#and I have until the end of july to submit the full first draft | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

h50bigbang · 3 years ago

Text

FAQ

General

What is the Hawaii Five-0 Big Bang?

A big bang is a writing and art challenge pairing authors and artists to complete a long work of fiction. The Hawaii Five-0 Big Bang is centered around stories that take place in the Hawaii Five-0 universe, with a minimum word count requirement of 10,000.

How do I sign up?

To participate as a writer, sign up at the Author Sign Up Post. Sign-ups begin Wednesday, June 1st, 2022, and run through Thursday, June 30th, 2022.

To participate as an artist, sign up at the Artist Sign Up Post. Artist sign-ups begin Wednesday, June 1st, 2022 and run through Sunday, July 31st, 2022.

Can I sign up as both an author and an artist?

You may sign up in both categories, but please be aware of your ability to balance your workload. Signing up as an artist is a commitment to the writer you claim that you will produce artwork for their story. Signing up as a writer is a commitment to the artist that claims you that you will produce a finished story to accompany that artwork.

Where is the schedule?

The schedule for this festival can be found here. If there are any questions or issues surrounding the schedule, please direct them to the mod contact post.

When and how do artists claim stories?

The Artist Claim Post will go up on Thursday, August 25th, 2022. In order to submit your story for an artist claim, you must be at least halfway finished with your draft (5000 words). Authors will submit their story summaries during Author Check-in Number 2, and artists will fill out a form to claim the story. All artist claims are first come, first served.

Where will the stories and artwork be posted?

All stories and their accompanying art should be posted in their entirety to Archive of Our Own, with a header linking to your story posted on this Tumblr. During the final check-in, when you have finished your work, you will be assigned a date and time to post your work to AO3 and the linked header to Tumblr. You will be responsible for posting your own story/header at least 2, but no more than 24, hours before your assigned time. Please do not cross-promote your work until the bang is completed.

Authors

What is the minimum word count? Is there a maximum word count?

The minimum word count required for this festival is 10,000 words. There is no maximum word count.

Can I use a story I’m already writing?

The goal of a big bang is to create a new work of long fiction within a specific time frame. As such, stories you have begun prior to the start of the bang cannot be used. Planning, preparing, and outlining prior to the bang is allowed; beginning your story before the bang starts defeats the purpose of the challenge.

Can I use a kink meme prompt?

As most kink meme prompts aren’t designed to inspire a full-length story, we would prefer that participants write their stories from their own ideas, and not from kink meme prompts.

Can I write more than one story?

Signing up for more than one story is allowed, but discouraged due to the high word count requirement. You are the best judge of your writing pace, so please only sign up for what you feel is realistically achievable. Remember that submitting a summary to the Artist Claim Post is a commitment to your artist to complete your story or stories.

Where can I sign up as an author?

Please sign up using the Author Sign Up Post, beginning on Wednesday, June 1st, 2022, and ending on Thursday, June 30th, 2022.

Is cowriting permissible?

You may sign up with one coauthor for any given story. You may also sign up for an additional story with a different co-writer if you desire.

Which pairings are permissible?

Any pairing is permissible, as well as general (Gen) fics. Crossovers with other fandoms are allowed for this bang. Real-person fic (RPF) is not allowed.

Will my story definitely have art?

Due to the higher ratio of authors to artists in most big bangs, we cannot guarantee that all stories will have accompanying art. This is why we require that stories be halfway completed for submission to the Artist Claim Post. Completing half the minimum word count by Satuday, August 20th, 2022, and writing an interesting summary will increase your chances of being claimed by an artist.

When are the check-ins, and how many words are required for each one?

The full Hawaii Five-0 Big Bang schedule, including check-in dates, can be found here. Check-ins are an opportunity to touch base with your artist, the other authors, and the mods, but no specific word count is required. In order to submit your story for an artist claim, however, you must have a word count of at least 5,000 words by the end of the second check-in on Saturday, August 20th, 2022.

What if I don’t finish my story?

You may drop from the Hawaii Five-0 Big Bang at any time prior to receiving an artist claim without penalty. Dropping after art claims is unfair to your artist. If you drop after receiving your artist claim without prior contact with the mods, you may not be allowed to participate in next year’s Hawaii Five-0 Big Bang or other gleekmods-affiliated bangs.

Is a beta required for my story?

Your story must be beta-read at least once before submission. If you do not already have a beta reader, you can visit our beta page to request one.

What pairings are allowed for this big bang?

There are no restrictions on pairings. We expect that most authors will choose to write about relationships, but if you wish to write a Gen piece, that is definitely allowed. Your story must unambiguously take place in the Hawaii Five-0 universe in order to qualify for this big bang.

Can I submit my story early?

You may not submit your completed story until at least 2, but no more than 24, hours before your assigned posting date and time. However, if you finish before October 15th, 2022, you will be poised to claim your posting time slot as soon as the final check-in opens. Please do not post your story to AO3 more than 24 hours before your assigned posting date/time.

Do I have a Tumblr/AO3 account to participate as an author?

All authors must have a frequently-checked email account, a Tumblr account, and an AO3 account (or access to one) in order to post your finished works. Tumblr and AO3 accounts are free to set up and easy to use. We apologize if this is inconvenient, but previous bangs have had difficulty with posting format and consistency and this seems like the best solution to allow authors to maintain control over their own work and keep the bang running smoothly. Please provide us with an email account you check at least daily. Only the mods and your artist/author collaborator will have access to the email you provide.

May I post my story as a series of installments over time?

No. Your entire story must be posted on AO3 before you submit it to our Tumblr. You may start posting to AO3 up to 24 hours before your time slot, in order to get all chapters posted and any formatting issues resolved. Please choose your posting slot accordingly. If you need more than 24 hours to format your story, please use AO3’s draft and preview system.

Artists

What are the art requirements for the Hawaii Five-0 Big Bang?

The Hawaii Five-0 Big Bang allows a wide array of art, with requirements based on the media. Artists providing a graphics package should include at least one piece of cover art, and a banner/header (which can be a modified version of the cover art). Artists submitting a fanmix should include a downloadable (hosted on dropbox or the like) mix of at least five songs with front and back cover art. Artists submitting traditional or digital artwork should include 2+ pieces of artwork, though one piece can be a banner/header or a piece of cover art. Artists submitting a fanvid should include at least one video of at least one minute in length. Artists submitting a Photoset or Gifset must have at least six (6) frames. Artists submitting a podfic should include a recording that covers the entire text of the story.

The summaries posted to the Artist Claim Post will include a note on any types of artwork an author prefers to receive/not to receive. Some authors may be uncomfortable with certain content (eg. nudity) or formats. Please do your best to make an artist claim that will best suit both you and your writer.

Artists are required to host their artwork on a site of their choosing, and then provide embedding links to their authors. Simply emailing your finished art files to the author is not acceptable. See below for more information.

How do I claim a story?

The Artist Claim Post will go up on Thursday, August 25th, 2022. Only stories with drafts of at least 5,000 words will be posted in the claim post, and all claims will be first come, first served. The Artist Claim listings will be anonymous (no author(s) names) and will include any pairings or warnings which appear in the story.

Can I claim more than one story?

Please claim only one story in the first Artist Claim Post. If we still have unclaimed stories, we will post a second claim post later that same week.

What do I do when I’m finished?

When you have completed your art, please contact your author to determine the best method for sharing your artwork. Any graphics or traditional/digital art should be embedded within the story, which requires the artwork be uploaded somewhere. There is no requirement for exactly where the artwork be uploaded (imgur.com is a popular service), though it must be uploaded by the artist. Graphic/traditional/digital artists may also make an art masterpost on AO3; please do not post your art to AO3 until 24 hours prior to your author’s posting date/time. Artists creating a fanmix for their stories should post the link to the youtube/spotify/etc. fanmix, along with the accompanying cover art, to tumblr or AO3; your writer will include a link to the fanmix in the header of their work. Artists creating a fanvid should post their video to YouTube, preferably with a link to the author’s story in the notes.

Do I have to have a Tumblr/AO3 account to participate as an artist?

No, a Tumblr or AO3 account is not required to participate as an artist. Your works can be hosted in any location mutually desirable to you and your author, and embedded/linked within the work in the most appropriate fashion. We do need a way of contacting you, so you must provide a frequently-checked email address. We cannot allow sign-ups with only Tumblr urls.

Betas

How can I offer my services to authors for this festival?

Please visit our beta page where you can advertise your services and/or respond to authors’ pleas for help.

Any other questions?

Please direct all questions to the mod contact post, and we will respond as quickly as possible.

#h50bb: admin

2 notes · View notes

davetheshady · 5 years ago

Note

🌟 how about chapter 4 of waiting for the bus in the rain 🌟 and only partially because i showed up to yell about the last few paragraphs when it first dropped. also just because i love Julie content and it's the very middle of that fic

::blows dust off inbox:: So! Now that I’ve back from traveling through three countries and recovered from trying to leave most of my arm skin in one of them (PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: don’t go so fast you flip over on the Alpine Slide, particularly if you’re in the actual Alps) here’s some DVD commentary on Chapter 4 of Waiting for the Bus in the Rain! It’s chock full of my stylistic hallmarks, i.e. way longer than I expected.

(Note to my sister: THIS IS FULL OF SPOILERS. GO READ MY STORY FIRST YOU LOSER)

There’s a Sheriff’s Secret Police officer outside Julie’s window. Considering she’s in her office on the second floor, this is fairly impressive. But when they scream and scrabble against the glass after accidentally kicking over their ladder for the third time, Julie’s had enough.

Even when they’re not under suspicion of using the scientific method, Julie has to deal with WAY more (attempted) surveillance than Carlos ever does. This is partially because she doesn’t have amazing hair, but also because Cecil doesn’t narrate large chunks of her life over the radio that the SSP can copy down and submit as a report.

vulnerabilities include fire and cold iron

and according to the literature high velocity cheese wedges but i’ve never seen anyone test that

My hand to God. Probably my number one complaint about fantasy as a genre is that everyone takes stuff from Celtic mythology so seriously when half of it is just. Completely bonkers.

Originally, most of the relevant exposition about fairies was provided by a different character entirely: Carlos-f’s misplaced smartphone, an AI who Julie called Hex (yes, like in Discworld, hell yeah science wizards) because she refused to give Julie her name. Hex provided such ringtones as “Dark Horse” and “Double Rainbow” and would occasionally get distracted by lists of numbers. Hmm…

I changed it back because 1) it was a detour and this chapter was long enough already, 2) Julie and Carlos’ friendship is one of the main throughlines and having them talk to each other was better for the story, and 3) him texting during the middle of a battle is hilarious. But as far as I’m concerned, Hex is still canon.

Andre yawns on the other end of the line and asks, “What time is it?”

“Quit whining, it’s only—” Julie looks at the clock.

Shit.

“—3:00 AM,” she finishes defiantly, because she still has her pride. Embarrassment pricks at her like flying embers settling on bare skin, because now Andre knows she was so out of it she didn’t even bother to try keeping track of the time, and he’s going to think she couldn’t sleep because of feelings, which is both correct and incorrect, because she wasn’t even trying to sleep since distracting herself by going over the minutiae of their data while the Sheriff’s Secret Police scream and fall in the bushes is better than listening to her cats prowl around while lying in her quiet apartment by herself, and any moment now he’s going to feel bad and decide to humor her and answer her in a voice filled with cloying pity and say—

“Would Hiram McDaniels count as one respondent, or five?” He yawns again.

A good chunk of Julie’s inner turmoil just, like, boils down to a recurring loop of that Tim Kreider quote about “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” She doesn’t consciously WANT the rewards of being loved, it just kind of… happens… and then she’s stuck with incredibly loyal life-long friends… and now she not only has to deal with her own feelings but theirs too, which is pretty much her worst nightmare…

Fortunately, since she’s already gone through the mortifying ordeal of being known, they do frequently pull through and offer the kind of support she knows how to accept.

“Give TV’s Frank a kiss for me.”

“I’m not kissing my cat for you,” says Julie.

I mean, she’ll kiss the cat. Just not on request.

And yes, all her cats are named after the Mad Scientists’ sidekicks on Mystery Science Theater 3000. ~foreshadowing~

When she opens the door of her workshop later that morning, she finds that someone has been by to leave her a breakfast tray. Well, “tray”, in that it’s a textbook, and “breakfast”, in that it’s a French press, a stale churro, and her blood pressure medication. But the French press is completely full with still-warm coffee, so overall she’s going to count this as a win.

This appeared pretty early in my drafts: it’s just such a funny mental image to me and also encapsulates Julie and Gary’s relationship pretty well, i.e. a string of question marks who somehow get along.

The naturally suspicious part of her wonders if he deliberately provoked her reaction to the flamingo to gather more information about it. The naturally analytical part of her points out that Carlos is more likely to gnaw off his own hand than put someone in danger, especially when he could just put himself in danger instead.

Julie is just a tad cynical, so she’d definitely think of potentially negative interpretations of her friend’s actions. But it’s not actually a possibility she dwells on in any real sense, and every time she interacts with Carlos-f (not to mention Carlos-0) she trusts him implicitly. She wouldn’t admit it in a thousand years, but she considers Carlos one of the few genuinely good people in the world: not because he never makes mistakes or creates personal disasters, but exactly because of those things. She knows he’s a flawed person, and that everyone is flawed, so that makes him genuine – which means every time he’s tried to do the right thing at personal cost, over and over, that was genuine too.

Basically, there’s a reason why in the last chapter she automatically references “scientist means hero” with “Fuck, I’m turning into you!”

“So,” she says. “Nilanjana. Do you need new pronouns, or anything?”

“Does anyone need any pronouns?” asks Gary contemplatively, which Julie takes as a ‘No’.

“Should I drop ‘Gary’ entirely? Do you want me to change your name in our paperwork?”

He thinks about it for a moment. “I don't know, man,” he concludes. “I don’t really believe in labels.”

Gary has galaxy-brained from “gender is a social construct” straight to “identity is a social construct” and beyond.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asks Julie.

