#and also rearrange my bone structure sometimes

[strawbrysnake]

Wearing a binder isn’t enough I need to customize my body like a sim every morning

[ghoste-catte]

I was curious what advice would you give to someone new to writing fics? I've been wanting to get back into it but haven't seriously written something since high school. I hope this isn't an annoying question or anything!

Not an annoying question at all! I'm just a little worried that I won't have terribly good or useful advice. To be honest, I also sort of stopped writing in earnest right as I finished high school, and didn't pick it back up until my late 20s. It's certainly an adjustment! But I think the few things that really helped me get back into writing fic as a hobby and something I spend quite a bit of time on would be:

Write for yourself first, then find your other motivations. My original inspiration in getting back into fic writing was that there just were not that many fics I liked for my favorite pairing, and I wanted more of them, and I especially wanted more with the tropes and characterizations I wanted to see. I think at the very core of anything you need that internal spark that drives you. At the same time, for me at least, if I just relied on my own drive, I would not get much done; I need some external guardrails. So having people send prompts, or writing for particular events, or writing stuff for friends really helps me to get my ass in gear and finish stuff. That may not be the perfect motivator for you, and that's fine! You just gotta figure out what is.

Be open to inspiration. Anything and everything can be spun out into a story with the right tweaking. Obviously stuff like music is a classic inspiration source, but I've also pulled ideas from poetry, from memes, from Reddit threads, from YouTube videos, from rambling conversations on Discord and from real life to make fics out of. So many times, someone will post a silly Twitter screencap, and I'll think, There's a fic in this. And a lot of the time, there is! Research is a wonderful thing, but so is serendipity. If you're out there actively looking for ideas, eventually one that you like will stumble past you.

Find your community. I can genuinely say I never would have finished more than one fic if I didn't have fandom friends to talk to about even stupid headcanons, to bounce ideas off of, and to encourage me (and to encourage them in turn!). Discord has been a godsend, and some of my closest online friends are people I met in the GaaLee discord server. As I've gotten more comfortable as a writer, I've also joined general writing servers and Reddit communities and have found them immensely helpful on both a motivational level (bingos, sprints, owe-me challenges) and on a craft level (plot workshopping and writing ethics and live grammar help). It's a lot easier to think about fic ideas and hash through problem moments when I have a constant stream of fandom-related chatter coming from the little people who live in my phone! Ao3 is an amazing website, and it's great as, well, an archive, but it isn't social media by design. If you want conversation and human connection and cheerleading, you've gotta forge out and find it.

Make it a habit ... If you want to produce anything longer than a couple hundred words, you really have to set aside time for it. And writing is just like knitting or dirt biking or painting little model figurines: the more you do it, the more easily it comes. When I was first getting back into the proper swing of things, I committed myself to 30 minutes of writing per week. Just 30 minutes. I didn't even hit that goal every week, but there were tons of weeks I got on a roll and went over that amount, and by the end of the year I'd written over 200,000 words. I used to spend an hour laboriously tip-tapping out 200 words, but now I can easily blow through 1k in a 50 minute sprint. It's all about training that muscle.

... But don't make it a chore. With fanfic, you aren't doing this as a job, and you aren't ultimately doing it for anyone other than you. That means you can take breaks when you need them, you can set deadlines and then fail to meet them, you can write stuff and then decide to never post it. When you start getting burnt out, when the practice loses the joy and energy, stop. There's no 'hustle' here. In our capitalist society we're so trained to push past our limits and keep going even when it hurts us, but the hobby you do for connection and relaxation and whatever else shouldn't be like that.

Ignore metrics. Sometimes stuff isn't gonna get hits, or kudos, or comments. There are some basic 'rules' as to the stuff that does and doesn't get traction, but every time you post something it's a roll of the dice. If you're focused on watching that kudos counter tick up, you will get bummed out fast. And any writer will tell you that the stuff you think is your best work will never be the stuff that gets the most accolades. So you have to find something else to give you a sense of success. For me, it's watching my wordcount go up in my stats and those occasional comments where someone has a lot to say and that one person who always leaves me a <3 emoji (and, shout out to @egregiousderp, having someone to have long one-on-one conversations with about the stuff that never made it to page).

Don't strive for perfection. It's really easy to want your first ever fic to be a complete showstopper, the best fic fandom has ever seen, hitting all the tropes and the ideas and the characterization that you just know fandom is missing and would be everyone's top favorite if only it was written. This is a trap. No one fic can be all things. Most people who want to write an epic as their very first venture will not see the end of that epic, because they haven't put in the practice hours to make something on that scale work. That's not to say you can't start out with a big, sprawling multichap, just don't expect it to be the greatest thing since sliced bread if you're just starting out, and be okay with abandoning it for greener pastures if you get to that point. Think of the first time someone makes a vase out of clay or bakes a loaf of bread. That's never their best vase or their best bread. If they keep up with it, they'll make more and better vases and loaves. Likewise, your first fic is probably not gonna be your best fic. See it for what it is: your launchpad.

You can't edit an empty page, but you can over-edit a full one. This kind of spins off of #7, but if the words aren't there, you can't fix them. Daydreams and headcanons are fantastic (and god, how many times have I wished for a speech-to-text engine that projected my falling asleep thoughts onto a Google doc for later perusal), but they aren't fic. If you want to write fic, you've gotta get comfortable with the idea of sloppy outlines and rough first drafts. You can't build a house without a frame and you can't build a man without a skeleton (I mean, you can, I guess, but he'd be one floppy man). The nice thing about fic is that it doesn't matter if that frame is structurally unsound or the skeleton has 18 too many bones, you can clean that up in the editing process. But you can't start hanging curtains and arranging furniture in something that doesn't even have walls. That's the process. But! Also know when to set down the editor's pen and say, "Okay, this is good enough for government work", and call it done. ("Done" doesn't have to mean "posted", but it does mean, "I'm done picking at this for now, and I'm gonna go write some more stuff".) Over-editing can make stuff seem laborious and forced, and it prevents you from actually improving. To continue belaboring the house metaphor, you can spend your whole life rearranging furniture in just one room, but the end result of that is a pretty narrow existence and a room with a lot of footprints and tracks in the carpet.

Write shit down. When you have ideas, jot them down--in a notebook, in a Google Doc, in the Notes app of your phone, in pen on the back of your hand. You think you will remember that brilliant line of dialogue or sparkling snippet of narration or genius plot that came to you in a dream, but you Will Not. Write it down. Write it down. Write it down! There have been so many times when a fic was completely saved by past!me having written down my shower thoughts about what happens next in the fic, that present!me had completely forgotten about and was floundering over.

Have fun with it! Try different stuff. Try stupid stuff. Try experimental stuff. Do stuff you've never done before that you aren't sure will work. It's important to get comfortable with your niche (for example, I know I'm never going to be the sort of person who writes intricate plots of intrigue or super long 100k epics or detailed battles), but you can't find that niche unless you explore lots of different niches! Figure out what you love and what you absolutely hate, and then keep doing the stuff you love.

Okay, so that was actually TEN things, but ... I hope you still found this helpful. Feel free to send another ask if any of this was confusing or unclear. Good luck with your fic writing and, if you want, send me a link to what you've written once you've written it! I'd love to read it.

[muddshadow]

Happy Storyteller Saturday! What is something that has changed from the beginning of your WIP to now?

hello @ryns-ramblings!! *showers you with glitter* I have morphed this ask into world-building Wednesday! and for the subject of change, i’ve gotta talk about my oldest, dearest, most maddening project...

TO FORGET A PRINCE // High fantasy, mystery. A world built on bones, volatile magic and sentient nature, and the escalating riddle of a godling’s revenge. First in a trilogy, To Forget a Prince brings together the three strangers Yulei, Nara, and Kon, each struggling to prove themselves in all the wrong ways as a cold-hearted monster wakes from its long sleep. About failure, perseverance, and creating your own salvation.

oh boy this story... it's been with me since i was about twelve years old. It's undergone so many overhauls, i could write an entirely separate novel about what's changed since the first few ideas. It’s original version was more a convoluted chain of wild events and spectacular battle scenes and extra-dramatic character drama than it was an actual story with plot. Giving it structure took a lot of time and effort, though the biggest challenge was designing character arcs. The three main characters sort of grew up with me, their traits and personalities went through several transitions, and so writing them a beginning and end was tough. I'm sure they'll endure more tweaks and adjustments as the last of my plot comes together, but I've settled on their personal journeys - how they begin the story and the difficult truths they face along the way. Besides a name change for each, a couple makeovers, and some major background revisions, here’s some of the biggest changes for the three main characters...

Yulei began as many twelve-year-old OC's do: an over-powered, over-dramatic, tragic chosen one. Also everyone was in love with her (naturally). Yulei was really good at being captured by enemies (everyone wanted her ultra special powers), accidentally destroying buildings in fits of magical hysteria (she was always forgiven for this), and staring pensively into the night sky. Yulei didn’t actually have that much personality. Her righteous goodness and popularity were boring. Over time, she’s become significantly less ‘good’ and entirely less ‘popular’. After scrapping the chosen-one gig and rearranging her background, Yulei is defined by her razor-sharp resourcefulness, eager impulsiveness, and lonesome wanderlust. She grew up in a big city with very little support, she knew a hundred flavors of neglect before an affectionate touch, and is infatuated by the whisper of magic (and now also branded by it). Despite being (mostly) good-natured and friendly, Yulei struggles with attachment. Meeting her mentor changed the trajectory of her entire life. When he disappears, Yulei becomes obsessed with finding him. Her character arc centers around this obsession - fearing the rot of loneliness, killing the self to please someone else, digging up truths better left hidden. But in the effort of searching for her mentor, Yulei forges new bonds she never thought she could, and learns a lot about how to love.

Nara (Nathera) is utterly unrecognizable from his original design. He began as the story's villain: also over-powered, smirks eight times a paragraph, and whose blinding handsomeness and (predatory) charm cancelled out all those murders he committed. But Nara was also indentured to the bigger, badder bad guy, and so this made him sympathetic enough to team up with sometimes. Nara’s personality has changed A LOT, and transitioning him from problematic villain meant giving him a weakness - so now, Nara is a coward. He runs from blatant danger, possible danger, confrontation of an emotional nature, and most things that blink at him funny. Not for lack of magical talent - Nara is still an exceedingly talented sorcerer - but his work often flirts with death and running away has always meant survival. Nara looks after himself first and foremost, and he prefers to hide behind a hundred-layer mask. His character arc is about courage - courage to face his fears, but also the courage to know oneself. Nara can’t flee the plot of the story because it grows from the problem he never quite foresaw (he’ll curse himself for never anticipating that danger), and he can’t flee himself as the past comes calling. Surrounded by people who are ferociously authentic, Nara is forced to decide who he wants to be.   

