#bc trying to keep the way the poem is written is so important but was tricky

[raayllum]

—two.bees.poetry

[eurydicees]

"hadigf;jhadkfgadkgl;jakdlgjnakdlfgn !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" for the wip ask game!! (the many exclamation points have charmed me, what can i say 🥰)

lmfao the exclamation points would intrigue me as well. they are there because i started the wip and titled it when i was having a minor breakdown. oops! at least it’s attention grabbing ! maybe i should keep it.

i talked about this one here as well, but here’s more info! under the cut bc this got long :D 

it’s mainly an oikawa study, but i’m also really interested in exploring iwaoi’s platonic relationship (and eventual romantic one, because this is me writing it). i’m working through how they support each other so entirely but also how they avoid being, like, super codependent. 

it’s really important to me that they exist as separate characters as well as being a pair do not separate at the same time. this has been hard to do successfully so far because of the way i’ve written bipolar II (what oikawa has in this) as a struggle that affects both yourself and those you love, but i think i’m getting it! 

i’ve also been playing around a lot with time in a way that i’m really excited about, and the narrative kind of weaves through time and space in a non-linear exploration of what makes a person a person. like, what memories make you? what actions make you and what do they make you in other people’s eyes? what objects hold pieces of you and what do you hold close? 

i’m also trying to figure out how to represent in words how bipolar II affects a person and their life—it’s something i’ve been trying to do for a long time, and i’m excited by how it’s working out in this.

i kinda started this theme in “blood to the heart like salt to the wound” but honestly i’m not super happy with how it worked within the fic and as a representation in general. there’s a lot i would do differently w that fic LOL. so i’m taking what i learned from that piece to do a better job writing it this time around!

here’s ur snippet: 

Now fast forward, to something that does matter:  Oikawa, standing by the ocean. There is a full moon above him, and it is so bright that it masks all of the stars. The moonlight ripples over the waves, glittering and shimmering as the water rolls over itself again and again. The crashing of the ocean is loud and cacophonous, but it is also a symphony, or a dream, or a kind of litany of inexpressible feeling. Like a poem that leaves you breathless or a painting that makes you cry.  He raises his arms up from his sides, out like the wings of a bird, and he pulls himself onto his tip-toes and he closes his eyes and— —and in his head, he can fly. In his head, he is surging upwards like a bat out of hell or a whale out of water. He is flapping his arms, only his arms have become wings with feathers as golden as molten Olympic medals, and he is strong and powerful and free. He can go anywhere in the entirety of the world, and he never has to return home.  He opens his eyes again, and he is still on land. His feet are buried in the sand. The sand is cold. The tide is receding. He is alone. 

rules for the ask game here for more <3

[inkskinned]

hey it's nanowrimo. i have tips bc i've done it about 34 times.

Don't edit. Ever. Stop it. If you just decide to start a new project half thru this one with all new characters, no problem. pick up and keep writing as if you'd already written the first half of that.

"but i spelled it wrong" whatever. "but the grammar" whatever. make it exist first. no time for sense. think like you're working on a typewriter. no backspace. only forward go.

Don't re-read further than a paragraph or two backwards. "did i mention the gun before?" listen - it doesn't matter. if you need there to be a gun there, the gun is there. put it back in once you finish the book.

"i forgot the specifics of X thing i already wrote" whatever. change it, make a note/comment to figure it out later, and just write what makes sense for the moment. "no raquel it's legit the characters name and origin" idc that character is now reborn as Claudius from Elsewhere. it's fine.

only you see your mistakes. nobody else knows. one of the ways writing and dance overlap - only you know the choreography. nobody else will know if you miss a step, so just keep dancing and pretend you meant to do it like that.

it's an illusion that you need to write linearly - from point A to point B to point C. Nah; that's just timeline propaganda. I've written a LOT of books out of order and just reordered them once i've finished. if you have a scene you'd LOVE to write but can't get there yet because of plot, just fuckin write the scene. I've always found its easier to establish "point F" "point J" and "Point A" and then wiggle my way between those scenes.

write what you WANT to write. 230 pages of smut? of well-researched discussion on bread? whatever. the point is to strengthen muscles however you can.

if you miss a day, a week, whatever. not the end of the world. we all have dry days. also time is a myth so u can do this challenge whenever u want.

as soon as you try to write for a specific audience, you kill your voice. you are writing for yourself. stop thinking about how people will take ur book. it don't matter. what matter is u, enjoying writing. i luv u.

play to your strengths. i have characters talk so much because i don't know how to write a plot if it kills me but i'm really good at dialogue so.

i love a flight of fancy. write a poem in there. shift tactics and write in code. keep it fun for yourself.

see what happens if you shift something major about ur main characters - gender, wealth, superpowers. or if you change point-of-view. or if you kill everyone in a big explosion. do NOT edit anything before this or after it. often these little weird one-off exercises teach me what interests me about what i'm working on. it is never what i thought. plus it is a fun way to add like 1k words.

stretch.

it's for fun and for practice. stop doing that project if it's giving you anxiety. once my nano was literally 50k words of half-started stories. just things i tried and tried and tried and wasn't able to flesh out. oops. but i am now 50k words of a better writer.

add dragons?

read books/listen to books on tape/etc. people often make the mistake of "buckling down" to just write. you need inspiration. you need to like. fill up on words. you need to remember how it feels to lose yourself in a story.

i don't have the time or space to really talk about this in this post but a lot of creative people turn to drugs/alcohol because it can help you be more creative. this is harmful, and walking a blade that only cuts deep. if you notice you and your loved ones are turning more to substances, please know i love you and i hope you are able to get help soon. i feel like this almost never gets mentioned because it's kind of a hazy underbelly to art. you are always more important than the work.

on that note. drink your fukin. water.

don't talk about a story until you've finished it. once you tell the story, it exists already, and isn't about discovery. i usually have a very canned "haha we'll see" response.

grapes :) tasty snack.

i love you be free.

[gra-sonas]

Hey! I hate to ask this, you already do so much for us! But would you mind just a tiny recap of Vlamis’ live from last night? You don’t have to go into a ton of detail or anything, I just saw that it was a half hour long. I have a weird anxiety thing that keeps me from watching lives and stories for the most. Still haven’t even been able to work myself up to watching the vlamburn one as much as I’d love to! 🙁

Either way, thank you for everything!

Okay, nonnie. I went and watched the whole thing again and wrote you a detailed account of what’s been said. I’ll link the live again, then you can watch here if you want to. Or not. Up to you. 🤗 Hope this helps. 💕

Brushing his teeth and flossing for 3 minutes while talking.

800 new follower lately “where have you been before?”

“Do you do anything to your hair at night?” He adds Moroccan hair oil in the morning, nothing at night.

“What’s your favorite of the drop?” He hasn’t seen everything from the drop (like the COSMIC tie-dye) bc he’s in Santa Fe. He loves the COSMIC and MALEX embroidered things (“so subtle”) bc they are in Vlamburn’s handwriting, he loves the Manesqueeze shirt bc you can make Alex and Michael kiss by putting your wrists together. He *loves* the candle (there’s one burning on his bedside table), the silky PJs are great, but he can’t decide on just one favorite thing.

“How’s Jesa’s sanity?” She needs like 3 weeks of sleep. He explains, that while we *are* the Vlambase, the Vlambase merch company’s just Jesa and Vlamis. Jesa has a team, but all the day-to-day things, ideas, emails/customer service (Jesa), the newsletter (Vlamis). They hadn’t collaborated with anyone before Tyler, so working with him was a new experience. 

One fan mentions how they wanted to buy stuff but couldn’t. Vlamis says that he’s been there, and when he wanted something in the past he couldn’t afford, he started putting away a Dollar a day. 

“Thought on One Direction?” Vlamis is a Harry Styles guy. “Harry Styles’ swagger is next level!”

“What do you think about Russia? Will Vlambase merch be available here?” Talks a bit about how annoying things are with shipping companies, says they wanted to protect themselves for the holidays, and now that the Christmas rush is over, some shipping options have become available again. 

“Who came up with  MANESQUEEZE” He ponders about it, and settles on Jesa. It was Vlamis’s ides to put tiny Alex and tiny Michael on the sleeves so that they can kiss tho. And Tyler came up with the idea to put a “toupee” on his head (in a previous drop, the NEVER LOOK AWAY design had tiny Alex and tiny Michael on the sleeves, but poor Alex was bald) for the design.

Someone got a MALEX pin and the candle. He knows the pin sold out fast, and he feels bad about that. They want everyone to get everything they want, but it’s difficult to make proper calculations how well an item will sell. The pandemic made things even harder. Like the PJ sets. Normally, they would wait until the sale ends and see how many sets were actually ordered, but during the pandemic, stock listings have been changing dramatically from day to day, so they had to pre-order the PJs and robes to make sure they had a certain number at their disposal. He said that they “overshot” on a couple of things, but ultimately sales have been great, and he appreciates that.

“I’m excited to make the MANESQUEEZE doodles kiss bc I do that with the NEVER LOOK AWAY shirt” Vlamis jumps up and shows his closet that’s full of Vlambase merch items.

“Why am I here, it’s almost 3am” He mentions that he’s been staying up until 4 in the past couple of days, but he has to be on set in 7 or 8 hours. 

“Hello, just wanted to let you know that I got a tattoo for you” Vlamis asks for a photo and to be tagged.

“Kyle the packer [Vlamis’s roomie KA, who works in the warehouse when a new drop is ready for shipping]” Vlamis says they’re working him to death.

“Please save this live” He doesn’t know whether he’ll save it. Thinks the one with Tyler was important, but since it’s just him, he doesn’t think it’s important.

“I followed Jesa, Jesa is the real MVP” Vlamis says that Jesa is “a beast, and best in the game”. Quickly explains who Jesa is, and that she’s his partner in the Vlambase merch company. He mentions that she recently called him with an idea for Valentine’s Day, and he was like “Jesa, we need to relax!” But she loved the idea. She’s a big fan of RNM and the characters (and Tyler). “Jesa’s amazing.”

“What about new Soli art [Soli’s the artist who created the Boys Will Be Boys art for a previous drop]?” Vlamis smiles. “What about new Soli art. I like that idea. 😏“

“Your house [in New Mexico] is so cute.” Vlamis says thank you and shows the ceiling of the house (which he likes best). “Santa Fe is dope!”

“I adore your teeth” *shows his teeth* Says he had to wear braces (some even adjustable)

“I could’ve used my birthday money to buy something but I forgot” 🤨 << Vlamis’s face. “How you you forget, man?”

“Back to Twitter after this live” He mentions that he’d just been on Twitter before the live.

He got retweeted by Mountain Dew and loves it.

“I’m from Australia and hope my merch arrives before winter” Vlamis says he hopes shipping will be fast. 

“Love the Valentines” They’re not actually Valentines, hence they’re “Love Notes”.  Vlamis considers doing them not just around Valentine’s Day. 

“You catch any of the CW shows returning this month?” “Might have to” But he knows what he’ll be catching on the 12th. “Prodigal Son, baby!”

“Where did you get the Game Boys?” Those are his Game Boys. He has a Game Boy Advanced and a Game Boy Color. 

“How do you feel about Forlex?” *scoffs* 😒 “Yeah” 

“So excited for the robe!” Vlamis gets excited. “The robes and the PJs are so comfy!” Talks about how it’s a bit weird, bc they don’t make them themselves.

Several people mention that their closet looks like his closet bc of all the merch and he loves that. 

“How do you feel about Forlex” *gets agitated* “Why are you asking me this? Don’t do that to me, alright?” *softer* “Don’t do that.”

“How are you doing?” He’s doing very well. Very relieved that eh sale went well. This drop was like 3-4 months of work, the night before the sale felt like an entire month, too. Jesa and Vlamis Facetimed for more than 5hrs. They set up the website, and that’s how the glitch with the GIVE ME MALEX OR GIVE ME DEATH shirts and poster happened. They made a mistake and only noticed after the website went live. 

“Do you know when S3 will air?” No, he thought it might’ve been sooner, but apparently not.

“I love your poetry from the last drop so why no poems this time?” He writes poems when he’s inspired, he hasn’t written a poem in a while. He’s currently preparing to direct his first movie in June 2021, and he’s been very focused on that. 

“The Meet & Greet day changed.”  Filming schedule changed bc they had snow, the schedule’s changing constantly. He’ll be set all day tomorrow (well, today, Jan 11) from 8am until 8 or 9pm. Sometimes they might even wake up in the morning and learn that the schedule’s been changed. 

 “You could talk about nothing and we’d still watch.” He doesn’t want to talk about nothing, wonders if anyone has any questions about the sale.

“I’m so excited about the robe. I was going to buy more but I’m broke.” He says we should be responsible.

Someone’s still waiting about their Black Friday stuff, but he says it’s the shipping company, not them. 

“Vlamentines" He *loves* that, thinks it’s a good pun. 

“Gotta support Aurora.” Always. 🥰

“Jealous Guerin in S3?” You’ll see, you’ll see.

“I placed 3 orders, last one last night. Give me Malex or give me death.” He loves it. He also mentions, that they’re working hard on figuring out how to combine orders in the future so people don’t have to pay for shipping several times. They just can’t do that logistically at the moment. 

“Real talk, how often do you check your DMs?” He says, that some people might’ve noticed that he occasionally likes random photos on people’s IG pages. When that happens, it’s a sign that he read someone’s DM. He feels bad when he checks his mentions with a delay, and people’s stories have already vanished after 24hours. He sometimes doesn’t get to checking DMs for a week.

“Will we ever get the original pic of the kiss recreation?” *smiles* *waggles his eyebrows* “Maybe in the morning”

“So happy the Trevor Project was chosen for this merch drop!” He’s very happy, too. According to him, it was a no-brainer. Tyler’s worked with them in the past, so it made even more sense. They wanted to make sure that Tyler felt very strongly about wherever they’d be donating. 

People urge him to go to sleep. “You want me to go to bed?” 

“Why is your merch not available in India?” *deep breath* “It should be, it’s ridiculous. Unbelievable.”

“Your poetry was awesome.” He appreciates the praise and promises to write some more poetry. 

