#also. this inspired me to actually write down my own timeline for the classical age of heroes with heracles and theseus etc

[savrenim]

okay so the writing prompts You have been sentenced to death in a magical court. The court allows all prisoners to pick how they die and they will carry it out immediately. You have it all figured out until the prisoner before you picks old age and is instantly transformed into a dying old man. Your turn approaches. and subsequent story reply passed my dash again and my problem is I have some Real Answers that are living rent-free in my head but I did not want to write several hundred words in tags of clog up the post so guess I’m doing the tumblr thing of ‘make your own post’

but here we go, answers to this question that my brain has thought up and their rankings:

1. ‘Immolated standing right here right now in this timeline and universe by a 12km planet-killer class asteroid traveling at 30km/s as it vaporizes upon contact with the planet, alongside everything else in a ~200km impact crater’  : 3.5/10

So this one gets points for being the classic ‘Taking You Down With Me Syndrome’ in as far as I can come up with in a minute with my fictional life on the line. Also points for: as unavoidable as I think possible to come up? I have specified here and now, so they can’t teleport me to a different planet or time, or similarly to a different multiverse, which really makes no easy escape for anyone else around me. Furthermore, the specification of being a part of the impact crater makes it less likely that it’ll just happen to me in a magical bubble that is killed without it affecting everyone around me; even if it transports everyone else outside of the crater and just kills me in the impact, enough of the planet’s crust will be ejected into the atmosphere from the ‘crater’ part of the request to heat it up upon friction of re-entry enough to bake everything on the planet’s surface, not to mention the superheated rock around that is basically acting like a nuke causing thermal radiation to destroy everything within 1000km, massive shockwave winds, a magnitude 11 earthquake, etc. Explosions like that happen so fast that 1000% this just flat-out Would Not Hurt, I’d be dead before I realized I was dead. All in all, nice generally spiteful way to go, fun wording to deliver, satisfying thing to stare someone in the eyes at their growing horror and describe.

Points taken away for the facts that (a) I do still die, (b) it is possible that the reason that other people have not done this or something like this already is because it’s built into the death curse that it won’t kill other people for you too and I did not word this carefully enough to allow for killing everyone else in the aftermath in which case I’ve just wasted the wish, (c.) this does kill the entire planet and end possible almost every living species and probably every intelligent living species in I’m guessing the known universe unless there are stuff like fae realms that might be safe but destruction on that scale is kind of petty and I’m not totally sure I would want to do it, I do kind of like humanity and all that jazz. seems like a bit of a waste to take everyone down with me in my grand revenge, unfortunately, I’m too flashy to ask for an asteroid just big enough to take out the village, if I’m going to go down it’s going to be in planet-destroying style.

specs for this description are taken from the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs on Earth, which has the advantage that depending on what angle the thing actually hits at, potentially leaving the planet habitable in a couple of hundred thousand years again.

2. ‘By our sun going supernova (at the end of its lifespan)’ : 2.5-6.5/10

So this one gets potentially slightly more points than 1. because it’s just....... interesting. in that there are a lot of options and any of the options are really cool? but also less points bc there are so many options that are SO much more unpleasant. (and yes this is somewhat inspired by Dr Who that was a fucking Iconic episode, moisturize me). but so far as I see it, there are four ways this can go:

(a) The sun just magically goes supernova right now, guess it’s the end of its lifespan because a death curse said so. Takes about eight minutes to hit us, everyone gets killed just like the planet-killing asteroid but tbh in a 10000x cooler manner, all of the advantages and disadvantages of 1 working.

(b) I get teleported into the future to watch the sun go supernova, die very quickly because the sun kills me not the vacuum of space or atmosphere being unbreathable again etc etc, but mostly this begets the question of: assuming that the fantasy planet that I’m on is fairly similar to our own, we are around a G-type main sequence star! Those things don’t go supernova! they don’t have enough mass! which means that I get to watch as a magical death curse attempts to somehow figure out how to make the entire fucking sun go supernova at the end of its lifetime think about what cool science that is!!!!!!! I might die but think of how much data future astromagiphysicists are going to get from this!!!!!

(c.) The Magical Death Curse Does Not Have Enough Energy To Make The Sun Go Supernova And Fizzles Out In Trying, which while it sounds good actually is pretty boring bc they’re likely to just, like, stab me with their swords if it happens. rip me.

(d) answer (b), but instead of teleporting me to the future, I am made immortal until the sun reaches the end of its lifespan and proceeds to go supernova which means that I (6.5) get functional immortality for at least a couple of billion years which is more than long enough to do some interesting shit and probably get tired of being alive and then die in the coolest fireworks display the planet will ever see. points taken away tho (2.5) for not specifying that, like, if I’m surviving until then it’s in a fine preserved manner rather than a fate-worse-than-death manner (rotting like a zombie, frozen in time unable to move but watching everything happen around me, etc).

general points for no matter what happens it’ll be REALLY FUCKING COOL to watch, general points taken away for the lack of control and real range of how shitty the possible outcome might be and that I still die in every scenario here no matter what.

3. ‘In a lich-creation ceremony that turns me into an undead immortal lich’ 6.8-8.2/10

Nice, simple, to the point. Points for: surviving the encounter, it being very difficult for the magic to misinterpret it. Points range for: depending on the rules governing liches in this magical world, it might not actually be that fun to be a lich. Points taken away for: if liches are an established element of this world, they probably know how to kill them, so I’m not out of hot water yet. And also there might be elements of lichhood that are not a completely optimal existence that obviously I would experiment to improve over the course of my new immortality but who knows how easy that would be to do.

4. ‘In a super-special custom lich-creation ceremony powered by my soul and my death that will create a whirlpool of necrotic energy gathering up the life force and magic of everything in its path to power the creation of an indestructible magical object that houses a magical projection of my consciousness that contains continuity of consciousness, memory, personality, the ability to grow and change, allows it to project itself outside of its container as a simulacrum to affect the world, and the ability to gather magic around itself and use said magic, that can sustain itself through any form of energy manipulation either with respect to mundane or magical thermodynamics-slash-entropy-theory, and--’ 10/10

This is the supervillain origin story shit that I’m talking about. Survive the encounter? check. Using a word that the magic recognizes so you have a base for what you’re turned into but customizing for what you actually want? check. Revenge on everyone? check. Easy ability to murder everyone who knows what happened so that it’s that much harder to hunt you down and kill you? check. Avoiding the potential of there being a built-in rule about no directly stating that your death will kill other people here too? check, I never state the whirlpool of magic kills everyone I just make it I can use it to kill them after and tie up all the loose ends to further my own power growth immediately. Ability to watch the sun go supernova? also check; I’m an immortal magical lich now babey I 1000% will use the several billion years that I have to develop our planet’s magical spaceprogram, colonize some other exoplanets, set up a galactic civilization, and then when our sun is dying yeet it into another star so that I get to enjoy the cool fireworks show.

5. ‘By giving up my mortal form and ascending to godhood, bitches’ 115/10

I’m torn bc on the one hand 3-4 are basically just doing this in a more and more specific manner, but on the other hand, oh my god the STYLE, the SNAPPINESS, -100pts for being So Much More Likely To Kill Me but +216 for Okay But Imagine If If It Doesn’t It’s Way Less Stupidly Nerdy Than Very Carefully Describing My Brand New Phylactery As I Try To Come Up With All Of My Ideal Circumstances Of Lichhood

like. I’d probably go for 4. bc I’m careful and want to survive this thing. but I think in my supervillain origin story I will tell everyone that I said 5. better to not give away my weaknesses that way too.

6. ‘By teleporting me 1ft to the left in a completely standard teleportation, retroactively establishing that teleportation in this setting does not in fact move you but actually kills you via disassembling your atoms and creates a perfect copy of you with continuity of consciousness where you ‘appear’’ 7.5/10

Points for: I basically survive the at least implementation of the spell, and I enact abso-fucking-lutely hilarious revenge on everyone but especially all the wizards who have ever teleported by establishing the Existential Beam Me Up Crisis as canon, and probably cause immense socioeconomic damage as suddenly teleportation can no longer be used for people as a quick means of transportation and there are probably a lot of stuffy rich people who will no longer want it used on their goods. Points off for: I am 1 ft to the left and there are soldiers with swords here, while I will get to see the looks on everyone’s faces as this sinks in I will probably still be stabbed and die.

7. ‘By teleporting me to an unknown untrackable safe friendly location outside of the country in a completely standard teleportation, retroactively establishing that teleportation in this setting does not in fact move you but actually kills you via disassembling your atoms and creates a perfect copy of you with continuity of consciousness where you ‘appear’’ 9.5/10

Points for doing everything 6 does while actually saving my life. Points off for not getting to see their faces. Also points off for not giving me free immortal lichhood from it, but not too many points off as I am now free to research and do a lichhood ceremony myself without worrying about a death curse misinterpreting what I want.

bonus: my mutual-slash-housemate’s answer: ‘in the same time, place, and manner that you do’ 6.3/10

sorry it’s good and snappy and points for: combination of either revenge or actually surviving the thing at least for a while, and sheer delivery impact, but points off for not turning a death curse into immortality, zero destruction of planets or stars involved, zero rewriting of the rules of magic, possible body count for your revenge is only one other person, forces you to encounter this person again and die with them which really is something quite intimate for a random imperial sorcerer that you ought to hate the guts of, potentially traps you into an enemy-to-lovers fanfic in which rip now this sorcerer insists on keeping you alive so that they can achieve immortality but that might just be unpleasant locking you in a pocket dimension and not fun tragic star-crossed lovers narrative that you deserve out of it but will lock you in tragic star-crossed lovers narrative otherwise, gives you zero control over time, place, and painfulness of death, and all in all not nearly as flashy or evil as it could have been. and did I mention no immortal lichhood. like come on, if you’re not getting immortal lichhood out of this what are you even doing it for.

[shinneth]

what is your absolute favorite ship? How did you start shipping Stevidot? And rant about any ship you feel like, good or bad? :))

… you fool

OH GOD ALL-TIME FAVORITE SHIP YOU SAY. YOU KNOW DAMN WELL I CAN’T CHOOSE ONE.

(it’d probably be Stevidot anyway; objectively I’ve done more for it than anything else I ever shipped in my life and it’s absolutely precious both in platonic and romantic forms)

BUT IN THE INTEREST OF FAIRNESS… and attempt to tone down redundancy, let’s see what other ships earned the “OTP” label from me!

I mean, I pretty much had to lowkey ship Mamoru Chiba x Ami Mizuno because Usagi/Mamoru is basically what Connverse wishes it could be as far as the Ultimate Ship goes. So at the height of my involvement in the fandom (you know, late 90s era), I was never brave enough to make anything for this ship. But the few times they get to interact in the classic anime is legit adorable stuff and I wish we could’ve had more of it. 

Before Gem Ascension, before Travels of the Trifecta, my greatest multichaptered epic was a Digimon Tamers fic called By My Decision. I was a hardcore Digimon fan in my early teen years well before I ever got into Pokemon, in fact. And I shipped shitloads of pairings in Adventure and 02 - I can only imagine how many of those would be demonized by the new age fandom puritans of Tumblr nowadays. You can actually see literally everything I ever shipped on my FFN profile here.

But I didn’t really make anything for the first two seasons. Tamers was what really sparked my inspiration, because Takato and Jenrya… honestly, they’re just adorable together. They get to bond a lot, they’re really in touch with their feelings (contrasting to token girl Ruki who was a stiff hardass most of the time), and I often got the impression that Jenrya, unlike Takato, really doesn’t have any other friends. 

So of course, I tormented these two on the regular in my story. I of course didn’t forget Juri (for I love her dearly); I was kinda trying a love triangle subversion with Takato angsting over loving both Jenrya and Juri… while Juri’s still got so much PTSD (story is 2 years post-series), shipping is hardly on her mind, and Jenrya’s outright in denial of his feelings for Takato to the point where it very literally screws him up and awakens some inner darkness of his own. I even had Jenrya and Juri bond, but it was pretty platonic stuff. 

Still, this ship was way down on the totem pole at the height of Tamers’ fandom. Very frustrating. Takato/Ruki and Jenrya/Ruki were way more popular and I hated both of those ships something fierce. I love Ruki, but I just cringe at the idea of shipping her with either of her fellow leads. Then Jenrya/Ryo got something of a cult following that I couldn’t stand; admittedly I was jealous it was getting the representation that I felt Takato/Jenrya desperately needed more, and I also didn’t like Jenryo in its own right, anyway. 

But yeah. Jenkato is a very underappreciated ship that I loved dearly and invested many of my teenage years into.

So, here’s a fun fact: While I played the classic games (my cousins had a Sega Genesis), the way I was mostly raised on Sonic was via the first two cartoon series and the Archie Comics version of the franchise. Archieverse was largely based on the SatAM cartoon; Amy Rose also didn’t exist in the show and it took about 25 issues for her to show up in the comic. 

So I was big on Tails x Amy. For a long-ass time. And really, the ship was really only feasible in the Archie continuity. There, Tails is actually older than his usual depicted canon age and Amy is introduced to be around his age before she artificially aged herself with a magic ring so that she could later take on her Sonic Adventure design. 

Before that… in these years, Sally was the most well-known love interest of Sonic in the west. So Sonic/Sally seemed like a lock (none of us knowing how Sega felt about that at the time) - and in retrospect I honestly believe it’s a far better Sonic ship than his more well-known modern alternatives. 

So, because of Sally’s prominence, Amy was relegated to Sonic’s fangirl and her crush wasn’t really that big a deal. Honestly, that was for the best, as I by far found Amy way more tolerable in Archie’s incarnation than the majority of her other canon contemporaries (Sonic the Comic Amy Rose is more of a competent badass, though).

Tails and Amy had some good banter in Archieverse and the few times they were allowed time to do stuff together as a duo, they were very cute and endearing and I loved them. 

Tails also had a lot more going on in terms of character development and backstory in Archieverse. Like, a lot more going on. He even had a “Chosen One” deal that sadly didn’t have a very good payoff, but. It’s more than what they really do with Tails in any other continuity.

Bear in mind, I started on these comics when I was eight or nine years old. Yet I followed this comic well into my late teens and even part of my early twenties, so you can tell Archieverse Sonic has shitloads of lore to it to have that long of an ongoing narrative. 

After Sonic Adventure was released, then the Sonamy shipping started to explode. Amy was front-and-center in the spotlight, Sally became the obscure figure in the fandom, and it’s more-or-less stayed that way ever since. 

But I was like “It’s okay! Tails and Amy are still tight in Archieverse! Sucks they have to adjust to Sega’s many changes but they’re still best buddies who’ll hopefully get married one day….” 

Then 25 Years Later happened and for some goddamned stupid-ass reason, Tails was paired with Mina the Mongoose and I believe Amy was suspiciously never ever mentioned in the future timeline stories (as Sonic and Sally did become endgame in this little series). 

Tails and Mina had little to no interaction, and Mina was largely there to be a potential Sonic love interest, and even after she moved on, she got together with another character and still didn’t interact with Tails. 

I was sooooooo pissed off. Archieverse was my one hope for Tails/Amy becoming a thing and they ruined it for me. :(

I did get a consolation prize in Geoffrey St. John x Hershey becoming so canon they actually did marry. That’s another one I shipped ever since they first interacted years and years ago.

Of course, Hershey was then “killed off” - and was set for a major comeback, but Ken Penders put a stop to that and had them both erased from reality because fuck Ken Penders, I actually got a nice thing and you yanked it right out of my hands.

Genis Sage x Mithos Yggdrasill from Tales of Symphonia, a ship I hardcore loved enough to write about. Also a ship I think Tumblr would burn me at the stake for shipping at all, but you know what? Fuck Genis x Presea. It’s a boring-ass puppy love ship that in its own right should be lambasted similarly according to anti logic. 

…. did I get sidetracked? I did? Pfff. Okay, let’s try and get to another question.

How I started shipping Stevidot?

Pretty simple story, really. I binged SU all the way up to Escapism (Change Your Mind hadn’t aired yet) last December/January. Also watched a looooot of Youtube clips. Most involving Peridot.

And inevitably, most involving Steven as well. 

When I started getting into Peridot and SU as a whole enough to seek out fanfiction and whatnot, I didn’t really have any set shipping preferences at first. But when I made myself think about it… honestly, Stevidot just felt the most natural to me. I wanted to see stories about antics with those two specifically - I never liked Lapidot and Amedot did nothing for me ever. So Stevidot was like, pretty much the only thing I really focused on after a while.