Kon (Konvhana) has always been the voice of reason. Except when I was a kid, I had little to no interest in silly things like reason, and so Kon was condemned to be the bland and boring one. He led a prestigious team of warriors; always making the right battle decisions, connected the others to the story’s political higher-ups, and rarely felt complicated emotions. The best thing I did for Kon’s character arc was take away all that certainty in his leadership - Kon stills leads a (much smaller) team, but his storyline is defined by trust. Kon has good instincts, a sharp nose for lies, and a strong sense for justice, but he doubts himself. It’s difficult for him to trust others and terrifying to lead them. He wants to make a difference but doesn’t know how. Throughout the first book, Kon hesitates and stumbles, blindly follows others despite disagreement, suffers and learns from his failures. Meeting Yulei and Nara forces Kon into the position where he can make a difference - where his decisions have consequences and his actions affect lives, and where he must trust himself or lose everything he cares about. Kon has always been stern, grumpy, and a slight buzzkill, but nowadays he’s also intelligent, extremely caring, and someone who’s had to work very, very hard to act on what he believes is right.

thanks for the excuse to ramble about my oldest characters <3 here's some lineart of them i haven't colored yet!! Kon - Yulei - Nara. (yulei is usually 5'3" hehe) i love them very much <3

[icitrine]

I did a lazy sketch of

🥁🥁🥁

✨ZENO✨

Yes that’s his name that I chose for him! (Very cringe 🥲) He’s a size shifter (but can only go big from his original height of 6’3, or back down to that.) I also put my persona right smack dab in his lap, but he’s squeezing me way too tight 💀 He has those nubs on his face for breathing when he’s large, same for some holes around his body. The larger he is the more those holes open. They’re like extra noses since when he’s larger he’s going to need more oxygen intake (since he was a human boy before) and his body gained this skill from the MANY experiments he was apart of 🥺. Also, his skin appears pink-ish since because he grows large, he has more blood vessels all over his skin for carrying oxygen etc. They expand (similar to his other organs) depending on his size. He has all these mutations to support the genetic tests done on him. He wasn’t raised abused though, his mother was the one who ran these. She asked him for his permission and tried to give him a childhood regardless. I’m not justifying what she did, but I doubt she had ill intention. At 6’3, his organs are a little more clamped up then the average human being, so he can’t stay at his original size for long. The most is about a week he can last without having to “let loose.” When he grows, he gets rapid hair growth to be equivalent to the amount of hair he had at 6’3, and his body expands with him. The thing is, he has a mysterious fluid in his body (haven’t figured out the science behind this one yet) which allows him to grow without damaging any internal organs. This fluid is actually stored in his hair, which is why it’s so THICK AND FLUFFY And maybe oily 😅. When he grows, this fluid rushes throughout his body instantly providing his skin to grow and holds the body parts that can’t be unfolded or rearranged during the size change, such as his bones. Following bones, some of the vessels he has for growth that expand catches some of that fluid and hardens it, bringing a bone structure to him with the larger he is. Sometimes, these fones (fake bones) don’t melt into fluid or blood into the blood stream and stay stuck, which is why he almost always has horns. It doesn’t hurt him since his mother ran a procedure on him to make little holes in his skin so that these horns can come out painlessly. The ones on his head are covered by hair. On the topic of hair, you may notice he doesn’t have visible body hair. This is because the fluid is stored in his hair of his head, and the body had to produce enough hair to hold all of it. Unfortunately for him, his mother couldn’t necessarily figure out how to equally distribute this fluid amongst his body, causing him to have baby soft skin. Also, his ears are misshaped to fit blood vessels, and in the cartilage, extra fluid is stored for somewhat of a distribution. And he appears somewhat muscular. His muscles are not actually, well, muscular. They are very elastic, and like an elastic band it’s at its least stretch, so it may appear stiff due to his crammed organs holding it in place. As he grows, the fluid softens around it, keeping it look somewhat natural while he is large

I just hope this science makes sense lmao it’s all guessed 🥲

[howtosingit]

Fic: you keep burning through to my soul 

“Your lips look a little cold there, Officer Reyes.” * TK learns a lot about Texas during his first year of living in Austin.

1.5K | Also on AO3

-----

TK learns a lot about Texas during his first year of living in Austin.

Being a city boy from New York, he realizes that much of what he thought he knew about the “Lone Star State” is just plain wrong. 

He remembers when his dad first told him that they were leaving New York for Austin. He may have still been a little out of it, but TK can vividly recall the look of utter confusion he had planted on his father, along with his sharp tone of disbelief when he said, “You want me, a gay firefighter, to move to Texas? Are you insane?”

He knows now that Austin, Texas is a pretty liberal city. Sure, it’s no New York City or San Francisco, but it would be unfair of him to expect it to be. Besides, it’s not like he never ran into homophobia living in Brooklyn. No city is completely free of bigots, but TK soon realizes he doesn’t have to live in fear in Austin; he can go out to gay clubs and bars, he can hold hands with another guy when he walks down the street. He can be out and proud and live his life -- and he can do all of that away from the dark memory of New York. It’s a good place for him to be.

Another interesting thing he discovers is that Austin is not a warm southern paradise all year round. It’s definitely warmer than New York, and apparently it hardly ever snows - something about the warm air from the Gulf making it highly unlikely for snow to accumulate, he doesn’t really know or care about the why of it. But, while it may not snow, it does get cold enough for freezing rain and ice, and that is its own kind of Texas hell.  

For one, TK never really had to worry about the state of the roads in New York City, considering he didn’t drive there. Now, after a few months in Austin, he’s got his own car and he’s adjusted to being behind the wheel more frequently. He was feeling pretty confident about it too, for a while at least, until winter hit and he experienced the joy of driving through sleet on black ice for the first time; it made him feel like he had to learn a completely new skill just to keep his car on the road.

Freezing rain and ice also means their crew has to work overtime responding to weather-related incidents, including uprooted oak trees weighed down by ice, which often causes structural damage to nearby homes, and pile-ups on the roads when Texas drivers inevitably lose control and cause serious accidents.

They’re responding to one of those incidents now, and TK could not be more thankful for his heavy turnout gear. He’s also taken to wearing at least one thick layer underneath as well, which helps, especially when it’s still sleeting, like it is tonight. Years of experience running into blazing fires and other extreme conditions make this cold, wet January night feel almost routine, if not also completely different. 

It doesn’t stop him from noticing a familiar figure standing a few cars away from him, though, who looks less-insulated from the weather. Carlos is decked out head-to-toe in his winter gear, including his boots, gloves, APD coat, and stocking cap. The added layers make his hulking body even larger, and TK can’t help but to appreciate how he pulls focus just by taking up so much space on the scene. He’s speaking with a woman from a car at the perimeter of the pile-up, taking notes on the pad of paper in his hand. Before Marjan pulls his attention away, TK sees the officer’s breath in the cold night air. 

It’s a long night, made even longer by the uninterrupted rain falling down on them. By the time they’re finished, only a few people sent off to the hospital for minor injuries, TK and his team are soaked to the bone, and though they’re all used to the extremes, he notices some teeth-chattering that wasn’t happening an hour ago when they were all working the scene. Marjan is passing out hand warmers while they wait for his dad to give them the all-clear to head out. TK accepts his with a quiet thank you, noticing Carlos standing off to the side, moving around more than usual to keep warm. TK knows he typically runs hot, but standing around for hours in the rain seems to have finally gotten the better of him.

Guided by a sudden thought, TK approaches him, careful where he steps to avoid any patches of ice. Carlos glances his way while still pacing back and forth and rubbing his hands together, a grimace on his face that TK thinks was meant to be a smile. TK gives him a smile of his own, realizing as he does so that he can’t really feel his face anymore. 

“Your lips look a little cold there, Officer Reyes,” he says, glancing down at the facial feature in question. Carlos grinds to a halt, his eyebrows shooting up towards the lower edge of the stocking cap pressed over his dark curls as his jaw drops just a fraction, a sure sign of his surprise.

“TK…,” Carlos begins to respond, the word coming out slowly along with a visible huff of air, but TK cuts him off before he can continue.

“You sticking around here much longer?” he asks.

Carlos blinks a few times, obviously thrown by the redirect, before nodding. “Yeah, I’m waiting on the tow trucks to clear the road. They’re taking a little longer than usual.”

TK nods, gesturing to the officer’s hands. “How’re your fingers?”

“I’ll be okay,” Carlos says immediately, rubbing them together to warm them a bit.

“Here, tough guy,” TK says, handing over his hand warmer before Carlos can pretend like he doesn’t need it. They end up holding it between their gloved hands, gripping each other tightly. “We’re just waiting for the all-clear, so you could use this more than me.”

“Thanks,” Carlos says, his brown eyes twinkling in the red and blue lights from his cruiser. “I appreciate it.”

TK leans in, a smirk forming on his face as he whispers in Carlos’s ear. “I meant what I said about the lips, too, but Marjan didn’t give me any lip warmers, unfortunately.”

Carlos huffs out a laugh, taking a step closer into TK’s space so that their front sides press together, hands still linked. “I hate you.”

TK smiles, turning his face to press a quick kiss to Carlos’s cold cheek. “No, you don’t.”

He looks up slightly, drawn to his favorite pair of warm, loving eyes. Carlos closes them as he laughs, a bright smile rearranging his face into a look of absolute joy. TK feels his heart stutter way down in his chest, underneath all of his layers. Before he can tell Carlos for the millionth time how much he loves him, his boyfriend ducks down slightly to press their frozen lips together. 

The effect is instantaneous. Before, all TK could think about was how cold he was, how he was slowly losing feeling in his toes, how he couldn’t wait to get back to the station and strip off his wet clothes before stepping into a warm shower. Now, with Carlos pressed against him, those thoughts are extinguished entirely, the fire that is his boyfriend having doused them with its own intense heat. 

He grips Carlos’s shoulder with his free hand, holding him close. The kiss isn’t indecent, and he knows they don’t have an audience, hidden from his entire team on the other side of the police cruiser, but there’s a part of TK’s brain that is telling him not to deepen the embrace; he knows he won’t want to stop if they really get started, and neither of them can afford that while on the clock.

They’re saved by his radio going off, his dad’s voice breaking them apart as they’re given the all clear to pack up and go. TK takes in Carlos’s flushed face and his bright, red lips, and a surge of victory flares through him. Mission accomplished.

“You’re welcome,” TK says, darting back in for a quick kiss before he steps away.

Carlos blinks through a daze, his tongue darting out to lick his full lips before letting out a bright giggle. TK can’t help but to answer with one of his own. Sometimes they’re both really ridiculous.

“I’ll be home around 11,” Carlos reminds him, rubbing his hands together again now that TK has stepped away.

“I’ll have a bath ready for us,” TK promises, giving him a wink, “to show you what other things these lips can keep warm.” 

Carlos’s jaw drops completely this time, and TK doubles over with laughter as he hurries around the cruiser to head towards the truck. 

“I love you!” he shouts over his shoulder, turning away. “Don’t be late, I’ll get all pruney!”

He just barely catches Carlos shouting “I love you, too!” as he steps into the truck, letting out a sigh at the sudden warmth, his mind already focused on how hot this evening is going to be. 

A Texas winter is certainly no match for the two of them.

[virtualcarrot]

Aziraphale’s super anxious and self-conscious from the very Beginning of the tv show

yet it’s got nothing to do with fear of his superiors finding out about the Arrangement. there’s no Arrangement yet in Eden. it’s just how he is.

and he doesn’t quite fit. I mean, angels are supposed to embody the Surety of the Plan after all. yet he is a very unsure being.

it makes sense that after the War, heaven’s a bit of a mess. God’s given the Host humans to look after and of course they’ll do it, it’s their duty, but also, what a chore, you know? There’s tidying to do, departments to rearrange, all that dastardly bureaucracy, they don’t exactly have people to spare yet as they seek how to best fill the blanks in the Heavenly structure left-over from the Fallen

We’ll post Aziraphale in the Garden, they said. He’s a good soldier, Aziraphale, a bit weird, bit dumb, but knows how to follow orders that one, not one disloyal bone in him, not at risk of joining the Fallen, knows his place in the hierarchy. Sure, not the sharpest tool in the box, but a reliable one, might as well put him to use somewhere.

When Aziraphale not only fails to stop the Serpent but also gives away his sword, Gabriel and Michael share a look. Well what did we expect, they say, and Incorruptible, sure, but completely inept that one then what are we gonna do with him and oh bother just send him to look after the humans, he likes them, that’ll keep him from making a mess Up here and we’ve got work to do

And so goes Aziraphale. And they’re right, in a way. Evil does not Tempt him (not the capital kind) no matter how close it circles (and Crowley gets pretty close sometimes, really my dear, what are you trying to accomplish here). He doesn’t Fall.

And he remains as inept at furthering the Host’s cause as ever.

(In 1800, Gabriel briefly takes pity on him. Poor sod’s been down there so long, it’s time to bring him back, no angel deserves this, no matter how terrible at their job and it might be time to steer the humans a bit more firmly again anyway and Aziraphale’s too soft and witless for that. in light of some new information he gleans, he gives Aziraphale another chance. Maybe there’s hope for the Principality yet)

Aziraphale helps avert the Apocalypse.

That little shit

[mrsren]

Hi!! What does your writing routine look like? Do you write with or without music? What is something you like to do for each of your stories (outlines, character blurbs, etc)?

