#and you forget the most minor yet important details you as a writer put down

[dlthedescent]

With the Beast dlc coming up and with the hints so far, I could see myself take a different writing in Descent from here on out (thankfully the large time gap between DL1 and DL2 gives that leeway). That said, I have gotten some comments and yeah it's a whole different take than my Freakazoid take.

And to be frank, I'm not too concerned about potential changes. Fanfics/fanarts are meant to be fluid and adaptive, and surprisingly, Dying Light is one of several that has a lot of potential for creativity freedom and character exploration. So I'm open to whatever Techland gives for this DLC and I don't mind at all adapting to the new content for Descent because who knows, it might open more ideas! Moreover, I'm happy with what I have so far is good enough that there doesn't need to be any severe changes to past chapters. Concept art, most likely (something I need to go back).

With that said, it's a good thing this happened. Because 1. the art for Freakazoid was still concept drafts so I don't mind refining the design based on new info (which means I CAN DRAW CLOTHES ON A HUMAN-ISH BODY AND NOT A FULL-MONSTER-ISH BODY YIPPEE!). And 2. it made me remember my damn timeline in Descent was that it has been four months since the Following in Descent.

I'm pretty sure NOW thinking of it, four months of infection and mutation is not gonna be as drastic as a full-fledged volatile or hunter....

[mvrtaiswriting]

Your writing is so beautifully done! I feel like you really capture your characters’ personalities. Would you consider writing a scenario where reader was part of the Crusaders and is reconnecting with part4!Jotaro after his recent divorce. It’s awkward dating at first, but Joot’s heart melts every time he sees reader and Jolyne getting along so well.

Are you even real? - Jotaro Kujo.

HELLO HELLO HELLO and thank you so much for waiting so long! Writer’s block has been a pain BUT this one actually carried me away and helped me get through it.. so thank you for requesting it! Gotta say it: timeline of jojo’s event is not accurate, but it does include everything you asked for!! I don’t wanna bother you anymore so please enjoy! I hope this meets your expectations!! 

Neutral reader x Jotaro Kujoh.

Jojo’s bizzare adventures: Diamond Is Unbreakable & Stardust Crusaders

Timeline of Jojo’s events (mostly jotaro’s fatherhood) is a bit bizzare

SFW

Trigger warning: usual jojo’s violence

Words Count: 2631

Song suggestion: Are you even real? by James Blake

Hi! Are you a new reader? Check my masterlist for more content!

Please feel free to reblog or leave a comment :) help me support my art (it’s free!),

© bearing in mind everything I post/write is my intellectual property so please don’t steal/copy and paste and post it as yours.

Jotaro was about to throw what would have been his last punch to Kira when he was interrupted by the manifestation of a familiar stand. Was he hallucinating? Did he lose too much blood to imagine things now? While he asked himself this questions, resting his back against the wall trying to preserve the few energies he had left in his body, he looked around looking for the owner of the stand that just came to his rescue. His eyes scanned meticulously the area; he was sure you weren’t far – of course, if all of it just wasn’t a massive joke made by his tired mind.

But you were there – you were really there. And you were beating up Kira so bad, making it look so easy. He widened his eyes open, forcing himself to remain conscious. Josuke would have arrived in matters of minutes and he would have cured all of his injuries.

Jotaro closed his eyes, and the next thing he saw was you and Josuke leaning over him. You smiled when you noticed he was regained energy and health, looking into his beautiful aquamarine eyes for some seconds. You really missed them, you missed him.

“Getting old?” you said laughing, offering him a hand to help him stand up. He shook his head while a soft, almost imperceptible smile formed on his lips as he fixed his hat onto his head as per usual.

“What are you doing here?” he said, opening his arms and implicitly inviting you into a hug.

You smiled, hugging him tight. You guys hadn’t seen each other in so long, and being in each other’s arms just felt like coming home.

“Guess this is your way to say ‘thank you for saving my ass, nice to see you again!’” you said laughing.

Behind you, Josuke’s and his friends’ all had riddled expressions on their faces. Seeing Jotaro so outgoing surely was something unexpected – so much that Kira running away didn’t seem to matter at all.

Jotaro nodded at your words, breaking up from the hug and taking a good minute to look at you. He still was much taller than you, and you didn’t seem to have aged a bit. You were as beautiful as he remembered you. What he didn’t remember was all the complicated, little emotions he felt every time he was next to you that were now coming back to surface. You always held a special place in his heart. You two always shared a particular bond that never got the chance to really develop. During the crusaders days, you were too busy fighting and looking for Dio to get involved into emotional relationships; and following the final battle, after losing Kakyion, Avdol and Iggy, Jotaro didn’t think it was appropriate to actually confess you his feelings. All of you were mourning the deaths of your companions, and although Kakyion would have encouraged Jotaro to actually tell you about how he felt, in that moment, it just didn’t feel right. So he let you go, and everyone just returned to their own lives. He had moved on since then or at least he tried to do so; he was now a father with a failed marriage, but he never really forgot you. Afterall, no one ever forgets their first love.

“Joseph called me a week ago. I’m sorry I came late but it was the best I could do!” You answered Jotaro’s previous question. “He told me you guys needed a hand and that my degree in criminology would have been useful. He explained everything to me and.. here I am!” you continued.

Jotaro’s expression seemed surprised. He didn’t know his grandfather was still in contact with you. At first, he started to ask himself why didn’t Joseph tell him years before. He could have had a chance with you – he would have followed you wherever you were. His jiji knew what he felt towards you, how could he just stay silent? Those questions were quickly followed by doubts: what was Joseph planning? Did he call you because they really needed you there or because he was just trying to help Jotaro overcome his divorce and find someone to help him with Jolyne? All these doubts clouded Jotaro’s mind, leaving him silent.

After you were introduced to everyone, you and the rest of the guys went to a coffee bar to discuss how  investigations would have been organised and what methods would have been more successful in finding Kira’s new identity.

Jotaro kept his eyes locked on you while you professionally explained to Rohan, Koichi and the rest of the boys what to do. A part of him was busy studying every little detail of your face. How you still did the same facial expression you did 10 years before, how your smile still managed to lighten up everything around you. It was so strange how much time passed by, how many things changed during these years; yet  things stayed the same between the two of you. He still felt the same way he did when he was just a boy, you guys still related to each other the same way you did when you travelled around the world.

Jotaro’s posture was much more relaxed now that you were around. His face had a more relaxed expression, and you gladly found out that he became a bit more talkative than he was in his younger days.

Joseph found you a room in the same Hotel where him and Jotaro where staying in while in Morio-cho, leading the two of you to spend an incredible amount of time together.

As time passed, you and Jotaro grew closer and closer. You quickly learned about his love life and that he became a marine biologist, something you would have never expected from him. He was very curious about your life too: he was eager to know what happened to you during those years – he wasn’t able to find you when he tried, and now that you were right in front of him, he wanted to make the best out of the time he got to spend with you. He wanted to know if the person he always loved was taken, and what happened to them during all that time. However, he never directly asked you any private question. He learned that you had an important relationship at a certain point, which broke your heart and made you afraid of love, but only because you and Joseph talked about it.

He thought it was ironic; he had a similar experience.

Searching for Kira’s new identity was tiring. You were all doing your best, and were using every resource you could. You in particular were really involved with the whole research project– it was the main reason why you were there. Every time there were news, whether they were minor or not, you were always the first one to be notified.

You were busy examining some of your notes and the pictures Rohan took when Jotaro knocked on your door. You sent your stand over to open the door, focusing on your studies. It was only when you smelled Jotaro’s sweet perfume filling the room that you finally lifted your eyes up from the books and the various pics in front of you. You greeted Jotaro with a weak smile, as he sat down next to you.

“Thought you could use some coffee.” He said, leaving a fuming cup in front of you.

You thanked him, and proceeded to take a long sip from the cup.

“How is it going?” he asked.

You sighed, running an hand through your hair as if that gesture could help you reorganise your thoughts. You explained everything to him, ranting a bit about how stressing the whole situation felt. Every time you thought you got closer to finding Kira, something happened that forced you to start all over again. He wasn’t like every other serial killer you studied about; he was always a step ahead of everyone.

Jotaro listened carefully to your words, nodding sometimes to let you know that he was really paying attention to what you were saying. Once you finished, he looked a bit perplexed and offered you his insight regarding the whole situations. You trusted his words more than anyone else’s – you knew he had great analytical skills, you would have trusted him with your life. Something you already did in the past.

The two of you spent the night together, smoking some cigarettes while discussing about every possibility regarding Kira’s escape. He sat exactly next to you on the sofa, reading some documents given to you by the Speedwagon foundation when you tiredly rested your head on his shoulder.

This gesture made his muscles contract for a second, catching him out of guard. He turned to look at you, your eyes almost closed because of your tiredness. Without saying a word, Jotaro leaned his lips against your head, leaving a soft kiss on it before continuing reading his documents as if nothing happened. It wasn’t long until you fell asleep. When Jotaro noticed it, he wasn’t sure about moving. He didn’t want to wake you up, but he knew that wasn’t the most comfortable position for you to sleep in. He slowly lied on the sofa, letting you rest your head on his chest. He put his white coat on you, deciding to stay there for the night.

You woke up next to him the following morning, your bodies completely intertwined. You were confused, as you didn’t remember falling asleep. Also, you didn’t really want to bother Jotaro this much, and immediately felt bad about it. You slowly got up, leaving the beautiful man sleep on the sofa of your hotel room. After a quick shower, you headed towards the hotel’s canteen to buy some breakfast for both of you.

When you finally returned to your room, you saw Jotaro stretching up, standing tall in the middle of the room. “Morning” he whispered in a low, raspy voice.

Smiling as if you were a teenager in love, you replied and offered him a donut.

“I’m sorry for yesterday. You could have woken me up.” You said shyly, doing your best to avoid eye contact.

He hinted a small laugh, messing your hair with his hand.

“No need to apologise, silly. It’s fine, I fell asleep too.”

-

Days passed by, and you knew you were getting closer to find out Kira’s identity. Your days however, weren’t made up solely by studies, researches or fight. Most of the time you found yourself spending time with the Joestar’s family: you would usually have dinner with Josuke, Jotaro, Joseph and Josuke’s mum, spending quality time together and hearing funny anecdotes from Josuke and Joseph. You also had the chance to meet Jolyne a few times; Jotaro drove you out of city because he really cared about letting the two of you meet. And it was a good thing: you and jolyne relly got along with each other, almost as if you had been friends in a previous lifetime.

Although Jotaro was never vocal about it, he was important to him to see how  along you got with his family. He loved seeing you playing with Jolyne, and he knew how much you appreciated and respected Joseph. It was also nice to see you getting along with Josuke – both of you had a lively personality, and he grew affectionate towards you really quickly. Sometimes, Jotaro would find your bond a bit irritating – but he knew Josuke was only a 14 y/o boy. He was also conscious about how irrationally jealous he could become, so he never really spoke about it.

As time passed, Jotaro became more and more aware of his feelings towards you. He never forgot you and now every emotion he felt in the past was simply coming back.

 The two of you spent an awful amount of time together, always finding new excuses to do so. Whether it was to investigate over Kira, training to prepare for the final battle or simply visiting some new places, there wasn’t a moment when you weren’t with him; and although he felt incredible bad for thinking about it, Jotaro hoped to find Kira as late as possible.

He needed more time; more time to fully understand what was going on inside his mind and his heart, more time to find the right words to explain everything to you, more time to understand whether his feelings were reciprocated or not.

It was during the final battle with Kira that he finally had the responses he needed.

Seeing you covered in blood made his heart beat incredibly fast. For minutes that felt like an eternity he did not know what to do, how to act - something which was very unusual for him. Jotaro had always been the kind of person to think rapidly, without letting his emotions overwhelm him. But this time it was different. He left you and Josuke fighting alone against Kira for too much time and now the both of you were in danger. It was something he already experience before in Egypt, and he wasn’t willing to lose anyone else.  You kept one of Josuke’s arms around your shoulders to help him standing, the young boy still towering you even if his figure was arched over you. Both of you were covered in blood and with various injuries over your bodies. You were still able to stand on your feet, looking angrily at Kira who was grinning in response. Your breath was heavy and you didn’t have much strength left in your body, but when you saw Jotaro, you knew you had to hold on.

You gave him a quick look, his face covered with worry and fear. “I’ll cover your back but you'll have to be quick.” you said, summoning your powerful Stand once again. Jotaro understood your plan, and without losing anymore time he started walking towards you, becoming close enough to use Star Platinum against your enemy.

“Star Platinum. The World!” he said, stopping time and letting Kira have a taste of Star Platinum’s punches.

Before he let time flow again, he gently picked your body up in his arms and stepped far enough from the explosion Killer Queen would have caused moments later. Shielding you with his own body, time started to flow again. You looked at him smiling, gratefully crouching yourself onto his chest, trying your best to recover some energie and enjoying the warmth of his body.

“Thanks for always being my hero.”

Jotaro couldn’t help but smile hearing those words, shaking his head in response.

“I just returned you a favour.”, he added.

-

Two weeks passed by since the defeat of Yoshikage Kira.

You and Jotaro decided to stay in Morio-cho a bit longer than what you originally planned. The time spent together allowed you to discuss your mutual feelings and, after a long night of passion and love, you started dating.

It was awkward at first. You and Jotaro never really officialised your relationship; you just let things between you evolve naturally, preferring a physical love language over words – what united the two of you wasn’t something that could have been easily described. However, he eventually confessed you that he had loved you since your trip in Egypt, receiving a: “I did too, idiot.” in response.

As time went by, you and Jolyne managed to build a strong, beautiful bond – so much, she’d start to refer to you as a parental figure and nothing less. Jotaro loved seeing the two of you together; you were the people he loved the most, and he was happy his little daughter liked you as much as he always did.

[soldouthaz]

hi!! these past few months i’ve gotten several asks about all different parts of my writing process and i thought i’d go ahead and make a full post that i can refer people back to in the future! with the fests coming up as well hopefully it may help someone because i know i always love reading about author’s processes! feel free to let me know if i’ve forgotten anything :) 

DISCLAIMER: this is MY writing process. these are my own opinions and maybe not methods that will work blanketly for everyone. writing is different for every person and you should always do what works best for you personally! 

this post will be split into four parts - before, during, after, and other tips and things to remember :)

inspiration & idea 

this is typically either the easiest or the absolute most difficult part of writing a fic. sometimes you begin with an exact idea and other times you want to write but have no idea where to start. personally i tend to draw inspiration from a few places in particular. writing prompt and dialogue blogs, although sometimes a bit cliche, are a huge help when trying to come up with ideas for scenes and outlines. these are some good ones – here, here, and here if you need some inspiration! pinterest and weheartit are also great places to search for inspiration both before or after you’ve settled on an idea. find an aesthetic you like and base the characters around it, do some world-building, create folders for your characters - this is a good place to reference back to while you’re writing! at this point i just try to pick something that i feel like ‘calls to me’ and leave the rest for later. the last avenue that i use to think of fic ideas is real life. i think of small things that have happened to me or to someone i know and make them much more dramatic and layered. add in some fluff or angst or whatever aspect fits and usually a storyline begins to carve itself!

outline 

once you have an idea, making an outline can help you figure out if it’s going to work for you or not. nailing down the important details and plot points before you begin writing is crucial so that you have a purpose to your scenes, so that things don’t feel repetitive or pointless. when i outline i tend to organize by word count. for instance, by the 5k mark let’s say i’d like to already have established what character A does for a living and some of their interests, and i’d like character B to be vaguely introduced. by 10k i’d like the characters to have formed a friendship and for the conflict to have been introduced, so on and so forth. the plot spacing may differ based on the goal word count for a fic (do things happen quickly or is it a slow burn? etc.). 

next I make a tentative timeline for the fic. I have to give myself sufficient time to plan and to write without rushing myself, but also make it reasonable enough that i can still look forward to it! writing takes different amounts of time for different people, but the more you write the more you’ll be able to estimate how long a certain word count is going to take you to complete. also, as far as advice goes, decide if you’re going to write everything and publish at once or if you’re going to upload weekly chapters, etc. i strongly recommend publishing a full work at once. typically people shy away from unfinished works and it can be very disheartening when there are almost no reads. publishing all at once will raise the chances of your fic being read and shared and will also help you as a writer not to make mistakes because you are able to go back and fix/edit certain plot points as you write. 

organization 

if you have more than one wip at a time, it can be really helpful to have some sort of organization in place. i write primarily in google docs, so i have one master doc with all of my wip information inside of it. i use a numbered chart (the docs themselves are titled with numbers only and correspond to the number in the chart) that has the tentative title, the goal word count, the current word count, which pov i plan to write from, and an estimated posting date. you can also limit the number of wips you have this way.once a work is published i move it from my wip list to my completed list, with the title, the final word count, and a link to the posted story. this part is optional, it just helps me to be able to see all of it in one place. i’ve found this method to be much more helpful than just making random notes on my phone that i forget about within the hour!

research 

depending on the topic of your fic and the setting, you may need to do some research beforehand. if it’s historical, I brush up on the history of it and watch some films or read some books about the time period to get a feel for the vernacular and style, etc.. if the protagonist has a job i’m unfamiliar with I search up what they do, how much they make, where they work, and things like that. it’s unlikely that someone is going to fact check every little thing, but accuracy when it comes to these topics is very admirable and i feel like it really adds a lot of depth and authenticity to a fic. 

another fun activity for this portion of planning is designing the characters. i try to do this for a lot of mine and experiment with personality traits, quirks, and appearances, and to create a character that feels layered as opposed to just surface level. it’s fun for me to figure out their morals and motives and opinions and to play around with those and see if they can be changed throughout the course of the story. an interesting activity here is to take personality tests from what you think they would answer about themselves! then, even if only subconsciously, your character now has interests and hobbies and feels more real, which will definitely show through when you write. there are some for you to take here, here, here, and here, and this is also a good resource.

atmosphere 

(meaning in real life, not the setting of a fic). i tend to produce what i feel is my best work at night, after dinner when i have nothing else to do for the day and i can just relax. having a designated time and space to write really helps with motivation and focus, and can be the difference in accomplishing your time goals for the fic. feel free to try different things like adding music while you write (i write with headphones in and music blasting!) and adjust your surroundings to your liking. put on noise cancelling headphones, stop the clock that keeps ticking in the background or turn up the floor fan to drown other things out, or play some ambience videos from youtube to help you focus. whatever works! sometimes i also create playlists for my fics that i listen to while writing them which can add some more depth to the story too! being comfortable and not distracted are my two main requirements. also, unless it’s for music or research purposes, i would suggest distancing a bit from your phone as well!

word vomit 

this is one of the most frustrating parts of writing but i can’t explain how many times it’s helped me, especially when i’m trying to reach a certain word count. i like to do an exercise when i don’t know what to write or i just have a vague idea where i sit down and just write. i don’t let myself backspace anything (unless it’s a small typo or something minor like that) and i just see where i end up. the reason why this is so helpful is because a lot of times subconsciously our brains already have some kind of idea of a direction to go in or what should be included. though this rough draft almost never makes it into my final piece and frankly doesn’t make much sense, i’m able to go back and read over it and think oh! that’s a good point, i can also write about [random plot point] here! as i think of it.

dialogue 

the very first part of a scene that i write is the dialogue. personally i find it the easiest, and it helps me make a skeleton of a scene where i only have to fill in the descriptions in between. most of the time getting the dialogue written can help to visualize a scene and make conversation flow easily when you aren’t distracted with everything else going on in the scene. a lot of times if you’re focused on what a background character is doing the actual speaking may end up choppy or not make sense when you’re finished with it, which is usually my issue. this method is a good idea to use if you find yourself stuck on a scene or if you don’t know what you want the setting to be yet. if the dialogue you wrote doesn’t fit just right once you’ve added in the rest of the scene, you can always alter it to your liking.