“I think so, Dr. K,” says Gary. “But how will we get three pink flamingos into one pair of capri pants?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-xrnIXQ3iQ

What happens when the wave function ψ is the same as the physical system it describes, and what happens when that physical system collapses?

i.e. what would happen if common misperceptions of the Observer Effect were actually the correct perceptions?

Julie can’t help it: she snorts. “Passionate? Me?”“Well, yeah,” says Romero. “You really care about the things that interest you. You get really involved and angry and never quit or back down.”“Oh,” says Julie, then blurts, “You like that I’m angry?”“I… don’t like it when you’re unhappy?” says Romero. “But – it’s part of you, so… yeah, I guess I do, because it’s how you are. Why? Is – is everything okay?”She’s spent a lifetime having people tell her to stop being angry. No one’s ever told her she’s fine the way she is.

There have been many, many, MANY thinkpieces about how women are socialized not to express anger, often even to themselves. That was never going to work for Julie, who after all is powered by constant low-level rage, but that just means she had to deal with the backlash from not adhering to social programming instead (on top of additional backlash from being a woman in a male-dominated field). Of his own free will, Romero not only rejects that social programming, but also clearly spent time thinking about her empirically to determine that her anger is a positive force instead of a random and horrible personality trait.

He’s a Good Dude.

When she was in elementary school, her third grade teacher had been fond of saying, “If you’re bored, it means you have no imagination,” at least until Julie had decided to deal with her boredom after finishing her science assignment, her homework, and the rest of the textbook by seeing what happened if you jammed a paperclip into the electric socket. (The answer was certainly not boring and, in fact, probably the most exciting and practical thing they learned that year.)

That used to be my aunt’s favorite saying. I personally did not copy Julie’s response, but it is based on research done by one of my friends. (It’s okay, he was very careful about safety and made sure to use rubber-handled scissors to poke random bits of metal into the outlet. Apart from a classmate’s socks catching on fire, everyone was totally fine.)

She wakes to the sound of Cecil talking about the other week’s marathon, which may or may not have been mandatory, whoops. Carlos has texted her an emoji of various hadrosaurids gathered around a campfire singing “We Are the Champions”.

PREVIOUSLY IN NIGHT VALE:

EXT. - THE LABS

Thousands of citizens stream down Main Street, driven relentlessly forward to the Narrow Place. The Harbingers of the Distant Prince hurl themselves towards the building again and again, only to be rebuffed by the wards. Charred corpses lay scattered around the perimeter. Green storm clouds gather overhead as their anger grows.

INT. - LAB ONE

ANDRE

Did you hear something?

JULIE

[not looking up from her welding]

No.

Carlos, meanwhile, has NO idea his emojis are not in fact standard.

“I liked him,” says Josie. [...] “He was trying to do… something, I forget what. I hope he figured it out.” At Julie’s incredulity, she says, “Some people, they’re rough around the edges, but they try. They hope for something better and keep going. That’s important.”

“What if you go where you’re not supposed to?”

“Then you come back and fix what you can,” says Josie.

“What if you can’t?”

“Then you find someone to help you,” Josie replies. “Oh! I love this song.”

She turns up the volume of the radio and treats everyone to the aria from Shastakovich’s Paint Your Wagon.

Vocals by L. Marvin

Angels chilling at your house are, of course, part of the standard retirement package for former Knights of the Church. Old Woman Josie used to carry Esperacchius and passed it on to the Egyptian, after which it went to Sanya. She and Shiro were buds and saw Elvis in Vegas (and also, interestingly, several times in the Ralphs).

Anyway, if you want to suggest that a character is subconsciously mulling over an issue, I recommend having them ask some leading questions without describing their reactions and then change the subject.

“It’s come to my attention,” she begins, then has to stop and clear her throat again. “It’s come to my attention that we have a pretty good thing going on. So I was just wondering if you’d like to keep doing this, you know. For the indefinite future. With me.”When he doesn’t say anything, or look at her, or move at all for that matter, she removes her hand from under her thigh where she’s been sitting on it and points at the lease. “I highlighted where you have to sign,” she says, somewhat unnecessarily. “If you wanted to.”

I think this is the only time we see Julie nervous about anything when her life is not actively in danger.

You can’t write a romance arc without including some degree of emotional vulnerability – it just wouldn’t be satisfying. On the other hand, how that emotional vulnerability manifests is REALLY dependent on the person, and if you don’t base it firmly in their character it wouldn’t be satisfying, either. (I’m REALLY picky about romances in part because of this.) Julie’s not the type to pine or swoon or be filled with self-doubt*, but she is bad at feelings, and unfortunately, she’s determined that an equitable relationship with Romero requires some kind of tangible, committed expression of them. So she does that as best she can. It’s not actively harmful to her, but it does require a stretch out of her comfort zone.

* ::cough::Carlos::cough::

Yes, Julie has technically registered their equipment with City Hall, in that they’re listed as alternatively “electronic abaci” and “databases” and she’s claimed they only use the internet for checking email. Until now, they’ve coasted on general good will towards Carlos/his hair and the fact that all authority figures have been functionally electronically illiterate since the Incident in the community college’s Computer and Fire Sciences building.

Look, I could have SWORN there was an Incident at the Computer and Fire Sciences building specifically mentioned in canon. Can I find it anywhere? No. Did I listen to an episode that was subsequently erased from history? Possibly.

This time, someone picks up. There are a few seconds of sleepy fumbling, followed by “Hello?” in more vocal fry than voice.“Cecil!” she says. “Is Carlos there?”“Are you in fear for your life from the long arm of the law?” Cecil mumbles.

her current ringtone

“Julie, I said hold on!”“I am holding on,” she snarls as the rumbling stops. “It’s a diagnostic. 75% efficiency? Am I the only one who cares about proper maintenance in this town?”

This combines two of my favorite things: people focusing on hilariously inconsequential details during a stressful situation, and Julie lowkey engaging in supervillainy. Nikola Tesla did not design earthquake machines so Night Vale could install shitty ones they can barely use. STANDARDS.

“I probably wouldn’t have destroyed Weeping Miner,” she says eventually.

“I know,” says Carlos.

“I could have, though,” she says.

“I know that too,” says Carlos.

[...] Carlos shifts. She looks over; he briefly catches her eye and says, “So could I.”It’s not the same. Carlos would probably feel bad about it, for one. But she feels some of her anger dissipate anyway. At least she’s not the only one dealing with this bullshit.

Subconscious concern --> conscious concern! Getting back to Julie’s cynicism: she doesn’t think there are very many good people in the world, and that excludes her too. Sure, she’s risked her life to save others, fight baddies, and make sure the dangerous technology she’s developed doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, but she knows she has selfish reasons to do them, like protecting her friends and making sure the town/world isn’t destroyed so she can keep doing her research.

But at the same time, the fact that she has been dwelling on the ethics of her situation ever since Chapter 19 of Love is All You Need, that she is genuinely bothered that she’d consider destroying a neighborhood, and that she’s talking about this with Carlos, who considers them to have a similar dilemma, suggests that deep down she is dissatisfied by her cynical model of the world because the data isn’t quite matching up. Which, of course, means she needs more data in the form of Chapters 6 and 7.

On one side is a large picture of Carrie Fisher giving everyone the finger

I think Space Mom is mandatory at protests now.

This whole section (especially the rain) was heavily influenced by the March for Science, which both Ginipig and I went to in 2017. You too can make a difference and also give yourself writing material!

“Any more words of wisdom, Usidork?” she asks instead.

USIDORE, WIZARD OF THE 12TH REALM OF EPHYSIYIES, MASTER OF LIGHT AND SHADOW, MANIPULATOR OF MAGICAL DELIGHTS, DEVOURER OF CHAOS, CHAMPION OF THE GREAT HALLS OF TERR'AKKAS. THE ELVES KNOW HIM AS FI’ANG YALOK. THE DWARFS KNOW HIM AS ZOENEN HOOGSTANDJES*. HE IS ALSO KNOWN IN THE NORTHEAST AS GAISMUNĒNAS MEISTAR AND HAS MANY OTHER SECRET NAMES WHICH YOU DO NOT… YET… KNOW.

* Hoobastank

He blinks at her in polite incomprehension. “I don’t want to miss the Life Raft Debate,” he says. “It’s important to support your department.”

Several universities hold yearly Raft Debates, where representatives from the different disciplines have a debate about which of their respective areas of study is the most vital for humanity and thus should get to take the one-person life raft back to civilization from the desert island they’ve all gotten stuck on.

I should inform you that at my alma mater the Devil’s Advocate, who argues that none of the subjects are worth saving, has won multiple times.

Without taking her eyes off her opponent, Romanoff thrusts out her hand. Dr. Aluki Robinson (Associate Professor of Ornithology) passes her a harpoon, its ivory barbs almost glowing in the dim light.

Nauja and Aluki are both from Cold Case, because no one deserves to be stuck in Cold Case where we’re apparently supposed to be deeply concerned about the main character’s sexual experience but only vaguely perturbed by the powerful white and white-coded women stealing Native American children to brainwash them to their culture so they can be fed to the system seriously WHAT the FUCK Jimbo

ANYWAY, in this universe the Winter fey of Unalaska are discharging their obligations to help the Winter Court against Outsiders by sending some of their people to monitor the prison in Night Vale. This also gets to highlight the fun of an unreliable narrator! Julie is generally not one of those, because she’s a smart and observant person who will happily question everything, but even she has her limits when she’s out of her element. In the case of this story, there are several minor details to suggest there is some Winter and Summer court drama going on in the background (the chlorofiends, an entire academic department of shapeshifters, Molly and Mab personally overseeing bus routes) and most of it just goes completely over her head.

During his undergraduate career, Gary had elicited a considerable amount of interdepartmental discussion about his desire to be exempted from lab regulations for wearing appropriate – or any – footwear in the lab, which evolved into a considerable amount of interdepartmental discussion about whether wrapping your feet in duct tape immediately before said lab time constituted appropriate footwear.

This was based on one of my mother’s students, who eventually resolved the situation by commissioning a handmade pair of moccasins he placed on his feet immediately before entering the lab.

“The scientific method is four steps,” says Carlos with a cheerful inevitability as the officers start shouting panicked instructions into their walkie talkies. “One, find an object you want to know more about; two, hook that object up to a machine using wires or tubes; three, write things on a clipboard; four, read the results that the machine prints.”

This is a direct quote from the book. Was this entire subplot about the scientific method ban designed just to come up with a plausible retcon for why someone with actual scientific training would announce this over the radio? It sure was!

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD:

1. “Step one, cut a hole in the box,” calls Wei.2. “No, step one is collecting underpants,” says Gary.3. “Step four: make a searching and fearless moral inventory,” says Julie.4. “And then step five, acceptance,” Andre finishes.5. “You see, the first level is ennui, or boredom. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific – nostalgia, love-sickness… At more morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for. A sick pining, a vague restlessness. Mental throes. Yearning. And at the scientific method’s deepest and most painful level, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.”6. “It’s how you decide whether to fix the problem with duct tape or WD-40,” says Julie.7. “I think,” says Osborn, “that it’s a divine machine for making flour, salt, and gold.”

8. “Don’t be absurd,” says Galleti. “The scientific method is two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the desert!”

9. “And they say the scientific method is—”

“—the quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality associated with sitting around a fire in the winter with close friends,” puts in Dr. Chelsea Dubinski, Assistant Professor of Chemistry.

10. “Or is it the special look shared between two people, when both are wishing that the other would do something that they both want, but neither want to do?” asks Galleti.

This section was also a chance to write about the rest of Night Vale’s scientists, of whom we still know so very little. There’s enough of them that there’s a whole science district, and the community college seems pretty well staffed, but the fact that Carlos made such an impact when he rolled into town suggests that they were either pretty lowkey or indistinguishably weird from the rest of the town.

“I don't feel alone,” snaps Julie. “I feel like shit, and I know why I feel like shit, and the thought of outlining that in excruciating detail is, oddly enough, not making me feel any better!”

One of the things I wanted to address in this story (inspired by Ghost Stories, which I uhhhhh did not care for) was the shortcomings of a lot of narratives about grief. Because many of them are not only oversimplified, but also not everyone processes grief in the same way. It’s not necessarily a linear narrative of where you go through the five steps and then you’re totally over it: it might take a long time, or you might be fine until some other, unrelated setback triggers you, or it might be a cyclical process as anniversaries roll around. Grief lingers. Related to that, helping people deal with their grief isn’t always as simple as sitting down with them and offering a sympathetic ear. Some people don’t process their feelings well verbally, and the emotional labor of formulating all your grief for another person’s consumption can be nearly as traumatizing as grieving in the first place, and VERY difficult to do when you’re already feeling down.

On top of that, I think general American culture is just. Real bad at dealing with grief. Which means we don’t have many positive models to base our responses on, either as grievers or as people supporting the grieving, and if you don’t fit those models at all it just makes the process that more difficult because everyone’s stumbling around in the dark.

“Does it always feel like this?” she asks.“Which part?” asks Carlos.“We won,” says Julie. “Methods have lived to science another day. We can do our work without interference. All we did was lie about what the name meant, but…” She taps the lab table with a pencil. Another secret violation of the law. “It still feels like we… lost something.”“We did lose something,” says Carlos. “It was just a name, but names are important.”

One of the reasons I love writing Carlos and Julie’s friendship so much is because it’s such a relationship of equals. They’re both hypercompetent, pragmatic, and a little ruthless; their skill sets don’t have much overlap (at least, not yet) and their personalities aren’t at all similar, but they get each other and it’s so sweet. When they wander out of their respective areas of expertise, or stumble across some kind of dilemma, they feel comfortable asking each other for guidance – they can admit their ignorance and drop their public facades of Having Their Shit Together because they trust each other.

“I want—” Her mouth opens and shuts again, wordlessly. Her scowl deepens.Then she narrows her eyes and says, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

Molly being a huge Trekkie is pretty much my favorite thing from Ghost Story (not to be confused with Ghost Stories)(although thinking about it, swapping their plots would be kind of amazing??), so of course I wanted her and Julie to interact in a way that showed off what huge nerds they are.