Someone asks whether the movie he’ll be directing in June will be a comedy, but he says it’s the opposite. He’s mentioned in the past that Aurora and him will both act in the movie, but apparently he forgot about that. He doesn’t want to jinx the movie and doesn’t know how much he should reveal just yet. Talks a bit about 5 Years Apart. 

Someone mentions that it’s Jeanine’s birthday on January 14th. 

“Do (or don?) a face mask, Vlamis.” He refuses. Mentions his friend and roommate Spencer Waldner, who makes face masks.

“If there’s leftover merch, will you do another sale?” He says that most things are actually sold out bc they use Blank Clo’s blanks and will only make what’s been ordered.  They might try to restock some pins tho, bc they went so quickly. 

“USPS are a joke” He defends them. “They’re a public service, they’re trying hard, guys.”

“You should do a Vlambase drop with the Real Vlamis [a.k.a. Jeanie]” He’s excited and thinks it’s a good idea and asks if anyone’d be interested. 

Someone congratulates him on directing his first movie. He points out that he’s directed before (Making It, a 3-part web series, it’s on YouTube).

 “Would you ever come to Australia Comic Con?” He’d love to. Mentions that he’s supposed to be in Paris in May for a convention, but he’s not sure whether that’s gonna happen considering how things are currently going with the pandemic. 

Some more talk about 5 Years Apart.

Circles back to doing a merch drop with Jeanine. People like the idea. 

“Please save this live.” After an IG update, things have changed and he doesn’t know how to do it. In the past he had the option to save it [for 24hrs], now he can only upload it to IGTV. 

“$30 shipping to Australia hurts my soul but I did it anyway.” He appreciates that and mentions, that he lived in Australia for 6 months in the past.

“Sing some Bright Eyes” He thinks his singing would hurt people’s ears. 

Jesa Joy pops up in the chat and urges him to go to bed. 

“Jesa is yelling at you.” Vlamis says that Jesa’s a “yeller”, and that she has a tattoo that says “Don’t yell tho”. He admits that Jesa often yells for a good reason. “I need to be yelled at sometimes.”

Someone asks him to accept a request to join his live. He says he’s pretty tired. 

He says hello to someone from Germany (not me btw :P) “What’s up, Germany ✌️” 

More people ask him to sing, but he says he cannot sing. He says it’s not like a joke  or him being modest, he straight up can’t sing and is a horrible singer. 

“Will there be a sequel to 5 Years Apart?” Maybe a sequel called “10 Years Apart” (he’s joking and visibly tired)

“Should I buy anything before the sale ends?” Yes.

Jesa Joy’s from Michigan, and Vlamis’s grandma’s from Middlesborough, Kentucky.

“Is Tyler singing again?” He doesn’t know. “I hope so. Love that kid’s voice” (Tyler’s 3.5 years older than Vlamis :P)

He’s getting sleepy and will read a little bit before bed. Considers drinking some Mountain Dew. 

“Do you take design ideas.” Sure. Sometimes he sees design ideas from people they’ve been working on for months, but he’s gonna “steal” an idea from someone, he’ll tell them. He’ll steal it, though. 

“Are you still reading SAGA?” He read the first one and is half-way through the second. He’s currently reading a book called “My First Movie” by Stephen Lowenstein. “How cliché.” Aurora got it for him.

Purple Skittles are his favorite. Purple everything.

“Your girlfriend’s the best girlfriend.” She is, she really is.

Asks Jesa Joy whether he should go to bed now.Even though it’s late, he’s hungry. Considers eating something. People tell him to go to bed.

He asks “Should I get naked and put on the PJs?” *waggles eyebrows* “I’M KIDDING, YOU’RE SICK. YOU’RE ALL DISGUSTING.” xD

“Don’t eat!” He laughs.

Says goodbye and says that Jesa’s posted a surprise picture. 

“Any advice for aspiring actors?” Tells them to make their own stuff bc no one’s gonna hire them. (He’s being sarcastic). “It’s dark, but it’s what you need to hear.”

“Okay, love you guys. Thank you again! It was our best sale yet. Means a lot to me. Means a lot to Tyler. Us doing so well might mean that Tyler will work with us again. So I really appreciate it. Okay, I love you all.”

Jesa promises to post the pic in 4 minutes. He’s excited. “See, I got her to do it! The picture is kind of ridiculous.”

*pretends to take off his shirt, stops halfway through* “Noooooo, noooooo, noooooo!”

*throws kiss* “Love you guys, good night.”

[justjstuff]

6, 9, and 26 for the writing asks! Hope you are having a wonderful day, J 💜

hi, hon! sorry for the wait! hehe thanks for the ask <3 Btw, was it you that reblogged something from Zoey smth-smth? lmfao bro you GOTTA watch Zombieland I swear to god I love that movie, it's so ridiculous xD

6. What point of view do you tend to write in? Do all of your pieces use the same POV? Do you have strong opinions on the POV used in novels?

r: Third person, always. I have VERY strong opinions about 1st person POVs lmfao I actually hate every single book I tried to read in 1st person. It feels very off-putting imo bc I never read a book inserting myself into the character (same reason I can't read y/n fics) so it feels wrong to see it "talking" as if it were me. The only two exceptions to that rule are Twilight bc I read it when I was 8/9/10 and it was the shit back then and Ume's fic the Eventual Descent. I don't know what it is about Ume's fic but I barely even notice that it's in first person, the plot is so captivating, the characters so fucking well-written it's just *chef's kiss*. This isn't to say that I don't change POVs while writing. I know some people say it's "bad writing" but I wholeheartedly disagree. A story can be told by just one person and it's even nice to play with the whole unreliable narrator style and the ramifications of it but that's not the only way to tell a story imo. I do think that the way the guy from GoT wrote his books is terrible tho lmfao. Yeah, mad genius that he is, it's very very VERY uncomfortable to me to be reading about smth that's kinda dull and then as soon as it starts to get interesting I'm suddenly reading about a character that is even more terribly boring than the first one. Lol, I'm probably gonna get hate for it but hey, if it's your thing then it's your thing, this is just my opinion.

Another thing that it's definitely a no-no for me is when the POV changes without a proper sign of it changing. No line breaks, no chapter breaks, nuthin'. It absolutely takes me out of the story when you're reading something and then you have to keep reading back to figure out who is now describing the scene to you. Changing POVs is great imo but it requires a bit more care about how the story is written in general, you gotta be mindful of the flow.

To answer the question, yes I do have strong opinions about it lol.

I should point out that these are all my personal opinions, this doesn't mean at all that if whoever is reading this does the things I don't like that they're a bad writer or anything like that. Even if I had tons of degrees in Literature (which I obviously don't) you should never listen to someone who says things like "this is the way you write well" or "if you do this, then your story sucks". Just tell those people to shut the fuck up. There's no right or wrong in writing, okay? Just what you like and what your readers like. Machado de Assis, one of the most famous Brazilian writers of all time wrote his books with TONS of grammatical mistakes. And you know what happened? We made rules about it lol. Now we accept those "mistakes" as something you can do in Portuguese all because this guy wrote books that people liked. So, yeah. To anyone reading this: DO YOUR THING.

9. What scene was the hardest to write for you and why?

r: Kakashi and Sakura kissing. LMFAO. I took around 200k words to get to a point where they would kiss for the mission, right? And it was fine, I kind of freaked out about it when I wrote but it was cool cool cool. Now, their real kiss? OH MY GOD, bro, I had such a hard time. I think I already told you guys this but I wrote like three times how they would get together and then ended up saving those scenes for later lol. I think this story is just an immense buildup to getting them to a point where I would like to see them together that now that they're finally there I'm... scared? I don't really know. It feels like I forgot how to write romance lmfao I'm currently rewriting their first real kiss for the fourth time I think and it's where I stopped with this writer's block :/

26. What do you feel like you need to work on as a growing writer? How can you improve?

r: This is a really great question. When I started writing (in Portuguese) I kind of copied the style from the books that I used to read at the time which is fine, you can't do anything without copying something first. The thing is, brazilian writing is a bit more... descriptive than English writing in general. Actually, let's make a comparison between English and Portuguese first. There are many linguistic reasons for this which I'm not gonna get into but in general, in Portuguese we use more words to speak. That is because of many many reasons but one of them is the fact that in English there's a process called "verbing" or "verbification" I think? Which is basically, you take a noun and you create a verb out of it. For example, to elbow, to distance, to inconvenience. In Portuguese, to say those things, we have to use more words, it takes us longer to get to the end result. Some more modern examples of it is terms like "Google it" or "Tweet it" or I dunno "DM her". We don't have that in PT.

Let me try and get back on track lol. So yeah, that happens because English speakers but mostly USAmericans tend to have a snappier way of speaking. You are direct and straight to the point in general. When I first started writing, my texts were best described as poems in prose form. lol. I was very descriptive, I took my time making sure the emotion was there and not just the basics to get my readers from point A to point B. I still like that type of writing but it gets tiring if it's a long piece. So, after being corrected by many english teachers on how I structured my stories (they were always very long sentences, sometimes a whole paragraph w only one phrase), I started changing the way I write.

Like anything in life, when you want to make a shift, you usually go from one end of the spectrum to the opposite. A full 180 turn. So I started writing shorter phrases, I stopped describing every single thing in the scene. I decided to let my readers fill in some of the blanks, let them figure out for themselves what kind of dress this character is wearing or how did she get from point A to point B, that's not the important part. Now, if you go see the first maybe ten chapters of Daughter of Fire, you'll see that I exaggerated on that end lmfao. Some things are too vague, some paragraphs could have been two or three sentences instead of five or six. It's okay, I don't go back to change those things bc I think it shows the progress I made as a writer.

What I want to do now, is to reach that middle ground, make a 90 degree turn instead lol. I managed to get better by treating first drafts as first drafts, I get my point across, point A to point B, quick, snappy. Then I go back and edit, I add descriptions, I connect the dots better. And that whole poem as prose thing? I save it for important moments. Those emotion heavy moments in the story where I do want to make the reader stop and feel. It's all a work in progress, I'm not even close to a professional writer or anything like that but that's where I'm at rn. I'm trying to find my feet in that middle ground.

[golbrocklovely]

idk if colby will ever see this, but i feel so bad about him having his journal stolen. as someone who literally lost all of her stuff on her computer - so many memories, photos, notes, song lyrics, poems - i know exactly the pain you're going thru. here are some things you can do now (and some stuff i did when i lost two years worth of stuff):

- you said that you were writing everyday in your journal, basically keep a 365 journal. i still do one of those and i've been writing one of those since 2020. the best way to kinda help rewrite it is to go back thru your camera roll, calendar, social medias, texts, anything that has a date to it, and rewrite what you know.

- for major events that did happen, you might also have footage you can go back thru. rewatch it and try your best to remember how you felt in that moment.

- anything that you can remember writing down, do it again. even if you have to write it out of order, it's better to write down what you can.

- i know losing poems and lyrics is the worst part (at least for me). a lot of that type of stuff can't be rewritten, but if you remember what you were writing about, you can always make up a new version now as someone with time gone by.

- finally, buy a new journal. start writing everyday again. you might have lost 6ish months of writings, but now you have 6ish more to do. maybe even write on your phone (as a back up) and take pictures of your journal everyday. that way if this one is to be lost or stolen, you'll have either your backup or your photos as proof of what you wrote.

at the end of the day, i know how much it sucks to lose something as close as a journal. it sucks to think back at all the memories that you had written down, sometimes from within that moment, now gone. weirdly enough, the slight solace in all of this is that the things you don't remember writing about will either come back to you bc they were important or they won't... bc they weren't.

now you have time to write all over again, from fresh eyes. and take the hurt you're feeling and make something with it.

hope this helps in some way <3

[aloera]

The ask prompt is too long to fit into an ask TT_TT but here's the doc for it docs(.)google(.)com/document/d/1yDI7iFRhOJ8ENv_IwZAo3rDSUqj80EiJROS10RzRbj4/edit

the lengths u are going for this,,, much appreciated you're very sweet!!!

prompts + answers under the cut!!

INTRODUCTION

Name: aloera

AO3 account: aloera

Fandoms you write for: bnha

How many stories have you written so far: 19

FANFICTION PROFILE

What's your favorite fandom to write for? hmm,,, used to do pjo and eah (ever after high) and eah was fun as fuck i will say!!! i think bnha is my fav mostly bc i made the most friends in this fandom :D

What's your favorite character/person to write for? bkg and kirishima!! cannot choose do not make me <3

Fic you'd want to improve? probably what we deserve? i rushed the beginning and the confession is a bit stilted imo

Hardest fic you've written? between lion and men -_- bc there is so much canon compliant stuff i've gotta write out before i get to the divergence and its HARD

Easiest fic you've written? come home to me!!! it happened so easily,,, no second guessing no writers block just vibes <33 was lovely i miss it

What would you say is the most "famous" fic you've ever written? also probably come home to me? its got the most interaction

first line of the first fic you've ever written and published. [not including my 2014 ffnet fics] "The bell rings, class starts, and Katsuki and Midoriya are inexplicably absent." from come home to me

Have you ever done a collab with another writer? yes!!!!! on two separate occasions and its so fucking fun i highly recommend trying it out its the best

Do you beta? if asked but honestly im a shit beta lmao

Do you like joining fic fests/exchanges? depends on what i have going on irl but in general yeah!!

FANFICTION PREFERENCES

Fluff or angst? definitely fluff

"OCs" or "Reader" inserts? reader inserts!! have been going ham on them recently

Blurbs or drabbles? blurbs!!

One thing you love about fanfiction i just. i really love slice of life romance?? and most media doesn't give you that bc its dedicated to plot and action and that's valid!! but fanfiction fills in the gap which is really nice

One thing you don't like about fanfiction most of the stuff i don't like is less about actual fanfiction and more about how people behave about it

What is/are your favorite fandom author/authors? IVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS ONE!!! TURN IT UP!!!

bnha: hiuythn, rae_tnub, Moniix, Ata_Lanta, wrunic, chezka, PurplePersnickety, surveycorpsejean, mahadevi, arxaris, deviance, Oceanbreeze7, MikeWritesThings, bonnia, wonhaebunny, dinosuns

voltron: hiuythn, Oceanbreeze7, DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee, arahir, dinosuns,

and honorable mention to loveclouds im not even in the haikyuu fandom i just love their fics So Much

these are just the ones off the top of my head i have so many favourites idc if i'm only supposed 2 have one!! die mad about it!!!

