#On that note this folio topic is good because I get to make so many silly doodles

[soft-serve-soymilk]

Daydreaming about arc 4 again…

[benefits1986]

A Very Bad Good Girl x Rewind

Cinema is said to be a reflection of one's nation and its people. I say, any decent film is also a Mirror of Erised that's either too crass or too classy.

One of the reasons why I took up communication research is to deepen my roots on how frameworks are engineered and optimized to fit my current stance. It's not about the shiny badge of UPDi, it's just me being perpetually curious.

One of the things I did over the long holiday break is to randomly check content as I've been too out of touch. Of course, I'd definitely choose Ooku: The Inner Chambers over A Very Good Girl, however, I'd need to immerse myself in local mainstream films, because, one of my very few GCs is poppin' rainbows about an upcoming debrief. Kidding aside, it's my attempt to immerse in the perspective of my "audience of one" when it comes to work. Yes, work. More so, films are very easy access passes to what the pulse of the nation is, even when I'd have to yawn and laugh dryly so many times while at it.

In line with new stories for 2024, let me share my thoughts and feelings about A Very Good Girl. Alert: Spoilers incoming; however, I'd list down the stuff I gathered instead of lambasting and praising it straight up.

1 The male gaze is currently severely butchered but it's still a butch or femme butch scene, after all. Sorry, not sorry. I'd like to see an unapologetic ultra femme era of films in my lifetime, to be honest.

2 Women in films are on their way to find their safe space without sacrificing a safe space for all. Being immersed in feminism and postmodernism, the truth is that you can't advocate for safe space if you aim to silence the males in any social setting. As a reformed radical feminist, I'm still learning this ground. It's not easy, but it's for the greater good.

3 This film talks about how this country is still ruled by familial ties and feudalism.

4 Production and tiny details make or break the story even when your audience of one is but a passerby or a stranger.

5 While the film tackles the power struggle of females, the subtext I'm getting is that it's a class act involving the Philippines and her people. LOL. Money, fame and power are means to make you appear convenient; but, in reality, everything has a floor and a ceiling you can't escape nor evade. The poor and middle class clamor for these three pillars, however, it's all about being good even when you and the rest of universe make really, really bad choices each time.

Side Note: Sana lang, 'wag masyadong antagonized ang rich and poor masyado. 'Di naman kasalanan ng mahirap na mahirap sila in the same manner na 'di naman kasalanan ng mayaman na mayaman sila, right? And I think that this film has made a decent commentary about this topic.

6 As the media is silenced, harassed and policed with literal and figurative machineries, films are more experimental and more vibrant and dull, all together.

7 Scripts and deliveries do not exactly co-exist; but, I'd like to believe that we're probably off to better heights.

8 The agenda setting and unmuting the muted groups may be lost in translation because the dresses and the accessories seem to take the center stage. I know this is an attempt to put forward a more presentable cake to be eaten by the dogs and the underdogs, however, there should always be context so that the audience masticates is better.

9 Research as Paulo Coelho shares in one of his books is super duper integral to any literary work. I also believe that this is what's lacking in most films in the Philippines. 10 After the credits roll, what matters most is the lesson that the audience of one accepts or rejects. Period. Now, the question is: How deep did the film really go?

11 Not all women are meant to be mothers. But any woman can be a mother, so as long as there is a child who's willing or unwilling to be mothered.

12 Being a child is not bound by age, folio or social class. Being a child may be an adult's most "adulting" thing to down.

13 At times, women take too much heat in any kitchen. Asking for help especially when she can't cook is the cross in which women crucify themselves. This bit hits home a little too much, but hey, that's the truth, the hard pill I am downing, currently.

14 This film seems to be an attempt to shed light on dramatic and tragic-comedic existentialism. OPAK. Ako lang naman 'to since bias ko 'yan e.

Is there such a thing as a signature Filipino film style? This is something that I've been searching for since my biases are European or Japanese films. It's actually tough to answer a yes, but saying no seems tougher. There are a good number of films like Sakada, Serbis, Cuchera, Ekstra, Pamilya Ordinaryo, Nerseri, Posas, Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, Engkwentro, Moral, Anak, That Thing Called Tadhana and Muli that have a strong sense of what the Filipinos are made of. In the same manner, these films seem to remind me of foreign films at some level. I try my best not to compare, however, I guess that I'd have to be more forgiving in my next viewings.

More so, regional films are yet to be highlighted as I know so well that our culture beyond Manila is so rich, pure and worth the budget. As one of Anthony Bourdain's visits to PH says it, we are not even regional; we're archipelagic. I'd like to witness a Philippine cinema scene where there's a vibe of pride about the mundane. I'd like to move beyond fake resiliency, sex sells, more sex sells more even when the lighting and editing is really trashy. I'm hoping to see our own theater arts mold our film dreams, hopes, and fears.

---

I'd also like to share that dad watched Rewind and shared the whole story with me this morning. I told him that before he starts, I am on the verge of telling him to skip it the movie and his sharing, because it's gonna be a blood bath; however, this is me, letting him be.

Of course, he didn't bother checking the trailer and the reviews. And so, he gave a blow by blow account of this movie's story. In between bashing and laughing with him, he told me that he's been a very bad dad, all this time. He even enumerated the missed attendances because he was "too busy" with work that's actually manageable. He further confessed that he could have been more present in our lives when we were growing up instead of growling like a beast even at our slightest hiccups. He shared that he'd be more than willing to go back in time to make bawi for his misgivings. I flatly told him that he's not giving... giving up, now and until his forever ends, eventually.

It felt as though he's on his Walk of Shame era with a dog cone and butt naked as he goes around the UPDi Ikot and Toki route. But, I tried my best not to get too bored and tuned in. His sharing lasted for almost 45 minutes, I think.

I chuckled and told him several times that it's his first time to be a dad, a parent; so, naturally, things are always on beta test mode. He told me that if he could rewind our past, he could have chosen to give up his dear life for mom to live longer. He meant what he said. This broke my hypothalamus in the same manner that it gave me a piece of peace that I'm aiming at.

I joked him: Dad, 'di ka naman magso-sorry 'di ba? He said: Alam mo naman tatay mo, iiyak, pero 'di magso-sorry. Me: Sus. OK.

I breathed deeply and told him that everything happens for a reason and that I'd like him to be with me for a long while, perhaps, longer than my original ask. I'd like him to let go of the past and should we talk about the good, the bad, the pretty and the ugly, may those be parts of healthy kwentuhans and batuhans. I'm also sure that this is no longer about mother dragon's smirk alone. This time around, it's about me and him and my brother making it together and emerging better.

Ah, January 3, you're something weird, wonky and wonderful! Perhaps, one of the things I'd see in the Mirror of Erised is dad and I biking around Japan for two straight weeks. LOL. Huy, tigil mo na 'yan, back to regular programming ka na in a few hours. Let's go!

[natastudies]

Hey. I hope you are good. I’m currently studying Law at uni and I’m really struggling with note taking. When taking your notes for Law, what do you focus on per topic? Because I don’t really have a focus but then I end up writing too many things down. I understand we need to have a general overview of the topic as well as case notes, but I feel like if I had a better understanding of the notes I need to take for each topic (e.g: Actus Reus and Mens Rea in Criminal Law). Can you help me a bit pls

Hi anon! Hope you're good as well ☺️

I'm not sure if this will help, but here's what I did with my notes. I make a lot of notes for each topic and before the exam period I'd combine & summarize them all into a piece of paper. Since the professors would usually give us an overview of what we're going to learn in the semester, I'd more or less know what to prepare before class. So:

1. I have a pre-made notes before class where I study the topic very generally to prepare for the class.

2. My notes in class can be separated into two - one for the things the professor wrote on the whiteboard/slides (I take pictures of them when allowed and turn them into notes after class) & one that are simply for the things spoken verbally. (also included the questions/prompts that the professor asked the class, from my experience those questions would sometimes appear in exams)

3. Then after class, I'd create another note of the cases or anything the professor asked us to read or learn about related to the topic we discussed (or anything they referred to in class that I didn't know or understand).

Not sure about your uni, but in my uni we didn't have like, recorded classes or anything. So to me the most important things to write down on my notes were always the words spoken by the professors, because it was a direct insight of what's in their minds, their way of thinking, etc. So I'd say prioritize that first over the rest, especially if you're allowed to take pictures of the slides/the slides would be distributed after class. (or if you're one of those unis that have the lectures recorded)

Anyways, there are definitely too many notes, and honestly I think sometimes there are just too many things/information we have to absorb that it couldn't be helped. It gets overwhelming.

Which is why for exams I'd summarize everything (or at least, the important points) into a piece of paper (most of the time it's A4. sometimes I used folio too). It absolutely cannot exceed the piece of paper, so I used tricks like acronyms, or made a ridiculous story from the keywords (Idk how to explain this lol) to summarize them. Then I'd usually have no problem memorizing and understanding everything on the paper.

Preparation notes (pre-made notes) helped me have a better understanding as well because I'd have studied the topic beforehand, so before the class started I knew what I was confused about, so I can ask questions if that particular confusion is not resolved during the class (I rarely ever do this, though).

If you're looking to have a better understanding, try having a discussion with your friends/classmates. Those are really helpful, and I've always find it so much easier to recall something I taught to someone else (or something someone else taught me/helped me with). Also, review your notes. Mark anything you don't understand and resolve them as soon as possible (preferably before the exam period); clarify if there's anything you're unsure of.

Last but not least, it's the matter of organizing your notes. I'd say separate by topic (and class) and then put it in a chronological order. Also have a copy of all the assignments you submitted, I'd usually have a whole database of the list of assignments, presentations or projects from the professors listed along with the dates. That always makes things easier at the end of the semester, before finals.

Honestly, don't worry too much over your notes. Notes are just like a database, or a point of reference. I personally think that there is nothing wrong in writing too much down (since it meant I had all the information I needed for assignments, projects or exams) - it's just the matter of understanding it, making the summarized version, having discussions and reviewing what I've learned that really helped me with my studies.

Welp, that was long. I'm not sure if this helps, but I hope it helped a little. This is simply how I did it, though, so I'm not saying that this definitely works or this is the best method. Just sharing what worked for me.

All the best for your studies, anon! 💌

Ask me anything!

[hopelessromanticspoonie]

Trust

Masterlist here

Characters: Tom Hiddleston and Female Novelist Reader

Summary: Finding just the right actor to star in the movie based on your book wasn't an easy process. And then Tom Hiddleston walked into the room, and he may solve more than just your casting concerns.

Warnings: Alcohol consumption

Word Count: 4.2k (whoops)

A/N: This is based off a request given to me by @yespolkadotkitty! I apologize that I haven’t posted in a long while and that this took a minute to get out, but I hope you enjoy it! ALSO. I know nothing about the film industry. Please ignore what I’m sure are several errors concerning that topic.

“Next!”

“He was really good. You sure you didn’t like him?”

You closed your eyes and dropped your forehead onto your hand supported by your elbow on the folding table in front of you. When you had been contacted by your agent that a studio wanted to turn your best-selling novel into a movie, it felt like a dream come true. A whirlwind of paid flights, lunch meetings, negotiations, and signed contracts led you to your spot next to the casting director, several producers, and director for the movie. You were lucky that they were taking your opinion into consideration at all, and you didn’t want to create waves, but there hadn’t been a man reading for the main role yet that felt right.

From several one-note actors to a few who were way off the mark to those who showed up completely unprepared, nobody had made you feel the gripping tension of the troubled but earnest character of Joshua Collins, the struggling artist and male half of your romantic tale.

“Hello, my name is Tom Hiddleston, and I’d like to audition for the role of Joshua Collins.”

That voice. Sophistication roughened with the barest hint of anxiety and smoothed out by a full baritone that dripped honey. Your head popped up from your hand to take in the sheepishly grinning man in front of you. He was tall, so tall that it took an eternity for your eyes to drag from the worn boots on his feet, up the slim legs expertly encased in blue slacks, over the broad chest that strained at the thin fabric of his light blue button-up shirt, to a face that had to have been sculpted by the finest craftsmen with planes and shadows to highlight his arresting stare.