Then I found A Gem Like You. And suddenly, INSPIRATION! I developed headcanons for Watcher’s fic, I started reading as much Stevidot as I could, and I was convinced it was the best pairing in the world and fucking hell I need to give it some representation after I noticed how relatively niche it was in the fandom. 

And so, Stevidot consumed my soul for all time. I hope those clods are happy.

Rant about a ship, you say…

Good god, that really does need to be its own post. I have so much to say about various ships in general, I may need a bit to… uh, figure that out. Or throwing out some random ones I’d know about would help my focus, fff.

[thegeminisage]

hey liz i've been thinking a lot about story structure lately and i wanted your take on how you decide what structure your stories will have? i know there's that "you have to do what your story needs and tells you to do" thing but these bitches dont ever tell me anything they just multiply so. thoughts? - bma

(as an aside, i don't know whether involving medium would change many things but it may be worth considering. mainly i think medium is just a matter of arrangement and that the story would be for most intents and purposes the same no matter how you choose to tell it. i guess you could argue that structure is arrangement in itself and intrinsically tied to medium but i sort of feel like it is secondary arrangement, if at all? like if you consider time as an element to outline -- the time IN the story (how things happen to your characters) is not necessarily the time you’re telling the story IN (how you are telling your reader that things are happening) aka internal chronology doesnt equal your work’s pacing? or should it??? does this make sense? i dont think so. i am sorry.) - bma :|

NOOO dont be sorry ur making total sense

i think there’s 3 thots to unpack here (medium, structure, & chronology) & i’m gonna start with medium bc it’s easier. im also putting it behind a cut bc it’s gonna get just stupidly long and rambly. i’m sorry in advance if it’s not helpful to you, i have a lot to say for someone who has never taken even one single class on writing and as a result doesn’t know jack shit (there’s a tl;dr at the end dont worry)

about MEDIUM: 

so like ok i’m just some goof-off with a HS degree who writes fanfiction but In My Very Super Qualified Personal Opinion, i don’t think that most of the time medium is intrinsically tied to STRUCTURE of the main storytelling arc...i think the art of storytelling itself is distinct from the medium you choose to tell the story IN. this post puts it better than i ever could but basically for me, i feel like the story itself is sort of the raw, malleable concept, and the medium you choose to tell it in is how you convey the information??

like in a book, you can say “she forgot her keys” and in a film you have to show her smacking her forehead, heading back into the house, and swiping her keeps off the counter. you can’t TELL in film, you have to show. similarly i regret every day i cannot perfectly describe a facial expression with words when i see it so clearly in my head. for audio-only podcasts that are dialogue heavy out of necessity you have different limitations than you would for, say, animated music videos with no dialogue at all. games allow for more interactivity and exploration while sacrificing accessibility, tv shows allow for more length while sacrificing, uh, a big hollywood budget...medium affects the kind of story you can reasonably tell which is why some stories are better suited to one medium than another. i think trying things in other mediums is a good way to stretch your storytelling muscles but with enough skill nearly any story could be told in any medium. i think when trying to decide on a medium you just gotta weigh the pros & cons and what you feel comfortable with/what you think would be most effective/what would evoke the strongest reaction

re: structure:

firstly “do what the story tells u to do” is a little silly like...the story isn’t sentient. come on. that’s like “i can only write when the writing gods inspire me” there are no writing gods! inspire yourself! it’s all in our weird messed up brains! ok anyway.

this is, again, just how i do things, and i am 700% self-taught so take it with a grain of salt, but when i sit down and start blocking out a story from scratch i don’t...actually consider the big structure at all! sorry if that’s not helpful to you. i like to make a list of everything i want to happen, and then put it together in a few different orders to see what looks best. and when i’m finished, whatever i have just like...IS the structure i go with, with perhaps minor tinkering to make it flow more smoothly. (i think this might be in the same spirit as “do what the story tells you” with less bullshit and more Agency Of The Writer.)

for long and more complex projects, i actually usually have several lists - one list of stuff that is, for example, the Action Plot (the kingdom has been cursed, i’m tracking down my serial killer sister to bring her to justice, i’m running from djinn who wanna kill my dad, i’m trying to bring my dead not-boyfriend back to life). then i have another list for Character A & Character B’s romance or whatever. and maybe a even another one for solo character development (magicphobic prince learns to love magic, former werewolf hunter figures out his family is a cult, half-demon learns to embrace his own nature). and as many lists as we need for however many Main Characters and or Plots/Sideplots

how i order the lists: individually first. don’t mix them together to start with. when deciding the order of an individual list i like to, for example in a romance arc, use escalating intimacy. “A and B have dinner together” is naturally gonna go way sooner than “A and B kiss” or “A and B talk about A’s angsty backstory” because that’s more satisfying. draw it out, good/important stuff last, dangle that carrot so we have a reason to keep reading! for singular character development, it’s basically a straightforward point A to point B...if i want my guy to start hating magic with everything he is and end up being very comfortable with it, i have to put “reluctantly uses magic to save his own life” WAYYY before “casually using magic to light torches and reheat his cold stew.” 

the tricky part for me is when i’m done with these lists and then i need to mix them together To Pace My Whole Story. (this is usually why i wind up with a rainbow colored spreadsheet.) i don’t like to put too many things too close together because then the pace feels uneven. even if my Action Plot is only a thinly veiled excuse for romance and character development, i still don’t want to focus on a romance for 30,000 words and then go “and oh yeah in case you forgot Serial Killing Sister is still coming for your asses.” the more sideplots and major character arcs you’re juggling the harder it is to get an even distribution, which is my main concern always

and like, generally, whatever i have when i’m finished...is my structure. (sorry.) 

i don’t know much about the classic 3-act or anything like that, but i usually can divide them up into 3-5 big arcs based on story turning points. sometimes i take a scene out of one arc and put it in another because it fits better and i like for my shit to be organized, but usually by the time i’m finished with all that, that’s what the final story is mostly gonna look like. (there have been a few exceptions when i realized i needed extra scenes/changes while i was MID-DRAFT and let me tell you that murders me EVERY time. it happened on the merlin fic i’m currently posting and that was like my own personal hell.)

this is also where thots about chronology come in:

i think time CAN be an element of this if you WANT it to be, but it doesn’t HAVE to be. if you want it to be, i would consider it just another “list” like character development or the romance arc. 

i usually plot without considering Time very much...to me, it’s all down to the events you want to show, and however much time it takes is the byproduct. if you want to show something from a character’s chilhood but then tell the bulk of it when they’re adults, that’s one thing. if you want to show a scene from their childhood, teenhood, young adulthood, etc, that’s a different kind of pacing?? i usually do it this way so i can regard time like wordcount: it takes as long as it takes. 3 days or 3 years, a 1.5k drabble or a 100k epic...overall, my LARGEST CONCERN is that even distribution. in the same way that i don’t want one chapter to be 30,000 words when the rest are 10,000 words, i personally am not a fan of huge timeskips offscreen

(because this where i think someone’s own internal chronology DOES matter...this is just a personal preference, as a reader i have a hard time really comprehending, say, a year timeskip or a 10yr timeskip when all i did was turn one page. like, a year is such a long time. i can’t even begin to describe how different i am now to how i was a year ago. it’s the same for character development. time IS development and as a writer i’m not really comfortable having that take place offscreen - for main characters, at least. it’s just too jarring. a little prologue with something happening 10 or 20 years ago is usually fine, but for the most part, i’m not a fan. ...i can do one chapter per year a lot easier than i can do two chapters in childhood and the other 8 in adulthood. of course you can play with this a LOT with nonlinear storytelling, which is a whole other very cool thing, and someone skilled in their work can keep me sucked in no matter what, but imo if you don’t want to risk throwing your reader out of your work it’s better to keep things steady)

HOWEVER sometimes time IS an element u wanna consider outside of just making sure your shit is evenly distributed...if your heart is moved to tell a story in a specific timeframe, over a year, or from solstice to solstice (this was almost the timeline for my merlin fic and then i changed it), for the first six months of a friendship, or even a huge journey in the span of a single day (toby fox had a lot of success with this one lol).

i think it can help to choose a start and end point for your chronology the same way you do for character development (prince goes from hating magic to being ok with it, story takes place from ages 8 to 25, or from new year’s eve 2038 to 2039, whatever) - that way you can keep your distribution even, if that’s a thing you want to do...even if you have a lot of skips you can still note what happens offscreen to make it work better in your head? like, if you just make it another List, another column on your spreadsheet, when you’re in the early stages of organizing you can be conscious of it and make sure it’s playing into the story the way you want it to

anyway these r my thots im SOOOO SORRY this is so long lmao. brain machine broke today which is why i had to ramble more to explain myself. the tl;dr in case ur brain is melting out of ur ears & u didn’t sign up for an essay:

imo medium is totally distinct from storytelling tho ofc some stories are better suited to some mediums

structure? i don’t know her. i plot w/o regard to structure and then if it looks funny i mush it into a more structurally sound shape

my main concern when structuring anything, including time, is an even distribution of Events and a steady rate of escalation

structure to me is just what i have when i’m finished plotting. i’m sorry one day i’m gonna take a writing class

internal chronology matters to me personally because i have a little bit of time blindness but maybe not to everyone, i know many very successful stories where they disregarded that entirely to no ill effect

writer’s block isn’t real! everyone just needs more rainbow spreadsheets

thank u for asking I HOPE i didn’t make you regret it too badly lmao and that at least a little of it was helpful!! 

[darthstitch]

Castlevania Netflix Season 2 Review: All My Bloody Tears

Yeah. Uh. SPOILERS. MASSIVE GINORMOUS SPOILERS. Consider yourself warned.

I'm kind of a complete mess as I write this because PAIN! PAIN AND SUFFERING! TEARS! BLOODY TEARS!

While it's not without its flaws, the second season of Netflix's Castlevania is incredible and lives up to the promise of Season 1. This, gentlebeings, is how you set up a sequel and leave the audience wanting more, but still walking away satisfied with what we've currently got.

The Good Stuff

The thing about Castlevania - as the game series by Konami - is that it's pretty much a patchwork quilt of everything goes. Think your favorite fan fiction peeve on AO3, the ones with the ten million tags before you even get to the goddamn story. So on one hand, it's got its clear inspiration from the classic Hammer and Universal Horror renditions of Dracula. But the game series is Japanese, so you have your beautiful anime-esque artwork by Ayami Kojima and the obvious anime influences.

I've played a few of the games, but I'm not going to claim gamer-god status. I just play for the fun of it and I don't hesitate to use walk throughs as a map of sorts, basically figuring out where to go, because the general castle layout is set up like a labyrinth and it is INSANE and FUN at the same time. So far, I've played and finished Symphony of the Night and two of the GBA ones: Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow. I'm still trying to master the ones on the NDS. But basically, the premise is the same: You're the hero/heroine, you need to enter the big spooky castle, gather weapons and/or spells to make you stronger and add to your abilities, take down monsters and Major Bads - including Death Himself - and hopefully prevent Dracula from resurrecting and covering the world in Eternal Night. The main timeline basically has Belmonts, assorted Not-Belmonts who also hunt vampires and of course, pretty, pretty Alucard.

Then, there was your AU timeline in which Gabriel Belmont goes to defeat a Big Bad and becomes DRACULA ... and Trevor Belmont is his son, a.k.a. Alucard. Yeah, wrap your head around THAT one.

In short, Castlevania canon is fucked. To quote our Trevor, "Snake-fuckingly insane."

So Warren Ellis does the smart thing and basically picks up what works from the "canon" and crafts a damn good story out of it.

The Disaster Trio that is Alucard, Trevor and Sypha, end up bonding even closer together and spend much of this series in the Belmont Basement...er.... I mean, "Hold," trying to do the game equivalent of gathering spells and weapons to storm the castle with. We learn a few more interesting things about the Disaster Trio. Trevor actually ended up losing his family at a way too young age. Sypha and her people have some pretty "interesting" views about God. Alucard has artistic talents and basically acts his real age, which is a traumatized snarky 20 something year old, who's barely holding on to his composure with his shiny fangs and claws. There are epic moments such as "Treffy" and I would absolutely LOVE to hear the Belmont family story that explains how the hell a book of "penis spells" ended up in the Belmont Family Library.

Seriously. Fan fiction writers, don't fail me now!

Also, Lisa gets a few more minutes to shine and break our hearts at the same time. This is the woman who managed to charm and get one Seriously Scary King of Vampires wrapped around her tiniest finger. She's snarky and sassy as before, but so real, so kind and just basically trying to be a decent person in a Crapsack World. She loves her husband but she knows he can be monstrous. She loves her son but as Alucard himself puts it, she wants him to be able to be himself, be happy and not be overshadowed by his father. Seriously, as long as each season gives us something more about Lisa, I'm gonna be content.

We also get introduced to a few more new characters, who basically make up Dracula's Court of Evil. Hector and Isaac are humans but sociopathic enough to despise their own kind and willing to take part in their death and destruction. They both have their requisite tragic and abused pasts. Hector, however, has an element of naivete that makes him an easy target for the machinations of Carmilla, the only general in Dracula's court who's figured out which way the blood's flowing and wants to make sure she comes out on top. Isaac, however, is somewhat the mirror of Alucard himself. This is the guy who gives his unconditional love and loyalty to Dracula and refuses to abandon him no matter the personal cost to himself or his remnants of a conscience or whatever he has that passes for a moral compass. I figure that it's there, it's just not one that I would recognize. Isaac is a scary, scary mofo and it looks like he and Hector are gonna be back for season 3.

In fact, if Isaac ends up becoming "Death" in this entire series, I'm gonna be evilly delighted.

And then, there's Godbrand, who is basically the vampire equivalent of YOLO. Basically, all he wants is to fight, fuck, drink blood and make boats out of things he shouldn't make boats out of. Generally, he just wants to have a good time, rule the world like a king and make sure the humans know their place.

So okay, let's give Carmilla her due. Evil? Check. Manipulative? Check. Sadistic, vicious and cruel? 10 across the board. In the absence of a Certain Fanged Someone taking a more active role in what should be "The War on Humankind," Carmilla wants to make sure she's keeping things moving, spinning her webs of intrigue and plans upon plans, thinking she's going to come out the winner and make herself the new Queen of the Damned.

Here's the problem. Dracula figures that out, easily enough.

Here's the OTHER problem. His Fanged Nibs is all out of fucks to give. He's done. Finito. Finished with everything.

Yeah, about that.

While the humor of this series is a gift that keeps on giving, the drama and the feels will DESTROY you.

You know that moment when you realize Dracula isn't just waging a war on humanity, he's waging a war to destroy all vampires too? Because in that moment when he lost his beloved Lisa, he hated not only humans, but he also hated HIMSELF. He hates the fact that his life of evil, wanton death and destruction, wrought this price on the person that he loved. And she damn well didn't deserve that treatment. He hates the humans who killed her but he also hates his own kind, who are just as monstrous as he is.

So when Godbrand basically asks him, "If we're killing all the humans, what are we going to EAT?" Dracula basically tries to fob him off with some excuse or the other. Yeah, His Fanged Nibs is a LYING LIAR WHO LIES. Also, this lying liar who lies is actually spending most of his time sitting, brooding and being HUNGRY. Because he's not drinking blood. At all. Any blood drinking we see from His Fanged Nibs is in flashbacks.

Let that sink in for a second.

Aluard accuses his father of basically doing history's longest suicide. Yeah. It is - Dracula wants to take EVERYBODY down with him.

The fight scenes are worth the wait. I was screaming when the classic "Bloody Tears" started playing in Episode 7, an episode that I'm gonna watch like ten thousand times more, because OH GOD THE EPICNESS OF IT. The sheer badassery. The fact that Alucard is actually the secret identity of Moon Moon.

And then, the final fight between Dracula and our Disaster Trio is just as epic as expected. Even when he hasn't drunk blood, the trio is outmatched and outclassed and this is where you remember that if Dracula had only roused himself long enough to give a flying fuck about something, Carmilla's head would have been rolling on the floor a long time ago.

But then: "My boy.... I'm killing my boy. This is your room. Your mother and I painted these walls, made these toys. Lisa.... it's our boy. Your greatest gift to me. And I'm killing him. I must already be dead."

GDI WARREN ELLIS HOW VERY FUCKING DARE YOU.

The only way they take down Dracula is because he basically wants to die. So he lets his son kill him and end his misery. And when his rotting, decaying, corpse seems to be reaching out to his son for some kind of last embrace, Trevor, thinking that Alucard's going to be hurt, takes Dracula's head off. Sypha burns off the remains.