taking breaks 

this is the key to staying motivated for me. if i push myself too hard or write for too long i get frustrated and struggle to keep the flow going. it’s important to take a break when that happens because it becomes very obvious in your writing when you aren’t inspired. you’re more likely to take the easy way out of conflicts and dialogue and it could completely change the tone of the fic. by this i don’t mean procrastinate writing, but definitely make sure not to over-write. writing should be fun, not stressful.

similar fics 

this step is 100% optional, but i find that it really helps me. when i read other author’s fics and i get inspired, the scene really sticks in my brain. to avoid accidentally copying someone’s ideas from their own fic, if i know that i’m writing something similar, i avoid reading any fic with a similar premise during the entire writing process. even if i think i won’t, often times i’ll subconsciously mirror a scene or a piece of dialogue from another fic without meaning to. this is definitely something to look for when you’re reading it back over!

balanced elements 

this step really just depends on the type of fic i’m going for, but i’ve found that fics with some balance to them tend to do better than others. by this i mean fics that have a little of each important element like angst, fluff, smut, etc.. of course, this differs from fic to fic depending on the plot. if it’s a pwp, obviously the main element will be smut. if it’s got some heavy topics in it it may be primarily angst, or a holiday fic might be just fluff. all of these are okay on their own but it’s super easy to mix them together to create more realistic scenes and meaningful emotion in the dialogue. in a pwp i try to add some back story into it, something a little angsty or that gives the smut more meaning than just surface level (unless of course that’s what you’re going for!). on the flip side, you could take a really fluffy fic and at some smutty elements that enhance the love-y feelings from the fluff. even fluff/angst might be fun to explore! my point is that realistically we feel many emotions at once, all the time. when i write one alone my writing often feels like it falls flat and my message/theme doesn’t come across the way that i want it to.

resources 

there is a list of resources and links at the bottom of this post that may help during the writing process! they are ones that I have saved to look back at when I get stuck!

read it over 

this is my least favorite step. at this point, once i’ve finished the fic, i just want to post it as-is. i don’t feel like reading it over or doing edits - i just want to be finished with it. the benefits outweigh my dislike of it though, so i make myself do it anyway. it’s necessary (for me) to take a short break between when i finish it and when i read it over so that i can look at it with fresh eyes, just a day or two at least. the most important advice that i can give here would probably be not to delete anything you don’t like immediately. almost 100% of the time something can be re-written without being deleted, so if you don’t like the way a sentence is structured or the way a character speaks in a certain scene, don’t delete it! just see if you can rewrite it to model what you’re going for better. this step helps me to stay above my goal word count and not to let my insecurity get the best of me. everybody is their own worst critic, but usually there’s a reason you wrote something down, so give it every chance before you get rid of it altogether. i wrote about this here as well.

beta’s 

i’m going to link to another post i answered about betas here!

choosing a title 

when it’s time to choose a title for a fic i usually pick from one of four places. the first is a catchphrase from the fic. if there’s a recurring theme or nickname or description, it may be a good idea to title it the same thing so that readers will connect the title with that detail and remember it more easily in the future. the second place is from a song. there’s a lyric for nearly every different message and emotion, so there’s a high chance of being able to find one that goes hand-in-hand with a fic. the third place i look is in poems. i’m personally a big fan of lang leav, michael faudet, and bukowski, among others, and poetry usually also features a wide range of themes to choose from. the last idea i resort to when i can’t come up with anything else, which is to take a word that you feel represents the fic and translate it into another language like french or spanish, among others, or pick a word that has a meaning that corresponds with the fic. although there are no right or wrong titles, i would suggest to try not to pick a title that’s been used a lot already, or one that you think might be easily forgettable. even if you think it might be odd or not typical, people are going to remember it much more than if it’d just been a regular title.

choosing a summary 

this step is also kind of hit or miss for me! either i know from the beginning what i want my summary to be or i struggle up until the last second trying to come up with one. there isn’t really a right or wrong summary – except for one. my advice here is please, please don’t just put ‘i suck at summaries! just read it!’. people tend to gravitate toward fics if the author seems confident in their own abilities as opposed to someone quite literally pleading with them to read. other than that, there are several types of summaries that i see a lot of. personally i like to use a snippet from my fics in italics, so that people can get a feel of what my writing style is like beforehand. when i write drabbles though, i usually come up with a quick, occasionally witty tidbit of a summary to grab people’s attention. for example: 

a longer fic summary

Harry Styles takes his time coming out to greet them. Louis only knows what he’s seen on file and what he’s heard them talking about, but he fully lives up to the image he had inside of his head. 

He saunters down the front steps of the farmhouse in his Levi’s, brown snakeskin boots curving out from underneath the denim Louis’ sure he had specially made. He’s got on a plaid button-down tucked into the jeans because of course he does, curls spilling out from either side of his cowboy hat around his sunglasses and country-tan skin. 

“Harry Styles,” he drawls, extending a hand to Louis’ manager, “Pleased to meet ya’ll.” 

(from my fic baby blue)

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a shorter fic summary

there is little harry hates more than truth or dare. 

and louis. 

(from my fic like it’s a game)

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and sometimes people use both as well, like this one from @falsegoodnight​ ‘s fic, before we knew – 

“C’mon Lou,” says Zayn after a moment, He sounds even more exasperated than before. Louis sort of has a knack for exasperating people, especially people like Zayn who aren’t usually bothered by his brattiness. “Can’t you give this guy a chance? Harry Styles? Aren’t you curious about him at all?” 

Despite his best efforts, Louis still flinches at the name. He really shouldn’t be so affected after all these years. He’s seen the name printed down the curve of his waist in obnoxiously and uncommonly large loopy letters every single day since his sixteenth birthday eight years ago. He’s very familiar with the name Harry Styles. It sounds pretentious and Louis hates it. He hates everything about his supposed soulmate. He hates his large handwriting that stands out like a claim on his skin whenever he’s walking around shirtless. He hates his pretentious name. And now he hates his supposed curls and green eyes and dimples. 

- 

Or Louis has been skeptical of soulmates for years so it seems like fate when he finally bumps into the owner of the obnoxiously large signature printed into his skin since age sixteen: Harry Styles, a human rights attorney who is firmly against soulmates.

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and this link has some other ideas and tips for writing summaries that I found to be very helpful! 

posting a fic 

as far as tags and ratings go, THIS PART IS IMPORTANT! all of the steps are in one way or another, but this one is crucial that it’s done correctly. warnings and tags can absolutely make or break a fic. people tend to have very strong preferences when it comes to fics so i try to be as specific as possible without giving the entire story away in the tags. if you’re afraid of doing that, you can always put the full warnings in the note before the fic and tell people to check there before reading. i won’t list all of the possible triggers here but be sure to look those up if you are unfamiliar with some of the common ones. when it comes to tags, you’re always better safe than sorry! i like to tell people they’re free to message me and ask about something if they’re uncomfortable as well, so i can explain the trigger to them and why i tagged it that way and they can decide if they’d like to read based on a more informed basis. tagging correctly saves many people from being blindsided by something they didn’t want to see, and it also protects the author from some very angry messages about warnings.

archive of our own has an extensive support page with all of the info you could need about posting a work on their site including tags, ratings, warnings, co-authors, translations, HTML, and more. you can find it here.

as far as wattpad goes, i am definitely not as familiar with it. i have only a couple of my fics over there and a few translations that people have done for me, so my knowledge is very limited. this link seems to have some good resources for posting with them.

moodboards, graphics, covers 

i feel like the writing does most of the work itself, but a graphic can really help when it comes to the next part of the process, posting on social media. some people like to do moodboards, some people commission artists to draw for them, and some like to create their own graphics completely from scratch. like most aspects of fic, there isn’t really a right or wrong way to do this. i usually make moodboards for mine! i try to stick to an aesthetic or theme, and pick a cohesive amount of pictures to use (typically three, six, or nine so they line up nicely). the pictures i use are almost always from tumblr, pinterest, or weheartit. i put them together using an app and then put a blanket filter over all of it so that it all looks unified. if you used pinterest or weheartit to create concept boards for your idea in the beginning, now is a good time to use those photos and media as well! if you’re curious, the apps i use to create graphics, moodboards, and covers are as follows:

canva (mobile app & website) 

tons of templates to choose from as well as patterns and fonts! some things are locked unless you’re a member but most elements are free! easy to download and share and lots of options to customize and play around with. i strongly recommend the website on desktop or laptop as opposed to the mobile app so that the features are more easily accessible.

picsart (mobile app) 

when i need to make one quickly and i’m not near my laptop (or just need something simple) i use picsart to make a quick collage and put a filter over them. there are some limited text options as well but they are not as advanced as some of the others mentioned here.

photoshop express (mobile & desktop app) 

a step up from picsart, but slightly different elements. photoshop allows you to control a lot more once you know how to use it. there are some nice moodboard layouts here, as well as text and fonts, borders, and color controls. my favorite tool on here is the style transfer option under ‘effects’. a very quick and easy way to make your pictures look very cohesive!

vsco (mobile app) 

perfect for adding filters and things like vignette, grain, and fade. it also has some color controls to customize those. this is typically the last step before i post. and you can save custom presets that you like to use again!

and there are many others as well – almost all photo editing apps and software have a function that will allow you to make a collage or add text to a graphic! i know wattpad also requires a cover for their stories and I believe they have an app for that too!

here are some lovely graphics that have been made for my fics by @lovelylou​, @behisoneandonly​, @tomlinvelvet-ao3​​ and @brickredtoe​  as some examples :) 

and one that I've made as well: 

social media 

once i have a moodboard or graphic, i post the link to my fic on twitter and tumblr. in these posts i always make sure to include the title, the word count, and the summary. i try to make it as visually appealing as possibly by organizing the post accordingly and using fonts occasionally to catch people’s eye. this is the app i use for those on mobile! 

i think about the sizing as well – twitter has set dimensions for its photos and is known for displaying the photos awkwardly. tumblr on the other hand will let you upload up to ten photos of any size, and will display them fully without any cropping. according to this link a single photo on twitter should be 16:9. this page also has some good tips. and as far as i can tell if you’re using two or four photos, i would stick to the square images as that is what’s worked for me personally. i believe canva also has a template for a twitter post too.

write for yourself 

i think everyone knows this on some level but i tend to need to be reminded pretty frequently. if you’re heavily involved in social media and fic discourse, it can be very easy to get attached to what you know people want to see. writing should be a balance though, and you should always write for yourself before anyone else. we’re all free to write whatever we want and, even if it’s difficult, you shouldn’t ever let someone make you feel guilty for doing so. writing is an escape and a safe space but it can very quickly become something that causes stress and anxiety if you aren’t doing it for the right reasons.

don’t stress 

easier said than done, I know, but like I mentioned earlier, writing should be fun. a lot of people here don’t do it as their job and no one gets paid to write fics. these are projects that authors take on on their own time even while they work and handle everything else in their lives and those things should come first and foremost, as well as your mental health. this circles back into my earlier point – don’t let people make you feel guilty about anything like not finishing a fic on time or not writing exactly how they wanted it. authors are real people with real lives too and if things get to be too heavy or too stressful, they’re entitled to a break or to leave if that’s what’s best for them.

don’t be afraid to ask for help / validation 

there are tons of lovely writers in this community and others that would be more than happy to answer questions and give advice. if you’re struggling with something, there’s always somewhere to go to get help! 

however, the concept of validation is a bit trickier than the others. there’s a fine line ;) between asking for validation for a little boost, or relying completely on it. posting snippets and sneak peeks is a great way to get people excited about your work and to get yourself motivated if you’re feeling down, but i would suggest not to post one with the sole purpose of fishing for compliments. if you do, it can be very disheartening if you don’t receive any or the ones that you were looking to hear. in my opinion you need to be at least somewhat confident in your own abilities before you can expect other people to be. posting a snippet is more beneficial for when you’ve got a mental block or are stuck in a scene as opposed to just searching for validation for the sake of getting it.

cliche vs. copying 

there’s also two sides to this argument! you shouldn’t be afraid to write what you want, even if it seems like it’s a common trope or cliche topic. everybody writes in different styles and has different ideas and therefore may provide an entirely different view on what’s been poised as a ‘common’ theme. i think i could read a thousand of the ‘there was only one bed’ trope or the college au’s or the other popular plotlines. they’re popular for a reason and you shouldn’t be afraid to explore your own take on it! no one author ‘owns’ a specific trope. 

BUT there is a clear difference in doing your own take on something versus just copying what someone else has written exactly. the lines can get blurry here but it’s obvious to readers when something has been repeated word for word from another fic or when one too many elements are the same. to be on the safe side, always check to make sure that the specifics of your idea haven’t been done exactly before. 

resources 

+ masterpost of some resources 

+ how to keep readers engaged 

+ helpful tips 

+ 100 words for facial expressions 

+ how to write good villains 

+ good advice  

+ synonyms for commonly used words 

+ using metaphors and references 

+ more helpful tips 

+ descriptions

+ synonyms for ‘beautiful’ 

+ tips for dialogue 

+ writing enemies to lovers 

+ other helpful tips 

+ writing friends to lovers 

+ dystopian writing 

+ writing a realistic argument 

+ ways to cut word count 

+ how to write smut 01 * tw for body descriptions etc.  

+ how to write smut 02 

+ SUPER helpful smut vocab

+ how to write flirting 

+ how to write about grief 

+ even more helpful tips

[letterboxd]

Truffle Hunter.

As Pig snuffles its way up Letterboxd’s best of 2021 ranks, Mitchell Beaupre hunts down writer-director Michael Sarnoski for a chat about some of the finer creative points of his Nicolas Cage-starring meditation on cookery and grief.

In a time when audiences know too many specific plot details of films months before they’re even released, the idea of a surprise sensation feels like a fleeting memory. Yet that’s exactly how one could describe Pig, the debut feature from director Michael Sarnoski. With minimal pre-release buzz and no flashy festival premiere, Pig is a film whose status has been created through sheer quality alone.

This is a true word-of-mouth smash, hailed by critics as one of the best films of the year, as well as quickly earning itself a high placement on our Top 50 of 2021. Jacob Knight praises the film as “an existential rumination regarding how people find meaning in a mostly meaningless world”, while Muriel declares it “the most unexpectedly wholesome movie I’ve seen in forever”. Not bad for a first feature.

Written by Sarnoski, from a story he developed with co-producer Vanessa Block, Pig opens on Rob (Nicolas Cage), a loner isolated in the woods with his truffle pig. Rob makes his living selling truffles to the eager and ambitious Amir (Alex Wolff), but when two people break into Rob’s home and steal his animal companion, he must do whatever it takes to be reunited with his only friend.

A rough day deserves a decent vin rouge.

While that setup led many to give Sarnoski’s film the moniker “John Wick with a pig” when the trailer dropped, the story ends up charting a course away from genre thrills and towards something else entirely. Pig is an exploration of grief, loneliness and compassion, featuring one of the finest performances of Nicolas Cage’s illustrious career.

Raised in Milwaukee, Sarnoski and co-producer Block met in college before working together on the documentary short The Testimony, which focused on the largest rape tribunal in the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That film made it onto the shortlist for the 2016 Oscars, putting the two of them on a path that would lead to their breakthrough opportunity with Pig.

Sarnoski spoke with us about the origins of Pig, the long-term impacts of loss in his own life, the joy of hand-cranked pasta and Bruce Springsteen.

Congratulations on the film! How has it felt seeing this outpouring of love coming for your first feature? Michael Sarnoski: It’s been amazing. Everyone who made this movie felt for themselves that it was special, and we all put a lot of care into it. We also knew that it was a risk, a strange film we figured would hit right for some people, but then plenty of others would think it was boring and weird. We’ve been very pleasantly surprised that it’s a small minority of people who feel that way.

What was the seed of the story that would eventually sprout to become Pig? I had this image in my head of an old man in the woods with his truffle pig. There was something sweet and tragic about that. Then I began asking questions about who this guy is and why he’s out there alone in the woods. What’s his backstory? It all evolved from there.

While the first act inhabits that “John Wick with a pig” space that people were perhaps expecting from the trailer, the story then takes a swerve and becomes a somber, thoughtful character study. Could you speak about navigating that unique arc with your storytelling? We never set out to try and subvert that John Wick sort of genre. We knew that we were playing with that lone-cowboy idea of a film and some of those tropes, but we never wanted to poke fun at that or switch people’s expectations in some sense by choosing Nic to star. We never wanted to “surprise” people by making a quiet Nic Cage movie. It was always just about these characters, what this story is, what we’re trying to explore. I think if we had tried to be subversive it would have come off as hokey.

Silence plays a key part in the film, as so much is being said in those spaces between the dialogue and action. How did you want to utilize the impact of saying more with silence? From early on, we always knew it was going to be a very silent film, and that followed all the way through the edit. Some of us wanted that opening to start out the way it’s done in the movie, where it’s totally silent and the music only comes in at the very end, while others were worried that people would get bored with it. The argument against that was that if they’re going to get bored with that, then they’re going to get bored with the rest of the movie. So, we might as well just lean into it, and let them know what it’s going to be.

From there we gauged how we wanted to approach the silence throughout. There’s some beautiful music in the film that Alexis Grapsas and Philip Klein did an incredible job with that allowed us to bring this beauty and splendor into the scenes. But there were also a lot of really quiet moments where we wanted the audience to be focused on the faces of the characters, and really be feeling the space and letting the sounds of the forest, or wherever we were, come across.

Nicolas Cage, his knife skills, and cinematographer Patrick Scola.

Along with the faces, you focus a lot on hands in the film. Whether it’s in scenes of violence or making food, there’s a real emphasis on what hands are capable of. Where did the inspiration for that come from? Nic was very into the idea of conveying artistry through your hands. He spent a lot of time with local chefs to try and get the vibe of how they moved and how they worked. He was always practicing knife skills in his room. I was constantly waiting for the AD to come up and tell me that we can’t use Nic today because he cut off a finger, but thankfully that never happened. Nic really sold that emphasis on the hands. Those shots could have felt empty if it wasn’t for him. I still am surprised watching some of the little hand choices he made.

I remember there was one shot where we didn’t get it on the day. So, we set it up with his stand-in, and just had him wearing his gloves. We all watched it, and it just wasn’t the same. Nic agreed, and so we reset the entire thing just to get that one shot with his hands in there instead. It was totally worth it. He’s an incredible actor, and it comes through every part of him.

Cage is an actor with an almost otherworldly mythos about him, which allows people to sometimes forget what a tremendous performer he’s always been. What was your experience in building a relationship with him, not just as an actor, but also as a human being? I only have positive things to say. That’s not just a gimmick. From the moment he read the script, he was interested, and he really responded to the character. He was committed to bringing the script to life, and was extremely respectful towards everyone on set. He had no reason to respect me. I’m a first-time director. He could have been a total diva. He could have been whatever he wanted to be, and we still would have paid him and been happy with his performance.

He was very kind, and maybe some of this came from the character, but he was also kind of somber and quiet in general on set. At the same time, he can also be very playful and sweet, even though he was trying to remain in the mood of the character. He set the tone, in a way, for the whole crew. A crew could easily look at a first time director and decide to just slack off and scrape by, because I wouldn’t have even known the difference. The fact that Nic treated me and the material with such respect really trickled down, and was so valuable to the film.

We shot the whole thing in twenty days, so if there had been any weak link with someone not doing their job or not being totally on top of it, we would have been screwed. I credit a lot of that to Nic, and him treating this with an incredible amount of professionalism. I think that’s where a big part of his long career comes from. He’s an incredible actor, but he also takes the art form seriously, treating it as both an artist and as this being his job, knowing that you have to do both in order to get what you need across.