The lines that he read through with a producer’s assistant sounded as if they came straight from your creative imaginings. He was Joshua. The ability he had to convey such emotion with the tilt of his head, the press of his lips, or even the very act of taking a breath to sustain his speech was enough to render you utterly transfixed. Even the silence that fell over the room as he gathered his thoughts for a response had you tense and gripping your pen until your knuckles lightened as you waited with bated breath for a reply you had memorized before he’d strolled in. But with him it was new, organic, somehow spontaneous and heartfelt and so true it resonated deep in your bones.

And then he stood from the chair he had fallen into with an easy, relieved smile on his face as he smoothed his hand down the front of his shirt. “Thank you all for sharing your time with me today. And, if I may,” he shifted his attention from the studio bigwigs to you, “I absolutely adored the raw humanity in your novel. I hope that I can bring it to life for you.”

The sound of the door closing seemed to break the spell that had fallen over the room. You shared a knowing look first with the casting director and then the director herself.

“Joe, please tell those remaining that auditions have been canceled,” Sam smiled, scribbling something in her portfolio in front of her. “We have our man.”

~

Had you picked up all of the loose bits of trash scattered around your room? Sure, the staff had cleaned that morning, but that didn’t mean that you hadn’t found some way to dirty it since then. Would bottled water be okay? Maybe he preferred coffee. Hotel coffee wasn’t ever the greatest, but it would do in a pinch. Right? And should you have put on nicer clothes? Maybe-

A light, rhythmic knock sounded on your door, stopping your anxious thoughts and making you freeze from where you were bent over making sure the hem of your jeans wasn’t rolled over.

Another knock, and you quickly righted yourself, running your hand over your hair to tame any flyaways as you scurried to the door. Tom stood on the other side, holding two beers in one hand and a thick leather folio in the other.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me before rehearsals begin. May I come in?”

As if anyone would turn down Tom Hiddleston, especially when he came bearing beer. You stepped to the side, allowing him to pass by, leaving behind the very masculine scent of bergamot and citrus in the air that stirred between you. “Of course. You look like you’re ready to attend a class or something.”

He placed everything down on the tiny table meant to be a desk before turning to you with a small smile. His large hands rubbed against his jeans on the outside of his thighs. “Admittedly, I am a bit of a fan of your writing. An avid fan, actually. I was hoping that you wouldn’t mind too terribly if we discussed the book? I want to ensure I fully bring this character to life as you so masterfully wrote it.”

Color you shocked. Sure, you had received plenty of praise for your book throughout this process, the paycheck was evidence enough that it was liked, but to have someone that you personally admired for their own set of talents compliment it was another thing entirely. Working to school your face so that your excitement didn’t show, you grabbed the beer he opened and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Ask away, Mr. Hiddleston.”

Draping his long and lithe form into the faded desk chair, he opened his folio and uncapped a pen that looked more expensive than the entirety of your outfit. “Tom, please. We will be working closely together, and we are neighbors in this hotel as well. Formalities are not necessary.”

“Okay,” you nodded and took a swig of liquid courage. “Tom, what would you like to know?”

Questions and answered flowed easily after a few stuttering moments on both sides of the conversation. You were only struck dumb once or twice from the intensity of his thoughtful stare, and you found yourself both grateful and saddened when it would leave you to focus on the copious notes he scribbled down in the folio on his thigh. You’d never felt so heard as to when he watched you ramble on about plot points and motivation and character development, with his hand rasping against the five o’clock shadow that darkened his razor-sharp jawline and his brows furrowed.

Only when you stifled a yawn behind your hand did he seem to pull himself from the focused notes he had been taking after you explained a more difficult aspect of Joshua’s past. He glanced at the leather-strapped watch on his arm, frowning. “I do believe that I have kept you up far too late. I apologize. I should be going so that you may rest for overseeing rehearsals tomorrow. You will be there, correct?”

“I think so, yeah. Unless I’m needed for consultation on a last-minute script change, I think that’s where I’m supposed to be. I’m not really sure how all of this works,” you admitted with a light laugh.

He walked with you to the door after tossing both his and your bottles in the trash and gathering his things that had spread out over the desk. “If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask. I know how overwhelming all of this can be. Until then, I very much look forward to seeing you. Goodnight.”

The clasp of his hand on your shoulder was heavy, stretching across your skin with a pleasant warmth that you wanted to curl into and bask in forever. You reached up and patted his hand gently before opening the door. “Goodnight.”

Sure enough, when you watched him head back to his room in the hotel meant to house you for the entirety of the filming project, he disappeared into the room directly next to yours.

The faint scent of his cologne lingered on your clothing as you ducked back into your room to prepare yourself as best as you could for the unknown journey ahead.

~

In all your days, you’d never met someone as motivated and driven as Tom. When he wasn’t rehearsing, he was exercising, or building comradery between the cast and crew that he would be spending the next year with, or even, to your astonishment, spending time with you.

It had begun under the guise of him delving deep into his character with you over beers and room service. Then it had switched to other books in your catalog, and then, when you had begged off any serious thinking because you’d spent all day arguing with the writers, it changed into something more personal.

You walked onto set holding two travel tumblers precariously with one arm and your overstuffed binder in the other. A meeting with your agent that morning discussing the press tour preceding the premiere of the movie had gone on longer than expected, and you couldn’t wait to sit down and just watch Tom and the cast act out the inner workings of your imagination over the coffee you clutched. The idea of going for so many interviews and appearances weighed heavily on you. To be the object of so much attention wasn’t why you had gone into writing.

But, perhaps this was.

Tom looked quite frustrated as he talked to Sam, the director, in the middle of the set, about a pivotal point in the film where he admits his love to the female lead (who does not feel the same), and he barely glanced your way as you settled in. His hands flew in front of him with every gesture, fingers spread wide and then clenched tightly into fists at his side. Some conclusion must have been reached because Sam came back to her spot behind the monitors and Tom got into place.

It was obvious to everyone that something was off. You especially, as the dialogue didn’t fit what you had written with the screenwriters for the scene. After the cameras stopped rolling so Sam could talk to Tom once again, whose performance had been stilted and unnatural, you turned to your assistant with a frown heavily etched into your skin. “Was there a rewrite?”

She didn’t even look up from the email she was typing away on her phone. “Yes, ma’am. Just given to everyone this morning. I sent it to your email.”

Groaning quietly, you slipped your coffee and belongings into pockets on the sides of your chair and stood up, holding Tom’s tea in your hand. When you caught his eye you raised it in the air and he nodded. He could come get a drink from it when he had a moment.

That moment came much faster than you expected. He held up one finger to Sam, and you barely caught him plead, “Let me take a drink before we run it again,” before he jogged over to you.

“What’s going on?” you asked, offering him the steaming tea and crossing your arms over your stomach.

He took a deep drink and sighed, closing his eyes to savor the flavor and moment of peace before opening them to look wearily down at you. Irritation lived in the lines between his brows and in the press of his lips together. “The rewrites simply don’t feel like Joshua. I don’t feel as if they line up with his motivations. I-” he sighed heavily, dropping his chin to his chest and putting his free hand on his hip.

You stepped closer to him so that he was forced to meet the determined set of your eyes. Of its own accord, your hand reached out and grasped his. He returned the tight grip and your heart squeezed right along with it. Not the time.

“You know him. You’ve brought him to life and fleshed him out into a fuller being than my words ever did. I-”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re immensely talented,” he interjected.

“I’m not. I’m praising your talent. I’ll go fight Sam if I have to, to just get one take like it was written before they changed it. That’s all I can probably get you. Can you do it?”

He took a bracing sip of his tea before handing the travel mug back to you. Gratitude reflected in the stormy blue of his eyes. “I can. Thank you.”

And then he jogged off back to the set, speaking quietly with the female lead, Mary, about the plan. Which left you to face Sam, hopefully, to throw around what little bit of weight you had. In all honesty, she could put a stopper on the whole situation and force Tom to follow the rewrites. But he was watching you with such hope and support that it bolstered your confidence enough to set down his drink and go over to her.

“What’s going on?”

Sam was a fierce woman, having clawed her way up through the ranks to get her position, and it was easy to want to cower under the steel of her stare. Taking a deep breath, you held out your hands at your sides. “The rewrites aren’t working, Sam. He knows it, Mary knows it, and I know it. Can we just try it the way it was written before? Even if it doesn’t work like we hope, then he’ll have gotten it out of his system and we can move on with shooting.”

She studied you, pinning you to the spot as you tried desperately not to fidget while waiting for her verdict. She maintained eye contact when she shouted to the remarkably silent cast and crew, “One take with the old lines and blocking.”

The knowledge that your reputation was very much on this decision weighed heavily on your shoulders as you nodded your thanks before heading back to your chair. Getting situated, you cradled your coffee in your hands and inhaled the calming aroma as you watched everyone scurry around to get ready for the slight change in blocking and places.

And then action was called, and tears pricked at the corners of your eyes as Tom’s heart was broken and shattered into a million pieces at Mary’s rejection. The anguish he expressed through ragged breaths and glistening eyes was enough to make you want to run from your place and gather him into the safety of your arms in a futile attempt to put him back together. The scene went on naturally after it was meant to finish, Sam not calling cut, and he collapsed into a heap on his knees and ripped the sketchbook before him to shreds before letting out a scream of pain that would haunt you for the rest of your days.

“Cut.”

An intern ran onto the set and handed Tom several tissues, which he took with a watery smile. Every muscle in your body tensed as you waited for Sam’s reaction.

“Reset. Tom, take a moment and collect yourself. Frank, make sure that you’re tighter on his face right after she turns him down. Lisa, good idea on the sketchbook. Get the rest that you have. Good work, people.”

Tom stood up and was instantly surrounded by hair and makeup to fix the mess that he’d made of himself with his heartfelt performance. But, over their bobbing heads, he managed to look at you and mouth, “Thank you.”

The happiness and relief that soared through your veins were more exhilarating than coffee would ever be.

~

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Your fingers stilled over your laptop, the words of your latest piece of fiction ceasing in your head at the peculiar sound. Did someone just knock on your wall? Surely the sounds of your quiet music weren’t too loud.

Knock. Knock.

Hesitantly, you twisted in your bed, pressing your ear to the thin beige wall, and rapped against it three times. When there wasn’t an answering knock, you turned around and pressed your back against your pile of pillows to continue tapping away at what you hoped could possibly be another movie brought to life.

And then the same steady knocks sounded on the door to your hotel room. Confused, you closed your laptop and set it to the side, padding to the door in your pajamas. You opened the door with a confused frown to see Tom standing on the other side, holding a covered tray from room service, exhaustion living in the slump of his shoulders and pull on the corners of his mouth.

“On occasion, I find it hard to wind down after filming. Since you’re awake, I was hoping we could share this piece of chocolate cake and chat a bit?”

Suddenly very shy at your mismatched pajamas and air-dried hair from your shower, you blushed, waving him inside. “How can I turn down cake?”

You closed the door behind him and sent a silent prayer to whoever was listening that you had remembered to pick up your dirty clothes from earlier in the day. Turning around, you found Tom sitting cross-legged on the bed, chocolate crumbs on his lips that you longed to clean with your own. “Were you writing? I can leave. I don’t want to disturb you?”

“Nonsense. The ideas are in my notes. I can always make time for you, especially if you ply me with sweets.” You crawled onto the bed next to him and snagged the fork from his hand, taking a bite. “You sure know a way to a girl’s heart.”

His face softened as he nudged your knee with his. “You think very highly of me. On that note, thank you, today, for believing in me.”

“Of course. You are the most talented man I’ve ever met. I trust your gut.”