And it's done.

Castlevania is a game with numerous endings, all depending on how you played the game and whether you got this artifact or what not. The series pays homage to it because Trevor bequeaths the Belmont Hold to Alucard and asks him to be the last defender of it and his father's Castle. It's not going to be Alucard's grave, but his home now. Trevor and Sypha wander off into the sunset, for more adventures and mischief and Alucard lovingly sends off his BFFs with a fond "Fuck you."

We check in with the villains who survive and of course, we know there's gonna be sequels, because, hey, that's kind of the point of each and every Castlevania game. There's always gonna be a new Big Bad coming around. And trust me, Dracula's gonna be back. He's not just going to lie quiet in his grave.

And just when you think you can end this series with a satisfied sigh, our very last moments are spent with Alucard. Who is haunted by the ghosts of the parents he loved so much. Who gets to relive one happy memory with his mom, who loves him with all her heart. And she's so proud.

And Alucard finally breaks down into heartbreaking sobs.

We grieve with him.

The Bad Stuff

Yeah, okay, so I need to get this explained. Why bother to have all these interesting character designs for Dracula's other generals AND NOT HAVE THEM TALK? I'm serious. Not one of these fascinating-looking vampire bastards HAVE ANY GODDAMN LINES. Netflix, FFS, DON'T WUSS OUT ON YOUR CHARACTER ACTORS. YOU CAN'T BE THAT POOR. GIVE THEM VOICES. PAY YOUR CHARACTER VOICE ACTORS. OMG.

They basically just get killed off in the end, but while we know they were pretty scary and formidable, we don't really know anything about them other than: Vampire, Scary, Dracula's General. They were just pretty much Red Shirts, because the heroes never did get to confront Carmilla, Hector and Isaac directly.

There was evidently so much story to be told here, like they seem to have come from all over the world, even as far off as China AND THEY'RE. NOT. TALKING. The only ones with any dialogue are Carmilla, Hector, Isaac and Godbrand and none of these guys even get to share screentime with the Disaster Trio. Godbrand doesn't even make it to the final battle.

I mean, if these guys were just going to be cannon fodder, then let's just use any of the voiceless Major Bads from the games. Put some requisite scary music and sound effects and let the Disaster Trio take care of them. Let them speak in mysterious archaic languages or whatever, since we're not going to care about them anyway.

The Conclusion

Apparently, this is gonna be a pattern for this series. It's going to be good, it's going to be GREAT but there's always going to be that ONE THING that would drive us batshit crazy. But not enough to wreck my enjoyment of it.

The best parts of this series is the faithfulness to character, the layers upon layers of motivations and feels you're going to uncover as you rewatch it, the fact that it's not afraid to put tongue in cheek and leave canon at the door, while still being true to the source material.

So. "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk! Have at you!"

[narwhallove]

Behind the Curtain: Interview with Romy Writer Ludi-Ling

House of Cards actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more.

@ludi-ling goes meta in our final interview about her writing process; how the Romy fandom’s changed over the years; alternate universes (AU); and the role of smut for Romy fans. (Spoiler alert, our heroes are hot.)

No surprise that it’s a pleasure interviewing Ludi. I kept sending her more questions (25 total!) because her responses fascinated me and inspired me to ask more. It’s a rare person who writes visceral, startling prose and can also talk about her work with clarity, intelligence, and an affection for her characters that doesn’t occlude good writerly judgment.

The superlatives don’t end there. Anyone who knows the community knows that Ludi is a friend to her readers and to her fellow writers. As we all enter a heady 2019, reading Mr. and Mrs. X together, Ludi is someone to cherish.

If you haven’t read our other interviews, please check out: Part 1 of interviews: X-men Origins Part 2 of interviews: Going Dark

As a scholar of fan studies, do you believe Romy fanfiction fulfills needs that Marvel never can? What needs might those be, for Romy fans?

Certainly I think that fanfic is built on the premise of filling in the gaps, scribbling in the margins (to quote the seminal fan studies scholar, Henry Jenkins!) and fixing perceived wrongs. Comics are unique in that regard because the characters and stories within them continue for years and even decades. Comics continuities are convoluted and complicated, and there is a constant churn of writers working on them. Many fans have followed characters for far longer than the writers, and may know the characters more intimately than the professionals. Comics are full of retcons and contradictory takes on the characters. And I think fanfic is an important medium for allowing fans to “fix” that, to negotiate it. Because of the ongoing nature of comics, and because the futures of the characters are always going to be nebulous and subject to the whims of Marvel and the writers indefinitely, I think it’s going to continue to be important. Romy may be married in the comics, but there will still be plenty to write about—kids, divorce, a reconciliation . . . who knows? ;) 

What do you think Romy readers seek out when they read fanfiction? If it’s wish fulfillment, what kinds of wishes are being fulfilled? If it’s looking for “gaps” that the comics skip over, what have you found to be the most common sorts of gaps?

I think Romy is a very interesting example of the “wish fulfillment” function of fanfiction. Because part of the mystique of that ship (no pun intended) is that they can’t touch, they can’t consummate their relationship . . . And fanfic is a way that fans can get them to touch, to work out that angst. I think that one of the staples of Romy fic is the sexual tension between the two, and how they resolve that; the push and pull between them. Sometimes these take place in epic, superheroic backdrops, sometimes in AUs, where they have no mutant powers and where the tension between them is born from other factors (such as already having significant others, or being enemies, or in illicit lines of work).

What draws you to AUs? Your stories aren’t a case of fanfiction filling what’s “between panels”; you tend to shift characters and relationships to entirely different settings, whether it’s a Strange Days–like world or another genre, like a Southern gothic procedural. Can you talk about AUs and how they play out in your imagination?

What I’ve always liked is world-building. One of my first large-scale writing projects was a fantasy trilogy called The Legend of Elu. Most of the fun I got from that was actually building the world, the kingdoms, the mythology, the theology, the languages, the history of that story. That definitely bled into my fanfic.

Now I tend to write canon stuff as one-shots, and novel-length stuff as AUs, because they give me more space to play with world-building. That was something I realised I enjoyed more when I wrote Threads. Writing all those little worlds in a series of one-shots felt too “small.” HoC was originally an expansion of the Threads tale Touch and Go, but it grew into something else, and since then, I’ve preferred to go the AU route for the longer-form stories. :)

We’re living in peak Romy times—I think we’re still reeling from the wedding! Let’s say you had the power to go back in time and drop a pin into an earlier moment in the Romy timeline that you felt truly represents what Romy means to you (which isn’t the same as when they’re happiest!). When and in what universe? Why this choice?

There are so many iconic moments from Romy’s past, but, for me personally, I always go back to their time in Valle Soleada (in X-Treme X-Men). That’s not because they’re happy per se, but because I think that that period was the perfect example of how great they worked together on every level, and was proof positive that they were a good match. I often say it, but I will say it again here, because it’s the truth, and y’all can fight me to the death over it—if there was a time they would’ve got married and I would’ve bought it 100%, it would’ve been in Valle Soleada.

On Tumblr, it seems a large contingent of Romy fans are women in their 30s who discovered Romy at a tender age, thanks to the animated series. This includes you and me! There are exceptions, of course. What’s it like for you to have been in the fandom from the early aughts? What changes in the fandom have you noticed between 2003 and 2018?

I really joined the fandom at an exciting time for Romy—they’d just got back together properly after all the turmoil of the Trial of Gambit. X-Treme X-Men was a treat for Romy fans, and Claremont wrote such a great dynamic between them. As fans we were all excited and happy and well-fed on all that Romy goodness.

So it was weird (not to mention disappointing) when the 2004 reboot happened, and Marvel did everything they could to tank Romy. Which is one thing, and I can stomach it if [it were] logically and well written, but it was just so terribly done that I think many of us just tapped out of the fandom completely. I’d say 2005–2018 were fallow years for the Romy fandom. Most (if not all) of the fan friends I made at that time completely left the fandom. For myself, as someone who enjoys writing AUs, it was the perfect time to branch out from writing in canon and fitting Romy into my own world.

Who are your influences? What writers do you feel a particular affinity for? Are there writers whom we might be surprised to discover informed your work, but you feel have, despite appearances?

I was heavily influenced by the dark, modern fairytales of Angela Carter about the time that I was writing Queen of Diamonds and Threads. She had a really magical way with words—her prose was lyrical, sensual, and unbelievably rich. She was a huge inspiration, but later I moved away from her tone, firstly because I felt I was doing a poor imitation of her, secondly because it wasn’t really appropriate for the direction I wanted to move my fics in, and lastly because I was becoming self-conscious of my insane verbosity and wanted to pare down my prose. That’s something I’m still working on!

At some point during the writing of House of Cards, I finally got round to reading Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I think it was Douglas Adams who convinced me to move away from Carter’s beautiful but too-flowery prose. I loved the way his narrative just sizzled. I’m bad at capturing that energy—but I do think that from HoC onwards, I’ve tried to learn to be more economical with my words—which is hard for a florid soul like mine. 

Threads—structurally at least—was influenced by Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and later, by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. 

Let’s say you can pair your fiction with other works of art—of all forms, films, paintings, music, etc.—as if you were pairing wines to foods. What other pieces of art might you say go along with yours?

Wow! OK—that’s hard. Threads I’d probably pair with Cloud Atlas (the book, not the film, which I haven’t yet watched). HoC—I don’t know that there’s any one thing I would pair it with, but you can bet a load of post-apocalyptic stuff was thrown into that stew, along with a bit of The Matrix and probably some Inception.

52 Pickup was influenced a lot by Asmus’s Gambit run, cos I really wanted to write a heist fic with Remy and Rogue rather than Remy and Joelle (who I freely admit kicked ass). But if I had to pair it with a piece of media, it’d be with the video game Remember Me, which dealt a lot with themes of how memories inform our identities, and the ethical concerns of having memories essentially become “documents” that are uploaded and shared digitally through the cloud.

This is a good segue to talk about high-low culture. We may not want to believe in a hierarchy of culture, but we can certainly talk about the differences between fanfiction and “regular fiction.” When you read fanfiction, do you approach it differently than you would regular fiction? Are your expectations for form, reading pleasure, or anything else different? If so, how so?

Interesting question! I don’t know whether I approach it differently per se, but I think that readers have different expectations of fanfic. Hopefully we all read “regular fiction” for the same reason we read fanfic—for pleasure. But I don’t think there’s really a binary between regular and fanfiction. I think both exist on a continuum. There is a lot of “regular fiction” (I prefer to call it “profic” or “professional fiction,” because I think that’s where the binary between the two exists) that is actually very close to fanfic, and vice versa. By that I mean that there is plenty of fanfic that is epic in scope, deals with serious themes, and might be considered “classics” if they weren’t fanfiction.

And there is also profic, like romance, that is more similar to fanfic in terms of the kind of functions that it serves. There is an illicit pleasure to reading romance—for example, it’s not the kind of thing you’d openly read in public! There’s a similarity between that and fanfic, and I think, as readers of fanfic, we anticipate some level of illicitness when we approach it—even if the illicitness is only in the format (i.e., it’s fanfiction!), not in the content.

Fun question: What role do you think explicit smut functions in a fic? How do you deal with smut in your work? There’s an interesting moment that’s not in HoC, in which you write about Gambit and Rogue’s first time having sex in his point of view. It’s a separate chapter that exists as its own entity on your fanfiction.net page. Notably, it is much more explicit than the scene in Rogue’s perspective. Can you talk a little bit about this decision?

Well, I do think that fanfic is a safe space for writers to explore their sexuality (and I think that’s a huge part of the reason why fic is looked down upon), and smut plays a significant role in that. And smut certainly plays a part in my own fics. HoC actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more. Generally, I do try to make the sex scenes have a purpose in the plot (’cos I’m kind of anal about plot structure!), but in the particular case of Slow Burn and the other HoC vignettes, those are more self-contained one-shots where I could explore things that I couldn’t explore in the main story. So I could indulge in the smut a bit more! And let’s be honest—Gambit’s dark sexuality makes it thrilling to write smut from his perspective—of course his “thoughts” are going to be more explicit! ;)

But I also think that it’s interesting to write their individual perspectives on their sexual encounters, because of that tension between their characters. Rogue is the quintessential virginal Southern Baptist gal who’s inexperienced; whereas Gambit is the sexually aggressive alpha male who’s probably never had a woman turn him down in his life. That makes for a very combustive love affair between the two, and makes it fun to write that love affair (and all the smut in-between) from both their points of view.

[letterboxd]

Helpers.

“I feel like after you have kids, everything else seems like it’s for f—king pussies. Everything else is f—king bullshit. You and your brunch—f—k you!”

Filmmaker Kestrin Pantera talks to Letterboxd about family, karaoke, improvisation and her new film Mother’s Little Helpers.

Of the many films that premiered at this year’s South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, Kestrin Pantera’s Mother’s Little Helpers, which played in the Narrative Spotlight section, had perhaps the most classically Austin feel about it.

As well as taking place in the Texan state capital, the film is heavily informed by a certain kind of bohemian nostalgia that permeates Austin.

Pantera also co-stars in the film as Sadie Pride, one of four adult siblings called home to Austin when their mother Joy (former Saturday Night Live cast member Melanie Hutsell)—an ageing folk rock hanger-on whose one claim to fame is taking the photo that adorns an iconic 70s album cover—is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Sadie’s siblings comprise the scattershot Julia (played by UnReal scene-stealer Breeda Wool, also a producer on the film), doctor-to-be Lucy (Milana Vayntrub, highly memorable in shows like Love and This Is Us, and to be seen as Squirrel Girl in Marvel’s New Warriors, if that ever happens) and wayward Jude (Sam Littlefield), who’s on house arrest.

Not one of the four siblings wants to be there for their mother, and they all still bear the very visible effects of being raised by a “cool” parent, one who isn’t done messing with their lives, even though she’s at death’s door.

‘Mother’s Little Helpers’ writer, director and actor Kestrin Pantera.

Pantera has a long history with Austin, having performed there in bands in her twenties, and through her business the RVIP, (a “mobile karaoke lounge housed inside of a customized RV that serves as equal parts transportation and entertainment—it’s called transportainment”), which would come to Austin regularly.

That local familiarity informs Mother’s Little Helpers to no small degree. The film is an authentic character dramedy that captures the contradictory frustrations of family relationships.

Pantera sat down with Letterboxd in Austin soon after the film’s SXSW premiere, and proved as cool in real life as her name sounds. Very few people could seamlessly drop into conversation that they used to play the electric cello, but with Pantera, it made perfect sense.

Mother’s Little Helpers concerns a topic that has made for some fascinating ensemble performances on film through the years—how modern day grown-ups interact with their parents. Kestrin Pantera: I think it’s so fascinating—how do you deal with a parent that wasn’t really a parent, more like your friend’s drug dealer? I remember the first time my mom said “cool”, because parents didn’t used to say stuff like “cool”. When my parents started talking like me when I hit my 30s, it was so weird. My husband’s family, who this film was inspired by, they were cool. My parents aren’t cool. What is it like having cool parents? Well, it’s a mixed bag.

So the real life elements of this story come from your husband’s family? We had been doing RVIP events in Austin for ten years, and [my husband] Jonathan’s dad, he was our runner. That was how I formed a relationship with this dude, he sang karaoke and helped move our shit in a truck. He would come to Burning Man with us, he was like this awesome cool dad. But then when he got sick, there was a lot of reluctance from his kids to come home, and I was like, “What the fuck is wrong with you? He’s awesome!” And then I was like, “Ooooohhh, maybe if he’s not your dad he’s awesome.”

Is that why the film is set in Austin? It was [also] inspired by when I had real life experiences in Austin. I used to tour in rock bands. In my 20s I would bring my electric cello out here and play shows and drink all day and party all night. There’s a fun charm to it. And my family’s from the south as well, so for me, homecoming and dealing with extended family lives in the world of the south. And it’s got that outlaw-country Willie Nelson vibe and ethos. Austin has just got that soulful vibe, it reminds you of the Allman Brothers, or Lynyrd Skynyrd or Tammy Wynette or Wanda Jackson.

Your co-stars are credited as co-writers on this film—is that to reflect the degree of improvisation? That’s a convention in filmmaking that I think I would like to democratize a little bit. It is really cool to just be like, “I wrote this—a Kestrin Pantera show”, as I did with my first movie [2014’s Let’s Ruin It With Babies], but that movie was improvised and everyone made up all their shit and I just took credit for it. Any movie that has improvised performances, the editor is really the writer. I wrote it, because I edited the pieces together.