Do you have a favorite Nicolas Cage performance? Other than Pig, of course. There are so many incredible ones. I really love Moonstruck. I saw that a couple of years ago, right before we officially cast him, when I was going through some of his ones that I hadn’t seen. Part of it I think is because I’m half-Italian, and I felt like it was showing me a side of my life that I never realized because my Italian family is on the east coast, and we moved out to Wisconsin when I was very young. I never got to be a part of that kind of thick Italian family, and seeing that on screen gave me a taste of what that would have been like. I loved him in that role. He was the perfect balance of sincere and sentimental, and also over the top when he needed to be.

Grub’s up.

Speaking of being Italian, Pig gets deep into the transformative power of food, and of the right meal. Has food always been an important part of your life? Definitely. I’ve never worked in restaurants. The closest thing was when I worked at a snack bar at a summer camp, which was very fun and also kind of a nightmare in its own way. I think most of the importance of food for me came from when my grandma lived with us. It was after my dad passed away, when I was a little kid, and she became this sort of old Italian cook in the house who was using food as this language of love and also as a sort of control. It had a lot wrapped up in it, this sense that we’re going to have family dinners to prove that everything is fine.

I think any Italian family is that way, but especially in that situation, having that presence come into the house when I was a kid, it made food quite charged for me. It was both a form of bonding and love, but also that control. That was very important to me. As I got older she taught me how to cook some things, and I became interested in that. I had a lot of friends who were great cooks and taught me how to do different things. I’m not an amazing cook, but I love cooking.

I love that act of making something that’s about to disappear. I think if you can be okay with that, and put a lot of time and care into that, it’s kind of a therapeutic thing to do. Accepting transience is a big part of cooking.

What’s your favorite dish to cook? I would say over the pandemic I really got into making lasagne. I had my grandma’s old hand-crank pasta maker, so I was enjoying making my own pasta and lasagne with that. I don’t know if I could pick one favorite dish, but that is definitely one that contributed quite a bit to putting on the Covid pounds.

Rob (Cage) and Amir (Alex Wolff) discuss their business relationship.

There’s a scene in the film where Rob and Amir go to a restaurant and Rob has a conversation with the chef there, who used to work for him, about the idea of losing our sense of identity when we give up on our dreams in order to fill this role that society expects of us. Is that something that you personally connected with? Yeah, people ask me a lot about what I think of the high-end cuisine world, and I have to say that I wasn’t trying to solely express that this world is garbage and phony. I was looking at it as another kind of art form. Any time you have an art form that combines someone’s personal passion with some sort of economy there are going to be conflicts to navigate. Whether you’re a painter, director, writer, whatever, those are going to be things you have to juggle. How true to yourself are you going to stay?

For myself, I’ve definitely found that when I try to focus on doing something that I care about, that’s kind of all I have control over and that’s what I should focus on. Pig was that for me. This isn’t the kind of script that you write where you’re expecting a big payday. It’s this weird movie that for some reason really means something to me.

The scene climaxes with Rob saying the line, “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about”. What about this movie exemplifies the things that you really care about in your life? It’s so many things, and even more things came from going through the process of actually making it and falling in love with Portland. It’s become even more than what it was initially intended to be. I mentioned earlier that my dad passed away when I was a kid, and the most personal aspect of the film for me was exploring that idea of what grief does to us long-term.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve been watching how my family members changed the way they interact with the world and built their perception of the world around some aspect of grief. It’s not those immediate effects of shock or sadness. It’s how those things ingrain into your worldview. I became much more conscious of how I was doing that in my own life. That was the deepest, most general thing that I was bringing to it, and that I was exploring personally through the film.

As far as specific things that I care about, I think I have all the classic things. I care about my family, and my friends. I care about the world, which is why this year has been so devastating. I don’t have one single pig. I think we all have a few different pigs in our lives.

Director Michael Sarnoski on the set of ‘Pig’.

Another scene that really stands out is the one in which Rob returns to his old home and sits with this young boy, having a conversation about a persimmon tree that used to be there. Talk to me about the significance of that moment for Rob. One of the things I love about that scene is that it seems so simple, kind of quiet and basic, but it’s getting into a lot of different things. I will say one thing about that scene. That was the first scene that we shot on the first day of filming. That kid was great, but filming with a child on your first day of your first feature was very much a moment of wondering what I had gotten myself into.

That scene does a few things. I won’t get into spoiler territory, but for starters he’s going back to his old house, so it’s his first attempt to really look at his past in the face, and to acknowledge that. I like that in that moment this is also one of the first times that we hear him speak romantically of food, because those things are very tethered to each other.

We get both the sense that there was a past, a personal path that he left behind, but intricately involved in that was how he interacted with food and his art. It’s the first time that we hear him acknowledge who he was in a way that’s okay. He tells the kid his name, and he’s acknowledging his identity that he’s been trying to hide from or ignore. Through doing that, it’s engaging with his passions and how that tethers everything together. I also thought it was cute explaining what persimmons were to a little kid.

I’ve got to ask you about the use of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m On Fire’ in a very meaningful moment. What made that the perfect song choice for that scene? Obviously, who’s singing it is very meaningful. I liked that song, though, because it’s different from the sappy direction we could have gone with that moment. There’s something very passionate about ‘I’m On Fire’, of course, and it’s a pretty sexual song. It’s really charged, but it also has this kind of ethereal quality to it that’s seductive in a non-sexual way. It washes over you, and it feels very mystical. This sounds so “film talk”-y, but I liked that meeting of that transcendent, abstract feeling with that immediate sense of passion and love and obsession.

Finally, what’s the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Probably Sam Raimi, his first Spider-Man movie. That was the first time I realized what directors do. I had a very strong association with Spider-Man growing up as a comic-book fan, and I was seeing how someone was filtering their own understanding of this character. Raimi coming from his horror background and being into the nitty gritty filmmaking with practical effects and everything, I got this understanding of how a director touches a film and shapes it.

Related content

Steve’s list of pigs in film

Melissa’s list of films featuring food, chefs, bakers, restaurants, cooking, hospitality, hotels, wineries, grocers

Rachel West discovers Nicolas Cage is her most-watched actor of all time

Letterboxd’s Official Top 50 of 2021—Jack Moulton’s list

Follow Mitchell on Letterboxd

‘Pig’ is currently in US cinemas via NEON, and available to buy/rent on digital.

[graffitibible]

Do you have any advice for writing or creating regularly? That’s hard for me and I’d like to get better at it.

it boils down to what works best for you personally tbh. i’ve got a system to write semi-regularly (or i did......restricted movement hours have kinda forced me to restructure that lol) and it works for me but that’s just how my brainyot works. i’m a routine-based creature so working writing into my routine was how i got myself to write semi-regularly. 

ive also had significant Brain Junk for most of my life and was gradually able to navigate how best to create in spite of that but im also like, medicated for it and the like so self-care was a factor. i couldnt create shit while i was too busy lying in a pool of my own filth having fits of paranoia about the nature of reality so i was hardly about to make myself try and create stuff when that wasnt even on my radar. 

i can share some of the things i do to keep myself writing though! like again this isn’t something that’s for sure gonna work for everybody cause everybodys wired differently but i hope some of it helps!

1. daily wordcount - i’ve mentioned this before but i have a daily wordcount that i do for my original fiction. i don’t apply the same standard to fic-writing because that risks making it an arbitrary barrier that puts too many numbers on my internal list. that being said, it’s very small. i make myself do 200 words per day. if that gets me going and writing more than that, awesome. if not, i still got a little bit done. 200 words is small, and it’s not overwhelming to catch up on if i miss a day. no matter how shitty im feeling i try to get in 200 words.

2. routine - since i’m a routine-based person by nature i basically found ways to finagle creative processes into all that. it’s not hard and fast because that kind of rigid structure makes me balk and i’m not that disciplined lol, but it’s usually something like “i have an hour-long lunch break at work and literally nothing else to do during it so i’ll write in that time period” or “i have thirty minutes of sitting by the stove making dinner so i’ll write until it’s ready”

3. momentum - or what my housemate fondly calls “The Juice.” if i have The Juice of inspiration i keep that going for as long as i can. if something’s not working for me i don’t scrap it or toss it right away. if i’m having trouble with a scene i make a note to myself and move on to a different one. example of this from my latest wip, which is part iv of mayhem

i hadnt worked out what was gonna go there and nothing was coming to me easy in the moment so i stuck the note there and kept going. my works are full of this shit. if i can’t think of a name or if there’s a statistic or a character i haven’t worked out yet i don’t wanna break my focus and momentum so i slap a note in the first draft and keep going. at a first draft stage the important thing is getting the words Out so it doesnt matter if theyre perfect. ill go back and fix them later, revise all i need to. first drafts dont need to be good, they just need to be there so i can spruce them up later.

on the flip side do not be like me and commit to this momentum so bad that you forget that you are a human being who needs to eat and consume liquids. i do that sometimes because of who i am as a person and it is a serious flaw of mine, do not be like this. sometimes getting some food in you is what you need to get The Juice flowing again and that sounds kinda gross and i am sorry

4. planning and hangups - this ones dependent on how you create. i forget where this analogy came from, but i’ve heard it said that some writers are architects who need a blueprint of where they’re going before they end up there and some writers are gardeners, who don’t need a set plan so much as they need to keep going. i’m definitely an architect - a lot of my works start out as bulletpoints of what scenes i wanna cover, what topics i wanna explore, etc. - though i have on occasion simply Written without any set destination, usually to force myself out of a creative slump. me being a big planner used to be one of the biggest barriers for me creatively because i’d spend hours agonizing over minute universe details and never start the dang story. this still happens from time to time. like heres what my organizational folder looks like wrt “pray for disaster”

that is not even all the files in there. why do i have two dictionaries. jesus. like i make these giant ass fuckin....tomes of stuff i like to keep track of, which i like to call “bibles” lol. except i could tell that getting too organized was gonna be an uphill battle with very little payoff so by the end i just made a “MISCELLANEOUS BULLSHIT” doc and for now i throw everything in there if it doesn’t fit into something like a dictionary or timeline

shit like this is why i like to just sit down and write without a clear destination in mind if i’m having writer’s block. that’s one of those things that goes hand in hand with the way i take advantage of my own momentum - if i reach a certain point where i’m just picking at details and not doing any writing i just go “ok motherfucker sit down and write shit. we will work out the details later.”

5. motivation - the ways i tend to motivate myself are weird so idk how true this is for anybody else but i’ve been writing for a pretty large part of my life. i went to college for english/creative writing and got a whole dang degree cause i still wanna make this my vocation somehow. one thing i cannot ever turn off is the writer part of my brain that’s going “oooh huh that’s not how i would’ve written that” in literally every piece of art i consume - tv, movies, books, songs, etc. sometimes that’s enough to inspire me into doing something on my own time. most of the time though if i’m feeling stumped i tend to crack open some of my personal favorite works, like books or fics that have really resonated with me, to fall in love with the art all over again. seeing the way different authors and artists do their craft helps me get in the zone of wanting to write more cause i get this nice feeling of “damn, these people really did those things with those words.....that’s fuckin amazing.....i wanna do that.” 

you do risk falling into the trap of “ugh i can’t write like them though” but that’s the beauty of writing. nobody can write the way anybody else does. ofc i can’t write like terry pratchett, only terry pratchett can write like terry pratchett, and if i compare myself to terry pratchett i’m only gonna get sad and mopey. but i can write in a way thats totally unique to me so i should not try to write like terry pratchett because that’s just impeding my own creative energy in the interest of trying to cookie-cut myself into someone else’s zone. only terry pratchett can write like terry pratchett but only i can write like zero graffitibible.

i hope that was helpful? like this is all stuff that works for me so no guarantee it’ll work for everyone else.

oh right and idk how many of yall are minors because let it be known that i do not condone underage drinking; i am an adult who occasionally will get crunk because i like to write drunk and edit sober. if you too are an adult who can legally consume alcohol feel free to write while buzzed because that is a nice way to write with zero fuckin inhibitions. i dont get blackout drunk or nothing just a little buzzed and sometimes what i write makes no sense but i am at times at my most productive at 2am while mildly buzzed. its a thing.

like again i’m not really an authority on this by any means - this is just what works for me. but if it works for you too, great!! find your zone and all that

[ego-driven-one-wing-angel]

I LOVE YOUR WRITING! What's your routine? Do you have one? Any tips on being a better writer?? THANKKSSS

I want to first say thank you for the compliment, it’s super sweet <3.

During Quarantine this is about a rough idea on what my daily schedule has been the past three weeks:

I wake up around 9-10 am. Depending on the type of sleep I’ve received. But I’m always up before 11 am.

I go and have a small breakfast after brushing my teeth. I’m pollotarian so I eat something small like a bagel with cream cheese or oatmeal and fruit. Something that’s filling and won’t waste away too fast. I also check emails and reply to asks on Tumblr.

At around 11:30 I do homework. I’m an honor University student who is going way over time. So I spend roughly three to four hours doing homework or studying. I try to write a bit in between breaks, but usually, when I’m in a homework mood I try to stay in a homework mood.

Around 3-4 I’ll have lunch. So this is where something heavier can come in like a few slices of pizza, a sandwich or two, something to last me until dinner. Or if I’m not that hungry I’ll eat something small as to not cause headaches. 

Usually, after 5 pm I’m done with homework for the day and can start to work on my writing. I’ll spend around 2-3 hours checking Tumblr, writing my original works, working on fanfics/imagines, whatever.

Around 8 or 9 I eat dinner with my parents. We eat late so this is pretty normal for me.

Then after dinner, I’ll spend some time checking school emails, checking Tumblr messages/asks, and check-in with my friends. 

I’ll work on Tumblr requests until about eleven or twelve am. (Right now as I write this it’s 11:40 pm)

I’ll finish out my last request for the night. I like to do first come first serve, so I go in order as I receive. So sometimes, like today, I have received around 32 requests and I try to get about five done in the timespan I have. SO DON’T WORRY IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN YOURS YET. I’m a slow writer and I apologize.

Anyway, after like, 12:30 I’ll turn my laptop off and go to bed. I’ll listen to music for about thirty minutes to wind down and get sleepy.

And I’m usually passed out around 1-1:30 am. And I repeat.

Some writing tips I can give are as follows:

Don’t stress about how you write. This is something I catch myself doing a lot, because I believe it has to perfect the first time I write something. DON’T DO THIS TO YOURSELF. It will cause you to give up. I’ve been postponing so many fanfictions because of this so please don’t stress about how you write it. Your goal should be to write it BEFORE worrying about it.

Always have an idea about where you want things to go. I wasn’t big on outlines when I was growing up, so believe me when I tell you OUTLINES WILL BE YOUR FRIEND. Especially in bigger picture books.

Get Grammarly. This baby will do wonders for you and is one of my best writing friends.

Try to find a time of day where you can sit and write something. In college, I learned your biological clock can help you find the best times to work on things. If you’re a morning person, don’t do things around night or late when you’re tired. Vice versa if you’re a night owl. Find a time where you’re most productive and stick to it.

Don’t make writing seem like a chore. If you don’t want to write something, simply don’t do it. Writing should be a fun hobby to relax you!

Keep your phone away from you! This is something I learned from experience. I usually keep my cell phone away while I’m writing/doing homework. Cell phones are an easy way to get distracted. One moment you’re sitting to write at noon and the next it’s eleven pm and you’ve been on YouTube. Don’t let this be you!

Practice. PRACTICE. PRACTICE. Just like any skill you need to work on it. You think I work up one day and just started writing!? YOU BET YOUR BEHIND I DID. But I was awful at it! CRINGE! I live my life by this quote so take it as you will:

“Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is your best.” St. Jerome

Think of writing as a movie playing in a way. Imagine the characters interacting, the dialogue, the camera angles, how they respond, where they put their hands. You won’t write it all, but you need to be able to see it first before you can show others.

Before you write, try inspirational quotes, Pinterest boards, draw, get your mind to relax so let yourself immerse in the world you’re creating.

Find your strengths and weaknesses. For example, I really suck at writing out more dynamic relationships sometimes, because I let the main storyline take over. If the romance is the focus, it needs to stay the focus. If your adventure is the main storyline, stick to it. Don’t be switching on the readers all the time because it can make them lose their focus on what’s more important.

RESEARCH. You don’t need to be googling the average rainfall in a town in Nigeria to be accurate, it helps, but not always needed especially if it’s minor details the reader will forget three chapters down the line. HOWEVER, if your story takes place in a small town in Nigeria, knowing the average weather patterns will be a big help. PLEASE DO THIS FOR PHYSICAL AND MENTAL DISORDERS. You have no idea how little people actually read about this type of stuff. Reading real accounts on certain disorders of illnesses will give a big insight into how it actually works. For example, I watched a few videos on how someone goes through narcoleptic attacks for a book I was working on not long ago. Not only did I do that, but I also rented out a few sleep psychology books and asked my Dr. Psych Advisor on certain illnesses and mental help on certain disorders. You don’t have to find a professional to answer your questions, but knowing a little can go a long ways.

It’s now 12:17 and I’m a bit tired, so if you have any more questions please feel free to ask! I’m always open to hearing the types of questions you have and I’m grateful you asked for any of my advice. 

THANKS

-KITTY

[metalgearkong]

Captain Marvel - Review

3/25/19

Directed by Anna Boden (Marvel Studios/Disney)

Captain Marvel is the 21st feature film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and wields the series’ first entry lead by a female hero. YouTubers and bratty bloggers across the internet have given this film a scathing reputation, even before showing in theaters. Say what you want about Brie Larson, I see her as an eager actress who is beginning to break into the mainstream, and is equally excited as she is nervous about being under the spotlight, carrying so much responsibility, and already under so much scrutiny. Somehow I’m charmed and endeared by her imperfection, especially in the PR realm, even if I don’t think I’d click with her in person. Captain Marvel is what you might expect from this franchise: a special effects-heavy character study about an iconic hero, cleanly connecting her to the greater MCU. 

Our protagonist is living her life as a Kree warrior under the name Vers. She has been a part of a Kree attack squad for 6 years, primarily fighting against the Skrull across the galaxy, but can’t recall her life before this time period. Chasing a Skrull to Earth (which had a classification name of M-55 or something to that degree) Vers attracts the attention of the retconed-named SHIELD. I say retconed because at the beginning of Iron Man which took place in 2010, and Captain Marvel taking place in 1995, it doesn’t make sense why they didn’t have an acronym for SHIELD in 2010 but call it “SHIELD” way back in 1995. Vers meets a younger Phil Coulson and Nick Fury, as they begin to learn who she is and where she came from. Vers becomes friends with Fury fairly quickly and easily for an extra-terrestrial (in my opinion), or does Fury know she’s human, despite her supernatural abilities and origin? I thought her adapting so easily felt a little generic and lazy for the script, even if she is a human down to the DNA.

This is a “hero’s journey” origins story of the character leading the MCU heroes beyond Avengers: Endgame. That alone relieves a lot of the tension of the film, as we’re all but guaranteed she will come out alive and on top, but this is a minor complaint I have about a lot of the MCU films, and something that is an inherit problem in a shared universe format. However, as stated, this is not the cynical cash-grab many fragile egoed men would have you believe online. I am proud the MCU now has a leading female hero, and one who doesn’t predominantly define herself with sexualizaiton, or has a story centered around a relationship. She feels like she could have been male or female (for the most part), which is exactly how Elen Ripley was originally written for the Alien franchise. Her forgotten past certainly integrates struggles of a woman in a predominantly man’s world (the US Air Force) but this was the only aspect of her story what was fundamentally feminine. Either way, Vers realizes she’s a human, and used to be named Carol Danvers, and suffered an accident that gave her energy powers and amnesia.