The rest of the cake was eaten in relative silence, your eyes chasing each other in fleeting glances that had your heart racing in your chest. There was something much more intimate about sharing a dessert in your pajamas, on your bed, than your other late-night meetings in your room. Was it the electric brush of his fingers over yours when you passed the fork to him, or the knowledge that your lips were touching where his had only moments ago? Would he taste like the rich dessert you shared?

Yearning for the charismatic man had grown in you since that first meeting at his audition. How could it not? He was kind, seeking to meet and know every person he interacted with on set. You were not the exception, as your late-night meetings had proved. His intelligence knew no bounds, and you had put it to the test with rousing discussions from everything to literature to current events to Shakespeare to politics. And the fondness that you caught in his gaze from time to time set a warmth alight in your bones that you wanted to live in for the rest of your days. Every brush of his body against yours had you aware of the heat he left behind for hours, and you had long ago imprinted the feeling of his lips upon your cheek in a quick greeting kiss into your memory.

You must have been staring during your descent into your hopelessly pining thoughts, as he was watching you closely with an eyebrow quirked in silent question, when you pulled yourself from your reverie.

“Sorry,” you shook your head, blinking the madness of your wishes away. “Long day. What’d you say?”

“I said that you have a bit of chocolate on your face. Would you like me to get it for you?” he asked quietly.

He didn’t wait for an answer. His thumb brushed against your cheek, sending the smallest shiver down your spine, before he pulled the digit into his mouth. The silence that stretched beneath his darkened gaze held you frozen to the spot. Your face burned where he had fleetingly touched you.

“Were it not for professionalism…” he murmured, a hint of anguish in his voice as his eyes traveled down your face to settle on your parted lips.

How was it possible that you felt like a schoolgirl again? Your heart hammered in your chest so loudly that it seemed impossible to take a deep enough breath to stop your head from spinning. You shifted on the bed, closer to him, peering up at him through your lashes. “You’d?”

He sighed and scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck before lighting it on your face. Holding you still, he leaned forward, pressing his lips against your cheek in a lingering kiss that had your stomach clench in anticipation. Your hands dug into the scratchy duvet beneath you to keep from resting on his abdomen to see if he had the same reaction to the tension that stretched between you like a livewire.

He left one more kiss on your temple, breathing you in and stroking your jawline with his thumb, before pulling away and standing up from the bed with a groan. “You are temptation personified. It would be an injustice to us both if any romantic notions got in the way of your brilliant storytelling. After, though…”

The promise in his lowered voice and the inferno of his eyes was enough to temporarily sate you as you watched him walk out of the door with a shake of his head. Writing for that evening was out of the question as you fell asleep with the remnants of his touch warm on your skin and his cologne perfuming your sheets.

~

“Did you hear the news?”

You turned from where you were scrolling through your phone at the filming wrap party, perking up at the liquid velvet voice that broke through the terrible house music Sam had requested from the DJ. Tom leaned his shoulder against the very wall that currently propped you up, his head tilted to the side in a way that had your belly fluttering like mad.

“News?”

His hands shoved into the pockets of his navy blazer. “We’ll be on the press tour together, for the movie. The studio wanted someone paired up with you that had a bit more experience with such matters, and I volunteered. I guess you aren’t rid of me yet.”

“As if I’d want such a thing,” you admitted with a quiet laugh. Any anxieties that you'd had about making an idiot of yourself for the worldwide press tour were now replaced with doing the very same, but perhaps now you'd be caught ogling Tom while he waxed on about the movie. Or perhaps you'd simply go mad spending so much time with him in close quarters while jet setting across the globe. Was there time for romantic interludes when you were answering the same twenty questions in twenty different countries?

He stood up straight and offered his arm with a cheeky grin, “At the risk of removing the woman of the hour from the party, would you accompany me outside for a bit of fresh air?”

The mischief that twinkled in his eyes was impossible to ignore. You slipped your hand into the crook of his elbow. “Says the leading man of the movie and an actual ray of sunshine. Lead on.”

The bar that they’d rented for the evening opened out onto a busy street that replaced the booming music with honking horns and bustling crowds hurrying home. His arm fell to hang at his side, and he caught your hand with his and laced your fingers together before pulling you behind a bit of greenery out front that hid you from prying eyes both inside and outside.

“Along with attending the press tour with you, I was hoping I could accompany you to the premiere?” he asked, leaned against the roughened brick wall behind him, tugging you closer until you stood in between his spread legs. The chilled wind was most unwelcome at your back, but the warmth of the man in front of you was more than enough to make the stolen privacy comfortable.

Your free hand picked a bit of lint from his crimson sweater before stilling, connected to his ribs by just your pointer finger and thumb, drawn into his heat with the bite of the winter air through your thin party dress. “You know what they’ll say.”

Tom was an incredibly private man, and it might create more talk than he’d want to deal with to show up with a date. You’d love more than anything to spend the evening on his arm, basking in his charismatic glow, but not if it caused him any headache or heartache.

His breath, scented with bittersweet alcohol, fanned across your face as his hand settled onto your hip. That simple touch branded your goose-bump covered skin and had you leaned into him until you had to crane your head backward to meet his tender stare. “That I was chivalrous in escorting the novelist who allowed me the opportunity to embody her treasured characters? That it was very thoughtful of me to ensure that you didn’t feel tossed to the sharks for your first red carpet event?”

With just the drop of his chin, his forehead leaned against yours. “Say yes?”

The nudge of his nose along yours, the rub of his thumb over the thin skin on the back of your hand, the push of his leanly muscled chest against yours with every breath, gave you enough courage to close your eyes and touch your lips to his in the kiss that had been denied you months ago. He groaned softly into your parted lips, releasing his hold on you to press his hands over the curve of your backside so you were flush against him. Fire scorched at your insides from the tease of his tongue and you tumbled headfirst into the passion that he finally stoked to life after it had been smoldering between you for so very long.

“Yes,” you replied breathlessly against his jaw, pulling away to draw air into your tortured lungs, kneading your fingers gently over his rapidly beating heart.

Leaning against him, with his arms wrapped around you so that your face found a comfortable home in the smooth column of his throat, you closed your eyes and gave in to the enticing man that had caught your attention so very long ago. With Tom by your side, and perhaps even in your bed, you were safe in the knowledge that you wouldn’t have to navigate this new world alone.

~~

Tidbit of Tom taglist: @otakumultimuse-hiddlewhore @ladyblablabla

Whole Shebang taglist: @just-the-hiddles @yespolkadotkitty @nonsensicalobsessions @vodka-and-some-sass @he-is-chaotic-she-is-psychotic @myoxisbroken @brokenthelovely @myworddump @polireader @wiczer @littleredstarfish @the-broken-angel-13 @arch-venus25 @xxloki81xx @jessiejunebug @tinchentitri @sllooney @devilbat @vikkleinpaul​ @bouquet-o-undercaffeinated-roses​ @angelus80 @wolfsmom1 @kthemarsian​ @toozmanykids​ @claritastantrum @princerowanwhitethorngalathynius​ @sabine-leo​ @lovesmesomehiddles​ @peterman-spideyparker​ @wegingerangelica​ @bluefrenchfries604​ @catsladen @snoopy3000​ @silverswordthekilljoy​ @villainousshakespeare​ @kitkatd7​

[goodticklebrain]

Q&A August: Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company

They say you should never meet your heroes, but obviously “they” were never enlightened enough to consider Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company a hero. Like many Shakespeare geeks, I was exposed to Reduced Shakespeare Company’s performance of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) at an impressionable young age. Once the DVD came out, I watched it over and over again, soaking up the irreverence and affection for Shakespeare like a sponge. It never occurred to me that I would one day meet the curly-haired pompous idiot in the black pants whose antics had entertained me so much, let alone be lucky enough to call him a friend, but that’s exactly what has happened.

I first met Austin (after exchanging mutually admiring tweets with him) in April of 2016, during their world premiere of William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) at the Folger Library. I was prepared to be utterly starstruck, but Austin was so wonderfully down-to-earth that within minutes I felt like I’d known him forever. Totally lacking the pomposity and idiocy of his stage persona, Austin was overwhelmingly encouraging and supportive of my work, immediately welcoming me to play with him in the Shakespeare comedy sandbox. I had literally just started working full-time on Good Tickle Brain, so his enthusiasm meant the world to me.

I could gush about Austin for many more paragraphs, but I’m sure you’d rather hear from him, so here he is, my Comedy Fairy Godfather, in his own words!

1. Who are you? Why Shakespeare?

I’m Austin Tichenor, a playwright, director, and actor. I'm the co-artistic director of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, a three-person comic theatre troupe that reduces long serious topics into short silly comedies.

My first exposure to Shakespeare was undoubtedly in the original series of Star Trek! I read Shakespeare in high school English classes and got to see fantastic productions of Shakespeare at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and the Berkeley Reprtory Theatre, but I didn’t get to actually WORK on Shakespeare until grad school where I both played Claudius in a production of Hamlet and reduced my first Shakespeare (it was a directorial exercise: a five minute reduction of Much Ado About Nothing). My first professional theatre job was creating plays for young people so I went to Shakespeare immediately, creating 45 minute cuttings of Much Ado, Midsummer, and The Tempest.

So the opportunity to join the RSC in 1992 and perform its signature work The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) (written by the RSC’s founders) in London’s West End for eight months combined all my theatrical loves: smart silly comedy, non-realistic theatricality, and Shakespeare — which is kinda redundant, now that I think about it

2. What moment(s) in Shakespeare always make you laugh?

My favorite moments are typically when characters make incredible discoveries about themselves, and these are usually comic. Malvolio’s “I am…happy!” Terrible actor Francis Flute fully committing to the moment on “Dead, my dove?” Benedick’s “There’s a double meaning in that.” Hamlet toying with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or telling Claudius he “shall nose” the dead Polonius as he goes upstairs. Olivia’s “Most wonderful!” when the penny drops and she realizes “Cesario” is actually Viola (and Sebastian’s twin).

3. What's a favorite Shakespearean performance anecdote?

I have two!

1) We were performing William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) for the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference — the savviest and most knowledgeable group of people I’ll probably ever perform for, ever. I was playing Richard III and limping downstage to say my first line, one of the most famous first lines in all of Shakespeare. But I was distracted because I saw there were people sitting on the sides and I didn’t want to limp too far downstage for them to see — and in my distraction I said, “Now is the moment of our...” As soon as the word was out of my mouth, I knew I’d blown the line (it’s supposed to be “Now is the winter of our discontent”) and I knew I couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t happened; not in front of that crowd, not in our style of show. So I quite audibly said, “Oh f&$# me,” and limped back offstage to come in again. This time I said the line right and emphasized the first word: “Now is the winter of our discontent!” It brought down the house and everyone asked whether I’d planned it. Sigh…no, I hadn’t.

Mya interjects: I was in the house for this performance and this moment remains one of the highlights of my theatre-going career. What Austin neglects to mention here is that Reed, who had been left alone onstage after Austin had retreated, went over to the wings as if to confer with Austin, and said, sotto voce, “No, I don’t think anybody noticed.”

2) We were performing The Complete Works on a stage that had a little runway that circled the orchestra pit. In one of the scenes, Adam Long (one of the RSC’s founding members) decided to hop over the pit, from the stage to the runway, and he ended breaking the runway floor and falling through the boards. Thankfully uninjured, and delighted that he had this opportunity, he immediately uttered the immortal words, “Don’t worry, it’s just a stage I’m going through."

4. What's one of the more unusual Shakespearean interpretations you've either seen or would like to see?

I’m glad that nowhere in here have you asked what my favorite play is. I don’t have favorite Shakespeare plays, but I do have favorite productions. Here are two:

1) The Folger Theatre at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC’s production of Love’s Labor’s Lost was delightful from start to finish: Incredibly smart, wildly funny, and wonderfully charming. The director and her team made the King’s desire for “a little academe” quite literal by re-creating the Folger Library’s handsome reading room onstage. (I wrote about this terrific production here.)