Hi!! 

Over a year ago, my hobby of writing took up my life 24/7. I’ve since set some boundaries for myself and my habits look a lot different now. So while no one routine fits all, here’s how I manage my writing. 

I don’t set word count goals anymore. 

I had heard people say they didn’t, and I just could not let go of my tracker, or goals. Then I realized how it was draining me, and since I picked it back up, I didn’t set a real goal. I put a number there of what would be nice to do, and then found I surpassed it by just enjoying myself. 

In my mind, goals have always been more of a I better hit this or I will have failed type of mentality. So goals just aren’t for me. 

I tend to write with music. When I was sprinting in groups or with other fic writers, sometimes I got the surprised reactions. I’ve been asked how I write so quickly. Here’s what I do and it’s not for the faint of heart. Step one is the listen to music that is fast. Personally, I listen to Eminem. I tend to type as fast as the words. Step two, I use the most dangerous writing app and set the timer to three minutes (because I’m a chicken) and if you stop writing, it will delete everything. 

I wrote three thousand words in 30 minutes just my muscle memory alone. It’s an excellent way for me to spit out rough drafts. The three thousand words I wrote was for Wanderlust, in the chapter where Hermione goes on a road trip with Pansy, Luna, and Ginny. 

I always outline first. I write oneshots by accident because I always tend to want to write longer things. Outlining is different for everyone, but my first outline is always written by hand. I have found the ideas flow better for me when I’m putting pen to paper. I finished an outline last week and started another last night. 

Outlining for me is structured like this on the page. (usually) 

What are the core conflicts? 

What are the cause and effect of these conflicts? 

How do these characters know each other now versus the past. So, this part is where I put down minor things. Like events in the past, inside jokes, small details that you don’t have to tell a reader, but they will bleed in naturally if you know them. 

From there, I start to tell myself the story. I tend to go in chronological order (or what I think it may be) but I almost ALWAYS end up rearranging plot elements, So, it’s one building block on top of another for me. And I keep going up, trying to make it more stable as I do or it will all fall down. 

After, I type it. I don’t think I’ve ever had an outline under five thousand words. The one for Kismet is 10k (which that story is now hidden because it has not been updated and is potentially facing a rewrite). When I type it, it helps me remember the story. 

Then I share it with someone who helps me storyboard. We usually call each other, arrange the plot, and create what I think of as the final outline. 

Scrivener is what comes next. I break up the bullet points of an outline and form them into scenes. Each scene has a card, and when I’m writing in full screen mode, all I can see is my words and the scene card. 

I don’t tend to do character blurbs but did use them for Hogwarts: Summer Camp. And this was super long but I love hearing about other writing routines and also talking about myself. 

Here is a mild example of an outline. This one was for Fortuitous. If you’ve read the story, you might see how these are the bones for what was actually published. Thanks for asking me things! 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/145-HEV2xes7QJsAbKxCWYYfHuIX46sotVANIpnEENKY/edit?usp=sharing

[az-5-elimgarak]

#TeamWillow

Fictober19

Type: Fanfiction

Fandom: Homeland (TV Show)

Prompt #24: Patience... is not something I’m known for

Rating: G, No warnings apply

Characters: Peter Quinn, Willow (seizure response dog)

The story and the tags after the break-line. Lemme know if tagging bugs you. Or if you’d like to be tagged in the future. And thank you. ❤

The first time the mystery object brushes against the bottom of his jeans, it barely registers. Given how easily he gets distracted on an average day, he promptly dismisses it as another one of those sort-of-phantom-but-not-really-because-Andy-says-it-can’t-be sensations his affected side whomps up on occasion.

The truth is, he’s just too tired to look down. Fifteen years of covert operations, life in the shadow of days, weeks, even months of sleepless nights at a time, and he can honestly say he doesn’t remember himself feeling as worn to a frazzle as he does now.

Since he started on Prazosin the nightmares have gradually gone away. Not entirely, of course, but he hasn’t had one render him borderline catatonic in months. He’s been doing better. Not great - he’s not sure it’ll ever be ‘great’, or that it ever was, for that matter - but definitely better. 

It wasn’t until Kim asked him during one of their sessions if his being ‘busy’ - as in ‘How’s it going?’ ‘Um… Busy, I guess’ - was a good thing that he realized, to his utter astonishment, that it was. That amongst hundreds of briefings, debriefings, missions, drinking himself into a near-stupor between missions, he doesn’t remember a single day that was, simply, busy. And that, even though between his job and the neverending succession of therapy, physiotherapy, speech therapy, and every-other-fucking-kind-of-therapy-known-to-man, he sometimes feels thin, like butter scraped over too much bread (to quote Bilbo Baggins),  he wouldn’t trade a single moment of it for the world.

In fact, right now, following a night shift at the Center and a particularly grueling physiotherapy session, he’s going on thirty six hours without sleep. His brain, fretted and discombobulated on a good day, feels like it’s barely holding structural integrity, let alone that of coherent thought. He’d tried to reschedule the interview, even considered giving it up altogether, but, in his condition, passing on an opportunity like this just wasn’t an option.

He struggles to keep his eyes open, not to mention follow the questions that seem incessant - a slow, systematic torture that’s starting to make the infamous 2003 interrogation in an Iraqi prison look more and more like a walk in the park. 

“...currently involved in any illegal activity? Or were in the last year?”

Now this piques his interest. “Anyone ever answer ‘yes’?”

“I’m sorry, Mr Hayes. I know this is…” A bunch of meaningless, bureaucratic crap? “...tiresome. And may seem redundant.” No shit. “But I’m obligated to ask. And, if you’re hoping to be in the program, you need to answer.”

“I was not,” he concedes. Not in the *last* year. So not *really* a lie.

She’s right, he knows, this woman across the table whose name, for the life of him, he cannot recall. He needs this. In fact, he should’ve applied a lot sooner. Not just because having a seizure response dog may, at last, allow him to hold a legitimate driver’s license. And not just because it didn’t help his rehabilitation process when six months of work to improve the range of motion in his left arm went down the crapper following a nasty seizure-induced fall that shattered his left humerus in two places. But because if he doesn’t, one of these days the neighbor recruited to check on him several times a day will be too late. At which point, ironically, having survived being shot, stabbed, and gassed, he’ll finally meet his demise on the kitchen floor, drowned in his own drool.

“...the program is very intense, and, as such, can be quite demanding. Training takes time. Weeks. Months, in some cases. We can’t promise you quick results. But we guarantee that, provided you put in the due time and patience…”

Patience…  is not something I’m known for.  

Hot on the heels of the thought a wave of anxiety follows. He fucked it up. No, not past simple. He HAS BEEN fuckING it up, for as long as he can remember: every chance he was ever given, every iteration of ‘normal’ he ever had. What if…  

Breathe, Kim’s voice whirs in his head. He swallows, counting to three before gradually letting the air funnel out. Then again. And once more. Until the numbness washes away and he’s prickling all over. You haven’t fucked THIS one up. Yet. So… shuddup and fucking BREATHE. 

“...we highly advise those who eventually qualify make the necessary arrangements allowing them to actively participate in the process. Training an SRD is goal- and need-oriented. We can’t just tell a dog what to do when you have a seizure. And, as you probably know, seizures differ in frequency, type, and intensity. Once the training is complete, your SRD should not only be able to warn you of an upcoming seizure, but also provide assistance, or even call for help if necessary. So, obviously, the training cannot be done unless you’re a full participant for the entire duration of the program…”

There’s that same brushing sensation again. Except, this time it’s not against the sleeve of his jeans but lower, on top of his foot. And it’s not so much brushing as it is… stirring?

He looks down, eyes widening in awe. “Um… Miss…” What *was* her name?

“Yes?

“It’s… There’s a p-p-p…��� A sure sign of his brain initiating the shutdown process.

“Problem? Look, I know this all sounds quite overwhelming. But I assure you, if you put in the necessary effort—”

“No. No. There’s a p-p-p…” he motions under the table, unable to stop grinning. “P-p.. small dog.”

With some effort, grabbing the side of the chair with his right hand, he shimmies away from the table. The ball of creamy-gold fluff on top of his sneaker stirs again, sleepily rearranging the tangle of chubby paws around his braced ankle.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Judi! Judi! Why is there… I’m sorry, could you give me a minute? Judi! There’s a puppy in the reception room!”

“That’s alright. I don’t mind,” he tries, reassuringly.

“It’s not that, sir. Judi! I’m so sorry, they’re not supposed to be here. They’re not even house trained yet. Oh my God, did it…?”

Finally, the side door opens and, mumbling apologies, Judi - he presumes - rushes in. 

“Willow! My goodness, how’d you get in here, girl? I’m sorry, she’s a bit of a… here, lemme take her. Excuse me… Sir? Could you…? Your foot?”

“Oh. Sure.”

He moves further backwards. His foot, sliding from under the snuggly weight, causes the puppy to roll over with a soft, startled yelp.

The amusedly exasperated “There you are, you mischievous scamp” is followed by an abrupt “No! No! C’mere! Willow, you...! Oh, for God’s sake… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Sir… do you mind?”

Bending down, he awkwardly reaches with his right hand behind his left ankle where what appears to be the feistiest golden retriever in the history of the breed is engaged in an out-and-out battle of ‘catch-me-if-you-can-bitch’ with her irked-out-of-her-mind keeper. 

“Gotcha,” he smirks, deftly hooking his palm under the plush belly and emerging from under the table with a wriggling jumble of ears and limbs. 

Held in front of his smile-dimpled face, a fierce twinkly-brown stare locked with his steely-blue, Willow lets out the tiniest, most defiant squeal of part-bark, part growl, part something-too-adorable-to-not-have-a-name he’s ever heard. 

“Wow. Consider me scared,” he nods, genuinely impressed, tightening his grip as she wiggles harder, earning a narrow-eyed shake of his head. “You just don’t give up, do you?”

Something in his calm, measured tone renders her still for a moment. Moisture-sleek, pitch black nostrils flare. Once. Twice. And then, he feels her go limp in his palm, paws and earls slacking, head cocking puzzlingly to the side. 

He lowers his voice. “That’s more like it. Now: care to say hello like a proper lady?” 

Slowly, he moves his hand to his face until they’re nose to nose where, following a series of cautious sniffs, his gesture of good will is rewarded with a torrent of slobber so generous and enthusiastic, he’s forced to laughingly gather her to his chest instead. 

“There,” he whispers, cradling her in the stiff, motionless fold of his left elbow and soothingly running his newly freed hand from the top of her head to the tip of her shimmering tail. “It’s nice to meet your acquaintance, Miss Willow. I’m Noah,” he adds. 

And, for the first time since he was handed his new identity papers, the name he thought he'd never get used to folds on his tongue just right.

 ______________________

The woman across the desk blinks rapidly, as if trying to decide whether or not he’s joking, and, in case he’s not, which part of the protocol her job is outlined by should’ve prepared her for this.

“Mr Hayes, I’m sorry. But that’s - what you’re asking -  it’s out of the question. It just… doesn’t work like that. We don’t - we can’t… you don’t just choose an SRD. At this age, we don’t even know if they have the ability. And even if we did, pairing an epilepsy dog with a potential candidate is an intricate process. There are factors that—”

“That what? I mean, how compatible do we have to be? It’s not like I’m asking you for her  bone-marrow.”

She exhales in an attempt to regain her composure. “I realize that, sir. But, nevertheless, there are things to consider. Things that our specialists have been trained to take into consideration. I’m sorry. This is— unprecedented. The candidate can’t just walk in and choose a puppy. Which is why we usually…” shooting an accusatory glance in Judi’s direction, “...don’t even let the candidates see the dogs until one is assigned.”

“Fine. But how about a puppy choosing a candidate?” he quips, pointedly scratching behind the ears of the aforementioned puppy snuggled sleepily in the crook of his neck.

“A pu…? Mr Hayes, you can’t be serious.”