What I wanted more clarification on are who the Kree truly are, and not just their job, but fundamentally what makes someone a Kree. Carol is obviously a human, but her squad clearly contains other humans and non humans. Were the Kree just a joint force where any race could join? If so, what would keep Carol from learning about Earth knowing she and other Kree were humans? What makes all Kree bleed blue if they’re from different races? Why was Earth treated as such a mystery, especially when the dominant race is identical to herself and certain squad mates? Its these sorts of details, and details mentioned before, that kept me from being immersed fully in this movie, and wish they were better hammered out in the script. I was glad the Skrull, or at least primary Skrulls seen in the movie, were people wearing make up and masks, and not yet another CGI creation. Ben Mendelsohn plays the Skrull leader Talos, and its yet another charming yet genuine role by one of my favorite Auzzie actors. Talos’ personal story is one of the better aspects of the film, and I wish he and his race got more attention than they did.

Ironically, the more powerful Carol gets, and the more of her powers she discovers, the less interesting the action got. I liked seeing her struggle with her emotions and learn to use her unique powers wisely at the beginning of the film. Once she unlocked her full potential later on, I may have liked the triumphant moment, but seeing a CGI girl shooting energy blasts and flying through space was less tense than the stunt and martial arts-centered fights earlier in the movie. The technology to de-age Samuel L. Jackson is excellent, as its easy to forget the man is in his 70′s. Phil Coulson’s effects don’t look quite as good unfortunately, but he has far less screen time. I loved Carol’s smaller "fish out of water" moments, and her somewhat sarcastic and upbeat personality, even if she did cross the line into being straight up rude in one or two scenes (her personality needs some consistency). Her nod to the late great Stan Lee also marked a small, but satisfying final cameo for the Marvel founder. I loved seeing Carol interrogate people making sure they weren’t a Skrull and her going too far on occasion I found charming and funny. 

I can’t say how relieved I was to discover this entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn’t the SJW propaganda the internet was making it out to be. Captain Marvel may not be a top tier Marvel movie, but it serves as a satisfying sci-fi/superhero origins story, leaving a lot of potential for the future. While Carol Danvers’ personality did teeter precariously between clever and overly cocky some of the time, I chalk it up to her finding who she is as a person both personally, and figuratively as the writers of the film. I have no doubt her sequels movies and presence in future cross-overs will round out her abilities, limitations, and personality exactly as we’ve seen with the legacy characters. I’m excited to see what lies for her onward, even if the film wasn’t as groundbreaking as they wanted it to be, and if the script was missing some important details as well. I’m also hoping deeply that Carol Danvers isn’t a human deus-ex-machina for defeating Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, and somehow the plan to reverse the “snap” and putting down the purple giant remains complex, nuanced, and meaningful.

6/10

[so-shiny-so-chrome]

Witness: Weirdness_Unlimited

Creator name (AO3): Weirdness_Unlimited

Creator name (Tumblr): Burn-your-face-upon-the-chrome

Link to creator works: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Weirdness_Unlimited/works

Q: Why the Mad Max Fandom?

A: In the Mad Max universe, anything that is completely absurd and outrageous is represented as the norm. Leather fetish gear? Oh, that's just the security guard uniform at Bartertown. Those guys over there are wearing black and white face paint? No, you're not at an ICP concert, those are War Boys, also run. Whoa, there are acrobats being flung through the air on poles attached to moving vehicles! No worries, that's just any Tuesday in Gas Town. I love this fandom because pretty much any nonsense my skull meat can come up with, as long as the mechanics of it work, I can throw it into my fics and not a single person will bat an eye. As a matter of fact, the weirder, the better. 

Q: What do you think are some defining aspects of your work? Do you have a style? Recurrent themes?

A: Life is gross, humans do gross things, and the environment around you could not care less about any of your moral dilemmas. I suppose you can say my style is a lack of it. I like things straight forward and I know this characteristic often weakens any aesthetic appeal to my writing. “To Love Reptiles” reads from Slit's perspective the same way a radio manual does but with a lot more cursing. I try not to make it too complicated to digest. I'd like for people to be able to fill in any blanks with their own interpretation of the situation and then move on to the next. 

Themes though, I go heavy on themes. The main theme is interpersonal relationships, coping with failure within them, and personal growth. Other themes include coping with mental illness, codependency, hunger, greed, warfare, trauma, etc.  

Q: Which of your works was the most fun to create? The most difficult? Which is your most popular? Most successful? Your favourite overall?

A: The most fun work of my own, by far, has been “To Love Reptiles.” It has also been the most popular, most successful, and my most favourite. The most difficult has been an original work with no working title. I can't give away much about this original piece but it has to do with local myths and survival in the wilderness. I quit working on the rough manuscript when my grandmother passed away several years ago. I'll be picking it up again soon. It may turn up on AO3 in the next three or four years.

Q: How do you like your wasteland? Gritty? Hopeful? Campy? Soft? Why?/

A: Gritty but hopeful, I think. The wasteland is nasty but humans need hope, right?

Q: Walk us through your creative process from idea to finished product. What's your prefered environment for creating? How do you get through rough patches?

A: Alright, so that's an interesting question with a pretty messy answer but I'll try to make it brisk.   Step 1: I start with a summary of the story as a whole with a point A (the beginning) and a point B (the end). Step 2: I break that summary down and and fill it out with events that can ferry the characters from the start of the story to the finish on a drawn timeline to keep things in chronological order. I also have note cards. I break this down further into named chapters. This can take a while. Step 3: I summarize each of those chapters to figure out if this story needs more than one installment. It depends out how the series of events land and how many minor arcs are included with the main arc/objective. Sprinkle some drama in there, scrap some unnecessary things, narrow an installment down to thirty (30) chapters at maximum. Step 4: I summarize individual scenes within the chapters and hack out important dialog. This takes weeks. There's typically between four and ten scenes per chapter. Also more note cards. Step 5: I try to flesh out one scene per day. (key word: Try) 

 I get the most writing done in the morning over coffee and before work. I usually sit at the breakfast table with my phone and spit out about 500-ish words before my husband wakes up. I'll write intermittently throughout the day. Lately I haven't been writing much because of holiday junk and winter being kind of a bummer. 

 If I'm in a rough patch, I can break though it by sitting in a room with no internet access and forcing myself to scratch out a scene or two in a notepad. Usually these notepad scribbles are so awful that they get torn out and chucked in the waste bin but the next day I'm keen to do the job right. 

Q: What (if any) music do you listen to for help getting those creative juices flowing?

A: Ambient sound, white noise, or nothing. I do listen to music and there's a lot of songs I associate with stories, fics, characters. Tove Lo is a big one for Dune. Most of the time I find that music with lyrics or a high tempo is distracting if I'm in the act of writing something but it can be a source of inspiration separately. 

Q: How do you keep track of all the details as you're writing? How do you keep details consistent in your works? How do you fact-check your writing?

A: I have a little memo pad with numbered facts that do not change at any point through the story. These are kinda the cardinal rules. I can't tell you the rules because they contain spoilers. After the “RULES” there are miscellaneous details that I'd like to remember in case they come up later. Things like birthmarks, scar placement, mannerisms, things I've hinted at without exposition that will need to be revealed later.

I fact check by googling stuff and falling down research holes for several hours until I forget what I was doing. EVENTUALLY I'll come back to writing and realize that's why there are things in my search history that probably have me on some kind of government watch list.

Q: What motivates your writing?

A: My motivation. Real talk? For AAL it's to get to a particular scene in the planned third installment. Scene thirteen in chapter seven. I know that answers exactly nothing and is weirdly specific but... yes. Other works of mine, I'm motivated by the idea that some of my ideas might entertain someone out there, even if it's just one someone then I've succeeded.

Q: What is your biggest challenge as a creator?

A: Time management. I have a lot of hobbies and finding time for individual projects is... Hard. I made a boredom jar that lets me pick an unfinished task/project/piece at random to do whenever I'm bored so that I can stop myself from starting anything new when my apartment is already full of unfinished junk.

Q: How have you grown as a creator through your participation in the Mad Max Fandom? How has your work changed? Have you learned anything about yourself?

A: Yes. My organizational skills have improved by miles and my attention span is better focused. Grammatically my work has undergone general improvement.  

Learned anything about myself? Hmm, I learned that my opinion of what is canon and what makes good fan fiction are two completely different things. If you ask me anything specific about the Mad Max franchise you will probably get both opinions. As an example: Does Maxosa make for good fan fiction? Heck Yeah! Will canon Max Rockatansky or Furiosa ever be mentally and emotionally healed enough to actually be in a relationship? Probably not and that's okay. I can happily read Max and Furi getting cuddly and domestic and enjoy the heck out of another writer's interpretation of these two overcoming the hurdles of their respective traumas. I can do this knowing full well that Max and Furiosa probably never canonically saw each other again after the closing scene of Fury Road. I'm okay with this because that's the magic of fandom and why I love it.

Q: Which character do you relate to the most, and how does that affect your approach to that character? Is someone else your favourite to portray? How has your understanding of these characters grown through portraying them?

A: I relate to Max the most, and I think the reason I haven't yet published anything written from his perspective is because he'd be the most difficult to write without touching on my own fears and inadequacies too much. Max is not interested in being involved with the dramas of anyone else's life. He's already seen too much turmoil and had a hand in it too many times to actively seek people and their inherent problems, however, when presented with zero alternative he'll do what needs to be done and suffer though forming new attachments to very mortal people who may drop dead at any minute. He isn't comfortable with the process of forming attachments and he'd rather avoid it. He doesn't want another ghost. At least that's my interpretation of him. 

 Slit, remarkably, is my favorite to write for in spite of the fact that I don't relate to him in any way and my interpretation of his portrayal in the film is, simply put, a blunt edged euphemism for abusive relationships. He's just... a guilty pleasure to examine and write. I blame my fondness on the stunning character design and Josh Helman's energy on screen. The character says and does ridiculous things and it's just hilarious to watch Slit dig his own grave and humiliate himself. Case and point: I've got his boot! My understanding of Slit has grown through writing about him. He's probably (canonically) deeply insecure and his way of thinking very toxic and self focused. There's gotta be trauma there (I took massive creative license in that area) and a whole host of personal issues that explain his behavior, but will never excuse it. Does that make good fan fiction??? Parts of it do, the rest has to be that very human ability to grow and improve, although I don't think he'd have that opportunity in canon or accept any form of assistance... If he'd lived. 

Q: Do you ever self-insert, even accidentally?

A: I think you kind of have to self-insert to a point. Writing tends to involve exaggerating your own experiences and the imagined interactions in your own head in order to make the experiences of the characters relatable. I'd rather not examine every individual facet of the issue but yes, I think Dune is an unintentional self-insert to cope with health problems before I was consciously aware of what I was coping with and since that realization, lately, she's a lot harder to write. 

Q: Do you have any favourite relationships to portray? What interests you about them?Honestly? Close platonic friendship. Emotional intimacy is interesting. I draw a lot of inspiration for friendship in fiction from Mulder and Scully in early seasons of The X-files.

Q: How does your work for the fandom change how you look at the source material?

A: I see more minor details and the context of silent interactions. Some of these details are unsettling, some of them are so subtle and subliminal that they're easily missed when you watch the films, especially Fury Road. Oddly enough, I'm a lot more- Ah whats the word? Not quite critical of but unnerved by my own observations of Capable's relationship with Nux. I'm not sure why. It could be that I'm misinterpreting the actress's tone or George Miller vision/direction, but I watch the movie now and find that the way Capable looks at and talks about Nux so intensely makes me uneasy. The previous is just an example among many that I've spat out so far, it's not important.

Q: Do you prefer to create in one defined chronology or do your works stand alone? Why or why not?

A: Everything I write within the Mad Max fandom with the exception of collaborative works will probably be linked together and consistent with one another because that means less to remember and fewer mix-ups.

Q: To break or not to break canon? Why?

A: If you have to, break it. I'll read it. I like my fandom unlimited, baby. In my own works I try to keep with canon somewhat but I resurrect a lot of characters who almost certainly died because if I didn't, it would really only leave seven (I think) named characters with dialog who did not die in Fury Road. (The surviving women of the Many Mothers weren't named.)

Q: Share some headcanons:

A: 1) Max has intestinal parasites. He ate a live (two headed) lizard in the first thirty seconds of Fury Road. You really really really should not do that. 

 2) Furiosa didn't want to kill Ace. She could have just blown his head off instead of punching him in the face with a pistol. She didn't shoot him. 

 3) Ace did not go under the wheels. Foxy Grandpa lives. 

 4) Miss Giddy is also alive somewhere 

 5) Actually, most people in the wasteland probably have intestinal parasites. 

Q: If you work with OCs walk us through your process for creating them. Who are some of your favourites?

A: My original characters tend to create themselves. I don't know how they do it, they kinda just decide for themselves for better or worse what they'll look like and how they'll behave. Dune was an accident and the “About a Lizard” series wasn't supposed to happen at all. It was supposed to be a one-shot word dump of what Slit's final moments might have looked like. Slit was supposed to die in a fleeting but intense two seconds of delusions about Valkyries and Valhalla... And then be eaten by a scavenger cannibal. The whole thing kind of just happened on the fly. Ardith, Phil/Crank, Featherknife, Bones, and the kids were also accidental. I had no idea where I was going with the encounter with Crow Fishermen. They just popped into existence of their own will and the rest is history. The only original characters that have been planned and designed well beforehand have been villains. This probably says something about me as a writer though I'm not sure what. 

Q: When creating a new character for the AAL series, how do you approach their first interactions with your main characters?

A: The first thing I ask is “What does this scene need” and sometimes it needs a new character for villainy or friendly acquaintance reasons or for a skill-set the main characters do not posses. New characters have a habit of changing a chapter or making it much longer than intended. First interactions with Slit probably won't surprise anyone. He phases through distrust to dislike to begrudged cooperation and from there he's either on his way back to dislike or entering the tolerance phase. Beyond the tolerance phase is... The Complicated Zone. The Complicated Zone is where Nux and Dune are situated. Dune has two basic instincts with people: Should I shoot you? Or should I befriend you? Bizarrely, being friendly is the weirder option in the wastes. Shooting is almost always a consideration if she's taken by surprise.

Q: If you create original works, how do those compare to your fan works?

A: My original works are probably darker and deal more with modern problems. I turn to fan fiction for fun and to indirectly work through things.

Q: Who are some works by other creators inside and outside of the fandom that have influenced your work?

A: A lot of the fandom, too many names to name but one stands out and I can't remember their name or the title of their work. It was about Ace growing up and there was a dingo and a young Miss Giddy. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, please help. I've been looking for this fic for ages.

Q: Is there a specific author(s) that inspired your work when you began writing TLR?

A: I don't think any specific author inspired me while I began TLR but The Dark Half by Stephen King is one of my favorites and I recall re-reading it shortly before getting deep into fan writing. I may even have unconsciously plagiarized a few lines off that book. In my latest attempt to re-read that novel I'm feeling like there's a lot of Thad Beaumont in my portrayal of Slit.

Q: What advice can you give someone who is struggling to make their own works more interesting, compelling, cohesive, etc.? 

A: Don't be afraid to write things that are too soft or too dark or too this or too that. Sometimes readers crave that stuff that makes us feel warm and safe and sometimes we're also here for things that make us wonder how the @!#$% the characters will ever recover or IF they will ever recover. The real world is full of all sorts of feelings, situations, serendipitous coincidences. Take us down whatever funky road you got! You're the driver, you decide. Your fic is your world. Write WILD things sometimes because it's fun. 

Q: Have you visited or do you plan to visit Australia, Wasteland Weekend, or other Mad Max place?

A: I would love to take a trip to Australia one day to paint scenery in oils but that predates my time in MM fandom. I really want to go to Wasteland Weekend in the next two years but finances, necessities, costumes, etc need to be sorted out first.

Q: Tell us about a current WIP or planned project.

A: Well, I'm buying up model car kits to make little Mad Max cars for nerd purposes.

Thank you @burn-your-face-upon-the-chrome

[leta-the-strange]

A far too long, fever-induced Unpopular Opinion, likely first of many, (keeping in mind that is it an opinion and not expressed at all in mean spirit): The casting/character ages in Fantastic Beasts.

Again, this is likely a wildly unpopular opinion because I’ve never come across anyone who has even touched slightly on the subject, but it is an, admittedly minor, detail that got me thinking a little. Again, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter a great deal and I’m sure I’m still going to enjoy the series either way but it’s just a personal opinion I’ve had nonetheless.

I do understand the organic nature of film and the flexibility you need to allow. Sometimes the character will be pitched or imagined as a certain age, but it doesn’t translate into film well (think LOTR or GOT, etc) or the casting directors like an actor who is obviously much younger or older so much that it trumps the desired age bracket. And most times, it is purposely done that way especially in teen-based movies and tv shows (90210, Smallville, Gossip Girl, PLL, etc, etc) which lead to wildly inaccurate expectations of what teenagers look and act like (in my high school experience anyway). Sometimes for legal and professional reasons, its more convenient to have adult actors portray younger characters. 

Often pre-imagined characters evolve and change to fit the actor that is set to portray them whether it be gender, race, age, hair colour, eye colour, relationships, characterisation, etc. Sometimes this is celebrated, goes unnoticed or is a disappointment.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I understand that it comes down to a matter of priorities.

Neville, Petunia and Dudley were all blondes in the books. Did it really matter that the actors weren’t (and didn’t dye their hair for the role?) IMO, nah not really. I know a lot of people still can’t forgive the ‘you have your mothers eyes’ issue. I can. Partially. Personally, I didn’t mind Harry’s signature “green as a fresh pickled toad” eyes being blue in the film because Daniel Radcliffe couldn’t wear the contacts. Only auditioning actors with green eyes, the rarest eye colour on the planet, would exclude a lot of talented actors and potentially perfect Harry’s. I don’t believe green eyes were essential to Harry’s character (but I can’t speak for everyone), I think there were more important qualities. Geraldine Somerville, who played the older Lily Potter, also had blue eyes. But then, after making a huge deal over Harry having his mothers’ eyes, they cast young Lily, with whom they do close up, full face scenes of, with big brown eyes. I’m not saying she didn’t do an excellent job – she did wonderfully. I suppose it was just a strange decision in the eyes (pun not intended) of a lot of fans that the casting of a two or so minute role precluded what seemed to be such an integral theme that had been woven through each book and movie so frequently. This is just an example of the questionable, dare I say for lack of a better word ‘lazy’, ‘just imagine for the sake of the plot that he/she…’ attitude that I get from HP/FB at times.

Getting back on the topic of age, one thing I did have a problem with in HP was James and Lily’s age. I don’t think I’m entirely alone in this. 21 seemed old when I was a wee one reading Harry Potter for the first time. It was only when I got older that I realised how young they were and how it added quite fundamentally to the tragedy of their short life and death. It was heartbreaking either way, don’t get me wrong, but seeing (an actual 21-year-old actor portraying) a 21-year-old young mother slain in the first flashback in Philosophers Stone would have been truly shocking. It would also add to the tragic aftermaths of Sirius and Remus too. However, I did later realise that this was probably due to having to match Alan Rickman’s casting as Snape, and later, Gary Oldman and David Thewlis (which I think were all fantastic in their roles). So, they sacrificed the canonical age of James and Lily for the casting of Snape and the Marauders (possibly). Whether this was something the fans agree or not, they prioritised what was most important, in their eyes, to the film. But then, after all of that, for some reason they keep James and Lily’s age of death as 21 on their gravestone??? Therefore, casting two barely-speaking roles to a 43 and 34-year-old who they expect the film going audience to believe are 21??? I assumed that when they did the full casting and knew that Alan Rickman, Gary Oldman and David Thewlis would look far too old for their long-deceased classmate counterparts they would just make the characters older in the films but now I think they wanted to keep film Snape, Remus and Sirius in their early to mid (and eventually late, by the end of the books) thirties and didn’t want it to look painfully obvious. I think a lot of films and tv shows do this to try and pull off the age differences. A 27-year-old actor portraying a ‘high school student’ can often pull it off until you stick them next to a real life 15-year-old. I like to believe it’s that or something other than lazy writing but I can’t know for sure. 