What is your favorite trope? secret relationship + relationship reveal til the day i die babie <3 <3

Least favorite trope? hm,,, probably just like. angst lmao i cannot stand 90% of it

A fanfiction cliché that you can't help but love? coffeeshop aus,,,, so good

Do you have a type when it comes to pairings? the otp where its like. piece of shit + himbo = love. ex. krbk, catradora, jade/beck

Favorite setting/au? hm,,, truly i cannot pick one KGKSJNHKj but i really like college aus!! and modern aus!! and roommate aus!!

Explain the meaning of your favorite line of dialogue you've written as if someone hasn't read it in context. “He doesn’t know,” Katsuki says, softly. “My timer stopped and nothing happened. He’s not mine.”

the line is from what we deserve!! it's a soulmate au where your timer counts down to the moment that you meet your soulmate!! bakugou's timer ends at USJ when he and kirishima attack kurogiri at the same time (impulsive kings <33) but kirishima's timer doesn't end until kamino because that's when he accepts himself as bakugous soulmate!! unfortunately, when bakugous timer has reached 0, he turned to see that kirishima's was still ticking and therefore believes that kirishima isn't his soulmate.

this line just,, idk. it's really sad. bakugou is such an action-driven character? if something doesn't go his way he Makes it go his way. he's got this insanely volatile quirk and he's got impeccable control of it!! but his love for kirishima isn't something that he can change and he's not going to ruin kirishima's chance of finding his own soulmate because he loves him and wants him to be happy. i really wanted to focus on how resigned he is? and how unusual that is for a character like him.

Favorite trope/genre to write? again, secret relationship with relationship reveals <33 fluff in general is my wheelhouse!!!

A trope/genre you haven't written but think would be a fun challenge? idk if this counts?? have been working on some dead dove concepts!! its super different from what i normally write so its a cool challenge

The one trope/concept you'll never touch and why probably cheating/infidelity?? it just looks,,, super difficult to write well and i don't have enough of an interest in it to try it out

Which do you prefer to write: longer or shorter fics? shorter!! low attention span gang <3

Ideal length to read? 5-10k?

Ideal length to write? 4-8k!!

How long was the longest fic you've ever written? control fraek is around 28k i think?

Have you ever written an AU? yeah!! i've done restaurant au's, soulmate au's, pro hero aus, and fantasy aus (general, not the bnha fantasy ending)

What's your favorite AU trope? hm,, probably when two people in authority are in a secret relationship? ceo's/uni professors/etc etc

Have you ever written smut? yeah!! was. difficult tho

What's your comfort genre? (the one you fall on most in writing/reading) fluff,,, hurt/comfort,,, fix-it fics with happy endings <3

If you were to start writing in other fandoms, which would they be? maybe jjk?? the characters are really cool!!!! fr i might go back to my ever after high roots i love the characters and setting so Much its so fun!!! idec if no ones into it anymore!!!!!

Is there a trope you think you could be easily recognized by in your writing? i've had people say they saw the mention of buff hagakure and recognized it was me so. probably that skdjhnksjd

WRITING STYLE

How would you describe your style? i tend to use shorter sentences and pretty simple words i think? and i gravitate towards lighthearted concepts that allow for ensemble casts and humour!!

Describe your style in three words romcom but fanfic

Favorite words to use when writing? the word reverent!! fuckin love including it!!

Dialogue tags or no dialogue tags? (she said, he said, they said, etc) dialogue tags!!!

Favorite dialogue tag (other than said, if you use them) again idk if this counts but "they said softly" is unmatched

Long sentences vs short vs a mix short <33

What colors would you use to describe your writing? hm,,, depends on the fic i would say?? control fraek is dark green to me?? kinda like a forest at night yk?? scary but there's still life there. sugar cookies is yellow like early morning sunlight, when it rains is yellowy-orange like a caution sign. not gonna list all of them cause theres a lot its just. do u get it? the colours change based on the vibe of the fic.

What song or music genre would you use to describe your writing? think. i am constantly trying to emulate that moment at the end of wasteland baby when hozier goes "im in love/im in love with you."

What kind of metaphors do you rely on? religious metaphors my beloved <33 they're just so pretty!!! i also love comparing stuff to water for some reason?? like that ocean vuong quote thats like "what are you now?/water." it goes hard!!!

What's something you'd say is experimental in your writing at this time? definitely action!! i have,,, no idea how to write it so anything i do is really just me playing around and seeing what works and what doesn't

Do you prefer to write by hand or to type? i've tried both!! personally i prefer typing because it goes way faster but i will say that writing by hand lets me get words down when i'm going through writer's block

What is your preferred place to write (notebook, laptop, cellphone, etc.)? laptop!!

What app/apps do you use to write (word, notepad, etc.)? google docs skjdnkjh its fine on desktop but mobile is,,,,, disgusting

Do you keep a notebook or file/notes page in your phone/device for notes on your writing? ngl i just have everything organized in my drive?? one folder per fandom and then sub folders for ideas+hcs, unfinished wips, and finished fics. multichaps get sub sub folders so i can organize outlines and drafts

Do you listen to music to help you write? yeah!! playlists organized by fic vibe :D

Where do you usually go to write (bedroom, living room, etc.)? mostly in my bedroom??? but moving around to different stops helps too i think!!

How long does it usually take for you to write? again this depends on what i have going on irl, how attached i am to the idea, my mindset at the time, etc!! i am,, the least consistent person skjnhdkjh.

What's your favorite font to use when writing? times new roman my beloved

Other writing habits? sometimes i'll write in the dark?? bad for my eyes but for some reason it gets the words flowing

CONCEPTUALIZATION

How do you conceptualize your ideas? (See specific moments like they're a movie, writing specific lines in your head, don't know until you put the words on paper, etc.) i tend to get inspiration from movies, books, poems, or other fics!!! sometimes one line just makes me go oh,, i want to write something like that,,, and then it helps me create an idea that makes me feel the same way?? i did this with control fraek!!!! i wanted a scenario where bakugou was cold and calculating and i was like hm. to do that he’d have to be focusing on something important. and from there i was able to flesh out the rest of the idea.

Which comes first: the pairing or the plot? with krbk its always always the pairing,, i'll be sitting there like wow <33 i love them <33 what if one of them had amnesia <33 (which, yes, wip!!) otherwise it's usually the plot!! and i slot in characters that i feel make sense

Have you ever used a prompt? yeah!! used a prompt for wlw week 2020 and it was fun as hell

Do you write around the story around a specific scene you want to get to or do you start from a plot idea definitely the first!!!! i almost always write like,,, a super messy scene thats 90% dialogue, keep it in my head, and then write the entire fic around that one moment

Do you find that you include a projection of some part of yourself in the way you write a character? a lot of the time when i write love confessions or love in general i'll have one of the characters think or say that the other person makes their head quiet? and it's because that's what i feel whenever i'm in love?? a quiet mind. i project on characters yeah but i think most of the projection actually goes to the way that i write love

Do you research some of the things you write deeply, partially and kind of wing the rest, or play entirely by ear (in this case, go with whatever base knowledge of the subject you have)? most of the time if i do research it'll be about the setting (ex. the izakaya in to have and to hold) or if i'm having the characters interact with an object that they like. need to know how to use (me, in control fraek: google. hey google. does someone die if they get shot in the foot??? no???? awesome thank u <3)

Have you ever had an idea for a story and forgot about it? lmaoo yeah all the time i'll find like 500-2k words of concepts in my gdocs like i do. not remember this at all

Is there a trope you think you could be easily recognized by in your writing? probably krbk secret relationship lmao

Are there concepts you've tried that turned out better than expected? yeah!! i fully thought the action in control fraek would be awful but it turned out not bad??? which im happy with

Are there concepts you've tried that turned out worse than you expected? again, what we deserve, i personally think it would have worked out better if i'd paced it slower and drawn out the pining but i. do not feel like going back to fix it so its staying the way that it is. pining is so fucking hard to do AHHHH i get so tired with it!!! im like just date already!!!!

PROCESS

How do you come up with titles? in rare occasions (literally. all my multichaps for some reason) the title comes after writing like .5 words of the first chapter im like YES this is it!!!!! sometimes i write the whole thing and pick out one line that fits (what i did with come home to me) a lot of the time i just. steal from songs or poems that i like

What's your favorite emotion to cause on your readers? i like making people happy!!!! love when people comment saying they're cheered up

What's your favorite emotion to write? lovelovelovelovelovelove

Have you ever cried or felt any emotion while reading something you've written? never cried?? but sometimes i'll rereading my hurt/comfort fics 4. yk. comfort

Do you write in order or whatever comes to you? in order!! unless i have a scene that i Need to write and i'll quickly jot it down so that i don't forget

Usual way you procrastinate while writing? ...doing asks like this, making playlists, discord, watching netflix. what don't i do smh

Do you outline or free write? i am. so shit at outlines. i mostly free write and write lil notes for stuff that i wanna add later

Do you set word goals or scene goals (scenes you want to include)? yes!! like i said i'll write loose notes for scenes that i want to add later!! it gives me something to write towards :D

What do you consider when writing your scenes? what goes into making the atmosphere and mood you want? to set a scene i do two things? the first is like,, the five senses bc that always sets the scene really well and makes it feel Real. i'll visualize stuff in my head like its a movie and write out what i would want to tell the set designer?? if the lights are low, if the space is busy, if it's supposed to exude comfort or not.

for putting forward the character's mood one thing i've found that makes a difference is sentence length!! long sentences are good for making a character seem flustered and nervous or not really in control of their emotions? good for love confessions. short sentences are good for when the character is focused on something or short on time. good for fights!!

What's something you never considered to include in your writing that you can't leave out now? def buff hagakure,,,, once i thought of it i was like. if i don't include this at least once in every single fic how could i look at myself in the mirror!!!!!! how could i face anyone!!!!

How do you start a story? establishing a fact about the character or describing the setting! option a is one single thread of gold, option b is between lion and men

How do you end a story? either by tying it back to the beginning or doing like a funny kind of closing??? option a is sugar cookies, option b is a godless society

How do you get out of writer's block? change something!! move something!! i go from typing to handwriting, moving from my bedroom to my living room, switching wips to work on something else!! i do sprints as well?? give myself like fifteen minutes to write something and sometimes 200 words opens up the way for another 2k. sometimes i'll just delete like 500 words and start fresh

Do you edit? or do you toss your writing out there? i edit!!! i'll go over it myself then send it to one or two betas (bee my beloved <33)

How do you edit? do you use spellcheck, grammar checkers, etc? bee is my grammar checker bc he is So Good with grammar. i use grammarly as well for spellcheck stuff mostly?? sometimes my edit process is just like "am i tired of looking at this!! yes <3" and then i post it

PROGRESS

Do you usually like what you write? yeah!!! i post stuff that makes me happy and that i'm fine with rereading!!! i write stuff for self-indulgence reasons first and foremost and i think my writing reflects that sjhnksj

Have you ever written something you didn't like but posted anyways? nope!! even what we deserve i LIKED even if i see a lot of room 4 improvement!! if i don't like smth it's not getting posted

Do you find yourself rereading your writing often? yeah!! the reason i wrote so much krbk secret relationship is because i loved it but i'd read all that there was so i just,, wrote more,, ngl its kinda nice being in a place where i actually like my writing bc i can write stuff that i want to see and really enjoy it!!

Can you tell us anything about your current WIP? sure!! i'm currently working on when it rains which is a fic where bakugou gets hit by a crying quirk!! i'm gonna be using it to explore So Much of all might's character and his relationships with bakugou and aizawa (and i think some people from his past!!)

Can you give us a sneak peek on your current WIP? “You did something. What the hell did you do?” Kirishima sounds pissed off. It would amuse Katsuki if he wasn’t fighting just to stay standing.

“Nothing he didn’t ask for,” Shinsou replies.

“K’ri… shima,” Katsuki croaks out. “‘S fine. Not him.”

His chest collapses back into the familiar dry heaving after that but Kirishima shuts up. He doesn’t apologize to Shinsou.

Kirishima’s a good friend, stubborn and loyal. He stands by Katsuki’s side like an attack dog, blocking him from the view of anyone ogling at his tears.

The last line you've written Ochako knows more than she'd realized. She knows enough to keep her guard up.

It’s not enough.

Open a wip. what’s the first line?

Katsuki wakes up feeling like absolute fucking shit.

INSIGHT

What's your favorite thing about writing? touched on this before but it's mainly just being able to write the things that i want to see and actually enjoy them!!! actually reread them!!!! i thought "wouldn't it be cool if bkg and kirishima owned a restaurant together" and then i wrote it and i like it enough to reread it!!!! being able to create content for myself makes me. so happy

How do you keep yourself inspired? this is gonna sound narcissistic maybe but honestly i'm just really excited about my ideas and where i'm gonna take them and the idea of "i'm gonna get to That scene" keeps me going through the entire thing. also my friends!!!! i'll talk to them about fics and their reactions keep me hyped up enough to finish!!!!

What is your favorite thing to write? just,, slice of life romance,,, stuff thats silly and makes people laugh!!

What do you think your strengths are in writing? i'm good with dialogue!! i do lil voice acting sessions with myself to make sure everything sounds natural and like it's coming from that character skhjnskj

i'm comfortable with my portrayal of love as well??? i spend a lot of time thinking about what it is exactly that i'm trying to get across and i think it turns out well!!

What are things you wish you could practice more? on one hand i wanna get better at writing angst on the other hand i dislike writing angst. do you see my issue

One way you've improved your writing since you began? characterization!! i think i've gotten better at writing characters that are all Different and bring different things to the table!!! i used to project a lot more and it would compromise the characterization because the character was like 70% me and 30% them? not to say that projection is bad but if you do it too much it just,, doesn't read like the character and from a reader's standpoint the narrative can become less compelling

One aspect of writing you're still working on? writing action!!! i. literally hate writing it but i write for a fandom about superheroes so. Unfortunately i gotta learn.

