan walks towards you, pulling his boxers down. He takes his throbbing member into his hand, and lines it up with your opening.

He looks deep into your eyes, licking his lips. 

Stefan groans as he thrusts his cock deep inside you. 

“Stefan! Fuck!” Profanities are all you can muster as your walls flutter around him, adjusting to his length. Stefan waits a minute, and then looks at you again, as if to ask you if you were okay. You nod to him in response. 

Stefan begins rocks his hips with yours, pushing in and out of you. You feel so full, so good. 

“Y-you feel amazing,” Stefan says, taking a fistful of your hair in his hands. 

“Harder, please,” You cry out, begging for more. Stefan does as you request, and his thrusts become deeper, more intense. His hand reaches down towards your clit, rubbing slow circles there. It was overwhelming.

“I’m-I’m going to…” Stefan trails off, breathing heavily. 

“M-me too,” You mutter. God he made you feel so good. Your walls clench around his hard cock, and you feel yourself coming undone. 

“S-stefan!” You cry out, finally coming around his 

“F-fuck…” Stefan says, coming to the sound of you screaming his name. He absolutely loved how it sounded. He slows his hips, pulling out of you. 

You two fall on the bed. Stefan pulls you into his arms, your head resting on his chest. 

“You’re so beautiful,” Stefan says, playing with your hair. “I’m so sorry about before. I-I just lost it.”

“Stefan, you deserve so much love. You are more than enough for me, never forget that,” You say, gazing lovingly into his eyes. 

“I’m so sorry if I hurt you,” he pauses. “I’m just so in love with you. I-I-I…” Stefan struggles to finish his thought . 

“You don’t have to worry, I’m not going anywhere. You know why?” You ask him. He shakes his head. “Because I’m just so in love with you,” You say, leaving a trail of kisses down his neck. 

You rest your head back on his chest, planting one final kiss on his collar bone. Stefan pulls the covers over the two of you, and you close your eyes, now feeling at peace.  

[silver-falling-star]

Sing me a song, o muse, of your bitter hatred against catcher in the rye bc SAME

Oooooh boy, I smell one of my long winded rants coming on. Strap in folks its about to be a wild ride.

So, Ima preface this by saying that I have NOT read it since I was forced to read it in 11th grade. For like, several fucking reasons. (the primary one being that I don’t want to, the 2nd one being I don’t know which bookshelf my dad stashed my copy on. He stashed all my required readings on various bookshelves after I was done with them. Because we were all given copies for free by the teachers that we were allowed to keep. I’ll chalk this up to private school benefits I guess? I’ve been out of the public school circuit since the end of 5th grade) So basically my memory of like, most of the events that take place in the book are foggy at best and unremembered at worst.

@ my mutuals and followers who like this book, that’s fine you do you, but I personally am not and probably will never be a fan of Catcher in the Rye. My feelings of why I dislike it are my opinions and I’m not gonna force them on you.

Problem 1: Main character is an unsympathetic asshole

My biggest gripe about the book is honestly a gripe I have about SEVERAL books. Unlikable characters, and I don’t necessarily mean written poorly (though I don’t remember being awed by how the book was written, I’ll be honest.) I mean unsympathetic asshole little bastards that make you want to just chuck the book across the room. Other books that share this problem are The Great Gatsby (that book is hot fucking garbage in terms of likeable characters and I WILL die on that fucking hill do not even @ me), Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Main character is an asshole little snobby bitch and despite being a murder mystery written in first person she literally figures things out at such a pace its not fun for the reader because she STILL ends up caught in shit situations she KNEW WAS GOING TO GO DOWN BECAUSE SHES SUCH A SPECIAL LITTLE SHIT- okay that’s a rant for a different post) and The King Must Die. (If you ever want to read a book with shit diction, pick it up.)

Now, as a writer/roleplayer of almost a decade, I’ve made plenty of characters that fall into the unsympathetic asshole role. My problem isn’t with the archetype, it’s often used and often done well (fandoms later trying to apologize for them aside) My PROBLEM comes when that’s either the archetype for the only character given any spotlight, or ALL the characters have that problem. (see, Great Gatsby.) Holden Caulfield(or however the fuck you spell it) is an unsympathetic asshole, and also the character who’s perspective is the only one we get to see, and the only character we really know much about. (Mainly cause he just doesn’t deign to care to give a legitimate effort in giving a damn about anyone else aside from how innocent children/his sister are. More on how creepy that shit is later.) Making a book like this means that I’m far less likely to enjoy it because I want to be able to root for someone. I can root for an asshole, so long as they’re likeable in some regard. Holden is a grade A fuckboy in the making and as such I am not a fan.

TL/DR: It’s possible to have likeable unsympathetic asshole characters, it is almost impossible to do that if that’s all you have exposure too in your cast.

Problem 2: I was really not in the best place to receive such a fucking depresso espresso lesson about life.

Switching gears momentarily from problems with the writing/book itself to problems with the timing of this book showing up in my life. High school was the time when all my trauma I’d successfully… repressed? Avoided dealing with? whatever, basically all my mental health shit suddenly decided to spring itself on me and yell “SURPRISE, YOU’RE MENTALLY FUCKED AND WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!” in 10th grade and it wasn’t until halfway through 11th grade that I even started getting a handle on shit. I almost failed high school and it was *bad*, especially for someone who was just trying to get to college so I could get to vet school and be qualified for a job that requires an ass load of education. So in walks this fucking book and it’s message of “adulthood is a sham, nothing matters and you really should just fuck around and do whatever because it’s all bullshit anyway. Childhood was where it’s at.”

Like???? Alright, that’s not what I need to hear when I’m barely passing high school. Go to fucking therapy and get some help, we all have trauma and therapy is the best path to work through it. I dunno like, yeah okay some people need to hear that message at whatever time in their life they read the book, but that message really wasn’t great to my Anxiety/Depression/ADHD struggling ass trying to just stay steady enough to get into college.

Honestly, even to this day I HATE HATE HATE books with depressing messages like that. I already deal with the struggle of being afraid of failure, getting where I want to be, all that shit. I don’t want that in my literature. Give me a person who struggles but still succeeds and finds some sort of happiness and self-worth in the end. Give me someone overcoming their traumas in such a way that they can at least have a good quality of life afterwards, even if the trauma will never leave, so long as they’re happy. I’m tired of YA novels that try and sell our generation and gen z the message that life sucks. Give me more hope, more heroes, more people making a difference because hell life is short so best make the most of it making a difference.

To quote GotG, why do I care so much about stories that revolve around saving the world, even if that world is just as small as a found family?

And my existence might as well be a happy one and have HOPE GOD DAMMIT.

TL/DR: If a book leaves me feeling like shit after reading it because it ends on a super shitty note, I’m generally not going to enjoy that book. And the fact that most YA novels these days that are given to highschoolers fall into this category is hot garbage when this is around the time they’re trying to find some sort of direction in life.

*Note: I realize that there are times and places for books that give more somber messages. Hell, I’ve even enjoyed some books with messages of such a tone. But media these days, and honestly for most of my life starting in mid to late teenage years (and maybe earlier) has started taking a turn towards the more depressing/somber stuff, and its overwhelming and just bad. And even back then when first reading it this was something I picked up on and didn’t enjoy. It just was not the right time in my life to hear a message so devoid of giving a shit.

Problem 3: Holden is honestly, super fucking creepy.

Okay, we back on the train of the actual book’s writing. Holden the dipshit is honestly, really fucking creepy. Towards women specifically. I have no direct quotes from the book specifically, but I DISTINCTLY remember the way he talked about women (or even young children/girls) being creepy as shit. Like, he waxes lyrical about his kid sister and her classmates and how innocent they are and how he wants to be the “Catcher in the Rye” to keep them innocent and to keep them from realizing how bad the world is. Great, lovely sentiment Holden. Except that the way you’re going about it comes across as being a pedophile.  You’re at the very least sexist as fuck, because you’re objectifying the fuck out of people anyway.

That scene with the sex worker in the hotel room is also one I remember making me feel super uncomfortable. Not because the sex worker is there, but because uh, just, god, that whole scene gave me the creeps. Probably because I felt bad for the woman, coming into the room expecting to be paid for work and there’s just this kid who breaks the fuck down, tells her some depressing shit, and maybe pays her? (does he pay her? I can’t fucking remember, I’d like to think he does, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t, because he’s an ass.) Actually, bigger question IS HE EVEN OF AGE TO HAVE SEX WITH HER LEGALLY? HOW OLD IS THIS KID? HES STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL RIGHT?

…. so I looked it up, he’s 17. SEVENTEEN. HE IS A M I N O R. I’m like 99% sure that the woman he hires is like, twice his age at least. That’s straight up illegal.

god this just gets worse.

TL/DR: Holden is a 17 year old creep who comes off as a pedophile in the way he talks about kids, and also definitely hired a sex worker while he was underage. Idk if that was legal at the time this book was written, but if it was (and I doubt it), that has aged very poorly.

Problem 4: It’s got a lot of male fans who fall into that all too dangerous category of having Fight Club or Rick and Morty being their favorite bit of visual media.

Okay, again, not a problem of the book. But when the majority fanbase (or at least, the most vocal part) are a bunch of abusive men who don’t realize that the message they took away from a work of fiction is incredibly problematic? Or worse, know and don’t care because they think their take is superior? Uhhh, how do I say, big yikes.

Like, this could be your favorite book, whatever, that’s you, I don’t care, but if your reasoning for it is because Holden is, in your opinion, an unflawed idealized version of yourself/your ideals?

thats a nope from me bro.

———-

That’s all I can do off the top of my head without going in and reading the book again. Which I probably won’t do for a long time, because I don’t need to hear that struggling to make a place for yourself is dumb and proves you’re just “part of the machine, the man has made you his bitch.” while I’m still trying to y’know, get to where I want to go.

But there you go, four solid reasons why I really really do not like Catcher in the Rye.

[radiantseraphina]

here are some results, all taken from copypastas except the last one which is a text version of a bit of vinesauce joel's movie he's makin in 3d movie maker: pepe silvia copypasta = cory doctorow, shaggy is the most powerful being = david foster wallace, attention all super smash brothers gamers = cory doctorow again, navy seal copypasta but it's dedede = j.d. salinger, blue shell incident = Raymond Chandler (note: idk who any of these ppl are)

I hate you. You can your David Foster Wallace and your J.D. Salinger and your Raymond Chandler. And I get freaking Anne Rice and Dan Brown. Screw you, anon! You’re not allowed to write again until I at least get Edgar Allan Poe.

(I’m kidding, of course. Cory Doctorow…I’ve never heard of myself. David Foster Wallace is an influential postmodernist writer, though; I’ve never actually read his work, but my graduate contemporary fiction professor was really inspired by him? J.D Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye, which you’ve likely heard of. Raymond Chandler wrote…ah, detective novels. You know how there are, like, hard-boiled detective parodies with the femme fatale who talks all sultrily and may have murdered her husband? We can blame Chandler for a lot of that.)

