#Going through my folder I carry around full of things I wrote or draw in the go and found this poem from a few months ago

[bijoumikhawal]

Sir Jay

I found you this morning beneath my work window

On your back, white shirt showing

During the first hour, full of traffic

My eyes turned to the frailty of your breast often

The crater in your down

My religion confers uncleanness to the dead

Yet more- it is contagious

But I am here to take care of you

So I will make peace with it

Once quiet, I move you away from the roadside

Laying you where the tall pondside grass begins

Away from the landscaper's scorn

Worms and beetles will rise from the firmament to greet you

You will become firmament

Blue transmutes to brown

Cars continue to roll on

[kisaraslover]

DO U HAVE ANY BLUESHIPPING FIC REC?????PLEASENIMSTARVINGKSKSKKS

anon kskkasak ITS FINE ILL SAVE YOU OK? here goes:

Scenes from a Kaiba Marriage and Temptation by my blueshipping queen @kisara-kaiba as the opening. the peak of modern life blueshipping fluff, very lovesick, when im reading them its heart full, head empty. youre gonna be lucky to start them now cuz ill be rereading and drawing scenes from them this week👀. itll be like premium fanfic reading.

Enjambment -> this fic might be the single best written blueshipping fic by the virtue of MIRRORING their encounter in ancient Egypt beat by beat, including BOTH of their character arcs and the netflix show vibe of suspense and the sharp, cold and bleak setting is chefs kiss. changed my brain chemistry. still one of my favorite portrayals of Kisara.

Maiden with Eyes of Blue -> Sometimes time needs to slow down and a single scene should be a character study/ hashing out of things you needed acknowledged by canon, the situation is ESPECIALLY dire for Seto Kaiba as ive made my feelings on his writing known many times. This is it. Kisara isnt reincarnated in this one though, but her love for him can be felt in the air. Ngl you could just incorporate this into post canon and it would be fine. canon compliant+ canon enriching.

Shades of Water, Ice, and Sky -> I'm skimming through each fic to see what they were about and i just gotta say: why so heart-wrenching if so short?? theyre in love your honor.

Their Promise: Book I -> ok gonna be honest w you i havent finished this one and the main reason is that i cant go past the SPECTACULAR first chapter. ive started and failed to draw it in its entirety. i open it, i chew on the first chapter like a rabid dog, i close it more often than not. the second reason is it has a lot more angst and heartbreak than most blueship fics do and im weak to that sort of thing. still, if we follow their ancient egypt encounter beat by beat, which is a fantastic way of following and enriching the canon, their first meeting needs to be as kids with him saving her from a cage. chefs kiss.

who are you? -> JUST the right amount of Seto Kaiba immediate fixation obsession on Kisara (which means insanely obsessed)

You Will Crave Your Ancient Roots -> this is so good and so heartbreaking man. Seto and Atem are shot back into ancient Egypt and Seto is only able to slightly alter the events around Kisara. hes fated to fall for that woman every single time and *starts sobbing*

Ancient Rules -> all i gotta say is this Seto Kaiba gives me brainworms. hes chuck full of Passion and Cockiness and Insanity. blueshippers sometimes take out his insanity. he is very unsettling here i love it. Kisara is truly at his mercy..

never forget your first dream -> fem!Set and Kisara in ancient Egypt, this story twists more than just Seto's gender. im a yuri seto truther so its great to have written proof of it. jokes aside, very well characterized Set and Kisara, rich writing.

One in Forty -> pretty short but this one fundamentally changed how i viewed Kisara's canon influence over BEWD cards and her constant and unbendable favor around Seto. canon compliant + canon enriching.

ok so these are the cream of the crop for ME personally, might have forgotten some in my other folders, i might have missed reading some, its probably not all encompassing. but frankly ive liked and saved fics for a single resounding line, single funny joke, one interesting implication about the story or the characters the author wrote up so in my heart theyre all worth checking out, always. fanfic writers are carrying this ship on their backs and theyre all 9 ft tall and im just walking around them, clearing the path, giving them a sip of water and snacks etc. so THANK YOU BLUESHIPPING AUTHORS I LOVE YOUUUUUU

[mrs-gucci]

Casting Couch {Charlie Barber x Reader}

author’s notes: hello, hello! I was driving home from work the other day and this idea just suddenly took over my entire thought process. so, naturally, I went ahead and wrote it up :)

warnings (what you see here is what you’ll get!): smut. the enemy of my enemy is my ally (with benefits). p in v sex. protected sex. rough oral sex. cum- swallowing.

(possible) tw’s: semi-public sex.

word count: 3.2k

charlie’s taglist peeps! {charlie currently doesn’t have any taglist peeps} my general taglist peeps! @frank-and-honey @shygirl268 @icarusinthesea​  @gildedstarlight​ @mrs-zimmerman @soldmysoulagain @roseepossee @pascalisfairyy​ @I-can’t-draw-faces @ahsoka1​ @babbushka​ @safarigirlsp​ (if you’d like to be added to or removed from any of my taglists, the link to the google form is HERE or on the top of my masterlist)

Two Years Ago.

“Y/N...she fucking did it again.” Nicole says as she barges through the door of hers and Charlie’s shared brownstone. “She got the fucking TV gig.”

Charlie’s eyebrows furrow a bit before looking up at his wife with an empathetic expression, setting the notebook and pen he’d been using down on the coffee table.

“Bummer. I really thought you had it in the bag.” He says, elbows on his thighs as he leans forward a bit, folding his hands. “There will be other roles; I wouldn’t worry too much. You win some, you lose some; that’s how it goes in this industry. You’ve taken plenty of roles from her.”

She sighs, nodding. “Yeah, I know, but this one I was excited about. And I really thought I had it, too. It just stung a little extra, you know?”

Her husband nods, patting the seat next to him on the couch. “C’mere, sit with me. We’ll have a glass of wine.”

Nicole gives somewhat of a dreadful grimace, a clear sign she really wasn’t interested. Charlie’s been noticing this for the past few months, her disinterest in being with him as much as she usually was, but he figured it was just her being tired. She’s been doing a lot of odd jobs to make some ends meet lately, so it’s probably a result of that.

“Are you sure?” He asks, a twang of longing sadness in his voice.

She nods. “Yeah, I’m just gonna go lay down for a bit.”

Charlie just nods, picking back up his notebook and pen, continuing to review and add to his notes from the day. 

“Let me know if you need anything.” He calls after her. “I love you.”

She only offers him a small smile over her shoulder in return before emerging into their bedroom, closing the door immediately behind her. 

Present Day.

It feels strange, holding auditions for a female lead. He hasn’t had to do so in almost a decade;  just yet another reminder of how much of his life has changed just in the past year.

The divorce had been painful, stressful, and he was honestly more relieved than anything when it finally came to a close, despite it not really turning out the way he’d hoped for in terms of custody over Henry. 

Luckily, he’s dove deeper into his one true love, directing, as a way to cope with the loss of everything he’d worked so hard to build for himself; the marriage, the 'American dream’ family and home he wished he’d had growing up.

Now, after six months of weekly therapy appointments and keeping himself busy with work, he’s feeling more like the old Charlie he was back before everything went to shit. Actually, he’s feeling like an even better version of that Charlie, the best version of himself there’s been in a while, perhaps even before he met and married Nicole.

The first audition comes onstage and Charlie can’t decide what’s worse, her off-pitch singing or her monotonous speaking voice. 

God, this was going to be a long fucking day.

-

You’d heard through the grapevine that the famed Broadway director had moved here to LA, and that he’d divorced his witch of a wife, Nicole. 

Nicole Barber had been your biggest rival ever since you swiped that first movie role away from her. She hates you, and you don’t particularly like her, either, thus your rivalry began. And it was pretty heated, too; the two of you were always trying to one-up each other.

It really was a back-and-forth battle, her swiping roles from you, you returning the favor; it was a game, to put it simply. Although lately, you’ve been getting more roles than she has, not that you’re complaining, and there’s a part of you that hopes she quits the business for good.

Word got around that Charlie is heading his first LA Broadway production and what better way to hit Nicole close to home than to show up at her ex-husband’s auditions? Even better, what if you got the female lead in her ex-husband’s production? Oh god, that would be fantastic, not only for the rivalry but also for your career.

You’ve been looking to branch out into more theater roles, and this is as good an opportunity as to dip your toe in the theater world water. Plus, you’re not necessarily complaining about having the chance to look at and work with Charlie Barber every day...

So you prepared your piece of dialogue and a section of one of the choice songs, heading over to the theater fifteen minutes before your set audition time. Your knee bounces as you sit in the waiting area, eyes running over your script and lyrics sheet one final time, solidifying it all in your memory.

Your name is called a few minutes later and you head out onto the stage, handing over your headshot and qualifications resume. The agent hands over your profile to the handsome director, but he doesn’t even really look at it, already knowing exactly who you are. A small smirk grazes his lips as he flips to a new page of his notebook, clicking the top of his pen.

“Whenever you’re ready, Miss Y/N.”

After you’re finished, Charlie scribbles one final thing in his notebook before looking up at you. His eyes trail over your figure for a moment, another smirk tugging at the corners of his lips.

“Would you be comfortable coming back for a more intimate audition later this week? Maybe, Friday at four? I would like to get to know you better, see if you meet all of my... qualifications.”

The look in his eye tells you all you need to know about the true motivations behind his question. You nod, biting your lip.

“It’d be my absolute pleasure, Mr. Barber.” You purr.

He shifts in his seat suddenly and quickly crosses one leg over the other before opening up your folder, handing the top sheet to his assistant.

“Diane, go ahead and have Miss Y/N put down all of her contact information.” His gaze never leave you as he speaks to the timid-seeming young woman. “Make sure she gives her personal cell number.”

You pull a pen from your bag on the stage, clicking it open before Diane hands you the paper. As you write every means of contact you can think of, starting with your cell number, you playfully bite the end of the pen and tap it against your bottom lip, something that certainly keeps the already attentive director’s full attention.

“Thank you so much for this opportunity, Mr. Barber.” Your tone is innocent-sounding, but your gaze is anything but. It sends a chill down Charlie’s spine. “I promise I won’t disappoint.”

“Oh, I’m sure you won’t.” A small tug at one corner of his lip accompanies his response. “See you soon, Miss Y/N.”

You offer him a nod.

“Looking forward to it.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In preparation for your upcoming...meeting with Charlie, you take a quick trip to the nearest intimates store, picking up a pretty little lace bra and panty set. Your lingerie wardrobe is long overdue for a bit of sprucing up, anyway.

When the time comes, you slip the fresh lace garments on before putting on your planned outfit, a cute-but-subtly-sexy low cut romper. You put on a light face of makeup, purely for professionalism’s sake, then head out with a small bag which contains various personal items as well as your script and composition page.

He’s not in his backstage office when you arrive, but he comes in a couple minutes later, a strong stench of cigarette smoke trailing behind him as he walks by your chair.

“I apologize for the delay. You weren’t waiting long, were you?”

You shake your head as he takes a seat behind the ratty oak desk, shifting a few small stacks of papers around on the heavily scratched surface.

“No, no I wasn’t waiting long.”

He nods, then folds his hands atop the desk, eyes flickering up to meet yours. For a moment, his eyes dart down to where your cleavage creeps out of your low-cut top.

“You’ve got the part.” Charlie says with a small smile. “You’re by far the best and most qualified audition we had yesterday, and I like the way you carry yourself. You’re exactly the type of person I like working with. Part’s yours if you want it.”

You’re overcome with joy, a wide smile spreading itself across your lips. “I’d love to be a part of this production, Mr. Barber. I’m really excited to get to work with you and the rest of the crew.”

“That’s great, I’m glad to hear it.” He nods, smile widening when as he processes your acceptance. His delighted expression falls after a few moments, replaced by one much more salacious.

“Now that we’ve gotten that part out of the way...I think you know why I called a meeting of such, uh, privacy.”

You smirk softly, shifting around in your seat slightly. “I believe I do.”

His feet plant on the ground as he pushes the rolling office chair out from under the desk, standing up and walking around the desk to tower over you. 

“Before anything happens, though, I want you to know that whether or not you do this with me will not affect my casting decision. Even if you decline, you still have the part.”

You nod before standing, quickly and swiftly, stepping forward to press yourself flush against him.

“Charlie?”

“Yeah?”

Your hands rest on his chest, neck craning slightly to look up at him. “Just kiss me, will you?”

He laughs, massive hand moving to cradle the back of your head before he bends down and connects your lips in a passionate kiss. There’s nothing tender or gentle about this embrace, it’s all tongue and teeth, raw lust coursing between your two bodies.

“Couch.” His voice is soft but husky.

“Unzip me first?” You ask, turning around so he can unzip you. He does, then his hands slide down to your hips and pushes you towards the leather couch tucked in the corner of his office.

The material squeaks when you’re laid down on top of it, head resting comfortably on the cushy fabric accent pillow as he climbs on top of you. He presses his hips forward while he tucks his face into the crook of your neck and plants kisses on the skin there.

Your eyes widen as his impressive bulge rubs up against your inner thigh and you quickly wonder how in the world you’ll be able to take him. His crooked teeth scrape over the taut muscles in your neck while his hands pull the backs of your romper down over your shoulders.

His hands grab and grope your breasts beneath where they rest in your nice bra, one you wore just for him, and your back arches slightly up off the cushions with a soft sigh. 

A small smile crosses his expression, teeth sinking gently into your neck. “I like the little noises you make for me, Y/N.”

“Yeah?” You smirk, running your hands through his hair. “Then I bet you’ll like my moans, too. If you think you can draw them out of me, that is.”

He laughs softly, sucking and licking at at the place his teeth have just abused. “Is that a challenge?”