A piece of writing advice you've learned while writing saw this on another tumblr post but they said sometimes if you're struggling with a scene, the problem is five lines back. i've found that to be true!!!! sometimes u gotta delete a chunk and start a little ways back!! i did this with too busy being yours because i was stuck for Weeks and i deleted like 25% of what i had but it helped me actually finish it :D

A bit of writing advice you can't stand when people shit on show don't tell for being overrated lmao bc when u read their writing you can Tell

Something you wish you knew when you first started writing? ,,,,honestly i kind of wish i could know some of the stuff that i used to when i first started writing?? technically i'm better now but creatively i was must better when i wasn't stressing about whether anyone would like what i was writing. so i guess i wish i knew that i should keep that confidence? i kinda wish that i wasn't as insecure about other people's writing styles because i never used to be!!

Something you've learned in life that you apply in writing there's no point in feeling inferior?? writing one genre isn't better than the other. being in one fandom isn't better than being in another. the kind of language you use or the length of your paragraphs- none of that stuff like. matters. what matters is that you're having fun and happy with what you're creating!!!! enjoy other peoples writing but don't let it make you feel worse about yours :D

[mirrorballparkers]

i have to send this bc of that call out post *ahem* you have the biggest crush on peter so whenever you’re in class you try n sneak lil glances of him but the one time he catches you staring and you both end up blushing messes h

this is the sweetest :( i love hims 🦋🐶🧚🏻‍♀️

━━

10:55 am. honors english class; tuesday afternoon, mid october.

he’s wearing that blue midtown high sweater, that is much too big for him, but it works - it works because he looks cozy, warm, and too adorable. you love the way he hides his hands inside the sleeves, due to the cold air radiating through the vents and waving through the medium size classroom.

the little habits he had were everything; the way he’d srunchbhis nose up after making a tiny typo on his paper, the blue ink smudged across his fingers, something you noticed happened nearly every day. but it was never something he noticed, so without knowing, he’d walk around the rest of the day with a bunch of blue ink plastered along his fingers and hands.

peter decided to go with glasses today, leaving contacts out of the equation, he was too tired to put them in this morning after a late patrol, then coming home to cram some last minute studying in. you thought he looked a little geeky, but also resembled a warm little puppy during the fall; the combination of his flushed cheeks, either from being near you or from the frigid air, the way his freckles laid across his nose and his cheeks, something you adored. his freckles were astronomical, they resembled little flowers, to you; you wanted to count them, all of them.

it was quiet, not too quiet, your teacher liked to play soft orchestra music in the background in order to get your motivation for writing started. the assignment today was to write a poem about new beginnings, how they were important each month, and each season; you longed for a new beginning this month. (perhaps, you’d have the chance with peter?)

your finger graces across your brown notebook, which you often used to write your poems in, so this wasn’t foreign to you; but today, your mind wasn’t agreeing with you. it didn’t want to write. your eyes always adverted to that boy with the pretty brown eyes next to you, always finding your heart beating a different poem itself; it was the best one, yet.

11:00 am. not a single word written, not even a trace of thought, just peter. always peter.

peter often wondered how you could write so well, being one of the best writers in your class. he thought words were simple, yet they touched his heart. you’d write what he was always thinking, and he admired that. he also admired your simplistic beauty; it was out of this world, it was fey.

he’d always write about you, anonymously of course, for you were his muse. was it creepy? to him, possibly ned, yes. but, if you ever found this out, your heart would be beating as fast as his. like some sort of duet.

with the hopes of getting some inspiration to jot at least one single word down on the paper in front of you, you glance over at peter. it was never a quick glance, you always gazed at him with wonder and with fervor. somehow, while staring, you found out more about the boy with the tantalizing eyes; reminding you of moonlight and a love song. you found out how good he was, how pretty he was. not just his features, but his heart.

a quick glance can never go unnoticed, and today was that day.

peter’s head turns slightly, and once his eyes land on yours, you’re paralyzed with embarrassment.

basically, you fucked up.

peter bows his head, too bashful, wondering how and why the girl of his dreams was looking at him with such adoration. was this all a fantasy?

suddenly, the butterflies were too much to handle in your belly, and your cheeks were starting to burn. you weren’t sure if it was embarrassment, or if it was because your english teacher had finally turned the heat up.

you felt a sense of awkwardness, uncomfortable (not because of him, because you just felt like a creepy stalker staring at someone you’ve barely spoken to.) and without thinking about anything but how stupid you looked, you just giggle quietly, and wave at the pretty boy next to you.

hey, nothing wrong with saying hello to a boy as dreamy as peter parker.

he tries not to smile too wide, and bites the bottom of his lip, waving back at you. he thought your blush was adorable, your bashfulness was adorable. you were adorable, and he wanted to kiss your pink nose so terribly at this very moment.

you grip onto your fluffy pink pen, turning away from him. it was a start, maybe a shy start, but it was a start anyway.

11:05, you started to write about your dream boy. words flowing like honey, body temperature going up every time. now, you were both making little attempts at looking at each other. all of a sudden, peter was now passing you little notes with sweet messages.

after breaking the ice by passing the notes, peter decides it would be best if he got to know you better. he wanted to keep talking to you; but he wanted to hear your voice. the voice as smooth as honey, as sweet as anything in this world. it made him feel like, maybe, there was good in this world. there was hope, perhaps.

so, i was thinking, we could maybe continue this conversation after class? but, like, not using notes because it’s a waste of paper. could i maybe...give you my number? c:

your heart skips a beat, feeling like you were, in fact, bringing one of your poems to life. but even better. you try not to look like such a lovesick fool, and turn your head towards peter, who was already blushing the moment your eyes met his dreamy ones.

“sure, i’m down.” you whispered, receiving a little hush from your teacher. you both giggle nervously, and due to peter’s spidey senses, he could hear your heartbeat now. and, gosh, was it perfect. the most beautiful song in this world.

this felt so kid-like, but also so cute and right at the same time. you glance over at peter, who just happened to be already looking over at you with a joyful, too cute for words grin on his baby face.

peter nods, carefully and diligently ripping a little piece of paper from his notebook, jotting his phone number down.

you thank him silently as he hands you the little paper with his info on it. you hold it tenderly in the palm of your hand, and on it read a little message, that was too sweet for words:

i already think you’re sweet...can’t wait to talk to you more, here’s my number:) - pete

it was crazy. one little awkward glance resulted in moments filled with fairytales; you couldn’t quite believe it, peter was your one and only true fairytale. it was better than anything you’ve ever read, because it was real.

━━

blurb night 9.2.19.

[iwanthermidnightz]

The following is the summary of Kate’s latest episode on Taylor. Forgive the back and forth and random points... Kate likes to ramble. It was literally an hour and a half of that but she did bring up some good points. This is her analyzing ‘The Archer’ among other things! For the record, I’m writing from her perspective/direct words.

————————————————-

-Thinks The Archer is beautiful, ethereal, and lush

-It’s very Donna Lewis, very Robyn, it’s a nostalgic sound, very Jack Antonoff, very Lorde Melodrama.. its a certain sound reverberating female celestial voices that reminds her of the 90s and she likes it

-It’s a promo single which means it’s released to promote the album, it’s not released to radio stations for airplay- no music video

-Sounds transitional, unfinished song… it’s building

-Released to convey a level of emotional vulnerability

-Taylor said in radio interviews in the UK that this album is very pure and it’s not in response to something like she said reputation was

-“Lover is about what songs would I write for the sake of writing songs? Most of them are about love in the sense that they’re a love letter to love itself”

-We’re in an era with VERY little information

-We’ve seen Joe twice in 2019 (go figure)

-Taymerica, Squad, Calvin, we see her all the time

-Then she gets in this mysterious private ‘relationship’ with Joe almost so much so that there’s no reason to speculate or think about her personal life because it’s so under the radar and she’s never officially talked about him

-She automatically likes his Instagram posts within 2 minutes which a lot of us think is some sort of thing Instagram does for people like her

-She has a theory Taylor and Taylornation can see stories without read receipts (duh)

-The Archer represents a person that's reflecting on their behavior and their patterns and thinking about their relationships in life and thinking about the role of self-sabotage as it relates to your personal relationships

-Talks about the dive bar situation, she needs to spend more time thinking about it

-She talks about the easter eggs leading up to the archer and debates whether Taylor planned this out 3 years ago because of the archer angel in the delicate mv, and the way the people in the delicate mv see right through her, it makes sense

-She always wondered what aspects of Taylors personal life is a media narrative. What has she actually confirmed herself? What are these songs really saying?

-She thinks the songs on reputation sound like really closeted anthems

-It’s none of her business what her sexuality is but it is her business to interpret her songs the way any open-minded person should

-So much of reputation she really read being about a relationship with a woman because it was so grounded in secrecy, quiet moments, darkest little paradise, happened for the first time, I don’t want you like a best friend, everybody thinks that they know us but they know nothing about us, I loved you in spite of deep fears that the world would divide us, I had a bad feeling… (yes she named them all in the same breath)

-Lyrics have never been about the protection and privatization of involuntarily public love, they’ve been lyrics about a perception of a forbidden love -It’s one thing to hide from the paparazzi, and to be like “something happens when everybody finds out, loose lips sink ships all the damn time”, recites ‘I Know Places’ basically- calls it a closeted anthem because Taylor literally comes out of closet doors on the 1989 tour.

-Thinks there are themes in Taylors songs that she might miss as a straight person and doesn’t want to discount them

-She was reading an article in Vulture written by none other than known Kaylor truther Jill Gutowitz, mentioned how Jill very openly talks about Gaylor and Karlie Kloss and even recently Tree Paine liked one of her tweets

-Tree Paine is a mastermind and has boots on the ground everywhere (Indeed she is!)

-Thinks the Tree Paine like was strategic

-Jill said in an article that there were implicitly queer lyrics placed throughout ‘The Archer’: ‘pace like a ghost’, ‘heroes die all alone’, ‘help me hold onto you’, dying alone and holding on to someone who isn’t right for you are all important tenants of the lesbian canon (shes quoting Jill)

-Kate did not pick up on any of that cause shes straight haha

-Mentions how Taylors fans are divided by those who think her songs are blatantly queer and those who don’t and believe the Toe relationship is real bc the media shows them that and they believe it firsthand (true)

-She quotes the reputation prologue “when the album comes out gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test and there will be slideshows and photos backing up each incorrect theory because it’s 2017 and if you didn’t see a picture of it it didn’t happen right? Let me say it again louder for those in the back… we think we know someone but the truth is that we only know the version of them that they have chosen to show us.”

-Kate says that those are her actual straightforward words and you can’t read that and say that it's not okay to believe in things we haven’t seen or that it’s calling her a liar to only believe what we’ve seen if she is telling us to our faces that we think we know her but the truth is we only know the version of herself that she has chosen to show us

-That is an admission of Taylor being strategic in what we know, and a ton we don’t know

-The prologue should’ve opened up the doors for an and all theories to be fair game but somehow it divided the fandom deeper than she’s ever seen

-Calling her a liar about what she’s told us thus far is not fair (it takes a mature person to understand that)

-The Taylor Swift strategic businesswoman who keeps us on our toes waiting for new music and clues is part of her success- not all. But there is a difference between that Taylor and the Taylor she is behind closed doors. She’s still a person. So to say she's a liar is not right.

-We can’t imagine what it takes to be in her position and not have lost her mind yet

-Maybe shes had a breakdown but we haven’t seen it (wasn’t that her disappearance before reputation?)

-Kate goes back to ‘The Archer’ and her internal struggle

-She read something that Taylor liked on Tumblr where someone said that The Archer is the song version of her poem called “If you’re anything like me”... epiphany.

-The song is about talking about her shortcomings while simultaneously accepting them and saying if you’re anything like me I’m sorry but you’ll be fine

-Kate recites the whole poem now lol

-Showcases a lot of strength in your weakness and pointing out the importance of going through these things in order to find oneself and to acknowledge that some things are just pillars of the way you are

-Back to the archer - this song is about the unwelcome justice system in her head in terms of patterns, knowing how she's going to react, in terms of wishing she were another way and objectively being able to see that but not being able to feel that is a very human experience to constantly be in between your head and your heart

-You only know your own experience, anyone that's hurt you stays in your subconscious or otherwise and we often react in response or defense of it and when she’s saying “no amount of friends at 25 will fill the empty seats at the lunch tables of your past and the teams that picked you last but darling, you keep trying”

-She has been criticized so many times and publicly taken down, shes felt like she can't do anything right at times

-Brings up the ME! Performance at the Billboard awards and no one talked about the performance, just that she ‘copied Beyonce’

-Stuff like that that was not intentional is often pegged on her for better or worse, correct or not

-To be accused of copying or being tone-deaf when shes probably orchestrated this team to make sure none of that happened would be so thankless and frustrating and sometimes the hate is louder

-At times in her career, she's had no choice but to jump to her own overwhelming defense

-You can't trust a lot of people if you are easily used and you do have to be somewhat cut and dry and I think that being put in an environment where it benefits you to be cut and dry because there are so many shady people but maybe she doesn’t really want to be

-She has no choice but to be black or white about her life and feelings and standing up for herself

-Back to The Archer- Kate doesn’t understand the point of “I’ve been the archer, I’ve been the prey”

-It’s kind of like I’ve been the attacker and I’ve been the victim, I’ve had the upper hand and I’ve had the lower hand, I’ve been the dumper and I’ve been dumped

-Kate thinks Taylor’s been on the attack and defense and she knows what it feels like to be treated the exact same way she treats people and therein lies the issue

-That’s a confusing thing to process in your head period and to communicate in a song is inevitably going to be a little bit frantic and convoluted but that's kind of the point. The anxiety of how you handle things and how you accept yourself despite the way you likely mishandle things

-Taylor starts out saying “I’m ready for combat” in the most reluctant, delicate voice that is not indicative of somebody ready for combat

-That sounds like somebody who is a reluctant participant in their own patterns and they don’t want to be doing it but they know they’re going to and they know they’ll do it again

-These patterns and issues that we have exhibit over and over the reason for self-loathing and it's almost harder when you’re older and can acknowledge that you do these things and they don’t work for you but I still do them anyway

-It’s that self awareness paired with the active participation in these bad habits that make a person really start to doubt themselves and in using figures of speech like “I cut off my nose just to spite my face”, like that cuts deep bc she's basically being like “I overreact and I know I do and on purpose”

-In acting out of anxiety and fear you often end up riding off alone

-At a point you see people come and go, you know how this whole song and dance goes, at a point you start to mourn it before it's over

-That’s kind of like “yeah I never figured out the best way to maintain these relationships and I’m tired of it, I never grew up, I don’t know why I am this way but since I know they come and go and since I’ve always ridden on the train alone that probably what I’ll do again but with your help, help me hold onto you… like I want you to be the exception”

-We all think of ourselves as a catch and a trainwreck and it’s not a bad thing

-Looking for someone’s flaws is something everyone does in relationships

-As it relates to in the past when she’s been burned by somebody’s dark side she wants to call it when she sees it and lock the door before she gets robbed but then there's the conflicting part where she’s like “well what I’m alright, what if I can trust you and I’m alright right here?”