But yet another element I wanted to include in this story is the background detail that ~the masquerade~ must be maintained because it’s too dangerous for humanity as a whole to be fully cognizant of the supernatural – which tends to get a little lost in the sauce, because the supernatural is consistently super duper powerful and our heroes (most of them pretty supernatural themselves) generally avert disaster by the skin of their teeth. But here’s Julie, just a regular human who’s capable of producing terrifying technology, has no concern for the rules and traditions of ancient regimes unless they’re inconveniencing her, and who would be perfectly fine with upending the status quo just to see what happens. Regular humans just aren’t more flexible about change than the supernatural, they’re even curious about it sometimes – which must be terrifying to something like the Winter Court, which has been devoted to maintaining the same strict balance since forever. Regular humans can do stuff like tell a story so well it inspires the Winter Lady to subvert her magical restrictions and remind her of her own humanity.

Julie grumpily emails him a rough summary of her thoughts on Troy Walsh and her conversation with Molly and heads up to her office to pull up everything she has on both the bus garage and the man in the tan jacket.

Bullshit secretkeeping (“I can’t tell the other main character this important plot point, it’s better if they don’t know”) is one of my least favorite tropes and I avoid it at all costs. It’s such a stupid way to add tension. It can maybe work once, but after your character has inevitably watched it backfire spectacularly, you can’t repeat it ever again unless you want to imply they’re a dumbass who never learns from their own mistakes and apparently doesn’t care that it clearly puts everyone in more danger. ::looks pointedly at a certain book series::

Also, it’s almost always much more interesting to have characters try to share important information. If they don’t succeed, it coats everything in ironic horror as the outcomes one person tried to avoid happen despite their best efforts. If they do succeed, it means everyone is fully cognizant of the potential danger even as they are still prevented from acting on it properly, like because they (e.g.) get kidnapped in the middle of the street.

King City is not in the correct dimension. The man in the tan jacket seems to know something about this, but up until a year ago he wasn’t drawing attention to it. He was busy poking his nose into everyone’s business, ingratiating himself with the powerful and the influential, dealing with them in secret…basically, the SOP of your typical Night Vale authority.Like the Night Vale Area Transit Authority, with its bus route to… King City.They had a job and they chose to keep it, Molly said.“Fuck,” says Julie. “He was working for them!”

In retrospect, it’s hilarious to me how much of this fic was powered by spite. Ghost Stories and Cold Case both really bothered me. The resolution of the Man in the Tan Jacket storyline, meanwhile, felt pretty underwhelming – not because what Finknor came up with wasn’t interesting, but because it barely engaged with the few plot points they had already established. Like, when TMITJ shows up in the podcast he interferes with the Mayor, he’s connected to the city under Lane Five, he surfaces during the Strex Corp arc, he interacts with a whole bunch of series regulars in an ominous fashion… Yeah, that probably came from Finknor dropping him in more or less at random, but the end result was that during the first several years of the show it seemed he was an active driver of whatever his plot was supposed to be. In WTNV: The Novel, though, he’s much more reactive and impotent. This wouldn’t necessarily be bad if this change was acknowledged as part of his storyline, but… it’s not…

(And I get that it can be difficult to come up with a plot for an element you didn’t intend to be plotty at all, but like: there wasn’t THAT much material they had to account for. I should know, I had to look it all up to write THIS story.)

I think this was especially frustrating because it ends up feeling like a “have your cake and eat it too” on the part of Finknor: it’s not automatically bad when fans care more about the show’s continuity than the creators (creators have different concerns, and a lot of time that means they’re using the creative latitude to do something neat), but the novel was very much presented as “finally, a resolution to that one mystery you find cool!” which is… pretty much a direct appeal to the fans’ care about the continuity. So to then ignore or retcon so many aspects of the continuity without any story payoff for it feels like a cheat.

(Ultimately, though, my inspiration to actually sit down and write mainly sprang from 1) all the lovely comments about how so many people loved my OFC, which as someone who started lurking in online fandom in the early 2000s was both mind-boggling and heartwarming, and 2) lol those ladies have the same name. I learned nothing.)

She gets the call at 21:27. She goes to the hospital, although there’s not much point. The human mind is the most powerful thing on the planet and it's housed in a fragile casing of meat and bone.

I’ve mentioned a few times (possibly more than a few)(probably more than a few) that I didn’t like the WTNV live ep Ghost Stories, and that’s because the ~big reveal~ is that Cecil’s story was actually about a personal family tragedy, and once he’s able to admit that, everything is hunky-dory. As I recall, it went something like this:

WTNV: hey remember that time your mom died and your family was thrown into chaos

ME: WELL NOW I DO

WTNV: and on that note, good night everyone!

Needless to say, everything was not hunky-dory.

But on top of being emotionally compromised for the whole following week, I was also professionally annoyed. Prior to this live show, we’d had a few cryptic references to Cecil’s mom and could reasonably infer that his relationship with his sister was strained. Critically, though, neither was their own clearly-defined character (compare to the treatment of Janice or Steve Carlsberg), these were not frequently recurring elements that would suggest they weighed heavily on Cecil’s mind, and it wasn’t even obvious that their backstory WAS particularly tragic. So the emotional lynchpin of this live show was mostly new information about Cecil regarding characters the audience had no connection to.

Tragic narratives are powerful not only because they evoke intense emotions, but also because those emotions are supposed to go somewhere and do something: provide catharsis, reinforce the artist’s philosophy, make the audience ponder the meaning of life... In using a tragedy as a plot twist, your ability to give it the proper emotional arc is very limited, because you have to misdirect from its existence while building it up, and then quickly progress from upsetting emotions to those more appropriate for concluding the story. That’s not impossible, but Ghost Stories immediately throws a wrench in the works by splitting the audience’s emotional journey away from Cecil’s: he already knew about the tragedy and the people involved with it, so the plot twist acts as his emotional catharsis... but only his. When the twist itself is the first time the audience realizes there ARE emotions, and that the first 85% of the show was completely unrelated to them, there’s simply not enough time for the audience to have them, process them according to the story’s weird ramblings that kinda imply fiction based on real life is more important than genre fiction like horror (PS: that’s a WEIRD take for a fictional horror podcast), and reach their own kind of catharsis without it being horrifically rushed. Particularly when they’re having a WAY more emotional response than the character due to their own personal tragedies which they were not expecting to have to think about during a fun podcast live show about ghost stories.

As stuff like this points out, you can’t just sprinkle in character deaths and expect quality entertainment to sprout: there has to be a purpose to putting the tragedy in the story (even if that purpose is to highlight how purposeless tragedy can be in real life). I’ve always been VERY critical of the assumption that tragedy is ~more artistic~, both in historical lit and modern pop culture; sad emotions aren’t inherently more meaningful than happy ones. Merely including tragic events isn’t deep; you have to do the work and make it deep, in its context and development.

So: on to ::gestures proudly:: probably the worst thing I’ve ever written!

From an aesthetic standpoint, I leaned into the Night Vale house style in this section because I found it to be really effective at conveying the enormity of the tragedy for Julie: it’s pretty blunt, just like her, but the focus on oddly specific details, the narrative distancing, and the lurking sense of existential horror seemed a fitting demonstration of how badly the emotional gutpunch disrupted her narration/life.

And I really wanted it to be an emotional gutpunch. (But not a surprise: even if I hadn’t warned for it specifically, Julie mentions Romero dying all the way back in Ch. 10 of Love is All You Need.) This is in part a story about grief and mourning, so the loss that caused it needed a central place. I wanted it to be powerful enough to retroactively fit in with how upset Julie is in the opening chapters and to add real tension to the devil’s bargain the feds want to make with her in the next chapter. But most importantly, I wanted it to be so significant to both Julie and the audience that the end of the story has an impact. Loss doesn’t get “cured” – but it seems to me like it’s not supposed to be. Loss is a part of life; love, in whatever form, helps give you strength as you grow and change from the experience into someone new, and this is also a story about the love in friendship.

I think a lot about the ethics of writing tragic stuff, because when you get right down to it, ultimately art boils down to poking your fingers in someone’s feelings and stirring them around. People get really invested in the stuff you are responsible for creating, and making someone feel bad for no reason isn’t being an artist, it’s being a dick. But I’m very happy with how this turned out, and hopefully didn’t traumatize anyone who didn’t want to be traumatized.

(I do feel bad for everyone who was reading as I posted that had to wait an entire year for the next chapter, though. I wanted to get something up sooner, but I had to wait until I sorted Chapter 6 and Chapter 6 was just. The worst. WORDS ARE HARD. People who read WIPs are braver than any Marine.)

hmu for more dvd commentary!

#muggle-the-hat #love is all you need to destroy your enemies #ask dave #welcome to night vale #the dresden files #fic #writing

19 notes · View notes

what-eats-owls · 6 years ago

Note

Hi! I just saw the news about your book; congratulations!!! That's so amazing!!! I was hoping I could ask you what your querying/publishing process was like? My dream is to get published by a big name kind of publisher like Tor, and it would be wonderful to hear if and how you got an agent, what the process was like, etc. Thank you, and congrats again!! I'll definitely be keeping a lookout for the book

Hey there!

(Sidebar: if anyone’s curious and/or wants to preorder my book, which I, in my unbiased opinion, highly recommend, here’s everything you need to know)

I can tell you about not one, but two querying processes, because they’re both equally important in how I made it this far.

The first querying process was for a book that I still love and would like to resuscitate someday.

Here’s how it went down:

I drafted the manuscript from February - October 2013.

I revised November-January 2014

I began querying literary agents toward the end of Jan 2014 and revised based on the feedback I got

I submitted the manuscript to Pitch Wars in 2014, and then again in 2015, and made it in for 2015, revising September-October, and pitching in November

Around mid-March 2016, I sent the last query for that novel, and focused my undivided attention on another WIP.

And here is a comprehensive list of every mistake I made:

I drafted the manuscript from February - October 2013.

It was a difficult-to-classify genre. Science Fantasy? Future Fantasy? If a bookseller doesn’t know where to put your book, they won’t make a whole new shelf just for you. (Note: this seems to be on the verge of shifting, but I wouldn’t bank on it for your debut.)

It was 152,000 words long. The industry standard for YA SFF (SciFi+Fantasy) is 100,000 words or less. Exceptions are rare and usually extended to established authors who have proven their marketability.

I revised November-January 2014

I had no critique partners. Sure, you can be your own worst critic, but you absolutely need another perspective.

I made no substantial changes. Removing an apostrophe didn’t fix a sloppy plot.

I began querying literary agents toward the end of Jan 2014 and revised based on the feedback I got

I queried without doing much research into industry standards, comp titles, etc. I just googled “how to sell a book” and went to town.

I submitted the manuscript to Pitch Wars in 2014, and then again in 2015, and made it in for 2015, revising September-October, and pitching in November.

Pitch Wars was actually great! I made a lot of friends who I still speak to today. That said, it was a big risk to enter a story that hadn’t made it in the previous year, because most of the mentors had passed on it a year earlier.

Around mid-March 2016, I sent the last query for that novel, and focused my undivided attention on another WIP.

CUE SIRENS, AIRHORNS, SKYWRITERS THAT SPELL OUT “THIS WAS THE SMART CHOICE”

At this point, I had spent two years trying to query a manuscript that wasn’t gonna make it. It was hard, and heartbreaking, because at that point I had poured everything I had into that story, and because it wasn’t enough, I didn’t feel like I was enough. I felt like Sisyphus pushing a big lousy rock up a hill, telling myself it was my fault it kept rolling to the bottom. But I loved that lousy rock! I didn’t want to walk away and find a different rock I could push up a hill, I wanted that rock. It took two years of pushing before I finally realized: it’s a rock. Without me, it’s not going anywhere. And I could come back when I was ready.

(I was also dealing with some major life events at the time - my mother had just been diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer, and my miserable job was in a downward spiral. IT WAS A GREAT MENTAL SPACE ALL AROUND. But my mom is cancer-free now, and I write for a living, so suck it cancer! Suck it, shitty job!)

What I didn’t realize until much later is that when you spend two years pushing a boulder uphill? You get shredded like Kylo Ren.

All those failures, all those mistakes I’d learned from, had made me a better writer. (It also made me a slower drafter because I was waaaay more critical of my own writing, but eh. I could draft slower because the end product needed less revision.)

So here’s how things went down with my second manuscript:

I drafted the manuscript off-and-on from January - July 2015, then exclusively from March - December 2016

I revised January and February 2017 (when I wasn’t, y’know, wallowing in existential horror in the orange mold infestation in the White House)

I was accepted into Pitch Madness, a contest which asked for a VERY short pitch (35 words or less) and the first 250 words of the manuscript; this was in early March 2017.

The response from agents in the contest was positive enough that I sent queries out to the rest of the agents on my priority list

I signed with my fabulous agent in mid-April 2017

My book sold in late June 2017

Said book will be released in just over four months from now. :)

So let’s review:

Manuscript one: eight months drafting, two years querying, no agent, no deal

Manuscript two: ~1.5 year drafting, one month querying, sold two months after signing with my agent

Yeah, I’d say I learned a thing or two.

As far as things go once you’ve sold to a publisher, everyone’s timeline is SUPER different:

Sometimes your editor has minimal notes, but you don’t get them for months.

Sometimes you get a ton of notes even BEFORE you sign your contract.

Sometimes your book may be in pristine shape, but the release schedule is super crowded, so it won’t be out until there’s an opening in a year; or the reverse, your book is super buzzy and gets fast-tracked and has to be ready on a SUPER FAST schedule.

Sometimes your editor moves to a different publisher, and you get assigned to a new editor.

All of these have happened for authors I know. It’s basically Calvinball, there is no norm. (Fun fact: this is also part of why every author yells “DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB FOR THE LOVE OF GOD” but that’s another post.)