[misspandalily]

update! - i was surrounded by phonies

Disclaimer: I don’t own Riverdale OR Harry Potter.

AO3 | FFN

"The only thing that would be different would be you."

- J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

"Dead," Jughead echoes her, somewhat dumbfounded.

Betty blinks, purses her lips, and looks to the side. The strawberry milkshake he doesn't recall bringing out is flat, the cherry on top beginning to sink down to the bottom. He's worked at Pop's long enough to know how what milkshakes look like when they're left out for a long time, sadly, so it's safe for him to assume that she's been here for at least an hour.

What surprises him more is that it's ten at night. He knows as a fact that Alice Cooper enforces a strict deadline at eight, unless Betty's doing wholesome things like organising charity fundraisers or studying for their upcoming OWLs. In fact, her dishevelled appearance is starting to disconcert him because the humans of Casa Cooper, on principle, do not overtly display physical imperfections.

Except Betty absolutely is.

"Cheryl-" Her voice breaks off as soon as she starts talking. He is patient - an acquired talent he'd obtained after becoming a waiter - and glances away when she blinks back tears. "Dilton found Cheryl a few hours ago at Sweetwater River. She was soaking wet, shivering on the rocks, and when the police arrived, she told them she'd gone rowing with Jason in the morning," Betty sighs. "The official story is that her glove fell into the water, and when Jason jumped in to retrieve it..."

"He drowned," Jughead finishes off. Betty nods in confirmation. His forehead creases. Jason's death-story seems as credible as pigs flying. He doesn't know Jason personally, because the Blossom twin-brother is a No-maj and spends next to no time in the magical community. But he's heard Cheryl boasting about 'Jay-Jay' in Ilvermorny corridors and can't help but wonder how the captain of Riverdale High's water polo team managed to drown in a river that was at low-tide a few hours ago.

And why didn't Cheryl use her magic to save her brother?

He holds his tongue when Betty exhales and sinks her head back into her hands, saving his speculations for another time.

"That's...unfortunate."

Jughead watches her ponytail disappear from his view as her head pops up again. "But you know what's really awful? His body."

His eyebrows shoot up. "What do you mean?"

"They've been combing the River ever since Dilton's Scouts found Cheryl, but Jason's body is missing," her tone rises, hands wildly gesturing around as she speaks, "It's like he completely vanished."

"No one just vanishes when they die," Jughead says critically. "If he really drowned in the Sweetwater River, then his body should have shown up by now. What reason could there possibly be-"

"Jug!" Pop's voice suddenly rings through the diner, cutting him off. "You mind taking the order?"

He swivels around, sees a woman in a thick fur coat making her way to the counter, and sends Betty an apologetic grimace. She smiles briefly in reply and waves him off, grabbing the milkshake with her other hand. "Sorry Betty," he sits up and makes his way to the customer, not bothering to and not seeing the point of fixing the crumpled state of his uniform when his shift ends in an hour. One hour left and he's free from work for another school term.

That thought alone cheers him up enough to speak to the woman with a forced smile and a robotic greeting. "Welcome to Pop's, what'll it be?"

"A gin and tonic," she replies without missing a beat, voice high-strung and high-pitched. "Or whatever it is you hobos drink to forget about your Loser-dom."

His face loses its faux-enthusiasm (which, he admits, was limited to begin with) when he realises that the Devil-incarnate itself is standing before him, flame-red hair slung limp over her shoulders.

"Always a pleasure," he replies dryly. "We have," he makes a clicking sound with his tongue, pretending to search the liquor cabinet, "Vodka for Alcoholic Teens, Whiskey for Ginger Trust-fund Babies, and my personal favourite: Blossom Heiress breaks the Law," Jughead pulls out a bottle of rum, then shakes his head somberly, "But no gin and tonic."

"No," she agrees, pearly-white teeth glistening from behind her lips, "But my brother just died, so I think I can get a free pass for today."

"Sorry for your loss, but no can do." Jughead, by all accounts, feels more sympathy for the rocks that get crushed under Cheryl Blossoms's heels than Cheryl herself. Hell, he doesn't even beat around the bush and do favours for Archie, whom he's known since birth, much less bend the law for Cheryl Blossom - dead brother or not.

But, apparently, Betty Cooper does. She practically comes running up to them, eyes twinkling like she's about to uncover a goldmine. "Jughead," she gives him a pointed look, "It's on me."

He clenches his jaw, makes sure the smirking Cheryl sees his stink-eye and takes Betty's proffered twenty-dollar note. Granted, he's underage too - turning sixteen this year - so he shouldn't even be allowed or be able to serve alcohol, but here he is. Serving it. "Thank you," he hears her whisper when he places the shot glasses on the counter.

Jughead shrugs, then slowly makes his way to the only booth that hasn't been cleaned yet, seizes Betty's half-finished smoothie with his left hand, and wipes the table down with a wet cloth. Hopefully, it's his last chore for the day. Hermione Lodge is replacing him in an hour when her graveyard shift starts, so he doesn't even need to lock up the diner or stack the chairs tonight.

As long as nothing too melodramatic happens for another forty minutes, he's well and truly done with work for the vacation. Done with the stupid travel-ban that Headmaster Weatherbee placed on him.

Granted, Jughead rarely travels during the summer vacations because he promised Jellybean he'd watch over FP (senior) for her. He does the bare minimum, has been doing so since FP started combining alcohol with Serpent business, but he tells JB that they're okay - that dad is working with Fred Andrews in construction, that he isn't using his magic to do bad things anymore. Lies, all lies.

Nothing good ever comes out of associating with the Serpents, especially not when it's in your blood. So he lies to avoid breaking Jellybean's heart. He tells her sugarcoated fairytales for her to think that her dad is a good man when he's really, really not. And in return for his lies, he sleeps on the streets at night, crashes in alleyways and showers in Riverdale High's bathrooms.

That's all going to change tomorrow, when he congregates at Archie's place to floo to Massachusetts. No more drunk father, deadbeat dad, lying Serpent, for another year - or at least until the next holiday.

And best of all, he thinks when he sees Betty consoling a sobbing Cheryl Blossom: no more dead men.

[witnessedx]

when philip read poems, he sometimes thought of lukas.

he’d never pegged himself to be much of a writer. ( or a reader, for that matter.) -- but sometimes even music couldn’t stop his mind from wandering late at night. helen had left a few books in the drawer next to his bed. most of them he’d already read for school assignments. wuthering heights. the catcher in the rye. to kill a mockingbird. 

but no teacher had ever assigned him allen ginsberg. philip spent his night drowned in the words of a man who loved like he did. a man who wasn’t ashamed of his emotions, to a point where everything he felt was an exclamation, every action he took was a statement, every rhyme, every word was spoken with nothing but truth. 

all philip craved from lukas was the truth. the blonde had a habit of denying himself happiness, often resulting in philip getting hurt -- or drunk, really. that had been plenty obvious during the few minutes he spent at the party last night. calling lukas’s goddamn name. 

so fucking stupid, philip.

he doesn’t care for you like you do for him.

then why do you keep reading? 

---

philip drops his pencil at the sight of him.

maybe it’s because he’s no longer the new kid. because this red haired boy, dressed in dark skinny jeans and grey boots must look as out of place as philip had. his green eyes lock on philip’s -- and then everything seems to slow down. 

“you like ginsberg?” he asks, taking the seat next to philip. a small smile rests on his lips. he has a different energy - one that philip recognizes, of course. definitley a city boy.

“didn’t know he existed until last night, actually,” philip laughs, tapping his finger on the cover of the poetry collection. 

the two talk for the next hour of biology. his name is daniel. born and raised in brooklyn. moved to tivoli because of his parents job. he wants to be a musician. songwriter, mainly. most of his inspiration comes from poems. and yes, he’s frequented quite a few of the same clubs as philip used to. one of which, he’d taken lukas to.

lukas sits across the room, trying not to look, but secretly watches all of it.

there’s a feeling in his chest that he can’t seem to shake. it practically eats him alive as he watches philip smile in ways that he feels like he’s never seen before. 

his pencil breaks when he overhears the name of the familiar club.

but he sits back and doesn’t interfere, because who is he to stop them.

who is he to say anything at all?

--- 

“there’s a poetry reading at cakes and ale on friday. sorta’ a long drive from here but i’ve got my license and everything. would you want to go?” daniel asks on wednesday. philip blushes. he can’t recall the last time he’s been asked on a proper date -- unless recording your crush having unrequited sex with a girl counts as a date. 

he knows that he should immediately agree, but before the words can leave his lips, he practically feels a set of eyes blazing into him. lukas. the blonde is practically glaring, which honestly comes as a surprise. the two hadn’t talked since the party. 

everything reminded philip of him -- really, everything, but after being ignored for so long, moving on begins to feel slightly easier. 

only slightly.

everything inside of him still screams.

that’s why philip says that he’d love to go, keeping his eyes trained on lukas the entire time.

lukas breaks another pencil.

---

“two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry i could not travel both,” a tattooed woman speaks through a flimsy microphone. her hands shake as she talks.

“thought this was supposed to be original pieces?” philip asks daniel, who sits next to him looking entirely amused. he wears a leather jacket and blue jeans. perfectly put together. 

“cassandra thinks this is her original piece.”

“ah.”

a few more minutes pass in occasional quiet laughter. philip can’t deny it - he’s having a good time. everything between the two of them feels easy. natural. but he can’t shake the feeling that something is missing. as if he’s reading a poem missing a stanza. unfinished. he feels good -- really good, but not as good as he could. ( you only feel that good with lukas. ) 

maybe, if he just closes his eyes, red hair could look like blonde.

he tries that at the end of the night, when daniel kisses him with breath that tastes like coffee and vanilla.

it doesn’t work.

--

“are they like --- a thing?” rose questions, looking towards philip and daniel, who sit together in the cafeteria. daniel’s hand is practically on top of philip’s. 

“what?” lukas questions, suddenly aware that he’s in the middle of a school cafeteria and not in the pits of his deepest nightmare. ( but right now, they’re both about the same. )

“philip and daniel. i mean, look at them. they’re totally doing it,” rose says, smirking the two city boys sitting together allows her imagination to run wild. 

a few seconds pass.

and then a minute.

and lukas’s fingertips press into the table, but he doesn’t move, because it isn’t his place to act. and when philip looks towards him, lukas turns his eyes away.

--

it was killing him.

philip paces around the attic in circles. he must’ve done thirty by now. he’d practically torn up his poetry book. none of it made sense. nothing. poems were supposed to be easy to read - they weren’t supposed to make you want to pull your hair out.

but then again, no true art was easy.

he saw lukas every time he closed his eyes. he thought about him every time he read another word. he heard his laugh as a distant memory. he thought back to the cabin again, again, again. 

he hadn’t let daniel kiss him since the night at the coffee shop. even sitting close to him was making philip begin to feel gross inside. like he was doing something tremendously, horribly wrong. 

what was lukas doing right now? was he awake? was he with rose? was he kissing her? finally closing off the distance? forgetting about him? forgetting about everything? was there even something to forget about?

when philip came to school the next day, his eyes were bloodshot. lack of sleep.