I think every actor really wants to have input into their dialogue. So why not just have really good actors and let them say whatever the fuck they want and also give them credit for that? I wrote the outline, I wrote the story, I wrote the characters, I wrote their back stories, but then we all came together as a team and filled it with their own lives. Also, I conned them into doing a movie for very little-to-no money, so why not be generous with credit? I feel like improvisers should get a little bit more credit for the writing that they do. It’s not a manifesto, it just felt like the polite thing to do when these people were giving everything to me.

The cast of ‘Mother’s Little Helpers’ at SXSW 2019.

How smooth was the process of discovering the dialogue with the other actors as you went along? In my mind, I knew what was happening because I was thinking about the edit. And the actors were generally confused because they didn’t have that picture as clearly in their mind as clearly as I did, even though everyone had the outline and everything. Most of [the improv] happened on camera, and if someone said something that was wrong, I would just be like, “No, no, no, this way.” I would just side bark. We would shoot a really sloppy first take, 300 percent too long and everyone would be figuring it out as they were going along. But then we’d figure out the shape of the scene in that first take, and be like, “Keep that, keep that, lose this part.” I would always just be thinking about that master sequence in my [Adobe] Premiere timeline. People were really flexible.

Did you have existing relationships with all the actors? Everyone was my friend, except for Melanie, who I’d met once. Breeda and I would go to parties together. We all sang karaoke together in the RVIP Lounge, so that was our core “patient zero” relationship. Milana and I would do excursions with one another, we took a class together, Breeda’s just one of my favorite, weirdest people. And Dave Guintoli [who plays Sadie’s husband], I was in an acting class with when I first moved to Los Angeles. It was literally just having the balls to call the most talented people I knew and just hope that they didn’t laugh in my face.

A press release for this film stated the “production was helmed entirely by women”—was that by design? It was an accident. It just happened that way, and I loved it. It was directed and written by a woman, the camera department was led by a woman, all of our producers and production team were women, our post-supervisor, up until the home stretch, was a woman. Pretty much everyone behind the camera in any leadership role, was a female.

Hiring moms I think is the smartest thing to do because moms are really good at multi-tasking and keeping zen and dealing with big emotions while showing up on time, and like, delivering the shit. I feel like after you have kids, everything else seems like it’s for fucking pussies. Everything else is fucking bullshit. You and your brunch—fuck you! Obviously I wouldn’t be biased against hiring someone based on whether or not they have children. But I noticed that the moms were the most responsible and effective and showed up early and actually anticipated the needs of everyone in a way that I’d never experienced before.

‘Mother’s Little Helpers’ is currently seeking distribution.

[firesign23]

WIP List

List all the things you’re currently working on in as much or as little detail as you’d like, then tag some friends to see what they’re working on.

So, the lovely @rositalg and @whopooh both tagged me in this. The latter knows not what she's unleashed. Actually, since she's been subjected to my lists, she probably does. And let me get this out of the way--I don’t know who has been tagged yet, so if you haven’t and you want to do this (and not jsut for MFMM fic--I love seeing what people are working on), consider yourself tagged.

I'm going to define "working on" as tasks I have a set deadline for, because if I include the others I will literally be here for hours. It’s kind of ridiculous.

First, I am beta-reading the second Doctor Who crossover fic for @scruggzi. It's delightful, you guys. So delightful.

As for my own writing... it's been a crazy few months and it's felt like I haven't written properly in ages. So many fics clammering for me to write, and no time. So I sat down recently and made a list of fics that I wanted to write before Miss Fisher Con--it's a concrete deadline far enough away that I have a slight chance of success.

First off, I have a few Phrack Fucking Friday ficlets in various states of completion--those are usually only a few hundred words, and aren't worth mentioning in much detail. I've got my eye on the monthly quote challenge, but I'm trying not to stress if inspiration doesn't strike for those. The rest I'm going to separate into "within a continuity" and "stand alones"

Within a continuity

I have two fics in the This Strange Eventful History timeline--the first is the Mac-centred Interlude that comes after Better Strangers, which will likely feature a bored Phryne and a bit of Mac/Frankie soppiness if I can fit it in. The second is a long casefic with a working title of Phrack Against The World (actual title is As The Winter To Foul Weather), featuring the infamous box from Madam Lyon's in season 2. The latter is, honestly, pants-pissingly terrifying: if it's good it will be amazing, but it's been in my plans for 18 months and I still don't know most of the plot.  I do know all the things I want the story to include, and that there is no way to fit them all in. Things will definitely have to be abandoned. Shame. (There's another two interludes and another casefic after this, but those aren't on on The Schedule yet.)

I also have one of about five short ficlets centred around (mostly) secondary characters in the aftermath of my ficathon fic Fragments Shored Against My Ruins. There's Mac being amazing, happy lesbians, Jane being a sweetheart, and a protective Dot. And, of course, some delightful Phrack throughout it all.

Bonus shout out to the sequel to Fear Not The Bugle which I swore I would never write, but that’s on the list for sometime after con. It picks up a year after the main part of Bugle--Phryne and Jack are called to investigate the case of a young girl missing from her bed, and is meant to explore the effects of sensationalist media. I’m honestly not sure how many people will read it--between the Phrack-have-a-kid element and the nature of the case, it’s not going to be an easy read.

Stand alones There is a one-shot locked room type mystery set at a restaurant. It's Phryne and Jack in England, dining at an exclusive restaurant when the chef winds up dead. Inspired by this New Yorker article, which does not have a murder but is utterly compelling.

A (hopefully) short and flirty casefic reunion that will be (hopefully) fun and interesting. There's a body on a train and a ton of snark, and Jack coming to the (hopefully unnecessary) rescue. What I have written so far feels very different than my usual casefics and I’m not sure how it will shake out, but it’s all (hopefully) a learning experience. The excessive use of (hopefully) is not a hint about the title, by the way. I‘m just easily amused.

A prompt from @whopooh that involves Phryne and Jack being taken hostage. Classic hurt/comfort, but with a setup different enough that I hope it will be interesting. (I say interesting, as if I don’t see a typical-tropey-hostage-setup and sit down with a cup of tea and refuse to move until it has been read...)

Bonus shout out to a casefic that will feature a character based on Madge Connor, who was the first female constable in Victoria and fought hard for fair treatment of female officers. She as amazing, and worked as a private detective after her forced retirement in 1929. She and Phryne would be a compelling combination, and poor Jack will probably end up with an ulcer. I look forward to it.

Now the actually DO these...

[nelson-riddle-me-this]

Rules: tag 9 people with excellent taste

Colour(s) I’m currently wearing

Mostly white - I’m wearing my bathrobe. My mom got it for me and it’s great. It’s not the softest but it’s good and it’s got cool blue and grey horizontal stripes on the bottom. Normally it’s very frustrating for her to try to get clothing gifts for me, but she hit the nail on the head with this one.

Last band T shirt I bought

I’ve never bought a ‘band’ t-shirt. The artists I really love don’t have much in the way of t-shirts and if they do, they look really corny. Like I’m not gonna get a Streisand t-shirt and look like some middle-aged empty-nester out grocery shopping.

Last band I saw live

I guess our evening Jazz Ensemble - it’s professional adult musicians - at my school’s Jazz Ensembles concert. They’re great. As for non-school performances, I think? the last concert I went to was a Brian Setzer concert at the Hollywood Bowl with my mom a while back.

Last song I listened to

I tried listening to some contemporary pop from the Love, Simon (2018) soundtrack today and it was really difficult so now I’m at the computer enjoying some tumblr-time and listening to my most-chill and most-favorite Doris Day album.

Lipstick or chapstick?

I used lipstick once for my Katharine Hepburn halloween costume last year and - tbh lipstick is so much work - makeup in general. Like it would be fun to be a girl and wear dresses and be super pretty and stuff - but wo-MAN it’s so much work!

So chapstick. The tube I use is some Burt’s Bees pink grapefruit that I really love. This might sound weird but I only have it because a boy I had a small crush on once asked me to hold it while he changed clothes and forgot to collect it from me..

Last movie I watched

I went to the movies last weekend with @adamsberg​ and another one of my best friends and saw Love, Simon (2018). I really really really really loved it.

I hadn’t even heard of it until a few weeks ago I saw a trailer on YouTube, but I thought it looked great and it was everything I hoped and more. I have this soft spot for angsty contemporary teen dramas like this [The Fault In Our Stars (2014) and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) are also in this micro-genre]. While I love my classics, I also love these great movies that are being made here and NOW! Sometimes I feel apart from the rest of the world - and not in a good way. I wasn’t friendless in high school - but I wasn’t anywhere near as close to any of my friends as any of these movie teens are... as accepted and loved as I am to/by an amazing, small, group of my friends now. I have no horror stories, but I don’t have very many stories and that’s just it - I could have had so much more, but I didn’t. Part of it was because I wasn’t out yet and this film so wonderfully explored that. I highly reccomend it - and not just for the good plot, it’s hilarious and an overall great experience.

Last 3 TV shows I watched

911 (2018-present) 

Sometimes my mom’s taste in first-run television is pretty bad (NCIS stopped being good like a decade ago) but in this case I am totally on-board. Angela Bassett [WAIT HOW IS SHE 59???????] is an inspiration (I WANT HER CHARACTER’S HOUSE!), the writing and production values are generally very good - it’s a solid, interesting show. Still, can anyone tell me what the deal with that middle-aged white lady (who’s a few years younger than Angela Bassett but lowekey looks 20 years older) who dresses like a suburban mom trying to dress like her teenage daughter - like what’s the deal with her dating that guy in his 20s? 

Frasier (1993-2004)

My mom and I watch this show somewhat regularly as it’s on like every flippin’ night on the scourge that is the Hallmark Channel (generally decent reruns, but I hate the channel itself and their original programming is complete trash). In a lotta ways I really love it - it’s hilarious, witty, sophisticated, adult, and has the power to  create a real poigniant moment like you rarely see so fully-realized in sitcoms. 

It has its issues though. Frasier and Niles (especially in early seasons) can get annoyingly whiny/snobby. I get that their characters are kinda built around that, but there’s a point at which they take it too far and it becomes disengaging. Also it’s a super white-people-centric show (I wonder why Hallmark likes it so much...) so diversity could be a lot better. Still, it’s generally a high-quality program.

Gosh I don’t remember what else I watched last. I haven’t had a lotta TV time lately so Imma use this opportunity to plug...

Stranger Things (2016-present)

One’a my best friends, Grace, introduced me to this show and I absolutely love it. The period’s really well done - not just accurate, but alive and real and relatable. The acting and casting is great. Winona Ryder is a treasure and I have a shameless crush on Joe Keery’s amazing hair and the person it belongs to. The scoring is effective, interesting, and very different from the kind of film music I usually am exposed to (I’m really making an effort to expand my horizons beyond classic orchestral sounds lately). The production values are great - it’s just an amazing show. 

Last 3 characters I identified with

1.) Simon Spier from Love, Simon (2018)

While there are some things about him I definitely don’t identify with (message me personally if you wanna know specifics- I don’t want to spoil anything), I very much identify with his coming out story and coming to terms with his sexuality on his own terms. 

I feel like there are people who will criticize the film based on Simon’s extreme normalcy - like he’s honestly a fairly stock white, middle-class, suburban teenage boy and, aside from his involvement in theater and ‘ya know liking boys he doesn’t do much that would be considered “gay” - but that’s kinda the point of the film. Being gay is just something that is and anyone can be gay - they’re not weird or whatever just for being gay - that was one of my fears - that I would be treated (or even just feel like) some strange unwelcome outsider just because of this one thing.

I had a long conversation tonight with an older kinda mentor’y friend of mine (though I’m more of the mentor) who’s gay and who was having a really rough night. Among the lotta things he said was that all gay men cheat that there’s no true monagomous love in the gay community and like lightning I shot him down with a fervor and wisdom and riteousness that would make Kate proud (wayto blow my own horn). 

That’s the exact kind of idiotic prejudice that makes people afraid to come out in the first place. It’s fear that kind of small-minded judgmental behavior which was most responsible for me remaining closeted in high school. It’s a hard thing to explain to someone who hasn’t been there because after you’ve been through it, it can kinda feel like nothing afterwards -  all this fear and conflict and it’s really kinda purposeless. You find that people still love you and the people who don’t are really not good people anyway. I wish I had come out in high school, I could have been happier. But I am happy now.

2.) Tracy Lord from The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Dedicated followers may remember I rewatched this one a few wks ago on what would have been a date with me and my crush until he cancelled. That time I saw Trace and Kate herself through lenses less tinted than ever before, but still she’s there in all her glory and all her not-glory. Tracy is riteous, despises drinking and gets very contemptful of what she views as weakness, such as her ex-husband’s drinking problem or Mike’s cynical view of the rich. I am often that way (in large part due to the second-generation effects of my mom’s own east coast catholic upbrining) which has it’s merits certainly - that specific east coast almost ‘puritan’ toughness (I think Dick Cavett, said Bette Davis and Kate both had it) can be a tremendous source of strength and sense. It can also easily become cold, prudish, snobbish, and condesending. I have tried to unlearn these aspects and I am still working on that. This is kinda what Tracy’s arc is about, learning to be human and be loved and to love others.

Though it’s not as recent, the next one that comes to mind is

3.)  Nancy Wheeler from Stranger Things

I already mentioned that my friend Grace got me into this show, but I didn’t mention that I only ever watch it with her. Not that I don’t really love the show - I do - but I like saving it for when we’re together - it makes it more special. 

Anyway, more than perhaps any other single character on that show, I identify with Nancy Wheeler. Regular suburban teenager who’s better - not just a regular suburban teenager - she’s aware of the sort of suburban ‘don’t do much with your life ‘cept rasie kids [not that there’s anything wrong with having and raising kids, that’s wonderful] trap. I also found the episode with her at Steve’s house really resonated with me. Barb telling Nancy “this isn’t you” really got to me. Part of me still has an internal ‘Barb’ that kinda ties in with the whole east-coast ‘puritan’y’ morality but there’s also the part of me that wants to be young and just a person and do cool things with my friends and kiss boys and watch great angsty contemporary teen dramas. They both have their merits and drawbacks - the young side has life but can be stupid and reckless - the old side is wise and careful, but can be paralyzing and stagnating.

Books I’m currently reading

I have a whole slew of books checked out that I’m supposed to be reading (for my own enjoyment).

The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard     by   Leonard Bernstien

I loved his The Joy of Music so I figured I would like this too. He’s a great music lecturer. I’m only like 5 pages in so far.

Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption      by    Ellis Cashmore 

This one I’m a little further on, though most of that was just the introductory timeline of her life with a key notating each illness/medical episode, marriage/actual or rumored romantic relationship, and neaar-death experience (her life is such ‘drama’).

I also have a book about motifs in Hitchcock’s films with the car picnic from To Catch a Thief (1955) on the cover. I haven’t started reading it yet.

And I have some book about Lerner & Lowe, the duo responsibly for My Fair Lady, Camelot, etc...

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

This was really really wonderful to participate in. Thank you, my amazing friends, so much for tagging me @adamsberg​ and @in-the-key-of-d-minor​. I’ve enjoyed lots of asks and tag games, but I’ve never felt this good about one before...

I tag

@hildy-dont-be-hasty @tyronepowerbottom @reluctant-martyrs @thevintagious @littlehappyrock @n2ninvisiblegirl @solasdisapproves @hepburnandhepburn and @her-man-friday

If I didn’t tag you but you wanna participate, have at it!

What’m I gonna do, fire you?

[judas-had-a-crown]

writer tag thingy

I’ve been miracously tagged by @wearemykingdom like eons ago, so let’s do this :P 1) is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

Yes. More than one actually, but at the moment it’s my. Fucking. Goddamn. HUGE-ASS. Mount Olympus / Roman Empire Batman / Crossover Gotham x Arkham Games AU.

It has become so complex lately that I just can’t find the will to continue structuring the plot at the moment.

2) what work of yours, if any, are you the most embarrassed about existing?

You really think I’d give you the means to search for it eh. But well, when we’re talking about English works (I have written more stories in my first language of course, so the ones in English are rather limited) it’s probably one of my earliest Hannigram fics. The theme is horrid because ao3 was so new to me back then including all the porn there and I was like “Hey, I can do this too! I want so many views as well!”

So I wrote a smut OS. And I despise it to this very day.