-The entire song is kind of like a back and forth of opposing feelings

-To cut off your nose to spite your face is basically a metaphor for overreacting

-She brings up the Hiddleswift stunt and Taylor revealing that she was Nils Solberg for some reason (connecting it to the metaphor)

(KATE IS RAMBLING SO I’M ONLY ADDING IMPORTANT THINGS NOW)

-We’re so quick to discount people's feelings just because they're in a position of fame and fortune and power but I think we would all feel no less us with money if anything everything’s intensified

-Taylor must have to put up a front all the time because she's not allowed to complain or have bad days when that is your normal and any therapist will tell you you can only heal operating out of your own normal.

-Pain is pain and when you start to compare pain is when you start to trivialize, minimize and not work through what you’re going through and you start to avoid/ignore it

-Taylors in a weird position where she probably has a more internal struggle that anybody

-Through her music we should acknowledge and think about what it’s like on that side, we owe her the respect to be like damn.. this must be hard

-Talks about the “all the king's horses” line and Humpty Dumpty

-All of the resources and people trying to help Taylor at her disposal and they still can’t fix this and that is an empty feeling, like a lost cause

-When Kate hears ‘The Archer’ she hears a highly anxious episode that is not just processing the individual situation going on but then doing a thing where you project it on every single thing that's ever going to happen in your life

OK FIN.

[fmdtaeyongarchive]

↬ the meaning you hold in your eyes, i could write a few poems on them.

date: october 2019 & february 2020.

location: ash’s apartment studio.

word count: 2,197 words, excluding lyrics.

summary: n/a.

triggers: mentions of alcohol as is way too common in ash’s verifications.

notes: creative claims verification. if any of this sounds familiar, no it doesn’t. (some parts of this are reworked from a different verification i did last year for a song that never happened because it fit this one too and i refuse to waste the time i put into that.)

october 2019.

he’d done this whole thing before several times while working on the album that will be coming out any day now and it would be easier this time. or rather, that was what ash told himself he’d be saying when it was all over. it hadn’t been just once, in truth. there were multiple songs written now that had been put into consideration for the first half of the track list of the album ⁠— the sensual and passionate half⁠ — but this wasn’t for that half of the album, or that album at all. the tracklist had been finalized long ago, but, in many ways, he was still hung up on the dissatisfaction that had crept in. so many songs for the album had been discarded and while it never quite felt good to have something he’d worked so hard on dubbed unsatisfactory, he’s still holding on to the lingering remnants of the phase where rejection made him more driven to create something that wouldn’t be turned down. a few more ‘no’s and he might reach his breaking point and want to give up entirely on catering to everything the company wanted, but for now, he was slowly settling in to the new challenge of writing outside of his standard comfort zone.

he’d written sensual songs before, but they were always manageable in their softness. that was the easiest lens for ash to view his own intimate experiences through, but bc had continued to demand something more aggressive, more bold, and ash hadn’t nailed down exactly how he was supposed to wrangle that yet and still remain true to himself.

he’d been surprised his album had ended up being confirmed for release at all with all the difficulties he’d had writing it and he still wasn’t sure what the turning point was where bc decided this was a sure thing. it may have been ash showing his ability to write what they wanted or it may have been a look into the expected profits for the rest of the year. understanding how bc’s employees’ collective minds worked wasn’t an easy feat, and ash had bigger fish to fry. namely, a fish in the form of making a song he didn’t have to worry about getting on the album that would calm the nagging in the back of his head that the company had found his weakness. successfully making one or two songs to please bc’s sexier image desires for fatalism hadn’t made ash an expert on the form yet, but he had learned ways to make it easier on himself than the stress he’d inflicted on himself and the worry he’d experienced when bc’s demands were still new to him. one of those ways was to start with a beat. that wasn’t a frequent necessity when he was shaping out a piano ballad or a folk guitar track, but if it was going to be danced to, it needed a good beat. any good dancer could tell him that the beat was a critical part of a song and, at one point in time, ash would have considered himself a good dancer himself. these days he was more like the leftovers of what was formerly a passionate dancer. he could never rid himself of the years as of technique training and the plentiful experience on stage and in a dance studio, but when he was merely going through the motions ninety percent of the time, it felt like he’d faltered since debut in some way. the worry about the bc-approved choreography for his second title track already had him on edge with concerns he’d be called out for laziness again, his mistakes becoming more glaring when he was the center of attention instead of being able to hide among a group.

that could be worried about later. it wasn’t the concern at hand at the moment.

right now, the song was what was most important and the beat was coming together nicely. it wasn’t all that unique in execution, but he intended the sexiness to lay in the instrumental more than the lyrics themselves. he layered some more interesting percussion into what he envisioned as the chorus as he built more musical lines on top of the foundation to construct a more full song than the basic outline of something sexy.

he started with the main attraction, the chorus, and built out musically into the verses, the bridge, and, at first, the song also included what he had at the time decided would probably be a dance break when the song became a full-fledged performance. 

as he worked, he built the song to be reminiscent of the songs he’d watched performance recordings of when he was younger. american r&b in the nineties and early two thousands had been secondary to the flashy dance performances of pop legends and trendy boy bands of the decade of his birth for much of his youth, if only because his young brain wasn’t ready for the more mature topics and sounds many of the best songs of the time had utilized. still, though, anything with a good voice, a good beat, and an eye-catching dance routine would have little ash’s eyes glued to the tv screen.

ash had never considered too much where his interest in performing had come from. according to his parents, he’d been dancing and singing since he could walk and talk despite neither of his parents being all that inclined toward the performance arts. if he thought about it now, he thought he might owe much of that to all of the awe-inspiring stage performances he’d been exposed to growing up. at such a young age, he couldn’t fully grasp the heartthrob appeal of the young adult men dancing on stage to a thumping back beat or the pretty girls who only needed a stage and a spotlight to shine. he hadn’t wanted to be admired or longed for. he’d wanted to perform and be able to captivate a crowd the same way the music icons he’d seen growing up had. 

that might be a better way to approach this.

ash took a break from writing to revisit a self-curated playlist of his favorite r&b songs spanning the best eras of the genre before he returned to fleshing out the song’s instrumental layers. it was becoming a good track by pure pop writing measure, but it was also becoming apparent something was missing when he set his sights solely on a replication of the nostalgia that other performers brought. being brought back to one’s younger days wasn’t exactly what was going to inspire the type of storytelling environment that had ash was aiming for. ash reminded himself that the song was supposed to have the musical themes suggesting intimacy that the lyrics suggested wasn’t entirely there yet on a conscious level. lust didn’t have to be presented as unromantic to be there, and it wasn’t always as black and white as sex. ash had met the beginnings of many a physical relationship, and the unintentional mind games and the questions were as much a part of the spark of something new as physical touch could

when viewed through the eyes of the adult he now was, those performances he’d watched as a kid had often been alluring in a seductive nature. often times, the words had danced around the literal, kept poetic for the romanticism of it. he’d written that exact kind of romance before, and the honey-tongued poetry he knew himself capable of didn’t have to disappear because he was working with a beat-driven r&b track instead of a rolling acoustic guitar instrumental.

making the instrumental had only taken ash a few weeks of work, but when it came time to put words to it, everything he wrote out only sounded shallow and forced. eventually, he was so stalled that he chose to switch into writing in english to see if a change of language would bring anything new out. he found words for most of the song that way, but they still felt disjointed and, if he were to be honest with himself, embarrassingly try-hard. the only thing that really stood out to him was the water themes he’d come up with, comparing the desire to get to know someone better to taking a deep dive underwater.

he reached out to a few close friends and work colleagues for advice, but nothing set him on the path to anything that could satisfy his perfectionist mind. he remembered being told once that if he was struggling with how to write a feeling, he should ask himself how he’d tell someone else to write it.

if you’re having trouble writing about desire, start with the basis of it all. a feeling. a desire. a question. nothing else. capture those feelings in the lyrics. desire at its best is simple. don’t overcomplicate it.

that gives him an intro that matches the beat well, but he grows stuck again after that, racing at top speed down the path to overcomplicating once again and, with time, he stops coming back to the song.

briefly, he considered trying to sell the instrumental off or asking someone else to write lyrics for him so he could present a full package to whoever he shopped it around to. deleting it off of his computer had been another option. he wasn’t confident enough in his abilities as a producer yet to believe his songs were of much value without his lyrics attached. this one had been created to prove something to himself, anyway, so what use would it be if it had to be finished by someone else?

february 2020.

the song has been abandoned in his files for months when he suddenly recalled it and, out of nowhere, suitable lyrics finally began to form themselves in his head. it was late and he’d had a bit to drink after returning home after a long day. valentine’s day was quickly approaching and it would be the first one he’d be spending alone since his scandal. a few vodka shots had seemed the fitting way to forget that.

tipsiness hadn’t been able to keep him out of his studio though and he’d sloughed into his chair as the black hood of his hoodie slipped off of the crown of his head onto his back, on a mission to get some work done before his head started hurting too badly. fifteen minutes into the mission, he had a loose leaf sheet of paper dotted with various phrases, most of which had something to do with the dark bubbly liquid poisoning his veins at that exact moment, but they mixed with lyrics fitting with the aquatic theme he’d come up with a few months prior, shaken loose from his mind by the ever-prying fingers of vodka.

it's like i'm drunk try mixing in another another blue sapphire let me know if there's an island for me in your sea it's like i'll explode the blue spreads through all of me if you want, you can fall into me

drunkenness and desire weren’t so different, he figured, as someone who’d gotten himself in trouble based off of both of those feelings before. his train of thought wasn’t very clear as he worked the rest of the song out, his thoughts veering into the safety of romance-colored interest, but his work came out in large chunks that gave him hope it wouldn’t be hopeless when he came back to it sober. 

when he did come back to the lyrics a day later, more sober and once the hangover had passed. while some of it was painfully clear in being the ramblings of a man under the influence, he’d gotten enough of a start in his state of lowered inhibitions for a less affected ash to fine tune the vocabulary and carefully round the edges into something more consumable, more seductive r&b ballad and less messy musings of an uninhibited might. it might not be the magnum opus of his lyrical career, but it wasn’t bad for such a highly metaphorical song written under the influence. it didn’t push ash too far outside of the walls of his comfort that had already done enough expanding while he worked on fatalism, and some cliches and over-bluntness had slithered into the lines, but it made the tone cheeky instead of taking itself too seriously, as ash was terribly prone to doing.

in a lot of ways, it reminded him of the song he’d written earlier in the month and turned in for his spring release. while woo ah had been colored pink in his mind, this was drenched in blues and purples, and even though he’d needed to drown himself in liquor to finish both of them, this one didn’t tie his stomach up into knots if he listened to it too many times in a row.

this one is a song about the desire, and maybe a little bit of frustration, of a new beginning and ash hadn’t felt that in years now. from that alone, it should have been harder to write, but the distance from the feeling might very well be what made it so easy to write about without ending up a mess by the time he was finished.

but, for some reason, it didn’t feel as distant as he thought it should.

[musings-on-bucky-barnes]

Q&A Part 3 with Owlet about The Infinite Coffee & Protection Detail series

Here is Part the Third of Owlet answering questions about The Infinite Coffee & Protection Detail series and also about her other writing. Some of the questions are from readers of the first Q&A, and some come from a Tumblr post of suggested questions for writers.

Warning for discussion of rape.

OWLET'S NOTE:

Thanks for all the cheers and good wishes on part 2! I'm glad people think the behind-the-scenes stuff is interesting and not just me being a windbag.

I was delighted that so many of you seem interested in my novel! It's not available anywhere yet: I still have to find an agent, and who knows how the heck long that's going to take? (I am NOT cut out for self-publishing.) But I certainly hope it'll find a home. If you want to keep up with me on tumblr (vmohlere) or twitter (virginiamohlere), I assure you that when such time comes, I will scream about it a LOT.

Pink floaty hearts, y'all.

  Reader questions:

From EssayOfThoughts:

 I know that you say that you like to imagine AOU doesn't exist, but I will admit (because I find Wanda deeply compelling and the twins story as a whole very interesting) that I've wondered a lot about how your Bucky would deal with the Maximoff twins? Like, on the one hand there's Wanda's ability to mess with minds, which he'd hate, but simultaneously (at least according to the AOU prelude comic) the twins was effectively radicalised by HYDRA while they were pretending to be SHIELD and expected to be their weapons which is not wholly dissimilar to Nat or Bucky. So if you're willing to acknowledge AOU just enough to ponder this I'd really like to know your thoughts! If not, of course, I understand.

Wanda’s not a character I’ve given much thought to. You’re right that her abilities would freak Barnes out. But he has a strict policy of observation before reaction, so he would give them a chance. And they’re so young (and so broken) that his protective instincts would kick in. I think they could probably count on some wary kindness, along with a dose of irritation at Pietro’s shenanigans.

From Ev42:

 Thing I can't stop thinking about today: babies. Specifically, Bucky + baby = ???

 I personally am a sucker for "Steve knows nothing, Bucky's a pro" thing re: babies. Mix that up with the Mission and the Briefing and what would we get? I keep think about, idk, maybe Sam has a niece or nephew, or one of the Olds has a grandchild or grandniece or something, and I just really want your thoughts on Bucky + baby... Please?