---

they were alone in the hallway when it happened.

philip had asked to use the bathroom. and then daniel had. the red haired boy caught up to the brunette in the hallway. his hand caught philip’s.

everything was quiet except for daniel’s whispering. 

“are you mad at me or something?” the taller boy asked, raising an eyebrow in genuine concern. and philip felt fucking horrible. of course he wasn’t mad. daniel hadn’t done anything at all. it was daniel who should’ve been mad. daniel who should’ve been putting his energy into somebody who wasn’t incapable of feeling anything real. somebody who hadn’t spent the last night pulling his hair out over words on a page. ( you’re going fucking crazy, philip. )

a look of concern flashed over daniel’s face as he noticed the others tiredness. it was visible not only in his face, but in the way his shoulders slouched, in the way a deep sigh left his lips.

“hey,” daniel muttered, wrapping his right hand in philip’s. his breathing grew heavier. heart faster. feet turned towards the brunette. he was getting closer. they were losing distance. closer. closer. 

“don’t,” philip mumbled. his voice was weak. “i can’t do this. it’s just--”

and then daniel kissed him. 

and he didn’t fucking want him to.

philip’s back was to the lockers, otherwise he would’ve stepped backwards. his eyes were wide open. but as daniel kissed him, philip swore that he could practically see lukas’s eyes. maybe he’d been doing this wrong the entire time. maybe he could pretend better with his eyes open. maybe this could work, if he just pretended it was all lukas ---

no. he wasn’t seeing things. suddenly, everything around him smelled like lukas and felt like lukas and lukas’s hands were brushing his shoulder because lukas waldenbeck was throwing daniel fray against the lockers. 

“what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” lukas spat, inching closer and closer to daniel’s face. philip was suddenly wide awake. all of his senses were finally working again. he couldn’t figure out exactly what he was feeling -- fear, for daniel maybe. or maybe it was happiness. just being around lukas seemed to bring him entirely back to life.

“chill out, man!” daniel replied. 

“he told you not to and you did, you piece of shit.” 

that was daniel’s cue to try and run, and lukas’s cue to send his fist smashing into the red haired boy’s nose. the crack sent chills down philip’s spine. lukas sent another fist - again, again, until finally, philip felt himself breathing again. he lurched forward and grabbed the blonde’s wrist. lukas froze instantly.

a choice was meant to be made.

philip’s eyes glanced in between daniel and lukas. daniel, bleeding hopelessly, looked with pleading eyes. lukas looked as he always did -- a complete and total mystery. 

he pulled lukas out of the hallway and into the stairwell. 

--

“i really, i -- i didn’t need to hurt him that much,” lukas spoke with rushed words. his hands were covered in dry blood. all he could think about was that he must’ve looked like a terrifying disaster right now. he wasn’t philip’s knight in shining armor. he was the the monster that needed to be taken down.

“no, you didn’t,” philip spoke, quietly. but as lukas stood there, practically trembling, shirt stained with crimson, all philip could think about was how beautiful he looked. how good it felt to look into those eyes. how the memory of this moment could help him fall asleep tonight. how every poem he’d read about eyes finally started to make some sense.

his pale hands wrapped into lukas’s shirt. 

he could feel their heartbeats slowly begin to match.

everything smelled like lukas’s cologne.

not even alcohol would ever be able to dull this longing.

when their lips touched, he could breathe again.

he held on like letting go would kill him. 

and lukas kissed back -- god, he’d never felt anything better. even with metallic blood in his mouth and a suspension in his future, all lukas could think about was the boy right in front of him. he was worth anything. even his dad’s disapproval, even being the center of the school’s gossip.

they kissed until the principal slammed the staircase door open.

and philip passed lukas a page from the poetry book that he’d kept in his pocket, subconsciously saving for the boy.

( i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. )

[doriscahill]

My History of Writing

September 8, 2010

My History of Writing

I do not believe as though I have ever written a piece of writing that was not required for school, job, or and extracurricular activity. The only strong memory I have of writing on my own would be writing letters from sleepover camp home to family and friends.

I would love to write letters to them, because I was able to update them on my daily activities even though I knew it would not get to them for days in end. When I do choose to write something it occurs in the evening, usually before I go to sleep. I have no idea why I always choose to write before I go to sleep, it might possible be because I find it to be a relaxing activity and a reflection period. 

The only time that I find writing an inconvenient subject is when it happens to be some ridiculous research paper. I never really write anything on my own unless if it’s a letter to a family member.I have no idea what inspires me to write anything. I cannot even understand what inspires me to do things day to day. I am a passionate cook, but if you were to ask me what inspires me to cook I would never be able to answer that for you. Inspirations to me are a difficult subject to put down into words, because inspirations shows how passionate a person is about themselves, the people around them, and the activities they love. 

Writing pieces are never really my strong suit and as you read this paper you will find out what my weaknesses in writing are, my best piece I ever wrote, the worst piece of writing that I had to create and my first memories of writing that I have. The problems that have appeared in my writing through my high school years stem from my early childhood. The areas where I have most difficulty in would be grammar, spelling, and on occasion topic sentence. I never correctly learned grammar skills, because I began hearing and talking at a later stage in life than most children. I had gotten constant ear infections when I was at a younger in age and that had effect the way in which I interpret information.

If I was able to overcome all of the writing issue that have occurred in my high school years, I probably would have gotten way better grades with a few teachers. But I do not believe as though I would enjoy writing anymore than I already do.

My writing experience in high school has been extremely interesting. One of my favorite pieces of writing I have completed would be a study case file on Hold Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. This writing piece consisted of making a psychiatric medical file for Holden Caulfield to diagnose his mental disease. I had found this piece to be interesting to write; because it was not just another boring essay reflection on a book we had finished reading in class. This paper actually required people to do research and prove what they believed Holden had as mental disease. It was one of the first papers I ever wrote that allowed me to express my own opinion freely. My least favorite writing assignment would be writing a boast about myself.

It just felt uncomfortable to boast myself through writing and then having to present it in front of the class. I will never understand why that was a popular style of writing. The style of writing I really enjoy doing, but hardly ever am aloud to do would be creative writing pieces. I have written less than five creative piecing in my three years of high school English classes. I have no accomplishments as a student writer in my high school. I do not feel as though my writing has improved from teacher or student review, but by my own will power to want to change how Iwrite things.

I cannot re call any early childhood memories of writing except for this one keeps circling around in my mind would be all the letters I wrote home from sleepover camps over the years. The letters were usually a positive experience of writing, even when I got bad news. The feeling of writing a letter and receiving one from someone who loves you, shows a particular passion you have for that person. In the letters I would try to write in cursive to mimic my grandmother Fran, because I love how fluid her cursive handwriting was after years of teaching.

My first experience of writing that I do remember is not from very early childhood but it has made a difference in the way I choose to write on occasion. I have never a single Stephen King novel until this summer reading list gave me the opportunity to read one. I had never thought to sit down and read one of his novels, because I do not enjoy depression, frightening, dark literate. But this summer I got to read On Writing by Stephen which gave a memoir of his person life and his beliefs on how someone should approach on being a good writer. One of his thoughts that I intrigued my interest was how he develops plots within in a novel; he says “The situation comes first. The characters— always flat and un-featured, to begin with. I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way” (161 King). This idea of allowing the characters to develop on their own is an amazing style of writing that I hope to be able to do on day, but I don’t have a passion for writing like Stephen king. 

The most memorable moment from reading his book would be that he was an addict. I had never known that he struggled with addiction throughout his writing career. The advice that I wish I had gotten earlier in my writing career would be the use of a passive voice and how to use adverbs in a proper manner to help express what I am thinking through my writing in better manners. I do not think it possible for me to enjoy writing more, because I am simple just more of a math and science person. I have never had the same English teacher twice my high school years. 

I understand Stephen Kings prespective on writing, but I have no way to relate to it on common grounds, because I have never truly written a piece of writing that was not required for a job, school, or extracurricular activity. I hope one day I might write for the enjoyment of it like he does, but I will never know if that will happen someday.

Thank you Nat for the Contribution-Doe

[johnsaye]

Planetary Motion

What a strange week, all kinds of things to do. For someone in my shape, you think I’d have just one boring day after another, but I don’t. Things are as fast-paced as I can ever think of. I’ve got on average of seven home health visits per week, two physical therapy sessions, two occupational therapy sessions, two more visits from a home health aid to help me take a bath and an extra nurse’s visit to help me through whatever I’m dealing with at the moment, although that’s going down to once per two weeks now, and then on top of that I’m doing my best to write every day. Kids are in school, I’m going each week to any number of doctor’s appointments from general practice and pain management all the way to neurology, wound care or urology as needed, and I’ve got a wonderful cat, Penelope, who naps on me a lot lately. Sometimes I just flop when it’s time to get back into the bed in the evening. 

Writing

Planning a whole galaxy of planets for world building it is tough work. Maybe I’ve gone too far? I decided as I’ve stalled a couple of times while attempting to begin writing a space opera style story that I wanted to know what all the major planets I wanted to include were. I decided that I just wanted to begin with a few (seven) individual solar systems that were habitable. I could make up stories that took place in those locations for days, and for a while considered having a single solar system where all the action happened. I thought it might be this solar system, with a future Earth at the center, but decided to stay away from that. I wanted light speed, or rather faster than light speed travel as a part of it, so I needed different places to go. So I picked a number and seven seems to be the right number, though I think maybe eight, just because I like the number eight. 

I want to know where everything is, where all the civilizations arose, who knows who, how many intelligent species are out there traveling the spaceways and what all their relationships are. Where are the natural resources, where can people, human or otherwise, live. What is the power or land grabs like. Which groups want single rule per planet, who wants a big empire spanning many planets (and habitable moons and dwarf planets.)

I’ve been working out where my barren and forest moons are, and where large quantities of rock are, and large ones that don’t qualify as planets, but might be good as a pirate base or something. The next step I want to take is to start pinpointing where intelligent spacefaring civilizations started. I want to know where didn’t leap to the stars on their own and where they did, and who first contacted them and whose side they might be on in a conflict. 

I’m barely scratching the surface of these worlds, but I ‘m finding that as I visit each character and planet, they all have a story to tell, and they want to tell me. Scenarios seem to bubble up that want to be stories, now I just have to figure out who is the lead character, because several of them keep raising their hands and want to be featured. 

Health

I had an interesting visit to the urologist this week. It’s not my favorite thing to talk about, but being a (recovering?) paraplegic fir this length of time has caused some issues to come up I wasn’t expecting. For instance, bowel movements have slowed way down, and apparently, I keep catching urinary tract infections because my bladder doesn’t empty as it should. Too much information… I know. I think I’m doing well, but it seems my bladder isn’t emptying fully as it should, and if I allow my blood sugar to spike the organisms already hanging out down in there go Ya-Ha! They have a little party and boom, I’m back up UTI alley. 