I’m not averse to smut in the least, but I didn’t like it mostly because it lacked a good plot, it lacked any kind of finesse, and, frankly, it also lacked dignity for both the characters. I also hate this OS in particular since I wrote it merely for the sake of gaining attention, I guess. I was a tag-along. You see, I don’t write smut too often, but when I do, I can’t help but try putting in a story which at least compliments the kinks.

Which reminds me, I should probably delete said shameful OS… but it is on my old account. Shit, need to search for the password.

3) what order do you write in? front of 📓 to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?

Fucking mess. Usually, my ideas start with that one goddamn scene in my head and I scribble it down in mere desperation whereever I can. Then I search for a good song accompanying the general mood of the story and somehow work up to this very scene if I can get my ass in gear. So, I usually start at the beginning.

4) favorite character you’ve written

Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. They have wonderfully complex psyches to play with.

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing to write?

Daryl Dixon and Rick Grimes - I don’t know anything about The Walking Dead, never watched one darn episode. It was a gift for a friend back then.

6) something you would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late/complicated to change now

I was much on the sappy and dramatic / sentimental side of prose for what seems like ages. I would stretch dialogue and thus doom it to become artificial in the long run. Purple prose is no bad thing, but I certainly overdid it more than once. Which is why I’m currently trying to keep my writing as true as possible.

I still love fancy words, but I need to find my own voice between the lines. And I need to finally figure out for whom I write in particular aka who I believe worth of being called ’my muse’… I already know the name of said creature, but I simply can’t decide about their appearance. Suprisingly, Persona 5 has given me great concepts to work with concerning this. I hope I’ll figure it out in time.

7) when asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?

I do not like to tell people I write if they don’t write themselves. I’ve been having bad experiences otherwise, including family members as well as friends and strangers. Mostly, I have been ridiculed, laughed at or looked over with a furrowed brow.

The only time my writing was kind of acknowledged back in my youth when I would read essays and short stories we would sometimes be tasked with in school. My classmates were glad when I read my stuff, but let me just say… they were happier they didn’t have to read their stuff instead than anything else. 

8) favorite genre to write

Is “Give me thee pure and I’ll make thee cry and die” a genre ?

To be honest, I’m not sure which genre I usually write in. I think it’s tragedy / drama.

9) what, if anything, do you do for inspiration?

Listening to music is one go, watching amvs, Let’s Plays of Horror Games and movies plus reading books are the others. I also cry.

10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?

@wearemykingdom I’m mostly with you on this one holy shit.

to quote her wise words : SILENCE. FUCKING SILENCE. I LOVE SILENCE. AND ALONE.

Alone indeed, I’m a sucker for solitude -> Solitaire - Marina & The Diamonds

The problem is, I have a problem concerning silence - it’s never enough silence. I have grown used to write on my laptop with in-ear headphones on the ready, but even the sound of the keys or my own breathing would disturb me. Since then I have tried to find in-ear headphones (I can’t wear on-ear headphones due to reasons I won’t explain further) which isolate me from literally anything but fuck, it’s hard to find them, not to mention how much some of them cost. I’m also no friend of bluetooth which makes it all the more difficult to find anything usable. *sigh* Currently - to drown out all the noise of the outside world - I try listening to classical music. Especially violines are soothing for me.

11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

I have literally no ass clue.

12) your weaknesses as an author

I’m always busy with plotting things out, imagining scenes and stuff, but I’m often strangely scared of really WRITING IT DOWN. Also I often get bored in the middle of a story and tend to discard it. Also I have been doubting myself quite much lately which is annoying.

13) your strengths as an author

I have literally no ass clue. My writing style has changed dramatically since last year - it will take a while till it gains some consistency again.

14) do you make playlists for your current wips?

“I spend more time on making playlists than writing on my current wips these days” I declare in shame, with four youtube tabs open.

15) why did you start writing?

To find my voice. Also to finally shut down the other voices and people occupying my head.

16) are there any characters who haunt you?

My OCs who want to kick my ass for me outlining their stories - but little old me is still too afraid to write them down.

Oh, also Joker and Batman aka Batjokes. I run into so many new kinds of story takes on their relationship these days and each has its special charm, this isn’t funny anymore.

17) if you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

Me: OH MY GOD STOP MAKING THEM TALK SO MUCH ADD SOME DESCRIPTION INSTEAD YOU DUMB POPTART

fledgling author self : *opens up another conversation about death and undying love with a crazed glint in her eyes*

Me:

18) were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? what were they?

Perfume - The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. The descriptions are various and exquisite.

Duma Key, Lisey’s Story and many other novels of Stephen King. You, good Sir, ruined me and my standards concerning horror fiction.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. A special book with Death lending his perspective and word.

The Bartimaeus Sequence by Jonathan Stroud - So funny it made me laugh out more than once. Close to my heart.

19) when it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, ect.?

Miley: outlines, characters, development, timeline, ect.

John Travolta: Me

20) do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?

I used to write in long sit-down sessions but currently I’m having a hard with them. I’m happy with little spurts.

21) what do you think when you read over your older work?

22) are there any subjects that make you uncomfortable to write?

Not yet. Which reminds me, I should probably expand my field of writing themes.

23) any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?

Besides always feeling like I don’t belong to anything or anybody like some weird E.T. shtick? Dunno.

24) have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?

I have never known so much about homosexuality and ransoming people sold into slavery in the times of the Roman empire than I do now. So yes, more than once. I want every detail as accurate as possible.

25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of

This isn’t short, because I am proud of this whole scene. Enjoy. ->

The fire is bright and hot and all-consuming as it licks across the doorframe and drags itself into the room with sharpened, yellow claws.

He might be blind, but the cackle of burning wood crawling closer to his position is a guess as sure as a man can get. He leans against the wall, fists numb, mind dazed by pain, flickers challenging the red-rimmed shadows behind his eyelids to join the dance. Why is he in pain again? He doesn’t know. The muscles in his legs are jelly, the flesh of his arms clad in stone. It feels more like his natural state to dwell in than anything else he has come in contact with in STEM yet which is impressive to realize if you think about it. But this isn’t STEM, is it? No. The fire came before they plugged him into this machine manufactured in hell. He tries to breathe in but can’t, not really, no matter how hard he tries; someone must have poured ice into his lungs. And why doesn’t this surprise him either? Everything seems to go the way it’s supposed to be.

He looks ahead and sees nothing but wary shapes taking form.

There stands Lily. And Lily screams, tears streaming down her cheeks like liquid glass. The fire catches her from behind and presses its lambent teeth into her hair, immediately going up in flames. Her skin bursts open und reveals tender muscle cords and bones which will never have the chance of growing out. They turn from white to pale yellow, from yellow to ocher, from ocher to a shade close to carbon black. He watches teary-eyed till her screams ring in his ears to the rhythm of his blaring heartbeat. What he called his daughter turns into a pile of ash and he could never put in words how much he despises himself for feeling relieved - if only for a moment, lost and uncared for - when the screaming dies down with her and fades into whimpers that are easily drowned out by the fire’s roar of triumph following behind.

When it turns its ugly orange head at him, jaw-grinding and repellently jubilant, he is as ready as one can be while they catch a beast’s eye. It teeters into his direction like a drunk whore that had their fill but are too far gone to realize it’s already over. He neither welcomes the plague nor shoos it away. And when it’s so close that its claws reach out to scratch the stubble on his chin, he couldn’t care less.

Being bathed in flames hurts less than he expected and more than his nightmares have ever dared to introduce him to. Heat engulfes him, the pain of thousand ant bites impaling his skin and rip through muscles and sinews. Thank fuck Lily had suffocated before she could feel this way… but no, she hadn’t, had she? Mobius took her. The charred corpse they found, the size of a child; four tiny fingers barely intact, the others scrunched to nothing. Myra and he had buried a forgery. Then she left and had made him live a forgery himself.

He only recognizes in passing that the ash started crawling up the floor and drapes over his sizzling bones. One could have called it a last act of consolation. A mercy he doesn’t deserve. The moulding ember is balm to his raw-burnt limbs, hovering over him, weaving a blanket of dead life upon his shoulders and his heaving back. He doesn’t struggle, nor does he think about getting up. He sits and pants and allows the dark remains of wood and flesh and cotton candy to encloak his body like a banshee offering her grave-cold kiss. The room has turned into furnace by now, the smell of his cooking flesh stuck in his nostrils. There is no end, no beginning, no remorse to deal with; only a hunger he is meant to satisfy but can’t. He just can’t do anything right, can he? The fire does not mind his inability. The fire is hungry, and Sebastian is easy prey.

Darkness, sweet as nectar, drinks him in. He lets it. Yet again I will torture tag @universallylightcherryblossom - (I’m sorry honey, but I don’t know too many writers here). Whoever reads this and wants to do it is more than welcome to feel tagged.

[theclothingtookyears]

Interview on Sloganeering

Karin: Can you talk me through the concept of sloganeering? Isaac: Sloganeering is the act of writing a slogan or phrase on a surface (bilboarding) or spreading it through other media (radio), mainly for marketing reasons. This has developed to the application of T-shirts. As T-shirts are the most democratic clothing product, they are a great tool for marketing and branding; similar, to bumper stickers, tote bags and key chains. T-shirts are the most popular and affordable item of clothing on the planet. Classless, genderless and cross-cultural, T-shirts are everywhere and here to stay. The contemporary influx of slogan T-shirts comes from a newly frustrated generation, who feel like people in positions of power are not hearing their voices. Citizens feel they have no voice, but they can wear it on a T-shirt and the public can’t not read it. Wearing your rights on your body has resonance. Whatever your “thing” is, there is a clothing piece or accessory that can hep you express that. Karin: What does it mean and what is the history of the phenomenon? Isaac: The easiest way to think of sloganeering is in timeline format. T-shirts were invented in the early 1900’s as an undershirt for men in the military with no laundry capability. They re-emerged in the 1960’s with DIY culture through hands on techniques (Tye dye, silk screening, block printing) as part of a new age philosophy and psychedelic rock. In the 70’s T-shirts became part of punk and grass roots activism, a vehicle for stances on social and political issues. Vivienne Westwood’s “I AM NOT A TERRORIST, Please Don’t Arrest Me”. Or a shirt with a swastika, layered with a crucified Jesus, combined with the word “DESTROY”¬ – a statement against dictatorship; in general statements of solidarity and unity. Katherine Hamnett emerged in the 80’s with bold font T-shirts that you could read from 30 m away. “STOP AND THINK”, “SAVE THE FUTURE”, “CHOOSE LIFE”. Continuing the activism inspired by Westwood, Hamnett stated, “A successful T-shirt has to make you think but then crucially, you have to act”. The end of the century saw Tongue-in-cheek slogans for the fashion world to laugh at itself. Some were funny because they were good jokes, some were funny because they were classics, and a large number were funny simply because someone would actually wear them. The new millennium promoted skanky, sleazy, and vague statements. “Young, willing and eager”, “Hotter than I should be”. Even Paris Hilton was captured by paparazzi wearing a shirt that said “THIS WAS THE ONLY SHIRT I HAD WITH NO CUM ON IT”. Obviously, this was before celebrities had stylists. In this last decade the fourth wave of feminism and “woke” movement used T-shirts that were ethically and morally inspired “This is what a feminist looks like”. “Love trumps hate”. “Poverty is sexist”. Karin: Where does your interest in this topic stem from? What can be deduced from your research? Isaac: What really sparked my interest was when I moved to Europe and saw non-native English speakers wearing English statements across their chests. I understood that these products were available at high volumes,that’s why there were so many popping up – but I was more interested in the motivation for purchase besides the low price point. Why do people voluntary wear text across their chests? Do they understand the statement they are wearing? Does the mass produced T-shirt “Undefeatable” make you feel that way? Do you wear this statement as motivation to feel that way? When you bought it – did you feel undefeatable? Do you feel defeated and want others not to know? There were too many unanswered questions. And once I saw one person wearing a slogan T-shirt I started seeing 20-25 a day, not searching for them, just by getting groceries and riding the train. The role of a fashion designer has always been about making a statement or message. And since the late 1990’s, fashion designers haven’t really considered or been mindful of the complexity of the human form, especially with the evolution of fully verticalized fast fashion retailers. Today, there is less product development in construction and cut and sew techniques and more on decorative elements and graphics, with the emergence of most fashion studios being run by graphic designers. We’ve moved from the idea: “The medium is the message” to “The message is the medium”. Karin: Where do you see the slogan Tee's biggest potential as a social and cultural mobiliser today and in the future? Isaac: I think that irony has dug everyone a hole that is hard to get out of, very comparable to the tone in current politics, where confusion and satire is a commonly adapted tool for manipulation. The new generation of fashion consumers don’t possess much historical knowledge of fashion. To these consumers, whoms knowledge on fashion is quite limited to street wear like, A-Cold-Wall, Alyx and Fear of God, irony seems fresh. This is a bit unnerving and leads me to believe that a slogan T-shirt with just writing and no symbol for context, will just be regarded as a cry for help or nonsensical bullshit. However I do think that, amongst all the nonsense, a return to the roots of smart slogans that Westwood and Hamnett pioneered could evoke curiosity, an emotional response, which could lead to a counter movement. Karin: What social shifts can we see through the evolution of sloganeering? Do you believe words and statements on garments can help bring about social and cultural change? Isaac: I do see that the true investment in clothing is a personal investment in constructing ones self and social identity, and slogan T-shirts can only aid this. Sloganeering is fascinating because if you look at trends in a timeline; they really mirror societal shifts and movements. To not sound overly pessimistic, one can see the decline of slogans mirroring the decline of high quality fashion. There is nothing unique about wearing a shirt that says “Not Normal”, when 100,000 of the same shirts have been mass-produced. Karin: Slogan T-shirts have often been connected to the opposition and worn as an act of activism. However, big fashion houses and established designers have also picked up the trend – what are your thoughts on this? Isaac: I think that the original purpose of wearing a slogan T-shirt has been lost to so many other motivational factors and it’s hard to bring back that authenticity. The motivation for wearing slogan T-shirts has expanded and changed from solely activism to a myriad of arenas. Slogans can be a political voice or statement for social and cultural change, a means of self expression, a way to attract attention to yourself or a way to use your body as a walking billboard. In the era of valorising personal identity, wearing a brand acts as an identity affiliation, even though following a trend is part of something mass market. It can also be an inside joke that unites people and makes a group feel part of something. Karin: What different types of slogans do you see at the moment? Do they follow any specific trends? Isaac: There are a few categories. The designer ones range from vulgar to positive to thought provoking. Designers like Diesel, Dsquared2 and Undercover, have all been experimenting with typeface and iconic terms that become part of their brand identity. The fast fashion slogans are often overly positive or self-critical – sabotaging in a cute way. And the ironic fashion fakes are probably the most interesting in terms of originality and how crude they can be. Karin: Can you tell me about the creative process with stylist Billy Lobos and photographer Spyros Rennt? Isaac: Billy Lobos is a good friend and we always wanted to work together. One day, after reviewing my collection of slogan T-shirts, Billy proposed a concept for an archival photo shoot. The photos were meant to be similar to my way of documenting T-shirts on Instagram, stalker- like pictures where the goal is to get a photo of the text on T-shirts, with little consideration of the wearer. Billy casted and styled models in their everyday clothes and directed Spyros to take very quick, unstaged, subtle photos of essentially pedestrians. Karin: How did the photos by Spyros Rennt translate into sweaters? Isaac: Spyros Rennt did a really good job. He doesn’t work as a typical fashion photographer and Billy and I didn’t see the photos translating into a campaign or lookbook. The photos were bold and simple, which translated well optically into pixelated knit structures. When you’re far away enough from the sweaters, you can read the slogans, which is the often the situational context I find myself in when I see a slogan T-shirt. Karin: What is the point of putting pictures of people wearing garments on a garment? Isaac: This project started with a lot of questions I had for people wearing slogan T-shirts. I think it’s funny to superimpose the two – wearing a person with a specific branded identity. People who wear slogan T-shirts can’t see how they look like to the public. It’s like giving someone a mirror of their own identity and making them be self-reflective of the image they are portraying. Karin: What does wearing statements have to do with "No Shame"? Isaac: I think the people that wear slogan T-shirts, band shirts, sport teams – it’s all a way of showing your pride and alignment with something or being part of a group. When someone catches me staring at their T-shirt in the street, they don’t look down and become insecure with what their wearing and sharing, they look me directly in the eye with confidence. These people have no shame and stand by their beliefs, values and branding. I wanted to document the confidence, esteem and pride of these people. Karin: We've seen high street shops selling T-shirts with statements related to topics like feminism for years. At the same time they are called out for being more interested in profit than activism. Is it possible to avoid that these statements empty out? Isaac: I don’t think buying a mass-market product helps the associated cause, unless a financial portion is allocated to an activist group responsible for change. What Katherine Hamnett did in 1984, making an anti-nuclear protest, was innovative beyond imagination today. She made her “58% DON’T WANT PERSHING” T-shirt for a fashion reception, which Margaret Thatcher was hosting. Margaret Thatcher decided to allow the U.S. perishing missiles to be stationed in Britain, which was very controversial and many decided to boycott this fashion event. Hamnett, however thought of it as a great PR opportunity. She smuggled her T-shirt into the event, wearing a white coat over it and right when she had the opportunity to take a picture with Margaret Thatcher she unveiled her shirt. Thatcher said: “You seem to be wearing a rather strong message on your T-shirt”, and bent down to read it and let out a squawk, like a chicken. This perfect opportunity and the exposure by the media gave power to the slogan T-shirt that mass-produced activist shirts will never be able to surpass.