Barnes would be too worried about inadvertently hurting an infant to be willing to touch one, though he likes the directness of slightly older kids.

If in the presence of Steve trying to deal with an infant, the Briefing would definitely have a lot of commentary about everything he was doing wrong.

From Fred1085:

 I guess if I had one question though it would be: Do you always see Bucky existing as Barnes, the Briefing, and the Mission, or do you see a time in his future in which those aspects of him would be more integrated. Not through the magical Asgaridan science, but through his own force of will/healing?

  He definitely does become more integrated over time. The Mission is a protective identity, and as he needs it less, it recedes. The Briefing is literally his memories, which he does recover many of over time, though that’s a long and painful process. There’s a lot of regression throughout the long-term forward progress. But he keeps some of the habits, like “confirm” and “deny.”

 MusingsOnBuckyBarnes:

 After “This, You Protect”, the Mission went to ground so to speak for a bit and Bucky was distressed at its loss, at it not communicating with him. But over time as he heals and it recedes, he wouldn’t be so upset?

Exactly. When the Mission’s going quiet is part of the organic process of healing, he misses it but isn’t upset by its loss.

From stentorian_lore_n:

 Did Bucky and Steve ever make a donation to Sam's VA?? :)

Yes, of course! But Sam had to be bullied into buying a better chair for himself, because he wanted all the money to go to programs.

There’s a lot of red tape involved with how much money the center can receive in donations, so Steve & Bucky give that much each year, even much later, when Sam does in fact move to NYC to become an Avenger.

From englishghosts:

 Also, since you're taking questions, I'd like to ask you something. (TW RAPE)

Although Bucky suffering sexual abuse and torture "for fun" during his time with HYDRA makes perfect sense in my head (70 years in the hands of powerful white men who had complete control over him, it's difficult to imagine nobody got ideas), especially with the imagery of the bank scene, it's something we don't see that often in fics outside certain areas of fandom. I'm really glad you included this, because for me it not only makes it more realistic, but also it brings an extra layer into Bucky reclaiming himself and being comfortable with touching and his feelings for Steve. So the question is what made you decide to include it in this fic?

Like you say, powerful men with a powerful man under their complete control, over the course of 70 years – to me, it’s a given that among the many abuses he suffered was sexual abuse. It was always part of the character, for me, one of the many layers that he needed to work through to reclaim both his body and his self.

I started to think that the romantic-physical relationship with Steve was an inevitable part of Barnes’s healing process, because he and Steve really just do love each other SO much. The more I thought about it, the more I could see that given the style that I’d set up, writing Barnes’s reactions to things kind of obliquely, would be SUPER FUN for writing about bodies and sex. I cackled my whole way through writing that section.

And, you know, there were a lot of commenters who were like “hey man where’s the smut?” – a few of them NOT SO NICELY. I’m glad I stuck it in its own section, though, because I know there are also a lot of people who like to only read the gen parts.

From Selkieinthesea:

How did you come up with the curses? My favorite is “Lenin’s pickled scrotum.” It makes me laugh every time I think of it. I’d use it, but I have toddlers so then I’d have to explain what pickling is, what a scrotum is and why you’d pickle one.

That is a mystery and a blessing from the part of my brain from which jokes arise. Every one of them delighted me. “Lenin’s pickled scrotum” hearkens back to college jokes in Russian History class about how they embalmed Lenin with a mixture of Twinkie filling and maraschino cherry juice, and of course scrotums are always hilarious, I don’t know how people who have them even deal.

from Ev42 (about the fic “Love Is for Children”):

 Nicholas. Anything to do with Nick Fury? Bc I think that'd make his faking-my-death-without-telling-Natasha sting that much more. Ouch.

 I'm trying to imagine how Nicholas meeting the gang would go. I... have no idea? Barnes would bake, of course, but what? The Olds would be happy. Barton already knows. I guess I'm just trying to figure out what the hurt/happy ratio for the rest would be

I actually have a tiny bit of this written out – it was originally going to be another piece of ICaPD, but I couldn’t get it to have any kind of arc to it, and the pacing was just BALLS.

Anyhow, yes, Nicholas is named after Nick Fury. His sperm donor is no one of import, and the only one of the Avengers who knows about him is Clint.

The snippet I never wrote involved Bad Guys kidnapping Nicholas & Steve/Barnes/Nat/Clint/Sam going on a rescue mission.

In this universe, Nat & Clint have a couple of Barton-Romanoffs, of whom Nicholas is the first (Clint adopts him). Tony & Pepper likewise have several kids in this universe.

  The remaining questions are from a “Fanfiction Writer Asks” Tumblr post by criminal-minds-fanfiction:

Do you prefer writing OC’s or reader inserts? Explain your answer.

I haven’t written a reader-insertish kind of thing since I wrote a Duran Duran scifi AU when I was 14 years old. Original characters are where it’s at.

What is your favourite genre to write for?

Fantasy, for sure. Tho romance tends to worm its way into most of my stuff.

If you had to choose a favourite out of all of your multi chaptered stories, which would it be and why?

I think This, You Protect has better pacing than The Long Road Begins at Home, and writing it helped me fall back in love with writing.

If you had to delete one of your stories and never speak of it again, which would it be and why?

Um. Maybe my Loki poem? Tho I don’t think it’s necessarily bad.

When is your preferred time to write?

First thing in the morning, tho I’m grateful to be able to write almost any time. In the past couple of years, I've gotten into writing into the notepad on my phone, so I literally write any- and everywhere.

Where do you take your inspiration from?

Absolutely everywhere.

In your xxx fic, what’s your favourite scene that you wrote? [Any of your Bucky fics]

The chapter of Team-Building Exercises where Barnes & Pepper go to France is something I’m so proud of. I think I did pretty well with the action and the pacing in that one, and I love writing Pepper.

Their first Thanksgiving, with the Sandwich of Suffering, is also a favorite.

In your xxx fic, why did you decide to end it like that? Did you have an alternative ending in mind? [The Long Road Begins at Home]

It was always going to go Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving.

If you write OC’s, how do you decide on their names?

ARGH NAMES. What a pain. Second only to titles in terms of terribleness. I try to roll a few names around and chew on them until I find the one that feels right.

Do you have any abandoned WIP’s? What made you abandon them?

I have notes for 3 more sections of Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail – one that’s pure fluff, one that’s an action scene, and one at the very end of their lives. But I dunno. For one thing, the last one is unbearably sad. And I don’t really have Barnes’s voice in my head anymore. I think it’s time to be done.

More about the action scene is answered in response to a reader question in the previous section. The Sad Ending is just too far off in tone that it doesn’t fit the series at all, so let’s leave it in a dark drawer. But Barnes & Steve live for a very long time and remain faithful to the successive generations of their Avengers family. And when they go, they reach the end of the line together.

The fluff scene is CAT JACK and will post on Friday, June 7. (it's not a full story, just a snippet)

Are there any stories that you wished you’d ended differently?

The epilogue chapter of This, You Protect has some cute jokes, but it’s pretty weird, and I kind of wish I’d left it off.

Do you prefer listening to music when you’re writing or do you need silence?

Depends on the day. I definitely like music when I’m Pondering, though.

How do you feel about writing smutty scenes?

LOVE IT

Do people know you write fanfiction?

People know about my MCU fic, yes.

What’s your favourite minor character you’ve written?

That’s like asking about my favorite child!! Hill is definitely up there on the list, though. Hair Club in general was fun to have around.

Has anyone ever guessed the plot twist of one of your fics before you posted it?

I wish I could remember what it was, but yes. That was really fun.

If you could write only angst, fluff or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why?

Smut, because I think the best smut is also really emotional, so it’s not like cutting out angst, fluff, or anything else.

xXx

The link to the full list of questions for fanfic writer is here:

http://criminal-minds-fanfiction.tumblr.com/post/172926526725/fanfiction-writer-asks

(EDIT: link appears to be maybe-broken?)

[fangsmyth]

* relationship headcanons

NAME:   lanque bombyx NICKNAME:   n/a GENDER:   male   /   he/him ROMANTIC ORIENTATION:   grey/panromantic

-- content warning for unhealthy relationships under the cut --

PREFERRED PET NAMES:   literally thrives off of people calling him a whore. slut isn’t as fun, but yes! call him whore! any form of ‘my [x]’ is very funny, and he loves giving people that illusion of power. but when it comes to the pet names he gives, he’ll usually default to ‘baby’ or some gross and equally common catcalling name. only ones he really cares about will get unique ones. i’d use some examples but i wanna make them a surprise when they come up <:3c RELATIONSHIP STATUS:   single, but constantly in a state of playing the field. honestly even if he’s taken he’ll still be going around flirting and fucking, it’s... this is a bad idea. lanque says he wants a real relationship, but it’s best for everyone that they don’t entertain that idea FAVORITE CANON/FANDOM SHIP:   i really like the idea of him being moirails with pretty much any of the jades? daraya and bronya are probably REALLY high up there though. literally no one ships him with anyone but mallek and it makes me mad bc i don’t know when i’ll ever get around to reading his route. lanque <3 damara is also very good and extremely underrated OPINION ON TRUE LOVE:   he definitely believes it’s a thing, and he’d love to actually take part in it some day... lanque just doesn’t feel like it’s worth the effort and is still super set on ‘the drones are gonna get me one day’ i really hope he’ll get over it at some point OPINION ON LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT:   lanque adores the idea of it, and he won’t tell anyone but he loves that trope in romance novels! but he knows it never really happens. he just loves taking advantage of people that believe in it, though. HOW ‘ROMANTIC’ ARE THEY?:    don’t get me wrong lanque is extremely capable of being a huge romantic, he just hasn’t found the right person to genuinely be that way with. it’s a somewhat exaggerated take on romance, with candlelit dinners and slow dancing the night away to some sort of jazz music... (i was listening to a lot of frank sinatra on the way home don’t @ me i was feelin it) i feel he’d definitely really like to surprise his partners with gifts too, going between handmade sweaters and poetry written with fine calligraphy

he’s a biiiig hopeless romantic and softie on the inside it’s just... good luck getting there, he finds those parts of himself boring and something to be ashamed of IDEAL PHYSICAL TRAITS:   he literally thinks every single human is the hottest piece of ass he’s ever seen. lanque is ultimately into someone that is unique and different, interested in new experiences as he’s felt he’s pretty much exhausted every type of troll. if there is anything he’d prefer from humans it’s probably big tits and well defined facial features (with a specific bonus if it includes an aquiline nose, it’s very vampiric don’t @ me) but honestly even without those he’s going to say you’re beautiful and mean it. IDEAL PERSONALITY TRAITS:   lanque really adores confident and unhinged people that are willing to just... go out there and throw caution into the wind. he doesn’t always like it when someone is also somewhat dominant and controlling, but every now and again if they have a suggestion he’s always happy to listen and just do shit. you cannot keep him in one place. UNATTRACTIVE PHYSICAL TRAITS:  any literal children or people that don’t bathe his standards are very low UNATTRACTIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS:   people that ignore him or actively block him out and don’t let him speak. lanque is fine with talkative people, but it’s important that he gets a turn too. and, obviously, people that are prudish and judgmental towards his lifestyle choices. IDEAL DATE:   filming an amateur porn together HAHA i wish i was joking DO THEY HAVE A TYPE?:   heh AVERAGE RELATIONSHIP LENGTH:   two weeks to a month. he hates being tied down, and honestly it’s very easy for him to just get bored with people. PREFERRED NON-SEXUAL INTIMACY:   kissing, hugging, cuddling, picking someone up off the ground, maybe tickling if he’s feeling sappy enough. just a lot of physical stuff. lanque loves dancing with people too, especially so with his s/o!  COMMITMENT LEVEL:   he doesn’t! 0! -5! very low! very bad! OPINION OF PUBLIC AFFECTION:   i wish he wasn’t so into it. i really wish he wasn’t because i personally despise it. but he hates it when people are doing it to sort of ‘show off’ their affection or treat their partners like trophies, but lanque only does it because he genuinely just can’t help himself! he loves touching people and kissing them, he really doesn’t like being restricted by any means towards showing how much he loves them!

PAST RELATIONSHIPS?:  oh there’s too many of them to count but i’ll specifically base them off of the poem in his sfw route, let’s see if i can play in this space. 

while lanque often declares how important it is for him to not get emotional or stay with someone for too long, it’s really not hard for him to get attached to the point of borderline obsession. many of his relationships are ended with a strong degree of regret, and he tends to ponder a lot about ‘what ifs’ and ‘what could have beens’. this problem is especially potent when he dates objectively good partners that treat him right and express genuine worry about him. lanque never truly values his relationships while he has them, they only really have any sort of pertinence in his head when they’re gone. and then he just dips into another one to forget, it’s kind of a horrible infinite loop. everyone he’s dated has been a rebound and him trying to find a relationship that... works for him. he finds comfort in the no strings attached player lifestyle where he goes from person to person, solving problems with fucking instead of talking or trying to understand where the other person is coming from. i almost wanna say he loves toxic relationships? but i feel like that would be a little too simplistic

his view on romance is ultimately extremely complicated, like someone that is trying to experiment with something by trying the same methods over and over again. sorry this one was so long i’ve been meaning to dissect and analyze lanque’s poem for a while and this seemed like a good time to do itdfghsdfhsfs

TAGGED BY:  snatching like an idiot TAGGING:  tag you’re it

[dailyaudiobible]

10/29/2019 DAB Transcript

Lamentations 1:1-2:22, Philemon 1:1-25, Psalms 101:1-8, Proverbs 26:20

Today is the 29th day of October. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I'm Brian. It’s great to be here with you today as we continue our journey through this week and through, of course, the month and the year and the Bible. And we have come to a day where we are making some changes into some new territory, new books, new letters in both the Old and the New Testaments today. So, obviously, we begin with the Old Testament and we’ll be beginning the book of Lamentations today. So, we can see there's an arc, there’s kind of a flow that the Bible takes us through. And, so, we reach certain books like Job or Ecclesiastes and issues of the heart that we don't normally deal with are brought up and that's what the book of Lamentations does as we move into kind of mournful territory. Again, the idea of mourning or lamenting or regret or grief, you don't usually sign up for those things. They visit us all, but we don't usually get in line for them. But the Bible leads us into all of the territory that we will experience as human beings and that…that's where were headed and it comes at a good time. As we’re preparing to move into the final push of the year. It's important that we explore this territory.