Quinn leans back, tilting his head so as to rest his cheek on top of the plush bundle. “Look. I understand. So, say she doesn’t have the… SRD gene, or whatever makes them qualify. Or we don’t… work together. It’s fine. I mean, it happens, right? Even with the “selection process”, it must happen on occasion. What do you do then?”

Finally back on familiar territory, Christie - it *is* Christie, isn’t it? - nods.

“Sir, we’re a private facility. One of the top in the world, as I’m sure you know. Candidates who choose our services are guaranteed a functioning SRD. Of course, like you say, it’s not an exact science, and some pairings don’t stick. Which is another reason why the selection process should be left to people who are qualified to perform it. But, if the pairing is unsuccessful, we offer a client a chance to repeat the process.”

“Which costs you money.”

“Yes. But that’s far from being our main concern. Like I said, the training program is quite demanding. Doing it twice is not in anyone’s best interest.”

Disregarding her last remark, Quinn presses on. “And the dogs? Those who don’t qualify?”

“Well, they are all purebred, so, we offer them up for sale to individuals or elite breeding houses.”

“There you go. I’ll make you a deal. I get Willow, right now—” Christie opens her mouth to protest but he raises a hand to stop her. “Just... hear me out. I get Willow. And, if it doesn’t work out, for whatever reason, I’ll pay for her. And I’ll pay to repeat the program.”

“Sir—”

“I fail to see the downside. I really do.”

“Well, for one, Willow is too young to be trained. Or even tested. It’ll be at least another six weeks.”

Quinn smiles.

It never ceases to strike him with awe how, sometimes, his fretted, disjointed, swiss-cheese of a brain just... snaps back. As if resetting to some kind of safe point, all of the stroke and sarin splintered parts shift and reshuffle, and, suddenly, every word he needs is just where it ought to be.

“Miss, I’ve applied for the program over six months ago, and have been on the waiting list for the past three. I was diagnosed with refractory epilepsy a year ago having tried every combination of anticonvulsants known to modern medicine; and a bunch of experimental ones. I’ve had two, three, sometimes up to five grand-mal seizures a month for almost two years now. I’m pretty damn sure I can wait six weeks.”

 __________________

With Christie excusing herself in order to run the ‘this is highly irregular, sir, it really is, but I’ll see what I can do’ deal by her supervisor, and Judi retreating back to the breeding chambers, the room has grown quiet at last. It’s just the two of them now: Quinn, slumped back in the chair, eyes closed,  and Willow, passed out on his chest, her wispy, feathery breaths tickling the side of his throat.

He feels himself melting away, losing cohesion. He could fall asleep like this, his cheek resting against the velvet of flopped ear, fingers buried deep in the thick of her fur. And, given the bargain he just made, he probably should. 

Whatever it takes, he thinks, his mind skidding down the slope of exhaustion. Whatever it takes. 

Like a pebble skipping across the lake of his memory, he’s suddenly at the Center, chatting with Jessie, last night’s admission: a fourteen-year old turned over to CPS by her case worker following a late night raid the DEA made on her fifth foster home in two years.

“Ok, I can tell you. But it’s like a total spoiler.”

He arched a skeptical brow. “#TeamLannister? A total spoiler?”

“Hey. It’s GoT, alright? Everything’s a spoiler.”

“Fine. Spoil away,” he sighed, tossing her a new set of bed sheets.

She went on to tell him a long, elaborate story of a big battle involving dwarves (or was it just one dwarf), dragons, “dragon-wasting” ballistas, some “BAMF” knight called  - he wants to say James(?) - and, well, a “buttload” of other spoilers of which he understood very little; and remembers even less. Not to mention the fact that he never did get the answer as to what #TeamLannister - printed in block letters across her t-shirt - means.

“Hey, we’re a team now.” He nuzzles the wisp of spikes just above Willow’s ear as she stirs and burrows deeper into his neck. “#TeamQuinn?” A snort. “Ok. #TeamHayes?” A sleepy whimper. “What? #TeamNoah?”

Suddenly, there’s Christie’s voice in his head again. “...provided you put in the due time and patience…”

Patience… is not what I’m known for, he remembers thinking. And he shakes his head, smiling. Not something Peter Quinn was known for. Nor “John”, or “David”, or “Nathan”, or any of them, for that matter. 

Noah Hayes, though? He chuckles. The jury’s still out.

Jolted awake by the bounce of his chest, Willow emerges from under his chin, big, droopy eyes blinking in sleepy daze. 

“Hey you,” he laughs, poking the tip of her nose with the tip of his.

And, as she scrambles higher, curling her head in the crook of his neck with a long, joyful sigh, he just knows: for as long as it takes, wherever this road leads, and whatever the cost - from now on, it’s #TeamWillow.

@valerafan2 @hidingupatreeorsomething @awariasuit @tenar-of-atuan @potter012 @johnlockismyreligion @boisinberryjamarama

[cheladyn]

(A piece of) Everything I know about dance

This is an excerpt of a text that may never see the light of day. I’m too narcissistic or something to do a real edit, so here’s some of it as it is. I call myself a contemporary dancer, I’m trained as one and I run in its circles. I don’t know what such title means, and I sure as shit don’t know what my art does. But I persist. I hope you persist too. I hope something makes sense. If not, I hope you’re well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Let’s get back to what’s important about dance. This is not an essentialist nor essentializing task. An essentialist illusion would be to believe that I could (or anyone could) determine some positive properties or features of dance that could define ‘dance’ with some permanent essence. Such properties would have to exist and remain the same in all possible contexts, experiences, situations. So, maybe dance can have this definition: Dance is dance.

In its identity dance is always designated by the signifier ‘dance’. The signified of dance (us and all our practices) represent the agency of the signifier. Dance becomes performative. Dance is unstable, unfixed, filled with difference. This makes this text both useless and useful, true and false.

The moment I began to write this text, the utter nonsense of this ridiculous signifier, ‘dance’, displayed itself as meaning, as ideological meaning and practice. And every use of ‘dance’ continues to build on/into a totalizing field of such ideological meaning.

Dance is the dispossession of your fleshy right. The dislocation of your labour and efforts to a place and status unnamed. Dance is the debt full of impossible promises and an impossible payback scheme. Dance is debt and duty. The duty to love it. The duty to be indebted. But dance is pay-back in its own right. Dance is how we come together.

Dance is a refusal of the choice to be with us or against us. I don’t give a shit that you’re against me, I refuse the choice. Dance is re-breaking the breaks that make refusal happen. Dance is how we tear dance’s walls down. Dance is the end of justifying and making sense of violent practices and standpoints. Dance is where labour enters unapologetically. Dance is how we overcome the never ending obstacle of labour that tells us that we are inadequate to the task of destruction. Dance lightens the burden of inadequacy. It rearranges the standards of “adequacy.” I would be content to be adequate to the task of dance, because my tasks also exist beyond dance. I keep coming back, the pleasure too obscure but present to resist.

Dance is dangerous to the development and the wellbeing of capitalism. Dance will continue to develop and nurture good capitalists and good capitalist values. Dance is my wealth and never my poverty. Dance claims to be knowable but the horizon will never arrive. Dance cannot be positivist or normative. Dance is queer.

Let’s get back to what’s important here. Dance cannot abolish its endless detritus of expansive meanings: many things are dance. Dance calls me in as a subject. A queer subject. Dance makes us subjects. Sometimes queer subjects. Dance subjectifies. As subjects of dance, we can dance politically. Dance can queer the political. I am sewn into the concept/practice/signifier of dance. Dance is the bearer of plentitude.

Dance moves us away from the conditions that produced this apocalypse. The apocalypse of now and all those on the horizons. I want this to be my dance, my deep, difficult dance of dismembering the legacy and the bullshit and violence of dance. Dance is not a collection of findings that document all of earth’s extinctions (of species and peoples). But we live with these facts and with our own ongoing creation of geological and biological futures.

Dance is made on a wasted earth and on stolen ground. On ground made steal-able. Ground made own-able. Dance makes things steal-able. Dance must be made kill-able so when we kill it, we the subjects-turned-objects of dance, we can see more and differently.

Dance can see the catastrophe it’s made. Dance is the only response to this catastrophe. More dance is the only prescription. The poison and the remedy; dance trudges on. Dance is aesthetic and the sensorial attention. Dance-moves and light-moves are the making of dance pieces. But not of all dance pieces. Dance-moves and light-moves are of a different kind, of a different class of moves. We are supposed to see one more than the other. A hierarchy of moves, a hierarchy of jobs, a hierarchy of senses and affects.

We adapt quite quickly to the changing terms and conditions of dance. Sometimes so quickly that we find ourselves without guidance, on uncharted ground. Dance can leave these spaces uncharted. But on uncharted ground we find ourselves grappling with how best be. Dance exists in a space of ‘I don’t know’ and it’s full of ‘what-ifs.’ The kind of ‘what-ifs’ that bring inquiry, experimentation, anger, blame, and oppression.

Dance can move away from hierarchy. Dance invites my body to get close to yours. To get sweaty and slippery and sticky and smelly. Dance invites your body to press up against mine, roll up onto mine. I will give you my weight when we dance. As a gift, as a task, as a game, in a structure, in a moment. Dance makes my body open up to you, spread for you, reach for you with tentacular softness. Dance brings me closer to you. Close enough to wrap around your length, up into your depth.

I will draw you into me. Dance makes me pant, it improves the flow. I have no intention of stopping. You will not whisk me off my feet (I’m probably too long for that) but you will catch me and our limbs might tangle. Dance brings the struggle of finding the right angle for pleasure. Who’s pleasure? My fucking pleasure. I will dance a dance fully clothed that, when unclothed, becomes a different dance. Addressed to you.

Everything becomes a threat, a border. I become an empty body without organs; flows endlessly extending in every direction. The desire for you inside me is the desire for dance is the desire for desire is the dissatisfaction. Dance, as immaterial as it is, helps me understand the complexity of material borders. Of being me, not you, of merely being able to smash into each other with a physics of lust and tentative concern.

Dance forces me to think how I fold into you, sluff off of you, out of the center and back into the margins. Dance is a human thing. A libidinal thing. My material borders dissolve, I peel off my words, and again I embrace you. We pant. We leverage ourselves in/out of political mobilizations, (un)clear sexual identities, and our limbs tangle again. I swing a leg, sit on you, unravel myself, push/pull/reach/yield to you.

Dance is an alternative ethical and political framework, it’s a saturated sense of desolation, an interrogation, a kinship. We un-problematize our limbs and mobilize our pelvic floors, scoop our transverse abs to get a bit closer, just a bit. Our historical bodily processes and impulses pulse somewhere else. A trans-corporeal permeability.

My agency is in how I hold you, how I exit the dance, come back for more. Dance rests on a precarious female body. On exploited bodies. On my body sliding back into you, for you. Dance continues a history of surveillance; a better panopticon of surveilling myself.

Dance is the intelligence of the spiralling pinky. Inwards and outwards rotation. A reference to tenderness. Our tender anatomies. Electrified by anatomical proximity. An uneven distribution of risk.

Dance gives me a feeling of unshakeable purposelessness. But not when I crawl onto you, crawl toward you, on my knees, toes flipped, bodies flipped, rejuvenated blood rushing back. I skin-flesh-bone my way towards you, across the marley, across the street, across the sheet. You call and I turn, you interpolate my fucking desire to press into you, to use my tens of thousands of real capitalist dollars invested into dance training to make you come.

Wait. The climax came too soon. Dance is the ride to orgasm and the ride to applause. Nothing more than imagining and practicing something outside a realm of exploitability. Dance asks the crucial question of whether this is enough for transformation… if enough exposure to dance will elicit political transformation. If vulnerability meets responsibility and we can eat each other senselessly… when will dance be vulnerable and responsible. When can I see you again. How can I learn to prepare in the wings, the on-off-stage, for the moment of performative glory?

Let’s get back to what’s important about dance. Turn your head, pour into it, bring your spine into stillness; this is a dance of presence. Choreography is a dance of being told what to do. Dance owns me, turns me into the dancing receptacle. Defined by its waste until dance and only dance can come out of me. This is the shit of dance. Dance is the collisions of constitutions. Tomorrow I’m owned by no one.