“Well, it’s more like an invitation to prove yourself, but ‘challenge’ is also a good word for it.”

Charlie pulls away with a smirk, shaking his head as he sits back on his haunches and begins to unbuckle his belt.

“Brat.”

Once he’s undone his pants and pulled them down enough to expose himself to you, he leans down once more and pulls your romper the rest of the way off, leaving you completely bare, minus your undergarments. His eyes roam your figure for a moment before he dips a hand beneath the patch of black fabric nestled between your thighs.

Your breath hitches as his fingertips swipe over your erect clit, giving it a few little circles before yanking the panties off your hips and down your ankles, tossing them down alongside your previously-discarded romper.

His eyes widen in realization, cheeks flushing pink.

“Do you have any, um, protection?”

You smirk, nodding as you sit up and pat his chest. “Indeed, I do.”

He crawls off of you and you walk over to your purse, grabbing a condom from the mini-stash you keep in your wallet, the one you replenished just minutes before you left the house this afternoon. He takes it from you and pinches the tip, rolling it down his shaft. For a moment, you’re worried that it isn’t going to fit, but he rolls it on with little issue.

His hips press forward, then, entering you slowly but steadily with a soft grunt. You whine as your insides stretch out around him, hands reaching up to tangle in his hair.  “S-Shit.”

“You’re really fucking tight, jesus.” He growls between gritted teeth, jaw screwed shut as his hips begin to move. “I haven’t fffucked anyone in a while, Y/N, so I can’t guarantee that I’ll last very long.”

You nod, softly. “It’s alright, Charlie; it’s been a little while for muh--me, too.”

Your eyes flutter shut and your face begins to scrunch up with each time his fat cockhead brushes up against your cervix. His pace increases after a minute or so, a consistent slap-slap-slap noise now echoing off the drywall with each snap of his hips. 

“You’ve got a nice little pussy, you know that? Always knew you would be, too, knew you’d be a good little cccocksleeve.”

You moan shakily as he adjusts his position, towering over you and pinning your wrists above your head with one of his large hands. Your body begins to bounce, tits, thighs and tummy jiggling each time he thrusts in. 

He’s starting to sweat, a few dark hairs sticking to his dimly-glowing forehead, more and more accumulating there as his hair rocks back and forth in time with the rhythm of his hips.

“Touch yourself, now, rrrub your little clit.” His voice is getting shaky as he draws nearer to climax.

Nodding, your hand slides down between your joined bodies until your fingertips settle onto the small bundle of nerves. The hand that’s still weaved in Charlie’s locks clenches and he lets out a sudden deep growl, hips stuttering for a moment.

“Ooooh, Charlie.” You moan, hips lifting and gyrating against both his cock and your fingers.

“God, fffuck I love this cunt.” A vulgar squelching sound knits itself within the quilt of your salacious symphony. “Wrapped around my cock like a vice, gonna pull the fucking cum right out of it. Swear you get tighter each time I push back in...christ, I’m not gonna last.”

Your fingers circle your clit faster, setting a desperate pace, one that almost matches his quick and sloppy thrusts. You’re close now, too, and it doesn’t take much longer for your orgasm to hit.

You cream around him with a long moan and a string of various other noises, with a few profanities thrown in as well. The product of your release coats his shaft in a pearlescent sheen, dripping down his ball-sack soon enough. 

The sensations your climax creates around Charlie forces him to pull away almost immediately after, quickly yanking the condom off and onto his office floor, squeezing the base of his flaming red length. 

His hand seizes your jaw tightly, thumb pressing down on your tongue, prying your mouth open. “I’m gonna fuck your mouth and shove my cum down your throat, and you’re gonna take it all, isn’t that right?”

You’re nodding instantly, slacking your jaw to open even further in preparation for his upcoming intrusion. He smirks.

“Good. Now, on your knees.”

He sits down where you once laid, lazily pumping his throbbing length as you get into position between his spread legs. He pulls your hair up into a makeshift ponytail with his hand, then lines you up with his cock and eases your mouth down onto him.

“Thaaaaaat’s it, oh, gooooood girl.”

You start gagging about three quarters of the way down his shaft, but he still keeps pushing until you’ve got the whole thing in your mouth. Your jaw’s already getting sore as he begins thrusting upwards, fucking your mouth. 

Tears swell in your eyes and begin to spill down your cheeks the more he goes, mascara surely ruined and running down your face. The sight only arouses him further, a low groan rumbling through his puffed chest.

He’s trying so hard to keep himself together, to stave off his orgasm for as long as he can manage, but soon he finds it next to impossible to hold back. His bottom lip quivers ever so slightly as his length begins to twitch, balls drawing up.

“Fuck, I’m gonna--”

You taste and feel the salty ropes shooting down your throat before he can even finish his warning.

“Ah, fffuuuuck.” His head falls back against the couch cushions, hips bucking gently as each bit of release is spilled into your mouth. His grip on your head relaxes after he’s finished, cock softening while he catches his breath and re-grounds himself in reality.

Your chest heaves as full airflow returns to your lungs, knees and jaw aching a bit sore from their exertion. You grab your underwear from where they lay discarded on top of your romper, putting them back on before standing up on somewhat shaky legs. 

Charlie also redresses, standing and straightening himself out as you do the same. 

“Mind zipping me back up?” You ask, turning around again. 

He pulls the zipper up your back until it’s at the end of its tracks, then steps up behind you, placing a soft kiss to your shoulder blade.

“Thank you.”

A soft smile grazes your lips. “No ‘thanks’ needed; the sweet taste of revenge and spite is payment enough.”

He laughs quietly.

“Well, I’ll certainly be available, should you ever need a little replenishing of those feelings.”

“Mr. Barber, you wouldn’t be saying that because you’d like to see me naked again, now would you?” Your eyebrows raise and you look over your shoulder, a playful smile on your face.

He laughs again, blushing a bit. “Uh, yeah, sure, I'd like that a lot. But I’d also like to see you, um...not naked, fully clothed, maybe at a restaurant in the city for dinner sometime? I totally get it if you’re not interested, it’s not a big deal if you don’t want to...”

Holy shit, he’s asking you out on a date. Well, he’s trying to, at least.

You laugh, cheeks warming at his proposition.

“Sure thing. I just accepted this new job, though, so I’ll have to get back to you about my availability...”

Charlie smiles, shoving his hands down in his khaki pockets. “I’m sure your new boss would be more than willing to accommodate. He’s a pretty cool guy, or so I’ve heard. Handsome, too.”

“Oh yeah? Sounds like you have a reliable informant.” You turn around as you laugh softly, grabbing your bag off the chair before stepping up in front of him. Your lips plant a quick peck on his, hands resting on his broad chest. “See you soon.”

He nods, biting his lip to hold back his big, goofy smile.

“Can’t wait.”

[kashimos-hajime]

sing for the lion and lamb

Summary: “This was what she had signed up for - a good man and minimal pleasure.”

WARNINGS: spoilers as we get through it, swearing, backstory, struggles, this is one of the happiest chapters Pairing: Dectetive Loki x Reader Word Count: 3.7k

A/N: i’m a mess over prisoners and i wrote this super mess series called 1996. this is the first chapter. this is finished so i’ll be posting the other parts later but its movie+extra scenes bc theres so much stuff to get through and also reader and loki need to get through shit

... | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05

To say you love Loki would be a stretch. Two humans, born and raised in Pennsylvania who just happened to have known each other since the care system should have a natural tendency to gravitate towards each other. The two of you found each other again, so you are bound to have some sort of connection. But whilst you have a certain fondness for the man, a certain bond you are quite sure was deeper than blood, you wouldn’t name it love.

No, love is for those who didn’t know better. 

Love is not for the shadows of your eyes or the darkness in his soul. Love is not for men and women like you. 

“Detective.” 

Your eyes raise from the police report of the missing girls before you, blinking away the black boxes and messy scribbles as the man tilts his head at you. “You need something?”

The corner of his mouth twitch into something almost like a smile but your eyes only soak in the pale half-moons under his eyes. He’s sleeping again. Good. He needs all he could get before the case on the missing kids gets some steam. Rolling out your neck, you slide the report into a manila folder and stand.

“Wanted to know if you wanted to head home for a minute or two.” There comes his wide smile, one that completely morphs his face. It tugs at his cheeks, wrinkles his eyes, makes him look younger than he is. Whenever he smiles as he does now, it makes you forget about the paleness in his cheeks, the taste of coffee on his tongue, the rough stubble along his jaw. It makes him look young and handsome and like the street kid you’d known.

He knows you like that smile. Like looking at him. In bed, flushed and moaning, or otherwise. He knows it will convince you and you roll your eyes because this is not going to be a rare occasion where it’ll fail.

“Are you trying to sweet-talk me?” You stretch your arms high above your head, ignoring the way his smile drops off his face as you turn off the burning lamp on your desk. Only the pale lights of the office remains, washing the both of you in ugly pale light. 

“If you have room for dinner, maybe I will.” 

You grab your long coat, popping the collar around your cheeks and he pushes off the wall of your cubicle, walking around and stuffing his hands in his pockets. You sling your bag onto your shoulder and pull hair from underneath your collar.

“No plans for Thanksgiving?” you ask, knowing the answer. It’s only polite to ask. Detective Loki always has a pleasant way of surprising you outside the bedroom.

“None without you, I s’pose.” 

“And we’ve spent the day at work.” You don’t sound particularly surprised and the detective merely shrugs. “Come on, I know a place.”

He cocks his head to the door. It isn’t only the two of you in the station at this time of night but your caffeine-lacking brain rationalizes that they wouldn’t care and you lean up to kiss his jaw. He turns at the last moment and presses a hard kiss against your mouth, teeth snagging on your lips and you sigh into his mouth, tasting coffee and gum and the faint scent of his aftershave. Hands finding his jaw, your fingers scratch at his cheek, trail down his neck and take fistfuls of his jacket.

Your heart thrums in your throat, beats at your stomach like a drum and all you want to do is peel off the clothes burning your body, feeding the fire in your core as he noses your chin, granting himself access to your neck.

“Hey,” you whisper, hands carding through his hair. You aren’t quite sure if you want to push him away or pull him closer as he raises his head from where he’d been sucking a wet mark along the cord of your throat. “I’m hungry.”

“I know.” He ducks again to gently nip at the mark and you smack him lightly, pushing him away.

“You know I’m actually fucking hungry,” you mutter and he growls against your lips, kissing your mouth bruisingly and too, too quickly before he rips himself away. You hadn’t even realized he’d been sucking the life out of you while his hands had casually been in his pockets but he shrugs, the jacket shifting along his shoulders.

Cocky bastard. 

“Come on. Sooner we get dinner, sooner I get you,” he whispers against your ear and you chuckle into his mouth as he snags another kiss.

.

“Do you know what your, uh, Chinese zodiac sign is?”

You wipe at your mouth with a napkin, frowning when your lipstick smears over white. The detective looks up from where he was reading the meaning of each on the paper place mat, offering a smile. This restaurant is one of your favourites, having been the restaurant you went to after your… well, you wouldn’t call it a first date. You went here for a meal once, alone, ‘cause you were hungry after a night with the man sitting across from you. 

After-fucking meal. That’s the phrase. Apt, and conventional, and...

Point is, you like it here and you want him to like it.

He sips on his white mug, taking in the tea as you push around your fried rice. He’s working on some noodles as you drag a finger over the drawings of the Chinese zodiac on the paper.

“No. Do you?”

“Rat.” You watch as he turned to read, finger trailing until he finds the animal at the top of the list. 

“Intelligent, charming, quick-witted. Hm.” He arches an eyebrow and you roll your eyes as the waitress came with the check. It’s only the two of you in this small establishment and you look around, nothing the absence of fortune cookies in the red metallic bowl near the register.

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Thanks.” He raises his hand to gesture in a vague shape and you squint as the waitress poured your mug full of tea. “Hey, you have any of those, um, fortune cookie things?”

“My boss told me cops don’t like fortune cookies.”

“Well, it’s Thanksgiving,” you murmur and the waitress laughs under her breath. “What’s your Zodiac sign?”

“Monkey.”

You toss a glance expectantly at the man sitting across from you and he drops the bill he was reading, looking down at the paper.

“Very intelligent. You have an ability to influence people.” You hum thoughtfully at his answer as he continues, “Maybe you could influence your boss to lower the check a little bit?”

You snort quietly, hiding your laugh as you pull out your wallet. Picking up the slip of paper, you read the the total and begin to lay out bills to pay as the waitress shakes her head.

“Mr. Li is a rooster, Detective,” you comment, extending the check back to the waitress. 

“Thank you.”

“Keep the change.”

“How do you know that?” You don’t miss the edge of his tone as he takes another sip of his tea. Jealousy. You opt not to answer and his gaze drops to the paper. 

“What does the rooster mean?” Leaning on your hand, you watch as he reads out the description. 

“He’s selfish and eccentric.” His eyes raise to meet yours and his gaze carries a hint of mischief. “That’s—”

In unison, both your phones vibrate. David’s clatters against the table and you shove a hand into your bag, feeling for yours. Digging out the phone, you stand and gather your coat and bag as David grabs his own raincoat. The heels on your boots click hard against the tile in your haste to get from the restaurant to the car with as little rain contact as possible as David answers the phone, right at your heels.

Shielding yourself from the rain, you walk to the car and duck into the old thing, slamming the door shut. He slides in beside you, twisting the keys in the ignition and he hands you the radio on instinct. As the two of you pull out of the parking lot, you can’t help the warmth in your gut extinguishing. 

It is so easy to pretend, sometimes. To act as if you’re people you wish you could be. A bitter taste floods your mouth as you think about moments like the ones in the restaurant, ones where you felt so perfectly normal that it’s crazy to even think about the broken parts between you and the man beside you.