One other note for this: if you’re interested in publishing with a mid-to-major publisher, you need an agent. Publishing contracts are notoriously full of potential pitfalls - for example, I can think of at least one major publisher that has language in their default contract that says the contract can be terminated if the author “flauts public convention.” And there are other, less flagrantly terrible parts of the contract that can still screw you over if they aren’t caught, and things that can still get weird outside of contracts that your agent can help you navigate, and basically your agent is there to make sure you’re all getting the best deal possible.

Anyway, that’s my publishing journey thus far! If anyone has any questions, hit up my inbox.

#not draws #my books #querying #publishing #ya fantasy #listen y'all it turns out failure makes you buff as hell #Anonymous

79 notes · View notes

mrsspidermanmaryjanewatsonparker · 6 years ago

Text

Sometime in the first few months of 2000, I dropped Stan Lee a line saying I’d love to do some work for Stan Lee Media, Stan’s well-publicized and multi-staffed dot-com company, if he could ever use me. He replied that, while he’d like to work with me again, I would’ve had to be around L.A. to work for SLM, but that, by coincidence, he really needed a writer to work with him on the SPIDER-MAN comic strip… to plot out and do the first-draft script of the seven-days-a-week King Features strip. I said that sounded fine to me (even though I’d never really been wild about writing Spidey compared to the F.F., Avengers, Conan, etc.). He replied with a chuckle that maybe I should wait till I heard his offer, because the money was so minuscule… just $300 a week. I laughed, and told him that he had no idea how little money it cost me to live on my 40-acre place in the middle of South Carolina. The mortgage and both our vehicles were paid off, so Dann and I had no expenses except what we spent month-to-month. So a deal was quickly struck, and I went to work, with my first strip (a Monday, of course) appearing on July 17, 2000.

As it turned out, although I never got a raise in 18 1/2 years I basically ghost-wrote the strip (though, until recent years, with his often hands-on editing), it was a great gig. I spent maybe two days a month writing four weeks’ worth of strips, and another day 2 or 3 times a year doing outlines for upcoming storylines.

After Stan cut back his activities a few years ago, following installation of his pacemaker, etc., I worked primarily with his longtime assistant, Michael Kelly, with some indirect verbal input from Stan, and in some ways I liked that even better, since Stan and I were only about 80% on the same page as to what made a good comic strip. Despite his well-known (and correct) views on how important the writing was to the success of Marvel Comics from 1961 on, he would often talk about how it was the artwork that sold the strip. I didn’t think that reflected the realities of the situation, particularly after John Romita left the strip a few years after it began, and as the printing of the strips grew smaller and smaller. Stan’s brother Larry Lieber was a good journeyman penciler (and Alex Saviuk considerably better), but the artists didn’t really have the scope, especially in the dailies, to do the kind of artwork that was going to excite readers the way, say, Milt Caniff once had in Terry and the Pirates. The sight of Spidey or Dr. Octopus in a strip might draw people in, but the writing had to bring people back, day after day, since Spidey and Peter and MJ and Doc Ock would always look basically the same, squeezed into small panels–with no “full-page spreads” like in the comicbooks. And yes, I wrote a bit more text and dialogue than he did… but that was partly because, otherwise, I wasn’t sure people could really follow the strip from day to day… or at least, no new readers would be brought in if it was hard to start reading the strip at any given point.

Mostly, though, Stan and I got along fine. For the most part, he liked what I submitted, accepted most (not all) of my ideas for stories… and until a few years ago often “suggested” (or insisted upon) alterations in them. For some years, he would rewrite a panel or balloon here and there, or even more… while other dailies or Sundays would sail through without a single word change.

The major change I tried to effect, after the first “Spider-Man” movie, was to go back to a time when MJ and Peter weren’t married. Stan agreed, and seemed halfway enthusiastic about the change at first, and we did one whole storyline (involving Electro) that way. But then Stan changed his mind, and I saw at once that I wouldn’t be able to change it back. So I wrote a “Dallas”-type scene in which Peter woke up (after going to sleep in Aunt May’s apartment as a single young man) to find himself married (again) to Mary Jane… and that’s the way we kept it from then on. Actually, I was increasingly happy with that, as an alternative to the bouncing around of the comicbooks, in which MJ and Peter totally forgot each other and their marriage, and who-knows-what occurred. Left increasingly to my own devices, and building on MJ’s modeling career in the comicbooks, I gradually took her from working in a computer store to becoming a Broadway star and movie actress, playing a super-heroine called “Marvella” (before the female Captain Marvel was a big deal, or maybe even was around at all)…but I kept her and Peter, somewhat incongruously, in their relatively small Manhattan apartment (except when they were in L.A., of course)… although they occasionally shopped around for something bigger.

In recent years, I had taken increasingly to using guest stars: Wolverine, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Ant-Man, most recently Iron Fist and Luke Cage. We never bothered to try to follow the current Marvel continuity, which Stan didn’t want to do… the more so, I suppose, as from time to time it was given increasingly to violent wrenches and re-starts, such as when MJ and Peter were abruptly uncoupled. If there were eventually several Spider-Man universes in the comics (with different Spider-Men, a Spider-Girl, whatever), well, our comic strip universe was yet another one… just about the only one, in recent years, in which Peter and MJ were a married couple, continuing the original direction of decades of the comicbooks. We were all kind of proud of that.

When the strip died (i.e., was killed), the Mammon Theatre where MJ’s hit play was running was shuttered by damage (in a Spidey-related fight, of course), and “Marvella II” had flopped, so the two of them took off to Australia for a vacation, and I wrote a couple of weeks of a continuity (along with a full outline approved by Michael Kelly) involving the villain the Kangaroo. Then Marvel decided to kill the strip and not print the final couple of weeks, and I declined to rewrite the last published strip or two to turn it into a “goodbye” strip. My feeling was that I had accepted the snuffing of the strip, and didn’t take it personally… it was just a business move (although when I was told the strip was being killed I wasn’t told—perhaps because those who informed me didn’t know–that Marvel was planning to either revive the strip with a new team or to start a new strip that might not be a Spidey strip per se, but more the equivalent of DC’s latter-day successor to its Superman strip, The World’s Greatest Heroes, which had featured the whole panoply of DC heroes). I felt that I had written what I had written for the strip, and they were welcome to do whatever they wanted to with the script (as long as I was paid for what I had done, naturally), but I preferred never to touch it again. When I’m done with something, I’m done with something.

Alex Saviuk, bless him, graciously reworked the final strip to show the two of us in it, and to add a “‘Nuff Said!” headline on the Daily Bugle. He was perhaps a better sport about things than I was… and I admire him for that, since he had spent well over two decades penciling the Sunday Spider-Man and then had only recently been promoted to seven-days-a-week penciler… only to see the strip almost immediately canceled so that he was out of a regular gig. I hope he finds one. He deserves it.

Naturally, I was sorry to see the strip end (the more so because it signaled the finale of the only long-lasting adventure strip launched in the past half century), just at the time when I could finally have begun to receive on-strip credit for the work I did… although of course I did have that for two years on the Conan the Barbarian comic strip at the end of the 1970s. But at least, once Stan wrote vaguely, maybe a decade ago, in his introduction to the hardcover volume Marvel Visionaries: Roy Thomas, that I “help[ed]” him with the Spidey strip, everybody with half a brain knew what I was contributing to the strip anyway. That didn’t bother Stan, and it didn’t bother me. The strip was Stan’s, and I was happy to co-write or write it under his name… although I wouldn’t have been willing to go on writing it anonymously once he had passed on, had that alternative been suggested to me.

Working with Stan and Michael Kelly (as well as with Larry, Alex, and the ever-amiable Joe Sinnott–with Joe spelled occasionally by Jim Amash or Terry Austin) on the Spider-Man strip was an enjoyable experience, and I’m grateful to Stan for offering me that “pittance” back in 2000. The strip became the last of our many collaborations of one sort or other, which began when, in early July of 1965, I inherited a Modeling with Millie story that he had previously talked over (I suppose) with penciler Stan Goldberg.

Best wishes,

Roy Thomas

The LAST SPIDER-MAN Daily newspaper strip! It’s been a fabulous time for me being part of such an iconic character for so long. I’ve drawn Spider-Man in comics and newspapers for 32 years in a row and unless I get another crack at him NEXT year that run will come to an end. But I am digressing a bit; I’m here to talk about the newspaper strip which for me OFFICIALLY started in the spring of 1977 probably around April-May. I say OFFICIALLY because back in 1980 , John Romita, Sr. who was still drawing the entire strip at that time called me and asked if I had the time to ghost lay out some Sunday strips for him since he was incredibly busy with everything else he had on his plate for Marvel. John lived ( and still lives, I believe ) in the town next to mine on Long Island when I was there and I actually met him about 10 years earlier since I was in high school with his sons. ( that’s right, I went to high school with JR, Jr.— he IS four years younger than me to the day and when I was a senior he was a freshman and today looks 20 years younger than me!) I was in a club in school with the older son Victor who over time found out I was interested in drawing comics and came to me one day and said “… my father draws comics — would you like to meet him?” Of course I knew that but I would never impose. We met soon after that. What happened after that is another story!

BACK TO THE STRIP: I did at least 4 Sunday layouts for John on vellum tracing paper and he took it to the next level and beyond yet saving him a ton of time. I was really happy and excited just to be called to assist him , first of all, and then get the privilege and honor of working with one of my comic book artist “heroes”. IDW just recently published that volume of reprints and it was fun to see our collaborations again.

FORWARD to 1997: Ralph Macchio at Marvel calls me up and asks if I would be interested in penciling the Spider-Man Sunday strip since fill-in penciler old time artist Fred Kida wanted to leave. Of course I agreed — i would get to work directly with Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott! I put a package together of my Web Of Spider-Man and Spider-Man Adventures books and sent them to Stan. His assistant Mike Kelly called a few days later and said Stan liked the work but wanted to see how I would handle a “horizontal” strip in a six panel grid format. I admit I was a bit surprised by that request since with my 20 years of experience at that time I figured i showed what I can do in just the comic books. But I went ahead and penciled a six panel episode of an encounter with Spider-Man saving JJonah Jameson from a few muggers with the end panel having an ungrateful JJJ waving his fist at Spidey as he swung away from the scene. I sent that in and a few days days after returning home from running errands I found a message from Stan Lee on my answering machine. “ Hi, Alex… this is Stan Lee. I LOVE your work and I’d love to work with you. It doesn’t pay that much but think of the GLORY!” Actually the page rate was as much as I was making at the time so i couldn’t complain. No raise in 22 years ( but from what I understand things havent changed that much for mainstream freelancers even today. ) I got my first script a few days later and in May 1977 I penciled a Sunday in the middle of a Kingpin storyline which was inked by Joe Sinnott , lettered by Stan Sakai and was published in August 1977. Sundays were always drawn 3 months ahead of publication. What a rush to see those preview Xeroxes and then the colored version in the newspaper( which I had to hunt down ! There were no papers in Florida where I lived carrying the strip but the local Barnes & Noble sold out of town newspapers so I managed to find one that published the Sundays )

FORWARD to Feb 2003: Got a call asking me if I could ink a week of Dailies drawn by Larry Lieber because inker John Tartaglione needed to go to the hospital for a procedure. John ended up being OK after that week but I had a blast inking Larry’s pencils since I really never inked anybody else other my own pencils for my Web Of Spider-Man covers. Sadly that November , I got a call that John Tartaglione has passed away at 82 because he lost the fight with his particular illness. At the same time I was asked if I would be able to take over the inking of the Dailies. Affirmative….

FORWARD to July 2018: Larry Lieber wants to retire at 87 after 25+ years ( maybe 30+? ) and I inherit the penciling duties! Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I thought the Stan Lee would live forever especially since a few years ago when he got his pacemaker he felt he was the next Tony Stark and felt stronger than ever. Unfortunately and sadly as we all know , that didnt happen and Marvel decided the strip shouldn’t go on without STAN LEE at the helm. But I am forever in Stan Lee’s debt for having me join him, Joe Sinnott, Roy Thomas and letterers Stan Sakai, Kenny Lopez, and Janice Chiang for all these years in bringing our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to our readers each and every day for these months and years! It’s been a joy, an honor and privilege which I will never forget!

( I do want to add that since since the Sundays were done so far in advance there are TWO more Sundays that followed March 17 that we did together that are now considered to be officially UNPUBLISHED! )”

-Alex Saviuk

P.S. Putting aside how Roy got his timeline mixed up because the back int ime stuff happened in 2008 not 2002, and just so you heard it louder at the back, Stan Lee and Roy Thomas 100% didn’t care fro OMD and actively sought to keep the marriage in the comics.

#Spider-Man newspaper Strip #Amazing Spider-Man Newspaper Strip #Roy Thomas #Alex Saviuk #Stan Lee #spider-man #peter parker #mjwatsonedit #mary jane watson #Mary Jane Watson Parker

30 notes · View notes

twilight-adamo · 6 years ago

Text

Author’s Notes: These Our Actors, Chapter 2: Rosalie

I meant to start getting in the habit of posting a link back to my work on AO3 with my author’s notes for Brave New World Chapter 1, but I plum forgot, so I’m starting that practice now:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14429865/chapters/46781116

As I’ve said, this was a particularly difficult installment for me to write. To understand why, you need to understand my creative process. I tend to view writing as something of a dialogue between myself and my characters, particularly my protagonist. It’s not that I’m literally speaking with them - I speak of my characters as having minds of their own, and they do to an extent, but they’re not fully realized people. It’s more of a mental back and forth. I have an idea for a story, I begin writing, and then I just get a sort of sense that, oh, no, things actually happened this way, or that character felt this and said that at a given point. The characters tell me their own story, in a sense, once I’ve set the basic framework of the story.

Sometimes a character doesn’t want to talk to me, and I get stuck, and have to find a way to move forward. That wasn’t the problem with Rosalie.

Rosalie just had too damn much to say, and was quite picky with how I said it.

Am I entirely satisfied with the end product? No. Is the part of my brain that got into Rosalie’s frame of mind, the part of my brain that IS my version of Rosalie, entirely happy? Also no! But at a certain point you have to call the work done and put it out there, and after over a year of struggle, I was ready to get the blasted thing out of my head.