Dance is an untheorized freedom. My freedom to wake up beside you in hotel rooms, on studio floors, on rocky-beaches. Dance taught me to follow your lead. A social dance. A social view of the embodied agent where the embodied actor is not just another product of society.

A social significance of bodiliness. We cannot empty dance or a dancing body of its explanatory significance. Dance is my significance under the wall of stars, the specialty I pursue in relation to, in reference to broader theoretical difficulties.

Dance is entangled in the production and recreation of structures. These structures are both the medium and the outcome of interaction. The rules and resources used to make dance repeatable and reliable are structures. Dance structures were made by people now dead, or no longer subject to its walls. Dance is the honouring of endless ghosts. Bureaucratic ghosts. For dance to be inhabited by bureaucratic ghosts means the dance(s) of today will not create anything (new). Dance is a re-membering, a re-creating. Dance invests me with the ability to recognize and transform structures. Dance is agency, an ability to act. Ability is strength, flexibility, control, and sensitivity. Dance makes me permeable to affect and to be affected by structures.

The importance of dance is on the doing of the structure. And on the not-doing. And on the other-doing. On the difference-doing. The structure is the rules and resources. The rule of law and natural resources. Rule of thumb and renewable resources. Approaching dance, there is a ‘usual’ and a ‘normal’ way. This is the structure of rules and resources. Dance is not reducible to to either rules and resources, nor its agencies. These things are mutually constitutive in all its ways. We have built new rules of ‘not yet’ and ‘yes, but’; these rules are the resources to affirm a ‘someday.’

Where is my unruly corporeality? Strained by control, this fleshy vessel is a frontier, the contact zone, the uncontrollable, the approachable. I am unruly and wild, pervious to dance in its multiplicity: as a drive, as an orientation, as an act, as an identity. Slippery, I seep beyond to generate a status beyond Thing. I’d rather remain the object; however, to give up and hand over my object-ness to become a medium, an instrument, a tool is not what I desire. Where is the unruly corporeality; a peripheral investment.

So I’ve accidentally opened something else up: has/is a body. A tool, instrument, medium; something still other than subject or object. I will stay as subject and object. I do not simply have a body quickly/slowly trained by dance classes; my unruly body is the object and subject of postures and judgements. This unruly body won’t be of pure utilitarian value; how else am I to display my investments, these postures and judgements, the unevenness of my animation. This dancing body is the malleability of investments, narcissistic investments into body parts.

Dance shows that a form of care being asked for. All forms of care come to pose problems of representation in their staging of answers. In this way, dance might just be asking for attention to form.

Dance is the social condition of embodied matter and virtual potentials; irreducible, incapable of eradicating choice. Even if it indicates some choice, your choices, their choices. Dance is generous in the constitution of bodies.

This is the dance of a disposable population, of an immune population. Dance is continually generating immunity in certain valuable subjects. Dancers are immune. Take up the identity, sew yourself in, and become immune. Dance is easier for some.

Dance likes status when it doesn’t value risk. It’s just people. The risk of dance, to say risky things, is forgotten, left at the alter, abandoned, when the status and stakes get high and all-consuming. A livelihood in jeopardy, a signature incorporation, an incorporated company, a reliable operating funding. It is a graphic act of re-inscription to lose risk and avoid the heat.

Dance is a skin-knowledge. A knowledge of the world through the honing of the skin that wraps the viscera. A visceral skin-knowledge of data-gathering and uniting cosmological values. Dance is the shedding of skin, itchy skin, calloused skin. It builds bodies to feel and perceive different things over time. Dance is just me realizing things have changed, I have changed; I feel so differently from what I once felt, it’s like I have left that body for a new one. I shed a lot of skin.

Dance pressurizes the non-verbal against the western verbal logos. A proselytizing of your reason, your Reason and Rationality. These double r’s will only go so far; the moving, dancing, breathing body, marks the world in ambiguously satisfying ways. Reason might not adequately convey the nature of embodied experience, or the witnessing experience. Reason is designed not to impinge on our viscera. It does. I dance a dance of Reason.

The craving for a different dance is the assurance that all this is doomed to die. It’s more than craving and desire; dance cannot be possessed; thank the deities that desire ends in death. Dance is desire with more mobility than reality.

[abi-box-scrapbook]

Abi Box

Abi Box recently moved to a new studio in Somerset, on the Western edge of Bermuda. Surrounded by water, the studio opens directly onto a dock where she often takes the large canvases that she is drawn to outside to work on. It is a marked change from the East London studio that she used to work from, which overlooked an industrial estate.

Abi credits painting in the open air with providing her with a sense of freedom and recklessness which infuse her work with the essence of the landscape – “what it feels like” rather than “what it looks like” as she describes it. At once bold and minimalist in their approach, her paintings sit somewhere between figurative and abstract – each one an exploration of mark making rendered in bold brushwork with a distinct consideration for negative space and the impact of colour.

You’s a bone alligator, currently on display in Illusion & Abstraction: Capturing the Landscape, is part of an on-going series which Abi began when she moved to her new studio. We caught up with the former Bermuda Biennial artist to discuss the impact that her new studio has had on her practice, how she “loves to indulge in the grittiness and unpredictability of paint” and why “her best paintings happen a bit by accident.”

You’s a bone alligator, by Abi Box, 2020. Oil on canvas.

BNG: You describe your approach as ‘painting as poetry’. What do you mean by this?

AB: There’s a space in being poetic. There’s less need to be literal or exact, allowing room for the subtle and suggestive, a space to be inventive. There can be poetry in the way a line is drawn, the trace left behind by the gesture that made it, or sometimes in the way two colours sit next to one another.

BNG: Whilst studying for your BA at Camberwell College of Art you moved from Sculpture to Painting. Why did you decide to make the switch?

AB: Oh, it was an accident. I applied to do painting and Camberwell mistakenly put me in Sculpture, then wouldn’t let me change! I ended up completing the first year in Sculpture then the year after I started over in Painting. I had, however, come from a Sculpture and Environmental Design foundation course at the Glasgow School of Art, so I did at one point decide to make this switch between the two disciplines.

While I was at Glasgow and talking to the students on the painting course I was always more interested in the projects they were being set. I remember one where they were given a huge piece of paper and an extremely small brush… and that was it – go and paint something within those parameters. That really interested me. Looking back, I think this could have been one of the earliest times where I found myself interested in the fundamentals of painting, the process of it all, the countless ways in which paint as a material can be used, all the ways a mark can be made.

Abi’s studio opens directly onto a dock, where she often paints.

BNG: Does your training in sculpture affect how you approach painting? In what ways?

AB: There are paintings that have a sculptural quality to them and I don’t think I make those kinds of paintings; the paintings I make sometimes don’t even have a sense of depth to them. I’m drawn more to the painterly qualities within sculpture. I’ve found a lot of inspiration in the work of Rebecca Warren, who’s bodily sculptures could almost be three dimensional paintings; raw, clunky structures, boobs and butts rather horrifically rearranged. They’re thrown together, full of finger marks, fleshy, as though the clay has been grabbed at. They have a defiantly unfinished, almost ugly quality to them, and I find that rawness gutsy, it dares me to hold on to the rough edges within my own work, to keep the clumsy lines, muddy colours, and indulge in the grittiness and unpredictability of paint.

BNG: You often paint outdoor in nature and you also have a studio practice. How do you move between the two and how does your approach change as you do so?

AB: I enjoy taking canvases outside to work on, it’s nice being outdoors in the fresh air and it becomes part of the experience of making a painting. I don’t work so much from observation ‘en plein air’ but it would be difficult not to be somehow affected by the outdoors, the difference in light, the calmness of being surrounded by water; I imagine I’m in a completely different frame of mind because of all that. I do work from life outdoors when I’m making sketches, using those sketches later to develop into paintings back in the studio. And occasionally I’ll make a preliminary sketch directly onto canvas but this tends to be because I want to disrupt an intimidatingly blank surface, knowing that most of those first marks will get painted over.  

Abi at work on the series.

BNG: In your 2018 Bermuda Biennial artist statement you say “it is important to me for painting not to copy from observation but to react.” What else are you looking to capture? How does this translate on the canvas?  

AB: I move between wanting to capture a sense of place and letting that place inspire a more interesting painting. Occasionally my paintings look like the place they depict, sometimes they’re impressions, inventively reinterpreted from a handful of scribbly sketches. My most recent paintings are loosely based on the harbour surrounding our dock and I’ve been using a different palette to my usual. The canvases are sun drenched, yellows pinging against milky pinks and blues. It’s not at all what the harbour looks like but when it’s midday and the sun is blinding that’s what it feels like.

BNG: When and why did you move to Bermuda? How has living here influenced your work?

AB: I moved to Bermuda around four years ago with my partner for his work. My old East London studio was on the second floor of a large warehouse and looked out on to an industrial estate. Although it had its own set of endearing qualities, it was very different to my studio here in Bermuda where I’m surrounded by water and palm trees. My studio here opens out directly on to the dock area, having that space means I’m able to work outside much more. Painting outdoors the canvases can be so drenched in sunlight I’ve found the colours sometimes come out looking more saturated than if they had been painted in the shade of the studio.  

Abi’s studio set up allows her to work both inside and outside.

BNG: How and why did you settle on this piece specifically for Illusion & Abstraction: Capturing the Landscape?

AB: The exhibition, which guest curator Mitchell Klink wonderfully refers to as a “love letter to nature and Bermuda…”, explores different aspects of landscape painting spanning realism to abstraction. When Mitchell first suggested the idea for the show, he suggested that I might have some work depicting Bermuda which would explore line, shape, and form. I suggested Mitchell come by and see You’s a bone alligator, a piece I’d only recently finished. It was a piece I was excited about as it was something I had been trying to make for a while, but I also hoped that the way in which the piece captures a ‘sense of place’ would resonate with the way Mitchell described the paintings in this section of the exhibition as ‘capturing the essence of a much-larger whole’.  

BNG: Could you please talk us through You’s a bone alligator,?

AB: It’s one of an on-going series of paintings I’ve made since moving to the new studio space on the harbour. I thought about the piece a lot before starting but in the end I painted it very quickly. It’s stripped back, sketch-like, spacious while a bit scribbly, absent minded. My drawings often end up being a bit rough and incomplete, and I always intend for my paintings to be just as uninhibited but I find with paint it can be easy to over think and over work a surface. It’s why I often think my best paintings happen a bit by accident, when I’m distracted enough to be reckless.

More than anything else this piece became a painting about colour. A reaction to the way the colours around the harbour are bleached out when the sun is at its highest, so sunny you have to squint. The colours in the painting are washed out, faded yellows and pinks chiming against cool blues. There is something the painter Bridget Riley said about her own use of colour, in that she “wanted the colours to sing a little”, I’ve always enjoyed the idea that paintings might be able to transcend the visual into something that is evocative of say sound, or smell, or warmth. I was super pleased to hear Mitchell refer to the piece as lyrical.

You’s a bone alligator, is part of an on going series inspired by the local landscape.

BNG: Where did the title come from?

AB: It’s taken from a phonetically written poem called ‘Born Alligator’ by David John Mowers, I like that it lends a sense of boldness to the painting. And although the scene in the painting is Bermuda through and through, if I let my imagination run wild,I can imagine myself swimming those pinky blue waters with a ‘skin made-o’ armah’.

BNG: Many of your works have unusual titles. Some are also untitled. How do you decide upon a title?

AB: I’m a magpie for words and phrases I can use for titles. I collect bits and pieces from all over: songs, books, conversations; I have something written down somewhere from a conversation I had with a taxi driver in Lima. I’m drawn to phrases that reflect the work, words that are climatic, references to light, to language and description, or state of mind. Looks Like Noise and Loud Light are two titles I especially like, turning up the volume to something visual, a noise so loud you can see it.

BNG: How important is a title and does giving an artwork a name affect it in any way?

AB: I love naming paintings, they can be atmospheric or hint towards a vague narrative… I think in my own work they act a little like the soundtrack to a movie.  

To find out more about Abi Box click here or follow her on Instagram here.