But then you’re dragged back into the real world. The real world of long nights, and bullet rain, and the fact that you and David are merely co-workers who live together because that is the only way you can survive having him in your life.  Any more than what he is now, the occasional hook-up, your partner in every case, it might as well break you.

It’s clockwork, working with him. Without rust or a knot in the system, you never feel like there is a task you cannot handle, a case you cannot crack. That ease, that bond, doesn’t come from something messy like what could’ve been. It comes from someone who knows your mind better than you. 

The thought terrifies you at night because you sure as hell think about what could’ve been more than you’d like to admit.

Shaking yourself of the person you were in the restaurant into the person you are, you roll down the window and let rain-slick wind slice into your cheeks. There is a plastic container of gummies on the dash and you reach for it, nerves biting at your fingers. Your other hand reaches for the radio as you respond.

“This is 13-40 and 13-41. We’re five minutes out. We’ll meet the responding units there.”

.

Your whole body drenched in sleet-cold rain, you feel your jaw twitch as David interrogates the man into the corner of the room. You can’t help the pity welling up inside you as you gently tease your hair through a proffered towel, and you can’t help the fire burning in your stomach, warming you from the inside out.

His tactic, getting up close and personal with the potential suspect, always has a way of messing with you.

Shaking it off, you ignore the thoughts that dog at you persistently — the images of him grabbing at Alex Jones and wrenching him to his feet — as you turn away. You squeeze your hair between the towel as you walk through the halls of the station, your heels echoing in the mostly-empty building. Linoleum reflects the artificial light as you reach the locker room, pushing open the door and throwing the damp towel into the dirty wash basket.

Shedding your long rain coat, you sigh and begin to unbutton your blouse. It sticks to your skin like wet paper as the air conditioning puffs goosebumps onto your chest and arms. You unzip your boots, tugging them off before peeling away your pants and examining the status of your socks. Your badge clatters against the wooden bench as you sit down in nothing but your bra and underwear. Your nose twitching, you stare down at your toes and inhale sharply. Rain is clogging up your sinuses, but your socks are dry.

Not soaked through, so boots held up. Good. 

The shower pelts against your skin, hot bullets that slam into your skull deliciously and chase whatever chill rain left on your skin as you hear the door open. Closing your eyes, you let the shower run over your face, focusing on the hissing stream over the clatter of boots you can hear.

It’s nearing 12 AM and you are sure everyone who doesn’t want to be here and don’t need to be here are gone. No one is here more than you and David. No one showers in here if they had a choice. So much for Thanksgiving. Should I be giving thanks that we might’ve caught the sick fucker already? Perhaps.

In your heart, somehow, you know it isn’t him.

Through the shuffling of fabric, you rake shampoo through your hair and begin to lather your body with soap, merely waiting until he shows up as steam begins to soak into your skin. A pair of pants drop to the tile, the clink of a belt against ceramic. Then, soft footsteps that brush against the shower tile and a shadow that blocks out the faint light. Taking a deep breath, you run your hand over your face and pull open the shower curtain. 

“Come here,” you murmur over the steam rolling out of your little shower stall. David steps in through the shaft of light that pours through to your little world before thrashing the curtain back into place. The stall dims remarkably as he leans down to kiss your forehead. You step back so he can stand under your stream of burning hot water and he blinks against the current.

Your forehead rests against his collarbone. His arms rise to run hands through his hair and he cards fingers through the dark strands as your hands encircle his waist. It’s darkly intimate, and all too familiar but you can’t help the addicting heat that he provides. Water runs down his chest and over your arms as you count the tattoos on his chest. One, two, three...

“Any leads?” Your voice is barely audible over the hiss of the shower.

“Aunt’s house.” He has a tattoo of a robin mid flight along his ribcage, and you trace the arc of its wing, palm flat against his heaving ribs. It’s one you know every stroke of, one you watched being carved into his chest. Your eyes close as a finger curls underneath your chin, lifting you to him. “Open your eyes.”

You do to see strands of hair falling into his eyes, his skin red against the blistering heat of the shower. Cupping his face with one hand, you use your fingers to delicately pull away the dark slick hair. His eyes bleeding midnight, his breath ghosts against your lips as his finger trails down your neck. His hand is warm against your throat and he makes sure that your eyes do not stray. As if an astronomer can look away from the phenomenon in the universe, a clash of asteroids, a dying star. He reaches into your mind, pulls you apart like a well-worn book, and reads your thoughts like a diary entry before he pulls out and his eyes fill with shards of glass.

“This isn’t like that,” he promises, insists, convinces you, and you nod because it’s the only thing you can do. Your heart splits in your chest, thrumming in your mouth and crushing your stomach all at once as his gentle grip on your neck firms. Your hands trail his waist, fingers dancing along tattoos that used to have meaning as you count the seconds you can stay standing. “We’re gonna find these girls.”

“Yeah. I know that.”

He sighs, eyes searching your face and you kiss him fully, softly. His lips taste of wind and rainwater.

The shower turns off and the two of you step out, drying each other’s legs and arms, face and hair as is routine when you shower together, and then you get dressed. He clips your badge to your belt, you slide the ring onto his pinky finger. He zips up your boots, you clip the necklace around his neck.

Clockwork.

You toss your hair up into a tight knot and hang your raincoat over your arm. Your gut twisted, you turn to your… something. He gives you a short nod, raking his hair back with rough fingers. You shed your old self, leave it in the shower to slip into the drain.

“Let’s go.”

.

Whilst David went for the Birches, you stop outside the Dovers, walking up the steps. The two of you had gotten no sleep last night after the visit to the aunt’s and forensics for the RV came back negative. Caffeine rules your system as you climb the steps and ring the doorbell.

A kid no older than sixteen or seventeen answers, all pale and terrified-looking. He looks like he hasn’t slept a wink either and you press your lips together. Although you empathize with the family, you can’t afford to become attached. You nudge your coat to flash your badge and the kid steps aside. Your fingers unclench from its tight fist as you enter the home.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Ralph. Uh, my dad… I… I saw the RV first. Did my dad tell you guys that?” 

You pause, turning around to spot the kid closing the door. He looks like he’s seen death, and his eyes are wide-eyed and shine under the light through the windows. Poor kid.

“Yeah, I read the statement.”

“Okay, Dad wanted me to, uh, make sure,” the boy says and you follow him to where a blonde sits on the couch, tissues littered around her. “Mom?” The woman looks up as you stick out a hand for her to shake.

“Detective Y/L/N. My partner and I are heading the case for your missing daughter.”

“Yes, of course. Sit. Do you need anything to drink?” She begins to unfurl on the couch but you simply hold out a hand. The woman’s face is sallow and thin, and she looks almost as if she is phasing from another time to your present. You sit down on the couch. Her voice scratches and you wonder when the last time she ate was, the last time she showered or drank or slept.

“I’m fine, thank you. I’m just here to…” Your voice fades as your phone vibrates in your pocket and you dig it out, turning on the screen to see an email notification from David. Opening it up, you frown at the few attachments strung along.

Better photos of the other kid. Heading over to you now. -D

“So, did we pass?” As you watch the bar across the screen signify the speed of your download, you also begin to forward the photos to the Captain.

“Hm?” You are only half-listening. Your phone vibrates again and you open up the downloaded photos, letting out a soft sigh as round, dark brown eyes stare back at you on your tiny screen. What a fucking shame.

“The poly thing. The lie detector we took this morning.” Turning off your phone, you let it fall into your tight fist as you look at the mother. She stares at you as if you hold all the answers and you swallow a tight knot. “Did we pass?”

“Yeah. You’re fine. I don’t think anyone really suspected the two of you anyway,” you say, glancing at your phone again. “Thank you for your cooperation, though. You understand — the formalities we have to take. Precautions.” You tuck a slip of hair behind your ears and her eyes flicker to the movement, gaze following your fingers. You know what she is trying to do and you interlace your fingers, hiding the permanent ink needled into your skin along your knuckles.

“Yes, of course. It’s just… it’s embarrassing. I don’t know. All this fuss — people are just going to think we’re crazy when they show up here, perfectly fine or… I don’t know.” The woman’s arms crossed tight against her chest, she doesn’t even look at you anymore. Your eyes dart to her knuckles to find them stark white, her fingers digging into the flesh of her bicep.

“Do you have any reason to believe they might’ve run away?” The words come out tough as rubber in your mouth. The woman’s eyes close and you sigh, already regretting your words. You know in your gut that that isn’t the case.

“No,” she breathes, “no. They’re happy. They… the must have run away.” A silly child’s game. The woman nods along to her own words as she tries to convince herself. Your heart crumbles to ash in your chest as you force on a smile. “I think they must have run away, right?”

“Of course, Mrs. Dover. But we’ll find them,” you assure, setting a hand gently on her knee. She seems to quiver under your palm as she swallows and looks at you with bleak, earthwet eyes.

“Your police captain told me about the two of you. Um, he said that you and your partner—” You suck in a quiet breath, already knowing what her next words are going to be. You don’t like it, the pressure, the want to keep a record pristine, but your reputation has always preceded you in cases like these. Cases where you just wanted to find the grave and be done with it when your very thought should be finding a warm body, not a cold one— “he told me that the two of you have solved every case you’ve ever been assigned. Is that right?”

Your nails dig into the flesh of your palms as you look away. You don’t want to give this woman hope, even if she needs it. It’s stupid, you realize, to stare at the reflection of yourself when you have already smashed every mirror.

Your nose twitches.

The doorbell rings. The kid, Ralph, goes to get it again as you look up at the woman. She’s beginning to break down, hiding her face in her hands as she mumbles out apologies.

“I’m sorry. I am so sorry,” she whispers through her tears as the door opens. You can see the shadow of him on the walls before he comes in and you shake your head minutely as soon as your gazes meet. Nothing here. “Do you… do you have children, detective?” 

You bite your lip until you taste blood.

“We’re gonna find your daughter.” Mrs. Dover looks up jerkily, flinching at the man’s voice. Closing your eyes, you hang your head as your partner walks deeper into the room. Everything feels like it’s been scooped out of you, replaced with nothing but sick and acid.

You can’t listen to promises you aren’t quite sure you can keep anymore.

[fandom-collective-writers]

Reader x Jihyun Kim {MysMes} - Letters to Heal a Broken Heart

Title: Letters to Heal a Broken Heart Fandom: Mystic Messenger Character: Jihyun Kim Genre: bittersweet? romance Warnings: spoilers for his good ending!  Intended Gender Audience: Neutral Audience  Word Count: 2040 words POV: second person Other comments: no smut but im proud of this! please note that everything with the push back is a letter! i think its pretty clear, but i wanted to make sure it’s understood <3 Written by: @mythiica​ Req: 

Dear –

I’ll admit, it feels a bit strange writing a letter for you, but my therapist recommended it. He told me to explain my emotions with words, saying it would help me become more confident. 

See, the reasoning behind it, at least from what I remember, is that there is no pressure to think quickly. Writing allows a flow, a sense of movement between the words before you pick which one you wish to use. Talking is different because it follows a completely contrasting rhythm. To keep a conversation going, you have to speak rather quickly so the person stays engaged in the topic. 

It’s all really interesting, and my therapist has given me a book over the fundamentals of other practices like this. I read half of it on the plane to Japan. 

To clarify, I’m writing this from my hotel room in Tokyo. I landed a few hours ago and the jet lag has yet to hit me, so I decided to take advantage of this time to write. 

I think you’d like it here ��� the sakura are in full bloom and I have three days dedicated to photographing the sea of pinks as they ripple in the wind. Until now, I’ve only seen pictures of the famous parks, and I never thought that I would be able to witness them in person. 

I didn’t think I’d

I never conside

Ah, I should mention, I’m not allowed to erase or cross out sentences I start. Another confidence booster? It’s a bit sillier, but it’s meant to force me to say what is on my mind, rather than letting it fester. I’ll try again: 

During my years under Mint Eye, my vision was narrowed, and I had only one duty. However, I am learning to broaden my horizons and expand my mind to encompass everything. The urge to explore bubbles in my chest, waiting for the moment to come out. There are so many chances to do anything, and I’ve got all the time to do all of it. 

I’ve also realized that I went over my word limit. I have to stick to 300 words or under. Confidence booster #3! Express yourself with less words. Take a guess of how many times I’ve opened the thesaurus, looking for better synonyms for words? At least seven times in the past five minutes. It’s crazy! 

For now, I’ll sign this off and try better next time. 

                                                 よりご多幸を祈って

                                                           Jihyun Kim

PS, I’m practicing my Japanese! That says best wishes… I think. 

नमस्कार

Hello and greetings from India! I took a long nap on the plane, and forgot to write. Although I’m only passing through, I ate some delicious food (that I should really try to replicate for you). India is absolutely beautiful – from the sunrises to the bustling markets to the colorful fabrics hung at every corner. I’ll inhale the air and smell six things at once, albeit, not all of them are the best, but I embrace it nonetheless. 

More about what I’ve been doing: funnily enough, my phone died on the bus ride, but I made a new friend named Sunmi, and she was kind enough to lend me her charging cable. Instead of ending the interaction there, we spoke for a few hours at least. I learned she was traveling with her friends on a photography excursion. She gave me all the information, and I’d like to look into it when I have wifi again. 

You wouldn’t believe what they’ve seen! Last year they went to Antarctica through South America. She got to pet a penguin! Apparently the company also takes people to Greenland and New Zealand – some places I’ve been dreaming of visiting since I was a young boy. 

I’ll use my last 100 words to mention that… I’ve gotten a bit homesick. I miss the RFA – well, the people from the RFA minus… 

Don’t tell Jumin about the company though, he’ll insist on flying me around with his private jet. I want to experience for myself. Saeyoung is somehow messaging me when I don’t have service? I don’t… understand. Anyways, I also saw Zen landed a huge international role (someone had a magazine on the plane). Otherwise, I hope Jaehee and Yoosung are well. And Elizabeth the 3rd of course. Send them my wishes. 