I’m very grateful for the chair Medicare just sent me, because it reclines all the way back, which allowed the docs at urology access to my butt. Got a shot in both cheeks with an antibiotic and another prescription for some additional ones to finish this garbage off. 

Twitch

In website news, I’ve integrated twitch into the right-hand panel of the site. I’m toying with a twitch as a way to interact with people. To be literally present Live on camera on my website at times. I’m pretty isolated out here. My wife is my best friend anyway, so it’s the best of both worlds there, but I don’t get to see many others who aren’t doctors, nurses or therapists, and I just wonder if this is the way to stick my neck out there. I miss being able to bring my Dungeons & Dragons books to the lunchroom to see who says hello. Today everything’s digital, so if this is it, then this is it. I was also considering doing the first draft of this year’s NaNoWriMo book on camera. I’m still thinking about that. 

Star Wars

Holy Cow! The Mandalorian is coming to Disney Plus in November and all I have to say is ‘Take my money!’ That’s just all there is to it. The trailer dropped and I’ve been going over it and over it again, maybe not with the depth that some will, but I’ve looked at it my fair share, and like many things from Lucasfilm, I think this is going to be a game-changer in what you can do in science fiction on television. I imagine it won’t be too long before every YouTuber at home has a motion capture suit and the ability to render detailed characters from their basement green screen setup. 

The fact that they are doing this now likely means they’ve mastered this technology among others over the last several movies, to make it affordable to produce quickly for something with the number of episodes to qualify as a television series. Pretty awesome stuff. I’m looking forward to the Mandalorian when it premieres. 

Reading

I can once more read the Catcher in the Rye! J. D. Salinger, someone I thought growing up to be a brilliant writer and mind disappointed me in his age to be one of the most famous hold-outs when it came to delivering his work through any other channel except for print. I’ve loved The Catcher in the Rye for many years, going through Holden Caulfield’s mind as he gathers himself up to return home again after getting ousted from yet another prep school. Salinger refused to release the book in another format, no audiobook, no movie adaptation, and especially no ebook. 

No movie, okay I can get that. It’s hard to get into a good first-person book as a movie without the lead sounding like a film noir detective, so there you have me. I don’t understand not having an audio version though, because among the disabled, as I am now, it cuts the story of from such a large group and that I don’t understand, and denying the ebook? What’s that about? In a world where the bookstore is no longer out there somewhere, but in everyone’s pocket, that seems like a poor business choice. ‘Oh but I love the smell of paper!’ No— you mean mold. Grr. He held out. When he died I found out he left instructions not to release them, and then his son held out… until now. The ebook version has been released. Maybe he needed the money? I don’t know, but I’m glad he did. 

My hands are still incapable of holding a book or turning pages, but I can read anything on my kindle app with the swipe of a stylus. I am very glad to be able to read the book again and have it in my virtual library. An audiobook is apparently still off the table. Maybe eventually. 

I still wonder, where do the ducks go when the pond freezes over? Even though I live in the south where the ponds never do. 

It’s interesting though since reading they were going to do it on the BBC website, they published that sucker to kindle quick!

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-49330560

Therapy

My therapists were excited that we won the eBay auction for an EasyStand XT, though the auctioneer doesn’t seem very interested in shipping it, and we’ve withdrawn our offer. (Because they freaked out when they figured out they didn’t account for shipping the thing…) We’ll see what eBay wants to do about that, but I very much dis;Ike it when people don’t know what they are doing. I feel for them. I’m sorry they haven’t got the wisdom to think about what shipping would cost. The bad thing is I would have happily paid extra for the shipping and worked out a deal. 

My second plan to get one is to go to my local supplier and start working a deal with Medicare for a new one, I’m going to have to pay to ship anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. I’m going to get one either way. It’s just now I’m waiting a little bit longer. That’s all. 

I see myself using one of these days as I get the strength back into my legs for standing up again. I used one of these in the hospital a few times. I need one now. So I’m going to make it happen. 

https://easystand.com/product/png50209-evolv-xt/

source https://www.johnsaye.com/planetary-motion/

[ciathyzareposts]

Ultima VII

From the time that Richard and Robert Garriott first founded Origin Systems in order to publish Ultima III, the completion of one Ultima game was followed almost immediately by the beginning of work on the next. Ultima VI in early 1990 was no exception; there was time only for a wrap party and a couple of weeks of decompression before work started on Ultima VII. The latter project continued even as separate teams made the two rather delightful Worlds of Ultima spinoffs using the old Ultima VI engine, and even as another Origin game called Wing Commander sold far more copies than any previous Ultima, spawning an extremely lucrative new franchise that for the first time ever made Origin into something other than The House That Ultima Built.

But whatever the source, money was always welcome. The new rival for the affections of Origin’s fans and investors gave Richard Garriott more of it to play with than ever before, and his ambitions for his latest Ultima were elevated to match. One of the series’s core ethos had always been that of continual technological improvement. Garriott had long considered it a point of pride to never use the same engine twice (a position he had budged from only reluctantly when he allowed the Worlds of Ultima spinoffs to be made). Thus it came as no surprise that he wanted to push things forward yet again with Ultima VII. Even in light of the series’s tradition, however, this was soon shaping up to be an unusually ambitious installment — indeed, by far the most ambitious technological leap that the series had made to date.

As I noted in my article on that game, the Ultima VI engine was, at least when seen retrospectively, a not entirely comfortable halfway point between the old “alphabet soup” keyboard-based interface of the first five games and a new approach which fully embraced the mouse and other modern computing affordances. Traces of the old were still to be found scattered everywhere amidst the new, and using the interface effectively meant constantly switching between keyboard-centric and mouse-centric paradigms for different tasks. Ultima VII would end such equivocation, shedding all traces of the interfaces of yore.

These screenshots from a Computer Gaming World preview of the game provide an interesting snapshot of Ultima VII in a formative state. The graphics are less refined than the final version, but the pop-up interface and the graphical containment model — more on that fraught subject later — are in place.

For the first time since Richard Garriott had discovered the magic of tile graphics in his dorm room at the University of Texas, the world of this latest Ultima was not to be built using that technique; Origin opted instead for a free-scrolling world shown from an overhead perspective, canted just slightly to convey the impression of depth. Gone along with the discrete tiles were the discrete turns of the previous Ultima games, replaced by true real-time gameplay. The world model included height — 16 possible levels of it! — as well as the other dimensions; characters could climb stairs to other floors in a building or walk up a hillside outdoors while remaining in the same contiguous space. In a move that must strike anyone familiar with the games of today as almost eerily prescient, Origin excised any trace of static onscreen interface elements. Instead the entire screen was given over to a glorious view of Britannia, with the interface popping up over this backdrop as needed. The whole production was designed with the mouse in mind first and foremost. Do you want your character to pick up a sword? Click on him to bring up his paper-doll inventory display, then drag the sword with the mouse right out of the world and into his hand. All of the things that the Ultima VI engine seemed like it ought to be able to do, but which proved far more awkward than anticipated, the Ultima VII engine did elegantly and effortlessly.

Looking for a way to reduce onscreen clutter and to show as much of the world of Britannia as possible at one time, Origin realized they could pop up interface elements only when needed. This innovation, seldom seen before, has become ubiquitous in the games — and, indeed, in the software in general — of today.

Origin had now fully embraced a Hollywood-style approach to game production, marked by specialists working within strictly defined roles, and the team which built Ultima VII reflected this. Even the artists were specialized. Glen Johnson, a former comic-book illustrator, was responsible for the characters and monsters as they appeared in the world. Michael Pierce was the resident portrait artist, responsible for the closeups of faces that appeared whenever the player talked to someone. The most specialized artistic role of all belonged to Bob Cook, a landscape artist hired to keep the multi-level environment coherent and proportional.

Of course, there were plenty of programmers as well, and they had their work cut out for them. Bringing Garriott’s latest Ultima to life would require pushing the latest hardware right to the edge and, in some situations, beyond it. Perhaps the best example of the programmers’ determination to find a way at all costs is their Voodoo memory manager. Frustrated with MS-DOS’s 640 K memory barrier and unhappy with all of the solutions for getting around it, the programming team rolled up their sleeves and coded a solution of their own from scratch. It would force virtually everyone who played the game at its release to boot their machines from a custom floppy, and would give later users even more headaches; in fact, it would render the game unplayable on many post-early-1990s machines, until the advent of software emulation layers like DOSBox. Yet it was the only way the programming team could make the game work at all in 1992.

As usual for an Ultima, the story and structure of play evolved only slowly, after the strengths and limitations of the technology that would need to enable them were becoming clear. Richard Garriott began with one overriding determination: he wanted a real bad guy this time, not just someone who was misguided or misunderstood: “We wanted a bad guy who was really evil, truly, truly evil.” He envisioned an antagonist for the Avatar cut from the classic cloth of novelistic and cinematic villains, one who could stick around for at least the next few games. Thus was born the disembodied spirit of evil known as the Guardian, who would indeed proceed to dog the Avatar’s footsteps all the way through Ultima IX. One might be tempted to view this seeming return to a black-versus-white conception of morality as a step back for the series thematically. But, as Garriott was apparently aware, the moral plot twists of the previous two games risked becoming a cliché in themselves if perpetuated indefinitely.

Then too, while Ultima VII would present a story carrying less obvious thematic baggage than the last games, that story would be executed far more capably than any of those others. For, as the most welcome byproduct of the new focus on specialization, Origin finally hired a real writing team.

Raymond Benson and Richard Garriott take the stage together for an Austin theatrical fundraiser with a Valentines Day theme. Benson played his “love theme” from Ultima VII while Garriott recited “The Song of Solomon” — with tongue planted firmly in cheek, of course.

The new head writer, destined to make a profound impact on the game, was an intriguingly multi-talented fellow named Raymond Benson. Born in 1955, he was a native of Origin’s hometown of Austin, Texas, but had spent the last decade or so in New York City, writing, directing, and composing music for stage productions. As a sort of sideline, he’d also dabbled in games, writing an adventure for the James Bond 007 tabletop RPG and writing three text-adventure adaptations of popular novels during the brief mid-1980s heyday of bookware: The Mist, A View to a Kill, and Goldfinger. Now, he and his wife had recently started a family, and were tired of their cramped Manhattan flat and the cutthroat New York theater scene. When they saw an advertisement from Origin in an Austin newspaper, seeking “artists, musicians, and programmers,” Benson decided to apply. He was hired to be none of those things — although he would contribute some of his original music to Ultima VII — but rather to be a writer.