Looking at the revision history, I see that I spent a lot more time actively working on it, with fewer breaks, than I did working on Brave New World Chapter 1. I did take a six-month break from September to March, and then another extended break from March until June and July. I wasn’t doing a lot of writing at all in those periods due to the major stressor I mentioned before, a troubled organization I got involved with last fall which ate up a huge amount of my energy and mental bandwidth. Only since resigning my position with that organization and taking a step back have I found myself able to write again.

I did have a fairly complete version of this installment last year, but I’d had so much trouble writing it that I felt I needed a few extra pairs of eyes on it. I’m part of a small local writers’ group that meets every other week to share and discuss our fiction. Mostly I show them my original work, but they had seen some of my fan work before, including pieces of Out of the Blue (my Little Mermaid/Wonder Woman crossover) and a Power Rangers fic I have not yet begun to publish. Only a couple of them had read Twilight and none, as far as I know, had read As Dreams Are Made On, but I felt their general feedback might help me figure out what I was still missing.

A lot, as it turned out. In the draft I submitted to the group, there were no flashbacks to Rosalie’s developing relationship with Bella. The story focused entirely on Rosalie talking about Vera, intercut with scenes of her vigil at Bella’s bedside in Denali. I made mention of Rosalie and Vera’s little blood sister ritual, but didn’t show it; and in fact the blood sister scene and the observatory scene were a single scene, when they were about ten years old, and Edward wasn’t present. (Edward was, in fact, a very late addition to the observatory scene.)

The group felt that the story might be better served with more emphasis on Rosalie’s memories, and less on what was happening in Denali. They also felt that they didn’t entirely understand the depth of Rosalie’s feelings for Bella, and would like to see how they had become close. There were other more specific criticisms and suggestions, but those were the main issues.

So I went back to the drawing board. Even though none of the These Our Actors installments are meant to stand on their own - they all depend upon As Dreams Are Made On (and will eventually depend on Brave New World) for context - I had to admit we had only seen Rosalie’s relationship with Bella from Bella’s side, and I wasn’t entirely sure I’d sold it. I wanted to get her perspective on things. As always, she had almost too much to say.

The revision that followed involved a lot of agonizing. A lot of hair-pulling. This is probably the most technically complex story I’ve written in a while. I tried to keep the order of events consistent, always shuttling between time periods in the same order - present-day, Vera flashback, Bella flashback. I wrote the flashbacks as Rosalie telling the story, and the present-day scenes as an inner monologue. I added dates and places to try and ease confusion. Edward turned up - he was originally mentioned, but not shown - and while I didn’t feel he really fit, he came off as a decent character and I’m trying to write him sympathetically so I let him stay. I found I wanted to include discussion of Rosalie’s power, something I couldn’t really fit into Brave New World right upfront, and again it didn’t really fit but I tried to make it work.

Did I succeed? I don’t know. The initial feedback I’ve gotten is that the story is still confusing in parts. But people seem to be responding well to at least one of the parts I’m proudest of, and perhaps that’s the most I can ask.

The scene in question - Rosalie visiting Vera near the end of her life - hasn’t changed much from the first draft, if at all. I wanted to bring closure to Vera’s story, beyond the night of Rosalie’s death. I found it hard to believe she would never look in on her best friend, her surrogate sister. And, well, I guess Alzheimer’s and dementia are becoming something of a theme in my work, and writing Vera as suffering dementia toward the end of her life gave Rosalie another point in common with Bella.

As this story has evolved, I have deliberately started divorcing Bella’s story from my own. When I started writing, she was a straightforward self-insert, and the only question the story asked was “what if I found myself dumped into the story, in Bella Swan’s body and role?” But as this has changed, I’ve been trying to see less of myself in Bella, to make her more of her own person. She still has some things in common with me; one of those is that my mother died, far too young, from early onset Alzheimer’s, or as near to it as to make no difference. We never got a definitive, final diagnosis, but I watched her lose her mind, go from a force of nature to a barely verbal shell, from an independent person to someone who needed full-time care, who drifted in time and place, and who ultimately lapsed into a coma and died.

It was agonizing. And among my many regrets is the fact that I didn’t get to have an exchange like the one Rosalie gets with Vera. I didn’t get to have that final moment where she recognized me, and we talked, and I got to say goodbye. I didn’t realize that I’d had my last remotely lucid conversation with her until it was already over and gone.

So it’s a little bit of bittersweet wish fulfillment, perhaps, and a road into Rosalie’s head that I didn’t have before I conceived and wrote it. I am glad that at least some people have found it moving.

On to other matters.

The story centers on two poems. “The Old Astronomer” - one of my favorites - was part of it from the beginning, and seemed like a piece that both Rosalie and Bella would find moving for their own reasons. Canonically Rosalie did study astrophysics at one point, and Bella (again, like me) has always loved the stars. “Autumn Chant” came later, but when I heard it for the first time, especially that final stanza, it seemed so very fitting, and it gave me some ideas for Rosalie’s unique qualities.

Even in the actual Twilight books, Rosalie seems to have a uniquely sharp recollection of her human life, compared to other vampires. I knew early on that I was going to give her a power, and I wanted it to be more complicated than “supernatural beauty,” so ultimately I decided to bring her supernatural charisma together with her unusually good memory and create a new power: a supernaturally resilient self-image, one that allows her to protect her memories and sense of self from outside influence, and even project her self-image onto others. She sees herself as uniquely beautiful, she was raised to believe first and foremost in her own beauty, so others still see her that way too. (Rosalie is naturally lovely, of course, but her power gives it a little extra oomph.) How will that power change as Rosalie begins to master it and Bella helps it along with her own ability? What relevance will this have to the plot? I can only say that time will tell. But it was important, I felt, to get it down. I’ll have to find some way to work the explanation into the main story as things go forward, of course.

Overall, I sincerely hope you enjoyed most of Rosalie’s story. It’s not perfect - I don’t know if I can ever make it perfect, even if I do eventually loop back around to making an author’s preferred text out of all the Tempestverse stuff - but I hope there’s more good than bad. I have much more straightforward ideas for Callie, Angela and/or Edward, and Jasper and/or Jessamine cooking on the back burner, so we’ll see who ends up getting to go next.

#twilight #twilight fanfiction #twilight fanfic #twilight au #bellice #the tempest trilogy #the tempestverse #rosalie #these our actors

5 notes · View notes

anaithya · 6 years ago

Text

2018, etc

2018 was one hell of a ride.

I spent the NYE working on thesis proposal with my best friends A & G at G’s home. It was tense, since the deadline was close but none of us was even halfway through. At midnight we took a break and walked to Bundaran HI to join the crowd and watch fireworks. We had a bit of fun, grabbed some food in the nearest McD, talked all the way back, and prayed for our hopes and dreams for the year, before finally continue to work.

We had our common goal: to graduate. Little did we know it will took a long, winding road before we finally reach one.

January was fine. IECOM was successful, despite me being a zombie for several days. It might not be perfect but I’m very proud of what my team has done. There were unexpected things happened in D-Day but we handled them well. It feels so nice to see people work together--voluntarily put their time, mind, and energy to make the plan come true. We did our best and that’s what mattered.

Two days after IECOM, batch 2014 went to field trip in Malang and Bali. Having too caught up with IECOM, my friends and I planned our extended trip on the bus lol (I wrote about it here). It was reaaal fun! I liked how chill we all were, stopped for a moment not thinking about thesis or our routine anxieties, living the moment we were in. Thank you crew #gogotrip.

But the chaos was waiting for me. From then on, I was drained working on my thesis. Thesis was like the epitome of my uni life: crappy and messed up. Full of regret and wrong decisions. Perfectly summed it up! I thought I planned everything perfectly, but then Murphy Law happened. I remember panicking when things were still uncertain. I overthinked a lot, I was desperate and felt so clueless on April, but things began to unfold in May. In early July, I was finally certain in what I had to do. But still not sure whether I could make it or not in October. The pressure was even higher after you see your own friends graduating.

Whole September I couldn’t manage to do anything but working on my thesis. The month slipped perfectly from my life, I barely remember anything but me sitting in my computer, whether looking on Word, Excel, or Lingo. I remember staying up all night in the then-newly-opened coffee shop until 2 in the morning with my friend N (we’ve been there for hours), working on our thesis, too tired to talk to each other. Then we do the same thing in the day, only in our lab, and there will be our other friends. On repeat, for days.

On Tuesday, 25th, I finally did my thesis defense. Got an A, with extremely minor revision. Happiest day of the year. Took a day off on Wednesday, printed the final draft Thursday, got my supervisor’s signature, submitted it to the library, and signed up for October graduation on Friday.

Took two companies, months of hustles and hurdles, loads of papers, countess lingo solving, and series of sleepless nights to finally did it. And also a great supervisor. I couldn’t thank my supervisor enough for all the help that he gave me. If it wasn’t him, I don’t know if i can still manage to graduate in October.

In between the mess, with the thought that I need a break, I signed up for HPAIR conference. After two essays and an online interview, I got accepted! So for a full week in August I went to KL. It’s been a long time since I visit KL, and it was my first time participating in an international event like that. (one bucket list checked!). The conference was lit with the intriguing theme and notable speakers. I made new friends and tried superb food in town.

I also got the chance to participate in Maybank Impact Challenge, which I think the most interesting part of the conference. It was modelled upon Maybank Go Ahead Challenge. We were divided in teams, and the members came from different backgrounds and nationalities. In the span of 6 hours I had to make a country development plan, played board game, took the role as a COO in an engineering company, cracked codes and analyzed financial statements, ran for 1-2 km?--wearing a smart casual attire--from Sunway Uni to a bowling alley in Sunway Pyramid, pitched my company to investor WHILE playing bowling, ran back to the Uni, and took the role as management in company-in-crisis. Too much for a day, eh? It was crazy but I got to learn a lot: 1) How to work under pressure 2) How to work with strangers, especially with a very dominating person 3) How to estimate and make up numbers that still make sense 4) How to do impromptu speech.

(I also signed up for IELTS and Germany course. The courses were so refreshing since I love learning languages. I stopped showing up in September tho when the stakes on my thesis were high)

October 19 was my graduation day, and 20 was the parade. Bachelor of Science, I am now. I finally ended my university life. (another bucket list checked!)

The past four years was rough for me, especially in terms of my own ambition and personal development. To be honest, I hate my university life so much. I hate it to the point I don’t like to talk about it. About this class, about this exam, about this task, about this A B C, about this time when we had to do X.

If I could turn back the time I would definitely pick another major and another university. I hate how I didn’t work hard enough. I hate how I didn’t give my 100%. I hate how I DID work enough but still failing anyway. I hate how the world seemed so unfair. I hate how unprepared and unplanned I was. But what I hate the most is... I hate that I didn’t pursue for things I really like the most, because I was too scared. I hate how I wasn’t willing to take chances and chose the easy path. I hate how scared I was, to the future, to the what-ifs, to things that were actually in my head.

So messed up. So many wrong decisions. So many regrets.

Nonetheless, university life gave me valuable friends and... meaningful relationships! I really didn’t expect this from ITB back then, but yeah. The people I met were good ones. MTI ITB IS AWESOME!!! (at a certain period of time lol). I’m thankful that I found trusting, reliable friends that might not be 24/7 for me but surely make me laugh and make me feel much better when they’re around. It is my memories with them that I cherish the most.

Several days after graduation, I secured my first job (or not? I’m not permanent yet but nevermind), and started to work rightaway--in a company that I really admire. (bucket list checked once again!!!)

November and December were about adjustments. Adjusting myself back to Jakarta, coming back home after years of living alone. Adjusting to the new role that I take, as an employee. Adjusting to the new routine.

I also got two free concert tickets in November: Gun N Roses and Blackpink lol.

I spent the last day of the year with my high school friends in a friend’s house. Learned to play poker, chit chatted about life, reflected on how the year was for each of us.

Calm and serene.

Despite the sour, sour lemons, I learned a lot in 2018.

Four years of desperation crafted this worrisome and pessimist attitude in me. Contrary after graduating high school, after uni graduation I feel like I have self-confidence issue and I feel like not knowing what I really want or what I have to do next. I am still clueless apparently.

However, knowing the fact how terrible last year was, and I still survived after all gives me this weird strength to carry on. It gives some me kind of positivity and energy for 2019.

I get this epiphany that... maybe life indeed sucks, it still has loadsss of lemons to be thrown at me. There will be more cancelled and altered plans, and there will be other twists, turns, and surprises. Nevertheless, I shall focus on things that I can control and let go the ones I can’t. I shall control my perception and reception towards what’s happening instead of letting it affect me. I shall not waste my energy panicking and thinking too much on things that don’t matter like I did last year (and throughout my uni life also). I shall let go of my fear and let loose, be less rigid.

I shall focus on me and my personal growth, also on people that matters. I want to regain my confidence and cut all the negativities that the past might have caused me. I need to reorganize my life and construct my future plans.

This year, I want to be chill like I was in Bali.

4 notes · View notes

some-cookie-crumbz · 7 years ago

Text

Not Another Fic Info Dump

Hey, all! I promised to get this up soon so here it is! I’m putting most of it under a read more, since even though it’s shorter than my last one, it’s still a full like 2 pages.

TLDR for those who don’t want to read:

Okay, so, remember that schedule I posted a few months back? That got totally blown the fuck out by the situation at work? I had specifically planned that out with the intention of having more free time this summer, but that simply didn’t happen. My boss of the last five years just left this week and has been replaced by a new manager, whom I already have high hopes for. Our staff situation is almost fixed, but our store’s assistant manager is receiving a promotion and we only have her for one more week. Once she’s gone, until a new assistant manager is brought in, I’m the only one with the availability and training to fill that role. I’ve already spoken about my situation with my new manager and explained that the absolute latest I can do that for is about a month, since I go back to school the third week of August to start up my final term of college. So, unless we get a new assistant in the next two weeks, I’ll basically have minimal free time until right before my semester starts, and then I’ll have to balance my free time to work in study/ class works as well. I am, however, confident that things will be able to get worked, since I’ve worked with the new manager before and know that he’s a great guy.