Introduction to the book of Lamentations:

The book of Lamentations is actually composed of five poems and they’re poems of lament over the fall and the destruction of Jerusalem. And it's right here that we need to just pause for second and put ourselves in the right frame of mind. We can think of the ancient fall of the Roman Empire, the ancient fall of Jerusalem and go like, “that happened thousands of years ago. Like it doesn't really affect me.” And if we were to name any modern city like, you know, lamenting over the fall of Tokyo or lamenting over the fall of New York or the fall of London, I mean even saying that snaps us to attention because we can only imagine what that would…what that would do to the world and what that would be like. So, when Jerusalem fell at the time of the writing of Lamentations it would've been like any of the major cities that we just named or any of them around the world falling. So, we can try, at least, to appreciate the magnitude of the soul wrenching emotion that these poems are coming from. Jerusalem was lost and we've been…we've been reading the prophecies and the stories of that destruction, and the exile that came as a result of it. The temple of the Almighty God had been destroyed, right? Fire consumed the city, ash was thick in the air, blood was in the streets. In Hebrew, the book of Lamentations is called “eicha”, which means “how”, “how could this happen”. And we know…like…we know that it did happen. The Babylonians finally breached the wall of Jerusalem and subsequently destroyed the wall and the city, and there's plenty of archaeological evidence of this conquest that can be seen in Jerusalem even till today. How it could happen was…was largely the topic we were covering as we read through the prophecies of Jeremiah. We just concluded that yesterday. Jeremiah warned for decades of the impending doom that would befall God's people if they didn't turn from…from the trajectory that they were on. And now, here in Lamentations the prophecies have come true. This book doesn't…doesn't explicitly name its author. So, that makes things a little bit more difficult, but the traditions of the book was written by Jeremiah, which is one of the reasons why Lamentations follows Jeremiah in the Bible. But that…that's been up for debate among biblical scholars for centuries. And there's plenty of compelling theories that are in favor of Jeremiah being the author, but there's many compelling reasons why he couldn’t be the author. But there is a general consensus on one thing, whoever wrote Lamentations was probably an eyewitness to the destruction of the holy city. The Babylonians did conquer Jerusalem and they did utterly destroy Jerusalem in 586 BC. And, so, Lamentations was probably written shortly after that today. And today in the Hebrew culture, on the ninth day of Av, Lamentations is read on a day of fasting to commemorate the fall of Jerusalem and the reading of each of the poems is a backdrop for personal lamentation, personal reflection, personalizing the story in our lives. And like we said a little bit ago, nobody signs up for that. Lamenting isn’t an easy thing. Grief is hard but…but it has a way, right? It may never ever quite leave us, but it has a way of washing us clean. It whittles us down. It strips off all of the fluff until all that's left is what is true, what is bedrock, what is real. And even though it’s intensely painful it's also freeing. When we’ve gone into the depths of sadness and we’ve reached the bottom then there's hope there for the future. And lamenting helps us to not stuff things inside, and name them and give them voice. Lamenting helps give us a language for suffering and it gives us a language that acknowledges that things have changed and may never ever be the same again and that we have to let go of how it was or how we once were, and be renewed again, begin again. And we’ll find in this book of Lamentations that sort of language and we’ll find it in our own lives as we enter into the book of Lamentations. And, so, we begin. We’re reading from the Amplified Bible this week. Lamentations chapter 1 and 2.

Introduction to the letter to Philemon:

Okay. So, now we’re moving into our New Testament portion, obviously, and we’re entering into some new territory there as well and it's another personal letter from the apostle Paul, this one not a pastoral letter. This one, a personal letter to an individual person in a church. And this book or this letter or epistle is 25 verses long. So, we’ll be beginning and completing it in today's reading. And this is the final letter clearly attributed to the apostle Paul. And it probably accompanied the delivery of the letter to the Colossians, which was a congregation that Philemon was a leader in. So, our likely scenario is that Philemon was likely one of the more wealthy and influential people in the church in Colossae and according to the letter a congregation met in his home and he had a servant who was named Onesimus and this servant ran away, probably stealing from Philemon in the process, which would've been an offense punishable by death in those days. So, Onesimus probably fled to Rome with the idea of disappearing. At the same time Paul was in Rome under house arrest, awaiting trial, and in a strange twist of divine providence Onesimus came into contact with Paul and under Paul's instruction became a follower of Jesus, and after beginning to follow the Lord he served Paul's needs in Rome. So, you have Onesimus the slave being freed to move around to serve Paul and you have Paul, the Roman citizen who's been arrested for his religious convictions who is under arrest. So, sometime later Paul wrote a letter to the church in Colossae with the intention of sending Tychicus on the journey to hand deliver it, but in the process Paul also wrote a personal note that's been preserved to Philemon and sent Onesimus the runaway slave to accompany Tychicus back to his hometown and his…his master, which would've…which would've been a frighteningly large step of faith, one in which he was taking his life into his hands, but the influence of Paul in his life and watching him as he was imprisoned gave Onesimus the faith, the boldness, to leave his life in God's hands as Paul was doing and do the right thing. And this letter actually packs…packs a punch it. It shows the importance of forgiveness and shows us that no matter how much authority we have or how much power we have over someone if…if they’re a believer in Jesus then they’re a brother or a sister, part of the family of God and none of us, no matter how much we have or don't have deserve that. It's God's gift His love for us. And this little letter gives us a real-life example of how God does work things together for the good of those who love him. And, so, we begin, and we’ll read in its entirety the letter to Philemon.

Prayer:

Father we thank You for Your word and we thank You for bringing us into two new different territories in the New Testament today, but we also thank You for the closing reminder, that gossip keeps the fire burning in a bad way, in a consuming way, in a destructive way. And yet when that is removed, the fuel is taken from the fire and contention quiets down. And, so help us Father, not to be…not to be gossips, not to run around today saying things about people behind their back, even just in conversation. And help us Father, perhaps even more importantly to not be consumers of this kind of behavior, to not listen, to not participate in it, because it does no good. It gives us offenses to carry around that we don't have, and it blurs things and infects our relationships in a very negative way. So, come Holy Spirit into our words today we ask in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.

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And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hello Daily Audio Bible family this is a Leonora calling from the Florida Panhandle. Six years ago, I started listening to DAB. It was an awakening to God’s word like I’ve never had. It burst a closer and growing relationship with our Father. I am 35 years married to a man I love very dearly and have been unequally yoked to a nonbeliever. Five years ago, I called in asking for prayer that after my husband soon retired, I shall continue to have quiet time with our Lord and stay focused on my walk with him. Now, five years later I confess it has not been an easy path. The enemy has a field day with my husband, and I am constantly tested. I need your prayers for strength, for focus, and self-discipline. I have just retired from my nursing career and it seems even harder than ever now to stay focused and make time for our Father and I am ashamed of that. My husband is a good man, but he will not yield to a God he is so unsure of. Please Lord, give me the strength to live through You and in You and every word and deed so that I may show my husband your faithful love. May the scales drop from his eyes in Jesus’ name I pray. I love you all so very much. I listen, I cry with you and pray for you always. Thank you, dear family. This is Leonora calling from the Florida Panhandle. I love you.

I’m sitting here with a patient. I’m a psychiatrist and I’m just reaching out to the Daily Audio Bible family to pray for her suffering from depression and anxiety. It’s affecting her whole life and she’s really scared right now with the different logistical effects it’s having on her including finances and connection. So, please pray for her Daily Audio Bible family. I’m really grateful for you. Take care.

I stand at the patio door watching snow fall upon the deck, the lawn, and the bushes beyond. The lilac leaves hold the gathering flakes as cupped hands receiving a gift. No wind disturbs the downward journey. As the flakes collect upon the deck I think of a summer day when I walked in prayer during the Daily Audio Bible long walk cottonwoods cast their seeds into the air swirling in unseen eddies and gathering near buildings and curbs in great clubs resembling snowdrifts. My praise rises to our Creator. This snow may disappear within a few hours but for now a silent fall of white upon white speaks peace. Oh Lord Jesus my heart aches for those who feel no peace. I lift up my brothers and sisters for whom each day holds pain and anguish. I ask for Your provision for those seeking work and safe homes. I pray for restoration of relationships. I pray for children who have lost their way. I seek Your forgiveness for those who took the wealth of Your house and spent it on pleasure only to find themselves living among the pigs. I weep with those who mourn for loved ones, beloved pets, or the loss of a life they once knew. Show them the path to move forward. Send light on their darkness and comfort their pain. I rejoice with those who rejoice. I stand with many who wait in faith not yet seeing the result of their hope but trusting in You anyway. May Your blessing fall upon this ministry as generously as the snow. Keep us united in love across the oceans, rivers, and hills that separate us. Keep us united until all the world here’s Your word. Amen.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family this is Heather. I’ve been listening for about five years and I’ve always been too scared to call in, but I love to listen and pray with you my family all around the world. Brian, thank you for the work you do. It’s so wonderful and soothing to hear your voice and God’s word every day at the touch of a button and I love praying along with each and every one of you that calls in. And today I’m calling to ask for prayer for my family. My husband recently retired from the military and it’s been five months and it’s been hard to find a job. He’s had a few interviews and a few rejections and most of all he’s starting to lose hope. I’m not really sure of his salvation but my prayer is that not only would he find a job, but God would use this to really get a hold of his heart and show him where his true identity lies. Thank you so much for praying for our family. I love you.

Hello Daily Audio Bible my name is Melissa and I just want to clarify that our Lord is awesome and powerful and mighty and wonderful and He’s working in our lives even when we don’t know what He’s doing. Today is my birthday and I just talked with my birth father that I have never known for 50 years for the very first time. And this all came about because the Lord…I don’t know…He provided an illness in me I guess…He provided it but I had adrenal tumor and I had to go through many problems seeing doctors, psychiatrists, Prozac, and they found out…I said, “there’s something’s wrong”, God was speaking to me, He led me to see an endocrinologist and they removed my adrenal. So, I’ve been on steroids since April. So, just pray that my right adrenal will wake up. But in the meantime, I searched out my family birth history that I’ve never desired or wanted to do before, and I’ve already contacted my birth mother and my birth father, and it’s been amazing stories and an amazing 10 months. And I slip back, and I see how God has worked and He has used all this to bring about other people in my lives and to witness to them about how awesome He is and how He’s just worked in my life to do all this. I’m still struggling from how the effects of the adrenal mess with my system and the hormones but I’m working on it every day and with faith and trust in the Lord and you can do it too. Just love Him and just He’s amazing and awesome and I just pray for anybody who’s struggling, that you might not see what’s happening at the moment but you look back and I see how he’s been working His hand on me the whole time and He was there and I thank you Jesus for that. So, always keep Him in mind and look up.

Hello Daily Audio Bible family this is Amari. I’m asking for prayer for my marriage. Been in my marriage for almost 30 years. Last 10 or 15 the been really really rough on me. We’ve come back from infidelity on his behalf and we’ve been trying our best to come back from that. Our marriage…our intimate relationship is just zero. We’re the best of friends and we’re good parents and we take care of business. We just don’t have an intimate relationship. And I admit that during…out of this conflict that I even had an affair because I was trying to fill a void that I wasn’t getting for my husband. But I knew it was wrong, so I broke it off because I was trying to be what God wanted me to be. But still things haven’t changed and now I’m at a crossroads where I’m ready to give up because I want to be loved and I want to be cared for and I want to be happy. Just want the hundred percent of our marriage and not just bits and pieces. So, pray my strength and pray that God would repair our marriage because I want it from my husband…no one else. And I’ll continue to pray for you all and I thank you, Brian for this platform. God bless all of you all and continue to pray for me and thank you in advance for the prayers and God blessing me and my marriage.

[didanawisgi]

The Odyssey is about a man. It says so right at the beginning — in Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation, for example, the poem opens with the line, “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.”

In the course of the poem, that man plots his return home after fighting the Trojan War, slaughters the suitors vying to marry his wife Penelope, and reestablishes himself as the head of his household.

But the Odyssey is also about other people: Penelope, the nymph Calypso, the witch Circe, the princess Nausicaa; Odysseus’s many shipmates who died before they could make it home; the countless slaves in Odysseus’s house, many of whom are never named.

Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, is as concerned with these surrounding characters as she is with Odysseus himself. Written in plain, contemporary language and released earlier this month to much fanfare, her translationlays bare some of the inequalities between characters that other translations have elided. It offers not just a new version of the poem, but a new way of thinking about it in the context of gender and power relationships today. As Wilson puts it, “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about.”

Why it matters for a woman to translate the Odyssey

Composed around the 8th century BC, the Odyssey is one of the oldest works of literature typically read by an American audience; for comparison, it’s almost 2,000 years older than Beowulf. While the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, the Odyssey picks up after the war is over, when Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, is trying to make his way home.

Both poems are traditionally attributed to the Greek poet Homer, but since they almost certainly originated as oral performances and not written texts, it’s hard to tell whether a single person composed them, or whether they are the result of many different creators and performers refining and contributing to a story over a period of time. (The introduction to Wilson’s translation includes a longer discussion of the question of who “Homer” was.)

Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated plays by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides and the Roman philosopher Seneca. Her translation of the Odyssey is one of many in English (though the others have been by men), including versions by Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, and more. Translating the long-dead language Homer used — a variant of ancient Greek called Homeric Greek — into contemporary English is no easy task, and translators bring their own skills, opinions, and stylistic sensibilities to the text. The result is that every translation is different, almost a new poem in itself.

A battlefield epic, the Iliad has very few major female characters. The Odyssey, however, devotes significant time to the life (and even the dreams) of Penelope. Circe, Calypso, and the goddess Athena all play important roles. This was one of the reasons I was drawn to the Odyssey as a teenager, and why I’ve returned to it many times over the years.