When he crossed paths with the rest of Origin Systems, Benson was both coming from and going to very different places than the majority of the staff there, and his year-long sojourn with them proved just a little uncomfortable. Benson:

It was like working in the boys’ dormitory. I was older than most of the employees, who were 95 percent male. In fact, I believe less than ten out of fifty or sixty employees were over thirty, and I was one of them. So, I kind of felt like the old fart a lot of times. Most of the employees were young single guys, and it didn’t matter to them if they stayed at the office all night, had barbecues at midnight, and slept in a sleeping bag until noon. Because I had a family, I needed to keep fairly regular 8-to-5 hours, which is pretty impossible at a games company.

A snapshot of the cultural gulf between Benson and the average Origin employee is provided by an article in the company’s in-house newsletter entitled “What Influences Us?” Amidst lists of “favorite fantasy/science fiction films” and “favorite action/adventure films,” Benson chooses his “ten favorite novels,” unspooling an eclectic list that ranges from Dracula to The Catcher in the Rye, Lucky Jim to Maia — no J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert Heinlein in sight!

Some of the references in Ultima VII feel like they just had to have come directly from the slightly older, more culturally sophisticated diversified mind of Raymond Benson. Here, for instance, is a riff on Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin’s landmark work of first-person journalism about racial prejudice in the United States.

It’s precisely because of his different background and interests that Benson’s contribution to Ultima VII became so important. Most of the writing in the game was actually dialog, and deft characterization through dialog was something his theatrical background had left him well-prepared to tackle. Working with and gently coaching a team consisting of four other, less experienced writers, he turned Richard Garriott’s vague story outline, about the evil Guardian and his attempt to seize control of Britannia through a seemingly benign religious movement known as the Fellowship, into the best-written Ultima ever. The indelible Ultima tradition of flagrantly misused “thees” and “thous” aside, the writing in Ultima VII never grates, and frequently sparkles. Few games since the heyday of Infocom could equal it. Considering that Ultima VII alone quite possibly has as much text as every Infocom game combined, that’s a major achievement.

The huge contributions made by Raymond Benson and the rest of the writing team — not to mention so many other artists, programmers, and environment designers — do raise the philosophical question of how much Ultima VII can still be considered a Richard Garriott game, full stop. From the time that his brother Robert convinced him that he simply couldn’t create Ultima V all by himself, as he had all of his games up to that point, Richard’s involvement with the nitty-gritty details of their development had become steadily less. By the early 1990s, we can perhaps already begin to see some signs of the checkered post-Origin career in game development that awaited him — the career of a basically good-natured guy with heaps of money, an awful lot of extracurricular interests, and a resultant short attention span. He was happy to throw out Big Ideas to set the direction of development, and he clearly still relished demonstrating Origin’s latest products and playing Lord British, but his days of fussing too much over the details were, it seems, already behind him by the time of Ultima VII. Given a choice between sitting down to make a computer game or throwing one of his signature birthday bashes or Halloween spook houses — or, for that matter, merely playing the wealthy young gentleman-about-town in Austin high society more generally — one suspects that Garriott would opt for one of the latter every time.

Which isn’t to say that his softer skill set wasn’t welcome in a company in transition, in which tensions between the creative staff and management were starting to become noticeable. For the people on the front line actually making Ultima VII, working ridiculous hours under intense pressure for shockingly little pay, Garriott’s talents meant much indeed. He would swoop in from time to time to have lunch catered in from one of Austin’s most expensive restaurants. Or he would tell everyone to take the afternoon off because they were all going out to the park to eat barbecue and toss Frisbees around. And of course they were always all invited to those big parties he loved to throw.

Still, the tensions remained, and shouldn’t be overlooked. Lurking around the edges of management’s attitude toward their employees was the knowledge that Origin was the only significant game developer in Austin, a fast-growing, prosperous city with a lot of eager young talent. Indeed, prior to the rise of id Software up in Dallas, they had no real rival in all of Texas. Brian Martin, a scripter on Ultima VII, remembers being told that “people were standing in line for our jobs, and if we didn’t like the way things were, we could just leave.” Artist Glen Johnson had lived in Austin at the time Origin hired him to work in their New Hampshire office, only to move him back to Austin once again when that office was closed; he liked to joke that the company had spent more money on his plane fare during his first year than on his salary.

The yin to Richard Garriott’s yang inside Origin was Dallas Snell, the company’s hard-driving production manager, who was definitely not the touchy-feely type. An Origin employee named Sheri Graner Ray recounts her first encounter with him:

My interviews at Origin Systems culminated with an interview with Dallas Snell. He didn’t turn away from his computer, but sort of waved a hand in the general direction of a chair. I hesitantly took a seat. Dallas continued to type for what seemed to me to be two or three hours. Finally, he stopped, swung around in his desk chair, leaned forward, put one hand on his knee and the other on his hip, narrowed his eyes at me, and said, “You’re here for me to decide if I LIKE you.” I was TERRIFIED. Well, I guess he did, cuz I got the job, but I spent the next year ducking and avoiding him, as I figured if he ever decided he DIDN’T like me, I was in trouble!

Snell’s talk could make Origin’s games sound like something dismayingly close to sausages rolling down a production line. He was most proud of Wing Commander and Savage Empire, he said, because “these projects were done in twelve calendar months or less, as compared to the twenty-to-thirty-month time frame that previous projects were developed in!” Martian Dreams filled six megabytes on disk, yet was done in “seven calendar months!!! Totally unprecedented!!” Wing Commander II filled 15 megabytes, yet “the entire project will have been developed in eight calendar months!!!” He concluded that “no one, absolutely no one, has done what we have, or what we are yet still capable of!!! Not Lucasfilm, not Sierra, not MicroProse, not Electronic Arts, not anyone!” The unspoken question was, at what cost to Origin’s staff?

It would be unfair to label Origin Systems, much less Dallas Snell alone, the inventor of the games industry’s crunch-time culture and its unattractive byproduct and enabler, the reliance on an endless churn of cheap young labor willing to let themselves be exploited for the privilege of making games. Certainly similar situations were beginning to arise at other major studios in the early 1990s. And it’s also true that the employees of Origin and those other studios were hardly the first ones to work long hours for little pay making games. Yet there was, I think, a qualitative difference at play. The games of the 1980s had mostly been made by very small teams with little hierarchy, where everyone could play a big creative role and feel a degree of creative ownership of the end product. By the early 1990s, though, the teams were growing in size; over the course of 1991 alone, Origin’s total technical and creative staff grew from 40 to 120 people. Thus companies like Origin were instituting — necessarily, given the number of people involved — more rigid tiers of roles and specialties. In time, this would lead to the cliché of the young 3D modeller working 100-hour weeks making trees, with no idea of where they would go in the finished game and no way to even find out, much less influence the creative direction of the final product in any more holistic sense. For such cogs in the machine, getting to actually make games (!) would prove rather less magical than expected.

Origin was still a long way from that point, but I fancy that the roots of the oft-dehumanizing culture of modern AAA game production can be seen here. Management’s occasional attempts to address the issue also ring eerily familiar. In the midst of Ultima VII, Dallas Snell announced that “the 24-hour work cycle has outlived its productivity”: “All employees are required to start the day by 10:00 AM and call it a day by midnight. The lounge is being returned to its former glory (as a lounge, that is, without beds).” Needless to say, the initiative didn’t last, conflicting as it did with the pressing financial need to get the game done and on the market.

Simply put, Ultima VII was expensive — undoubtedly the most expensive game Origin had ever made, and quite possibly the most expensive computer game anyone had yet made. Just after its release, Richard Garriott claimed that it had cost $1 million to make, the first time to my knowledge that that milestone figure was associated with any game. Of course, the number is comically low by modern standards, even when adjusted for inflation — but this was a time when a major hit might only sell 100,000 units rather than the 10 million or so of today.

Origin had first planned to release Ultima VII in time for the Christmas of 1991, an impossibly optimistic time frame (impossibly optimistic time frames being another trait which the Origin of the early 1990s shares with many game studios of today). When it became clear that no amount of crunch would allow the team to meet that deadline, the pressure to get it out as soon as possible after Christmas only increased. Looking over their accounts at year’s end, Origin realized that 90 percent of their revenue in 1991 had come through the Wing Commander franchise; had Wing Commander II not become as huge a hit as the first installment, they would have been bankrupt. This subsidizing of Ultima with Wing Commander was an uncomfortable place to be, and not just for the impact it might have had on Lord British’s (alter) ego. It meant that, with no major Wing Commander releases due in 1992, an under-performing Ultima VII could take down the whole company. Many at Origin were surprisingly clear-eyed about the dangers which beset them. Mike McShaffry, a programmer and unusually diligent student of the company’s financial situation among the rank and file — unsurprisingly, he would later become an entrepreneur himself — expressed his concern: “The road ahead for us is a bumpy one. Many companies do not survive the ‘boom town’ growth phase that we have just experienced.”

Thus when Ultima VII: The Black Gate — the subtitle was an unusually important one, given that Origin had already authorized a confusingly titled Ultima VII Part Two using the same game engine — shipped on April 16, 1992, the whole company’s future was riding on it.

Classic games, it seems to me, can be plotted on a continuum between two archetypes. At one pole are the games which do everything right — those whose designers, faced with a multitude of small and large choices, have made the right choice every time. Ultima Underworld, the spinoff game which Origin released just two weeks before Ultima VII, is one of these.

The other archetypal classic game is much rarer: the game whose designers have made a lot of really problematic choices, to the point that certain parts of it may be flat-out broken, but which nevertheless charms and delights due to some ineffable spirit that overshadows everything else. Ultima VII is the finest example of this type that I can think of. Its list of trouble spots is longer than that of many genuinely bad games, and yet its special qualities are so special that I can only recommend that you play it.

Inventory management in Ultima VII. It’s really, really hard to find anything, especially in the dark. Of course, I could fire up a torch… but wait! My torches are buried somewhere under all that mess in my pack.

Any list of that which is confusing, infuriating, or just plain boring in Ultima VII must start with the inventory-management system. The drag-and-drop approach to same is brilliant in conception, but profoundly flawed in execution. You need to cart a lot of stuff around in this game — not just weapons and armor and quest items and money and loot, but also dozens of pieces of food to keep your insatiable characters fed on their journeys and dozens or hundreds of magic reagents to let you cast spells. All of this is lumped together in your characters’ packs as an indeterminate splodge of overlapping icons. Unless you formulate a detailed scheme of exactly what should go where and stick to it with the rigidity of a pedant, you’ll sometimes find it impossible to figure out what you actually have and where it is on your characters’ persons. When that happens, you’ll have to resort to finding a clear spot of ground and laying out the contents of each pack on it one by one, looking for that special little whatsit.

Keys belong to their own unique circle of Inventory Hell. Just a few pixels big, they have a particular tendency to get hopelessly lost at the bottom of your pack along with those leftover leeks you picked up for some reason in the bar last night. Further, keys are distinguished only by their style and color — the game does nothing so friendly as tell you what door a given key opens, even after you’ve successfully used it — and there are a lot of them. So, you never feel quite confident when you can’t open a door that you haven’t just overlooked the key somewhere in the swirling chaos vortex that is your inventory. If you really love packing your suitcase before a big trip, you might enjoy Ultima VII‘s inventory management. Otherwise, you’ll find it to be a nightmare.