I didn’t forget about you though! The keychain you gave me reminds me of home every day. It might have lost an eye, but I found a button and stitched it on. And I also wanted to ask you–

Ah, I’m over again. 

Next time. 

                                                           Jihyun Kim

Iyi günler! I am in Turkey now and actually writing this on a boat. The sun is setting over the horizon, making the sky change colors with every passing minute. It’s breathtaking, but I wish you were here with me. The other passengers and I take turns standing at the front of the boat, and I sometimes linger, trying to take pictures. 

Good news! My vision is getting better. I’ve been taking some Greek herbal remedies, and the seem to be helping. Either that, or they have a wonderful placebo effect. Has that ever happened to you? To think something is working, but you’re just imagining things? 

I apologize, maybe that stirred bad memories for you. 

Back to Turkey: I stepped out of my comfort zone and spent a night camping. Honestly? I was terrified of doing so, but now I want to do it every night. It is the perfect temperature for hiking, even though I am a bit sunburned. 

So many people have been commenting on my hair. Good things mostly, and I started styling it with a bit of gel to keep it out of my eyes. It feels good to look people directly rather than through a curtain. 

What are you up to? Hosting anymore parties? I imagine that you are keeping busy, as always of course. My therapist said it would be best to wait messaging you until I return home. I nearly called you a week ago, but I didn’t want to break my vow. It’s like lying to myself, and I know better than that now. 

Still, it doesn’t stop me from dreaming. 

                                                           Sending love, 

                                                                     J

I’m genuinely angry, but writing to you always calms me. Someone stole my bag – I luckily didn’t have much in it, but your keychain�� can you make me a new one please? Now that I don’t have it, it’s almost like I’ve lost a part of you. It hurts a lot, but then I wonder if I am being silly. It’s just a keychain. 

Otherwise, France is nice. I didn’t want to go to Paris, so instead I traveled through the countryside to visit a few wineries. 

Yes, I did… drink a bit, but I wasn’t impaired when my bag was stolen! 

You would laugh at me if I told you what happened, so I will save the story for another time. Before coming to France, I went through Germany and visited some of the most beautiful castles I’ve ever seen. They all looked like they could be straight from a fantasy movie set, and I was convinced one – Neuschwanstein Castle – actually was. 

I’ve barely written anything despite so much happening. 

I got a haircut (finally), because it was becoming a hassle to tie it back at night. 

One evening, I fed some stray cats and they followed me home. 

And a drunk (?) tried to play cards with me. But he didn’t have cards. He was dealing an imaginary deck. 

Other stories will have to wait until I see you again, and I feel better now. It’s okay to be upset, but it won’t hinder my trip any more. 

                                                           Je t'aime, 

                                                                     Jihyun

Alaska doesn’t have a night. 

That’s not exactly true, but it’s basically true. The hotel has special curtains that block the light, and it is only dark for a few hours. 

It has been many miles since I last wrote, but I was caught up in visiting show after event after party after exhibit through America. Their art has given me a new perspective on point of view and emotions, so I hope that the ten camera chips I’ve filled with photographs will be able to convey the same sense of awe. 

I’ve also been mistaken for an idol? Like – multiple times. Interesting to say the least, maybe I’ll say yes to the next person that asks. What should my stage name be? I’ll spare you the embarrassment and not share my ideas. They are all very silly and no one would believe me if I told them my name was Cam Ra. Do you get it? It’s bad, I know. 

I’ll be returning home soon, unless I get distracted or impulsive and go down to California and Hawaii before coming back. I want to – it doesn’t feel right to return just yet. But that doesn’t mean anything about you! 

Really, I think about you and everyone else each day. 

Have you met new people? We’ll exchange so many stories… 

                                                           See you soon, 

                                                                     J K 

You pace around, waiting for the last guest on the list to appear. The party started an hour ago, but he still has not arrived. Then again, it has been three months since anyone heard a whisper from V, and you start to lose hope. Swallowing hard, you remind yourself that V is having a wonderful time exploring the world and finding himself. 

          Taking a handful of your dress, you turn and head through the doors to the main room. Jumin tries to pull Saeyoung away from Longcat, Yoosung explains his most recent surgeries to a group of nurses from his work place, and Jaehee receives many compliments for her majestic cake. 

         Everyone is happy and has moved on. 

         You hope V has too. 

         Maybe all the wishing and praying finally paid off, because you hear his familiar voice calling out behind you. It’s a long shot, but you turn around nonetheless, thinking it is a different guest. 

         Instead, you see Jihyun, wearing the most dazzling smile you’ve ever seen, running towards you. He’s carrying a folder filled with papers, but that doesn’t stop him from embracing you. He smells rugged, like his voyage has transformed him, but you rather like it. 

         “Jihyun!” You melt against his hug. “You’re.. Here… you’re here!” 

         Your squealing draws everyone’s attention, but he focuses on you and only you. “Of course I’m here. I missed you more than I can verbalize.” 

         His stance is open, welcoming, and confident, much different from two years ago. He is a different person now, brave and proud. Jihyun offers you the folder. It is strange to gift something in the middle of a party, but you accept it anyways, happy he has returned. 

         Jihyun’s heart races as he explains. “I wrote you letters every time I went somewhere new. These are just a few of them, really I have so many. But each shows something I’ve learned.” He takes a breath and laces his fingers with yours. “This is sudden, and I’m sure you will need time to think about it, but I’m trying something new: asking without being afraid. Over the past two years, I’ve… longed for you. Art has shown me the power of friendship, joy, perseverance, and most importantly, dedication. I want to dedicate my art to you, if you’ll stand by my side.” 

         You can’t find the words to express yourself because you are so awestruck. He truly has changed, but he has embraced himself and his life. Tears start to roll down your cheeks from the overwhelming surge of emotions. Jihyun brushes them away and presses his forehead to yours. 

         “I still have much to learn, but I want to do it all with you.” 

         “I’d like that a lot, Jihyun,” you whisper, captivated by his intense gaze. 

         “And I can finally say this without fear–” 

         You tip your head up, and Jihyun kisses you the next moment. His lips are chapped and the warmth radiating from his skin envelops you. He doesn’t need words to communicate it, because you understand perfectly what he is trying to say. 

[bookenders]

11/11/11 Tag Game: Rounds 24, 25, 26, and 27

Tagged by the wonderful @corsairesque, the lovely @azawrites, the stellar @sunlight-and-starskies, and the incomparable @inexorableblob - thanks!

And @inexorableblob, thank you for letting me rewrite the end of The Great Gatsby. It was very cathartic.

Rules: Answer 11 questions, write 11 questions, tag 11 people!

Bilbo Taggins: @aurumni-writes @quilloftheclouds @aslanwrites @starlitesymphony @writingonesdreams @waterfallwritings @cataclysmic-writer @ren-c-leyn @timefirewrites @minusfractions @ink-flavored - and if you like the questions and aren’t tagged, feel free to answer them! And tag me so I can see! 

My Questions:

How many licks would it take for your OCs to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

What are your favorite smells?

What’s the book you’ve read most recently? What did you think of it? What impressed you? What would you have done differently?

What are your thoughts on mugs?

If your OCs had a comic book series/graphic novel about them, what would it be called? What would be on the cover? What would the art style be?

Can you draw a bear?

Do you do any other kinds of art? Are you ever influenced by other kinds of art? What about other areas like science or mathematics/other disciplines?

Have you read any craft books or writing advice books? If yes, how have the helped or hindered you? Which would you recommend? If no, would you ever consider reading them?

What are your favorite kinds of narratives? What narrative structures do you prefer to write and what do you prefer to read?

What’s your favorite recipe?

What are some signs that make you consider setting a project aside vs continuing with it?

As always, answers under the cut!

@corsairesque‘s Questions:

1. Do you create playlists for your stories or characters?

I do! 

Here’s a detailed post about how I make them.

This is Mel’s from H2H.

This is Gemma’s from H2H.

This is one for the story I recently posted.

And I have one for each WIP on my WIP page! (Mostly, I’m still working on Fish Food’s.)

I actually have folders in Spotify for my characters and stories. Each one gets a playlist.

2. What is your stance on endings that don’t end with some hope?

Sometimes a story needs to have a certain ending to have an emotionally satisfying conclusion. I don’t think hope is absolutely required for an ending. I’ve ended stories without hope because that’s how the story ends. If I wrote it to conclude with an upturn, it would’ve been disloyal to the narrative. Like life, not everything ends happily, or with a positive outlook.

If you want it from a more technical perspective, there are three sorts of endings: positive, negative, and neutral. They can mix and match, but these are the three base ones. I tend toward neutral or positive-neutral endings. The best story I’ve written so far has a negative-leaning neutral ending because it concludes with a loss that does not promise hope. Positive endings are not necessary for a narrative, or for a conclusion. 

Sometimes you need to write a hopeful ending. Sometimes you need to read a hopeful ending. And sometimes you need to read or write something that ends on a down-note. I know I have. 

So, TL;DR, there is no ending hierarchy. It all depends on the reader and the writer, what they need, and what the story demands.

3. What author would you love to hear feedback from on your WIP?

Of literally anyone? Dead or alive? I mean. I’d love to hear what Flannery O’Connor would have to say about my short stories. I try to do a remix-version of her moments of grace in each of them.

4. What is the genre of your WIP(s)?

I mention these on my WIP page!

Most of my short stories are literary and contemporary fiction. My longer projects tend toward low fantasy.

5. How do you come up with new ideas for your WIP(s)?

I don’t have a method or anything for idea generation. My brain works in the background while I’m doing other things, so I’ll be washing dishes, or brushing my teeth, or writing something else, and an idea goes HI HELLO WHAT ABOUT THIS HUH? and I scramble to write it down.

Most of the time, my story ideas come from cool sentences I think of while observing. That sounds super weird and nerdy, but it’s true! When I’m bored or need to occupy my brain or just sorta feel like creating something spontaneous, I’ll look around and figure out how I’d write about a certain thing in the vicinity. 

Some examples of this from my phone notes:

“Laughter echoing through a cave, bouncing off the walls, the gift of hearing it over and over until it fades like gentle waking”

“Cheeks baked pink from the flush of her modesty”

“The last remnants of home, the dirt hidden beneath their fingernails”

“Headlights flicker between the gaps in the barrier like a slipstream of stars”

Ya know, stuff like that.

Sometimes, if I’m stuck while writing and need a thought, I look at the plot and think up complications for my characters to face. That’s how I figured out how to make Lithium 100% more plot relevant. I thought, okay, so she has this role right now, what can I add to make her stand in the way of X plan while also being an asset to Y? And boom, idea generated and problem solved.

6. What do you use to keep all your writing on? (Scrivener, Google Docs, good old pen and paper…)

I use Scrivener for all my main writing. I have a ton of phone memo notes for ideas on the go. I have a notebook full of random stuff for when I’m blocked and need to hand write something.

I also answered this further down!

7. What gave you initial inspiration for your WIP(s)?

H2H: There was a publisher who had a call for shapeshifter stories, and then I missed the deadline so I decided to try for a zine instead, then I got rejected, so I made it into my own thing.

AOPC: I needed to flesh out a piece of my homebrew DnD world, so I started worldbuilding, then it was my turn to turn in a story to be workshopped in my writing class, so I wrote a thing set in the village about the tribe and it all spiraled out from there.

FF: I had an errant thought about the script that hero and villain stories follow and wrote a thing about what would happen if one of them decided to deviate from it and BOOM the plot hit me like a semi truck.

Almost all of my short stories start with a sentence I think sounds really cool, a tone I want to try to capture (ex. the feeling of standing inside an old cathedral), or the ending moment of a character arc (I tend to work backwards).

8. How long have you been working on your WIP(s)?

I’ve been working with Heart to Heart since November 2018. I started thinking about Fish Food like 3 months ago I think? And I got the idea for All Our Painted Colors 3ish years ago, but it started as a short story that I thought about expanding about 8 months ago.

My writing process starts with a long period of thought percolation before I write anything definitive down.

9. What was the first thing you came up with for your WIP(s)?

H2H: The fact that the main character is an apothecary who uses recipes from historical documents to brew things and lives in a small town, and that their love interest changes shapes in some way.

AOPC: That the tribe is a society based around body paint, art, preserving their personal history, and stories. But mostly paint. 

FF: The hero danging over a pit of hungry piranhas and asking the villain a question that throws off the whole “death threat” vibe.

10. Have you considered Hogwarts houses for your characters? If so, what are they?

Answered this for the H2H cast here.

As for the Fish Food cast:

Iron Will - Hufflepuff

Overseer - Ravenclaw

Nightmare - A Hufflepuff who asked to be in Slytherin and the hat said “yeah okay”

Lithium - Gryffindor

Babylon - Slytherin

Sparkplug - Gryffindor

11. What do you find easiest to write? (Description, dialogue, etc.)

Interiority! Free indirect discourse! Unvoiced character brain thoughts! Which I guess means description? 

Writing dialogue sucks old car tires!