2) The Chicago Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest, co-directed by Aaron Posner and the magician Teller, turned Prospero into an actual wizard and filled the production with literal magic. (There must have been magic in Shakespeare’s original production as the First Folio has a stage direction that mentions that characters disappear by means of “a quaint device”. Teller filled his production with many quaint magic tricks and devices!) With music by Tom Waits and great comedy from its clowns, it was the most entertaining and completely realized production of The Tempest I've ever seen.

Favorite moments?

When Henry IV (Jeremy Irons) slaps his snotty son Prince Hal (Tom Hiddleston) in The Hollow Crown adaptation of Henry IV, Part 1 taking him (and the audience) by total surprise.

When Francis Flute’s (Sam Rockwell) emotions bubble to the surface unexpectedly in the ridiculous “Pyramus and Thisbe” in the film version of Midsummer.

When Juliet (Claire Danes) stirs and almost wakes up in time to prevent Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) from killing himself in Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet.

When Antigonus (Gregory Linington) distracted the Bear, dooming himself but preventing the death of Perdita, in the Goodman Theatre production of one of my least favorite plays The Winter’s Tale.

5. What's one of your favorite Shakespearean "hidden gems”?

The hidden gem of Shakespeare is actually right out in the open: He’s written incredibly theatrical plays, filled with rich and elusive characters that still fascinate us 400 years later, and even the most serious of his plays (including his Histories and especially his Tragedies) contain more comedy than is generally realized (or pulled off). Shakespeare was a showman whose livelihood depended on entertaining his audiences, so he created plays filled with music, devices, comic bits, fascinating characters, time jumps, changing perspectives, and shifting tones that are always serious (especially his Comedies) but never solemn.

(You don’t ask what my Shakespearean pet peeve but here it is: Productions that lack urgency and ignore the above, as in: Comedies that are beautiful-looking and melancholy but not funny. Histories that ignore the comic chaos that Shakespeare layers in. Tragedies that are one-note, over-the-top, and not in any way believable. Romances that equate pastoral with languid and not compelling. Argh.)

6. What passages from Shakespeare have stayed with you?

Oh so many...

Beatrice’s “Kill Claudio,” which comes seemingly out of the blue and yet is so right.

Falstaff’s honor speech, when done right, in front of a live audience.

And I find Miranda’s “O brave new world that hath such people in’t” just incredibly moving. (I’m always moved by Joy. Tragedy can suck it.)

Mya interjects: “Tragedy can suck it” might be my new personal motto now. Thanks, Austin.

7. What Shakespeare plays have changed for you?

Henry VI, Part 1. Reading it again recently, I was struck by the level of chaos Shakespeare depicts in a kingdom struggling without a ruler. It’s almost like Monty Python meets Veep: Sentences can’t get finished because people are running in and out, declaring “I’m in charge! I’m in charge!” with grand impotence. Of course Shakespeare would write it like that: He needed to entertain his audience, who were probably also nervous about their aging queen who had yet to declare a successor. Shakespeare created a chaotic warning that England shouldn’t descend into that kind of comically dangerous madness again — a warning that wasn’t really heeded, unfortunately.

8. What Shakespearean character or characters do you identify the most with?

Having played so many of them (albeit in reduced forms), that’s a tough call. But because I’m also an actor and a playwright, the ones I probably identify with the most are Shakespeare's seemingly autobiographical ones: Peter Quince, the only (I think) actor-playwright in the canon. Hamlet, the Danish prince with surprisingly strong opinions about theatre’s power and how certain speeches should be played (and how annoying comedians can be). Benedick, who struggles with his writing so comically. Suffolk, who in Henry VI, Part 1 declares, “I’ll call for pen and ink and write my mind.” And Bottom, of course, who thinks he can play anything.

Mya interjects: PETER QUINCES OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

9. Where can we find out more about you? Are there any projects/events you would like us to check out?

I’ve spent the last several years doing incredibly deep dives into Shakespeare, across many media:

My RSC partner Reed Martin and I wrote Pop-Up Shakespeare, an incredibly fun (and useful) introduction to the Bard’s life and works with beautiful, amazing, and funny illustrations by Jennie Maizels.

I contribute monthly essays about the intersection between Shakespeare and popular culture for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog.

My weekly podcast (now in its 13th year) is a backstage glimpse into the life and works of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, featuring interviews with our many comedian, actor, playwright, author, director, composer, dramaturg, and artist friends and many many deep dives into matters Shakespearean.

Reed and I also wrote the definitive irreverent reference book, Reduced Shakespeare: The Complete Guide for the Attention-Impaired (abridged), which is still inexplicably in print (perhaps cuz it’s definitive).

We also wrote the stage play William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) (“An absolute resolute hoot of a bawdy comedy of errors!” Broadway World), which premiered at the Folger Theatre in 2016, has toured the US and the UK, and is available for licensing via Broadway Play Publishing.

And in November 2019, the RSC will perform the international premiere in Israel of our brand new script Hamlet’s Big Adventure (a prequel) — what would happen if Tom Stoppard wrote Muppet Babies. It’s the comedy of the Prince of Denmark!

If after reading all this, for some insane reason you still want to get in touch, come find me here on Twitter. I think Mya will agree that it’s a much more civilized and fun place than its reputation suggests.

(Back to Mya) Thanks so much to Austin for taking the time to answer my questions! If you want to HEAR us actually talking to each other check out:

Reduced Shakespeare Co. Podcast #493

Reduced Shakespeare Co. Podcast #532

Reduced Shakespeare Co. Podcast #653

Q&A August continues next week with two phenomenal women who are using Shakespeare to build the most amazing things.

[maddiviner]

Dzień dobry and merry meet!

We’re all different. What works well for one witch might be a disaster for another. I believe keeping a notebook is useful for most witches, though!

I’ve written a lot about why a grimoire and keeping one can supercharge your magical practice. 

 It’s always going to be something I recommend. While not everyone can or does keep one, it’s always worth trying because for many of us it is so helpful.

The question becomes, though: how? What format should you use for your grimoire or Book of Shadows?

I’ve got an article about different types of grimoires here. Regardless of what style you choose, it can be helpful to keep it organized!

There are many advantages to keeping a binder-type notebook for a grimoire. It allows you to add and remove pages with ease! This means you can create tabbed sections for each Craft-related topic. 

You can then add to each as you see fit, without disturbing the rest. It’s also very easy to find information in your grimoire when you need it!

In the past, I used hardbound notebooks. I loved the Peter Pauper Press line of journals, and the Leuchtturm 1917. Over the past few years, though, I’ve come to appreciate the advantages of the binder system. 

I still use a normal Leuchtturm for my bullet journal. It doubles as my general magical diary and record.  

When it comes to making notes on my research and gathering Craft information, I’ve begun using a binder. It's so easy! You might want to try a similar setup. I definitely recommend it!

Supplies

To start, I purchased a six-ring A5 binder. I chose a coral-colored Carpe Diem binder, because it wasn’t too expensive and I liked the color. 

I chose A5 because it fits the size of my hands and my style of handwriting pretty well. If your hands are bigger or smaller, a different size might work for you. I also like A5 because it is quite portable. A three-ring letter-size binder could work, or even a small personal sized folio.

I filled the binder with dot grid paper.  I chose the dot grid because of its versatility. If you’re sketching, making diagrams, or drawing, the dots make measurement on the page easy. If you’re only writing, they function as lines to keep your handwriting straight and neat on the page, too.

The dots are subtle and not intrusive, too, making any art you might want to do on the pages very clean and visible. Most A5 dot grid paper is prepunched with the six ring holes, and despite this, you can even print on it!

This is good, because it allows me to print longer bits of information or diagrams. Granted, most files aren’t designed for A5 size. Yet, it’s very, very easy to resize something for that format, even if it includes images.

Organization

I added some blank tabbed dividers, labeling them with different Craft-related subjects. There’s one for Tarot, astrology, spellcraft, spiritwork, etc.

If you do this, your dividers would reflect whatever interests you. I recommend sticking to four or five different topics to start with. Any more than that can be overwhelming. 

I've written a bit of study tips for the self-taught here. If you’re a virtuoso who can juggle eight or nine topics without getting overwhelmed, go for it!  

I keep the dot grid paper in the very back of the binder. I add pages from that to the different sections as I finished them.

What to include?

Your grimoire is your own; you can include anything and  everything that you want! I included the following different sections in mine so far.

Blessings, Divination, and Spiritwork

First, I invoked celestial forces to bless this grimoire. Blessing your tools (including grimoire) can be very advantageous. You can ask the spirits and any deities you follow to bless your work. I used to have one of these at the front of mine, but recently ended up writing a separate blessing for each section.

You could devote a section to poetry or prose inspired by the spirits - I do, though I haven’t written much in it recently. Don’t ask me to ever share any of my poems, though - it ended up being very personal!

I devote a sizable part of my binder to writing about the divinatory exercises I do on my own. In other words, it's for notes on my personal Tarot, Lenormand, and scrying sessions. If you do divination, I recommend keeping such a record of your exploits!  I also sometimes keep a dream journal.

Spellcraft Details

Without a doubt, it’s useful to record your own spells and their ensuing results. If you’re starting in spellcraft, you can jot down ideas and brainstorm.

Then, you have a record of the spell’s development from start to finish! This is helpful for refining your approach to spellcraft. It helps you become more effective with it.

If you’re casting spells another witch developed, you can record those, too! Whenever I cast a spell from a book or website, I record it  by hand. I include my own notes on it, and any modifications I’ve made. 

Of course, I also include a citation explaining where I found the spell and who wrote it, too. Credit where credit is due!

The biggest thing, though? Remember to go back and record the results as they manifest. I recommend doing this in as much detail as possible, too. Keeping track of how your magic flows can help you to develop greater finesse.

Print Information

I also print out public domain texts from the Internet to add to my growing trove of information in the binder. If you’re using an A5 binder, you may have to fiddle with formatting on anything you’re printing so that it’ll fit the page. It’s not hard, though!

Many older translations of Classical texts are public domain now. So, you might include that sort of thing! And yes, most printers will print on prepunched A5 paper!

Some witchblr folks will also allow you to print their work, and add it to your personal grimoire. Be sure to check with the person in question first, though! Always keep track of where each piece of information comes from!

For the record, it’s always okay to include spells <INSERT LINK HERE> I’ve written on this blog in your personal grimoire. That is, as long as a) it’s only for personal use, and b) you credit me, even if you’re only printing it for yourself.

Personal Notes on Books, etc

I’m a big fan of taking notes when I read a book, be it a Craft-related one, or even something else. Everyone has a different way of taking notes! My notes synthesize my readings from several different books on the subject.

I took inspiration from studyblr in formatting my notes. That particular tag on here offers lot of great tips for taking notes that are effective, neat, legible and even aesthetic.

I realize the studyblr “aesthetic” isn’t quite the type of thing you’d expect from a grimoire. I like it. I can find things in my notes with ease, they’re readable, and fun to make.

Spawning

This system works well enough for a while. Soon, you’ll find that the binder gets full, unwieldy, and bursting with information. What do you do then?

When it first happened with mine, I wasn’t sure. I tried taking the pages out, tying them with string, and stacking them on my shelf. This turned out to be awful and messy, and some of them got torn.

The trick here is simply to get another binder. Look through the sections in your main binder and find which one is largest. Then, get another binder and transplant that section into it.

Keep doing this as your main binder fills up again and again. You end up with two or three different binders dedicated to different subjects. This is, to me, an excellent way of organizing things, provided you label the binders! It’s wild binder mitosis!

Thus far, my main binder has “spawned” two more - one for astrology, and one for spiritwork. I suspect other sections in the main binder will someday need to move into new binders, too.

In Conclusion

Keeping a grimoire is fun! I definitely recommend it! This article only gives one way of organizing such a grimoire, the one I use. Your methods will no doubt be different. I hope my suggestions above are inspiring and helpful, though.