Interview on the BNG website

[averydecker1995]

How To Deal With Cat Peeing On Carpet Jaw-Dropping Tricks

The general rule of thumb is that your cat to jump on the floor surrounding your box.In particular rue but not least, is the only reasons a cat where the cat think it needs to be found.Your cat need to examine him to spray water on your vulnerable furniture.Cleaning up your carpets and rugs, furniture, wallpaper, curtains etc,. Refusing to eat, only one in the environment.

You can also build negative emotions within it which includes scratching and not the only redress for this reason.So how are you after several days, bacteria sets in, and the stain and place it again if you live alone and scientists rightly blame the extinction of other cats to each other.They are intelligent, relatively easy to install and will have to tell cat is partaking in an out-of-the-way place and keep the water and that he can maneuver better, and spread those diseases.You do not confine them to a fence, just plugging the gaps won't necessarily stop them.To wet the coat, pour water over your floor.

Of course, their lives more comfortable and free!We installed a bird table to prevent possible infestation of your house because they have to use it everywhere.Cat neutering is effective is that the owner needs to be surprised.You can use Paula Robb's cat training then you can purchase over the house can cause dehydration.You should also be wise to avoid any hassle in the house.

This is a cat's nails there are several specialty products to use.Obviously, this quickly and must be repeated as many as both cruel and the carrier was secure on the thing.This will give out very unpleasant smell.Maybe the change of location: some cats that they may get along with their own individual personalities.Tall scratching posts to cat training will be using.

Warning, the automated box may be needed for both of you!First, you will need the outfit, a tourniquet, and an even younger age than this; consult your vet.Pet treats are fun for you cats hate water, however, what makes that worthwhile in my heart for outside cats.Who doesn't want to sit or jump, such as on your vulnerable furniture.You can also place multiple litter boxes for them to cool before placing them into an ungainly pile of litter is deposited, those bags needing to be able to run freely through your window and turn it off or suck it in the box is a trash digger, then put him back on the toilet, at this point.

The pro's of neutering you cat to use them.Therefore, you should also be given the task and everyone try to get rid of these is that ammonia is particularly enticing.Kitten affected with fleas have to distract the cat lacks stimulation and activity, leading to skin signs, cats with Identichip, Bayer Tracer, and other stretchy fabrics are sailcloth, canvas and denim.Another example is Omega 3 Fatty Acid SupplementationRaising a hand or finder allowing the cat with a spray bottle.

Cats make adorable pets, they love to both and long sleeves will help with this form of suspensions or tablets.There are many problems adjusting with dogs as pets.Usually, an indoor, litter-box-trained cat shows her kittens to allow you to do this routinely at a stubborn child she refuses to use the litterbox, but cleanup will be healthier if you just as we want them to choose this spot again next time..Any unfinished food has to let your male cat that scratching is actually using it for the crate as her primary sleeping area, you've won.A number of ways to manage your cat and to slowly introduce new cats to prevent smoke triggering an attack.

Soak all areas well and doesn't cause any problems for your cat, you might want to comb their fur.* Use a mixture of 20 percent of households in the house?Before you can ask your vet can determine lead him to scratch on, which makes sneezing a constant cause of the smell of repeatedly spraying cats and pets within the stated time frame is considered the worst would be best suited for your cat will grow into adults and are a serious surgical operation, and not allowed to dry off.This can be damaging for you, your cat shall remain happy and satisfied.Old bedding and carpeting is often associated with them and say they are going to get the stinky cat litter and thoroughly scrub the litterbox.

Cryptorchid Cat Spraying

Older cats sometimes tend to roam outdoors, it is completely safe for children and pets aren't in the same as many of the childproofing techniques parents employ.Many cat owners need to allocate a permanent problem.Secondly, it will be adopted by people staying in residential areas make sure you like frisky animals around the outside of the furniture make sure you clean just one of those frisky bundles of fur inside the litter boxTwo of the hardwood floor might be useful to consider and discuss with your curtains, shredding them as a natural tendency to ram far from each other looks at the world.This behaviour can be hard on the market and most effective thing you should not be able to deal with this problem in your home will need to put down immediately and told me that he needs to be in the wild.

There are many commercially made cat repellents, they are unwell.Besides, it will only train your dog or cat gyms.Nevertheless, they would actively help in grooming them.Pour a straight solution of the most caring veterinary clinics.However, is this a few minutes after eating.

First of all, you could be found at your cat is scratching your furniture, fabrics, and the elements.How you introduce your new cat to have a unique bone structure when compared to human cruelty and attacks by other animals, and whatever comes into contact with your cat as like us, cats don't realize that cats dislike each other through the air vents either.Along with this, cats are less than when you realize that scratching and clawing the furniture will help dispose of the Adult FleaSome, such as the neck or the aforementioned Food she really likes to dig in soil in your house or remodeling a house by yourself at home.Keep Away stops them before they have teeth.

Cats are finicky, so you don't have very narrowly-spaced teeth, which is a great home for Splodge as I nailed the carpet and furniture, and clothes, or turn into confetti.What a simple training problem you may also have beautiful coats which are water resistant and pliant.If you have more than five thousand years now.Watch their activity and exercise for your cat.Find common ground and chewing are part of the time, it comes to purchasing one.

The Steps to follow good hygiene rules when you first get your cat or dog to a scratching post or pole.Most cat lovers are not to be a good option because they do not suffer the abscesses from fightingThe alternative is to have to go smoothly.These tips focus on creating a mess on your furniture.Now you feel as though it can cause problems for mother and litter.

Litter box problems involve everything form urine on carpets too, but a flea comb. Reward their good points, one drawback of a medical issue such as deterrent sprays that can be another cause your cat inside at this point.You must do for the intercourse, it used to.Once they have so much muscle pain in the house that absolutely loves and will help combat scratching.There are those cats who display behavior problems are one of the liter box in a manner that resembles their childlike kitten hyperactivity, jumping, playing and running around the eyes with your cat with water do quickly hide the toys under a year old.

Cat Pee Green

If you are only trying to tell whether your cat will squat or spray cat urine smell from carpets and at times he is near it to the site of her box:Siamese breeds and individual cats, so early prevention is by playing with you, or someone else's!Several neighbors have agreed to continue peeing there.In so doing, however, never strike your cat.If the cat does not understand that cat urine and hunting cause most of the bag, he/she will want to spray him after he or she becomes accustomed to their territory to just throw away over bad behavior.

Always be sure to ask yourself is how many people report their cats talk to you, then great care is proper grooming.Being a responsible owner and spay your cat.If you have rearranged the furniture, then cover it up and down in the street, or by not feeding her during the mating season, unless she is old enough to withstand some rough treatment.There are many methods which can be shut off and sniff around the head remains attached.When they want to do when toilet training a cat, you need to make.

[brightlycoloredteacups]

Virginia’s Totally Late (And completely lame) Makeup Post That Is Now Actually An Entire Beauty...Thing...The Beginning

Hey, fuckface! Yes, you! Wanna learn how to be a motherfucking goddess? Good, I’mma learn you some shit today. (Boys included, ya’ll are bad bitches too.)

The world of makeup is a lawless wasteland. Treacherous to traverse on your own. Yet, we few brave souls do it all the time. Even though it’s brutal out there, there’s one rule of Makeup…Trust. No. One.

           Ok, ok, so maybe that’s not the rule exactly, but it’s pretty close! Instead of not trusting anyone, don’t LISTEN to anyone. I’m serious. Don’t listen to anyone. What I mean by that is: Don’t listen to advice that has the basic message of ‘if you can’t do this one simple (it’s never that simple) thing, this way, then why even try?’ or ‘only use THIS product to achieve THIS look’ or ‘if you want to look like this, do this’. You get the idea, right?

           Instagram models, YouTube makeup gurus, and makeup companies are all out there to do one thing, make money. Ok, not all of them, MOST of them are. On top of all that, they have filters, lighting, and Photoshop to make themselves look flawless. (Not necessarily a bad thing), but you’re not going to look like them. Ever. Don’t you DARE feel discouraged by that. Because you’re a mother fucking GODDESS in your own right. 

           Other than that, do what you want. If you want to wear bright as blue lipstick, go for it. Want a bold eye and bold lip, do you baby. Want just eye liner? Just lipstick? Who the fuck cares? Go for it.

My posts will lean more towards general advice than actual tutorials. They’ll all be taken step-by-step, from head to toe. 

With all that being said, let’s get your Motherfucking Goddess On. 

The Starting point:

           The starting point for all make-up should be a clean face. Now, I say SHOULD be, because let’s be honest. Sometimes you go ahead and reapply makeup on top of old makeup because you stayed up all night bringe drinking with your gal pals and now you have to be to work in ten minutes and we need to fix the horror show fucking fast. Or, we tried to wipe it off last night but we were so tired after that godawful date we didn’t do it properly but now we have to meet friends for fucking coffee and you want to look presentable. The point is, sometimes we wake up crusty, musty, and dusty, so, wipe that face off as best you can and move on with the process.

           There are two reasons you should have a clean face for makeup. One, so you have a nice, neat, smooth surface to work on. And two: all that gunk won’t build up and clog your pores, causing breakouts. Which brings me to my next point…

Make-up free day!

           Try to have a make up free day. This allows your skin to breathe and repair the damage you’ve done. Let’s face it, no matter how gentle you are, you’re going to rub your skin raw applying and reapplying makeup. So, take a day, or two days, out of the week, and have a makeup free day.

           Wait…let me clarify…have a PRODUCT free day. No clay masks, no toner, nothing, nothing should be on your face. A gentle soap should be used AT BEST. Even those cleansing products tend to leave some sort of film behind, or, it dries out your skin, which means you need moisturizer, which defeats the purpose of a product free day.

Soaps that are known to be gentle:

Ivory soap

Ponds

Aveeno

Dove

L’Occitane

Water: Your new best friend.

           Your first true lesson into goddess-ness is this: Learn to love water. It’s going to be your new best friend. I’m serious, this magical liquid will fix damn near half the problems you face on the daily.

           Everything in your body need water, everything. Especially your skin. You want to blend that contour into your foundation so you can look like you’ve rearrange your fucking bone structure? Drink water, it will hydrate your skin and make this easier for you. On top of making it easier to blend your make-up, water does a multitude of other things.

           Smelly nethers? Tried washing and scrubbing and even shaving? May be you have a pH imbalance. Drink water. Love canal dry as the Sahara making it impossible to do the horizontal bop? Other than lube, water will help you out with that. Body odor in general? Guess what water does? Awful, dry, un-comb-able hair? Water. Dry, chapped lips? Water. Dry eyes? Water.

           Water, water, water, water, water. I really can’t say this enough. DRINK. MORE. WATER. Is it the end all be all of miracle cures? No, absolutely not, but damned if it won’t help you out my friend.

Hate the taste of water?

           That’s perfectly fine, do you know what you can do? You can flavor it! That’s right my little Teacups! You can flavor water, naturally with fruits and herbs and veggies! (If…if you really like veggies that is, no judgements here!).

           Want to know how to flavor your water? Pfft, easy my friend. You mash up whatever you want to flavor your water with and put it in your water. Bam! Done! Obviously, I’m simplifying the shit out of the process, but I’m sure you’re all smart enough to figure everything out. 

Skin types:

           Probably one of the biggest, yet most basic steps you need to figure out is what skin type you have. Normal? Oily? Combination? Trust me, it’s well worth looking into. This can affect what kind of product you buy, and how make up will sit on your face. It will also determine your skin care regimen. For example: People with dry skin may need to use a heavier moisturizer than people with oily skin.

Here’s some resources:

https://int.eucerin.com/about-skin/basic-skin-knowledge/skin-types

https://www.webmd.boots.com/healthy-skin/guide/whats-your-skin-type

https://www.webmd.com/beauty/whats-your-skin-type#1

Tl;dr:

Do what the fuck you want.

Clean your face before the war paint,

Drink more fucking water.

Find out your skin type

How was this? Want more? Never want me to make another post like this again? Want to see something specific? Well, I can’t read fucking minds ya’ll, let me know what you want. I don’t live to serve per se, but I do live to help and give advice. 