[homesteadchronicles]

10 Writerly Questions Tag Game

Ooh, thank you so much for tagging me @necwrites! :)

1. How many WIPs (Works in Progress) do you have?

You mean beyond the eight billion vague concepts eternally buzzing around every author’s brain?

My primary focus is the Kingdom Come series, which focuses on five kingdoms warring to open the Seven-Sealed Vault, an ancient artifact that could supposedly bless its opener with their heart’s desire.

However, when I need a break from fleshing out my main series, I develop stories elsewhere within the world and timeline of Kingdom Come. For instance, I started a side-story about a group of people originally from the continent of Kingdom Come who relocated to an isolated island during an ancient catastrophe and still live day-to-day not knowing that the world was saved thousands of years prior.

2. Do/would you write fanfiction?

Oh boy. You haven’t seen my embarrassing fanfiction confessions have you? I have, in fact, delved into the dark abyss of fanfiction. In my younger days, I primarily wrote for the Harvest Moon and Super Smash Bros. fandoms. As I grew older, however, I transitioned more towards Dragon Age, Fire Emblem, and Radiata Stories. After beginning to write my own original works, I stopped producing fanfiction. To be honest, I don’t miss it. I do still occasionally read some, as there are legitimately talented writers out there.

3. Do you prefer paper books or e-books?

I’m one of those old-school snobs who refuses to read anything digitally. Don’t ask me why, it’s just a necessity. I love the scent and the feel of an actual novel in my hands. For me, reading something online or on a device loses its impact because I am so desensitized to the eight thousand other things I normally read, usually on something like social media. 

4. When did you start writing?

Oh gosh, I have been writing for about as long as I can remember. I can’t remember a time where I wasn’t writing stories or designing imaginary games or drawing picture books.

5. Do you have someone you trust to share your work with?

Unlike most, I am blessed with a beautiful, talented, and supportive best friend who will not only eagerly await news about my own writing, but walk through the struggles and successes of storytelling alongside of me. I endlessly love and am eternally grateful for you, @khymnal

6. Where is your favorite place to write?

Typically, I spend time whittling away at the keyboard atop my bedroom desk. I set up a lovely little display with various knicknacks from my favorite series (mostly Nightmare Before Christmas) and hung some Christmas lights around the area. When I need a change, I typically go downstairs and write at my kitchen island with a cup of tea.

But my favorite place that I never get to write at? The shore. I live about an hour away from the beach, and every year, my family and I rent a house down there for one week. That week, I spend every second I can alternating between taking walks, eating food, and writing stories. I find so much inspiration sitting on a balcony with the sea breeze blowing through my hair and the sound of obnoxious seagulls blaring in my ears.

7. Favorite childhood book?

Where do I even start? I read all of the Chronicles of Narnia books, and have been obsessed with C.S. Lewis ever since - as a person especially so, even more than as an author. I remember plowing my way through the Wrinkle in Time series, too, but I remember little about them now. Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown were HUGE inspirations to me back in the day, too. 

8. Writing for fun or for publication?

Ideally? Publication, of course. But I have no contract or agent or anything of the sort as of yet, and no finished product to show them. So, for now, it’s still all fun and games, although I see it as work as much as I see it as recreation.

9. Have you taken any writing classes?

I wish I had. I’ve taken workshops here and there, but I never found them to of any lasting impact. Most were so generic and bland, or focused on writing the “next great American classic” (most of which I loathed even discussing in high school). However, my grandmother gifted me a Master Class in Writing with James Patterson for Christmas and I cannot wait to take it! I’ve also considered SkillShare, as I’ve seen some discussion about it before, and it seems intriguing to me. One of my biggest goals this year is to improve my skillset, which classes will inevitably help me to do.

10. What inspired you to write?

All throughout my life, I see people with untold stories that the world deserves - and needs - to hear. I see people silenced by shame, by apathy, by pain of every sort. I see people in need of stories that elevate, that inspire, that instill hope in their hearts when the world wishes to diminish their dreams into nothing. That is why I write - to drive away the darkness and restore light, in whatever way that I can.

Who am I tagging? I have three in mind - @lisa-writing, @breakeven2007, and @khymnal. Feel no pressure at all to participate, but I thought I ought to include those of you who have discussed their current projects with me recently!

[obsidianarchives]

AJay Jordan

AJay Jordan, has always been a person who likes to tell a story. She’s always sought to communicate with people in a creative way, having studied vocal performance for 14 years before moving onto film production and screenwriting which brought her back to creative writing. She loves writing magical revenge plots featuring “fantastical dope black girls and boys.” In an effort to make stories centering the experiences of marginalized people, she created The Bookshelf, an online database of 500+ books by underrepresented authors.

Black Girls Create: What do you create?

I am very self conscious about the stuff that I create, and I’m never sure if it’s enough, whether it’s good enough, or enough work, or enough quality. So I feel like I create, and beyond that I stop my brain from going into imposter syndrome mode. I can say I create websites and I create stories, but if I were to get deeper—I don’t know. It’s really hard. I can see everyone else and I can see everyone else’s purpose with their actions and what they create and what they’re trying to do but it’s hard seeing myself.

I hope that I create more space for marginalized people, more specifically brown and Black people, and more specifically Black people, and more specifically Black people with dark complexions because that is what my family reflects and that’s what my children will reflect. And I guess those are the stories I would have wanted to see as a little brown girl, brown Black girl, Black Black girl. When I was creating The Bookshelf I knew right away I wasn’t going to make it just for the age category that I write for. I also wanted to make finding those books accessible for parents finding stories that look like them.

About The Bookshelf

As a writer for the past couple of years I’ve gotten to know this writing community…and through it I found it was hard to find books by people of color. Usually Goodreads is my go to place to look for books, but even then our percentages are so abysmal. I would rather there be a place where I can find a book or even discover new books that are own voices because there are so many tricky people out there who don’t share ethnicity or marginalization with these people. Nothing against them. [I'm] not saying that they can’t do their due diligence, but they’re writing from a place where they’re not experienced and that’s inauthenticity.  I’m sitting here with a book that’s not on the shelf and I’m reading your story that has to do with my culture and you’re profiting from this.

Long story short, I wanted there to be a way to find books easier. I was actually going to hold onto The Bookshelf because that was my filler name for the time being. I was going to change it to something but then Barnes & Noble dropped that bullshit changing all those classic white titles and putting brown faces on the covers and I was like, “Dang, I can’t even hold onto my database anymore and perfect it and make it better before I go live. I just have to do it now because I have to combat this issue with Barnes & Noble," because that is such a slippery slope and a bait and switch. I wasn’t here for it.

BGC: Why do you create?

I think very linearly and I imagine a line being drawn across the paper and you draw the line up, and you draw a line down, and squiggle it or you swirl it—that’s the trajectory of that one person. I feel like if maybe I had a second book as a child, not just the one [with Black representation], that trajectory that I had maybe would have been a little bit off; it may have changed the direction of what I would be today and so I feel like that’s why I do The Bookshelf, too. Because you don’t know what you don’t know and you never know where inspiration or where something will spark some level of interest in a child.

Black people don’t have all of the same experience. For me, I am a Black American and in turn an African American, but I don’t know my lineage enough to be able to connect to my culture. So, when I say things like, “Write stories about Black people even though Black people don’t all share the same experience,” it’s for all of those people like me who don’t know their own history. I’m seeing a little bit more stories feature African fantasies, which is still abysmal in the grand scheme of things, that Black stories are like 3% of publishing as a whole or whatever that percentage was. Although I love [African fantasy] stories, I want to write stories for those who don’t have those connections who would still be able to relate.

BGC: Who is your audience?

Definitely, I want to gear my stories towards Black teens, but I feel like you’re not going to find my book in the Scholastic Book Fair. Maybe some time in the future I'll write a middle-grade and you’ll find that at the book fair (you can get your little book and get your little bookmark to go with it).

I still want to gear toward a Black audience but at the same time I got so much inspiration from watching anime. When I watch it there’s a level of freedom. I want that freedom, but with Black characters. So I’m hoping that my audience would be those who like anime but also those who like to game (because I like to game sometimes and I get some inspiration from that, too). I want people to dress up and go to Comic Con in their costumes of my characters.

BGC: Who or what inspired you to do what you do?

"I want to create experiences but I want to have fun while creating those experiences as well."  -- AJay Jordan

This is a fair question but the gag is I don’t know if I am inspired by anyone. It’s more like a self motivation for me because I want to create something fun for people to experience. I want to create experiences but I want to have fun while creating those experiences as well. You know how in high school people would be like, “Oh this is the person I look up to. I want to be just like them.” That was not me. 

I’ve always been the person to go left when everyone wanted to go right. It’s almost like I was challenging myself to be my own inspiration. I am a competitive person in all things. I will kill you in Uno, Monopoly is my game. I can look up to people but it doesn’t give me the fire to create. It’s the competition with myself or seeing others do something terribly that makes me think, “Hey! I can do that!” 

I want to be better everyday. Every time I do something I try to surpass what I created because I don’t have someone to look up to and gauge myself [by]. I just work hard and hope it works out for the best.

BGC: Why is it important as a Black person to create?

My first answer is representation, because that percentage in publishing is so low that it’s almost like we shouldn’t even exist. Animals will take a higher percentage than a person of color — I think in total, too. On the flip side, those in publishing that share the same marginalization of us querying authors is abysmal, as well. Which is why it’s so hard when agents say things like, “Oh I couldn’t connect.” You couldn’t connect because you don’t share these experiences. Your own biases are getting in the way of stories that are authentic.

Representation will allow those that come after us to feel like they have the ability to do what we do. A Black little boy isn’t going to know he can become a bio-engineer unless he sees one. It’s almost like feeling like it’s OK to be here, you deserve to be here, too.

BGC: Why is it important that folks, but especially marginalized people, have access to these stories?

I think that [The Bookshelf] is a great resource for writers who want to comp their own books because sometimes literary agents ask for two titles to see where your book would sit on an actual bookshelf. I’ve even had editors tell me that they use it as comps for the stories that they’re reading for. 

I’ve had teachers and librarians tell me it helps them build their lists, that they would also maybe have their students come to the website and find new books. I always tell them to do their research before you have them jump on the site because I have books from picture books all the way to adult. 

I’m hoping that it will create baby writers. So those who didn’t think that they would be a writer will see these stories and will be excited to write more. It’s like a virtual hand reaching back to pull up children of color or Black children to write these crazy fantastic stories and become authors. 

But also to up the percentage of reading. Reading has definitely changed my life. I was not a reader when I was a kid. I had that one picture book [that had Black representation]. My godmother even tried to pay me per chapter to read this book. I did not finish the book. It was only because I did not have the right story in my hand. It wasn’t until there was finally a book that I was like, “Wow that was actually a good book.” It was that moment that I found a book I actually liked that it changed the trajectory of my career. I don’t think I would be a writer today, I don’t think The Bookshelf would exist, I don’t think I would be as passionate about representation and trying to make these books accessible to people. None of this would exist if it wasn’t for that one book. This is serious. My life could have been completely different if not for reading that book. If that happened to me, it can happen to someone else. And if it can happen to someone else, it can happen earlier in their timeline for their life and trajectory and change their life for good. I feel like books are good things and we have to uplift them especially Black and brown and marginalized voices.

BGC: How do you balance creating with the rest of your life?

I feel like I’m good but I feel like I’m not. I feel like I’m good because I think very linearly and I will be doing multiple projects at once and I’m like Go-Go Gadget, let’s-get-this-shit-done. Let’s do it and have fun. 

At the same time when I work, sometimes I forget to eat, sometimes I forget to drink water, sometimes I forget to stretch, maybe go out into the sun and get some vitamin D. I don’t exercise because I’m so into my creative work. I’m always doing something and when I’m glued to my screen and I’m just going. I don’t feel like my health deteriorates, but I forget to take care of myself. I have to work on that because I’m not going to stop doing something until I finish X, Y, and Z and that can backfire. I have to learn to stop and be OK with stopping. But I feel like I have to keep going so I can have results.

BGC: Any advice for people who don’t see themselves reflected in the stories around them?

One thing I didn’t get to do growing up was shadow people. I didn’t get to see this job or this art, I didn’t get a chance to see what something was about. I was very much in the dark. I essentially felt along the walls and found a light switch. If you want to skip that, try to shadow someone or even interview someone who does what you want to do. Try to get as close as you can in regards to things you have similar with the person. Whether you’re a little Black girl and you want to speak with a Black woman who is an architect. If you just do the research and find them and reach out and interview them because there’s potential in you having interest in whatever that is then I feel like you will find your path to creating much easier. 

Then, after talking with these people who are doing what you want to do, make sure to keep in contact with them…because if you keep those relationships you never know if it can help you down the line. If it’s a genuine interest in these different things, you never know.

BGC: Any future projects?

I am expanding The Bookshelf. I don’t know if I’m going to keep it under the same name, but it’s definitely moving in the direction of having its own website. And with that, I hope to add some other special things on that website too aside from just books. I am in the literary community and I know that writers struggle in the trenches and just struggle with writing period because writing is hard. So, I hope to add some tidbits on The Bookshelf for that and for those who just started writing and think they may want to write.

I’m drawing more. I can’t say that I’m the best artist but I feel happy with my work art right now, so I’m hoping to start doing some commissions with that but I’m probably going to limit my time on that because in order of importance The Bookshelf and my writing career take precedence.

I’m working very hard to find a literary agent that sees me and would be ecstatic to champion my book and champion my future stories. I’ve tried many different careers in my life and the only thing that has really stuck has been writing.

You can follow AJay on Twitter @AJay_Author and check out The Bookshelf here!

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Bryan Ferry on how Roxy Music invented a new kind of pop: 'We were game for anything'

More than 45 years ago, a new group released their first album. They didn’t wear denim, nor had they, apparently, paid their dues. Indeed, their heavily stylised presentation – a model posed archly on the cover in a 1950s pastiche, the musicians inside clad in leopardskin and leather with styled quiffs – could not have been more opposed to the rock modes of the day. “Is this a recording session or a cocktail party?” inquired Ferry’s friend Simon Puxley in the liner notes. Before you even got to the music, the record cover was a gauntlet thrown down – an explosion of glamour in a wasteland of faded blue cotton.

“The clothes we were wearing at that time would have put off quite a large chunk of people,” reflects Bryan Ferry. “What I liked about the American bands, the Stax label and Motown, they were into presentation and show business, mohair suits, quite slick. And the cover art, I thought of all the American pop culture icons, Marilyn Monroe: selling cigarettes or beer with a glamorous image. But it was a bit off-kilter as well; there was something a bit strange about it, futuristic as well as retro. All that, instead of a picture of the band, in a dreary street, looking rather sullen. Which was the norm.”

Timeline

Bryan Ferry: his career highlights

1971

Roxy Music form

Bryan Ferry was working as a ceramics teacher in a girls' school after leaving art school in Newcastle, having already played with Roxy bassist Graham Simpson in the band the Gas Board. They began amassing band members, including Brian Eno, eventually recruiting the final piece of the Roxy puzzle, guitarist Phil Manzanera.

1973

For Your Pleasure

Roxy Music's self-titled debut was a hit, as was this second album, which reached No 4 in the UK. It would be the last album with Eno, and features some of Ferry's most evocative performances, from the debonair strut of Do the Strand to the creepy In Every Dream Home a Heartache.

1974

Love is the Drug

Love is the Drug, from the Country Life album, is perhaps the most enduring Roxy hit – an irrepressible disco stomp, with Ferry peacocking through it with a magnificent staccato delivery. It was the band's only US hit, and reached no 2 in the UK.