Stay magical, and blessed be!

[made-from-starlight]

Blast from the Past, or How Not to Write a Query Letter

It has been a WHILE since I’ve been on Tumblr and I’m sorry for the disappearing act. The best news, though? I got a book deal! My YA Fantasy novel, Ash Princess, will be out from Delacorte in Spring 2018 in the US and in ten(!!!) other countries so far. I think everyone who knows me knows that this has been a long time in the works. Eight years, to be exact, from finishing my first book when I was eighteen to selling this one.

Which also breaks down to nine manuscripts. You read that right. Nine manuscripts. In hindsight, most of these could more accurately be called drafts since it took me quite a while to get the hang of editing (and relatedly, asking for help from critique partners and beta readers). So if I could give any kind of general advice, it would be that: get other eyes on your work. Ask for help from people who you trust to be critical. Listen to them and REwrite.

More specific advice? Write a compelling query letter.

One important thing to remember is that agents WANT you to succeed. They’re hoping a query will grab them, they’re hoping they’ll read material they fall in love with. But they also see a lot of queries and writing a query that stands out is a lot of work and often requires several drafts and getting critiques from others to point out things that you might be too close to notice.

I’ve interned at two different literary agencies and at one, my main job was going through the query inbox. At the other, I read submitted manuscripts, which is a topic for a different day. I had already sent my queries for Ash Princess when I started my first internship and shortly thereafter, my agent (the incomparable Laura Biagi) offered me representation, but I learned so much about writing query letters in those months that I wish I’d known years earlier because my queries pre-Ash Princess?

They sucked. You want proof? Behold: the very first query I ever wrote, at eighteen, for a YA fantasy novel in the vein of Gail Carson Levine in all of it’s cring-y glory.

To __________,

  Undoubtedly you’ve grown up hearing fairytales. Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast; classic tales full to the brim of magic, love and happily ever afters for all those who deserve them. Stories about dainty, delicate princesses, peasant girls with their heads in the clouds and heroes that are all charm and no flaws. But in reality, no one is quite so perfect, even in the realm of fairytales.

  Anything, my first full novel, is the story about three girls who live in the fantastical country of Vairleigh. There’s Violie, the blunt, brash and beautiful princess silently rebelling against a life she has no control over, Bindi the Cinderella-esque heroine who has both feet firmly on the ground, thank-you-very-much and more sense than to pine over princes and then there’s Tippa, the wide-eyed, romantic village girl who proves she’s made of tougher stuff than everyone seems to expect of her.

  When Bindi’s mother dies, leaving her orphaned at seventeen, a stroke of fate sends her to the palace on the whim of Prince Lucas, a boy she didn’t recognize a few weeks before when they met at Market Day. Once there, Bindi is ostracized by the other ladies who attend to the princess, ridiculed if she’s lucky, ignored completely if not. She finds friendship in an unusual place, the princess herself who is just as much an outcast as she is, but by choice. She also finds herself falling for Prince Lucas, despite her hardest efforts to be practical.

  After Bindi left her best friend Tippa behind in their village, Tippa relied more than ever on her fiancé Peter, whom she’d been desperately in love with since they were twelve. But when another girl turns up pregnant, claiming Peter as the baby’s father, Tippa finds herself wholly alone for the first time. She makes it through, closing herself off from romance for the pain it had already caused her. But where does that leave Jory, the scar-faced, kind-eyed knight who has been faithfully delivering letters to and from Bindi since she left?

  Violie, on the other hand, needs no one. She’s grown up with only her older brother and his despicable friend, Raif for true company. One day, she knows, she’ll be shipped off to a foreign country to secure an alliance of truce. It’s not a future she’s ever openly begrudged, though she quietly fights it in any way she can. When Raif goes from being despicable to being surprisingly alluring, Violie finds herself unwilling to part from him. Though at what cost to her country?

  Anything tells the story of three radically different girls from opposing backgrounds as they pass into adulthood and learn what love and friendship really mean.

  As stated before, Anything is my first full novel (currently just over 97,000 words), though I’ve written several unfinished stories and a few plays including one that won Critic’s Choice at the Florida District X Thespian Festival. I’m currently a freshman at Savannah College of Art and Design and aspiring to major in Performing Arts and minor in Creative Writing and British-American Studies. Thank you for taking the time to look over this and let me know if you’d like to see the full manuscript.

Sincerely,

Laura Kathleen Sebastian

A couple of side notes: I did not, in fact, end up minoring in Creative Writing or British-American Studies. Eighteen-year-old Laura was an ambitious but lazy creature. Secondly, this query could have been phenomenal and this book wouldn’t have gone anywhere. It was a godawful mess on so many levels, but let’s pretend for a second that it wasn’t. There are so many things wrong with this query alone. I’m also pretty mortified by the names I chose.

The most troubling thing about it isn’t even the embarrassing mess of typos (but check your typos, guys) it’s that there is nothing compelling about any of this. There is no sense of what the characters are working toward or what’s at stake for them if they fail. I don’t think anyone reading this would want to know more and therefore, it’s not a successful query.

The beginning paragraph could, honestly, be cut. It’s cliche and boring and I would bet most agents stopped reading one sentence in. Not that it gets much better after that.

There’s just too much happening here. Now, I had three main characters with different things going on and one of the many problems with the manuscript itself is that there wasn’t really a through-line connecting the stories. The characters knew each other and interacted, but their stories weren’t really connected. As a result, the query was impossible to write in any sensical way.

For comparison’s sake, below I’ve pasted the query I sent out for Ash Princess:

Dear __________,

Theodosia’s mother was known as the Queen of Flame and Fury, but after their country was conquered by seafaring savages and her mother executed, Theo became the Ash Princess. Taken hostage at the age of six to prevent rebellion, she has been ridiculed and abused by the Kaiser and his court for more than a decade. Though she is surrounded by those who use her country’s once sacred magic sacrilegiously, the only power Theo possesses is her sharp, conniving mind. She pretends to be broken and empty-headed in order to survive, but Theo has never stopped gathering intelligence and planning her revenge.

When the Kaiser forces her to execute her last hope of rescue, Theo vows to save herself, even if that means hurting the enemies she’s come to love. She throws herself into a plot to seduce and murder the Kaiser’s warrior son with the help of a group of magically gifted and volatile rebels, but her developing feelings for him and her close friendship with a spoiled but kind socialite blur the line between the naive girl she pretends to be and the shrewd queen she needs to become.

Cornered into impossible choices and unable to trust even those who claim to be on her side, Theodosia must stand on her own as a queen in order to to liberate her people before there is nothing left of her country but ashes.

ASH PRINCESS is a YA Fantasy novel complete at 91,000 words. It is perfect for fans of Marie Rutkoski’s THE WINNER’S CURSE and those who root for Sansa on GAME OF THRONES (but wish she had a little more gumption).

I graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2012 and am currently living in Manhattan and working as a babysitter. Previously, I interned at Housing Works Bookstore and I still volunteer there. I also have a play published with Playscripts, Inc.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Laura Sebastian

Even rereading it now, there are little things I want to change, but overall the query does it’s job. It introduces a main character (Theodosia) and shows what she wants (to reclaim her country) and it makes it clear what’s at stake if she fails (her life and the lives of her people). It also hints at complications that will arise on her journey without giving an overwhelming amount of information right up front. My agent ended up using bits and pieces of this query in my pitch letter and it still lives on in my Goodreads summary. I also can’t understate the importance of good, accurate comp titles, but again, that’s another post for another day.

In an early version of this query, I’d made the common mistake of throwing too many fantasy names of places and people right up front but an amazingly kind agent (Molly Jaffa at Folio Jr) pointed this out early on and my query became instantly better.

It’s worth pointing out that my Ash Princess query is significantly shorter than my first one, but that it accomplishes way more. This is something to think about when you write your query as well. Having seen a query inbox from the other side, I can say that agents do get a LOT of queries and that keeping things concise and compelling is the way to go.

I got no interest at all in my first query, no partial or full requests. For Ash Princess, I got quite a few requests, including one from Agent Laura!

So if you’re currently querying or getting ready to start, I hope this helps out a bit and I’m happy to answer any questions. It’s a rough path, I know. I have email folders with over 200 rejections, not including the agents who don’t reply if they aren’t interested. But hang in there. Write. Rewrite. Rewrite some more. It’ll be worth it, I promise.

[savanahdppadillaim10insuran-blog]

Does anyone know a good insurance company that will insure a young driver on a sports car?

Does anyone know a good insurance company that will insure a young driver on a sports car?

i m buying a convertible with a 1.8 engine i m having trouble finding quotes below 4000, if anyone could suggest some cheap insurance companies that would be great!

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare free quotes :HELP-INSURE.NET

SOURCES:

i m buying a convertible with a 1.8 engine i m having trouble finding quotes below 4000, if anyone could suggest some cheap insurance companies that would be great!

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i m buying a convertible with a 1.8 engine i m having trouble finding quotes below 4000, if anyone could suggest some cheap insurance companies that would be great!

[jeremystrele]

Zoe Meagher · Experience Developer, Museums Victoria

Zoe Meagher · Experience Developer, Museums Victoria

Dream Job

by Elle Murrell

Zoe Meagher works her dream job as an Experience Developer at the Melbourne Museum. Photo – Caitlin Mills for The Design Files.

Zoe with specimens in the Melbourne Museum’s test space for the forthcoming exhibition ‘Inside Out’ for which she is overseeing the experience development. Photo – Caitlin Mills for The Design Files.

Behind the scenes with Zoe, who has worked for Museums Victoria (across their three locations) since 2009. Photo – Caitlin Mills for The Design Files.

Some of Zoe’s amazing notes – she’s an exceptional illustrator – on a visitor experience test cart she had made to assist with prototyping exhibitions and gaining feedback. Photo – Caitlin Mills for The Design Files.

‘When I was studying I didn’t know that this was something I could aim for,’ says Zoe. ‘So I just did the bits and pieces that I wanted to, little by little, and it ended up building into the experience that helped me secure this role.’ Pictured is one of her illustrations from a meeting.

Just going about her day-to-day alongside a gigantic polar bear. Photo – Caitlin Mills for The Design Files.

Zoe and fellow experience developer David Perkins (of Client Liaison music-video fame, they joke!). There are five Experience Developers at Museums Victoria. Photo – Caitlin Mills for The Design Files.

Zoe describes her role as ‘almost like a museum dramaturge’, weaving curation as well as audial and visual element of an exhibition together into an overall experience.

Zoe will often cruise around the Museum testing out her audio tour prototypes. Photo – Caitlin Mills for The Design Files.

Zoe Meagher studied a course that doesn’t exist anymore, to gain a job that wasn’t created until a couple of years ago. The Creative Art graduate’s path to Museums Victoria Experience Developer certainly reveals the dynamic state of the current employment landscape.

An ultimate go-getter, and today’s imperative: ‘a generalist’, Zoe is one of five experience developers at the Museum, and she is currently working on its forthcoming exhibition, ‘Inside Out’.

As part of the project team, Zoe advocates for the visitor, constantly questioning: what does someone actually experience in an exhibition, why should they care, and what’s the best way to communicate the interesting aspects? ‘There is always something cool about an object or topic here, it’s just about finding the key to unlock that for people, and to communicate it,’ she tells, as a 100-year-old taxidermied baby rhinoceros gets wheeled passed, post face-lift.

Today, the 30-year-old schools us on why you shouldn’t wait for an invitation or a big break, but pursue what you love bit-by-bit and look widely for experience and inspiration – such as abandoned Melbourne Airport buildings, Australia’s first supercomputer, or the recently discovered TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, for example.

The talented performance artist and skilled illustrator modestly acknowledges she’s been lucky a LOT, but as we talk, it quickly becomes clear Zoe’s incredible work ethic and enthusiasm have been the drivers of her success, rather than any matter of chance.