As such, I’ve reached the following decision regarding my fics: I will not be following any specific schedule anymore, but I am going to be trying my best to get into a rhythm.

For now, I am limiting myself to only four major projects, though I do have some more one-shots and continuation pieces in the works for other stories I’ve submitted. I’ve decided to run with the four ideas I have the most plans for and my goal will be to upload the first chapter of all of them before this month ends. I am not abandoning any of my other projects, though; they’ll just be settled on the back burner until I have more free time/ finish one of the other four projects.

So, which projects should be expected from me?

Time, Space, and Everything Between: This fic is one that I’ve been chomping at the bit to work on and have already almost finished the first chapter. Of all my undefined projects, this will most likely end up being the longest, as while I have a lot of ideas I want to explore with it, I haven’t really decided tOo much in regards to how I want it to end. Pairing: Kidge; Others to be determined at a later date.

Copper and Indigo: The Voltron Soul Eater!AU that I keep promising will be uploaded soon! Since I’ve gotten the results from the poll, I’ve started drafting out an outline to try and have a general idea of where I want to take that story. This is a project that might end up a bit longer than most of my defined projects, but not as long as T,S,aEB. Pairings: Kidge; Hanlura (I think that’s the ship name? IDEK)

Squeaky Brakes: I’m going to be honest and say that Heith has very quickly become my second favorite Voltron ship and I couldn’t resist. I really wanted to do something that was a bit more on the domestic side of romance, and what could be better than Single Dad Keith falling for the Patient Mechanic Hunk? I’ve already got a rough outline completed for this one, and it will only be about 10-12 chapters, maybe, so not a particularly long project. Pairings: Heith; side-lined Allurance.

Here (In Your Arms): Title taken from a song by the band Hellogoodbye (Please listen to it, it is a great Kidge song and also a great Latte song!) This is the fic I was talking about in this post a little while back. I’ve decided I really want to pursue it, since I think it’s be a blast to write and it got a lot of positive feedback! This is another shorter project that I doubt will make it far into the double digits, if it even does, so probably about 8-11 chapters, maybe? Pairings: Latte; Kidge; others to be determined as I start working it out.

My goal will be to have the first chapter of all of these uploaded by the end of July, and then I’ll be running with the goal of updating them each once a month, so it’d be one update to one of these projects a month. All other ideas I have will still be worked on as my free time/ interest wavers. My goal is to be consistently uploading something at least once a week, though there will be weeks that my productivity goes higher due to additional projects – I’ve fallen hard into Persona 4 Hell and am big on a low-time ship that needs some more love, as well as having a short story idea using my own characters that I want to maybe self-publish on Amazon – so there’s that to consider as well.

Hopefully this helps clear up my current situation in regards to writing! Looking forward to seeing what you all think of everything I have up my sleeve in the coming weeks!

#crumbles grumbles #And now to get back to typing all the things I'm working on!#Can't wait to upload them!

14 notes · View notes

tolkienrsb · 7 years ago

Text

TRSB18 FAQ

General Information

What is a Reverse Big Bang?

A Reverse Big Bang is literally a reverse of the Big Bang challenges you may have come across in the past (such as Hobbit Big Bang, for example). The participating artists create a piece of art, which is posted anonymously for authors to view and claim. The authors will then write a fic based on the art they chose.

What kind of artwork/story is eligible?

Hobbit, Silm, LotR, HoME, whatever takes your fancy, be it movies or book-canon ;)

This challenge is open to all characters, genres and ratings, as long as there is a clear link to Tolkien’s mythos.

OCs are welcome, although crossovers are not currently permitted.

We are not setting any restrictions on content, but please work with your artist/author to ensure that the fic turns out well for both sides; refer back to the individual’s Do-Not’s and Must-Haves before you decide to claim a piece of art!

If you create a NSFW piece of art for the Preview, we will put a SFW crop in the Preview with a link to the NSFW version.

Because this challenge is open to and inclusive of all Tolkien characters and ships, we would like to remind all participants that absolutely no shipshaming or kinkshaming will be tolerated.

Please respect each other and the all-inclusive tone of the challenge.

Long post under the cut, can also be found at https://tolkienrsb.tumblr.com/faq

What’s the time frame?

May 1, 2018: Sign-ups open

May 15, 2018: Artist sign-up closes

Monday, May 21, 2018: Art Draft due

Friday, May 25, 00:01 CET, 2018: Art up for preview

Saturday, May 26, 2018: Author sign-ups close

Monday, May 28, 20:00 CET, 2018: Claims open [What time is that for me?]

Sunday, June 3, 2018: Post-Claim Check In

July 5, 2018: Check In.

July 30, 2018: Check In.

August 17, 2018: Deadline to tell us “Help, my pants are on fire and I won’t be able to complete my story!”

August 25, 2018: Fics due.

Monday, August 27, 2018: Posting begins in the last week of August, running in staggered schedule until all Fics have been posted/reblogged.

The scheduled times and dates are not negotiable.

What’s a checkpoint? They’re something to give you a feel on where a typical artist and/or author should or could be at in their creation process. They’re used for encouragement and motivation only. The last author checkpoint is mandatory and for us to determine what art pieces we need to find pinch hitters for. Any author who does not check in then (or if they can’t make it lets us know why) will be dropped from the challenge and a pinch hitter assigned to the art prompt. What should my art draft look like for Preview? It should be the equivalent of about 75% of your final artwork. That’s hard to measure, of course – basically it does not need to be a finished piece but it should give the author wanting to claim your art a good idea of what it will look like.

Time should go into it, this piece will be what the author bases their story on.

What should my rough draft look like for the Final Checkpoint? It needs to be at least 4,000 words, or 80% of your fic. You do not need to have your fic finished by this time however, you may still work on it and get it beta-read until your final fic and art is due. We just need to be able to reasonably verify that you are going to be able to finish your fic by the due date.

How will I contact my artist/author? We will provide an author with contact information once they are committed to an artist(email/tumblr/other - artists choose their preferred communications method when they submit their art for Preview). From there it is up to the author to communicate with the artist and create a story that would fit the art.

How do I sign up? Sign-ups for the 2018 fest open on May 1, you can sign up via forms linked on the @tolkienrsb blog.

FAQ from Artists

Art encompasses (but is not limited to) drawn or painted artwork (both traditional and digital), comics, and digital manips. Craft is welcome as long as the final piece can be photographed and submitted to us via email as an image. If you have an unconventional idea for your artwork, please email the mods at tolkienrsb at gmail dot com to discuss.

Artists may submit up to 3 separate pieces of art for this challenge to be claimed separately by 3 different authors. Alternatively, artists may choose to submit one piece for the preview and create more pieces as the collab continues - whichever best suits the story you and your partner want to tell!

Can I draw anything I like? Basically, yes. However, bear in mind that you are creating something to inspire a writer. Is there an AU or a headcanon you’d love to see explored? Give your author as much information as you can in your art to capture their imagination. Just as with a Big Bang when authors try to make their summary as enticing to artists as possible, you have the opportunity to inspire a writer with your idea and to have them write a fic specifically for the art you create.

What about nudity/ships/kinks? Bring them. Go wild. Ship it (you know you want to). This is basically your party (and we know we have some kinky writers out there, so you might find a kindred soul for yours ;) )

Bear in mind that if you DO create an NSFW piece of art as your prompt, we will put a SFW crop in the Preview and link a full version hosted on Mod Raiy’s private Imgur account for the duration of the Preview Weekend.

Do I have to finish my art before Previews? No, but submitted artwork should be at least 75% done. We know that can be tough to gauge with art; the main thing is to post a draft with enough detail that authors can clearly make out what’s going on in your artwork.

Art is only to be completed before the posting date (this means you have all the weeks of writing to finish it - or to make more art or sunbathe or however you’d like to spend time this summer).

See Submission Info for more details.

Can I create a crossover or fusion piece? No, we feel Tolkien’s works are a large enough sandbox for this first round – perhaps in future we will open for true fusions/crossovers.

NB: THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN’T DO AU’s!

What happens if the number of authors doesn’t match up with the number of artists? We will do several rounds of claiming so that EVERY piece of art has a fic in the event that the art pieces outnumber fanfiction writers. If it’s the other way, we may open up the pieces of art so that more than one fic writer is assigned to the same piece of art. Either way, everyone who wants to participate will get to participate.

Will my art be archived anywhere? No, we will only post your art in our Preview document, which will be deleted by the end of the TRSB18 event.

NB: Art pieces created for this challenge are NOT TO BE POSTED ANYWHERE ELSE before story posting takes place.

How will art claims work? Art will be posted anonymously to a Members Only, View Only private presentation document. Each piece will be numbered and accompanied by additional information supplied by the artist so authors will have plenty of time to peruse and choose their preferences. See Submission Info to see what info the artists will submit, and see Claims Info for how claims will work.

FAQ from Authors

After claiming takes place, authors will have approximately 10 weeks to write a story with a minimum of 5,000 words. The fic must be original, complete, and related to the claimed art for which it is written.

We strongly recommend that the fic is beta-read, either by the artist or a third party to reduce errors.

Do I get more than one piece of art to work with? That’s up to your artist, though we encourage our teams to collaborate throughout the process in whatever manner they see fit. There is no obligation for your artist to create additional art unless they wish to; before you begin writing, have a chat with your artist about interpretations of the artwork - bear in mind that elements of the artwork must feature in your fic.

What if the artist’s OTP is my nOTP/squicks me? Then you shouldn’t pick that piece of art on your claims form. Elements in the artwork need to be present in your story - this means that if there is a pairing specifically shown or suggested, then that is the pairing you are claiming and promising to write for. We also encourage you to discuss any squicks before you start writing and respect each other’s Do Not Wants. (Key word here being “respect” - it should go without saying, but we will not tolerate shipshaming, kinkshaming, flaming or other hurtful behaviour.)

What type of requirements are there for a fic? You will be expected to write a fic with a minimum of 5,000 words, based on the prompt you choose in the Art Claims post. Claims will be first come, first serve. Beta-reading is strongly advised.

How do I know what art I’m writing for? / How do I make a claim? When the artists turn in their rough drafts, we’ll make an Art Preview. Signed up authors will be emailed a link to view the Art Preview and have a couple of days to think about their favourites. Then we will open the Claims Form where you will rank your choices by preference and we will match authors with claims on a first come first served basis.

I’ve already been writing a fic - can I use that one? No. The fic you write must be based around the art you choose, using that as your prompt.

What if my [character] doesn’t look like my artist’s [character]? Then you should probably have chosen a different piece of art ;) As the entire idea of this fest is to use a piece of art as a prompt, discarding the artist’s vision for your own is pretty bad form. Pick art you like/agree with!

What genres/warnings are allowed? You may write/create art for whichever genre of fic you choose, as well as any rating as long as your artist is comfortable with it. Remember, you’re creating the fic around the art and the artist’s original vision.

Can I write with someone else? No, only one person may write. You may use your artist as a sparring partner or utilise the services of a beta reader(which we strongly recommend all authors do), but your story should be yours.

Will my fic be archived anywhere? No, where the story is posted will be up to the author. We will create/reblog MasterPosts to DW and Tumblr, but the location of your fic is entirely up to you.

How does posting work? Each author/artist team nominates their preferred posting day within the last week of August. Each team of author/artist is required to post on their assigned date to the platform of their choice(DW/Tumblr/AO3/ Other).

Each team will also be required to create a masterpost of their collaboration on Tumblr(no matter how they choose to post), including a summary and links to wherever they’ve posted their work.

If you do not have a DW account when it comes to posting time, just email your links/information details to a mod at [email protected] and we will make the post to the DW community for you.

Each Tumblr MasterPost will be reblogged via @tolkienrsb to give each team the maximum exposure we can give on their day of posting. Round-ups of all the works created for the Tolkien RSB18 will be posted here too.

An AO3 collection is available for teams to add their work: TRSB18.

See Masterpost Info for more details.

Any questions or issues can be addressed to the mods at tolkienrsb at gmail dot com or by sending us an Ask. We answer all signed-in Asks on private and there are no stupid questions.

Thank you for participating,

Raiyana & Narya, your friendly community mods!

#TRSB18 #FAQ #mod post

22 notes · View notes

bryanastar · 3 years ago

Text

Short Story Introduction - Judith was Never Adopted

She should have married well—married the son of an oil tycoon or a politician—a prince who jumped from the creased yellowing pages of an old classics book from the back of the school library. That’s what the books said happened to girls like her. The books, the movies, the musicals, the TV shows.

But Judith was never adopted, and she never married well.

———

Howdy Tumblr! Enjoy my mid-story excerpt? I know I usually post the first paragraph of the thing and not something in the middle of the piece, but I wanted an excerpt that included the title, so I chose these two paragraphs!

This is a story I never thought would ACTUALLY be published, not because I thought it was bad, but because the decision to get it published was a pretty impulsive on-the-spot decision in the first place.

Any way, enough of my waffling. Read the rest of the intro under cut.

Genre: Flash Ficton/Literary Fiction

Word Count: 890

Publisher: Rhodora Magazine

Musical Inspiration: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Synopsis:

A veteran recollects on an old friend from foster care and a promise he made to her that was never fulfilled.

Project History:

This story started as me trying to complete one of the daily challenges for The Young Writer’s Initiative discord camp. I don’t quite remember what the challenge was, but I believe it was to write a short story based off a song you liked, and I chose Somewhere Over the Rainbow from the Wizard of Oz. The story wasn’t quite based off the lyrics per se, more so the vibes that the song gave me—the soft yearning for something more, something better, in a dark and gray world.

The initial draft ended a few paragraphs earlier than where it does now—mostly cause I didn’t have time to make it a full fledged story. I posted it to the feedback channel, got a few compliments, and then didn’t think much about it for about a month.

Flash forward to late July, and I really had an itch to submit something to a literary magazine. I submitted a different short story to three different magazines, but it wasn’t one that I thought was likely to get accepted (until it was) and it wasn’t something that reflected my current style or fiction interest. I thought back to the piece I wrote for the first writing challenge I did for the TYWI discord camp, and—on a whim—decided to finish, edit, and submit it to two different literary magazines.