This brings us to my current thoughts about Fantastic Beasts which has some of the most wildly strange actor vs character casting age I’ve seen in some time. As a quick refresher (or if you don’t know…) here are the actors ages vs what their characters age is (if I’m not mistaken)...

 Eddie Redmayne - 36 / Newt Scamander – 29

Zoë Kravitz – 29 / Leta Lestrange - 29 (probably given that she was in the same year as Newt)

Ezra Miller – 26 / Credence Barebone - 18 (from an interview but still unconfirmed from filmmakers)

Katherine Waterston – 38 / Porpentina Goldstein - 25

Alison Sudol – 33 / Queenie Goldstein – early 20’s/hopefully not late teens (she’s younger than her 25-year-old sister so 24 at the absolute most but I’d say younger given the dynamic). I haven’t found a confirmed age anywhere.   

Dan Fogler – 42 / Jacob Kowalski – 26

Callum Turner – 28 / Theseus Scamander – 37

 Try and keep in mind that there is no mean spirit intended in my opinion on this. My opinion on the acting ability of each of these people isn’t necessarily relevant to this particular discussion though I do commend actors who can convincingly pull off different ages though I certainly can’t fault actors who can’t as there is only so much you can do sometimes. This is purely about what is most important – character or actor – and the relevance of it.

Eddie Redmayne, in my opinion, seems to have features that allow him quite an amount of leeway in terms of age. He starred in the mini series based off one of my favourite books, Pillars of the Earth (definitely an underrated series I heartily recommended) where he portrays his character as a teen all the way up to a man in his forties/fifties and, in my opinion, is quite believable. I think I have more trouble believing that Eddie Redmayne is 36 than I do believing Newt Scamander is 29/30 (as his birthday is in February, I’m assuming he is 30 during Crimes of Grindelwald) and even if that weren’t the case, I think a six-year difference at those ages can be neither here nor there with some people especially with the right clothes, mannerisms, etc...

Zoë Kravitz – hold on to your hats, a 29-year-old playing a 29-year-old. I haven’t done my in-depth research on the other actors not aforementioned, but I believe this may be the only occurrence of this happening in this film series.

Ezra Miller said that Credence was 18 in an interview. This is probably true, and I would’ve guessed around that age anyway. I think I double checked it on the characters wiki and it matched. As a side note, as a general rule I don’t tend to take the actors words as gospel truth until its confirmed by the writer or director. I feel like, in this film series, there are some actors that get maybe somewhat carried away and speculate rather a lot about their character and sometimes it isn’t entirely accurate. Of course, actors are usually allowed some creative control over their characters and often get little titbits about their past/future that help with their portrayal, but I have noticed some actors’ thoughts about their character don’t add up at all to what the filmmakers have also said and I know which side wins out. A lot of actors are shocked/surprised/disappointed/elated when they find out developments about their character - not even they always know what’s around the corner and sometimes what they think isn’t necessarily true. No matter how deserving, creative or insightful they are about their character, it doesn’t solely belong to them. I think a lot of fans forget this. They go on about ‘so and so said this’ and ‘so and so literally said…’ while blatantly disregarding anything J.K or the FB filmmakers say and again, I know which ones actually run the show. This has nothing to do with Ezra, to be honest, it’s just a quick observation I’ve noticed.  I’m so off topic! Anyway, Credence I would’ve put as a late teen/20-year-old at most from his character and I think Ezra has one of those faces that, like many, can float around in the weird young adolescence stage that you can can’t quite pinpoint whether they’re late teens or mid-twenties (I’m in university and pretty much anyone between 18-27ish is indistinguishable to me). Either way he’d be carded at the uni bar. I think if I met a modern-day Credence Barebone I wouldn’t think twice if he told me he was 18.

Katherine Waterston is the one I am most anxious writing about and the one I’m sure a lot of people are cocked and ready to come after me about. She’s probably also one of my two biggest irks with the age issue. Just to get this out the way, I am not the biggest Tina fan (yet). At first, it was casual indifference. I didn’t (and don’t) hate her, I just didn’t really take to her in the first film (I already have hope that the new film may sway me). It really started as simply as that. I will write a separate post on all my thoughts revolving around this because there are many. All I will say is that if you don’t love Tina or ship Newtina based on the first film, it is a very cruel and vicious fandom to be part of. At least in my experience. But that’s a different issue. Let me say firstly that I think Katherine Waterston is very beautiful and I would be happy to look like that at 38 (obviously not the same as she is very Caucasian and I’m a nut-brown Maori, but you get my point). Obviously, I don’t know how the story will unravel and how important it is but was it absolutely necessary that Tina had to be 25? I think 30 would have been passable. Or even better, she could’ve been a little (or however much) older than Newt? Normalising relationships where the woman is older than the man is something I’m here for (my sister is two years older than her boyfriend – 19 and 21 – and it’s so controversial to people??? But I know lots of relationships in the reversal). That would’ve been my ideal scenario if they had Tina originally set for 25 but discovered they really loved Katherine Waterston and decided it would be inconsequential if they wrote Tina a bit older than originally planned. However, I do think it might be the other way around. Maybe it is important that Tina is 25. This might be one of the reasons why I haven’t yet meshed with this character or either of the Goldsteins for that matter. I do admit that I forget that they are in their early and mid-twenties. I do forget that Tina is (apparently) only 25. I honestly believe that I would have liked – or at least had a lot more understanding and sympathy – for Tina’s character had it been obvious she was so young. I will explain more thoroughly in the separate post I’ll eventually write that, had FB been a book before a movie, I would likely have really enjoyed book!Tina. Please understand this particular opinion isn’t about the actor. I’m just saying that I, personally, feel like it was easy to lose sight of the fact that this character is only 25 when the actor playing her is nearly forty years old. Please don’t twist this and interpret it to being me ‘coming after’ the actor. I don’t know why age is regarded as such an insult. It’s the most beautiful, natural thing. Katherine Waterston is 38. There’s nothing wrong with that. She’s healthy and pretty and could easily pass for younger if she so desired. But again, I think sometimes why I don’t find Tina endearing at all (yet) is because I see (not in terms of the actor, the character) a 38-year-old (or round about) woman acting like a 25-year-old. This might be even harder for me to combat in the next film as she is supposed to be quite younger than newcomers Theseus and Leta (ridiculously younger than Theseus) whose actors are both twenty-somethings joining Ezra as the babies of the cast. Don’t come at me about insulting her about her age. Carmen Ejogo is 45 and she cancelled everyone in FBWTFT. A lot of people grow more and more beautiful with age. Older doesn’t mean less beautiful so let’s put that to rest immediately.

Alison Sudol looks like a fucking earth angel and she was a great Queenie. I loved Queenie’s character. Did I love Queenie as a person? No. There is a difference – again, that ties in with what I’ll eventually write about my feelings about those two. I don’t know Queenie’s age, but she is younger than Tina so at the absolute most she would be 24 but I would wager given the big-little sister dynamic they seem to be following, there’s likely more than a year’s difference. I wouldn’t have thought Queenie was so young had I not known otherwise. There are some who find her character a little more annoying than cute, but I think if she were portrayed by someone who was in fact in their early twenties, she probably wouldn’t have come across as so naïve and a little airy. A lot of development occurs in your twenties and there is a tremendous amount of personal growth by the time you hit thirty. The same issue with Tina I suppose. You can forgive a lot of Queenie’s quirks when you remember how young she is but sometimes it’s easy to forget when physically she seems older. I will have to keep in mind how young and impressionable she is still while watching her actions in Crimes of Grindelwald because again, I think I forget sometimes.

I had no idea how old Jacob was, admittedly. I guessed anywhere between 32-40 (I assumed Jacob and Queenie had a bit of an age gap either way) but I was way off. Apparently, he’s 26. My head is in my hands at this point. I know Jacob’s been through a lot (and I’m not saying Dan Fogler isn’t a cutie!) but if some guy told me he was 26 and I arranged to meet him and Jacob Kowalski (again, based on first impressions. I love Jacob) walked in, I’m calling the fucking police. There is no way he is TWENTY-SIX. I love Jacob and Newts relationship, but I never saw Jacob as being the younger one. The fact that he is younger than Newt, Leta and Theseus (again! 11 years younger than Theseus!) when he looks like he could be their fucking uncle is unreal. I don’t really know why they made Jacob so ludicrously young when there was honestly, in this case, no need. I had to track down his age because it had zero (0) relevance to the film. Only thing I can think of is maybe to make his relationship with Queenie not come across as creepy? Who knows. 

This one really hurts me. Theseus, my poor boy. The FB team really are just gonna swing around and do THAT. Callum Turner is, in my opinion, a great Theseus from what I’ve seen so far. From interviews, it looks like he adores Zoë and he has great chemistry with Eddie. They’ve also done well to find an actor with similar physical characteristics and mannerisms as Eddie Redmayne making him a very believable casting for Newt’s brother. Though later it was revealed that Theseus is supposed to be eight years older than Newt making Theseus 37/38 which I think was completely unexpected for most people. We knew from the first film that Newt was the youngest brother and even with Callum Turner only being 28, I thought with the right clothes and such they could make him look older – or at least old enough to look like he could pass as Newt’s older brother. But nearly forty? With the kind of trauma Theseus has been through not to mention the likely constant drama of his troublesome brother and fiancée (and his brothers’ new friends and extremely messed up future brother-in-law)? Does he exfoliate with the Philosopher’s Stone? Drop that skin case routine, Theseus. Again, I don’t know what the film is going to bring. Perhaps Theseus must be significantly older than Newt for plot related reasons. Maybe for the sake of the story, he had to be old enough to not attend school with Newt, or maybe their father died early on and Theseus had to grow up quickly to fill a father figure void (that could explain the complicated nature of their relationship) or it might be for any number of reasons. My only hope is that it is specifically relevant to his character and not an inconsequential detail that could easily have been adjusted when they cast such a young actor. It can be a risk having a cast of actors in their thirties and forties playing a cast of twenty-somethings convincingly, and I’ve mentioned why, but it can be pulled off though I think it’s a strange move casting an actual twenty-something year old, one of the youngest cast members, to play a character 10+ years older than some of the oldest cast members characters. I think, like with the Goldstein’s, I will have to be constantly reminding myself when understanding the character that Theseus is that much older than Newt and Leta and even more so than Tina, Queenie and Jacob. 

Again, I’m not saying the actors haven’t done a good job with their respective roles, it’s just my 4am cough medicine powered thoughts on how they’ve made some interesting choices regarding what age they’ve kept the characters vs the actors real life ages and how it, for me at least, has affected the way I’ve interpreted the characters and would I feel any different about them had they made the characters similar ages to their actors or vice versa. I might be the only person who has thought about it and it’s not even a complaint on the cast itself (it’s a great collection of actors), it’s just an observation not at all eloquently put by a flu-riddled person. 

[missblanchette]

Long Dream [5/7]

Series: Joker Game

Characters: Hatano/Jitsui; special guest star appearance: Tazaki

Rating: PG (for language)

Summary: Hatano wasn’t one to read shoujo manga, but there was something familiar about this mangaka named Kunio.

Words: 4947 + bonus

Notes: Modern AU/Reincarnation AU; Spin off to Déjà Vu (KamiMiyo); *wheezes* I promised an update in November, so here we are...!! Sorry for the long wait, life got in the way + writer’s block, but it’s done TwT

Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | You can read this on AO3! Thank you guys for your patience and reading; I hope you enjoy~! ☆ﾐ(o*･ω･)ﾉ

Ch. 5 - Hatano III: Days of Suffering 

As hazy as his recollections may be, Hatano recognized this room. Though perhaps it wasn't the room itself, but whom sat on the other end of it. The hardwood floors were the same as any, just as the beige walls and wooden shelves that lined every other room were. But he could pick out that familiar head of black hair from anywhere, even if facing away from him.

Hatano couldn't recall why he'd entered the room nor why he'd sought Jitsui out in the first place, but a mischievous grin grew on his face. As quietly as possible, he crept into the room and stopped short behind Jitsui. He waited one second, two, three --

"Boo."

Slamming his hands onto Jitsui's shoulders, Jitsui hardly reacted save for the quirk of his body.

"Can't you let me have my fun?" Hatano said, feigning annoyance. Jitsui's next words were lost on him, though, as he took a seat next to him. But his body knew the act by heart and went through the motions as usual: he scoffed, placing his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his seat.

"That's an insult if I've heard one."

"Don't worry --" Jitsui's lips read. "You --"

"Gee, thanks."

The conversation dipped into a lull, which allowed Hatano to observe him. Even if he couldn't make out his features, he'd have to be blind not to notice how different Jitsui appeared. The black frames he wore were the most obvious point, but it was also in the the way he held himself (shrinking inwards, not refined and professional) and the way he'd marked his place in the book he held (bookmarked, not doggy-eared). And maybe, just maybe, the looming sense of separation didn't help the matter either.

"The glasses look suits you," Hatano said finally.

"You --" Jitsui took them off his face, running a hand through his hair. Just like that, the Jitsui he'd always known sat before him.

"Mhm, fits a bookworm like you." He glanced at the book that rested on Jitsui's lap. "Mythology? Didn't think you were into that."

"-- not --" Jitsui placed the glasses on the table beside them. "-- Kunio --"

The name brought about a sense of sorrow that Hatano couldn't quite place, one that he pushed back immediately as soon as it sprung up.

"Yeah? Then what does Kunio think of it?"

"Enjoyable --"

"I'll take your word on that, but --" He grabbed the glasses, pushing them high up the bridge of his nose, and brushed his bangs up. "-- maybe Shimano would."

Without missing a beat, Jitsui curled into himself like a shrinking violet. Even the way he thumbed the book matched the demeanor he now took on, handling it with gentleness.

“-- sure?”

"Try me."

Writing off the gaps in the tale as his incomplete memories would've been an easy lie; the myth Jitsui -- Kunio, rather -- told didn't interest Hatano in the slightest. But he wouldn't be a very good actor, much less a spy, if he couldn't pretend to be interested, so Hatano -- acting as Shimano -- listened to the Egyptian tale of Osiris and Isis. From what he could glean, they'd been lovers separated by Osiris' death. Isis, distraught, searched for Osiris' body parts to put him back together. While she'd succeeded, Osiris' resurrection made him king of the Underworld, keeping them away from each other once more. Surely Jitsui had been more detailed, but that was the gist of it.

"You were right," Hatano said, taking the glasses off and shaking his hair back in place. "I didn't care at all."

"-- the one listening --" Jitsui mouthed. "What --"

Hatano hummed, pretending to think about his response.

"Searching for a lost lover seems like a waste of time, doesn't it?" He shrugged. "Sure Isis brought Osiris back, but what's the point if they're going to be separated again?"

"Depends --"

"Wow, didn't realize you were a romantic deep down inside," he said with a teasing lilt.

Though he couldn't make out his expression, Hatano grew warm underneath Jitsui's gaze.

"I'd do the same," his lips read, and Hatano didn't need to be told for whom. "Wouldn't you?"

Taken aback, Hatano merely stared at Jitsui. He mulled over his next words, wary of their surroundings.

"Careful," he said, trying to maintain the levity in his voice. "Someone might think you're actually capable of love."

To this, Jitsui gave no reply. Instead, he smiled -- a rather sweet smile that Hatano decided suited him the best. And in return, Hatano smiled back.

They soon fell into a silence, but Hatano didn't mind in the slightest. Considering everything going around them, he could almost believe they were at peace in this little bubble of theirs. There'd be no goodbyes between them when they left for their missions and he'd have to pretend as if what they had never existed -- that Jitsui didn't exist.

But had the circumstances been different, had fate been a little kinder towards them, Hatano would've answered Jitsui's question with an "Of course." He would do anything for him, after all.

Forgetful he may be, Hatano still considered himself a perceptive guy.

Minor details like what shirt somebody was wearing or what he did for the day often escaped him, but patterns in behavior were ingrained to his mind. Cycles of repetition made it easier to catch nuances in behavior, whether they be a change in tone or even a simple gesture. No matter how good the actor may be, there was always some hint of their true intentions in their actions.

Take his dad, for example. The guy was always an ass towards him, but now he was just taciturn and evasive.

And it all started with that unknown visitor.

The first incident, Hatano could brush off as nothing; they didn't typically get visitors -- especially unannounced ones, at that -- so of course his dad would get upset. Sure, he was bitchier than usual, but he'd give him the benefit of the doubt just this once.

The second time around, however, Hatano couldn't ignore as easily.

It was strange enough to have someone drop by one day, but it was a flat out abnormality for it to happen twice in a row.

Hatano hardly had time to think when the doorbell rang, having been hit with a migraine as soon as he stepped into the house on top of pondering the whereabouts of the letter. By the time he stumbled off his bed, he heard the door being unlocked.

By all means, he could've just minded his own business, flop back into bed and try to sleep the pain off, but curiosity won him over and his feet dragged him out into the hallway with Yoru following in tow. Staying hidden, Hatano strained his ears to catch the conversation.

"Good afternoon," the person behind the door said. At the sound of those words, Hatano's heart skipped a beat. Though he couldn't see who it was, he could tell it was a guy's voice -- polite, refined, and most importantly, familiar . But much to his frustration, he couldn't place exactly where he'd heard it.

His dad clicked his tongue, bringing Hatano's attention back to the present.

"You again."

A pause.

"Yes, it's me again," the other man said. Though soft spoken, an underlying edge crept into his voice. "You said Hatano would be around later and since it's later, I was wondering if he was around?"

Hatano furrowed his eyebrows. His dad never mentioned anyone looking for him.

"Sorry, kid. He's not here."

"Then could you tell me when he'll be back -- exactly ?"

"I wouldn't be able to tell you; he's back when he's back. Now leave."

Something blocked the door as his dad closed it. From this angle, Hatano couldn't see what was going on outside, but he could only assume it was the other guy who’d done it.

"I'm sorry, but --"

"I said leave." Without giving him a chance to finish, his dad pushed him back and slammed the door with finality.

The air suffocated him, much like how the tension stabbed his head. It seemed that the other guy had given up for the day but his dad made no sign of moving, staring at the door as if daring it to respond. Hatano waited, counting his heartbeats before stepping out into the living room.

"Who was that?" Hatano asked as casually as he possibly could.

A beat.

"No one important," his dad said, slowly turning to him.

"Same shit head as yesterday?"

His dad's lips twitched.

"Yeah."

His dad gave no further explanation, not like he expected him to in the first place. The annoyance written all over his face told him more than he needed, anyways.

As his dad retreated into his own room, Hatano looked back towards the door. The very fact that someone was looking for him was difficult to swallow, especially given his small social circle. The guy certainly didn't sound like any of his friends nor could he think of anyone who'd want anything to do with him. Even so, his eyes drifted down to his wrist, yet he couldn't find it in himself to be sure.

He couldn't rely on naive hopes, he'd learned that long ago. Regardless, Hatano made note to keep watch. The missing letter, the unknown visitor, his dad's attitude -- something was up, and not for the better.

Hatano had stopped anticipating anything in the mail but that didn’t stop the disappointment that struck up at the sight of the empty mailbox. Sometimes, being a monster seemed easier than dealing with these human feelings.

Thankful for the minimal contact with his dad upon his return, Hatano made his way to his room. As much as he wanted to rest his throbbing head, he ripped off the post-it note that he'd stuck onto his headboard and checked off "mailbox." Underneath it, "visitor" had yet to be touched. If there was a pattern to be seen, it was that these two happened to coincide.

He clicked his tongue as he checked his watch, berating himself for not taking down the time. That might've been a smart idea, but whatever. It'd happen eventually. In the meantime, Yoru's meows filled the room and while he loved the fur ball, he could only take so much before his head exploded.