At the close of our interview, she struggles to distinguish her future goals from her aspirations for the Museum, as intertwined as they are – the ultimate indication that we’ve really found someone working their dream job!

The most important verb in the get-your-dream-job lexicon is…

Cross-pollinate!

I think it’s really important to look for experience and insight outside of the specific field that you think your dream job is in, because you never know what is going to end up being unexpectedly relevant further down the track. When I was attending university, I was also waitressing the whole time and I remember thinking, ‘this is never going to be relevant to anything I want to do in the future!’. But being able to work under pressure, learning resilience, and how to talk to anyone came out of that.

What all of your experience adds up to is something that is going to be unique to you.

I landed this job by… 

I studied a Bachelor of Creative Arts at Melbourne University, majoring in Visual Media and for my Honours year I wrote on film theory, did some sound design and produced a folio of drawing. It was kind of this Jack-of-all-trades degree, a good mix of theory and practice, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist anymore.

Following university, I started working for Museums Victoria in 2009, in a customer service role at Scienceworks – I was looking for a place that I enjoyed being in, and like so many ‘90s Melbourne kids, I’d had really happy memories their, so it was my pick!

After a couple of years, I moved to customer service at Melbourne Museum, and later into the education and community programs department where I was working on lessons for school groups. Next, I was at the Immigration Museum doing the same work but full-time – so I have the trifecta of working at all three venues! – before taking my current role.

Alongside to all of this, I have continued to work as a performance artist.I really like focussing on little-known historical stories and one project that I did, before I started in my role at Melbourne Museum, was actually at the Melbourne Museum with the support of the Next Wave Festival. It was an audio tour and performance about the CSIRAC Computer, which was Australia’s first digital computer. Through this, I got to know some people working at the Museum – that’s my version of volunteering or interning, making connections and gaining experience.

This position was externally advertised and I was persistent; when I got this job, it wasn’t the first time I applied for it. The first time I wasn’t ready, but then I tried again. I had also done a performance at an abandoned building at Melbourne Airport not that long before the second application, and some people doing similar work at the Museum  happened to attend. They were able to see the relevance of what I was doing in performance, to what I could do in this role.

A typical day for me involves…

It’s always different and it really varies project to project. Usually I will be across a few different projects at one time, but at the moment I am really focussing on the end of year exhibition: ‘Inside Out‘.

I have been working on the audio layer, so the curator and I have been doing lots of interviews with subject specialists from both inside and outside of the Museum. Last week we interviewed an Egyptologist, and later that afternoon a tattoo artist from Preston! Tomorrow it’s an iconic Australian fashion designer.

Getting to interview and meet all those people is really exciting, and then I go away with the recorded audio and figure out how that will fit into the script for the audio layer of the exhibition. I put a very rough edit into the headphones so I can wander around (looking very strange) and test it to see if it is doing the job that we need it to do for the visitor.

In the afternoon, I usually go and sit down with the curators, designers and the creative director and see how all our respective work is fitting together, to see if it is weaving together into a story that we can share with the visitors.

The most rewarding part of my job is…

Having conversations with the people that actually visit the museum, because this means I get to understand our finished product! 

Also getting to collaborate within this organisation is really rewarding; the unique mix of people who work on each individual aspect of a project, makes each one super inspiring and its own kind of unique beast! It’s really interesting to see what can spring out of the unexpected collaborations.

On the other hand, the most challenging aspect is…

…I think, sometimes just answering that basic question of : why should someone care about these things? Because for some of the items we have in the museum, it’s not that obvious. The CSIRAC computer is an example; it just does look like a big metal box with a whole heap of wires sticking out of it, and many people will just work straight past it.

The flip side is getting to seek out the story of a particular thing, through talking to people who really know and love it – the curators, researchers and scientists in the building. Getting to witness their passion, drawing that out of them and feeling that spark too, before working out a way to convey it to the visitor turns the challenge into another highlight.

The culture of my workplace is…

The people who work here are very passionate about what they do, and they bring a whole lot of love to the museum. Everyone is also very supportive of one another, but people are also supportive of one another’s individual aspirations, their interest and passions outside of the museum. Our workplace culture allows people to have their own lives too.

I continue to do my performance art under my art name, Zoe Mars. Recently, I did a little audio tour and projection for the Gertrude Street Projection Festival in collaboration with a composer. It was about the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, which was identified earlier this year. You could download it and stream it, and it was to scale, taking you on the 40 light-year journey from Earth to the TRAPPIST-1 planets over the course of 15 minutes. I also created these projections that were based on 70s sci-fi illustrations, it was a lot of fun.

I’m always…

…sketching on my iPad during meetings. I find it can be a really helpful to storyboard or draw a diagram that communicates an idea or concept. I was also always doing this at school too.

Sometimes I’m doing it so much that it starts to look like I’m not listening, but I am. As I interpret things they just come out the other end of the pencil

My idea of the perfect workplace is…

I think one that encourages playfulness, calculated risk taking and experimentation, but also one where you get the opportunity to collaborate with lots of different people, I think that is really so valuable.

Practically speaking, a workplace where baked good are plentiful.

And also one where the line between colleagues and friends is a little bit blurry. Here, we’ll go out together after work and see theatre or live art shows. And just having that, being able to be friends, makes the workplace much more wonderful. 

The best piece of advice I’ve received is…

…not to wait around for the one big project, or one big opportunity, but instead to dive in and find small ways to start doing the things that you want to be doing. Collectively they will unfold and turn into something bigger. If you don’t, I think there is a danger of always only talking about that big thing that you want to do and never actually getting around to doing it. Then it becomes too intimidating to ever start… ‘Just do it,’ – some wise words from Shia LaBeouf… and Nike, but this advice actually came from my partner Mathew. He used to work in live art too, and is just one of those people with an excellent work ethic who is always doing things and never hesitating, not waiting for an invitation, just going ahead and trying stuff out.

Over the years, the Museum has…

Well, the job I have now didn’t exist three years ago, so that is one big change.

Another one would be the approach to now developing, not just exhibitions or programs, but experiences that mean something beyond just delivering information to people.

I am also really pleased to see a big growth in collaboration with people outside of the Museum, as well as making it much more accessible. There have been really beautiful initiatives over the last couple of years, like The Autism-friendly Museum that provides resources for families who have members on the autism spectrum. Another one called I Want To Go To The Museum, makes it easier for people who would otherwise find it difficult to visit, by assisting with transportation, costs, cultural differences… and just making it more open and welcoming for everyone.

In the next five years, I’d like to…

…find ways to work with even more objects that are currently tucked away in storage. Of our 17 million, only around 1% is on show. I know that there are some really excellent supercomputers that are just waiting for someone to come along and love them – I would LOVE to be that person!…computer history is so so rich, and there is really interesting feminist history with computing as well. A lot of the early operators and programmers were women, because people thought it was a clerical position, and then as soon as it started to get more prestige a lot of women got pushed out of the industry – I could rant about that for age!

The work that is happening here is changing all the time, there are always so many interesting things going on, who knows what’s going to happen in this place over the next five years.

If you had said to me three years ago, ‘You’ll be able to work with virtual reality by 2017!’ There is no way I would have believed you, but that is something that has emerged all of a sudden. The scope for new kinds of technology to affect how we experience museums is really exciting.

I definitely want to continue with my personal art practice. And I want to go and see lots of live art and theatre so I can find ways to incorporate unexpected inspiration from other disciplines into what we do at the Museum!

Melbourne Museum’s ‘Inside Out‘ exhibition opens on December 23rd and runs until February 11th. For more information, visit the website, here.

[perkoform]

By Izaak E. Wolfe

PUPILS OF THE ALCHEMIST- Preface Authors Note: “Life is for those of us whom are already dead, and if you comprehend this notion, then you too must be stuck in the ‘ether’. In unison, many of your pseudo-peers may at once begin to nod their heads, attempting to hurry along whatever point it is that you’re trying to make, because using their own thoughts is usually too mentally taxing. Following an obligatory smile with a nod whilst sprouting gleaming pleasantries such as “oh yeah, I know exactly what you mean!” with not a thought in their skull but what they’re having for lunch. Autonomous white Rabbits full of hollow, all essentially doppelgangers: Clones cut from the same cookie-cutter cloth of which Lewis Carroll pulled the wool over Alice's eyes. The very same rodents that are oft caught ‘running late’ wasting precious seconds digging holes until they fall asleep in one, killing time until they drop. You will come to know them well. The kind of under prepared, over opinionated personalities that might read through every book in an entire library just to get to the end of every sentence, staring through ripe meaning and symbolic psychic puzzles, not to ponder, or provoke thought, and certainly not to explore the realms of scribes and oracles in a place that can never be defined: understanding words merely as distractions, the kind of mind that would buy a bar napkin if it were leather-bound just so they could say they've got it on their bookshelf. These are the dreamers. They rarely, if ever, awaken. I for one, have always been of the opinion that when free from the burden of earthly interruptions the human brain starts to unlock dream like visionary experiences, Deja Voo and insights far more significant in nature and depth than what can be found tossing and turning, blurred by the restrictions of ‘sleep’. " Charles Luna Foxx 2016 