Mind you, this all how happened in the span of maybe a few hours in the late afternoon. That story was hastily finished and edited. This isn’t a strategy I recommend because, most of the time, it ends in failure and regret. I’m honestly still flabbergasted it got accepted at all—considering that magazine that I submitted and ultimately got accepted by IMPLORED all authors to not hastily edit and submit their work. I guess, because it was a flash piece, there were less problems that needed ironing out than in a longer story, but it was still kind of funny and bizarre.

Quite literally, the DAY after I submitted, I was ACCEPTED to the first magazine I submitted the piece to. This means that the story hasn’t been rejected once, and that they read and accepted it pretty much only a few hours after submitting (since it was, like, eight in the evening when I did). That day, I’d also had a different story accepted by a different magazine (the one that I thought would never get accepted anywhere). From that alone, it was already the best day of my life, but that wasn’t all.

The acceptance letter for my short story may just be the nicest most thoughtful response I’ve ever received for a short story ever.

I’m not gonna even bother summing up what they said, and instead just copy-paste it:

“That was an emotional read. It is wonderful how you have captured the devotion of the narrator. Your insights into the psyches and circumstances of foster children are beyond impressive. More points to you for equipoise and compactness, crucial aspects that prevent a work from collapsing under its own weight.”

Emotional. Wonderful. Impressive. That’s what they called something I wrote. Something I loved and put my heart in—albeit fleetingly. This magazine adored the story that I wrote. And this wasn’t a teen magazine where they had to go overboard in their adulation. This was a real adult magazine. I was competing for space with grown writers, and they showered my piece with praise.

It was about then that I, for the first time, had felt like a real author. Not a writer—which I’ve been for years—but an author, and a good one at that.

Still, I didn’t fall in love with the story until I made the cover for it. Because I’d never planned to do anything with the story before submitting it on a whim, it never had a planned cover or introduction prepared beforehand like all my other pieces. It took about five minutes for me to make the cover (after letting myself be distracted by victory music). It’s technically a very simple composition: some golden stars across a navy sky with neon-sign-like writing for the title and my name. It’s actually, in my eyes, a tad generic. The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neil and my copy of The Great Gatsby have very similar covers.

But the minute I saw my creation, I fell in love both with it and my story at the same time.

Even now, I still don’t consider my story a masterpiece, despite all the heaps of praise it’s been given. I don’t actually have any specific problems with the story itself, I just think I can do better. But I do love this story for what it represents. This type of story with this style of writing is where I want to go with my writing career in the future, and to see my first piece like that debut witch such fanfare is a really promising sign for my future prospects as a writer. Is it perfect? No. In fact, I’d say my style and concepts are still quite unrefined. But this story is still the beginnings of my future career with both, and for that I will forever love it.

Here’s the link to the piece. I hope you enjoy it.

That’s all for now. See you next week Tumblr!

#Judith was Never Adopted #Rhodora Magazine #teen writer #young writer #writeblr #writblr #creative writing #writing #short fiction writing #publication #literary magazine

0 notes

tkmedia · 4 years ago

Text

Seattle Kraken roster tracker: Latest updates, rumors on 2021 NHL Expansion Draft picks

The Seattle Kraken are ready to officially unveil their roster during the 2021 NHL Expansion Draft. On Wednesday night, general manager Ron Francis, aided by a plethora of big names including women's basketball star Sue Bird, Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton and Marshawn Lynch, will announce the 30 guys he's taking from your favorite team during a broadcast on ESPN. Until then, who will don the Kraken jersey come October is still a subject of speculation, but that hasn't stopped the mock drafts to flow, the rumors to swirl and the news to leak out early. Seattle submitted its picks to the NHL before the 10 a.m. ET deadline.Sporting News is tracking the latest rumored selections and side deals until the Kraken announce the players who will join their lineup. SN'S MOCK DRAFT: Carey Price, Vladimir Tarasenko headline picks

Seattle Kraken roster

The Kraken must pick at least 14 forwards, nine defensemen and three goalies. Twenty of the 30 players selected must have contracts for 2020-21 and all contracts must be cap compliant (ceiling is $81.5 million). Also, a quick reminder: the Golden Knights are exempt.TEAM PLAYER POS CAP HIT Anaheim Ducks - - - Arizona Coyotes - - - Boston Bruins - - - Buffalo Sabres - - - Calgary Flames Mark Giordano (reported) D $6.75M Carolina Hurricanes - - - Chicago Blackhawks - - - Colorado Avalanche - - - Columbus Blue Jackets - - - Dallas Stars - - - Detroit Red Wings - - - Edmonton Oilers Adam Larsson (reported) D UFA Florida Panthers Chris Driedger (reported) G UFA Los Angeles Kings - - - Minnesota Wild - - - Montreal Canadiens - - - Nashville Predators - - - New Jersey Devils - - - New York Islanders - - - New York Rangers - - - Ottawa Senators Joey Daccord (reported) G $750K Philadelphia Flyers - - - Pittsburgh Penguins - - - San Jose Sharks - - - St. Louis Blues Vince Dunn (reported) D RFA Tampa Bay Lightning - - - Toronto Maple Leafs Jared McCann (reported) C, LW $2.94M Vancouver Canucks - - - Washington Capitals Vitek Vanecek (reported) G $717K Winnipeg Jets - - - EXPANSION DRAFT: Protected lists | Players available

NHL Expansion Draft rumors

(All times are Eastern)11:45 a.m. — Seattle has perhaps found its first captain in 37-year-old Mark Giordano, plucked from new Pacific Dvision rival Flames. BREAKING - I can confirm that the Seattle Kraken have chosen Calgary Flames captain Mark Giordano as their pick at the Expansion Draft, to be announced this evening. — Salim Nadim Valji (@salimvalji) July 21, 202111:37 a.m. — Seattle has reportedly sourced its goalies from Florida, Washington and Ottawa. Sounds like the three goaltenders selected by #SeaKraken will be Chris Driedger (FLA), Vitek Vanecek (WSH) and Joey Daccord (OTT).@DFOHockey — Frank Seravalli (@frank_seravalli) July 21, 202111:33 a.m. — Kaapo Kahkonen was widely speculated to be one of Seattle's goalie selections. As of this very moment, I'm getting the impression that the Kraken did NOT take #mnwild goalie Kaapo Kahkonen.We shall see. If true, that'd leave Carson Soucy, Victor Rask, Nick Bjugstad, Brennan Menell, plus free agents/minor leaguers — Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) July 21, 202111:30 a.m. — The NHL Expansion Draft has so far been a buzzkill for anyone hoping for chaos. Gabriel Landeskog, a pending UFA, won't be Seattle's pick from Colorado. Know some fans are wondering about this…but hearing SEA did not reach an agreement with Gabriel Landeskog. — Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) July 21, 202111:21 a.m. — This means Alex Kerfoot is staying put in Toronto. His stay was short-lived in Toronto. The #SeaKraken will be selecting Jared McCann from the #Leafs.The end result: Toronto traded prospect Filip Hallander and a 7th round pick to Pittsburgh to essentially protect their roster from Seattle.@DFOHockey — Frank Seravalli (@frank_seravalli) July 21, 202111:16 a.m. — Another big name who won't be headed to Seattle. Sources say #SeaKraken also passed on another high-profile, big money player: Vladimir Tarasenko.Subject to change but sounds like the selection from #stlblues will be Vince Dunn.@DFOHockey — Frank Seravalli (@frank_seravalli) July 21, 202111:10 a.m. — It appears Carey Price to Seattle was all talk. According to sources, the Kraken did NOT select Carey Price in the expansion draft. He remains property of the Montreal Canadiens@TSNHockey @TheAthletic — Pierre LeBrun (@PierreVLeBrun) July 21, 202111:07 a.m. — Could Vladimir Tarasenko be at the center of one of today's biggest side deals? If the Kraken take Tarasenko from the Blues (and I have no confirmation they will), hearing there are teams that have already told Seattle they would trade for him if the Kraken would retain salary... @TSNHockey @TheAthletic — Pierre LeBrun (@PierreVLeBrun) July 21, 202110:40 a.m. — Brandon Tanev is the Penguins guy? Interesting. Early word is #SeaKraken have zeroed in on Brandon Tanev from the #pens.Kraken already unfolding as tough to play against. With Brandon in the Kraken fold, looking forward to potential Tanev v. Tanev brother matchups in the Pacific. @DFOHockey — Frank Seravalli (@frank_seravalli) July 21, 202110 a.m. — The Kraken have submitted all the deets to the NHL. Now we wait.9:57 a.m. — Another pending UFA but time is ticking on when things need to be submitted to the NHL. The Kraken had contract talks with pending UFA Jaden Schwartz but ultimately did not sign him during the window which just closed, source confirms. So the Kraken's pick will be another Blues player. Dunn? Tarasenko?@TSNHockey @TheAthletic — Pierre LeBrun (@PierreVLeBrun) July 21, 2021MORE: Everything you need to know about the Expansion Draft9:05 a.m. — A little shocking that Larsson is not re-signing with the Oilers who reportedly offered him similar money. Further to Frank's reporting, Adam Larsson has a four-year deal with #SeaKraken -- hearing it'll be a $4M AAV.Seattle locked him during its exclusive UFA/RFA interview period. https://t.co/7HAV5aVD3C — Chris Johnston (@reporterchris) July 21, 20219:42 a.m.. — Any thought of the Kraken taking anyone but Gourde appears to be squashed. Early word is #SeaKraken were focused in on one player from #GoBolts lot: Yanni Gourde.Not entirely clear how tonight will work. Teams wondering if he's the only Tampa player heading to Seattle? Could change. But sense is Gourde will be a Kraken before night is done. @DFOHockey — Frank Seravalli (@frank_seravalli) July 21, 20218:58 a.m. — The first news comes down. If it is in fact Larsson and Oleksiak, they will be the only players Seattle can select from the Oilers and Stars, respectively. Early word is #SeaKraken are closing in on contracts with two UFA defensemen: Adam Larsson (EDM) and Jamie Oleksiak (DAL).Not finalized. But barring any last minute change, the expectation is those players will be the selections from #Oilers and #GoStars.@DFOHockey — Frank Seravalli (@frank_seravalli) July 21, 2021 Read the full article

0 notes

delicatefury · 7 years ago

Text

I’m back in my city, at the LCS, enjoying a coffee on a miserable day. The bar exam is over and I have two days before I go back to work. I still need to do one last thing for my bar application (the state’s a UBE state so I have to do an “educatonal component” on the differences in the state law from the common law. It’ll probably take me a morning or an evening and it’s an open book test that you can keep taking until you pass), but other than that, my time is completely my own for the first time since frickin’ September.

So here’s the plan of what’s going to change going forward:

Back to writing! Good news everyone, I can finally write and plot and all that good stuff without immediately being distracted by the guilt of “you should be studying”. I’ve got some asks to answer, some plots to lay down, and some editing to do but I hope to have a new TDPL snippet at the very least ready to go by Friday. Still no clue when chapter 5 will be ready though. I need to rearrange some plot stuff first.

Also, I plan to have a second or third draft in my one completed original story done by my 30th birthday in seven months, so depending on inspiration, so expect some general writing rants about that too. (I’m going to flood my two best friends with drafts of that once I’m ready. One because she is a nit picker who loves reading more than I do so will easily find every plothole, grammar mistake, and OOC moment for me, the other because she’s been heavily invested in my writing since we were fifteen and I still have some old, old drafts covered in her notes and questions and excited squeeing.)

Reading! My goal is 8 hours a month (at least) which means about two hours a week. I’ve got Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch sitting on the table right now, and I found a copy of The Hero of Many Faces at the used bookstore (warehouse, actually. That place is friggin’ huge), so that’s probably next. I want to finish a book or two a month, so once I reach those goals, I’ll be working on some of my massive tomes from college (Socrates, Plato, some political books and collected writings, some stuff on game theory... etc.)

Drawing! My paper collection habits have left me with a lot of sketchbooks and drawing pads, so if I want to keep indulging, I have to start using them up. Plus, I love having a visual reference for the characters I’m writing. Also, my skills are super rusty. So, I’m gonna try to do a reference picture a day (from Senshistock on deviantart and a couple drawing apps since I can’t do posemaniacs. No computer so the pics don’t load. Which is a shame. Those thirty second gesture drawing exercises are awesome.) I’m also gonna use some time on the weekend to learn/refine a skill. This week? Skin tones. ‘Cause I suck at them. Always have.

Painting! One evening a week (or every other week) just having fun with a canvas and trying new things. I’m tired of bare walls so I’m going to fill them up with my own work and learn as I go. I’ve got so many ideas too, pages of sketchbooks filled with basic designs and rough sketches that I’ve been dying to put to canvas. Also, motivation to get my office clean.

KNITTING! I’m finishing my nephew’s blanket before Easter now that I have the time to devote to learning the new skill needed to complete it. Then finish my brother’s scarf, work on my sister’s afghan, and make myself that pretty summer shawl I want before going back and working on socks for Christmas next year.

Law stuff!

Being Social! Again, no more guilt of “I should be studying” so next time my sister or coworkers say “let’s get a drink” I can say “OK!” Instead of “I really want to but...”

Cleaning! My office and room are nightmares right now. I was doing ok most of the last few months, but the entirety of February... yeah. But it’s spring and I need to pack up my winter clothes (in a new box that I know for a fact my cat can’t get into and which will be at the bottom of a stack of boxes just in case) and take stuff to the dry cleaners and air out the house before we switch from the HV to the AC. So might as well do a whole cleaning/purge, right?

Exercise! I signed up for cardio boxing at the very end of January but have yet to go (you know the drill of why that is), so I’m gonna go get my membership card and try to go at least twice this week.

Job search. My cousin’s wife’s workplace back home (and in the state where I just took the bar exam) is looking to hire people with J.D.’s, and she’s asked for my resume to show to their HR people, so I’ll be cleaning that up and sending it on. I also need to work on a writing sample. My current one is several years old, and, as I’ve been advised, I should probably start doing my own research to submit for publishing (since this is kinda what I want to be doing anyway). Also, my linkedin is embarrassingly out of date and bare, so, yeah. I’ll be working on all that in the evenings too.