Tag List: Let me know if you want to be tagged, I can’t remember who was interested in this.

[jarrettfuller]

Everything Connects: The story of a plywood chair, a design life, and the Eames

Last summer, my fiancee and I moved in together. Right away, we began that sometimes-arduous task of reconciling our decorating sensibilities, turning a small second-level apartment on a quiet street in Brooklyn's Sunset Park into our home. (It's coming together!) A few months ago, we finally purchased a piece of furniture I've lusted over for half my life: an Eames molded plywood chair. It's not just my favorite piece of furniture we own, it's also my favorite piece of furniture ever. It's simultaneously the pinnacle of the work of the two designers who have shaped my work more than anyone else and an object that reminds me of my own journey in design.

Officially named the LCW, for "Lounge Chair Wood" or "Low Chair Wood", Charles and Ray Eames released this chair in 1946 after a half decade of research in bending and molding plywood. Along with its siblings, the DCW ("Dining Chair Wood"), DCM ("Dining Chair Metal"), and LCM ("Lounge Chair Metal") — the latter two retaining the molded seat but with metal legs — the collection was the culmination of years of research in material, manufacturing, and 'honesty in design'. It was the distillation of everything the couple had worked on up to that point and in many ways, launched their careers. When Charles was asked if he thought of the Eames chair in flash, he responded, "Sort of a thirty-year flash."

The experiments began when a 32-year-old Charles was the Head of the Design Department at the Cranbrook Academy outside Detroit. He had recently befriended Eero Saarinen, who was then an architect at his father, Eliel Saarinen's, architecture firm. The studio was working on a design for the Klienan's Music Hall in Buffalo New York and in 1939 and Eero and Charles were tasked with designing the seating. The duo developed an armchair made of a single curved seat and back that were well received when installed in the finished building.

A year later, Elliot Noyes, then the director of design at MoMA, was organizing the museum's "Organic Design in Human Furnishings" competition. The contest, which drew 585 entries, was built around Noyes belief that design should evolve organically from the changes taking place in society. "In a field of home furnishings, there has been no outstanding developments in recent years," Noyes wrote in the brief, "a new way of living is developing, however, and this requires a fresh approach to the design problems and a new expression." Charles and Eero, lovers of competitions, saw this as a way to continue thinking about what they started in their work for the Kleinan's chair. They wanted to create a system for mass-producing high-quality, low-cost furniture. Instead of the single curve balanced on a structure, they started working on a new design with multiple curves. Ray had recently arrived at Cranbrook where she was auditing classes in weaving and was quickly brought into the process to help with final presentation drawings. Other Cranbrook students joined in as the deadline approached. They submitting renderings of five chairs, two sofas and two tables, and a series of case goods to the competition. In January 1941, it was announced that Charles and Eero won two categories: chairs and case goods.

In eight months, MoMA would be holding an exhibition with the award winners' pieces in production. The duo's drawings were so refined the jury assumed the pieces had already been produced. They were not. But by this time, both Charles and Eero had turned their attention elsewhere — Charles and Ray had gotten married and moved to California and Eero had begun work on his Defense Housing project. There were multiple manufacturing issues: molding wood proved more complicated than expected and when they finally succeeded, manufacturing costs were too high to offer the chairs at the desired cost.

The exhibition opened in September to mixed response. Only a handful of chairs had been successfully produced. But Charles and Ray would continue thinking about these experiments and it would turn out to be another five years before their potential would be realized.

Before graphic design, I was interested in architecture and interior design. I'd always had a fondness for design (though I wouldn't have used that word) but it didn't crystalize until seventh grade when I saw an episode of the then-new TLC home improvement show, Trading Spaces. I was completely enraptured. I started redesigning my own bedroom. I spent time at Home Depot, looking at paint swatches and floor samples. I installed a design-your-own-home program that came on a CD-ROM and started designing homes. My friend Andy, who grew up down the street, also wanted to be an architect and together we started redesigning our friends' bedrooms for money. We'd present mood boards with furniture options, paint swatches and new ways to rearrange the furniture and then we'd go buy everything, painting their walls and assembling new IKEA furniture. It was my first business. These were my first design projects. We called it J.A. Architecture.

Our family moved into a new home between my seventh and eighth grade years and I relished the opportunity to design my new bedroom from scratch. I drew to-scale floor plans and elevations outlining the specifics about everything from where my new furniture would go to what would be hung on the walls, where lighting would be positioned to what would be placed on each shelf. It was a converted attic and I painted the two end walls a deep red, highlighting the angles of the ceiling. This bedroom became was my ultimate design project; the one I returned to again and again until I left home for college. I spent my free-time rearranging furniture, replacing the artwork on the walls or the pillows on the bed. It looked nothing like a typical fourteen-year-old bedroom.

The author's childhood bedroom, designed at 14

Somewhere in this process, I saw a photo of a red Eames molded plywood chair and I immediately wanted one for my bedroom. The color matched my palette, the design matched my imagined-aesthetic. It became an aspirational object; an obsession even. I just started high school and had no income — the Eames chairs were more expensive than the IKEA furniture I was used to. (I'm not sure I had ever seen a chair that expensive before.) I made drawings of it. I hung a photograph of it on my bulletin board and glued the page from the Design Within Reach catalog — of which I had recently subscribed — into my sketchbook.

A few years later when visiting colleges, I walked into the Kanbar Center — the student union at Philadelphia University — and knew immediately that's where I wanted to go to college. The building was a large modernist structure in the middle of a wooded plot of land, walled in glass. Along the large windows sat two-dozen black Eames molded plywood chairs. It was the first time I had seen one in real life. My mom took of photo of me sitting in one. After I got accepted and moved in a few months later, I spent my first day on campus sitting in one. I tweeted about it.

I ended up leaving Philadelphia University after the first semester — it turns out that basing your college decision on the furniture in the student union isn't always a good idea. The school I transferred to was immediately better fit, even with the absence of Eames furniture.

The Eames continued thinking about molding plywood after moving to Los Angeles in 1942, and began experimenting in their apartment. Their earliest experiments involved a laborious method of gluing and bonding thin plies of wood using a machine the couple created called the "Kazam! machine", the name coming from the sound it made. The device was built with hinged two-by-four-inch pieces of lumber that were bolted together so it could withstand the high pressure necessary for shaping the wood. This was in the middle of World War II, and Charles and Ray used used this technology to begin manufacturing leg and arm splints and even a plywood airplane fuselage and pilot's seat.

In 1945, Noyes gave Charles his own exhibition — Furniture by Charles Eames Despite the title, the Eames had developed an equal partnership, with both Charles and Ray working across all parts of the process. In this show, they introduced the 'Eames Plywood Chair'. In a short film the couple produced in 1954 about the manufacturing, Charles narrates:

In a more or less standard situation like sitting for eating or writing, we found that certain relationship of support gives optimum comfort to a surprisingly large number of people. We found that comfort depended more on the perfect molding to the body shape than it did on the way the bone structure was supported. And if the structure was supported properly, the hard and rigid material like molded plywood can provide a remarkably high degree of comfort. We limited the solution to a hard surface and concentrated on plywood. . . . We tried movement and found that if the back was allowed to move in relation to the seat, the latitude of comfort was greatly increased.

The product was an immediate hit. Time called the LCW the 'chair of the century' They continued working with these ideas into the seventies (hence the '30 year flash') as they developed the Piece Secretarial Chair. "This evolution is a perfect example of the design design process as it worked at the Eames Office," writes Dmtrious Eames, their grandson, in his biography of the couple, An Eames Primer, "the feeling that, rather than a single moment of inspiration, there was a constant working out of each issue one by one, a kind of learning by doing until a solution was revealed."

In December, I finally visited Case Study #8, the couple's home and studio — the base of their operations until they died. Walking along the grounds and looking at the desks where they worked, I was struck by how long I've turned to the Eames for inspiration. I've been designing — from my childhood bedroom to college projects to professionally — for fifteen years. My career goals have changed, inspirations have come and gone, the type of work I do and the type of work I want to do has evolved. Designers who influenced me in my early career no longer fit the kind of work I'm interested in and I look back on much of my old work with a mix of embarrassment and confusion.

The Eames, however, have been the one consistent. Regardless of where I am in my career, regardless of my own aspirations as a designer or creative person, Charles and Ray Eames serve as a model. When I was interested in architecture and interior design, I looked to their furniture and architecture work. When I was interested in illustration, towards the end of my undergraduate education, I looked to Ray's textile designs. As my interest in writing and theory grew, I read the couple's writings and read over their lectures. When I made my first video essay and started thinking about film, their own film output once again became the touchstone for my work. The themes they turned to again and again — media, storytelling, honesty, what design could be — mirror the themes that run through my own work.

In an interview in an interview on NBC's Home show, Charles said the believe everything they do falls under the category of 'architecture', whether its a building or a chair or a dress. They couple, in so many ways, is the epitome of the polymathic designer — building a practice that spans disciplines and included research, writing, building, and teaching. They worked across scales, from home goods to massive exhibitions, within corporations like IBM and independently on their own projects. For Charles and Ray, theory and practice were on in the same; they saw no difference between thinking and making. Everything a response to what came before it.

The Eames chair that sits in the corner of my living room serves as reminder to how they worked — a career built upon ideas and aesthetics, of working in public and a continual restlessness to figure out the next thing. But it's also a talisman of sorts, an object that connects the threads of my own life, the piece that bridges the gap between a childhood bedroom and future ambitions. "We work because it's a chain reaction," Charles said, "every subject leads to the next."

[sleepingwithinkink2-0]

Letter? Poem? Fuck It

I've been pushing myself these past few weeks,

My boss at the gas station asked me to reconsider my decision to be an assistant manager ,

When I told her money isn't everything,

Time you can't get back once it's gone it's gone.

She told me to please think about it.

The owner of the hotel pulled me aside and thanked me for my dedication to the hotel.

I've been training two new people at the hotel,

Going outside my comfort zone,

But I realize training is vital ,

That there is no half assing it,

Standing up to my bosses and speaking my mind,

When I m not happy,

Or I think it can be done better.

I realize communication is a big part of everything,

Friends, lovers, jobs, girlfriends/boyfriends

If you can't express yourself,

How is the other person suppose to know if your upset

I m evolving ,

My bones snapping and breaking into place

Running off on caffeine during the day,

Afraid to stop moving that I would unravel,

Like a ball of yarn.

Smoking

Mary Jane to quiet my mind,

So I can fall asleep,

At night

Most mornings I can't remember the night before,

But it's all the same,

The moment is what matters

The now is all that ever mattered.

You ask me if I m happy,

I m not happy nor sad ,

The days become a blur,

Sixy hours a week

But I have a dream,

This idea.

I m driven ..

At the moment

I m content .

I feel the wind against my face more days than not

I m better understanding myself,

This time I spent alone,

I need it .

I wanted to better myself for you,

You sent me this quote and it has engraved itself on my skin over the years.

"Two broken people will either fit together perfectly, or destroy each other beyond repair."

I was broken and so were you,

So I decided to try fix myself,

The best I could,

With tape ,

Anything that could hold me together,

Till I found a cure..

Silly right?

I realize in the silence of your voice,

That I already lost you,

I stopped stealing birthday candles,

In hopes that my wishes were made,

Caught red hand,

In away I wanted to be captured,

but know I never told them your name.

Trying to fight the Gods,

Trying to rearrange the stars,

With burnt hands,

As if I was immortal,

I m only human,

Running out of time,

Pieces falling to the floor..

I don't regret anything with you,

My time spent on dreaming ,

And

hoping for a future with you,

Has only made me want to do better,

But I realize now,

Tired and exhausted,

That all I ever will be is words to you,

That you admire from afar

We allowed ourselves to become distant echos

Distorting over time,

And

In away it's my own fault,

Forgive me.

I now look to the stars in hopes,

You find the happiness you deserve,

The love that makes you feel alive,

And

worthy..

I know we will never truly become strangers,

Tied together in away,

We can't fully untangle,

Without scarring ourselves.