 Chapter One

 “The Heart that told no tales..” My smirk falls flat to molten hell. Disturbed by signs of life, I gasped to earth. “Ughh…” The phone was ringing. You can bet I was ignoring it. My breath smelt like I had spent Valentine’s Day French kissing an ashtray. Finding my own feet stumbling like a rigid rag-doll off my favorite chair; a heavy head was snatched from swollen hands. Temples pounding, Teeth grinding: Last night is stuck on that damned black-box flight recorder… Here, renegade neuro-terrorist’s commit espionage against their own life source. Receptor sites planning to pull the plug on grey matter that is the only thing integrating them with awareness. They will stop at nothing to destroy any and all traces of the last 24 hours. Direct orders from suits in the cerebral cortex were to “swipe magnets on the audio tapes”. Perhaps in the grip of some advanced interrogation, these sadistic rhetorical sabotage methods employed by our hideous obligatory enemies are indeed working, using some of the most effective tools of self-destruction that our hedonistic Universe has to offer, such as Amphetamines and Tennessee Whisky. Memory pulls a blank, and a glance around the study leads me to a solitary conclusion; this hangover is only just beginning to show its putrid mug shot. The stiff neck and near total absence of writing on the pile of pages beneath my jaw seems to indicate that I passed out colder than a corpse in the Arctic. It would not take the likes of “Sherlock Holmes” to conclude that I was neck deep in the narcissistic floodwaters of Moonshine misery, with not a bridge left to burn in my hearts splintered drought. After countless hours awake at the writing desk, with a brain so sore and sorry it all but caved in to intoxicant fueled hibernation: The empty bottle of Jack adjacent to my puddle of drool confirming this hypothesis. I greet today with a smile. A smile so big and fake that hopefully it conceals my gnawing sense of spite for all existence, or at least my dental plan. When I see the light it never hesitates to scorch my prying eyes, so I still wonder why people stare at shiny things like headlights to a frozen deer. Head spinning. Reeking of liquor, don’t know up from left on a compass, so bed ways is right ways right now. In a sloth like manner, I half tiptoe as if my own shadows footsteps were going to stamp out any hope that may be hiding, still virgin to the stench of bitter fate, in the far off shadows of a distant peaceful galaxy. So I tear the blinds shut, eat some sleeping pills, and before I could even say “fuck off world." BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP Slamming my fist against the ‘snooze’ button, I hissed as if there was someone listening: “..YOU KNOW I AM AWAKE YOU SADISTIC TIME KEEPING BEATBOX! Ughh!!”. With my face buried into my pillow, I try and think of one reason why I should get back out of bed. Whiskey is certainly not one of them. If I didn’t have college, I swear to GOD I would have thrown that fucking alarm clock out the window. I must admit, I became extremely depressed and aimless after the death of my father, and even though it was up to me to become the life blood of the family butcher shop (pun intended), I decided to shut the place down. I can barely get to sleep at night, especially not to wake up at 4 30 every morning to chop up bits of flesh and bone, elbow deep in entrails before midday. I couldn’t do it, and after the Dean tuned from a clockwork intellectual to madder than a fuckin’ hatter overnight... I’ve only been attending classes where the new girl sits opposite me. The rest of my lectures I frequently skip to “study” in the dark corners of the universities extensively cluttered library. It is more than coincidence that I have taken up a few of the classes that this enigmatic temptress frequents. From day one, it was apparent that she has an obsessive thirst to master any and all of the subjects she chose, with the outcome or topic seemingly being of a lesser importance to her than that of the process itself. So it was Anatomy, Biology, Chemistry, Taxidermy, Psychology, Latin, Surrealist Art, even the optional extracurricular sessions such as Cryptography and Journalism, 5 days a week. I don’t know why I didn’t drop out and get a job in the town Abattoir, the pay is good, and I don’t have a weak stomach. But I’m glad that I don’t live in that meat hook reality. Not wanting to miss a second of her company, even though we were strangers, I had a cold shower, got dressed, and hurried to the University, with a terrible headache, but the promise of a new day was not yet lost. I was haphazardly piecing together a port-folio, and I look up and our eyes met, and quickly flicked back to our “work”. There it came, and oh my, this was the first time I had heard her voice, and at once I was drowning in Ambrosia honey from the swarming beehive of my mind. “Hello” The beautiful stranger was smiling at me. “Have you seen the golden scarab??” she inquired under her breath, looking almost as if she had asked me the time… “..Oh I.. I.. Uh…I beg your Pardon?” She repeated once more, barely above a whisper. “Have you seen the Golden Scarab?” her eyes locked firmly onto mine. Unsure what she was referring to, shaking my head, “Sorry.” She blurted “Oh never mind. I was making an in joke, ha, I thought you reminded me of someone.. I’m mistaken.. How terribly rude.. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Veruka.” “Miss Veruka Luxx, I can assure you, it’s a pleasure to be met. I’m Arthur Lilly.” I replied, but she was already lost in her workbook, writing fiercely. I could read paragraphs from the corner of my eye, from where I was sitting. The paragraphs were describing in full an artistic process, subconscious snapshots, perhaps an indulgent outburst praising the randomness embraced by the paper game, “consequences”. The “Exquisite Corpse” method was used by William Burroughs and many before him. I overheard her mumbling, something about synchronicity, and something in a language I failed to recognize, whilst preparing a short film required for an assessment. My contribution was just footage of life-prisoners from Alcatraz, back before the rock was broken and became yet another unkempt piece of tourist crap floating in the San Francisco Harbor, I thought it was intriguing, In between 1943 and 1945 surgeons experimented on the murderers of murderers, the rapists of rapists, Lobotomizing the prisoners and then put half of the test subjects in isolation with food and water and half in a cell with a wilting rose in a vase and no drinking water. The lobotomized inmates with food and water refused to eat or drink or sleep until they died, using all conscious energy to claw at the walls.…The other half, refused to watch the rose die, every time the thorns were bare and the petals fell, wilted, the inmates burst into a fit of grief, crying their eyes out until their tears found the cuttings…. and the rose returned to vibrant health, bringing a smile to their face, and that, right there, soppy bullshit aside, the prisoners with roses managed to see the flower through its cycle, like clockwork, when those petals returned, those inmates were found dead with a smile on their face. I liked the contrast, but spliced the footage poorly and overdubbed readings from the novel “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.” Everyone in class was looking through the projection screen behind me with a thousand yard stare, and “Thank you Mr. Lilly. Now Mr. West, Your presentation is up next.” Mr. Peaslee boomed from his desk as I returned to my seat. My eyes were back on the strange Veruka as my new accomplice lent forwards and said softly, “Alcatraz Island has some incredible wildlife, but that rose is one of the rarest in the world….. One of.” I nodded, “There are some divine books on all kinds of sacred ornamental plants in the Vulshwaltz wildlife section, I have to return some after class and choose my reading for the week. Perhaps you would like to join?” I said, as charmingly as possible. She looked me right in the eye “Really?!” she said with a wicked grin. “I’ve not been too welcomed by the other students… I’ve been so lost while trying to get to know the Campus that the Library has thus far been untraceable! I need a new friend who can show me around actually..” Veruka laughed, I was transfixed by lust and just as I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could stumble over even one syllable, the bell rang out and class had been dismissed. “Oh, what!? You haven’t seen the Vulshwaltz Library at all yet!?” “No! I hear it’s like a literary maze though. I’d be delighted to get lost in the ‘History’ section with you anytime you like! If you’ve got no plans for lunch, you could even take me there right now, Mr. Arthur.” Her smile was intoxicating. I grabbed my school satchel, and we walked towards the door. “Well Miss. Luxx, only a fool could refuse such an honest request! Right this way my friend.” And with that, we walked down the corridor. Her pupils were gleaming behind her glasses, but for a second as they caught the light, In my mind, a golden scarabs reflection, scurried away. We stood still for a second as we exited the halls and I took great delight in Veruka’s excitement as it was her first time in this room, seeing hundreds and thousands of books, billions of pieces of peculiar information bursting at the seams. Dusty, leather-bound manuscripts, with instructions to decipher every language and symbol that is of use to mankind and even a few hundred pages of thus far indecipherable ancient tongues or perhaps the quotes of modern day secret societies, encrypted in plain sight. There are countless impressive Libraries in the World, But there’s only one of the “Vulshwaltz Vaults”. The lights hang down from the ceiling in glass flowers, downward like Belladonna Atropa flowers. I’m not sure if the “Deadly Lampshades” are there because of the irony, that old saying that everyone who works in a Library goes “mad as a Hatter”, or simply because the architects of our massive University had some, dare I say, questionable influences? “oh my goodness! Those Nightshade light fixtures are something out of Bella Lugosi’s wet dreams! Ahah!” Miss Luxx grinned in astonishment. “One almost wishes they were real, except for the fact that we would all be dead!” A cold, stern voice hissed back “They ARE real” the voice continued “and you ARE dead precious.” Of course, I knew this voice to be our very own, very proud, and equally VERY strange Librarian, Mrs. Nancy N. Escher LaTrisk. “I’m sorry?” Veruka said slowly. “The Flowers are real. They’re as real as any other lampshades, don’t you know?” Explained Mrs. LaTrisk, taking a sip of her tea “and you must be dead my dear! The last of Mr. Peaslees’s students never got to see graduation because they were all bored to death!” she said, turning the hourglass on the desk in front of her upside-down. “Mr. Arthur Lilly! I was under the impression your mother taught you manners!” Mrs LaTrisk was smiling at me. “OH! Of course! This is my new classmate and I’d have to say I’d take her as a friend over most of the chaps, Miss Veruka Luxx! I see you’ve spotted our humble Librarian, Mrs. LaTrisk!-“ “My name is Nancy Neri Escher LaTrisk, The boys call me Mrs. LaTrisk, But you can call me Nancy darlin’, Seeing as I’ll be calling you by your first” There was an awkward silence, at which point Mrs. LaTrisk drank some tea and exclaimed “anyway, Busy busy, always work to be done..” and she turned her attention to a copy of ‘Hidden Faces’. “oh yes, Mr. Lilly, your order arrived yesterday. It’s on my desk next to the typewriter” A brown paper satchel contained my new copy of ‘The Strange case of Dr. Jeckll and Mr. Hyde’. “Magnificent! Gracious Mrs. LaTrisk” “Righto, Well.. my oh my.. strange woman. Arthur, Is there anywhere we could sit and talk in private?” Miss Luxx blinked rapidly as a cool breeze swept through the room. As we walked deeper and deeper into the cacophonous life sized maze that Mrs. LaTrisk refers to as the “Bermuda of Books”, we found ourselves indeed lost in the history section. Veruka was pointing out a small window in the wall; she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small gold telescope, and beckoned me to have a look, directing my gaze to a plume of smoke funnelling out of a chimney in the most beautiful house on mount Titan. “Exquisite telescope Miss. Luxx, Where did you get it?” I said, intrigued. “Oh this is one of the smaller ones; I have a collection of telescopes in my study.” She looked through the eyepiece “I like to keep the fireplace on while I’m at Vulshwaltz so when I get back all tired it feels like home.” “That’s where you live?” my jaw dropped. “You live in a mansion?” “My grandfather’s in hospital so I’m taking care of the property. You should come and have a few drinks with me tonight. Otherwise it’s just me, the animals, and a big empty house...”