The combat system is almost as bad. Clearly Origin, to put it as kindly as possible, struggled to adapt combat to the real-time paradigm. While you can assemble a party of up to eight people, you can only directly control the Avatar himself in combat, and that only under a fairly generous definition of “control.” You click a button telling your people to start fighting, whereupon everyone, friend and foe alike, converges upon the same pixel as occasional words — “Aargh!,” “To arms!,” “Vultures will pick thy bones!” — float out of the scrum. The effect is a bit like those old Warner Bros. cartoons where Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner disappear into a cloud of arms and legs until one of them pops out victorious a few seconds later.

The one way to change this dynamic also happens to be the worst possible thing you can do: equipping your characters with ranged weapons. This will cause them to open fire indiscriminately in the vague direction of the aforementioned pixel of convergence, happily riddling any foes and friends alike who happen to be in the way full of arrows. In light of this, one can only be happy that the Avatar is the only one allowed to use magic; the thought of this lot of nincompoops armed with fireballs and magic missiles is downright terrifying. Theoretically, it’s possible to control combat to some degree by choosing from several abstract strategies for each character, and to directly intervene with the Avatar by clicking specific targets, but in practice none of it makes much difference. By the time some of your characters start deciding to throw down all their weapons and hide in a corner for no apparent reason, you just shrug and accept it; it’s as explicable as anything else here.

You’ll learn to dread your party’s constant mewling for food, not least because it forces you to engage with the dreadful inventory system. (No, they can’t feed themselves. You have to hand-feed each one of them like a little birdie.)

Thankfully, nothing else in the game is quite as bad as these two aspects, but there are other niggling annoyances. The need to manually feed your characters is prominent among them. There’s no interest or challenge to collecting food. Even if you aren’t willing to blatantly steal it from every building you visit — something for which, unlike in Ultima IV, there are no consequences — there are lots of infallible but tedious means of collecting money to buy it. (Determined to be a good Avatar, I spent literally hours when I played the game marching back and forth from one end of the town of Britain to the other, buying meat cheap and selling it expensive, all so as to buy yet more meat to feet my hungry lot.) The need for food serves only to extend the length of a game that doesn’t need to be extended, and to do it in the most boring way possible.

But then, this sort of thing had always been par for the course with any Ultima, a series that always tended to leaven its inspired elements with a solid helping of tedium. And then too, Ultima had always been a little wonky when it came to its mechanics; Richard Garriott ceded that ground to Wizardry back in the days of Ultima I, and never really tried to regain it. Still, it’s amazing how poorly Ultima VII, a game frequently praised as one of the best CRPGs ever made, does as a CRPG, at least as most people thought of the genre circa 1992. Because there’s no interest or pleasure in combat, there’s no thrill to leveling up or collecting new weapons and armor. You have little opportunity to shape your characters’ development in any way, and those sops to character management that are present, such as the food system, merely annoy. Dungeons — many or most of them optional — are scattered around, but they’re fairly small while still managing to be confusing; the free-scrolling movement makes them almost impossible to map accurately on paper, yet the game lacks an auto-map. If you see a CRPG as a game in the most traditional sense of the word — as an intricate system of rules to learn and to manipulate to your advantage — you’ll hate, hate, hate Ultima VII for its careless mechanics. One might say that it’s at its worst when it actively tries to be a CRPG, at its best when it’s content to be a sort of Britannian walking simulator.

And yet I don’t dislike the game as much as all of the above might imply. In fact, Ultima VII is my third favorite game to bear the Ultima name, behind only Martian Dreams and the first Ultima Underworld. The reason comes down to how compelling the aforementioned walking simulator actually manages to be.

I’ve never cared much one way or the other about Britannia as a setting, but darned if Ultima VII doesn’t shed a whole new light on the place. At its best, playing this game is… pleasant, a word not used much in regard to ludic aesthetics, but one that perhaps ought to crop up more frequently. The graphics are colorful, the music lovely, the company you keep more often than not charming. It’s disarmingly engaging just to wander around and talk to people.

Underneath the pleasantness, not so much undercutting it is as giving it more texture, is a note of melancholy. This adventure in Britannia takes place many years after the Avatar’s previous ones, and the old companions in adventure who make up his party are as enthusiastic as ever, but also a little grayer, a little more stooped. Meanwhile other old friends (and enemies) from the previous games are forever waiting in the wings for one last cameo. If a Britannia scoffer like me can feel a certain poignancy, it must be that much more pronounced for those who are more invested in the setting. Today, the valedictory feel to Ultima VII is that much affecting because we know for sure that this is indeed the end of the line for the classic incarnation of Britannia. The single-player series wouldn’t return there until Ultima IX, and that unloved game would alter the place’s personality almost beyond recognition. Ah, well… it’s hard to imagine a lovelier, more affectionate sendoff for old-school Britannia than the one it gets here.

The writing team loves to flirt with the fourth wall. Fortunately, they never quite take it to the point of undermining the rest of the fiction.

Yet even as the game pays loving tribute to the Britannia of yore, there’s an aesthetic sophistication about it that belies the series’s teenage-dungeonmaster roots. It starts with the box, which, apart from the title, is a foreboding solid black. The very simplicity screams major statement, like the Beatles’ White Album or Prince’s Black Album. Certainly it’s a long way from the heaving bosoms and fire-breathing dragons of the typical CRPG cover art.

When you start the game, you’re first greeted with a title screen that evokes the iconic opening sequence to Ultima IV, all bright spring colors and music that smacks of Vivaldi. But then, in the first of many toyings with the fourth wall, the scene dissolves into static, to be replaced by the figure of the Guardian speaking directly to you.

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/intro-1.mp4

As you wander through Britannia in the game proper, the Guardian will continue to speak to you from time to time — the only voice acting in the game. His ominous presence is constantly jarring you when you least expect it.

The video snippet below of a play within the play, as it were, that you encounter early in the game illustrates some more of the depth and nuance of Ultima VII‘s writing. (Needless to say, this scene in particular owes much to Raymond Benson’s theatrical background.)

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/U7.mp4

This sequences offers a rather extraordinary layer cake of meanings, making it the equal of a sophisticated stage or film production. We have the deliberately, banally bad play put on by the Fellowship actors, with its “moon, June, spoon” rhyme sequences. Yet peaking through the banality, making it feel sinister rather than just inept, is a hint of cult-like menace. Meanwhile the asides of our companions tell us not only that the writers know the play is bad, but that said companions are smart enough to recognize it as well. We have Iolo’s witty near-breaking of the fourth wall with his comment about “visual effects.” And then we have Spark’s final verdict on the passion play, delivered as only a teenager can: “This is terrible!” (For some reason, that line makes me laugh every time.) No other game of 1992, with the possible exception only of the text adventure Shades of Gray, wove so many variegated threads of understanding into its writing. Nor is the scene above singular. The writing frequently displays the same wit and sophistication as what you see above. This is writing by and for adults.

The description of Ultima VII‘s writing as more adult than the norm also applies in the way in which the videogame industry typically uses that adjective. There’s a great extended riff on the old myths of unicorns and virgins. The conversation with a horny unicorn devolves into speculation about whether the Avatar himself is, shall we say, fit to ride the beast…

For all of the cutting-edge programming that went into the game, it really is the writing that does the bulk of the heavy lifting in Ultima VII. And it’s here that this first million-dollar computer game stands out most from the many big-budget productions that would follow it. Origin poured a huge percentage of that budget not into graphics or sound but into content in its purest form. If not the broadest world yet created for a computer at the time of the game’s release, this incarnation of Britannia must be the deepest and most varied. Nothing here is rote; every character has a personality, every character has something all her own to say. The sheer scale of the project which Raymond Benson’s team tackled — this game definitely has more words in it than any computer game before it — is well-nigh flabbergasting.

Further, the writers have more on their minds than escapist fantasy. They use the setting of Britannia to ponder the allure of religious cults, the social divide between rich and poor, and even the representation of women in fantasy art, along with tax policy, environmental issues, and racism. The game is never preachy about such matters, but seamlessly works its little nuggets for thought into the high-fantasy setting. Ultima VII may lack the overriding moral message that had defined its three predecessors, but that doesn’t mean it has nothing to say. Indeed, given the newfound nuance and depth of the writing, the series suddenly has more to say here than ever before.

Because of how much else there is to see and do, the main plot about the Guardian sometimes threatens to get forgotten entirely. But it’s enjoyable enough as such things go, even if its main purpose often does seem to be simply to give you a reason to wander around talking to people. In the second half of the game, the plot picks up steam, and there are a fair number of traditional CRPG-style quests to complete. (There are also more personal “quests” among the populaces of the towns you visit, but they’re largely optional and hardly earth-shattering. They are, however, often disarmingly sweet-natured: getting the shy lovelorn fellow together with the girl he worships from afar… that sort of thing.) The game as a whole is very soluble as long as you take notes when you’re given important information; there’s no trace of a quest log here.

While a vocal minority of Ultima fandom decries this seventh installment for the perfectly justifiable reasons I mentioned earlier in this article, the majority laud it as — forgive the inevitable pun! — the ultimate incarnation of what Richard Garriott began working toward in the late 1970s. Even with all of its annoying aspects, it’s undoubtedly the most accessible Ultima for the modern player, what with its fairly intuitive mouse-driven interface, its reasonably attractive graphics and sound, and its relatively straightforward and fair main quest. Meanwhile its nuanced writing and general aesthetic sophistication are unrivaled by any earlier game in the series. If it’s not the most historically important of the main-line Ultima games — that honor must still go to the thematically groundbreaking Ultima IV — it’s undoubtedly the one most likely to be enjoyed by a player today.

Indeed, it’s been called the blueprint for many of the most popular epic CRPGs of today — games where you also spend much of your time just walking around and talking to a host of more or less interesting characters. That influence can easily be overstated, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to the claim. No other CRPG in 1992, or for some thereafter, played quite like this one, and Ultima VII really does have at least as much in common with the CRPGs of today as it does with its contemporaries. On the whole, then, its hallowed modern reputation is well-earned.

Richard Garriott (far left) and the rest of the Ultima VII team toast the game’s release at Britannia Manor, the former’s Austin mansion.

Its reception in 1992, on the other hand, was far more mixed than that reputation might suggest. Questbusters magazine, deploying an unusually erudite literary comparison of the type of which Raymond Benson might have approved, called it “the Finnegans Wake of computer gaming — a flawed masterpiece,” referring to its lumpy mixture of the compelling and the tedious. Computer Gaming World‘s longtime adventure reviewer Scorpia had little good at all to say about it. Perhaps in response to her negativity, the same magazine ran a second, much more positive review from Charles Ardai in the next issue. Nevertheless, he began by summing up the sense of ennui that was starting to surround the whole series for many gamers: “Many who were delighted when Ultima VI was released can’t be bothered to boot up Ultima VII, as though it goes without saying that the seventh of anything can’t possibly be any good. The market suddenly seems saturated; weary gamers, sure that they have played enough Ultima to last a lifetime, eye the new Ultima with suspicion that it is just More Of The Same.” Even at the end of his own positive review, written with the self-stated goal of debunking that judgment, Ardai deployed a counter-intuitive closing sentiment: “After seven Ultimas, it might be time for Lord British to turn his sights elsewhere.”