@azawrites‘ Questions:

what’s the best part about your writing style? I like how I build up to emotional punches. It’s like walking up a ramp, but in a literary way. And at the top of the ramp you either get a gut punch of feels or an ice cream cone.

do you write on the computer or on paper? I do most of my writing on my laptop because my hands can’t write fast enough to keep up with my brain. My typing is way faster. If I’m having trouble getting an idea down, or the tone of the writing lends itself to being handwritten (idk how to describe this, but sometimes words just gotta be scribbled, ya know?), I’ll hand write it in pen. I don’t use pencils anymore because I wasn’t allowed to in college and it kinda stuck.

what are your favourite books and why? Oh, no, there are too many. So I’ll just say my top book: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien because of how it deals with stories and grief and remembering, the fact that it’s a story cycle (which is very cool), and the way he writes - it’s beautiful and sad and messed up and poignant. I love it.

why did you start writing? I’ve answered this before, but there was never really starting point for me. It’s just something I’ve always done. 

why did you continue writing? Because I had too much fun to stop! I also get creatively constipated, I guess is how I would phrase it, and need to have some sort of narrative outlet or my brain gets really mad at me.

where do you usually write? Pretty much anywhere, but most often at my desk. I think I need a taller chair, though...

can you describe your favourite piece (written by you) in one sentence? Let’s get authory with this one: The teacher hands out the tests, multiple choice this time, but when the stapled packet slides across your desk, there’s something odd about it, something that brings the war to life inside your head, a long-forgotten voice that speaks the souls of the soldiers and tells their stories from the annals of history. Or: A multiple choice test about WWII that tells the story of 4 men from Company B from enlistment to the end of their campaign.

what’s one cliche/trope you overuse, but still like anyway? It’s a trope when it comes to my own writing, actually. Person Sits Alone in the Dark and Contemplates. I love it, I abuse the hell out of it, and I will never stop.

what music do you listen to when working on a WIP? Depends. I have a go-to Writing Flow State song, playlists to help me get in the right head space when writing certain characters, and playlists that help guide the tone of a story. I can never listen to movie or video game scores because the association of song and cinematic moment is too strong for me.

have you ever dreamed of a fictional character? Uh, I have the occasional nightmare about Kokopelli? Does that count? 

what’s one thing that makes you automatically dislike a book? Overly pretentious first person POV prose (and I don’t mean purple. I mean a character who - honestly and without a hint of satire - thinks like a writer from the 1920s who just discovered what “paid by the word” means and believes they’re the wisest human being in the universe and everyone who doesn’t agree with them is the basest of idiots - barf). Gratuitous female violence. The use of the word “loins” outside of an animal context. Everything about The Beginners by Rebecca Wolff. 

@inexorableblob‘s Questions:

Which of your characters could you write as twice their current age? Oh, man, I think writing Iron Will in his forties or fifties would be really cool. It’d certainly give the story a new commentary twist.

Which of your characters could you write as half their current age? (I’m not gonna cheat and say Mel, I promise.) I think writing a 30yo Treena would be very cool. However, writing a 13 or 14yo Lithium who is just learning how to use her super powers would be WILD. 

What big city would your characters do best in?  London?  New York? Tokyo?  Mexico City?  Rio? The Fish Food characters would all do best in New York or London, since they’re very close to Conover. Lithium would prefer Rio, though, and Babylon would lobby for everyone to move to Tokyo.  The H2H characters would do best in Mexico City or London, depending on who decides to take charge and teach everyone the local customs. 

What would your characters do if they were in a small rural community that was attacked by underground worms? This is giving me too many ideas for H2H. Gemma would be a little bit furious, since she hates having to get rid of animals, especially when they’re invasive. If the worms just minded their own gosh dang business then everyone could live in peace.  If we’re talkin’ normal sized worms, like worm-sized worms, then Gemma would develop a pesticide that wouldn’t kill them, but force them to the surface where they would then be stunned by whatever weird solution Mel comes up with. Then the town would have a Worm-Off, where the person who collects the most worms wins free pie for a year, courtesy of Harry’s.  If we’re talkin’ DnD-style Purple Worms, like Beetlejuice worms, then Mel would take over. She’d help organize an evacuation and steal Oz’s gun, just in case. Then she’d do some spoilery things with Gemma assisting.

What is the worst place where you’ve ever wanted to write? Probably while I was taking the math section of the SATs. Kinda inconvenient, brain, thanks for that. Other terrible places: mid job interview, in the middle of an empty street at midnight, anywhere I’m sitting where I have terrible posture, watching a slam poetry event in a very crowded bar, etc.

What’s the most uncomfortable subject you’ve ever written about? I’ve written a little bit about hate crimes and loathed every second. I’ve written a character actively contemplating suicide (he was a WWII soldier) and that was not fun at all. I mean, I also wrote a paper about sexy (somewhat graphic) wlw poetry for my Sexuality class, which a lot of people would be uncomfortable with, but I thought it was a very good collection. Go read Marilyn Hacker’s stuff, it’s good.

If you had to change the ending of any famous novel, which would you pick? The Great Gatsby. We don’t end with the green light, screw the green light.  Gatsby wills all of his possessions and wealth to Nick and Nick becomes the next James Gatz. But this time around, he pines for the man who was killed in the pool just below his balcony while pretending to love Jordan, who finds out and amicably marries him because 1920s. She then uses Nick/Gatsby’s money to purchase an automobile manufacturing company and makes cars in every color but yellow. (Gotta maintain that color symbolism for F. Scott, I guess.) Nick discovers Gatz’ old bootlegging and illegal activities buddies and starts up a criminal empire. He and Jordan become the biggest, queerest, most spiteful and angsty crime bosses in New York. Nick makes it his life’s mission to take down false accusers, vigilante style. The car manufacturing company is what they use to launder money. Daisy divorces Tom because they’re both terrible people. Daisy takes her daughter and moves to California. Jordan sends Daisy’s daughter money secretly, about a hundred dollars a month. The last line is something about how Gatz was always reaching out and chasing green, but because of him, Nick is steeped in dark, bloody red. I would then write a sequel about Nick and Jordan and their crime empire that spans the East Coast. God, I hate this book.

If you had to change your life, what would you change without regret? Start therapy way earlier, 100%. That would have saved me a lot of nonsense.

If the end of the world where scheduled a week from tomorrow, what would you do?  Would you tell anybody? Everybody?  Keep it a secret? Assuming this was legit and the end of the world was actually happening, I’d probably try to tell some big-shot geologist or something, hoping they spread the word. Other than that, since debt won’t be a thing, I’d take the people I love on a killer trip around the world.

What would you do if a wizard offered to cast one spell for you, but your worst enemy got the same spell? Hmmm. I’d ask them to cast the Self-Realization spell, so they would instantly become aware of the effect their actions have on others and know exactly how terrible they’ve been to other people their whole life. Maybe then they can be a better person. My anxiety makes this spell ineffective on me, since it’s already there! Thanks, brain! 

Which would you choose, never eating in the same place, always eating the same meal, always eating with the same people, or never eating with the same people? I’d choose always eating with the same people. I like frequenting restaurants I like and eating different things. I don’t think I could deal with only eating the same thing/off the same menu forever. And I have bad social anxiety, so constantly eating with new people would probably short-circuit my brain eventually.  A good meal in good company is pretty great, though. 

@sunlight-and-starskies‘ Questions:

What is your favorite genre of music? I’ll always be a rock fan at heart. Right now, I really like folk rock and any kind of music that sounds like it has history behind it.

What are your favorite words? Illustrious, shimmer, soliloquy, incarnate, bound, and many more. Also most Yiddish curses.

Describe your ideal vacation. Somewhere cozy where I can explore and chill at my leisure. A week of artsy events in the city. Exploring landscapes in the country.

If you could have any fictional creature for a pet, what would it be? Why? Pegasus! I can ride and they can fly. We’d make an excellent team, and where we’d go, we wouldn’t need roads.

Which fictional universe would you live in if you had to live there for the rest of your life? Logic dictates the Star Trek universe, since I’d probably be an average civilian. Post-scarcity society? Sign me the hell up. My heart, however, is screaming ROHAN.

Favorite childhood toy? Uh... I honestly can’t remember. 

What is your aesthetic? Good smelling old books with doodles and notes in the margins, a pile of unfolded clean clothes on a chair, a stack of handwritten papers perched on the corner of a desk, the smell of breakfast cooking when you wake up, the immediate “woops” shock the moment you trip over something you should’ve moved earlier.

Tell me a random fact about your current project or you. About me: I have a birthmark that kinda sorta looks like an elephant. About Fish Food: The Coalition knows what happened to Hydrophase. So does Sparkplug.

Are you an early bird or a night owl? Night owl, all the way. I like the idea of being a morning person, though. 

What is your favorite food? Pasta! Or any kind of Asian food. 

What is your happiest memory? Oh, geez. Ummm. When I was little, I would curl up in my grandpa’s armchair and eat Burger King breakfast sandwiches on Saturday mornings. 

[siderealscribblings]

Would You Rather? (Ladybug!Nino/Adrien)

“So…hypothetical question.”

“We are not doing this again,” Nino sighed, burying his nose in his textbook as Kim drummed his pencil against table.

“What’d I do?” Kim asked.

“The last ‘hypothetical question’ you posed nearly tore the class apart,” Max sighed, casually leaning over and changing an answer on Kim’s worksheet when he wasn’t looking.

“Oh, please,” Kim said, squinting at the answer Max wrote as he tried to make sense of it. “When have I ever-”

“Chloe almost tore Marinette’s hair out when she suggested that Chat Noir would beat Ladybug in a fair fight,” Adrien said, a dark look flitting across his sparkling green eyes.

“And that’s why you’re banned from posing hypothetical questions,” Nino concluded, stiffening a little bit as Adrien leaned across his lap to check Max’s answers. Perhaps it was natural for someone who was homeschooled to lack any sense of personal space, but that didn’t make it easier for Nino to have the subject of his affections practically sitting in his lap while he checked his answers against the smart kid.  

“How about a peaceful one then?” Kim suggested.

“No such thing,” Ivan muttered, paging through the library’s copy of Metamorphosis while he waited for his friends to finish their homework.

“It’s always some kind of competition with you,” Nathanael added, sharpening his colored pencil. “Who would win in a fight; Ladybug or Chat Noir?”

“Who would win in a footrace; Ladybug or Chat Noir?” Ivan said in a shocking imitation of Kim’s voice.

“If you had to make out with Ladybug or Chat Noir, who would you pick and why?” Max said.

“Dude!” Kim hissed, turning a shocking shade of scarlet. “I told you that one in private!”

“Now that’s not a bad question,” Nathanael said, chewing on the end of his pencil thoughtfully. “Given the choice between the two…which one would you rather…?”

Nino tensed suddenly, skin prickling as a tentative silence came over the group. Homework forgotten, books closed, they glanced around the table, waiting for someone to be the first to broach the question at hand.

[Ao3]

Finally, Nathanael—turning back to his artwork—said, “Chat Noir.”

Adrien’s ears immediately started burning. “R-Really?” He asked, sitting up a little straighter.

“Well…y-yeah,” Nathanael coughed, tucking his comics back into his folder as he was suddenly aware that all eyes were on him. “I mean…”

“Okay, hold on, are we talking like…a one off thing or someone you would rather settle down with?” Kim asked, holding up his hand.

“I believe the question didn’t specify,” Max said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “Though, in that case, I would have to say my preference would naturally be Ladybug.”

Nino’s leg unconsciously banged against the underside of the table, drawing everyone’s attention as he tried to hide his blush behind a book. “I, uh…s-sneezed.”

“Bless you,” Adrien said, returning his attention to Max. “Why Ladybug?”

“The prestige, if nothing else,” Max said thoughtfully, leaning back in his chair. “To be able to say that I won the affections of Paris’ greatest hero-”

“What?” Kim asked.

“In the interest of not rekindling that argument, let me change that to one of the greatest,” Max said, holding his hands up defensively. “Certainly the most striking figure at least.”

“Again what?” Kim spluttered. “I mean, dude’s got the back muscles of an Olympian swimmer, granted, but you’re telling me the rather play tonsil hockey with the Boy Scout rather than the bad boy?”

“How is Chat Noir the bad boy?” Adrien mumbled, shaking his head.  

Boy Scout? Nino thought with a small grimace that went unnoticed as Kim flagged a passing Alix down.

“Hey, back me up here,” Kim said, grabbing Alix by the arm. “Chat Noir is hotter than Ladybug, isn’t he?”

“Is this how we’re greeting each other now?” Alix sighed, crossing her arms. “No hey, no how-are-you; just straight to would you rather’s?”

“Just answer the question,” Kim sighed.

“I don’t know…I guess?” Alix shrugged.

“Ha!” Kim said, pumping his fist. “Three to one!”

“And here we go again,” Ivan sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“I believe the question was posed to only those sitting at this table,” Max replied. “So two-to-one. Don’t pad your data like a doctoral candidate during finals. ”

“What happened to no hypothetical questions?” Adrien murmured in Nino’s ear. The proximity combined with the sensation of Adrien’s breath on his neck made Nino’s skin prickle pleasantly.  

“Ivan?” Kim asked, leaning across the table. “C’mon; who would you rather make out with?”

“Ladybug,” Ivan said without hesitation and without looking up from the page. If he did, he would have naturally seen Nino flush a darker shade of purple and suddenly become interested in the contents of his homework.

“Ah, I see you’re a man of taste as well, Ivan” Max nodded sagely, bumping his knuckles against Ivan’s.

“Poor taste,” Kim muttered.

“Hey!” Nino opened his mouth to protest, only to find Adrien had beat him to the punch, standing up a little as all eyes trained on Adrien.

“I think that raises the count from two to three in favor of Ladybug,” Max said, leaning back with a smug smirk as Adrien quietly sank back into his chair. “No need to sulk just because Adrien has better taste in husbandos than you do.”

Nino was deaf to this conversation, largely due to the fact that Adrien had almost jumped to his feet in defense of his alleged hotness. It took every ounce of his willpower not to read too much into what was likely just a friendly game; surely Adrien was just suggesting that he would rather make out with him than Chat Noir if he had to.

…still.

“Never pegged you for a huge Ladybug fan,” Nathanael said, chewing on the end of his pencil as he studied Adrien’s flushed expression.