"What d'ya want, bud?" He said, kneeling down to scratch the underside of Yoru's neck.

All of a sudden, a clank resounded, causing him to jump as he'd been too focused on petting Yoru. He looked around and nearly dismissed it as nothing when another clank followed, his hand raising to his head to settle down his headache. His mind raced, scrambling to find the most likely source of the noise. As far as he knew, there wasn't anything that could've made such a loud sound.

Well, maybe there was one thing.

Yoru tailed after him as he made his way towards the balcony. The only thing he could think of was outside -- the fire escape to be exact. The trap door was the only thing he could think of that was heavy enough to make such a noise. Then again, if it was the fire escape, why the hell was it making that noise? At a first glance, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then he heard another clanking sound, stronger this time, and moved to slide open the door. Just as his hands gripped the handle, his father called out.

"Hatano!"

Hatano huffed, debating on whether or not he should humor his dad.

"Yeah?" he called back, only to get no response.

"What?" He tried again to no avail. Rolling his eyes so hard they could've fell out of his sockets, he turned away just as another clank rang out.

"Be right back," he told Yoru. "Keep an eye out for me, 'kay?"

With Yoru's meow of affirmation, Hatano took one last glance outside the balcony before leaving his room. It probably wasn't a big deal anyways, he thought to keep his nerves down. Still, that didn't stop him from wondering.

Usually, Hatano could deal with his migraines and suck it up to go about his day, but there were times where he wanted nothing more than the sweet relief of death. As he burrowed his head deeper into his pillow, he made such a wish to rid himself of the damn stabbing in his head. It must've been a culmination of all the stress from the past couple of days, where he felt like he was going outta his goddamn mind; having been constantly on the edge, it'd gotten to the point where he swore he heard someone calling his name. Who? He didn't know. Either way, he simply couldn't bring himself to get out of bed, let alone crack open his eyes.  

Days to himself were far and few in between and if not for his current state, Hatano would've have taken advantage of the time alone. His dad was out at work so he was free to do as he pleased, which meant he could've even done more investigating on that mystery visitor. Though, he supposed, there wasn't much to be done about that. Even if he had his suspicions, he couldn’t determine anything was a sign from them. Well, good thing he was incapacitated -- he wouldn't have been able to do a damn thing if they actually stopped by.

Fur filled his vision, Yoru's meows greeting him like nails against a chalkboard. He reached out to pet him, partly to silence him, partly to find some semblance of being alive. He managed to quiet Yoru down into a purr -- much like a flick to the forehead -- but that only spurred Yoru into pawing at him. Deigning himself to the outside world, Hatano squinted at him.

"Need something?" he asked. Yoru mewled in reply. Hatano sighed.

"Can it wait? 'm kinda preoccupied." Lazily, he gestured to his head. Yoru's reply was to stare at him, his yellow eyes boring into his. With a look like that, Hatano knew he wasn't gonna win.

"Okay," he said. "Give me a sec."

Mentally counting to ten, Hatano hauled himself up from bed and rolled out. He landed on his feet rather unsteadily, but brushed it off as he made a face at Yoru.

"Lead the way," he said, exhausted.

As much as he detested special treatment, Hatano was glad Yoru didn't move too quickly. His own steps were but stumbles in comparison to his, what with his migraine making it difficult to walk around. Though it was a short trip, it seemed to last longer than one of Tazaki's pigeon care lessons and he'd nearly blanked out when Yoru stopped. He nearly tripped over him as his hand slammed against the nearest surface to keep him steady. With that, the door in front of him creaked open and it was then that Hatano realized where Yoru brought him.

"...You sure 'bout this?" he asked, peering into the room. It wasn't that he'd never been in his dad's room before, but he never went in unless absolutely necessary. Maybe he needed to stop watching horror movies, but it felt like cold air hung around the room like some ghost haunted it.

In response, Yoru pushed the door open further. Hatano hugged himself as a shiver ran through his body, missing his chance to scold Yoru as Yoru ventured in further. Resigning himself to Yoru's judgement, he trudged after him. Yoru's last stop was the drawer that stood opposite to them, and he climbed on top of it before beckoning Hatano with his yellow eyes. His tail swung back and forth across the top drawer as if signalling him. After a moment's hesitation, Hatano stepped forward and inspected it.

"Open it?"

Yoru blinked slowly.

Running his hands across the wood, he found a keyhole in the center. He clicked his tongue as he pulled on it to no avail. But dammit, he was no quitter. He gripped onto the handles, using the pressure from his migraine to edge him on, and after a few pulls, the drawer popped open.

"All right, so... what am I looking for?"

A meow.

"Very helpful." Nonetheless, he began shifting through the drawer's contents.

Hatano wasn't sure what surprised him more: the fact that his dad kept this stuff or that it existed at all. To the side were some certificates, a ripped up marriage certificate and his birth certificate right underneath. On top of them was a tarnished ring, a wedding ring from the looks of it. Further on was a family picture from when he was a toddler, or what was left of it anyways. His mother was torn off, the tear cutting right into his own face. As he reached out for it, something else caught his eye -- an envelope. With his name on it.

Everything else now forgotten, Hatano grabbed it immediately. Flipping it back and forth, Hatano noted two things: the letter had already been opened and the sender's name was painstakingly familiar. Wasting no time, Hatano pulled the letter out and began reading.

Dear Hatano,

Hopefully this has met the right person. If it has, then I won't be keeping this too long. Admittedly, part of it is because I'm not quite sure what to say. Ironic, isn't it? I've spent a long time wanting to see you again but now that you're within reach, I find myself speechless. For now, I'll put down my feelings as best as I can.

There are stories of lost loves, of the harrowing journeys taken to find them, and there was once a life where I'd found them far-fetched. After all, there are other things to do than wasting it on a futile search for some person. But thinking about it -- about us -- I'd do the same, wouldn't you? Perhaps this will sound cliche, but I've found that cliches do just the trick. I don't know if you feel the same, if you remember me, or have any idea of what I'm talking about, but that's okay. It's funny how much just the memory of someone can influence you, and how much you've motivated me even if you weren't by my side. I just wanted to let you know that even if I haven't met you in this lifetime, you're still important to me.

With that said, I hope you don't mind me dropping by and that we can catch up then.

Love,

Jitsui

The letter tight in his grip, Hatano stumbled backwards and fell right onto the bed behind him. So. He was right. Kunio was Jitsui, Jitsui was Kunio -- the very same guy. Getting that confirmation, Hatano felt a weight lift off his shoulders, the ache in his head beginning to dull. To think that Jitsui had been looking for him, too, this whole time -- even longer than he'd been, in fact. It was a concept Hatano could barely wrap his mind around, the concept that someone had missed him and wanted him.

But it was just as the words he'd read began to sink in that Hatano realized the circumstances in which he'd found the letter: a locked drawer in his dad's room, with the letter having already been opened. Not to mention, the letter was dated from last week. His dad had been keeping it from him, but Hatano couldn't fathom why. Before he could question it further, the doorbell rang.

He glanced towards the clock and saw that it was just about the time his dad came home, but he should've had his key on him. Regardless, Hatano carefully folded the letter and placed it in his pocket but not before giving the words another glance over. He then patted his pocket to make sure the letter was still there and headed towards the door.

He wasn't sure if he wanted to confront his dad about it now or not. But then again, if not now, then when? Perhaps he was more of a coward than he thought he was. As Hatano beat himself up over the matter, he slowly removed the hatch and unlocked the door. Allowing himself a moment's breath, he swung it open, only to grow numb at what greeted him.

"Hatano?"

His breath caught at the sound of his name, the voice so familiar but yet not so. Similarly, he knew the head of obsidian black hair, the cherubic face, and the porcelain skin; vaguely, he recalled dreams that felt far out of reach. And the eyes, especially -- though he couldn't remember seeing them, he knew those big, dark brown eyes. He knew him, and Hatano had never felt so sure of anything in his life.

There was a name on the tip of his tongue. His thoughts drifted to the characters written on his wrist.

"Ji --"

"Excuse me." His dad's voice cut in, Jitsui suddenly being pulled back as his dad entered the fray. "We're not having visitors right now."

Before Hatano could even process what was happening, his dad pushed him back into the house. Too stunned to even think, Hatano stood numbly as his dad locked the door behind them. Loud bangs reverberated throughout the room from the other side, the door practically reaching off its hinges, but his dad paid no mind to them. It was only until his dad passed him by, their shoulders touching ever so briefly, that Hatano snapped back into reality.

"What the hell was that about!?" Hatano said the first thing to come to mind, repercussions be damned.

"What the hell was what?" His dad was as dismissive as always, only adding more fire to Hatano's temper.

"You know exactly what I mean."

Still, his dad continued playing it off as he put his belongings away.

"It's none of your business."

"Are you shitting me?" Without thinking, Hatano grabbed his dad by the collar, their gazes clashing against each other's. In any other situation, Hatano would've hated laying an eye on the man -- equal parts spite and fear -- but now, all he saw was a target to beat the crap out of. "You keep things away from me , and you say it's none of my business?"

His dad remained silent, his stare piercing. It was only once the adrenaline started wearing off that Hatano began to think that maybe he should’ve gone about this differently. His grip loosened, and it was then that his dad shoved him onto the floor. Hatano hissed as his body made contact, his hands shooting out just in time to protect himself from too much damage.

"You live under my roof, don't you?" Towering over him, his dad grabbed the back of his head and forced him to look up. "I'm just doing what's best for you."

"What's best for me?" Hatano spat the words out. "You've done nothing but make my life hell!"

Hatano bit down on his lips, the iron taste of blood filling his tongue as his dad's grip on him tightened. Even if his heart pounded against his chest, he didn't once dare look away.

"Your mother left you in my care," his dad said, the coldness in his tone enough to send shivers down his body. "I'm just doing what she asked of me."

A bout of silence fell over the two, but Hatano wasn't about to let his dad have the last word.

"No wonder she left you."

His face slammed against the floor faster than he could comprehend. The side of his face was going to bruise for sure, if the stinging was anything to go by. But he had no time to take care of his wounds, as his dad forced him to look up again.

"Hate me all you want, but you're under my rule, whether you like it or not."

His dad dropping his head against the floor, Hatano was left lying there. Attempting to get up proved useless, as he was too tired, too overwhelmed to pick himself up and fell back down. He didn't know how long he stayed there, but time didn't matter when he couldn't even think properly. It was only when Yoru neared him, prodding and poking him as if to make sure he was all right, that Hatano returned to his senses.

Slowly, Hatano sat up. The room had gone eerily silent after all the banging on the door that must've stopped some time ago. Looking at the window, Hatano noted how late it was as the sun had already set. Clicking his tongue, Hatano pet Yoru, letting his purrs soothe him.

"Well, that was a fucking mess," he said more to himself than anything. In return, Yoru nuzzled against him.

He sighed, trying to figure out all the thoughts running through his head. But if there was one thing he knew, he knew that he couldn't stay here. Not for the time being at least.

Taking the letter out from his pocket, he found the sender's address. It wasn't too far away from where he lived, actually, but something inside of him told him not to go tonight. It was late, was the excuse he thought of, but he knew deep down that he couldn't handle anything else going wrong today. Loathe as he is to admit it, he was scared. Of being wrong. Of being rejected. Of loss.

Regardless of his feelings, he knew he'd have to face it eventually. So picking himself up, Hatano wobbled into his room and began stuffing his belongings into his bag. With each thing he grabbed, a voice told him to drop it and stay put with what was familiar. Try as he might to ignore it, it only grew louder and louder until he'd gotten everything. As much as he entertained the thought of running away, he'd never actually gone through with it before. Leaving what was a shitty environment was for the better, but it was all Hatano knew, all he could remember, all he could grasp. Though, this wasn't really running away, was it? He'd come back once he'd dealt with everything, though he supposed the consequences would be the same. Then again, did his dad even care --

A meow came from his side, shaking him out of his thoughts. Right, he knew he was forgetting something.

"Let's go, Yoru," Hatano said, picking Yoru up. "We're taking a little trip."

Opening the balcony door, he slid down the fire escape.

Running away staggering on his feet and nursing a migraine probably wasn't his best idea, but no way in hell was he going back now. Since it was pretty late, Hatano could only hope that one of the guys saw one of his many texts. He reconsidered Kunio's (no -- Jitsui's, he reminded himself) address but decided that he wasn’t mentally prepared for that reunion yet. Talk big he may, but the thought of reuniting was a little daunting.

Just a little.

Okay. Very daunting. He didn't wanna keep Jitsui waiting, but he didn't wanna disappoint him with his current self either (despite no matter how many times he reassured himself that Jitsui didn't care, Jitsui would be happy to see him, Jitsui cared about him). The most important thing now was that he had to get away from the place he called “home” and recollect himself.

Within a few seconds of him knocking, the door swung open to reveal a sleepy-eyed Tazaki.

"...Do you realize what time it is?" Tazaki mumbled.

"I know, I know," Hatano said, wasting no time stepping in and letting Yoru down. "I'll be gone in the morning, but I’ll pay you back somehow."

"You're always welcome here, you know," Tazaki said as he closed the door behind them. Once the lights were on, Hatano could clearly see the worry etched on Tazaki's face -- his furrowed eyebrows and the frown he wore. Then, Tazaki's eyes bulged and he reached out to touch his face. "Oh my God, are you all right!?"

Out of instinct, Hatano flinched but he reminded himself that it was just Tazaki and forced himself to relax.

"I am -- will be," he said, finding it difficult to keep eye contact with Tazaki. He turned away, setting his bag down. "It's just..." He trailed off, not even sure how to explain himself.

Now that he thought about it, he never really discussed anything that was going on lately with the guys; sending a text that said "im dropping by" in the dead of night didn't really count. Whether he was just tired or just truly speechless, Hatano couldn't find the words to speak even after all that happened. So instead, he put a hand on Tazaki's arm. "There's a lot going on; I'll explain later. Right now, I just need to get away from there," he said, both of them knowing exactly what "there" meant.

Tazaki didn't say anything at first, his gray eyes running over him as if looking for further explanation. Thankfully, he didn't push the topic, patting a hand on his and nodding.

"Whenever you're ready, okay?" he said. He paused, as if wanting to say something else. "Let me get you a blanket. And an ice pack."

"Thanks," Hatano said, slumping into the couch and finally letting his body rest. He was gonna get through this, he told himself. With the image of Jitsui in mind, he knew that things would work out somehow.

bonus

Just as he sank into the couch, a thought hit Hatano. Immediately, he popped into a sitting position and started rummaging through his bag.

"Wait!” he said, causing Tazaki to freeze in his steps. “I have something for you."

It didn't take him too long to find what he needed and handed it to Tazaki, whom looked at it incredulously.  

"Is... this my hot glue gun?"

"Yep," Hatano said, popping the "p."

"I lent this to you, like, six months ago."

Hatano shrugged.

"Said I'd give it back to you, didn't I?"

Tazaki looked back and forth between him and the hot glue gun.

"...True."

[inlibrislibertas42-blog]

More Teen Wolf Plot Holes!

Part 2 to this post:

Derek’s “evolution”: As soon as Derek re-ages his wolf has yellow eyes instead of blue, and then he slowly starts losing his wolf abilities (Because apparently now your eyes being blue is tied to your strength, not having killed or your level of guilt?) Also, did de-aging trigger the evolution somehow? Why? We know various other people who could do a full wolf-shift, supposedly without going through this bizarre process.

Then Derek spends a period of time losing his powers, thinking it’s something Kate had done to him… (and again, we know other characters who could full shift: Talia and most notably Laura. If losing your wolf was part of the “evolving” process, how would Derek not have known about it?) And then somehow dying triggers the final state of his evolution? Did Laura and Talia (and Malia, etc) die as well? Or was the timing a coincidence? And somehow evolving cures the fact that he spent at least a few minutes being dead from blood loss?

Actually nothing about his evolution makes sense, and none of it was explained.

Healing: The amount that a werewolf can heal changes a lot depending on the needs of the script. Ex: Derek’s impaled in s1 by Peter (as a beta) and is completely fine an episode later. The tips of Derek’s claws go into Boyd’s chest in 3A and he’s done.

Braeden: In 3A Braeden has magic –(she touches Lydia and Allison’s arms and brands an image of the Nematon onto them) and when she comes back later it’s never mentioned again (The writers really should think about writing down card for each character about whatever special powers they are giving them so they don’t forget about it). Braeden also has scars up her throat from an alpha’s claws, which apparently didn’t turn or kill her. Kate has her throat clawed by an alpha, and it did.

Malia: I already talked about it but her being able to be in high school with a nine year old education really bothers me. Even forgetting that she spent 8 years in the wild, she should literally be in fourth grade and there’s no way a couple months’ worth of offscreen studying would have caught her up sufficiently. Seriously, whyyyyyyyyy? Howwwww?

Also, Malia’s age, as shown on her birth certificate, makes her 13 years old when we’re introduced to her. However, she’s apparently supposed to be 17 or so, the same as the rest of the characters.

Ages and time in general (nobody knows how time or calendars work in the writing room, do they?): There’s a discontinuity between birthdays given in the show and external materials, such as the TW calendars (which are said to be the real-life ones, ya know, the ones everyone uses). The ages listed also suggest that basically everyone will be graduating at 19 years old, which is incredibly uncommon, and especially odd considering Allison made a big deal about being “older” than everyone else in s1, which wouldn’t be true according to what we’ve been shown.

Important detail: Allison is freaking out at turning 17 years old during her sophomore year in s1, because she hates being “so much older” than everyone else. Lydia turns 17 only several weeks later during s2, in March of their sophomore year.

Meredith is the Benefactor: So many issues and just… how does a banshee magically control computers and printers?

Stiles & the pack after the Nogitsune: Everything he did while possessed… How have they not delved deeper? How has nobody shown the nightmares, the panic attacks, the trauma of the entire pack, the grieving process?

The pack is a bunch of kids, god dammit! And when you’re a kid, a goddamn breakup almost kills you, let alone watching your best friend/close friend being possessed and killing people and watching your ex-girlfriend/girlfriend/best-friend/close friend die in front of you!

Like, this makes me so mad! Like… NO! I don’t care about gory scenes and epic fights if you’re not giving me the aftermath of all that. If you’re trying to be realistic, if you’re trying to put all these supernatural creatures in real life, then give me real reactions and consequences! Don’t just give me a time jump and tell me they forgot about it and moved on. (arghhhhhh)

Paige: Ok, a serious question now: WTF happened after Paige’s death? ‘Cuz like, bites and scratch marks from giant wolves are hard to hide and miss… So… What did her parents thought when they saw her body?

I’m assuming that, ya know, someone found her body, called the police, took her to a morgue so they could find out what the hell happened… Did they just told her parents it was a “mountain lion”? Did they buy it? Didn’t they… I don’t know… questioned Derek, her at-the-time boyfriend? Didn’t they questioned why was she, an apparently perfect student and perfect kid, at the school in the middle of the night? Alone? Like???? Does anyone knows? Do the writers care?

Other important details that we won’t ever have answers for:

Why was Danny writing a paper about telluric currents for a chemistry class? Wouldn’t this topic be more adequate for a physics or geography or geology class?

Also, why was Lydia’s mom subbing a biology class for Harris when he taught chemistry?

How does Ms. Morrell works at echo house and beacon hills high yet no one has brought her up on child endangerment?

Why did Jennifer needed to poison Danny, considering he doesn’t interact with Scott that much and his paper on telluric currents wasn’t being taken seriously?

The overwhelming lack of funerals and wakes and memorials (teen wolf is on a very short timeline, where the fck are all the funerals?).

Why some werewolves can survive impalement multiple times and others get killed by things even a human could conceivably survive for at least a while (see: Boyd’s death vs Peter surviving getting his throat slashed).