Not helping the game’s reception were all of the technical problems. It’s all too easy to forget today just how expensive it was to be a computer gamer in the early 1990s, when the rapid advancement of technology meant that you had to buy a whole new computer every couple of years — or less! — just to be able to play the latest releases. More so even that its contemporaries, Ultima VII pushed the state of the art in hardware to its limit, meaning that anyone lagging even slightly behind the bleeding edge got to enjoy constant disk access, intermittent freezes of seconds at a time, and the occasional outright crash.

And then there were the bugs, which were colorful and plentiful. Chunks of the scenery seemed to randomly disappear — including the walls around the starting town of Trinsic, thus bypassing the manual-lookup scheme Origin had implemented for copy protection. A plot-critical murder scene in another town simply never appeared for some players. Even worse, a door in the very last dungeon refused to open for some; Origin resorted to asking those affected to send their save file on floppy disk to their offices, to be manually edited in order to correct the problem and sent back to them. But by far the most insidious bug — one from which even the current edition of the game on digital-download services may not be entirely free — were the keys that disappeared from player’s inventories for no apparent reason. Given what a nightmare keeping track of keys was already, this felt like the perfect capstone to a tower of terribleness. (One can imagine the calls to Origin’s customer support: “Now, did you take all of the stuff out of all of your packs and sort it out carefully on the ground to make sure your key is really missing? What about those weeks-old leeks down there at the bottom of your pack? Did you look under them?”) Gamers had good cause to be annoyed at a product so obviously released before its time, especially in light of its astronomical $80 suggested retail price.

A Computer Gaming World readers’ poll published in the March 1993 issue — i.e., exactly one year after Ultima VII‘s release — saw it ranked as the respondents’ 30th favorite current game, not exactly a spectacular showing for such a major title. Wing Commander II, by way of comparison, was still in position six, Ultima Underworld — which was now outselling Ultima VII by a considerable margin — in a tie for third. It would be incorrect to call Ultima VII a flop, or to imply that it wasn’t thoroughly enjoyed by many of those who played it back in the day. But for Origin the facts remained when all was said and done that it had sold less well than either of the aforementioned two games after costing at least twice as much to make. These hard facts contributed to the feeling inside the company that, if it wasn’t time to follow Charles Ardai’s advice and let sleeping Ultimas lie for a while, it was time to change up the formula in a major way. After all, Ultima Underworld had done just that, and look how well that had worked out.

But that discussion, of course, belongs to history. In our own times, Ultima VII remains an inspiring if occasionally infuriating experience well worth having, even if you don’t normally play CRPGs or couldn’t care less about the lore of Britannia. I can only encourage all of you who haven’t played it before to remedy that while you wait for my next (and last) article about the game, which will look more closely at the Fellowship, a Britannian cult with an obvious Earthly analogue.

(Sources: the book Ultima: The Avatar Adventures by Rusel DeMaria and Caroline Spector; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin dated August 7 1991, October 25 1991, December 20 1991, February 14 1992, February 28 1992, March 13 1992, April 20 1992, and May 22 1992; Questbusters of July 1991 and August 1992; Computer Gaming World of April 1991, October 1991, August 1992, September 1992, and March 1993; Compute! of January 1992; online sources include The Ultima Codex interviews with Raymond Benson and Brian Martin, a vintage Usenet interview with Richard Garriott, and Sheri Graner Ray’s recollections of her time at Origin on her blog.

Ultima VII: The Black Gate is available for purchase on GOG.com. You may wish to play it using Exult instead of the original executable. The former is a free re-implementation of the Ultima VII engine which fixes some of its worst annoyances and is friendly with modern computers.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/ultima-vii/

[rebelthroughreading-blog]

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Guy Montag is a fireman, except that in this world, instead of putting out the fires, he creates them.

Quick Information

price: $8.99

number of pages: 249

ISBN: 978-1451673319

publisher and date: Simon & Schuster; Reissue edition 2012 

author’s website: http://www.raybradbury.com/

genre: fiction, dystopia, uptopia

main subjects: dystopia, book burning, censorship, totalitarianism, state-sponsored terrorism

Plot

In this utopian world, Guy Montag is a fireman, someone who burns books which are illegal and seen as one of the greatest threats to the happiness of society. He lives with his wife, Mildred, though she spends the majority of her days in the parlor with the “family” who are just the people on the giant television screens that she watches. Everything is normal, or so Montag thinks until he meets Clarisse, a strange teenage neighbor who speaks of things of which he had never even considered. Then one day, she is gone, and everything in Montag’s mind changes.

Who’s reading it?

Though the book is written at about a 6-8 grade level, high school ages are more likely to be interested by the plot, since it includes topics such as censorship and discussions of totalitarianism and technology.

Why did I read it?

In eighth grade, I was looking for more books that had more than just fluff to say. I had read plenty of other books and was starting to look at them in a more critical manner than before, so of course I told my librarian mother this. One of the many books she recommended was Fahrenheit 451, a book she had read and adored because of the real discussions it had with its readers. 

Evaluation

Fahrenheit 451 is hands down one of my favorite books that I have ever written. I have read it a total of three times now, which is a lot since I do not often reread what I have read previously until they have settled in my mind, given me ample time to mull over their words, and it has been many years since the reading. With the majority of books that I have decided to reread (Harry Potter Series, Twilight, The Giver), I have only read them twice (with a couple of cheats here and there - audiobooks will do that to me), but I have read this book three times. I love the consideration that not everything is perfect in the world even if it feels as though it is. I love the idea that television and other such technology could get out of hand one day, which rings eerily true to how today is with social media, the internet, and cell phones. I appreciate how a utoptian world can show just how much the world is really a utopia. The questions that Fahrenheit 451 poses make you think about what more can come from the book and not just censoring is bad, technology is taking over, and we need books. But, to really understand the appeal and greatness of the book, you have to read it for yourself. 

The Issues

censorship

violence / murder

explicit language

anti-religion

age appropriateness

The ultimate issue with this book is that it is an adult fiction book as opposed to a juvenile fiction. The book was written with an older audience in mind, and therefore, much of the issues adults have with young adults reading it is that they feel that the book is inappropriate for the age of the reader. The other issues fall under this main issue. The book was written for someone old enough and with enough knowledge to understand the meaning and discussions, and young adults are not ready for that kind of content.

The book is destroying other books. Yes, the books says that the action is bad, but it still happens. And in turn, those who are in charge of destroying the books also destroy the houses in which the books once were and even the people who read and protected those books if they do not allow the firemen to do as they are supposed to. Those caught reading or harboring illegal books are severely punished. Again, yes the books says that actions are wrong, but they continue to happen. Readers still read and think about them.

The firemen burn all books including the Bible. No one is religious anymore. They talk nothing of any sort of faith and instead busy themselves with their brainwashed thoughts and televisions. 

As with many books written for older audiences, it includes explicit language such as “hell”, “damn”, and “bastard.”

So why should we read it?

How many teenagers have never heard a bad word? How many young adults have never witnessed, read about, or watched on TV some form of violence? How many have done something or knew someone who did something that was not exactly religious? Books like this are nothing new to many young adults, especially those who attend or attended public school or who have ever been in a public setting. They hear language of which their parents may not approve, watch others commit acts that may seem against religion, and smack each other around in unnecessarily violent ways. The real world out from under the protective shield of parents can be ugly, nasty, and downright terrible in certain areas. Yet, despite the negative perspective some might have of that part of the world, it does not mean that it is all bad. Just because someone says “damn” in the hallway, they are not necessarily anti-religious. Just because they spend more time playing video games than doing homework, it does not mean that they are destined to be extremely violent. There are many discussions to be had, but readers cannot have them unless they are able to read the book.

How can we use it?

As I mentioned before, the book includes several discussions. It of course, discusses censorship, a topic that has been around since there were stories. Throughout centuries, people have decided whether or not to allow others to read, hear, watch, or experience stories due to their own opinions and prejudices that can be completely understandable and validated. However, censorship, as appropriate as it may be in certain situations, may not always be appropriate just because someone does not appreciate a work the way that it may have been intended. For example, Fahrenheit 451 is a work of fiction often shelved in the adult section of a library. Putting this book in an elementary school would be inappropriate, and the school librarians are censoring it by choosing not to put it on the shelf. That kind of censoring is absolutely appropriate since a young second grader may happen upon the book and read something they do not understand and are not ready to consider because of their lack of preparedness. On the other side, would taking the book off a high school shelf be appropriate just because the book is considered a work of adult fiction? That begins the new conversation of what censorship is appropriate and justified in certain settings, and the book discusses that with the readers. Is it right to censor every book that has ever been written because the government finds them a threat to their reign? Is it right to decide what to allow people to read due to the beliefs and faith about which the books’ contents talk? Is it right to deny something like religion to a group of people for any reason?

As big a topic as censorship is when it comes to Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury also discusses the issue of television and new technology and how it could not only overtake old technology like books but also consume lives. Entire walls are television screens where characters on shows are considered families. They burn books and replace them with brainwashing machines so that no one can have their own ideas or thoughts. The discussion is clear, throughout the entire book, but often overlooked because of the censorship. This book is perfect for getting young adults to start thinking about these real-life issues and forming their own opinions for which the book advocates anyway.

Booktalk Ideas

Considering the story, is Beatty an antagonist or does something else take that role? Beatty is obviously much of Montag’s opposition, but is he the antagonist to Montag’s protagonist?

Mildred spends all of her time in the parlor talking about her “family” on the television screens. She only wants to spend time there instead of spending any with her physical family. What is the significance of the television taking over for her real life?

What else can I read?

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

The Giver by Lois Lowry

1984 by George Orwell

Awards and Lists

Prometheus Hall of Fame Award 1984

Retro Hugo Award for Best Novel 2004

American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature

Professional Reviews

Daniel D’addario (2018), Time - http://web.b.ebscohost.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=d422f36d-38be-412e-89c6-9ee18b58f6c8%40sessionmgr102&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=129532402&db=a9h

Rodney A. Smolla (2009), Michigan Law Review - http://web.b.ebscohost.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/ehost/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=521731b0-bc4b-49a3-af63-1ce30a40a02b%40pdc-v-sessmgr02&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=502090656&db=brd

[valeriewedding9-blog]

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[creamysouls]

It’s been a while

since the last time I’m writing on this. Actually, I have written this yesterday but something went wrong on tumblr so my post couldn’t posted. I’m mad of course I had spent more than an hour to write that. But I will try to write again.