“Oh, w-well, I just…” Adrien cleared his throat. “I mean…who would pass up the chance to kiss Paris’ number one hero?”

“I know we’re having a who’s hotter debate right now, but if you want to drag up the who would win in a fight argument-”

“Look, I’ve got my preferences, okay?” Adrien said, holding his hands up before Kim could get too carried away. “I just…think he’s cute is all. Back me up here, Nino.”

Nino was thoroughly incapable of backing anyone up seeing as how he was currently fixating on the fact that Adrien actually said he was cute. To. His. Face. The mask didn’t cover all that much, so Nino was fairly comfortable taking credit for the fact that Adrien preferred him to his partner.

Somewhere, Chat Noir was probably coughing up a hairball knowing that he had competition.

“Uh…I…I mean, yeah, Ladybug’s good looking and all!” Nino laughed, scratching the back of his neck.

“So we can assume the final tally is four-to-two?” Max asked, teeth glinting as Kim’s head sank to the desk with a groan.

“I…w-well…” Nino said, fiddling with his cap’s bill. “Honestly, I would…much rather kiss Chat.”

There was a beat of silence before the table dissolved into a chorus of mixed reactions.

“Thank you!” Kim said, thumping Nino on the back.

“Pleb,” Max sighed, shaking his head as he returned to his homework. Nathanael and Ivan just shrugged, busying themselves with more interesting things. Adrien was the only quiet one, leaning on his elbows and cupping his nose and mouth in his hands.

“Really?” Adrien asked after a moment, drawing Nino’s attention away from the headlock Kim now had Max in. “You…like Chat Noir?”

“I mean, i-it’s just a game, right?” Nino laughed, closing his notes up as a distant bell signaled the end of the school day. “If I had to pick one, I’d just rather go with Chat.”

“Right…” Adrien nodded, swinging his bookbag up on to his shoulders as the pair made their way towards the front of the school. “No…particular reason?”

Yeah, because I can’t exactly make out with myself, Nino thought.

“I mean he has his…rakish…charm I guess?” Nino said, scratching the back of his neck. “Cute in a scruffy teenage dramedy sorta way, y’know?”

“I guess I’ve never really thought of him like that,” Adrien said, adjusting the strap of his bookbag.

“You’re probably the only one,” Nino chuckled. “Paris seems to have a thing for blondes, don’t they?”

“No accounting for taste,” Adrien shrugged. “Personally, I’m with Chloe, Max, and Ivan.”

“Don’t let Marinette hear you say that,” Nino said, bumping Adrien’s shoulder with his. “She sewed up that Chat Noir hoodie out of pure spite, you know.”

“I’m sure Chat Noir appreciates having such an enthusiastic fan,” Adrien chuckled.

“…you just happen to prefer Ladybug though, right?” Nino said, licking his lips as they approached the street they usually diverged at.

“Well…yeah, I mean…” Adrien trailed off, a flush of color rising to his cheeks. “L-Let’s just say that I’d would kiss Ladybug whether I had to or not…”

It was a miracle that Nino didn’t drop dead of a heart attack.

“It’s just a little crush though,” Adrien laughed, an almost wistful look in his eye as he leaned against a nearby lamppost. “Not like I have a real shot with him or anything-”

“H-How do you know?!” Nino blurted out, drawing the attention of a passing crowd of Japanese tourists. “I-I mean…you don’t know that you don’t have a shot with him, right?”

“Come on,” Adrien scoffed. “He’s a superhero and I’m just-”

“Handsome, funny, smart, talented,” Nino cut himself off with a cough before he started blabbering at length about Adrien’s finer qualities. “Who’s to say he wouldn’t bite if you tried flirting with him?”

“Oh…call it a hunch,” Adrien said, turning on the lamppost to face Nino.

“He seemed pretty happy to kiss Chat when that whole Dark Cupid thing went down,” Nino pointed out.

“What am I supposed to do; kiss him full on the mouth then?” Adrien said, looking flustered for some reason.

“Well…” Nino said, heart pulsing in his ears in time with the rush of foot traffic brushing past them. “Wh-what’s the worst that could happen?”

Adrien opened his mouth to respond, but the light flicked green and the crowd of people began shuffling between them across the sidewalk.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Adrien said, shooting another wave over his shoulder as he jogged down the sidewalk, disappearing in the crowd as Nino watched him go with a small sigh.

“I’m proud of you,” Tikki chimed in his ear as he turned and headed down the street. “That was almost a confession.”

“Button up, bugaboo,” Nino said, fishing a tiny cookie from his pocket and passing it to his kwami tucked into his hood.

“I’m serious,” Tikki said through a mouthful of crumbs that spilled on Nino’s lapel. “You should be more honest about your feelings.”

“Says the bugmouse who has been soul-bonded to a talking cat her entire life,” Nino mumbled. “Not that easy…”

“He’s been pretty clearly crushing on your alter ego so you know he would be open to-”

“A relationship with his best friend?” Nino said, sighing and scratching the back of his neck. “There’s a lot of moving parts where he’s concerned and I don’t really want to take a chance and make it weird, y’know?”

“So you’re just going to spend the rest of your life consumed with romantic desire for your best friend and never tell him?” Tikki asked.

“Sounds like a good plan,” Nino said as a scream came from down a side street. A moment passed, followed by a chorus of more screams as people started running past him.

“Please be a bank robbery,” Nino silently prayed. “Please, please, please be a bank robbery.”

“It’s never a bank robbery and you know it,” Tikki sighed as Nino flipped his hood up and ducked into a nearby alley.

“So much for finishing my homework on time tonight,” Nino sighed, adjusting the silver studs in his ears. “Tikki, transform m-”

Nino trailed off a flash of movement caught his eye. A bright, black and red akuma was harassing a group of people hunkering down near the entrance of a café. At the head of the group, wielding a large patio umbrella like a lance, was Adrien, trying to distract the akuma from the group of civillians cowering behind him.

“That idiot,” Nino groaned. “That handsome, handsome idiot! Tikki-”

“On it!” Tikki said, disappearing into his earrings and transforming his clothes into the familiar black and red spotted cowl of Ladybug. Latching on to a nearby lamp post, Ladybug kicked off the sidewalk, swinging around a parked van for momentum as he kicked hard against the side of the akuma that was shredding Adrien’s lance to pieces.

“What are you doing?!” Ladybug said, batting away a long, sharp claw with the end of his yo-yo. “You need to get off the streets!”

If Adrien was flummoxed by the sudden arrival of his hero, he didn’t seem to show it. “I was trying, but these people were getting cornered and-”

“You were gonna fight the akuma all by yourself?!” Ladybug said, ducking another attack and riposting with a swift flick of his yo-yo that knocked the akuma ass over teakettle into the street. Taking his chance, Ladybug ducked back, wrapping an arm instinctually around Adrien’s waist. “Come on; we have to get you out of here!”

Amidst Adrien’s cries of protest, Ladybug latched his yo-yo on the ledge of the roof, yanking the pair of them up and onto the ledge of the rooftop. The akuma followed, claws outstretched as Adrien’s batted him away with a well-placed kick in the noggin that sent him tumbling into a dumpster across the street.

“Are you okay?” Ladybug asked, setting Adrien down on the roof.

���I’m fine,” Adrien said, brushing himself off. “You need to get going; that akuma is chewing up anything that gets in its path.”

“Not until you’re clear of all this!” Ladybug insisted, scanning the horizon for another place to latch his yo-yo on to.

“I’m fine; you should be more worried about them,” Adrien said, nodding down at the crowd below. “I can handle myself!”

“With what; a beach umbrella?” Ladybug said, head swimming as he remembered the way the akuma bore down on Adrien. “I can’t fight this thing and worry about you at the same time!”

“A superhero is supposed to be concerned with everyone; not just one person!” Adrien insisted.

“I’m not!” Ladybug blurted out before he could stop himself, heart hammering in his ears as Adrien recoiled a little bit. “I know; I know I need to be the Boy Scout who’s worried about the greater good and-and ‘Paris as a whole’ and all that stuff but…I’m not. I wish I was but…I can’t think straight if I think you’re gonna get hurt.”

Adrien was quiet, brows knit together as he stared at Ladybug for a long moment. Then, without warning or preamble, he grabbed the lapels of his black hood and kissed him square on the lips.

It lacked any of the grace or perfection Nino thought it would have; in fact the first thing Nino registered was pain as Adrien’s nose bonked against his. But the fact that Adrien’s lips were so imperfectly pressed against his was enough to obliterate most rational thought from Nino’s mind for the few seconds they kissed.

Air and rational thought returned in a blur as Adrien pulled back, licking his lips as his cheeks flushed a deep shade of pink.

“Go save the day and I’ll treat you to dinner tonight,” Adrien murmured as Ladybug’s brain slowly rebooted enough to process that Adrien was asking him on a date.

“Uh…h-hold that thought?” Ladybug said, stumbling backwards and flipping off the roof on to the head of the akuma. “I-I’ll call you!”

Adrien watched, heart hammering in his ears as Ladybug wrestled the akuma to the street.

“I’m gonna vomit,” Plagg gagged, poking his head out of Adrien’s collar.

“Just shut up and transform me,” Adrien said, pulling his cell phone out. “Hello, Mrs. Cesaire? This is Adrien Agreste. I was wondering if there’s a table for two at Le Gran Paris’ restaurant for the evening…”

He was going to have to figure out some way to thank Nino for inspiring him to take charge.

[thejustinmarshall]

Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog

One afternoon last August, a delivery truck rolled up outside my house in Denver. Two men got out, dollied a large box through the front door, unpacked a 6-foot long wooden workbench top and gave it a once-over to see if it had been damaged in shipping. I signed for the delivery, carried the wood and accompanying metal legs back to a 10-foot by 10-foot room at the back of our duplex, and put it all together.

A few minutes later, I dusted off my hands and stood in front of it: the first real desk of my outdoor writing career.

I’d been trying to be an adventure writer since 2004, been trying at it full-time since 2012—and I’d never had a place to set my laptop, pile up notebooks, stick post-it notes, or leave a printer plugged into a wall outlet. I’d typed in coffee shops, at friends’ kitchen tables, in the back of a van, at my own kitchen table, at airports, laundromats, anywhere I could when I had to. But now. A desk, in its own room. I must be a real writer now, right?

It’s funny how your definition of “real” changes.

—

In the spring of 2004, I had decided I was going to be an adventure writer. Not immediately, but someday. I had discovered Mark Jenkins’ columns in Outside, read Daniel Duane’s El Capitan book (despite never having climbed or seen El Cap), and tore through Jon Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams and Into the Wild. The model I understood from those writings—going on big adventures and writing stories about them—seemed like a dream job, although I had no idea if it was an actual job, or how a person could get that job. I did my master’s thesis at the University of Montana School of Journalism on peak bagging, and as a requirement for my magazine writing class, I had gotten published—an article in IDAHO Magazine about a road trip I’d taken the previous summer. The check for the article was for $40, or would have been, had I not asked the editor to please send me $40 worth of copies of the magazine instead, because I was so excited to have been published. It was a start, I thought. A slow one, but a start nonetheless. At $40 per article, I’d have had to write 233 articles each year just to crest the poverty line in 2004.

So I needed a real job, too. I applied at newspapers with no luck, so I got a job on the sales floor at the Phoenix REI to work while I sent out resumes and made calls to prospective journalism employers. I finally got a full-time editor/reporter/copy editor job at a small suburban weekly newspaper, and stayed on working part-time at REI.

In my spare time, I pitched every outdoor magazine I knew of, writing query letters that almost without fail resulted in rejection letters sent back to me weeks or months later. It was like walking up to a sport climbing crag, trying a route, falling after clipping the first bolt, failing to climb any higher, and moving on to the next route and repeating the process, with nothing to show for it. For months.

In my second year of pitching stories, I made $75 from one article. I moved to Denver to work at a small newspaper—but on the side, I kept pitching any outdoor publication I thought might pay. Almost all of them sent me rejections. In late 2006, John Fayhee at the Mountain Gazette liked a story I sent him enough to publish it and pay me $100. In mid-2007, I got a part-time job writing funny 100-word blogs for an outdoors website, at 15 cents a word, 2 to 3 blogs per week.

I kept working day jobs, first at the newspaper and then at a nonprofit that took urban teens on wilderness trips. After work, I obsessed over rock climbing routes, logistics of road trips I could take during my time off or over three-day weekends, read adventure books and magazines, and checked out guidebooks from the public library. I kept writing and trying to get published, chipping away at that idea of becoming a real writer.

I finally got a small assignment from a big magazine. I would interview a guy named Fitz Cahall, who had a podcast called “The Dirtbag Diaries.” I did the interview, wrote the 400-word story, sent it in, and … months later, I hadn’t heard from the editor. I checked back a couple times, and somehow the story had gotten lost in the editor’s spam folder. It never ran.

From the interview with Fitz Cahall, I held on to one part of his story: Fitz had wanted to become a magazine writer and had some success at it, but magazines weren’t interested in what he thought were his best story ideas. So he wrote them anyway, recorded them, and made them into a podcast—his own thing.

I ended up writing and recording an episode for The Dirtbag Diaries in mid-2008, starting a years-long relationship with Fitz and Becca Cahall. And, in late 2010, I followed Fitz’s thinking and took my rejected ideas (or ideas that were so ridiculous I’d never even pitched them) and started my own blog. In December 2010, I paid $12.17 for the URL Semi-Rad.com, and started writing short blog posts. I published the first four of them on February 2, 2011, and shared one of the posts with my few hundred Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

The first month, I published four blog posts, one every Thursday. My friend Josh Barker had told me that a regular publishing schedule would keep readers interested, so I decided to write one blog every week until something happened or I got sick of it. The first month, my blog got 646 page views. Not exactly setting the internet on fire.