How the hell did Peter pass a credit check to rent an apartment after being either comatose or dead for the past 6+ years? And, because I’m talking about Peter, how the heck nobody cares that, you know, a comatose patient with little to no chances of getting better simply got up and started walking and talking? Like… he just left! No questions asked. A freaking patient disappeared from the hospital, his nurse got killed and nobody comes asking for answers?

Where is Isaac’s CPS case manager? Who was he living with? Derek? Ms. McCall? Some random people? How did Chris got away with taking him to France (and leaving him there)? Did he adopted/fostered him? Why didn’t Isaac, Chris or Derek ever mentioned this?

Where did those japanese internment camp messages on Allison’s phone come from and why was Allison’s phone turned off for that entire episode?

Seriously, what the hell is up with Deaton?

Why aren’t there any security checks and security guards posted at Beacon Hills High? With the amount of missing, dead, hurt (and much more) students, that school should have police at the door, police patrolling the hallways, cameras everywhere and a very strict policy of no backpacks/bags and sharp objects within the school perimeters!

How could Malia just walk out of Eichen House all by herself. Was she just like, “lol, I’m a minor and checking myself out ‘cause that’s how it works”?!? Also, if there’s no key to that cellar door in Eichen House, how does everyone but Stiles get in so easily?

How is the Beacon Hills hospital still open, it should have been sued to hell and back by now, with all the people disappearing from it, being murdered in the hallways, and bodybags plus bodies going missing from the morgue!!!

Do Boyd and Erica’s families know their children are dead? Are they still “missing”? Like, after all this time, they are probably presumed dead, right?

How have any of the kids not failed all their classes yet? I mean, between not dying, lacrosse, dramatic + romantic moments and fighting the bad guys, how do this kids have time to do homework, study and go to school? And why the heck the school doesn’t call their parents about their kids constantly leaving the classroom, just like that? Without any permission or anything?

Why does Derek not know ANYTHING about what werewolves can do? We know he was born one but he didn’t know how to train a bitten wolf, or if it was even possible; he never showed them how to do the healing trick, which leads me to suspect he didn’t even know anything about it until Scott or Isaac showed him; he didn’t know Peter was the Alpha; didn’t know Paige could die from the bite; didn’t know some humans might not WANT the fucking bite; or that burying Peter wasn’t enough to keep him from coming back from the dead. Basically, DEREK DOESN’T KNOW ANYTHING, EVER!

[elgomoviereviews]

Who will win in the Oscars?

Only a few hours separate us from the Oscars ceremony, the event that marks the official end of awards season. And while most of this year’s categories do not hold that much competition, the question of whether Roma will win big this year is still to be decided. Here are my predictions and hopes for who will take the award home tonight:

- Best Documentary Feature:

Will win: RBG

Should win: Free Solo

Judging by the fact that my favorite documentary of the year; Three identical Strangers, didn’t even get nominated in this category, I wouldn’t say that I really understand on what basis the academy chooses its nominees or winners when it comes to documentaries. And between this year’s nominees, Free Solo stands out as the most eye opening story that both thrills and inspires. But, nominate anything against RBG (a dull movie that feels like an overlong tv report biopic about a female lawyer who made her way through becoming a judge when it wasn’t easy for women to do so) in this day and age and it will automatically lose. 

- Best Animated Feature:

Will win: Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse

Should win: Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse

Don’t get me wrong, I think that Isle of Dogs is a masterpiece, I think that Incredibles 2 is as good as its predecessor and I even think that Mirai is an animated feature that could’ve won the Oscar if it was nominated in most other years. But Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse is a movie that came and took everyone by surprise. I went in with the highest expectations ever, after the rave reviews it’d received, and I still was blown away as it exceeded all my expectations. Unlike all titles it’s competing against, I’ve never seen anything like Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse. From the range of amazing colors displayed on screen with every shot, to the intricate and unpredictable plot, to the highly emotional take on a very well known character, to the message that the whole movie so smoothly delivers to its multi-generational audience, besides being an experience of sheer fun, this movie never takes a wrong turn. 

- Best Foreign Language Film of the Year:

Will win: Roma

Should win: Roma

This is by far one of the best years for this category. There is a frontrunner like most years for sure, but what’s different this year is that the runner ups are so significant that they could’ve definitely been the frontrunner if they were released any other year. But while Capernaum, Cold War and Shoplifters are all amazing movies that are well worth your time, Roma is considered by many (including myself) to be the best movie of 2018, let alone just the best foreign language one.

- Best Achievement in Visual Effects:

Will win: Avengers: Infinity War

Should Win: First Man

I’ve seen superheroes and super villains smash heavily CGI’d cities and landscapes a million times by now. What I haven’t seen though is such a horrifyingly realistic look of the moon’s surface and the POV of a man stuck in a capsule that might or might not land on it. My bets go to the more popular movie though, the movie that probably hired half of Hollywood to work in it, Avengers: Infinity War.

- Best Achievement in Sound Editing:

Will win: A Quiet Place

Should win: A Quiet Place

My vote goes to the only movie in the nominees list that actually wouldn’t have been bearable to watch if not for its creative sound editing job. In A Quite Place, a movie that’s nearly silent from beginning to end, any sound the audience hears has to act as a direct tool to translate the plot to screen, it does the job perfectly.

- Best Achievement in Sound Mixing:

Will win: Black Panther

Should win: First Man

Even though the moon landing sequence gives us some layers of sound that we haven’t heard before, mixed together so masterfully that you get an idea of the emotional state of the main character, the nature of the landscape he’s just landed in and a background of grandiose music that both his achievement and sorrow. That’s not enough to break the Academy’s unspoken rule of giving this award to big action movies. So again, my choice for the win will go for the more popular choice with this category. 

Best Original Song:

Will win: Shallow - Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson (A Star is Born)

Should win: Shallow - Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson (A Star is Born)

Out of all nominees of all categories this year, this song will have the safest win. Every Oscar voter must’ve listened to one of the most popular songs of the year five hundred times by now and they won’t imagine anyone better than pop queen, Lady Gaga raising a statue in this category. Besides being a beautiful song that sticks to your head for days after watching the movie, it also is essential to the movie’s plot, where it gets sung in a very powerful sequence, making it all the more iconic and giving it even more reasons to be the best original song for a movie of the year.

Best Original Score:

Will win: If Beale Street Could Talk

Should win: If Beale Street Could Talk

The biggest contender here would be Black Panther, and it’s very probable that it might take home this award. But I just can’t imagine that anyone could listen to If Beale Street Could Talk’s original score and deny its beauty and the huge emotional effect it has on them. This score has an instant feeling of classiness about it that you’d think this is a re-shuffle of a 1950′s orchestra recording. The tracks Eros and Agape will go down as two of the most iconic pieces in movie history.

- Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling:

Will win: Mary Queen of Scots

Should win: Vice

My personal preference here goes to Vice, the one time this year that I found myself suddenly forgetting who the star of the movie I’m watching in front of me is. Yes, I forgot that this is Christian Bale for real, and I had to remind myself that I actually know who that is and that he doesn’t look like that in real life. This in big effect is a result of Bale’s brilliant performance, but it wouldn’t have looked and felt that realistic if it wasn’t for the best makeup job of the year in my opinion. That being said, this category doesn’t only reward makeup, but also hairstyling, and since DIck Cheney’s bold in most of the movie, I understand why the academy would choose the usual period piece over Vice. 

- Best Achievement in Costume Design:

Will win: The Favourite

Should win: The Favourite

One can only argue that Black Panther should win this for creating a clothing style that merges between modern and classic African-American fashion, but I will go with the more detailed, outrageous costumes of the period drama (the genre also well known for winning in this category), The Favourite. 

Best Achievement in Production Design:

Will win: Black Panther

Should win: Roma

Thinking that the Academy will choose Black Panther’s art direction for looking cool, over the efforts of an art director who recreated the entirety of a Mexican city in the ‘70′s (Roma) or another who reimagined an 18th century Queen’s palace to its deepest details (The Favourite), is ridiculous to say the least. The Academy has to justify giving Black Panther all this recognition though, and having its first time black female nominee art director win in their ceremony could be a huge boost to the Oscars’ image as the platform that honors minorities like no other. 

Best Achievement in Film Editing:

Will win: Bohemian Rhapsody

Should win: Vice

Bohemian Rhapsody is a project that was doomed to fail. It’s director Bryan Singer got fired in the middle of production and left the set without a director. Consequently, putting all pressure on its editor to complete the final outcome and make it look like a movie. I get that it’s a very demanding task, but upon judging the movie as is, without knowing anything about the hurdles of its production, I wouldn’t even nominate the distracted, at times awkward editing of Bohemian Rhapsody. Huge props for recreating the whole Live AID Queen performance while adding an extra emotional layer to it, making the movie end on a bang, but I’d still take the smooth, slick editing of Vice, that allowed its director to maneuver the audience into trick after trick so effortlessly, over it any day.

- Best Achievement in Cinematography:

Will win: Alfonso Cuaron - Roma

Should win: Alfonso Cuaron - Roma

Smooth camera movement to help invest the audience in time and space? Check. Interesting camera angles to reflect the character’s opinions and emotions? Check. Memorable stills, so iconic that you’d frame them on your wall? Check. Capturing shots so deep where one still shot could tell the audience so much information about the characters and their relationship to others and the space they’re at? Check. Finding the essence of the landscape and its details so much that you’d start smelling that place as if you’re there? Check. FIRST TIME CINEMATOGRAPHER? CHECK!! 

- Best Adapted Screenplay:

Will win: Blackkklansman

Should win: If Beale Street Could Talk

Consider this a lifetime achievement award to the black director with the longest career in Hollywood right now who hasn’t won an Oscar yet (and he’s been so vocal about, it’s starting to make noise). Does he deserve it? In my opinion, Blackkklansman is the most boring movie of this years Best Picture’s nominees by far. It’s plot feels aimless most of the time, its dialogue tries to be funny but usually fails and it never succeeds at striking any emotion out of the audience up until its very shocking ending. On the other hand, everything about If Beale Street Could Talk’s screenplay feels right from the start. The dialogue is so smart that you learn about important plot points, amidst a day to day conversation between two friends, without even feeling it. The voice over helps the plot progress so effortlessly and the story just never seems to reach a stagnant point. Add to that, some of the most memorable quotes of the year, If Beale Street Could Talk has all what it takes to win in this category, except the right writer’s name.

- Best Original Screenplay:

Will win: Green Book

Should win: Green Book

A screenplay that takes the audience through a journey across America and a another inside its two protagonists. Equally balancing between humor and drama, tackling big ideas while never falling into the trap of feeling like a lecture, all thanks to the light approach this screenplay always takes, focusing on the bright side of this story instead of the melodrama other movies stick to when it comes to ideas like the ones this movie tackles. The only danger facing Green Book in this category would be if voters decided to not honor writer Nick Vallelonga with a win for the racial tweets that recently surfaced from his past. In this case, The Favourite will take home this prize.

Best Achievement in Directing:

Will win: Alfonso Cuaron - Roma

Should win: Alfonso Cuaron - Roma

All hail the king who gave us the only masterpiece of 2018 and saved it from becoming the worst cinematic year of all time. I can’t think of any other contender who’s even worthy of being mentioned in an argument on whether Alfonso Cuaron should win best director this year or not. Besides all the spellbinding technicalities, all the hardship of the production, all the courage displayed in casting, cinematography, recreating from memories and helming a vision that he only sees and needs to convince everyone around him with, what makes Roma stand out as a groundbreaking achievement is the emotions it ignite in the audience, which literally transcend time and space.

- Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role:

Will win: Regina King - If Beale Street Could Talk

Should win: Amy Adams - Vice

None of the contenders in this category stands out in my opinion. They’ve all given really good performances and none of them rose to the level of greatness at any point. Emma Stone gave the most multilayered and complex role of her career. Rachel Weisz gave a believable performance as a character, both warm and dangerous at the same time. Regina King gave a very subtle, yet memorable performance, despite how small her time on screen is. My vote goes to Amy Adams though, the 6 time Oscar nominee who’s never won before and definitely deserves the recognition. Her role in Vice is pivotal in understanding the motivations that drive the lead character and consequently the whole plot, and she delivers that with the command of the masterful performer that she is.

- Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role:

Will win: Mahershala Ali - Green Book

Should win: Mahershala Ali - Green Book

What I don’t understand really is how this role with that much screen time is considered a supporting role. This character is more of a lead character than that of Viggo Mortensen’s in Green Book in my opinion. Mahershala Ali does it again and steals the show with his great charisma on screen. This is a locked win for Ali and he deserves it.

- Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role:

Will win: Glenn Close - The Wife

Should win: Yalitza Aparicio - Roma

Again, another lifetime achievement award for an actress who’s done nothing significant this year. This whole category is one of the weakest in this years’ categories. With overhyped performances from all five actresses, I’d honor Yalitza Aparicio; the only actress who’s never stood in front of a camera before nor received any acting training, yet her spontaneity helped her give a very heartfelt, universal performance. 

- Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role:

Will win: Rami Malek - Bohemian Rhapsody

Should win: Christian Bale - Vice

This is the most powerful category of this year’s Oscars in my opinion. All five performances are career best performances. Willem Dafoe’s take on Vincent Van Gogh is as impressive as his early work in The Last Temptation of the Christ, cementing his status as a Hollywood legend. Bradley Cooper succeeds in delivering an undoubtedly demanding performance that required him to sing live, learn to play guitar and embody a melancholic artist. Viggo Mortensen gave the funniest, most heartfelt performance of his career in his portrayal of a character that might have felt like a caricature if any other actor had played it. Rami Malek carries the weight of Bohemian Rhapsody on his shoulders. He outshines anyone with him on screen in a role that he clearly enjoyed playing every minute of, and successfully captured Freddie Mercury’s larger than life spirit. But it’s Christian Bale who gives the best performance of the year for me. His performance of the monotonic, robot like Dick Cheney may not be as flashy as that of Malek’s, but the impact that he leaves on the audience is second to none, even under that much makeup. Playing Dick Cheney is a role that had previously been deemed un-playable by many actors, but leave it to Hollywood’s chameleon who changes his whole skin with every single movie to take on this challenge and turn it into one of the most powerful performances of the decade. 

- Best Picture:

Will win: Black Panther

Should win: Roma

If we could see any trend for the Oscars these past years, it’s that their Best Picture winner almost always has nothing to do with whether it won any other significant awards or not. Spotlight won Best Picture, with only one other win for Best Editing. Moonlight won Best Picture, after losing the director race for Damien Chazelle. While Roma is the most critically acclaimed movie of the year, it’s also a Netflix produced movie; a platform previously thought of as a production house for TV series at best, and many of the voters would feel that it’s still not time for Netflix to produce a Best Picture. A really absurd argument that shows how Oscars (and specifically the Best Picture win) is about being politically and socially relevant and has nothing to do with art. And for those reasons they might go for the highest grossing movie out of the eight Best Picture nominees. The first comic book movie to be nominated for the award and it doesn’t hurt that it has a full African-American cast and director. I wish that they would prove me wrong.

[dietauthority]

10 ways to spot a burnout and 11 ways to handle it

Hey everybody, As you may have discovered, the fashion week season remains in complete blossom, yet I am hanging around in my comfy home in warm Barcelona.

In instance you could question why: for the past couple of weeks - or also months - I've been under a lot of stress and I chose to unwind this season. I have actually been doing some study as well as I concerned the final thought that I'm on the side of a fatigue because of an overload of expectations, workload, stress and also perfectionism.

" However you have actually been doing terrific! What happened?" Exactly, I have actually been doing more than great all these weeks. As a matter of fact, I've been doing SO excellent that my present workload is around 75 hours a week, not counting the other hrs I spend thinking of job on the side (I'm not also joking, I've been monitoring my hours). It would certainly be charming to already make enough money to employ people to take on a component of that workload, but as long as I'm not there yet, I'm on my very own. And considering that I want my job to be premium, I will certainly not quit working until it's excellent. Competition is however, could you blame me?

I was questioning whether I need to create concerning this, or even allow any person understand that I could have concerns because the globe of social networks is meant to be best. I neither desired to give the suggestion that I'm attempting to obtain compliments or focus with this: I merely figured that since my blog site is meant to be about me aiding people with my personal experiences, it would certainly be hypocrite of me to overlook the unfavorable things. As well as that knows, maybe I can in fact aid a person by speaking regarding my very own experience. Specifically in the world of creative freelancers I am sure there are more of you around that are on the side of a fatigue, considering that we never ever appear to be able to stop functioning. So this is for you: allow's feel better with each other! In the video I discuss everything you have to know, however in situation you wish to find out more details, check out the text below: 

First of all, it is necessary to recognize which variables are likely to add to a burnout:

Poor work/life balance

Lack of resources, training or support required to do your job

Stressful workplace dynamics

Being took part in job that you don't find meaningful or important

Failing to carry out proper self-care (workout, eating well, etc.)

Perfectionistic tendencies

Secondly, we have to locate the indications of an exhaustion in order to recognize whether we are dealing with one, so I did some research and made a checklist of the 10 most common symptoms.

1. Lack of ability to quit believing regarding work

Obviously it's regular to think of work in your downtime, however when it becomes compulsive you might wish to consider taking a few deep breaths as well as CHILL.

2. Constant exhaustion

Waking up exhausted everyday, no issue how lots of hours you rest? Do you really feel frequently like you are at completion of your resources, psychologically as well as physically? Besides that this is a signs and symptom for a fatigue, it also is for other health and wellness issues ... so obtain yourself checked!

3. Poor job performance

Even though you always utilized to shake your work, now you are really feeling too weary and also can't appear to focus on your jobs anymore. You're putting things off and privately wishing another person will repair the mess.

4. Guilt

Even though you're frequently (obsessively) functioning, you still can't seem to obtain it right. The tons is as well heavy or you can not focus ... anyway: you really feel responsible for not having the ability to finish your job. Which typically leads to functioning also more.Are we sensing a pattern here ...?

5. Mood modifications, inflammation and also cynicism

Burnouts trigger psychological fatigue and also a loss of a sense of personal success, that makes the mood unstable. If you're really feeling out of control, it's very easy to take those feelings out on those around you. You could be so bewildered by your very own problems as well as exhaustion that minor inconveniences bring about extreme sensations of anger as well as irritability. At the workplace you could end up being cynic and also pessimistic, which is identified by regular isolation. Simply put: you are NOT in your pleased place.

6. Social Isolation

The mix of fatigue, depression, sense of guilt as well as a sensation of failure can lead us to isolate ourselves from others. You begin feeling embarrassed about your job as well as you favor to don't be around individuals all also much. I indicate ... not everybody needs to know you are a failing, so it's far better if they do not see it right?

7. Unhealthy lifestyle choices

You are currently worn down and depressed, who has time or power for cooking a well balanced meal as well as going to the health club? You may be eating excessive (or insufficient), select harmful foods and also stop working out. You likewise may be consuming even more alcohol than you used to, in order to get away the nervous or depressive sensations. Did I hear any person state satisfied hour?

8. Loss of enjoyment in daily activities

Since you are obsessed with your job and efficiency, you don't really feel like you can really appreciate your daily activities anymore ... not like you made use of to at least. You not feel satisfied with your individual life, you may also feel apathetic or fearful ... is that the guilt speaking.

9. Difficulty sleeping

Frequently being incapable to fall or stay asleep - specifically if associateded with by thoughts of work - can be a signs and symptom of a breakdown. You are feeling too distressed to rest, makings you even much more exhausted throughout the day and also execute even worse at the office ... as well as the vicious cycle continuous.

10. Stress-Related health and wellness problems

People struggling with fatigue commonly experience health issues commonly associated with anxiety and also anxiety. These can consist of gastrointestinal troubles, pain in the back, constant migraines as well as reduced energy levels. Make sure that the doctor depends on date concerning your physical, in addition to mental state!