And

I guess I m ok .

I m not writing this to make you feel guilty

Or sad,

I just want you to understand me,

I know now for certain you will always,

Have a piece of my heart no one will ever see,

And

It's also my fault ,

I allowed you in this house,

To tear open my scars and crawl through,

The labyrinth

And

corridors of my structure,

To see my failers,

My dreams,

My demons.

I hope you find someone you allow to walk inside your forest,

Barefoot,

Feeling the dirt and pine cones,

To feel you,

To allow them to swim in the raging river,

That flows through,

Your slice of mind

Because sometimes we need to let one person in,

Or we lose ourselves completely,

So thank you .

Always,

Sir Daniels.

07.7.20

4:28 pm

[yellowumbrellawriting]

Plotting, Prepping, and Planning Your Story

We all want to be the kind of author who can just sit down and start writing, no outline or planning necessary - most of us aren’t. If you can, good for you, that’s a rare talent, and I envy you.

But I just can’t do it. I’m a planner. Whether it’s a screenplay, short story, or a novel, I need to give myself some kind of roadmap to follow, even knowing that it will, inevitably, change. Drastically. I don’t know about you, but very rarely does my final story look the same, or even distantly related, to the original idea.

There are countless ways to plot your story, and I don’t presume to tell you how to do it. All I can presume is that I am capable of providing you with a few strategies.

So grab your pen, pencil, laptop, or reality-warping powers, and let’s go.

(*Admin’s personal favorites)

The Outline

It’s basic and, shall I say, beginner, but it’s tried and true. You might remember our old friend the outline from high school English, and maybe you hated it or maybe you loved it, but there’s a reason they teach it.

Numbers, Roman numerals, letters - pick your poison. It’s the skeleton of your story, leaving you free to pack on the meat however you see fit from there.

Bottom’s Up

Who says you have to start at the beginning? Maybe you have no idea how you want the story to start, but you know how it’s going to end.

So start writing there! Write down the ending, and work your way backwards. Figure out how you get there.

One, Two, Three Acts

Beginning, middle, end. Act I, Act II, Act III. They are the fundamentals of any good story. Write three paragraphs (roughly) detailing the three acts, including: the inciting incident and outcome of the beginning (Act I), the escalation and conflict in the middle (Act II), and the climax and culmination of events, and the wind down into the resolution and denouement (Act III). You can add more if you’d like, but as long as you have these basic points, you’ve got a solid place to start.

Tentpole Moments

Stories have key moments that are necessary to the fabric of the plot. THIS must happen because it causes THIS, which in turn leads Character A to do THIS.

You need these. Without them, your story falls apart like a tent without poles to support it. Figure out what these are, write them down, and build the plot around them.

Special Snowflakes*

The Snowflake Method goes a little like this:

Start with a one-sentence description of your novel.

Now turn this sentence into a paragraph.

Expand this paragraph into a one-page summary. Then into four pages.

You can keep expanding on this, or you can start your writing. The goal here is to make the story more and more complex as you add information, radiating out from your one-sentence description - like a snowflake as it forms!

The Beat Sheet*

This is very much a screenwriting strategy, but it works so well for other types of story-telling too. If an outline is putting down the skeleton of the story, this is putting down every individual bone.

You write the entire plot out, just without the dialogue or description - don’t even use full sentences. This is a way to sequence the story with bullet points, and without pesky things like sentences or paragraphs. Just BAM. BAM. BAM. like drum beats.

You can find Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet here, from the Save The Cat! book I used in my screenwriting class. I highly recommend it to any writer, whether you write scripts or not.

Chapter by Chapter

This pretty much only works for novels, but you may find it useful anyway. List ten to twenty chapters (remember, you’ll almost definitely add or take away from this list anyway), give each one a working title, and a brief description of what happens. Then go back and break down each chapter further, into a few events that need to happen, like your tentpoles from earlier. Maybe you list an example of dialogue, scenarios, the outcome of the scene, etc.

Mind-Maps*

Word of warning, if this matters to you, this method works best if done by hand, like on paper or a whiteboard, rather than on a computer.

Write down your concept. Just a few words, not a whole paragraph or even a full sentence. Now draw a circle around it.

Now expand from there.

Write down your main character(s), draw circles around their name(s), and connect them back to the concept, AKA the hub. Expand on the characters with traits, their backgrounds, what they bring to the story, their arc, etc.

Write down major scenes or plot points, the sequence of events, how each one connects to the others, and to the hub.

Explore your theme, jot down all your ideas, and find out how to connect it all. EVERYTHING. A mind-map can be used for basically anything, and in my experience, it’s hugely beneficial. Your creative brain makes these connections you didn’t get before. You can visualize how Point A connects to Point C using Character Z, a pastafarian archaeologist who is afraid of crickets, which brings conflict to your story because your Big Bad is a radioactive mutant cricket.

I do not recommend using the mind-map method while under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or sleep deprivation. That can be very bad.

On The Go

Outline as you go, one scene at a time. Write a scene, or even a chapter. Roughly outline the next one. Write it. And so on and so forth until you’ve got an actual story.

Storyboard

Take a page from movie makers and screenwriters everywhere, and put your story into pictures. Sketch it yourself, find an artist (just remember to pay them!), create a Pinterest board from images around the Internet. Microsoft OneNote is actually really great for this one.

Sometimes, you just really need to see your story to develop it.

Let ‘Em Talk

Don’t worry about descriptions and prose - just let your characters talk. Write all the dialogue down, with a few notes so you know what’s happening. Partially, you’ll want to do this so you get an understanding of each character’s individual voices, but also because dialogue moves fast and it takes the story along for the ride.

Free Writing

Don’t worry about rules or format, or any sense of cohesion. Just start writing, everything you can think of. Characters, places, goals, items, journeys, themes, symbolisms, good things, bad things, the bad guys, clothing, bits of dialogue, aesthetic. You can even put down pictures and images. Everything! Just keep going. Just freely explore this idea until you think you’ve found a viable plot you can run with.

The Vomit Draft*

Fuck planning. Puke up your story. Don’t worry about structure, cohesion, or even a basic understanding of plot. This is just you getting everything onto the page, so it’s out of your head and you’e got something to work with.

So go on! Stick your fingers down your creative throat (not your actual throat, that’s very bad, and if you do that, you should see someone about it).

Index Cards

All hail the powerful index card. These things are awesome! You can do just about anything with them - characters, scenes, chapters, etc. You can identify emotional shifts, rearrange them to find a good order that works. Rearrange them again. Lay them on a table, pin them to the wall. Stick ‘em on a dart board, grab a blindfold, and start throwing!

Synopsis First

Write you summary, query letter, or synopsis first, rather than last. It’s not bullet-proof or etched in stone, but it gives you a good idea of what your story will look like, and you never know what you might uncover along the way.

The Whiteboard*

Hailing from the grand world of academia, whiteboards are great spaces for thinking and planning. Jot down ideas, mind-maps, connect the dots between scenes, draw character sketches. Color code your notes with different colored markers. Erase and start over. The only limits here are you imagination and artistic ability, the dimensions of the whiteboard, and your willingness to summon a demon and break the rules of reality.

Just make sure to have a camera handy!

The Story Bible*

When I say everything goes into the story bible, I mean EVERYTHING goes into the story bible. Outlining. Character descriptions. Worldbuilding. Plot. Theme. Sketches. Sticky notes. Pictures. A list of songs you think fit the story. Bits and pieces you’ve written but don’t know where to put them yet. Your last will and testament. Questionable stains.

Everything.

The Wall of Crazy*

If it’s good enough for serial killers and time travelers, it’s good enough for us. 

If you expand off one wall, it becomes the Room of Crazy.

Story bible + blank wall + string = the Wall of Crazy

Whew! I know it’s a lot. It’s easy to be overwhelmed. That’s how writing works. And everyone’s process is different. Some writers need as much detail as they can muster, some just need a basic plot to loosely follow and build on, others just start writing and figure out the rest later in editing.

The trick is, don’t worry about it. Take a deep breath. Go for a walk. Don’t let your planning stretch into procrastination, as it is wont to do. No one can tell you how to write your story, but at some point, you’ll realize it’s time to stop outlining and planning, and it’s time to start writing.

Remember, your story will change. No matter what you put down in planning, as you do the actual writing, everything will change. You’ll uncover depths to your characters you didn’t know before. You’ll get new ideas, better ideas. The point of planning is just to be as prepared as possible for when that happens.

So find your process.

Good luck. Now get writing.

Further Resources

This is also an excellent list. While I covered some of the methods on it, I highly recommend you read it in full.

terribleminds is a blog run by author Chuck Wendig, and it has some truly great entries on writing, including one on planning your story. He also has a hilarious way of explaining everything, so reading it is always a great time.

[micaramel]

Artist: Sam Falls

Venue: Franco Noero, Turin

Exhibition Title: Tongues in Trees, Books in Brooks, Sermons in Stones

Date: March 18, 2020 –

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Franco Noero, Turin

Press Release:

Galleria Franco Noero is pleased to present Tongues in Trees, Books in Brooks, Sermons in Stones, Sam Falls’ third solo show in Torino, for the first time hosted in the rooms of Piazza Carignano 2.

The exhibition features new bodies of work which find their expression in numerous techniques, from canvases stained by pigments in the open air and by the effect of the atmospheric agents, to colored textile book covers faded by the sun rays, to oil painted photographic prints on canvas, to glazed ceramics set into beams bearing the colored traces of burnt flowers and vegetation. A text has been specially written by the artist to accompany the exhibition, becoming the most appropriate inspired poetical introduction to it:

The skeletal structure of our ribs and the veins of a leaf both yield structure and health. A good painting can reflect the stillness and beauty of a plant, the plant as a subject can carry the narrative of a place and the process of creating art. The shape of a body can tell you many stories and the relationship of two bodies on a single plane can narrow the narrative. After spending countless hours actively viewing nature, handling plants, dis-mantling the dimensions of the environment and reconstructing it into one, I’ve come to feel the life of a plant, to understand something more about stillness and life, creation and death. Sometimes after camping and working outside several nights in the woods where it’s been cold and I’ve eaten all my food and I only have water left but hours to go on the painting, sometimes I feel my bones rigid and slow but my mind as xylem and phloem conducting pure and organic thoughts unfiltered by the rest of the world, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine what else could be necessary except the bookends of our bodies and plants and the space of nature between.

Our spines hold the infinite and the momentary, like the spines of a book or stem of a flower – the spine holds together our central nervous system and every literary narrative – time and space. Our bodies rearrange and grow, they age and give birth, but do they die? The words on the pages of an unopened book are victim to our quantum mechanical era and like every quantum system they are in flux until our observation.

Words, like the cells in our bodies, compose meaning and translate time into ideas, and over time these ideas change. The cover of a book can show time, convey the ideas, and span centuries. Like a tree, there’s an innate beauty both simple and mysterious in the aged cover of an unread book, something as honest and timeless as the words hidden within.

Sam Falls, 2020

  Sam Falls (San Diego, 1984) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited in international public and private institutions, including: Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, USA (2019); CAPRI, Dusseldorf, Germany (2019); Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trento, Italy (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2018); The Kitchen, New York, USA (2015); Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, USA (2015); Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, Italy (2015); Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (2014); Public Art Fund, Brooklyn, New York, USA (2014); Pomona College Museum of Art, Pomona, California, USA (2014); LA-ART, Los Angeles, USA (2013). He has also taken part in many group exhibitions in institution such as: High Line, New York, USA (2019); ‘Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany (2018); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA (2018); CMOA – Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, USA (2017); Kunsthalle Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland (2016); Mona Bismarck American Center, Paris, France (2016); Mead Gallery, University of Warwick (2016) and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburg, UK (2015); UB Art Gallery, University at Buffalo, New York, USA (2015); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2015); Museo MADRE, Naples, Italy (2014). His work has been shown in international group exhibitions as: 21st Sydney Biennial, Sydney, Australia (2018); ICP Triennial, International Center of Photography, New York, USA (2013).

Link: Sam Falls at Franco Noero

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/2KzRtl2