1976

Let's Stick Together

During a two-year Roxy hiatus, Ferry released a pair of solo albums, with the title track from Let's Stick Together hitting the top five. It's a cover of the blues song by Wilbert Harrison, and Ferry has proven adept at covers down the years – his debut solo album in 1973 featured versions of everything from Piece of My Heart to Sympathy for the Devil, while Roxy Music's cover of John Lennon's Jealous Guy became the band's only No 1 single.

1982

Avalon

The final Roxy Music album was a long way from the fiendishly psychedelic art pop of their first records – it helped define the slick sound of 80s soft rock with tracks such as More Than This. It was released a month before his wedding to Lucy Helmore, a marriage that lasted until 2003.

1990

Fourth son Merlin born

Ferry has four sons: Otis, Isaac, Tara and Merlin. The latter survived a terrible car crash in 2014, while Otis became infamous for his support of fox hunting.

2001

Roxy Music reform

Roxy Music reformed for their 30th anniversary, and went on to tour in 2005, 2010 and 2011. Ferry continued to release solo work, including more cover versions – an album of jazz standards, As Time Goes By, was followed by an album of Dylan songs, Dylanesque.

2010

Olympia

After teasing new Roxy Music tracks for a number of years, including sessions with Eno, Ferry released the songs on his solo album Olympia, which also features Nile Rodgers, David Gilmour, Johnny Greenwood and Flea – plus Kate Moss on the cover.

Thank you for your feedback.

The music inside lived up to the cover’s challenge: a collage of pop-culture nostalgia, hard-rock guitar, piano-driven melodies, stylised high vocals, strange musical structures and experimental sound pictures. Roxy Music’s eponymous album sounded like nothing else in 1971 and 1972 – and like nothing else the group would ever attempt again. Recorded in the first full flush of inspiration, songs such as Ladytron, The Bob (Medley), and Sea Breezes exist outside of their time: a radical synthesis that mapped the future at the same time as it plundered the past.

Watch Roxy Music performing Ladytron on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972

“We were definitely trying to show our versatility,” says Ferry now. “I had lots of musical influences, plus what the band brought to the table.” Lead guitarist Phil Manzanera, he says, “had this Latin heritage, being born in South America”. Saxophone and oboe player Andy Mackay was classically trained. “[Brian] Eno with his deep interest in experimental music. They were specialists in their field. Paul Thompson brought a lot, with his very powerful, earthy drumming, which was one of the features of the Velvet Underground.”

The cover of Roxy Music immediately marked it out from the rest of 1972’s fare

Ferry is talking in his west-London studio. We walk past repeated Warhol Marilyns and sit under a large print of Jerry Hall on the north coast of Anglesey, the cover for Roxy Music’s fifth album, Siren. Wearing a blue jacket, V-neck pullover and tie, Ferry is measured, at once diffident and supremely assured. At 72, he looks great. “The only bit I don’t like is analysing it,” he says of his work. “I do sometimes envy the people who don’t ever have to describe what they’re doing.”

Despite its age and apparent familiarity, Roxy Music’s debut remains thrillingly strange. A new reissue, eight years in the making, traces the development of this revolutionary record that seemingly arrived out of nowhere in June 1972. Combined with the group’s first, 1971 demos, three 1972 John Peel sessions and album outtakes, the songs that would populate Roxy Music come into focus as the bold, honed culmination of lifelong fixations.

Growing up in Washington, County Durham during the monochrome 1950s, Ferry found a lifeline and an inspiration: “I loved American music,” he says. ““From the age of about 10, every week you’d discover somebody new. I was very much into jazz. You know how English people are; there’s a certain amount of musical snobbery. I mean, I loved Little Richard and Fats Domino, but when I heard Charlie Parker for the first time, this was something I really loved, and nobody else who I knew knew anything about him. It’s good to have your private obsessions.”

Roxy Music photographed at London’s Royal College of Art, July 1972 (from left): Phil Manzanera, Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Brian Eno, Rik Kenton and Paul Thompson. Photograph: Brian Cooke/Redferns

As a paperboy delivering newspapers and weekly music magazines, Ferry read about more music than he could actually hear. “There wasn’t a great deal of jazz on radio. Radio Luxembourg was very important for emerging pop and soul. The BBC had one or two programmes. When the skiffle thing happened, that was when you started hearing Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy. That intensity of feeling; that’s what I got, hearing Leadbelly with a 12-string guitar, that yearning in his voice, it struck such a magical chord in me.”

He had similar revelations from hearing Lotte Lenya singing the songs of her husband Kurt Weill and the German soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, He loved the beat poets, TS Eliot and American show tunes. “I liked Fred Astaire, Cole Porter, and I’d hear those songs played by Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Billie Holiday. There was a music store in Newcastle where you could go into a booth and listen to stuff. I lived in there.”

While in the sixth form at Washington Grammar, Ferry joined a group called the Banshees, who played R&B in the local clubs – including the famous Club A Go Go that had provided the launch pad for the Animals. In autumn 1964, he entered the fine art department of Newcastle University, where he was inspired by the British pop-artist Richard Hamilton and Warhol associate Mark Lancaster. After completing his degree, Ferry moved to London, where he supported himself by teaching art and ceramics at a Hammersmith school.

Roxy Music began in the late 1960s, after this move to the capital. Having sung R&B and soul with groups such as the Gas Board and the City Blues, he began to pursue the idea of striking out on his own. “In my college band, I had been imitating whichever song I was singing. We used to do quite obscure covers – Bobby Bland, BB King – but by the time I was writing my own songs, I didn’t want to sound too American. At the time, most English bands tried to sound American. Except for people like King Crimson. They had an English voice, which was quite interesting.”

He was convinced that he could start his own band. “First of all, [it was] just me and Graham [Simpson], the bass player. He had been in my college band. He was a very cool guy, into the beat poets, had a huge jazz collection, all those Blue Note records. He was one of the most interesting people in the band, actually. Sardonic sense of humour. Then Mackay, next, then Eno.”

Another early shot of Roxy Music from 1972. Photograph: Brian Moody/Rex Features

Each new addition brought an element that enabled the new group’s individuality. “The oboe was Andy Mackay’s first instrument, his main thing, although he developed into a great sax player. I met Andy because he had a synthesiser. So Andy brought a) the synthesiser and b) the oboe. Eno, of course, manipulated the synth in the band as soon as he joined, really. Those textures: the oboe is very precise, and the synth sounds were washes, colours, textures, mood enhancers, and so on. So, yes, it was a key part of the sound.”

Together with first guitarist Roger Bunn and drummer Dexter Lloyd, Roxy Music recorded their first demos in May 1971, early versions of The Bob (Medley), Grey Lagoons, 2HB, Chance Meeting and Ladytron. “They were all done in Eno’s flat in Camberwell, which is where we ended up doing a lot of rehearsals. There was a derelict house off Portobello Road where we went as well. That’s when it started. I thought of nothing else, I was quite driven to make it all happen. I would carry the tape around to record labels on my days off from teaching.”

A key early supporter was Richard Williams, who featured the group in Melody Maker during august 1971 before they had any whiff of record company interest. Williams had written glowing and informed reviews of, among other things, the recently reissued first three Velvet Underground albums, which piqued Ferry’s attention. “I always seemed to agree with his taste. So I thought, if anyone is going to like my music, it’s going to be this guy, so I sent him the tape. And he phoned me the same day to say how much he liked it.”

Slowly Roxy Music came into their time. With their Velvet Underground influence, they were tapping into similar sources to David Bowie. But the connections went deeper, into the Warholian fusion of pop and art – an approach prompted by Ferry’s friendship with Lancaster, who had worked in the Factory as a screen-printer in the mid-60s. “He was a really influential guy for me. He was the link between us and Richard Hamilton. All of those people were very influential, working with pop imagery.”

Ferry in 1973. Photograph: Ian Dickson / Rex Features

It was Roxy Music’s explicit intention to dissolve the boundaries between high and low. As Michael Bracewell writes in Re-make/Re-model, his account of the group’s founding years, “they chose to inhabit the point where fine art and the avant garde met the vivacity of pop and fashion as an almost elemental force in modern society”.

Produced by King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield, Roxy Music came together over two weeks in March 1972. The range of material is extraordinary: almost every song contains sudden twists and turns, like the galloping Joe Meek-style descent that comes out of nowhere in Ladytron. The opener, Re-Make/Re-Model, begins in party noises and breaks into brief, emblematic solos from each instrument. In Sea Breezes, synthesiser washes introduce a heartfelt torch song, which then segues into a strangulated guitar part: next up is the cocktail doo-wop of the tart album closer Bitters End.

“A lot of the first album is first or second take,” Ferry remembers. “Thinking about the songs, some of them are collage-like, with different sounds and moods within them – they will change abruptly into something else. For instance, Sea Breezes is a slow song, and suddenly moves into this angular, quite opposite mood. I found that interesting, and this band was perfect for that; they were game for anything. We were constantly fiddling around, changing things. I was still trying to find my voice. I [now] think sometimes I’m singing too high, or I should have had another go at that.”

It would have been easy to write Roxy Music off as pastiche – as a few die-hard hippies did at the time – but the feeling is authentic: the love, loss and regret in songs such as If There is Something, Sea Breezes and The Bob (Medley). It’s an album of chance encounters and wistful, evasive memories. “On one hand, you try to shape the emotion, but you’ve got to feel it,” says Ferry, “you don’t analyse as you’re doing it.”

Released in the same week as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Roxy Music entered the UK album charts in late July 1972. Within a month, the group’s first single, Virginia Plain, which wasn’t on the album, was on its way to the Top 10 (it reached No 4). Referencing an art college painting by Ferry, it distilled Roxy’s art-pop manifesto, “what’s real and what’s make-believe”. “It is much more confident,” Ferry says. “We’d made an album and we knew how to do it – sort of. Everyone was featured. It had oboe, the synth, the drums are powerful, and the lyrics were much more assured. I was still finding my feet as a songwriter.”

Roxy Music: 10 of the best

Roxy Music had no sense that the album would reach a mainstream audience. “We thought art students; people like us; limited interest; underground. Coming overground was … interesting.” When did he realised Roxy Music were really taking off? “I suppose when I heard Virginia Plain on midday radio. When the record came out, we were still playing tiny places – driving up to Scarborough or somewhere to play in a club. Hearing Virginia Plain on daytime radio, that felt like … something. Or seeing this album filling the record store window in King’s Road, which is where we went to the manager’s HQ. That was quite moving for me. Walking past, at night, and they’d just filled the window, I couldn’t believe it. It was so great, seeing the image repeated.”

Like a Warhol, you mean? “Exactly, yeah.”

Roxy Music: 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition is out now on Universal (£130). A 2-CD version is also available (£20)

Topics

Reuse this content

This content was originally published here.

[daniel-browne]

Cold Case Logic #21: When I Was Cruel

This one’s been a long time coming. [You can say that again. I started writing this more than a year ago!] I ride hard for a bunch of artists—Dylan, Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, Prince. But there’s only one of whom I can say I’ve heard it all, bought every album (in many cases, more than once), tracked down every B-side and soundtrack appearance, showed up for just about every tour when it came through town. That’s Elvis Costello.

And yet I find the prospect of writing about the man and his music daunting. The essence of his art is harder to pin down than it might seem on the surface. A virtuoso songwriter and a spirited performer, Costello has nearly 30 albums to his credit, give or take, and only one that could fairly be called a dud (I’m looking at you Goodbye Cruel World). He’s never gone through an extended wilderness period like Dylan or Neil Young. That consistency has been to the detriment of his legacy, I suspect. By maintaining such high standards for so long, he’s denied us the comeback narrative we seem to expect from aging rockers. No one ever says his latest album is “his best since King of America” the way it used to be common to say Dylan’s latest was “his best since Blood on the Tracks.”

Another reason he’s so difficult to write about is that he’s written (and talked) so much about himself over the years. Again, the contrast with Dylan is striking. For decades, fans pored over Dylan’s every move and utterance, even his garbage, because they felt they knew so little about him. When his memoir Chronicles was finally published in 2004, it was greeted as a major revelation, even though everyone knew, or should have known, they were dealing with an unreliable narrator. By contrast, when it was announced that Costello would be releasing his memoir, fans speculated that it might be simply an expansion of the extensive liner notes he’d written when his catalog was reissued a decade earlier. He’d already given us thousands of words about his life and work, not to mention a Vanity Fair article in which he listed 500 (!) of his favorite albums; what more was there to say?

With Costello, it seems there’s always more to say. Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink weighs in at nearly 700 pages, not one of them a repeat of those ten-year-old liner notes. As if that weren’t enough, I recently found a post on his website in which he compiled a High Fidelity-style ranking of his own songs. (I can’t seem to find it now, so it’s possible I hallucinated it. The recent Rosanne Cash, Kris Kristofferson co-write “April 5th” came in at #1. I was amazed to see my all-time favorite “Suit of Lights” at #2.) This prolixity, all but unprecedented for a rock star, is both a sign of generosity towards his fans and a strategy for keeping us at bay. Where Dylan has maintained an air of mystery, Costello always seems to be stepping out from behind the curtain to make sure we don’t get the wrong idea. (His 1986 cover of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” went to #33 in the U.S.)

Unfaithful Music was a big event in my life as a Costello fan, partly because of my own circumstances at the time. My son had been born a few months earlier, my wife had just gone back to work, and I was taking over at home, a role I wasn’t ready for. It was an emotionally draining time. If I was lucky, Theo would conk out after his midday bottle, and I’d gingerly wheel him through the cold to Starbucks where the hiss of the milk steamer and the purr of Sinatra crooning Christmas standards served as white noise and I could steal an hour or two to read.

I’d expected the pages of Unfaithful Music to be stuffed with anecdotes and insights about the music, and I wasn’t disappointed. But when I discovered that the book’s main thru-line is Costello’s relationship with his dad Ross, well, let’s just say it hit me where I live. I was familiar with some of the story already. I already knew, for instance, that Ross was a singer in a popular dance band of the ��50s and ’60s. What Unfaithful Music brought home for me was how central a figure he was at every stage of Costello’s journey, both as a man and an artist. Reading the passage in which young Declan MacManus eavesdrops on Ross practicing “Please Please Me” in the front room, itching to get his hands on the record when his dad is done with it, not knowing his course has already been set, I realized the profound responsibility I’d taken on, and I thought about what kind of father I wanted to be. For one thing, I wanted to whisk Theo home and play him something more inspiring than “Jingle Bells.”

And where better to start than with my Elvis Costello albums? I jumped around over the next few weeks, but for some reason I was especially drawn to his recent work. Maybe I wanted to spare Theo’s tender ears the coiled fury of the early “guilt and revenge” years. Or maybe I wanted to continue spending time with the fellow who wrote Unfaithful Music, his edge still sharp but the steel more tempered. In any case, I’ve never viewed his body of work the way many critics do: a “classic period” followed by a series of perverse experiments. My first Costello album was 1991’s kitchen-sinky Mighty Like a Rose (a.k.a. The Beard Album), and even as I explored the back catalog, I kept moving forward with him. I never resented 1993’s string quartet opus The Juliette Letters for not being This Year’s Model. I discovered them both at the same time.

With that in mind, my original idea for this post was to write a paragraph on every album he’s released in the past twenty years or so, from the Burt Bacharach collabo Painted From Memory to the Roots collabo Wise Up Ghost. I quickly realized the task was overwhelming. I needed to pick the one album about which I had the most to say, or more precisely the one that would help me access what I had to say, which felt deep-seated but inchoate. Without really thinking it through I settled on When I Was Cruel from 2002.

Now that I’m sitting down to write, though, even tackling this one album feels overwhelming. When I Was Cruel is a rich text as the academics like to say. Ironically, it’s not among Costello’s most heavily annotated works. It came out after the reissue campaign that resulted in those exhaustive liner notes, and it’s barely mentioned in Unfaithful Music. It does, however, make for an illuminating companion to the memoir. In both, Costello confronts the passage of time and also confounds it, skipping around in time freely, from chapter to chapter, song to song, even line to line.

This skipping around is a typical Costello technique. Linearity isn’t his way. Even when he hatches a group of songs with a unifying topic or storyline, he’ll break them up, obscure his intent. (The Juliet Letters is the only entry in his catalog that could be called a proper concept album.) Half the songs on 2004’s Delivery Man, give or take, are episodes in a Southern Gothic tale about a sinister figure and the women under his spell, but they’re jumbled together with the other half, which are unrelated, and I only know what Costello had in mind because, in his usual way, he explained it in interviews at the time of the album’s release. He even pointed out that the Delivery Man character had already appeared in “Hidden Shame,” which he wrote for Johnny Cash more than a decade earlier. Costello’s own version of “Hidden Shame” eventually turned up on 2009’s Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, along with a clutch of songs from an unfinished opera about Hans Christian Andersen and Jenny Lind.