Video games. I’ve finally started my Pokémon Sun game (hey, do any of you play it? I’d love to actually know the people I add to my friends’ list for once) and I’ve got a whole friggin’ backlog to get through. I’m gonna save up for a New3DS since the left-trigger of my current one is broke (a mild annoyance for most games, but for some of the ones I really want to play, it completely breaks the game i.e. I can’t aim in any Zelda game and I’m not good enough to play without targeting) as well as a switch.

Work on a side-hustle. Be it producing original stuff here for a Ko-Fi account, finally creating that etsy store for my cute little paintings (remind me to post the fox painting I made for my nephew), or selling my coffee cozies at the LCS, I’ve got plenty of ways to make extra money that I haven’t taken advantage of. No more! If I want to enjoy my daily coffee while still saving up, I gotta start earning extra money.

COOKING! And BAKING! I’ve got so many recipes better suited to spring than winter and so many cookies I’ve been neglecting (macarons and snickerdoodles and fancy iced sugar cookies...) because they take more time than chocolate chip. But now I have time and SUNLIGHT (which makes it easier for me to be productive in the evening. Once the sun goes down my mind says “day’s over” and goes into pre-bed mode. But we’re almost to SPRING so that’s not an issue anymore) so more messing around in the kitchen for me.

Now, is this too much to conceivably fit in a week when I’m still working full time? Probably, yeah. But I’ve always done my best and been happiest when I’m slightly overwhelmed (slightly being the operative word. Last month I was just completely overwhelmed because of that background chorus of “study study study study” going in my head at all times), so Imma try to do it all. Or at least attempt. And if I turn my “indulgences” of reading and video games into important self-care with goals and everything, I think I’ll be more able to healthily fit them into my life and schedule.

And I’m just... so excited to finally move forward. And if I end up failing the bar and have to retake in July? I’ve got nearly two months before I know if that’s an issue and nearly five months before that test anyway so I’m going to enjoy myself until then.

6 notes · View notes

david-d-levine · 4 years ago

Text

(Not Really) A NaNoWriMo Success Story

At the beginning of NaNoWriMo I started a new novel with nothing more than a one-paragraph pitch, intending to do the whole thing by the seat of my pants (I'd never "pantsed" a whole novel before). Yesterday I sent a finished draft, about 102,000 words, to my agent.

In a Solar System well inhabited by humanity but far from settled, a gang of grifters and thieves -- the scattered survivors of a big job gone very wrong ten years ago -- must reunite to break the gang's erstwhile leader out of captivity. But after ten years, no one is who they were... and some are not what they seem.

THE KUIPER BELT JOB is a space opera caper novel, a mash-up of Firefly, Leverage, and The Expanse. It's an ensemble piece with complex character relationships and a twisty, compelling plot, but beneath the entertaining surface it raises deep questions about identity and personhood. In a world where minds can be copied, what does it mean to be "me"?

Oh wait, I left out one important detail... I started work on this book at the beginning of NaNoWriMo in 2017. It actually took three years and one month to get to this point.

Let's back up a bit. I started writing Arabella of Mars in November 2011. Finished it and submitted it to Tor in October 2013. Got a three-book deal in October 2014. (Yes, it took a full year to get an acceptance. And another six months after that to receive the contract.) Then Kate was diagnosed with brain cancer and had brain surgery in November 2014.

Somehow I managed to revise book 1 by August 2015, and draft book 2 by June 2016, all while caring for Kate. I got my revision letter for book 2 in August 2016. Revised book 2 while Kate was dying, and turned in the final draft in October 2016 -- the day after the funeral. I dove right into book 3 (I could have gotten an extension from Tor but needed something to do), submitted a draft in July 2017, and turned in the final draft in October 2017 (pulling two all-nighters to get it done by deadline). And then I stalled.

(Reality check: not only had I just finished a trilogy, and now had to start an entirely new world and characters for the first time in six years, but I had just had to write book 3 in 6 months and heavily revise it in 2 weeks... because my wife died. Not to mention Trump's election. Of course I was stalled.)

I selected an idea for my next novel from among several candidates in October 2017 and started drafting in November 2017. But I only wrote a few thousand words during NaNoWriMo 2017 and then set the book down -- it just wasn't coming together. I spent most of November-December 2017 on copy edits for Arabella book 3. I wrote a standalone novella January-March 2018, but didn't submit it anywhere. I'm still not sure if it's any good at all. April-July 2018 I barely wrote anything at all. August 2018 I tried to resume work on the WIP but didn't accomplish anything other than "noodling" -- brainstorming, research, character sketches, and outlining. So in September 2018 I signed up for a "write a novel in 8 weeks" workshop through Literary Arts (basically a guided half-NaNo with a target of 50k words in 8 weeks). That went really well! I wrote about 20k words... and then I had an intestinal blockage and spent 11 days in the hospital, which knocked me on my ass. I didn't write another word until January 2019.

Feb 2019 I got back on the horse, with 13k words at the Rainforest Writers workshop for a total of 43k. Plugged away March-August 2019. Sent a 60k partial draft to some friends for critique at a writing retreat on the coast in September 2019. Got a very encouraging crit from them and wrote 5k words at the retreat for a total of 65k. Kept plugging away October 2019 - February 2020, including 13k at Rainforest, for a total of 94k. And then the pandemic hit. No writing March-August 2020.

In August of this year I started to get my feet under me again, and after a few throat-clearing exercises (what Jay Lake used to call "writing-related program activities") I returned to the WIP in September. I think I had reached the point in the pandemic where the situation was, if not actually improving, at least not changing as frequently, and so I had energy left for things other than worrying. I wrote pretty steadily in September and finished up a 104k-word draft at the end of that month. I revised it in October and November, including changing some character names and relationships and moving one large section from one PoV to another.

They say no novel is ever finished, only abandoned, and at the end of November I realized I'd reached a point of diminishing returns on revisions, so I decided to send it to my agent for his feedback.

I don't have a publisher yet. There will likely be another round of revisions before it's even submitted. It may not sell. But after three years and a month, it's complete. Yay.

0 notes

go-redgirl · 4 years ago

Photo

Trump Rewrites H-1B Program to Help American White-Collar Workers

President Donald Trump’s deputies have launched a fundamental reform of the H-1B visa system to protect American graduates from outsourcing — despite furious opposition from donors and leaders from Silicon Valley, Fortune 500 companies, and coastal investors.

The reform will end the annual award of 85,000 H-1B visas by lottery, which has been gamed by companies to import foreign workers at wages far below the salaries needed by American professionals. Instead, the visas will be offered to the companies that compete to offer the highest salaries, preventing employers from undercutting American graduates.

“The Trump administration is continuing to deliver on its promise to protect the American worker while strengthening the economy,” said Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli. “The current use of random selection to allocate H-1B visas … hurts American workers by bringing in relatively lower-paid foreign labor at the expense of the American workforce.”

“We have seen more progress in the last few weeks than we’ve seen in the last 30 years,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which opposes the H-1B and other visa worker programs. He continued:

If you look at it on the whole, Trump is side with working Americans. Look at the beginning of his administration when he canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All the elites wanted that — he said no. He allowed labor into [negotiations about] NAFTA II — the USMCA — and they made a better deal for working man and women. On August 3, for the Tennessee Valley Authority, he used the authority he had to protect those white-collar jobs [from H-1B outsourcing]. So he’s clearly made a choice between the elites and working men and women.

Trump has pushed forward with popular and dramatic reforms of the visa worker programs since June, with additional actions taken in August and early October.

The actions may be helping his poll ratings among vital white-collar graduates in two critical states: North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

For example, Monmouth University’s early October poll showed Trump getting 38 percent among white college graduates, while Biden had 57 percent. That is down slightly from a September 2 poll that showed Trump was getting 40 percent but is above Monmouth’s July poll that showed Trump getting only 34 percent of white college voters.

On October 13, Monmouth showed Trump was getting 48 percent of white college graduates in North Carolina, up from 42 percent on September 3.

Both states have been hit hard by H-1B outsourcing, giving Trump a chance to champion the very popular economic self-interest of college graduates.

“There are many financial institutions in North Carolina that are abusing cheap labor and H-1Bs,” Jay Palmer, a civil rights activist who works with abused visa workers, told Breitbart News. He continued:

Charlotte, N.C., is the hotbed of visa fraud. They’re laying off American workers left and right because there is so much cheap [foreign] labor in North Carolina …

They’re hiring anybody through third-party consulting companies, and they are paying them on 1099s [as gig workers] to work at the financial institutions.

They’re replacing American workers such as risk managers and actuaries — any jobs they can fill with cheap labor. It’s horrible. You don’t even know how bad it is.

But other estimates say 900,000 jobs are allocated to H-1B workers. In addition, at least another 600,000 foreign workers hold white-collar jobs after being imported via other pipelines, dubbed Optional Practical Training (OPT), L-1, J-1, TN, Curricular Practical Training (CPT), and H4EAD.

Some of these million-plus foreign workers stay in the United States until they are trained by Americans and can take the white-collar jobs back to India.

But most of these foreign workers come from low-tier universities and work for many years at low wages in mid-skill jobs in the hope or expectation of getting green cards and citizenship delivered via a current or future employer. For example, at least 300,000 Indian H-1B workers are now working while waiting for employer-sponsored green cards. Many more visa workers work as gig workers for little-known subcontractors in the hopes of getting into the H-1B program so they can get citizenship.

CEOs at Fortune 500 companies quietly outsource many of their full-time jobs to this huge “Green Card Workforce,” so cutting costs and boosting near-term stock values for shareholders and C-Suite executives.

This green card outsourcing prevents many American graduates from getting paid jobs where they can use the degrees they earned with borrowed tuition money. Also, outsourcing pushes many experienced American professionals from mid-career jobs, while millions more face lower salaries and persistent job insecurity.

Corporate diversity reports, university reports, and census data show that large slices of the nation’s technology workforce consist of ill-paid, ill-treated foreign workers who have the same job security and professional authority as migrant stoop workers in U.S. fields.

The large number of foreign workers are used to minimize U.S. professionals’ role and prevent the formation of innovative companies. The foreigners’ limited skills and lack of workplace rights help to reduce productivity, the quality of software, and to slow research.

But this labor policy also delivers workplace stability, cheaper graduates, and higher stock values to the current executives and leading shareholders of the Fortune 500 companies.

A statement from the Department of Homeland Security described the new rule:

WASHINGTON —Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced the transmission to the Federal Register of a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that would prioritize the selection of H-1B registrations (or petitions, if the registration process is suspended) based on corresponding wage levels in order to better protect the economic interests of U.S. workers, while still allowing U.S. employers to meet their personnel needs and remain globally competitive.

Modifying the H-1B cap selection process by replacing the random selection process with a wage-level-based selection process is a better way to allocate H-1Bs when demand exceeds supply. If finalized as proposed, this new selection process would incentivize employers to offer higher wages or petition for positions requiring higher skills and higher-skilled workers instead of using the program to fill relatively lower-paid vacancies.

…

This effort would only affect H-1B registrations submitted by prospective petitioners seeking to file H-1B cap-subject petitions. It would be implemented for both the H-1B regular cap and the H-1B advanced degree exemption, but would not change the order of selection between the two as established by the H-1B registration requirement final rule.

DHS will open a public comment period once the NPRM is published in the Federal Register. Interested parties will have 30 days to submit comments relevant to the proposed rule and 60 days to submit comments relevant to the proposed information collection. The Department will review all properly submitted comments, consider them carefully, and draft responses before issuing a final rule.

In contrast to Trump’s partial populism, Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign theme claims, “We are in a battle for the soul of this nation.”

“When Biden talks about ‘Saving the Soul of America,’ he is whistling through a cemetery,” responded Lynn:

Under globalists like Biden, the neoliberals have destroyed of hundreds of thousands of good middle-class and upper-middle-class jobs. That is what killed the American dream. The American Dream is, if you want to find it, you go to the cemetery. That’s where you’re gonna find the people have actually lived it. If you’re a millennial, looking to get into the job market, or you’re a boomer getting ready to retire, you’re very insecure right now … I wish Biden would be more concerned about the body.

Biden is backed by companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs, he said. “One need only look at the support that he’s been getting from Google, Facebook, and Twitter … it is obvious.”

“This is why it is so critical that if Vice President Biden wins in November, he follows through on his commitment to reforming our failed immigration system,” wrote Todd Schulte, director of the FWD.us advocacy group. The group was created in 2013 by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and other coastal investors who were hoping to get the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty through Congress.

The bill would have dramatically accelerated the inflow of consumers, renters, and workers into the U.S. economy and also allowed an unlimited inflow of foreign postgraduates. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” said a report by the Congressional Budget Office.

If Biden “follows through on his commitment to reforming our failed immigration system … We can create a streamlined modern visa system so that people who want to come to contribute or unify their families can do so,” Schulte wrote October 28.

Biden’s 2020 platform promises to let companies import more visa workers, let mayors import a new class of visa workers, and allow an unlimited flow of foreign graduates through U.S. universities and into white-collar jobs. The plan says Biden would “exempt from any cap [the] recent graduates of Ph.D. programs in STEM fields.”

In contrast, Trump is likely to reject migrants, narrow asylum claims yet further, and fund the transfer of migrants waiting in Mexico back to Latin American countries. His 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers. For example, in many speeches, Trump generally ignores the economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration on Americans while stressing issues of crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare, even though his low-immigration policies have been a popular boon to Americans.

Open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control on American professionals, centralize technological innovation, undermine labor rights, and to get many progressive reporters to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.

Neal Muro@·May 20@ NewMuroDCThe inflow of India's visa-workers creates a huge 'bonded labor' workforce that empowers Fortune 500 CEOs & shrivels professionalism, say US/India tech-professionals. "We’ve lost our competitive, innovative advantage because of it," says US manager. #H1B

0 notes