So many things happened in these past few weeks. I had a boyfriend and such but it only lasted for 3 weeks lol. Let’s start from this past 3 days.

Two days before.

As usual I was in my room and I wanted to eat with someone, anybody honestly. So I started to text my friends or who I thought could be my company. But no one could, of course I understand this because they have a life. Before that I already felt lonesome and all and I texted my best friends to come here to visit me because I have no one. Of course once again, they couldn’t. Then after no one would want to eat with me, I called my best friend. At first she didn’t pick up but when I called again, she did. She told me she just had finished work and I tried as much as I can to not crying because she’s already tired. But when she said what happened, I burst into tears. I begged her to come here to visit me. I told her that I had no one. I have no one. And I was crying and I couldn’t remember the last time I cried that hard. Then she told me she couldn’t. As always I truly understand this but somehow I still asked it anyway. The thing is, this feeling, I started to feel when I’m in Uni. My (ex)boyfriend once told me that he’s couldn’t be happy. Like really-happy happy. His happy more like usual-happy happy. And I asked why and he said he didn’t know he just lacks of emotion and it started since he was a child. Little did he know, I feel it too. I know how it feels to be usual-happy which doesn’t last long and somehow it just not recorded in “happy memories” memory in my brain. But he doesn’t know that. I’m the type of people who gets uncomfortable if someone knows me well or too well. My seven-years-bestfriend know this. So, he tends to ask me twice if I rejected anything that uncover my personality. So, yeah. I felt this too for a long time. I don’t remember the last time I feel really-truly-happy. I think when I was in high school. Before I graduated, before I started my life in Uni. Then my life is changed and I just feel this usual-happy afterwards. One day, my (ex)boyfriend read this book, The Catcher in the Rye, and he told me, actually he snapgrammed the book and said 10/10 relate. After he had finished it, I asked him if the main character really relates to him then he said yes. After that, I borrowed the book and started to read myself. That book is very unique. It made me laugh from the first 10 pages. The main character, Holden Caulfield, is something. Honestly, Holden is like the boy version of me despite I’m more emotional and I still believe in God. I can relate myself to him. How I always doing something depend on my mood and just like he said ““I’m not in the mood right now,” I said. I wasn’t, either. You have to be in the mood for those things.”. How I hate boring guys, “I don't understand boring guys. I really don't.”.  How my closest friends always told me to grow up and whenever I try to act mature, they never notice. Just like Holden thought “I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it. People never notice anything.”. I’m the kind of person who I don’t know how to explain it but I am both care or not give a damn at all. At some point, I don’t care if someone hates me or someone wears something that unpleasant my eyes and all and once my classmate told me that I am ignorant person just because I don’t know who he or she that she talked about, she said that she is very popular in our faculty but I don’t care so. I don’t care if someone so beautiful that everybody knows them as long as they don’t disturb my life and they don’t looking for trouble with me, I will not give any single thought about them. And I think if I don’t know them, they are not that popular, that’s all. At the other point, I care with some people, especially my best friends and my family. I even care what those bitch*s in my class talk about me. The rumors. Somehow when I listened to what they said about me, just for the sake of my curiosity, and I would over-thinking it until I’m full of negative vibes. My seven-years-best-friend once told me that I have this big curiosity and it will jeopardize me. And I just responded it with laugh. I also care with this world. I hate people who act any kind of violence. I hate people who don’t care about our world we live in. Who spit their saliva everywhere on the road. So fuck*ing disgusting. Who throw their garbage everywhere. I hate that people. I’m willing to spend hundreds of rupiahs a month just to buy The Bo*dy Shop products for my skin care because I am against animal testing. I think my (ex)boyfriend when we were together, he just saw this side of I am instead the other one so that’s why when we broke up he said to me that we’re too different. And I responded with laugh again. I was fcking laughing instead of crying I don’t know why I think because I had expected it coming, that finally he’s tired of me and all and finally ended our relationship. I always think about death. People said that if we’re dead, we still can see our funeral, we can see people the ones who crying for us and the one who don’t. And I always think about it. I guess just few people would come to my funeral because I’m not kind person, I’m not a lovely person whom everyone loves. I’m not like that. I’m annoying and sensitive and all. I’m not even funny person. But somehow, I’m still wondering if people loved me and they would cry in my funeral and pray for me. I also like to fantasize about someone’s reaction if something had happened to me. If one day I got an accident and people would cry for me and they regretted their mistakes and what they had done to me. I know I’m crazy. When I read this alike scene, when Holden always fantasizes about how he pretending he had a bullet and he would call Jane and she would bandage his wound, I don’t know if someone did that too. Somehow it makes us feel that we’re important and loved in this fantasy mind which opposite to the reality. How Holden doesn’t like a gift from his mother because it is not what he wants. I also relate to this part. So for my last birthday, two of my best friends gave me a sketch of my and their faces in a framed. The thing is, I hate looking at my own face. I don’t know why I just do. And another thing is I don’t know if my face is that ugly or the one who made it didn’t know how to sketch someone’s face. But at the same time, I was feeling happy because finally someone gave me a present for my birthday. I know what I said it shows the ungrateful attitude but I don’t care though because this is what I truly feel. I would be just like Holden feels “but it made me sad anyway. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”. Last weekend, I went to Jakarta to have a little escape from this city and its people. Two weeks before, in the midnight, I feel depressed and lonely and just wanted to get out from here and then I texted my mom that I wanted to go to Jakarta to visit my sister and I begged her to allow me. I was kinda miss her though, my sister. Then the next morning, I bought a ticket immediately after she called me that she allowed me to go there. Just like Holden thought the night he left Pencey “I just didn't want to hang around any more. It made me too sad and lonesome. […] Besides, I sort of needed a little vacation. My nerves were shot. They really were.”. I always want to do what he did. How many times that I have this urge to get out from here is countless. I really want to go somewhere far from here without saying to anyone and only said “good bye ya morons!” to these people. But I’m not that brave. I’m still thinking what my parents would think about it and how they would be disappointed on me and they would blame me and said how could I give up my education and scholarship and what do you want to be in the future and all. It’s so frustrating the more I think about it. So, one day, the day we broke up, my (ex)boyfriend and I, I asked him which Catcher in the Rye’s character am I to him and he said I am Ackley. The disgusting and pimply Ackley. Honestly I’m thinking the same of him, without the disgusting side of course. He was always there, you know. If you wanted to eat together with someone or just felt lonely, or just like Holden thought to himself “Boy, did I feel rotten. I felt so damn lonesome.” No matter how he always judges Ackley, he still reaches out for him. Because Ackley, he just always there. Holden hates people, he hates how the society turned out to be, but at the same time he feels lonely. This is how I feel towards him. He then asked me if I ever thought that I am Phoebe to him and I said no. I have some kind of feeling that I want to be just like her, you know. But I am Holden too. That’s why this thing is not working I guess. I hope we both find our Phoebe. One or several times,he made me feel like he was my own Phoebe. The way he always there. The way, I hate people, I really do, but I don’t hate him, the way he was not like the other people. The way he concerned about me. How he made me feel really-truly-happy happy. It made me sad of writing this. A few days after we broke up, I didn’t realize that I lost something until one day I feel lonely and when I reached out for him, he wasn’t there anymore. It still makes me depressed until now. No, not 100% because of him, how silly is that sound. It’s just, I feel this feeling, depressed and lonesome and sad for a really long time and I started really feeling this when I graduated and first time I came to Uni. Just like Hannah Baker said “I sat. And I thought. And the more I thought, connecting the events in my life, the more my heart collapsed.”. And now I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read, I’m just like Esther Greenwood after she came back from New York. I tried to finish The Bell Jar book but I can’t and it’s been more than a week and the book only has 244 pages. He once said that he is always tired after I asked him if he was tired or not and I asked him why. I do too, you know, I always ask him “why?” even though I know perfectly well but I wanted to hear what he would say. And he said it is just what he regularly feels. I’m tired because I always feel tired and sad and I’m looking for a day when I truly happy and not tired anymore but it doesn’t come. It just, I don’t know, it feels like I’m paying for my sins which I don’t remember. Maybe. or maybe not. Maybe yeah this is how my life goes. I don’t know though.

Yesterday.

Yesterday, all I was doing was staying at my room and eating and watching Game of Thrones season 3. Then my mom called me and I asked her if I could go back to my hometown next month at the first week for ten days and she said yes I could but she still needed to ask my father first. At midnight I started to write a post of what happened and my thoughts on the day before. I also thought about going to psychologist the next day to figure out what happened to me and what’s wrong with me am I really depressed or not but I don’t know if I could tell a stranger the story of my life and I didn’t want to wasting my time to just sit in silence in front of him/her. Also I was going to buy a box of blades but it was raining outside so.. tomorrow I guess.

Today.

This morning I wake up at 9.45 am. Not really wake up though. I was trying to sleep at 3 am but I couldn’t. I don’t know but this can’t-sleep-problem has happened to me for few weeks. Then I did my homework, eating some crackers, and went to Uni at 12.30 pm. After quiz, I went to the toilet. At first I thought I just wanted to piss but suddenly I felt like I didn’t want to go to class and depressed and started calling 500454 but it told me that it was wrong number and turned out the hotline doesn’t work anymore (smh indone*ia) so I tried to call my mom and she didn’t pick up until one of my classmates entered and at first I didn’t want to cry then she asked me why are you okay then my tears came out. I told her I wanted to kill myself. Then she suggested me to go to a psychologist and told them what happened because she wasn’t an expert and she couldn’t help. After class, I went to a shopping market to buy a box of razors which only cost 3 thousand rupiahs and then I went to my room.

Tonight.

I have made a start. At first, I’m staring at the box for a few minutes then start laughing because I don’t know what to do and how to do it and I don’t have any courage to slash my wrist with it and then I’m crying. Then I tried to call my best friends, just want to hear what they would say, searching for any one who still cares for me. First, I tried to call Sonya. She didn’t pick up because she’s still in Uni I guess. Then, I called Noora and she picked up. I asked her where she is and she turned to ask me am I crying then I said I don’t know how to use this blade and I listened the zombie voice came out from within then she started to tell me why and to stop and I burst into tears I told her why the hell no one would come over here and I begged her to visit me because I have no one, I repeat this sentence over and over and she finally asked me to calm down and I hang up the phone and she started to text and call me again but I don’t have energy to pick up so I just staring at it until my mom calls me. I don’t know why my mom always knows when I’m sad and all and she would call me out of nowhere just to ask if I have eaten or not. After I tried as much as I can to use my regular voice, she hang up. And I started looking at the blades again and I pick one and tried to use it. I feel nothing. And I try again and again until I see the redness flower blooming from my wrist and I just watching it for few seconds before rubbing it with tissue. Then I’m feeling exhausted and sleep and I wake up and eat and watch Game of Thrones again and I write this. Until now. 03.14 am in the morning.