When I Was Cruel has its own displaced narratives. “Soul for Hire” was written for a little-seen movie called Prison Song, starring Q-Tip and Mary J. Blige, with Costello appearing as both a teacher and a lawyer. (“Soul for Hire” is sung from the lawyer’s point of view.) The origin of lead single, “Tear Off Your Own Head (It’s a Doll Revolution)” is even more far-fetched. If Costello is to be believed, it was meant to be the theme song for a show about singing female spies that he and T-Bone Burnett pitched to the WB.

As amusing as all this backstory is, it doesn’t reveal much about When I Was Cruel. More telling is the odd placement of “Dust 2…” three tracks before its bookend “…Dust.” The crux of the album is what lies between those ellipses. The final words of “Dust 2…” are “Well, I believe we just/become a speck of dust”; the first words of “…Dust” are “If only dust could talk/what would we hear it say?” This is an album about what it feels like to be in the middle of a life and to be living in the middle of history. To capture that feeling, Costello draws on a lifetime of songcraft: fractured timelines, a riot of voices, inexhaustible skeins of wordplay.

Like “Dust 2,” the title track is the second in a series (it’s listed as “When I Was Cruel No. 2”), but its predecessor isn’t on the album. This is an old Dylan trick, nicked from the high art world: “I Shall Be Free” was followed, two years later, by “I Shall Be Free No. 10”; the other eight iterations may or may not exist. In the case of “When I Was Cruel,” no. 1 does exist—it was released as a B-side—but its absence from the album contributes to the sense that we are joining a train of thought in medias res. (Toward the end of the album, “Episode of Blonde” fades out in mid-verse, a train of thought going on without us. This is one trick Dylan never pulled, though the Talking Heads did.)

When was Costello cruel exactly? The title evokes the sneering young man who spit acrid lines like “Don’t ask me to apologize/I won’t ask you to forgive me” back in 1978. The liner notes are seeded with other allusions to the persona forged in his early years. Production is credited to “The Imposter,” a reference to a song from 1980’s Get Happy that Costello has used as a pseudonym from time to time (although in this case, he actually shares the name with three other producers). Two of the three members of his legendary back-up band The Attractions—keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas—appear prominently on When I Was Cruel, and Costello would soon announce the formation of The Imposters with bassist Davey Faragher replacing the recalcitrant Bruce Thomas.

Calling the band The Imposters served two opposing purposes: to remind his audience of his brilliant history with The Attractions and to make it clear that this was not The Attractions and could never be. This doubleness of intent is all over When I Was Cruel. Unlike so many of his peers, Costello has never tried to bask in past glories. (He’s struck a defiantly anti-nostalgic tone in talking about his current tour revisiting 1982’s Imperial Bedroom.) Instead, on When I Was Cruel, he takes the temptation to live in the past as one of his central themes. The refrain of “When I Was Cruel No. 2” is “but it was so much easier/when I was cruel.” Several other songs cast a harsh light on the spectacle of people, specifically men, refusing to grow up. From “Spooky Girlfriend”: “I want a girl who’s helpless and frail/who won’t pull on my ponytail.” From “Daddy Can I Turn This?”: “Is anybody acting your age?/You got a girl you keep in a cage.” From “Episode of Blonde”: “She’s a trophy on your arm/a magnet for your money clip.”

The subject of “Alibi” could be either a man or a woman, although when I first heard it, at a concert before the release of When I Was Cruel, I assumed it must be addressed to a woman because it reminded me so much of “I Want You,” Costello’s epic psychodrama of curdled love. “I Want You” and “Alibi” are almost identical in length (6:41 and 6:42, respectively), and both build on the repetition of a simple title phrase rather than a traditional verse-chorus structure. At the concert I saw—Costello performing as a duo with Steve Nieve—“Alibi” achieved some of the show-stopping intensity fans have come to expect from “I Want You.” The studio version is more subdued (as is the original recording of “I Want You,” compared to the juggernaut it’s become on stage). Still, it’s a merciless song, exposing the irony in the past tense of “when I was cruel.”

“Insane, what a mundane Alibi, alibi And you only wanted to be famous Alibi, alibi Sorry, but your mummy doesn't love you Alibi, alibi Stop me if you've heard this.”

As we get older, we all accrue stories, justifications, excuses for the way things turned out. Costello calls these stories alibis because they cover up a crime: our failure to live up to our ideals. We act selfishly (“You did it 'cos you wanted…And you took it/'cos you need it/Alibi, alibi”); we let material comfort corrupt us (“You were happy when you were poor/and more honest and that’s your/Alibi, alibi”); we hurt those close enough to see us for what we are (“But if I've done something wrong there's no ifs and buts/'Cos I love you just as much as I hate your guts”). The “I” in “Alibi” could be the same needy manchild as in “Spooky Girlfriend” (or, for that matter, the jaded public defender of “Soul for Hire”) but then who is the “you”? In Costello’s world, point of view, like chronology, is slippery.

There is one line in “Alibi” I’ve never been able to parse: “But if I've done something right then don't be surprised/There are soldiers who will kill but refuse to die.” As inscrutable as it is, the reference to soldiers is a portal, a glimpse of something larger than one person’s delusions. For if there are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, there is also another kind of story, the ones that happen to us, in which we are nothing more than bit players.

This larger story is present in the album’s opening lines:

“Bells are chiming for victory There's a page back in history 45 They came back to the world that they fought for Didn't turn out just like they thought”

The song “45” is, among other things, a bravura feat of punning. It refers not only to the year World War II ended but also to Costello’s age when he wrote the song, and to the 45 rpm records that were the defining artifact of his youth. In a sense, “45” is the seed that contains all of what would become Unfaithful Music. Costello makes it clear in his memoir that to grow up in England in the 1960s was to come of age not only with The Beatles but also with the lingering aftermath of the war. And while pop music showed young Declan MacManus the possibility of transcendence (“Bass and treble heal every hurt/There’s a rebel in a nylon shirt”) and reinvention (“So don’t you weep and shed/Just change your name instead”), the collective past makes its presence felt in his own songs. In “45,” it’s an echo in the distance as he contemplates his mortality: “Bells are chiming and tears are falling/It creeps up on you without a warning.”

Personal history and the other kind intertwine on When I Was Cruel until it becomes difficult to tell them apart. “Tart” opens with the words, “Hear silver trumpets will trill in the Arabic streets of Seville,” an evocation of a fallen empire. Later there is a reference to the rationing of nylon during World War II, which led women to create tromp l’oeil stockings with make-up and eyebrow pencil: “Nylon was hung from a peg/And a kohl black seam ran down her leg.” Despite these far-flung allusions, the feel of the song is intimate, sensual. Costello has described it as a reminder to himself not to give in to the dark side of his nature (“it was so much easier/when I was cruel”). So, beneath the impressionistic imagery, a familiar story. Haven’t we all tried to buck ourselves up by thinking about how bad people had it “back then”?

(“My Little Blue Window,” one of Costello’s few unambiguous love songs, uses more straightforward language to explore similar psychological terrain. In this case, the job of bolstering his spirits falls to his companion: “My lovely hooligan/Come by and smash my pane/'Til I can see right through/My little blue window.”)

“Dust 2…,” offers no such consolation. “Could I spit out the truth/Or would you rather just swallow a lie?” Costello asks but doesn’t wait for an answer. His lens never stops roving, abruptly jumping from panoramic view to extreme close-up. In observing the dust caught “beneath the marble fingernails of kings and saints,” he captures both the veneration and eventual neglect of all history’s great men. A snippet of sexual tension (“And then she caught you staring/She knows what you're thinking”) turns out to be just a fleeting moment of privacy before the outside world comes crashing in:

“Here comes the juggernaut Here come The Poisoners They choke the life and land And rob the joy from us Why do they taste of sugar? Oh, when they're made of money Here come the Lamb of God And the butcher's boy, Sonny”

This disturbing verse carries over from “Dust 2…” to “…Dust” (or is it vice versa?). Here, individual destiny and the larger forces of history are no longer even nominally distinct. People are reduced to either casualties (“Why did they dam the land?/How did they flood the plain?”) or collaborators (“You kept your mouth well shut/Appeared to turn your coat/Now there's a name for you but it's stuck in my throat”). Costello ends the song by acknowledging the limits of the transcendence he celebrates in “45”:

“If dust could only gather in the needle track Then it would skip a beat and it would jump right back If dust could only gather in a needle track Then it would skip a beat And all the sense I lack”

We lack the sense, the perspective really, to divine our place in the grand scheme. A love affair can feel as momentous as war. This breakdown in perspective becomes a kind of delirium in “15 Petals,” the album’s most powerful song. “I love you twisted/And I love you straight,” the singer tells the woman he is no longer with.

“I'd write it down but I can't concentrate Words won't obey they do as the please And all I am left with are these 15 petals One for every year I spent with you…” It bears noting that Costello had been married to Cait O’Riordan for about fifteen years at the time When I Was Cruel came out, and while the album (like many before it) is dedicated to her, they would divorce that same year. But “15 Petals” refuses to confine itself to the dimensions of gossip (“words won’t obey me…”). It’s a cracked kaleidoscope, shards of narrative and imagery catching the light for a moment before spinning away again: “Down in the tavern with Mary and Joe…Mussolini highway/There’s a frankincense tree…” The song ends with the lines, “Ein Panzer Kommander with no hair in place/The crooked battalion drilled holes in the square.” The Prince of Peace is born, peace is shattered by madmen. A marriage dies, an ex-husband pines for “useless battles I’ll never start”—around and around we go. The music is an uncanny personification of the mayhem in the lyrics. Acoustic and electric guitar, bass, and percussion (possibly a loop?) lock into a circular pattern; a horn section made up of members of The Jazz Passengers and The Mingus Big Band (both past Costello collaborators) stab through the mix with bleating, staccato commentary. The charts for 1983’s Punch the Clock, Costello’s earlier experiment with horns, sound cutesy by comparison. I’ve quoted and parsed the lyrics of When I Was Cruel at great length both because I believe they reward such close attention and because, as far as I know, no one has bothered to do it before. But up to this point I’ve neglected to mention that the album sounds incredible. Until When I Was Cruel, Costello had worked almost exclusively with big-name producers: Nick Lowe, country legend Billy Sherrill, Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, British hitmakers Langer & Winstanley, New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint, roots-rock illuminati T-Bone Burnett, go-to '90s soundscaper Mitchell Froom, easy listening legend Burt Bacharach. The trio that joined Costello under the Imposter alias for Cruel have comparatively few credits to their names (the highlight of their resumes is probably some work as assistant engineers for fellow Irishmen Van Morrison and U2). And yet they helped him achieve what may just be his most fully realized sound. As Costello tells it, while on his way to a Lucinda Williams concert in New Jersey, he saw a 15-watt Sears Robuck amplifier in a shop window, and, “it just sort of spoke to me, and said, ‘Buy me, I am the sound of your next record.’” I’m no gearhead, so I’m not sure where the sound of that amplifier fits into the aesthetic of the album, but Costello and his production partners do at times flirt with a tinny quality; you can hear it in the unaccompanied electric guitar that opens the album and the shrill organ that rises to the top of the mix once the band kicks in. Far more striking is the influence of hip-hop and contemporary R&B. In the same interview in which he mentions the Sears Robuck amp, Costello namechecks Timbaland and El-P. “Spooky Girlfriend” was written with Destiny’s Child in mind, an obvious inspiration once it’s pointed out, which, in typical Costello fashion, he was quick to do in other interviews promoting the album. He even thanks Def Jam mogul Lyor Cohen in the liner notes. Costello has earned a reputation as an uncanny mimic; he can write a country weeper that’s a dead ringer for a George Jones classic or a torch song that sounds just right coming from Chet Baker. But on When I Was Cruel, he sublimates his sonic reference points into a style of rock and roll that is uniquely his. Unlike Lou Reed, he knows better than to stake a claim to rap music by spitting bars over a drum machine (RIP, Lou). And unlike Steve Earle, he understands there’s nothing intrinsically fresh about turntable beats and wicky-wicky scratches (love you, Steve!). What jumps out at you on first listen is that the album is thick with bass. Attractions bassist and Costello antagonist Bruce Thomas was known for his melodic approach, often playing intricate figures high up on the neck (this is not an original insight—I seem to recall Costello pointing this out somewhere or other). When I Was Cruel was Costello’s first rock album after the definitive dissolution of The Attractions, and you get the sense he felt liberated; the songs take full advantage of Davey Faragher’s meatier attack. (Tom Waits once described Faragher as “a gorilla of groove.”) Other emblematic touches: the skittering dub effect (phased guitar?) in the intro to “Alibi”; the way the piano and drums in “Tart” go from elegant and spare to thrashing and stark and back again, as if two different versions of the song have been roughly collaged together; the sample that drives the title track, a first for Costello. It’s a single syllable (“un”) taken from an Italian pop record O’Riordan played him, and it melds with a heavy looped beat, whispers of vibraphone, and James Bond guitar to create a languorous atmosphere unlike anything else he’s done. My favorite musical moment on the album, other than “15 Petals”’ feral horns, is a subtle bit of singing right at the very end. The voice we hear in “Radio Silence” belongs to a more tragic variation on the self-involved loser who appears throughout the album. He’s barricaded himself in a talk radio station and is threatening to commit suicide live on air; it’s unclear if he’s a listener driven to the brink by the histrionics the medium is known for—or the host, coming to grips with the toxic influence of his own vocation (“it was so much easier/when I was cruel”). In any case, he has an announcement to make:

“From this distance it’s hard to tell the difference Between a king and a jack And a poet and a hack Maintaining radio silence from now on” Costello is one of the only rockers whose range and power as a singer seem to have grown over the years. Consequently, he’s become a bit of a belter in middle age. (He’s in full cabaret mode in the previous song, “Episode of Blonde.”) But he treats these words—the album’s last—delicately, with a sense of resignation shading into tenderness. The sound coming from the radio is of a man who has dropped his alibis. He is, as Pema Chodron might put it, in a groundless state. Society is too frenzied and vacuous to recognize his worth, and from within his own unfinished life, he can’t see himself either. Is he a king or a commoner, a maker of history, or a victim of it? We invent stories to answer these questions, but when our stories fail us, the only thing left to do is stop telling them. There is a more mundane gloss on the song, as well: If memory serves, Costello performed “45” on The Tonight Show before When I Was Cruel was even announced, and in his couch chat with Jay Leno, he hinted at retirement. When I first played “Radio Silence,” I was convinced it was the last I’d hear from him. I took it as a kind of sequel to 1978’s “Radio Radio,” another plaint in which the industry he’s devoted his life to is nothing but an agent of conformity and mediocrity. Back then, he was a young man, raring to “bite the hand that feeds me”; this time, he was giving up with a sigh. I still suspect this was at least a part of what was on Costello’s mind when he wrote and recorded “Radio Silence.” But it’s also clear to me, clearer now that I’ve written this essay, that the song is connected to a set of concerns that Costello has explored in all his work, never more deeply than on When I Was Cruel. If he did intend the song as a definitive, however veiled, statement about his future, then he ignored the truth in the messy fictions his characters inhabit: We can never know for certain what life has in store for us. Case in point: Costello’s retirement didn’t take. Though he still periodically threatens to give up recording, he’s released seven studio albums since When I Was Cruel. The first of these, North, chronicles the end of his relationship with O’Riordan and—surprise!— the beginning of a new love affair with the jazz chanteuse Diana Krall, who would become his third wife and the mother of his twin sons. He even hosted two seasons of a TV talk show, a turn of events I for one didn’t see coming. Later this year, I’ll get another crack at introducing my son to the artist who has been such a constant presence in my life. Costello and Krall will be playing the parents in Pete the Cat, a new animated show based on Theo’s favorite books. Theo is two now, and he’s already lived through four bomb threats at his daycare center. These are the most troubled and troubling times I’ve known (“here come The Poisoners”). I can only hope the worst has passed before he’s old enough to remember. In the meantime, I find nourishment, if not comfort, in When I Was Cruel’s harsh but lucid vision. I’m approaching middle age and there are dark clouds ahead, but if there’s one thing this album still has to say to me after fifteen years, it’s that there’s no going back.