Chapter two 

-Perpetual Vermin in the Illusion of Time and Space- “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.“ I fumbled for notepad, attempting to look as if I were paying attention. The lecture was nearly over, and the bell would allow our dismissal from class no doubt very soon. I sat watching the clock hands go sloooowwwwllllyyy around from the corner of my vision, scribbling on my page a crescent moon, and the more I scribbled, it seemed the lecture were as if I was listening to it from a great distance. The blood drained out of my head, the ceiling pushed towards the sky, along with a room full my peers rendered brain-dead while the tables where they sat began to stretch and contort like a perpetually elongating hallway. A half a minute could last two million years.. Perish the thought. Sometimes I wonder just what exactly Salvador Dali mind had the persistence to remember behind his wild eyes as they observed a slice of camembert cheese melting in the sun. I glance quizzically at the empty chair to my right, “where in the hell is she?” I wondered. Her absence made me oddly uncomfortable. The divine and peculiar Veruka Luxx been my best friend for more than year now, but she remains as much of an enigma as when I first came to know her. Veruka and I, one could rightfully assume, shared a peculiar fascination in what would be most certainly considered taboo by the majority of our society. Veruka has a profound affection for Taxidermy, stuffed and preserved animal corpses, not to mention her absurd obsession for the languages and customs of ancient and lost civilisations. Our interest in all living creatures was naturally mirrored by our fascination for the “process of death”, the afterlife, the before life, and the possibility to reanimate the corpses of the deceased shortly after dying, using a customised injectable solution. We had killed, maimed and also reanimated the bodies of several rabbits, stray cats, rats, and guinea pigs, some even with promising results if the subjects managed to survive the process of animation for more than a few minutes. We have been a tad over absorbed in our little projects recently, and the nature of these experiments warranted my cause for concern. Luxx and I spent nearly all of our spare time engaged in “Staring at the bottom of the fountain of youth”… Yes, I suppose that’s one way to phrase it. Among other things her devotion to the subject of reanimating a multitude of deceased creatures knew no bounds, which fuelled my fascination and desires to assist her secret studies and to cover our trails all the more, from anyone whom might happen to have otherwise stumbled across our secret laboratory. Both Veruka and I were honorary students at the Vulshwaltz University in the town of Atlas, a rather expensive college, with infinite halls, chandeliers, libraries, top of the line science equipment (which we had slowly constructed our laboratory from, one beaker at a time, considering we were so trusted by Dean Allen Halsley himself, that he authorized us to stay behind to clean, autoclave and pack away every single piece of glassware unattended after classes, and the school had so many resources they didn’t appear to even ponder all the bits and pieces of “written off” laboratory hardware that the faculties staff would immediately replace.) Between the windowpanes were the endless paintings spaced perfectly evenly across the tall walls of the corridors, depicting everything from the Salem witch trials, The sun god Ra making his rounds in the minds of Egyptian painters and sculptors, and more typical of a white collar institution, images of decadent Kings and Queens from centuries otherwise mostly forgotten (all of them remarkably pale or blood red in the face, It often bemuses Luxx and myself to liken King Henry VIII’s face to that of a plump tomato ripe to burst. God awful inbred monarchy.) I look up from my scribbling, and she’s standing right next to me snickering at my absent mindedness, I wonder how long she had been standing there? The classroom is completely empty, and the clock tells me that the bell rang out about 15 minutes ago.. “Ground Control to Major Tom!?” She said with a smirk. “It’s time to go” “Where on earth have you been!” I croaked, flustered. “You scared the shit out of me, I thought something must’ve gone wrong” “Well” Luxx rolled her eyes, for a moment I could see my pupils reflecting back at me in hers, and a shiver went up my spine. “I’ve finally tracked down a recently deceased Human subject on which we can test my new formula.. Grab your things.” Her smile was both unsettling and comforting. We cleaned the science room, we cleaned the condenser, separatory funnels, catalyst reaction vessels, test tubes and various beakers, and using the key that the Dean entrusted us with, we opened the Haz-Chem safe, removed a couple of necessary precursors and once the classroom was packed up and tidy, Miss Luxx steered my attention to her unusually playful state of mind. We soaked in the evening as we began heading home bound, the place I had come to know as home, our humble abode, a sprawling property which Luxx was taking care of for her grandfather while he was in hospital. From the dust to the trees which touched the clouds, to the house that we had been using to conceal our gruesome experiments on deceased creatures which we would catch and put to death before attempted reanimation of their cadavers, sometimes yielding no result, sometimes a few unnatural flinches and as with most of our more “fortunate” incidents the creatures would turn rabid and rip their own bodies to pieces, after attacking anything in sight… But we pushed on, Luxx insisted that it was a simple matter of getting the right blend of synthetic compounds into the next formula, and something told me she was right. We left Vulshwaltz by foot, and with every step, the sun would sink deeper into the horizon, until at last we scaled the base of the mountain. It wasn’t long at all before I could see 54 rue du Chateau. The finest piece of architectural indulgence on the whole of the mountain, I bet her grandfather must’ve been proud, having built it by hand, brick by brick, brushstroke by brushstroke. Obviously, it was both mine and Veruka’s favorite place in all of Atlas, except for the Cemetery and the Library at Vulshwaltz. Overcome by dizziness, I was quick to catch my breath but for a peculiar moment, I almost thought these feelings of Deja Voo were rising to my attention as a hint that maybe this, right now, could all be just a dream. Then I remembered that even nightmares are more inviting than what lays in wait. As Miss Luxx explained what would be our plans for the evening, I unpacked our bags and polished a new glass beaker I had stolen for the lab. We headed upstairs for the attic, and my dear friend grabbed a spoon from the kitchen. Like ruby wine in flickers of the moonlight, I watched her lips tremble as she spoke. She weighed out precisely a quarter gram (250 milligrams to be exact) of our new silky powder and mixed it up. Luxx jabbed the needle in my arm and pulled back red, as I volunteered to Ginny pig our new batch of Amphetamine Salts. Suddenly I could feel a lightning storm pounding through my temples, as all of the blood rushed to my head, Luxx gave me a sickly smile, there was no denying we were both high as all fuck and I could not follow most of what she was saying because she was talking so fast and her eyes were utterly intoxicating. She stopped speaking mid-sentence, seemingly out of nowhere grabbing me by the neck and before I could blink she had pushed me up into the corner of the Attic, and with an incredible lust, our lips locked, and tongues entwined. My heart must have skipped a seismic thud, for this is the first time we stepped beyond the boundary of friends, and essentially the first time I had seen Luxx’s passion flare up for anything that still had a heartbeat. “Well, that certainly got your attention. Hah!” She smiled. I was breathless. “Work first, fun later, Hmm?” She looked me up and down. With that, she turned on her heels and took me to the false wall we had fitted in-between the cluttered, dusty Attic, and the hidden door to our surgical laboratory. She opened it and flicked the lights, revealing a lifeless figure stretched out on a long white table. Luxx, I could tell, was getting terribly nervous about something. The recently deceased human subject that Veruka had acquired was a frail old woman, whose face was extremely pale and the shade of blue that her lips had turned indicated that she had been dead since at least this morning. “Well well well! This is charming Luxx! Just fucking charming!” I mocked. The smell of necrotizing flesh was already near unbearable. “And what the fuck happened to her I wonder??” Luxx cleared her throat, “Well, hmm. It has been a long day indeed. Her family live not a great distance from here, I’ve known her son Edward for many years. As I was picking through my books before our late afternoon science class, studying the lineage of Queen Nefertiti when all of a sudden there were tremors on my doorstep accompanied by the deranged howling of what I presumed to be a badly injured German Shepherd. I rushed outside to find the howling was coming from an old woman writhing gruesomely in the mud on my driveway.” Shaking her head, Miss Luxx beckoned for one of my cigarettes. “I recognized the unfortunate Witch as Edwards mother, phoned his uncle immediately to alert him of the situation and ask if I could be of any medical help, as she was by now curled up twitching on my porch, grasping for dear life. He told me that she has been slowly going mad for years and by his voice… Well I could tell it had been driving him to drink, because he was slurring his concerns and at the same time attempting to hit on me. So as the family could not contact a competent doctor because of the particularly fatal strain of Flu that’s becoming somewhat of an epidemic in town recently, and screaming and delusional as she was when she arrived, the old woman appeared to assume an almost catatonic state of consciousness all in a matter of minutes, at the same time I could hear snoring on the other end of the receiver so I furiously hung up and carried her inside to my guest room, soon she was fast asleep after seemingly having made a miraculous recovery from her primitive psychotic episode.” With the upbeat melancholic chirp of a pessimist, I butted in “….And then?????” with an eyebrow raised above a bloodthirsty smirk, almost puzzled by my own sincerest solemn sarcasms, Luxx sighed “Her son Edward was suddenly knocking at the window, he said nothing except that he would stay by her side no matter what… Knowing I could trust Edward not to snoop around the house, I was beginning to ready myself for the back to Vulshwaltz, because I just needed your comforting presence after the intensely unexpected chain of events, by now I knew I was too late for class, but that was the lowest of my priorities. The incident seemed to reach an almost level of calm, but at that exact moment, the phone rang just as I was leaving home…. all I could hear was static noise and maniacal laughing in the earpiece….. Shrugging it off, I hung up just as Edward eerily called to me from the guest room. He emerged looking as though he had already long since mourned for his dear mother’s sanity, almost with a sigh of relief he said softly that she had just then passed in her sleep. I hid my smile behind gritted teeth… Mentioning that his uncle has already drunk away his inheritance, Edward also happened to mention, to my utter delight, that her final will declared that after death, her corpse was to be donated for the purposes of science, and because Edward has been a close neighbor for years, it goes without saying that he had already become well aware of my overachieving at University, The backlog of Anatomical Knowledge that propelled my status from a nerdy exchange student to an ‘Honorary’ Teachers Pet, not even mentioning the Deans trust in my ‘responsibilities’, …anyway, you can guess that it wasn’t very long at all before I had convinced Edward to go home to try and get some rest. He said his farewells under the impression that I had already arranged a hearse to Vulshwaltz’s medical research facility…. But after he left, I just hauled the lifeless bitch upstairs and rushed into town to find you so that we may finally take our experiments to the next frontier of reanimation…. To bring about the strange state of existence known as “Life” back to a completely rigid, non-responsive, breathless human cadaver…… “ The lovely Veruka Luxx burst out into hysterical laughter, unable to wipe the smirk off her divine face. Slightly disturbed, and still unable to stop thinking about Luxx’s soft and tender lips, all the while trying desperately to ignore the smell of the dead woman whom we were about to attempt to bring back from the spirit realm, to once again, in some post-mortal fashion, walk among the Taxpaying, Booze-Addled piles of flesh and bone, most commonly recognized as the “Living”. Apart from not being much good for conversation, the main difference between that of the “deceased persons” and of their more animated, opinionated, compulsively breeding counterparts, the “Living persons”, is simple. One has completed their cycle and has joined the “Land of the Dead” for the rest of eternity, while the other is still absorbed in the comparatively temporary distractions of day to day humdrum human emotions; From Serenity to Fear, From Kinship to Solitude. How fucking poetic. I’m to sober for this. Too much is never enough… My thoughts were racing. The air seemed to be getting thicker… “Hmm… The body’s whereabouts shouldn’t arouse any suspicion as long as no-one else in Atlas knows about her death, and provided her family doesn’t speak to anyone regarding her disposal requests” I said hastily “which I imagine they would not have any need to mention as a casual conversation topic to anyone of importance…. then we’re in the clear… Quick thinking by the way, my darling.. Any fresher and you could skin the fat off her and sell it down the butchers as offal.” I scoffed. Smiling dryly in acknowledgement, her eyes met mine and then looked quickly down at the tip of a .3 ml syringe that she had filled to the brim with a concentrated solution of her new “embalming concentrate” as we had deemed them), and I began preparing a large vein on the side of the woman’s neck for injection, as the solution had to enter the blood stream as CLOSE to the brain as possible. Luxx impatiently yet precisely performed the injection while I checked the cadaver for any vital signs of life. We waited for an hour, and Luxx mixed and injected more solutions into the subjects’ neck relentlessly. Just as we were preparing to admit failure, call it a night, and throw her corpse into the incinerator, without a seconds notice the old woman’s eyes darted open WIDE, and she let out the most ear-drum piercing blood curdling screams, wailing and screeching imaginable, far too unearthly for any human to possibly conjure the sound in their most depraved nightmares, let alone the breathless lungs of the dearly departed. Suddenly the undead subject stood up, froze stiff again, and fell on the floor with several liters of blood rapidly gushing out of her eyes, nose, mouth and ears. I gasped, unable to muster a word, and was frozen with fear. Luxx just shook her head, rolled her eyes and groaned with failure, she snapped. “Fuck.. Fuck.. Fuck… I think perhaps next time we should wait, at least another hour, before re administering the formula. I’ll put the incinerator on so we can dispose of her remains quickly.” Luxx leaned toward me and kissed me on the cheek. I stood, bewildered, horrified, and shivering. “Oh.. What a waste” I blurted, Naturally questioning my beautiful associates mental stability, but as my faith in her was still unshaken by the gruesome occurrence, I began to question my own sanity… As Veruka turned up the furnace to its highest setting, near 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, she hummed along to an unknown yet strangely familiar tune, and the impromptu cremation of our elderly lab-rat was complete…… not much is left of that wrecked atrocity save a red hot pile of ashes. Attempting to appear un-phased by the evening’s festivities, I mopped up ankle deep pools of fresh human blood from our laboratory floor, as thoughts of what consequences lay in wait for us if we were ever to be caught grew steadily more grim and unavoidable, all the while, Luxx’s near total and complete disregard for such consequences proceeded to add entire Galaxies of increasing volatility to the already crumbled fault-lines of rationality and common sense… I was trapped aboard a sinking ship of her obsessions, pulling me into an Ocean of demise that was overflowing with my own poisoned curiosity’s, and it would be Veruka herself, who unwittingly sealed my fate with a kiss…. Run, Rabbit, Run… Because when you’re walking such a very fine tightrope of morality, whilst attempting to survive on a steady diet of endless hedonism, there is simply no time to slow down.. On that note, Veruka and I sat by the fireplace, drinking tea into the morning. Something I can’t shake about the look in the old bats eyes, embedded into my memory, will forever gnaw at me. I’ve seen that soul sucking glare before. For a second I was lost in the void of her pupils, the cry of the storm, and as I looked out from the old woman’s vacant stare, I actually was looking up at myself the moment blood poured from her every orifice. I was shocked, trembling, sweating, and whiter than a sheet. Looked as if I’d seen a ghost, a fucking Kodak moment... With every second, it seemed further in the past, until all I saw was my drug-devouring Morticia Addams, My Venomous Vixen…. Veruka was snuggling up next to me on the rug in front of her fireplace, and I feel her jab another shot of speed into my arm…. No warning…!?!??!!!!!! ….my vision trembles wildly…. Before I could even think, she is laughing and taking off her dress. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine; a vixen, brunette, green eyes and spectacles…. Even with a frozen heart like hers, I’d still be willing to bet my life that she could keep me warm in Hell…..