The next month, I got 1,810 page views. The next month, still posting every week, 2,085 views, and then 1,506 views the month after that. It went like that for a while. I wrote about pumping your fist out the window of your car at the start of a road trip, about the amount of beer you should pay your friends back with after they did a favor for you (like letting you borrow gear or digging you out of an avalanche). I wrote about not buying new gear just because you can. Steve Casimiro from Adventure Journal reached out and asked if I would be interested in him re-posting some of my stories on his website and referring traffic back to me? Fuck yes I would. In October, I had more than 12,000 views. That December, Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times asking consumers to not buy Patagonia jackets if they didn’t need them, so I made a few knock-offs of their design, around other environmental issues. It took off, and that month, I had almost 30,000 page views. More importantly, I had survived 11 months of writing one blog post every week. So I kept going.

—

After almost six years of trying, I started getting magazine assignments, starting in early 2011 with a story I’d been pitching and had written for Climbing Magazine. I started writing more stories for them, and eventually a monthly column—which was titled Semi-Rad, like my blog. Over the course of the next few years, I wrote short and long pieces for almost every magazine I’d wanted to—a gear review here, a short piece in the front of the book there, the occasional feature story. Sometimes I loved the result, sometimes the magazine and I had different goals, and once my name actually got spelled wrong in my byline (not in an outdoor mag, but a men’s magazine doing some outdoor stuff). In mid-2013, I was working on an assignment for an outdoor magazine, and the editor said that when I was writing the feature story we were discussing, I should “imagine if you were writing about it for your blog.”

By the time I’d gotten to write for a few of the outdoor publications I’d always wanted to, I started to realize things were changing, for me and for everyone. In 2004, I’d wanted to write magazine feature stories, Jon Krakauer- and Daniel Duane-style—but in 2014, lots of magazines were shifting resources to online content, and often (but not always) decreasing resources devoted to publishing long features. Gone were the days (that I never experienced) of travel budgets and high-four-figure/five-figure story payouts—the kinds of things that “real writers” had. But the internet, which made life hell for lots of newspapers and magazines, was fantastic for people like me, who could hand-draw a flowchart about pooping in the woods or write a half-serious blog post about how much I hate (but kind of love) running and potentially reach thousands of people—or sometimes, only a few dozen, which happened lots of Thursdays. At the beginning of 2013, I landed a sponsor, Outdoor Research, whose support cosigned my efforts and made sure I had what I needed to keep it going.

—

In June 2014, I was driving around Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs doing research for a rock climbing guidebook I was co-authoring. The year before, I had put large “Semi-Rad.com” decals on either side of my Astrovan, which I was living in, thinking I needed to do that in order to deduct mileage on my taxes.

A car started tailgating me around the scenic loop, flashing its headlights. I wondered, “did I just cut that guy off? Is the van on fire?” I pulled over at the next pullout. The car pulled over, a guy got out, and introduced himself. His name was Willie Bailey, and he was a firefighter and photographer from Tennessee. He had been reading my blog for a couple years, and he had just read the road trip book I had self-published and got inspired to take a road trip himself—which he was on. Right now. We chatted a little bit, took a quick photo, and I got back in my van to drive away, thinking that was a pretty heartwarming side effect of writing a blog post every week for three and a half years.

This would happen more times over the next few years, and it’s not something they teach you in journalism school or creative writing classes: if you put a little bit of yourself out there and people can relate to it, sometimes you get to meet people you’d otherwise never meet, and hear a little bit of their story. And you don’t get that in every job.

—

There’s no monetary reward to having people you don’t know talk about some goofy thing you wrote, and it’s not a Pulitzer or National Magazine Award. But it was something I hadn’t considered when I started writing—that the weird shit I posted on my blog, which falls flat sometimes and makes it a little way around the internet some other times, could also become a piece of dialogue between friends. That not only do they laugh at the joke—which is all you hope for when you’re trying to be funny—but they laugh again later when they say it to a friend.

In late 2014, my friend Jim Harris wrote me an email from a bed and breakfast in Punta Arenas, Chile. He had been sitting on a couch around a wood stove with a group of people who were on their way to Torres del Paine when one of the group “started quoting your ‘Obsessive Campfire Adjustment Syndrome’ piece and the rest of the group filled in other memorable lines. I think they’ve memorized in a way I can only claim for a few Monty Python bits. Even 10,000 miles from home, the world’s a smallish place.”

—

Late last Monday night, I sat in my kitchen hand-writing thank-you postcards to the folks who support my creative efforts on Patreon, and realized my blog at Semi-Rad.com had turned 8 years old a few days before. I turned 40 last month, which means I’ve been writing Semi-Rad posts every week for a fifth of my life. If each blog was 500 words long, that’s well over 200,000 words written.

Since I started eight years ago, I’ve been able to successfully explore other ways to make a living besides writing a blog—public speaking, directing short films, writing books, drawing cartoons, and of course, writing for other publications. Some weeks I wondered if I should keep doing the blog, and some weeks it felt like no one read the blog at all.

But I had a place to write where no one told me what I could do and couldn’t do, for better (often) or for worse (hopefully not quite as often). I had a place to write an obituary for my friend Mick, who wasn’t a famous adventure athlete, but who I still quote to this day. I had a place to write about my mom, who climbs at a gym in Iowa, and my dad, who doesn’t climb at all, and about my friend Abi when she finally summited Mt. Shasta last summer. I wrote a story about my friend Nick’s rabid obsession with getting himself an old Trek 970 back in 2010, something he’d forgotten about until I reminded him last week. I don’t know if those stories would ever have gone anywhere if I hadn’t just done them myself, without caring whether 100 people or 100,000 people read them. (And let’s be honest—it was a little closer to 100).

Every once in a while someone asks what the word “Semi-Rad” means, and I explain that when I started the blog, I thought there was already plenty of outdoor media coverage of elite climbers, skiers, runners, and other record-breakers. I wanted to focus on the rest of us who love the outdoors—the things we have in common. I think those things are valuable too, and often ridiculous and worth laughing at.

If you ask any writer how to get started, I think you’ll get countless variations on one piece of common advice: Start writing. You just make yourself do it, even if you’re not sure if it’s any good at first. Writing is a lot like digging a hole in the ground: You only make progress after you actually start.

The one thing I’ve learned from making myself write something every week is this: You can’t hit a home run every week. Maybe you can’t hit a home run every month. But if you keep writing, sometimes you bunt, sometimes you strike out, and sometimes you get a walk. But if you get to first base, there’s someone out there who might need whatever it is you wrote, on that day. Even if the rest of the internet doesn’t seem to notice.

In mid-2017, Jonah Ogles, then an editor at Outside, reached out and asked if I’d be interested in having my Semi-Rad blog posts published as a weekly column on OutsideOnline.com. It was an unexpected, but welcome, honor for a blog born out of the fatigue of trying to get my stuff printed on someone else’s platform.

It was a totally different path than my adventure writing heroes, like Mark Jenkins, took, but making a living as a writer has never been straightforward, maybe less straightforward now than ever. If you had told me in 2008 that it was possible to get a book deal by writing really good Instagram captions, I would have said, “What the hell is Instagram?” in the same way if you’d told Mark Jenkins in 1998 that you could get a book deal by writing a blog, he probably would have said, “What the hell is a blog?” We’re all trying to figure it out as we go, whether you’re a publication like Outside or a hopeful somebody who just wants a few people to read your stories, in whatever format.

I don’t pretend to speak for all writers, but I think if you’re a writer and you’re honest with yourself, the thing you want most for your writing isn’t money or some sort of fame, but readers. You want a genuine connection with a few people. I don’t know if I’d say everything has turned out like I thought it would, but I’m grateful I found a small community of people who read some of my stories about all the things we love to do outside. I may not be filing dispatches from a base camp in the Karakoram or anything like the legendary writers I read, but I’ve had a great time trying to make sense of all the weird stuff we do out there—getting cold, exhausted, scared, stormed on, wondering why we do it until we get back home and immediately want to do it all again.

Eight years after starting a blog, and picking up that metaphorical shovel every week to keep digging that metaphorical hole, I still can’t say I know what a “real writer” is.

I do have a desk now, though. So I might as well stick with this writing thing.

—Brendan

The post Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog appeared first on semi-rad.com.

from Explore https://semi-rad.com/2019/02/lessons-from-eight-years-of-writing-an-adventure-blog/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[olivereliott]

Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog

One afternoon last August, a delivery truck rolled up outside my house in Denver. Two men got out, dollied a large box through the front door, unpacked a 6-foot long wooden workbench top and gave it a once-over to see if it had been damaged in shipping. I signed for the delivery, carried the wood and accompanying metal legs back to a 10-foot by 10-foot room at the back of our duplex, and put it all together.

A few minutes later, I dusted off my hands and stood in front of it: the first real desk of my outdoor writing career.

I’d been trying to be an adventure writer since 2004, been trying at it full-time since 2012—and I’d never had a place to set my laptop, pile up notebooks, stick post-it notes, or leave a printer plugged into a wall outlet. I’d typed in coffee shops, at friends’ kitchen tables, in the back of a van, at my own kitchen table, at airports, laundromats, anywhere I could when I had to. But now. A desk, in its own room. I must be a real writer now, right?

It’s funny how your definition of “real” changes.

—

In the spring of 2004, I had decided I was going to be an adventure writer. Not immediately, but someday. I had discovered Mark Jenkins’ columns in Outside, read Daniel Duane’s El Capitan book (despite never having climbed or seen El Cap), and tore through Jon Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams and Into the Wild. The model I understood from those writings—going on big adventures and writing stories about them—seemed like a dream job, although I had no idea if it was an actual job, or how a person could get that job. I did my master’s thesis at the University of Montana School of Journalism on peak bagging, and as a requirement for my magazine writing class, I had gotten published—an article in IDAHO Magazine about a road trip I’d taken the previous summer. The check for the article was for $40, or would have been, had I not asked the editor to please send me $40 worth of copies of the magazine instead, because I was so excited to have been published. It was a start, I thought. A slow one, but a start nonetheless. At $40 per article, I’d have had to write 233 articles each year just to crest the poverty line in 2004.

So I needed a real job, too. I applied at newspapers with no luck, so I got a job on the sales floor at the Phoenix REI to work while I sent out resumes and made calls to prospective journalism employers. I finally got a full-time editor/reporter/copy editor job at a small suburban weekly newspaper, and stayed on working part-time at REI.

In my spare time, I pitched every outdoor magazine I knew of, writing query letters that almost without fail resulted in rejection letters sent back to me weeks or months later. It was like walking up to a sport climbing crag, trying a route, falling after clipping the first bolt, failing to climb any higher, and moving on to the next route and repeating the process, with nothing to show for it. For months.

In my second year of pitching stories, I made $75 from one article. I moved to Denver to work at a small newspaper—but on the side, I kept pitching any outdoor publication I thought might pay. Almost all of them sent me rejections. In late 2006, John Fayhee at the Mountain Gazette liked a story I sent him enough to publish it and pay me $100. In mid-2007, I got a part-time job writing funny 100-word blogs for an outdoors website, at 15 cents a word, 2 to 3 blogs per week.

I kept working day jobs, first at the newspaper and then at a nonprofit that took urban teens on wilderness trips. After work, I obsessed over rock climbing routes, logistics of road trips I could take during my time off or over three-day weekends, read adventure books and magazines, and checked out guidebooks from the public library. I kept writing and trying to get published, chipping away at that idea of becoming a real writer.

I finally got a small assignment from a big magazine. I would interview a guy named Fitz Cahall, who had a podcast called “The Dirtbag Diaries.” I did the interview, wrote the 400-word story, sent it in, and … months later, I hadn’t heard from the editor. I checked back a couple times, and somehow the story had gotten lost in the editor’s spam folder. It never ran.

From the interview with Fitz Cahall, I held on to one part of his story: Fitz had wanted to become a magazine writer and had some success at it, but magazines weren’t interested in what he thought were his best story ideas. So he wrote them anyway, recorded them, and made them into a podcast—his own thing.

I ended up writing and recording an episode for The Dirtbag Diaries in mid-2008, starting a years-long relationship with Fitz and Becca Cahall. And, in late 2010, I followed Fitz’s thinking and took my rejected ideas (or ideas that were so ridiculous I’d never even pitched them) and started my own blog. In December 2010, I paid $12.17 for the URL Semi-Rad.com, and started writing short blog posts. I published the first four of them on February 2, 2011, and shared one of the posts with my few hundred Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

The first month, I published four blog posts, one every Thursday. My friend Josh Barker had told me that a regular publishing schedule would keep readers interested, so I decided to write one blog every week until something happened or I got sick of it. The first month, my blog got 646 page views. Not exactly setting the internet on fire.

The next month, I got 1,810 page views. The next month, still posting every week, 2,085 views, and then 1,506 views the month after that. It went like that for a while. I wrote about pumping your fist out the window of your car at the start of a road trip, about the amount of beer you should pay your friends back with after they did a favor for you (like letting you borrow gear or digging you out of an avalanche). I wrote about not buying new gear just because you can. Steve Casimiro from Adventure Journal reached out and asked if I would be interested in him re-posting some of my stories on his website and referring traffic back to me? Fuck yes I would. In October, I had more than 12,000 views. That December, Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times asking consumers to not buy Patagonia jackets if they didn’t need them, so I made a few knock-offs of their design, around other environmental issues. It took off, and that month, I had almost 30,000 page views. More importantly, I had survived 11 months of writing one blog post every week. So I kept going.