So ... in case you might feel like you can associate with one of these ten signs: you could have an exhaustion, or at least be headed to one. So keep reviewing! It's time for the most fundamental part: how to manage a burn out:

1. Lower understood stressors at work

Analyze what are the things worrying you out most about your job. Are they truly worth worrying concerning that much?

2. Make healthy and balanced way of life choices

Even though you may not really feel like it, keep dealing with yourself! Eat well and keep working out: it will not be a magic universal remedy for a breakdown, but it will absolutely improve your energy levels and also assist you manage stress.

3. Talk with your working environment

Since your burnout is affecting your work performance, it's crucial to talk to your boss or the people you collaborate with. Discuss your concepts on reducing your stress levels along with increasing the job efficiency. Do not forget to be clear about exactly what you require, and how these approaches will enhance your efficiency at work!

4. Take a leave of absence

In situation you truly can not manage your work anymore, you need to absolutely think about relaxing to offer your mind and also body a chance to relax. If you don't take some time on your own you will just make it even worse, no person will enjoy with that!

5. Use your spare time for anything apart from work

It is typical for individuals that are on the side of a breakdown to use their spare time to obtain ahead on work, wishing that this will reduce their stress levles throughout the day. Research programs, nevertheless, that investing your off-hours doing non occupational social as well as physical tasks really help you stop - or recuperate from - a burnout

6. Set Boundaries

Be strict to on your own by making sure you will not take on too much work or spend your spare time functioning. Offer on your own policies such as "weekends are cost-free" or "after 20.00 I need to quit working", as well as learn just how to claim 'no' to jobs which might not be that intriguing for you, in order to minimize your workload.

7. Make Changes if necessary

Obviously food is not functioning the means it should, so aim to find out what it is. Reorganize on your own and your job: compare the principle of your brand/company to your present tasks, make a structurized weekplanning to produce a much better review as well as start prioritizing!

8. Learn to Switch off

Sometimes it's extremely tempting to 'merely swiftly finish this task', and after that brand-new things keep turning up so you entirely forgot you remained in your 'off time'. Do not fret: tomorrow is one more day, answering that mail can wait 8 extra hrs! Be rigorous to on your own and try to absolutely appreciate your totally free time.

9. Ditch the Technology

Okay, I understand this is a though one! Particularly for the blog writers around ... our phones and also laptop computers are our spirit pets. At least try this: take - at the very least - 30 minutes to examine your phone after waking up: consume a mug of tea, do some extending, enjoy an appeal regimen, have morning meal ... whatever you do, merely do NOT touch your phone while doing so! The very same matters the Thirty Minutes before going to sleep. It's not great to have a countless working cycle, it gives so a lot even more stress.

10. Start a new Hobby

A leisure activity is a wonderful means to obtain your 'me-time' and also having fun! It's the most effective means to swtich off and to even work with your healhier lifestyle (showing off, dance, strolling, everything counts!). Is there something you've been intending to do permanently yet never ever made the effort? This is your chance

11. Find support

Avoid social seclusion by speaking with your pals and also family about your existing dip. Trust fund me, they will be more than delighted to assist you! Allow them take you out for a favorite, a good dinner, the cinema, whatever! Any type of distraction matters. It will certainly really feel terrific to have their support as well as like around you, I promise.

I hope with this post I had the ability to assist amongst you overachieving creatives out there! From currently on I will absolutely start working with myself: this month I will be publishing a bit less, yet I will be discussing blogposts on ways to make your life less complicated with tips on organizing yourself, improving your Instagram skills, photography abilities as well as more!

Lots of Love,

Lynn

P. s. For more reading on Fatigues you can have a look at these resources:

- Inc.com: 5 Surprising indicators of Burnout

- Inc.com: 10 indications you're movinged towards a Burnout

- The Guardian: How you can acknowledge, avoid and take care of exhaustion in a Creative Job

[brownducks]

P. Fitz – a centenary essay

First published at Minor Literatures

“I have been reading steadily for seventeen years; when I go down I want to start writing”.

What Penelope Fitzgerald, quoted in the pages of Oxford University’s Isis magazine in 1938, meant here, was that when she left with her degree – as she would that summer – she was going to become a novelist. Part of the second generation of women allowed to go to Oxford, she was at Somerville, which is mostly (and unjustly) famous for being the college Margaret Thatcher went to. Penelope graduated in English Literature with a First and something called a ‘congratulatory viva’, which is apparently when your tutors sit and tell you how brilliant you are rather than make you argue your case. If she wanted to be a writer, her future was looking bright.

Maybe the reason why Penelope Fitzgerald might be considered a minor writer is because she’s hardly remembered. She’s neither feted nor fashionable. But there’s more to it than that – I think she’s also a minor writer because of what happened in her life. She clawed things back anyway, proving herself, of course, to be ultimately brilliant, but getting your first novel published at sixty-one and writing your masterpiece at eighty might seem a terrible fate – and a terrible wait – to some people.

December 16th 2016 was Fitzgerald’s centenary. I think she’s one of the most extraordinary novelists I’ve ever read, and want to try to explain why. I’m not trying to rescue her from the margins, though. That’s the perfect place for her – she thrives on that sidelong, quiet, outsider’s look at life. Instead, as is the point of shining a spotlight on minor writers, I’m just hoping that a few more people will read her books.

How many of us, these days, expect a short, direct line from anonymity to success? Write well, and hard, make friends with the right people, and things shouldn’t take too long. Maybe this was what Fitzgerald felt when she graduated in 1938, Oxford’s golden girl with her First in English who was going to be a great writer. What fascinates me is that it took her forty years – or life took forty years of denying her – before she got that chance, and yet it doesn’t matter a bit. It should perhaps be a salutary lesson to us, but maybe things were just different then.

As soon as Fitzgerald graduated, the Second World War threw ordered lives and steady trajectories into chaos. She had all the intellectual advantages it might have been possible to have – she’d followed her mother’s footsteps to Oxford, her father edited Punch magazine, her uncles were respected clergy (one of whom, Ronnie Knox, Evelyn Waugh wrote a biography of), and she lived in infamously literary Hampstead. Her mother, to whom she was very close, had died of cancer not long before. Then, some of her best friends died in the war, and her brother disappeared for three years – they eventually found out he’d been a POW in Japan. Desmond Fitzgerald, the man she married in 1942, was a promising barrister, but he was sent off to be a major in the First Battalion of the Irish Guards, which saw only 326 men out of 926 return – one of the worst casualty rates in all the fighting.

Desmond was one of the many post-war sufferers of shellshock. So was her brother, who had a nervous breakdown but never spoke of his experiences as a POW. In Fitzgerald’s biography, Hermione Lee says, “Desmond had been profoundly changed by the war, and came back a different person from the dashing young officer Penelope had married in 1942. He had seen appalling things and lost many men; he had killed a large number of people. He would wake up in the night, screaming.” Even so, like so many men in his position, on returning home from the war he was expected to slip back into normality. Instead, normality slid away from him. He drank too much, was humiliatingly dismissed from the Bar for stealing money from his Chambers, and the family, with three children, tumbled from middle-class Hampstead towards near-destitution. They first moved to Southwold, on the Sussex coast, and then, because they couldn’t afford anywhere else, onto a leaky barge on the Thames. When that sank, they were homeless. They were put into a shelter – Desmond was absent at this point – and eventually moved into a council estate in South London. Fitzgerald worked as a schoolteacher in order to support her family, whilst Desmond held down a low-level clerical job at Lunn Polly. This is not a squalid fate, and to suggest so would be problematic, but Penelope felt it to be drudgery, and far from the life she had envisioned for herself.

She remained a teacher for twenty-six years, until she was seventy years old.

In a notebook from the late ‘60s, she writes: “I’ve come to see art as the most important thing but not to regret I haven’t spent my life on it.” It’s a lament for what could have been, and what she wanted so dearly – but she wasn’t going to pity herself.

However, a change was on the horizon – shortly after this, she began to research a book on the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. She presented it to her family as a hobby, or therapy – to ‘stop her going mad’. It took five years, and was a sign: the dam had burst. Immediately after, she wrote another biography, this time of her father and three uncles (called The Knox Brothers), and submitted a story to a Times ghost story competition, which was shortlisted and published – her first piece of published fiction for over twenty years. Finally, she began work on a novel. Then Desmond died. The novel, The Golden Child, came out the following year. At sixty-one, she was a debut novelist.

After this, Fitzgerald just got on with it. The following year, she published The Bookshop, a short, sad and thoughtful novel about a woman who opens a bookshop in Hardingham, a fictional stand-in for Southwold. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Upon hearing this, Fitzgerald said it must be a mistake. The year after that, in 1979, she published Offshore, based on her life aboard her sinking Thames barge. There’s an estranged husband, two young daughters running wild around London, and a self-effacing heroine who is not to be underestimated. It won the Booker. I have to admit that, like Frank Kermode (one of her favourite critics), I prefer The Bookshop – he wrote: “Offshore, though admirable, strikes me as decidedly inferior to The Bookshop. The earlier book was defter, more resonant and more complete” – but it’s still a wonderful novel. The media, for the most part, treated Fitzgerald’s Booker win like an abherration, as though she were a dotty grandmother who had somehow found herself in entirely the wrong place. But it suited Fitzgerald to be seen like this. She told reporters that with the £10,000 prize money, she was going to buy a typewriter and an iron. In fact, she went to New York.

After her Booker win, not wanting to be alone and with nowhere permanent to live, she moved around the country to be close to her daughters and their families. During this time, she decided it was time to stop writing fiction based on her own experiences. The four novels that followed, published from 1986 to 1995, are four of the best in the modern English canon.

The first, Innocence (1986), was also the first Fitzgerald novel I read (thanks, Jack). It’s about a sixteenth-century Italian noble family, the Ridolfis, and their cash-strapped twentieth-century heirs, one of whom, the well-meaning Ciara – surely the story’s innocent – falls in love with Salvatore, a difficult, emotional doctor, who amazes himself by reciprocating entirely. The novel is about love and hope, innocence and (of course) experience. It’s also about vigorous pursuit of life versus stubborn decaying passivity; and how in either case it might just slip through your fingers, or surprise you. It’s a brilliant evocation of post-war Italy – decrepit Florentine villas, olive groves and lemon trees, crops of hay, Fiat cars and English cigarettes.

Innocence shows Fitzgerald’s growing mastery of narrative. I imagine her in a cutting room, with reels of footage about her characters, sizing up what’s necessary. She has so much information, but knows that only a bit of it needs to be shown. She pinpoints what matters, knowing each word (or, to keep that cinematic metaphor, each detail in each shot) must count. It must add texture, depth, and context. If not, forget it. What emerges from this is an elliptical text with a profound intelligence; proof that in order to tell everything, not everything needs to be said.

Near the start of the novel there is a flashback to Salvatore’s 1930s childhood. His communist father takes him to visit Gramsci, who is dying in prison, wanting him to ‘come into the presence of a great man’. As it goes –

“Salvatore had seen deformed animals, and dead bodies of both people and animals, but never anything as ugly as Comrade Gramsci. Ugliness is a hard thing to forgive at the age of ten. The thick mouth of the prisoner, his father’s friend, opened darkly, like a toad’s, without a single tooth in sight. The tiny crippled body could no longer make any pretence of fitting into his ordinary clothes, which hung on him, as they would have done on a circus animal. He was not sitting down, but propped standing up against the wall. The smell of illness, stronger than disinfectant, filled the room, and there was no other air to breathe. While his father unwillingly took the only chair, Salvatore, after standing up for a while, perched on the corner of the clean, hostile cover of the bed…”

Salvatore rejects politics then and there and resolves to become a doctor. He trains himself to be rational and passionless, though this is impossible for him. He is thirty when he meets Chiara, and she finally tips the balance between his rigid discipline and inherently volcanic nature: “She was pale and shining…totally inappropriate to his state of mind, to the time of the evening, to everything imaginable.” His turmoil over being madly in love is played for laughs, as most of Innocence is, but Fitzgerald’s comedy is never just for kicks. As her earlier novels made clear, she sees humour as necessary for survival in a disappointing world. She writes, she says, of “the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?”

This is a serious and compassionate belief about the point of comedy. I was re-reading The Beginning of Spring recently (which she wrote just after Innocence), and it was so funny – yet every awkward, stupid or embarrassing moment in it is there to highlight either the characters’ compassion towards each other, or Fitzgerald’s own generosity towards them. The Beginning of Spring is even better than Innocence – wait, let’s be precise here, it’s extraordinarily better than Innocence, and Innocence is astonishing. It is also very different. The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow in 1913, is about an English family who have long owned a printing press there. As it starts, its self-effacing hero, Frank Reid (my favourite Fitzgerald character) who runs the press and has lived most of his life in Moscow, learns that his English wife, Nellie, has left him. The ice that has sealed up the city is about to crack, winter is soon to give way to spring, and Frank must pick his three children up at the train station – Nellie had taken them with her, but changed her mind and sent them back home. This slight novel is patterned around familiar Fitzgeraldian tropes – the comedy of bewilderment at one’s circumstances, love at first sight, a spooky ending – but packed into a rich, strange context:

“He was heading towards the river, and the air was full of the vast reverberations of the bells from the five golden domes of the church of the Redeemer, not at anything like their full power, but like the first barrage of artillery before the main attack. The attack did not come – it was Lent, and they chimed only once, but they were answered from across the river by a hundred others, always with one chime only. He stood listening to the bells in the open starlight. From the cathedral square a ramp went down to the water. The river ran darkly, still choked with the winter’s majestic breaking ice and the debris carried along with it, an inconceivable amount of rubbish – baskets, crates, way-posts, wash-tubs, wheels, cradles, the last traces of the traffic the ice had carried while, for four months, it was a high road. Watching the breaking ice from the bridges was one of Moscow’s favourite occupations. The Gazeta-Kopeika said that a pair of dead lovers, clutched together, had floated by, frozen into the ice. The Gazeta repeated this story every spring.”

The Beginning of Spring is also a novel about coping. When Frank’s life falls apart – as it surely would if your wife leaves without telling you why, or where she’s gone – he is stoical. As Fitzgerald says, she is interested in “a sort of noble absurdity in carrying on in unlikely circumstances”. Frank does his best for his children, keeps his business going, immediately falls in love with someone else, too, but life is complicated and unpredictable – even a man who loves his absent wife might be stirred in other directions. Indeed, maybe falling in love with someone else is a form of coping. It’s how you might cope with the pain of loss – you might sublimate it, at least for a while.

The surprise of a new love when you love someone else, and the consequent inner conflict, forms part of the melancholy that runs through The Beginning of Spring. It’s a dark thread up against all its scatty joy. Frank tries so hard to cope yet is bereft, wrongfooted, unmoored. At the end of the novel, though, in the dense forest outside the family’s dacha, life is stirring again. Hope is renewed:

“As the young birches grew taller the skin at the base of their trunks fragmented and shivered into dark and light patches. The branches showed white against black, black against white. The young twigs were fine and whip-like, dark brown with a purple gloss. As soon as the shining leafbuds split open the young leaves breathed out an aromatic scent, not so thick as the poplar but wilder and more memorable, the true scent of wild and lonely places. The male catkins appeared in pairs, the pale female catkins followed. The leaves, turning from bright olive to a darker green were agitated and astir even when the wind dropped. They were never strong enough to block out the light completely. The birch forest, unlike the pine forest, always gives a chance of life to whatever grows beneath it.”

Both The Beginning of Spring and Fitzgerald’s next novel, The Gate of Angels, are set just before World War I and the Russian Revolution – she was drawn to moments just before a great change. I wonder if this has anything at all to do with her own experience of emerging from the prelapsarian brilliance of Oxford into World War II. The rupture of continuity is always interesting, though. The Beginning of Spring was Fitzgerald’s favourite of her novels, and it’s mine, too.

The Gate of Angels (1990), set in Cambridge around 1910, came next, when Fitzgerald was 74 years old. Her uncle Dillwyn (a Bletchley codebreaker) was at Cambridge then and she knew that its atmosphere, as he had conveyed it to her, would be juicy enough for a novel. It explores both a breakthrough in physics – the discovery of the atomic nucleus – and the history of medicine. As ever, there’s a love story running through it – and as ever, the falling in love happens quickly, between very likeable characters. For all Fitzgerald’s clear-eyed unsentimentality, falling in love was, to her, endlessly fertile ground. She is wonderful on its maddening irrationality, the pain of its frustrations and the purity of its joys.

After The Gate of Angels was Booker-nominated (it lost to A.S. Byatt’s incredible Possession, so fair enough), Fitzgerald was in her mid-seventies and her health was deteriorating. She had arthritis, high blood pressure and arrhythmia, and would go to the Whittington Hospital in Archway (just down the road from where I live now) to get prescribed treatments she hated. As her health worsened, she wrote The Blue Flower. How can I describe this novel without hyperbole? I’ve already used ‘masterpiece’ and ‘astonishing’. Perhaps there’s just an immense sweetness in seeing someone who had waited so long reach their peak – at long last, their genius is there for the world to see, and after all, the world finally seemed to agree, it was the brightest of anyone’s. Against DeLillo’s Underworld and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, The Blue Flower won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award – so she made it big in America just before her 80th birthday. On beating DeLillo and Roth, she said, with her customary self-deprecation: “I was so unprepared to win that I hadn’t even planned a celebration. I certainly shan’t do any ironing today.”

The Blue Flower, set in eighteenth-century Germany, is about the Romantic philosopher Novalis, in whom Fitzgerald had long been interested. The ‘blue flower’ comes from Novalis’ novel fragment Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800), which is a poetic, mystical search for this flower – an unattainable object – and a symbol therefore of yearning, passion and transcendence. Novalis, or Fritz, as he’s mostly called in Fitzgerald’s novel, is a generous, garrulous, wide-eyed genius. At twenty-two he falls in love, as Novalis did in real life, with twelve-year-old Sophie, who is a bit dim (though he calls her ‘My Philosophy! My Wisdom!’). Despite her age, and the slightly less pressing problem of her being unable to remember his last name, Sophie accepts the integrity of Fritz’ affection. Fritz waits for her to come of age, develops his ideas, manages the salt mines of Saxony (the family business) and obliviously, and very sadly, breaks somebody else’s heart. All of this is told in fragments that move through time with the minimum of explanation or context. It’s like following a dream – and as you keep up, you’re swept away. As ever, almost all the characters are sympathetic – a hard thing for a writer to do well, never mind brilliantly. The Blue Flower is a culmination of the forms of craft Fitzgerald was practicing in previous novels; the fragmented perfection of Innocence, the comedy and sadness of The Beginning of Spring, the balance of density and light of The Gate of Angels.

She died in 2000, aged 83, one of the great writers of the twentieth century. I don’t want the lesson to be taken away from her life that you can triumph in the end. Her writing tells so many better stories. She is interested in – and she wants us to care about – the vulnerable, the defeated, the forgotten and the quiet. She explores lives of frustrated passion, stubborn idealism, idiotic love, hopeful love, hope in general (there is so much hope in her novels), failure, quiet courage, kindness, and moments when the tragic and the comic overlap. Her imagination might have been especially fired up by Italy, Russia and Germany, but she declared herself a typically English novelist because “most English people think life is not important enough to be tragic and too serious to be comic”.

What she looked for in other writers was “the quality of pity and kindness. I don’t see how this world is to be managed if we don’t pity each other.” This wasn’t a patronising kind of pity. In line with her Christian faith, it was – as she said – a form of kindness. It is a plea for sympathy, for courage and for understanding. In The Bookshop, she famously divides the world into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’ – and her characters, the ones we root for, are always the latter. They are courageous and good and hopeful, but they are outsiders, too: marginalised, defeated by circumstance, failing through no fault of their own. But they are written, always, with tenderness. Perhaps, then, that’s Fitzgerald’s real legacy: her empathy for these exterminatees, her kindness.