—

After almost six years of trying, I started getting magazine assignments, starting in early 2011 with a story I’d been pitching and had written for Climbing Magazine. I started writing more stories for them, and eventually a monthly column—which was titled Semi-Rad, like my blog. Over the course of the next few years, I wrote short and long pieces for almost every magazine I’d wanted to—a gear review here, a short piece in the front of the book there, the occasional feature story. Sometimes I loved the result, sometimes the magazine and I had different goals, and once my name actually got spelled wrong in my byline (not in an outdoor mag, but a men’s magazine doing some outdoor stuff). In mid-2013, I was working on an assignment for an outdoor magazine, and the editor said that when I was writing the feature story we were discussing, I should “imagine if you were writing about it for your blog.”

By the time I’d gotten to write for a few of the outdoor publications I’d always wanted to, I started to realize things were changing, for me and for everyone. In 2004, I’d wanted to write magazine feature stories, Jon Krakauer- and Daniel Duane-style—but in 2014, lots of magazines were shifting resources to online content, and often (but not always) decreasing resources devoted to publishing long features. Gone were the days (that I never experienced) of travel budgets and high-four-figure/five-figure story payouts—the kinds of things that “real writers” had. But the internet, which made life hell for lots of newspapers and magazines, was fantastic for people like me, who could hand-draw a flowchart about pooping in the woods or write a half-serious blog post about how much I hate (but kind of love) running and potentially reach thousands of people—or sometimes, only a few dozen, which happened lots of Thursdays. At the beginning of 2013, I landed a sponsor, Outdoor Research, whose support cosigned my efforts and made sure I had what I needed to keep it going.

—

In June 2014, I was driving around Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs doing research for a rock climbing guidebook I was co-authoring. The year before, I had put large “Semi-Rad.com” decals on either side of my Astrovan, which I was living in, thinking I needed to do that in order to deduct mileage on my taxes.

A car started tailgating me around the scenic loop, flashing its headlights. I wondered, “did I just cut that guy off? Is the van on fire?” I pulled over at the next pullout. The car pulled over, a guy got out, and introduced himself. His name was Willie Bailey, and he was a firefighter and photographer from Tennessee. He had been reading my blog for a couple years, and he had just read the road trip book I had self-published and got inspired to take a road trip himself—which he was on. Right now. We chatted a little bit, took a quick photo, and I got back in my van to drive away, thinking that was a pretty heartwarming side effect of writing a blog post every week for three and a half years.

This would happen more times over the next few years, and it’s not something they teach you in journalism school or creative writing classes: if you put a little bit of yourself out there and people can relate to it, sometimes you get to meet people you’d otherwise never meet, and hear a little bit of their story. And you don’t get that in every job.

—

There’s no monetary reward to having people you don’t know talk about some goofy thing you wrote, and it’s not a Pulitzer or National Magazine Award. But it was something I hadn’t considered when I started writing—that the weird shit I posted on my blog, which falls flat sometimes and makes it a little way around the internet some other times, could also become a piece of dialogue between friends. That not only do they laugh at the joke—which is all you hope for when you’re trying to be funny—but they laugh again later when they say it to a friend.

In late 2014, my friend Jim Harris wrote me an email from a bed and breakfast in Punta Arenas, Chile. He had been sitting on a couch around a wood stove with a group of people who were on their way to Torres del Paine when one of the group “started quoting your ‘Obsessive Campfire Adjustment Syndrome’ piece and the rest of the group filled in other memorable lines. I think they’ve memorized in a way I can only claim for a few Monty Python bits. Even 10,000 miles from home, the world’s a smallish place.”

—

Late last Monday night, I sat in my kitchen hand-writing thank-you postcards to the folks who support my creative efforts on Patreon, and realized my blog at Semi-Rad.com had turned 8 years old a few days before. I turned 40 last month, which means I’ve been writing Semi-Rad posts every week for a fifth of my life. If each blog was 500 words long, that’s well over 200,000 words written.

Since I started eight years ago, I’ve been able to successfully explore other ways to make a living besides writing a blog—public speaking, directing short films, writing books, drawing cartoons, and of course, writing for other publications. Some weeks I wondered if I should keep doing the blog, and some weeks it felt like no one read the blog at all.

But I had a place to write where no one told me what I could do and couldn’t do, for better (often) or for worse (hopefully not quite as often). I had a place to write an obituary for my friend Mick, who wasn’t a famous adventure athlete, but who I still quote to this day. I had a place to write about my mom, who climbs at a gym in Iowa, and my dad, who doesn’t climb at all, and about my friend Abi when she finally summited Mt. Shasta last summer. I wrote a story about my friend Nick’s rabid obsession with getting himself an old Trek 970 back in 2010, something he’d forgotten about until I reminded him last week. I don’t know if those stories would ever have gone anywhere if I hadn’t just done them myself, without caring whether 100 people or 100,000 people read them. (And let’s be honest—it was a little closer to 100).

Every once in a while someone asks what the word “Semi-Rad” means, and I explain that when I started the blog, I thought there was already plenty of outdoor media coverage of elite climbers, skiers, runners, and other record-breakers. I wanted to focus on the rest of us who love the outdoors—the things we have in common. I think those things are valuable too, and often ridiculous and worth laughing at.

If you ask any writer how to get started, I think you’ll get countless variations on one piece of common advice: Start writing. You just make yourself do it, even if you’re not sure if it’s any good at first. Writing is a lot like digging a hole in the ground: You only make progress after you actually start.

The one thing I’ve learned from making myself write something every week is this: You can’t hit a home run every week. Maybe you can’t hit a home run every month. But if you keep writing, sometimes you bunt, sometimes you strike out, and sometimes you get a walk. But if you get to first base, there’s someone out there who might need whatever it is you wrote, on that day. Even if the rest of the internet doesn’t seem to notice.

In mid-2017, Jonah Ogles, then an editor at Outside, reached out and asked if I’d be interested in having my Semi-Rad blog posts published as a weekly column on OutsideOnline.com. It was an unexpected, but welcome, honor for a blog born out of the fatigue of trying to get my stuff printed on someone else’s platform.

It was a totally different path than my adventure writing heroes, like Mark Jenkins, took, but making a living as a writer has never been straightforward, maybe less straightforward now than ever. If you had told me in 2008 that it was possible to get a book deal by writing really good Instagram captions, I would have said, “What the hell is Instagram?” in the same way if you’d told Mark Jenkins in 1998 that you could get a book deal by writing a blog, he probably would have said, “What the hell is a blog?” We’re all trying to figure it out as we go, whether you’re a publication like Outside or a hopeful somebody who just wants a few people to read your stories, in whatever format.

I don’t pretend to speak for all writers, but I think if you’re a writer and you’re honest with yourself, the thing you want most for your writing isn’t money or some sort of fame, but readers. You want a genuine connection with a few people. I don’t know if I’d say everything has turned out like I thought it would, but I’m grateful I found a small community of people who read some of my stories about all the things we love to do outside. I may not be filing dispatches from a base camp in the Karakoram or anything like the legendary writers I read, but I’ve had a great time trying to make sense of all the weird stuff we do out there—getting cold, exhausted, scared, stormed on, wondering why we do it until we get back home and immediately want to do it all again.

Eight years after starting a blog, and picking up that metaphorical shovel every week to keep digging that metaphorical hole, I still can’t say I know what a “real writer” is.

I do have a desk now, though. So I might as well stick with this writing thing.

—Brendan

The post Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog appeared first on semi-rad.com.

[patejustesen4-blog]

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[thecosydragon]

My latest blog post from the cosy dragon: Interview with Emi Louise Croucher (Part 2)

An Interview with Emi Louise Croucher (Part 2), author of The Butterfly on Fire

Did you miss Part 1, where Emi introduces herself? If so, you’d better go back HERE now!

Everyone has a ‘first novel’, even if many of them are a rough draft relegated to the bottom and back of your desk drawer (or your external harddrive!). Have you been able to reshape yours, or have you abandoned it for good?

The Butterfly on Fire is definitely linked, in some ways, to a draft I started a couple of years ago for what would have been called Serendipity. It was similar in its narrative structure; in that it followed the stories of a few different lives and linked them all up together at the end. I think what stopped me from completing that old draft was the fact that I was trying too hard and ended up making it all too complicated. That, and of course the fact that I hadn’t progressed through my own personal story, and therein didn’t have the same motivation at that point. Once I realised exactly what I wanted to write about and cleared up in my head what message I wanted to send out into the world, it all fell effortlessly into place. I used the older draft as a kind of reference, and some characters are in their in one way or another, but The Butterfly on Fire sort of grew its own pair of wings and really took off by itself (pun instead!). 

Some authors are able to pump out a novel a year and still be filled with inspiration. Is this the case for you, or do you like to let an idea percolate for a couple of years in order to get a beautiful novel?

As above, I am someone who needs to let the idea percolate and I cannot write without motivation. Some of the readers of this debut novel have asked “when is book two coming out? I need to know what happens!?” Unfortunately, I just have no idea. I know I will write a sequel, but until the ideas and the emotions start to flow in the right directions, I don’t feel as comfortable writing. I think a large part of that comes from my protagonist and main characters channelling my inner voice, depending on what different aspect of that character matches my personality.

I admire those who can just start writing without years of pretext, and hope to one day be able to do the same!

I have heard of writers that could only write in one place – then that cafe closed down and they could no longer write! Where do you find yourself writing most often, and on what medium (pen/paper or digital)?

I wrote a large proportion of The Butterfly on Fire at my ex-boyfriend’s house, so I can imagine how problematic it would be to not be able to write anywhere else! Ouch! Sunday mornings would be filled with cups of tea, comedy programmes in the background and the sound of my keyboard clattering away.

The other main location that I found inspiration (and time) to write was on my two hour commute to and from work. That train and bus journey was great for getting out the thoughts and feelings that I had gathered through the day into the book.

Yes, as mentioned above my medium of writing was my small laptop. But that’s not to say I didn’t have tons and tons of paper notes, drawings and hand-drawn maps! In fact, by the time I started editing the novel with E Goulding I had to carry around a full blown A4 folder with all my notes as well.

Before going on to hire an editor, most authors use beta-readers. How do you recruit your beta-readers, and choose an editor? Are you lucky enough to have loving family members who can read and comment on your novel?

In my case I was particularly lucky. I started The Butterfly on Fire whilst I was working at a legal translation company in central London. Within that company there was a proofreading department, and so I approached the lovely E Goulding with my novel when it was about three quarters of the way done. I asked her to give it a read, and if she liked it then would she mind editing it? She ended up becoming a virtual business partner! We then worked together to send specific sections to certain people; friends and friends of friends, when it was ready to be read by the world. One of the main goals we had was to send specific parts to random people (that don’t know me or my story) to see at what point they “worked out” the main part of the narrative. It was great to get feedback from a range of people, as it really brought the book to life. Overall, having a true friend help me edit The Butterfly on Fire will be one of my fondest memories in this entire process.

 I walk past bookshops and am drawn in by the smell of the books – ebooks simply don’t have the same attraction for me. Does this happen to you, and do you have a favourite bookshop? Or perhaps you are an e-reader fan… where do you source most of your material from?

My heart is truly torn with this question. On the one hand, I am a millennial. We breathe technology, and I cannot deny the convenience of having a book I want to read on any device, instantly. It’s just so easy! Life should be easy, right?

But then again, nothing beats the smell of a good book. As an indie writer who is self-published, it is a huge honour to have a physical copy of my very own novel. Every time I see it, I just smile! Technology will overtake and outdate many things, but I think the paperback will be on this planet for as long as the human race is.

So I will have to answer this very carefully! I do buy ebooks, and enjoy the ease of reading on my commute. However, nothing will ever get me to digitalise that old copy of Harry Potter that I use to sleep with under my pillow when I was a child.

I used to find myself buying books in only one genre (fantasy) before I started writing this blog. What is your favourite genre, and do you have a favourite author who sticks in your mind from:

childhood? J. K. Rowling

adolescence? Cate Tiernan

young adult? George R. R. Martin

adult? Still George R. R. Martin (It’s a long series!)

Judging from the above I guess you could surmise that I too only buy fantasy novels. As much as that’s not my intention, the evidence says otherwise! I guess for me, a large part of why I love reading and writer is the escapology. More specifically the ability to be something other than myself and almost pretend to “be” the character I’m reading about. I would be Hermione Granger, or I would be Daenerys Targaryen.

Social media is a big thing, much to my disgust! I never have enough time myself to do what I feel is a good job. The more I think about it, the more I hate it! What do you do?

Again, as a millennial, social media is a necessary evil that we are all brought up with. I admire those people who actively choose against things like Facebook. It must be annoying every time someone asks for your Facebook details!

For me, I have a wordpress blog, and use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (@thebutterflyonfire) to try and promote it. I’m now also on Goodreads, but I’m keeping that in its own bubble for now. I manage them myself and do what I can to keep the pages alive. As a self-published author it’s fully up to me to market the novel, so I have to use social media for that. Whilst this can take a lot of time, I like that I get to keep control of the marketing of this book by doing it myself; as it’s such a personal story that I wouldn’t want to give the work over to someone else.

I spend a good two to three hours a day on checking notifications, coming up with new content and sharing the process of my novel out into the world. Sometimes I spend money on advertising and sometimes I just use word of mouth to get the novel out there as well.

I hope that my social networking is helping towards getting The Butterfly on Fire known in the world, and if not then I need to re-think what to do going forward!

Answering interview questions can often take a long time! Tell me, are you ever tempted to recycle your answers from one to the next?

I personally try to answer every question in the state of mind and emotions that I’m feeling at that time. I’m a true believer in the notion that everything happens for a reason. So, things that happen may change how we feel, and I see within myself very frequently that I feel differently about things as I get older. This is all coming from the 25 year old me though, and as time goes on I may just rely on the copy and paste buttons when I have toddlers running around and dinner to cook!

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