But the Odyssey is hardly a feminist text. Odysseus may have trouble getting home, but at least he gets to travel the world and have sex with beautiful women like Calypso and Circe. Penelope, meanwhile, has to wait around while boorish suitors drink and carouse in her family’s home, pressuring her to marry one of them. To buy time, she says she can’t marry until she finishes weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, but every night she undoes the day’s work, making the task last as long as she can. “His work always gets him somewhere,” Wilson told me. “Her work is all about undoing. It’s all about hiding herself, hiding her desires, and creating something whose only purpose is to get nowhere.”

Some feminist readings of the Odyssey have tried to cast Penelope as heroic in her own way, sometimes by comparing her to Odysseus. “I think there’s so many things wrong with that,” Wilson said. “She’s constantly still being judged by, is she like him.” What’s more, the heroic-Penelope reading focuses on a wealthy woman at the expense of the many enslaved women in the poem, some of whom meet an untimely and brutal end. When Odysseus returns home and kills all the suitors, he also tells his son Telemachus to kill the slave women who had sex with (or were raped by) the suitors. “Hack at them with long swords, eradicate / all life from them,” Odysseus says in Wilson’s translation. “They will forget the things / the suitors made them do with them in secret.”

As a woman, Wilson believes she comes to the Odyssey with a different perspective than translators who have gone before her. “Female translators often stand at a critical distance when approaching authors who are not only male, but also deeply embedded in a canon that has for many centuries been imagined as belonging to men,” she wrote in a recent essay at the Guardian. She called translating Homer as a woman an experience of “intimate alienation.”

“Earlier translators are not as uncomfortable with the text as I am,” she explained to me, “and I like that I’m uncomfortable.” Part of her goal with the translation was to make readers uncomfortable too — with the fact that Odysseus owns slaves, and with the inequities in his marriage to Penelope. Making these aspects of the poem visible, rather than glossing over them, “makes it a more interesting text,” she said.

Wilson’s translation is different from its predecessors in subtle — and not so subtle — ways

Part of the way Wilson challenges previous readings of the Odyssey is with style. Her translation made a splash months before it was published, when an excerpt ran in the summer 2017 issue of the Paris Review. I and other Odyssey fans were excited by Wilson’s opening line: “Tell me about a complicated man.” In its matter-of-fact language, it’s worlds different from Fagles’s “Sing to me of the man, Muse,” or Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version, “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending.” Wilson chose to use plain, relatively contemporary language in part to “invite readers to respond more actively with the text,” she writes in a translator’s note. “Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement.”

“There’s an idea that Homer has to sound heroic and ancient,” Wilson told me, but that idea comes with a value system attached, one that includes “endorsing this very hierarchical kind of society as if that’s what heroism is.” Telling the story in plainer language allows readers to see Odysseus and his society in another light.

There are flashes of beauty in Wilson’s Odyssey. “The early Dawn was born,” she writes in Book 2; “her fingers bloomed.” Of the forest on Calypso’s island, where many birds nest, she writes, “It was full of wings.” But throughout the book, there’s a frankness to Wilson’s language around work and the people who do it. Of Eurymedusa, a slave in the house of princess Nausicaa, she writes, “She used to babysit young Nausicaa / and now she lit her fire and cooked her meal.”

The slaves in older translations of the Odyssey do not “babysit” — often, they’re not identified as slaves at all. Fagles, for instance, calls Eurymedusa a “chambermaid.” Fitzgerald calls her a “nurse.” “It sort of stuns me when I look at other translations,” Wilson said, “how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible.”

Wilson, by contrast, uses the word “slave” for Eurymedusa and many other enslaved characters, even when the original uses a more specific term. The Homeric Greek dmoe, or “female-house-slave,” Wilson writes in her translator’s note, could be translated as “maid” or “domestic servant,” but those terms would imply that the woman was free. “The need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery,” she writes, “and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted, seems to me to outweigh the need to specify, in every instance, the type of slave.”

While Wilson’s language is often plain, it’s also carefully chosen. She told Wyatt Mason at the New York Times magazine she could have begun the poem with the line “Tell me about a straying husband,” an even more radical choice that would still have been “a viable translation.” But, she said, “it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem.” She spoke, Mason noted, with “the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in.”

Those choices show up clearly in her treatment of Penelope. Penelope is a frustrating character — it’s not entirely clear why she doesn’t simply send the suitors away or marry one of them, and the poem offers limited access to her thoughts and feelings. Wilson didn’t try to make Penelope easier to understand — “the opacity of Penelope,” as she puts it, is one of the aspects of the poem she wants to trouble readers and make them uncomfortable.

But small details can tell us something about even the most frustrating of characters. At one point in Book 21, Penelope unlocks the storeroom where Odysseus keeps his weapons — as Wilson writes in her translator’s note, this act sets in motion the slaughter of the suitors and the resolution of the poem. As she picks up the key, Homer describes her hand as pachus, or “thick.” “There is a problem here,” Wilson writes, “since in our culture, women are not supposed to have big, thick, or fat hands.” Translators have usually solved the problem by skipping the adjective, or putting in something more traditional — Fagles mentions Penelope’s “steady hand.” Wilson, however, renders the moment this way: “Her muscular, firm hand/ picked up the ivory handle of the key.”

“Weaving does in fact make a person’s hands more muscular,” she writes. “I wanted to ensure that my translation, like the original, underlines Penelope’s physical competence, which marks her as a character who plays a crucial part in the action — whether or not she knows what she is doing.”

Wilson does not give Penelope more agency or power than she has in the original poem, but she also does not take any of the queen’s original power away by making descriptions of her conform to modern gender stereotypes.

“Part of fighting misogyny in the current world is having a really clear sense of what the structures of thought and the structures of society are that have enabled androcentrism in different cultures, including our own,” Wilson said, and the Odyssey, looked at in the right way, can help readers understand those structures more clearly. The poem offers a “defense of a male dominant society, a defense of its own hero and his triumph over everybody else,” she said, “but it also seems to provide these avenues for realizing what’s so horrible about this narrative, what’s missing about this narrative.”

Recent events have led to a widespread debate over how audiences should consume the work of people we know to be abusers of women. This is intertwined with the question of how we should consume art that has racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted elements. Often elided from this conversation is the fact that people of color and women of all races have been consuming racist and sexist art in America for generations (in many classes on Western literature, for instance, they have had little choice), and developing their own responses to it, responses that are often deeply nuanced.

Conservative talk of “special snowflakes” demanding trigger warnings ignores the fact that people marginalized in the Western canon have long read literature from it in exactly the way Wilson describes: both as an endorsement of its author’s values, and as evidence of how horrible those values can be, and whom they leave out.

Wilson’s translation, then, is not a feminist version of the Odyssey. It is a version of the Odyssey that lays bare the morals of its time and place, and invites us to consider how different they are from our own, and how similar.

[emisue-khaleesi]

The shots always ends in Sue, because SUE IS THE ONLY ONE WHO TRULY UNDERSTAND HER AND THE ONLY ONE WHO SPENT THE REST OF HER LIFE TRYING TO COMPILE EMILY'S POEMS IN A WAY THAT SHOWED THE REAL HER. THE EMILY THAT SUE KNEW. SUE is the only one Who always hold Emily, got her and understood her, her mentor and keeper of her legacy!🦋💘💫

Sue knowing how important this visit was for Emily, Sue taking care of Emily's interests and legacy like the good wife and mentor that she IS! Soulmate status. Loved It! Just the added weight of Sue's full commitment to the legacy of the dickinson family! FACTS! Its just the focus on Sue while it was discussed how it may take centuries for people to realize her genius, knowing that Sue has known from the start. Sue owns Emily, and we see her being supportive and proud of Emily, as only she can, cause she's the only one who gets her brilliance. The keeper of her legacy!💫

The last shot of Sue..omg this is my favorite shot, just everyone is here talking about Emily...AND the shots always end with Sue while they are saying that the world never understand because for Sue IS NOT like that: they said: "People might have to wait centuries to understand her" and "Because the poets had to be left to tell the story". THEN IT CUTS TO SUE WHO SPENT THE REST OF HER LIFE TRYING TO COMPILE EMILY'S POEMS IN A WAY THAT SHOWED THE REAL HER. THE EMILY THAT SUE KNEW. Yeah! We got It! SUE is the only one Who always hold Emily, gets her and understand her, her mentor and keeper of her legacy.. that look says It all..when Sue looks up.. wistfully, adoringly thinking of Emily in her room she is the last person we see bc all of that! Also while "THIS WAS A POET" IS RECITED. THAT'S POETIC CINEMA. And the transition to Emily's room while She is writing. That's poetry and Justice! (It's The quote of Sue too: "your work is so powerful and I just felt like the country needed it." *Mentor Sue*)✨

Sue trying to make the best impression possible to Higginson is a lovely example of how Sue fought through her life for keep Emily's poetry legacy safe and how they care for each other. It reminds us as their story goes on while they aren't always with each other how a traditional couple would be, they always care and look out for each other. Everything they do has a touch for the other..this is love, this was their love. No presence was needed for their love to grow everyday for it was felt/seen in their actions. And We also saw Emily looking out at the horizon of all of the poems she hasn't written yet. And we know that those poems involve Sue. We saw it and it's a fact, the first poem Emily recited in that montage in her bedroom is "I have a bird in spring" that was a poem to Sue. I think there's this huge sense of hopefulness in that end of the show, for Sue and Emily, and their real lifes, love and legacy!💘

Alena not only honored Emily and her legacy, she honored Sue Gilbert too giving her the praise she deserves not only as Emily's lover but also as inspiration of her poetry and as keeper of Emily's legacy. (In this last EP IS clear seen again..with all of the Sue's actions and with all of the shots with that dialogues!) THANKS! Poetic Justice!💫

Hailee Steinfeld (as Emily Dickinson) Ella Hunt (as Sue Gilbert) Darlene Hunt (as Maggie) Anna Baryshnikov (as Lavinia Dickinson) Gabriel Ebert (as Thomas Wentworth Higginson) SUE GILBERT QUIETLY CELEBRATING EMILY’S LEGACY. We can all agree she saw it.. before anyone did.  From the biopic-comedy series, DICKINSON (2021) [+] SUE & EMILY ❤ [+] ..more on DICKINSON

[aerisleis-fics]

Fic Writer Questions

Tagged by @jadekitty777

How many works do you have on AO3?

62 at this time!

What’s your total AO3 wordcount?

454642

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Uh, well. 11, technically. There are more in the list but they're subsets of the same fandoms. The most common are Final fantasy XV, RWBY, and BNHA.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. Burden to Bear

2. Wingbeat of a Butterfly

3. Sins of the Father

4. Pain Shared is Pain Halved

5. Emerald Sunlight.

I'm actually sad that they are ALL BNHA pieces tbh. But it's a BIG fandom and two of those are the longest works I have posted... so... okay. Uhh... 3 tododeku pieces, one Dad for One, and one Toshinko.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I usually do! I like to at least thank people for reading and taking the time to comment, if nothing else.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Uhhh. Probably... probably Alone Inside which was a Beyblade fic that I wrote when I was Young and thought I was Edgy. There's absolutely 0 redeeming qualities in that fic. It's a pure angst fest. I don't recommend going to look at it. I've considered orphaning it but so far... nah. I mean. I wrote it. I did that, disaster tho it may be.

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve ever written?

Not really! I do kind of have one or two mentally in the works but I don't do a Lot of crossovers and if I *do* they tend to fit together pretty snugly. I uh. Also don't rly read crossovers so there's that.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Some yes! I don't want to talk about what fics in detail... But, I've gotten hate for using the wrong general terms to refer to people and also for... *checks notes* following my plan for a story that a reader decided was "too much'. That fic remains the one fic I have ever deleted.

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Not often! Usually very vanilla if I do write it. I'm very ace and not very confident in my smut, tbh. I do like to get into the intimate before and maybe after where the feelings can be examined sometimes tho so maybe I'll do more of that Eventually.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not to my knowledge!

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not to my knowledge here, either!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Nothing published. My spouse and I have started to work on and discuss a few together but -splays fingers- we'll see!

What’s your all time favorite ship?

Uhhh. O...one? You want me to pick one? I can barely pick one in any specific fandom lmao. Bc like, for ATLA it's Zutara (tho I do also like Toko, bc my partner loves toko and it's fun to write w/ faer). For BNHA its Tododeku (but I also love toshinko). For Yuri on Ice its absolutely Victuuri. But for Beyblade it's Kai/Rei. And for RWBY... ah... RWBY... Probably Hummingbird (but I could write a List of Rwby ships I like and why that's... very long).

So! Like, there's a lot of dynamics and I can't say there's One I like more than anything though like Sunshine child plus Stubborn/Cold/Stunted does seem to... show up a bit.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Uhhhh. If I'm being honest, Probably Razor Thin Line which was Supposed to be an examination of the thin line between heroes and villains in the BNHA verse, but I have... many... BNHA wips and a Lot Less interest in writing for BNHA than I once had, for many reasons. I really wanted to finish it, bc the idea still rly intrigues me, but at this point I'll be happy if I finish... Wingbeat of a Butterfly and the rest of what I want to do for the Burden to Bear verse.

What are your writing strengths?

Um.... hm. See... bc I have such... a love/hate relationship with my works this is hard. But, I've been told that I have generally strong characterization. I also .. usually... like the way I handle descriptions and most dialog. I also like the way I can adjust things and then start to see how the world unfolds around them - but I don't know if I'd call that a strength so much as a writer-default?

What are your writing weaknesses?

It's hard for me to write off of a prompt! I'm slowly getting better at it. Also most of my ideas tend to come in epic length and require... trimming... for short fics or warm ups and drabble-types. I have to try much harder to write shorter types of works and that's something I've been working hard on.

Also just. Fighting scenes. They are the bane of my existence (now laugh bc I write in the fandoms I do. Go ahead. You can laugh. What genius picks up Shonen anime and final fantasy when they struggle with fight scenes)

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I mean. It's definitely a thing? I guess I'm not sure what we mean here. Like yes, other characters use other languages sometimes. mentioning that in narration is important? I'm not big on peppering with foreign language words Unless it's deliberately done to kind of point out that the listener doesn't know what was said, either.

As a working example off the top of my head, Viktor from Yuri on Ice dropping a nickname or complement in Russian and Yuuri, not speaking russian, not understanding that particular word said but understanding everything else bc the rest of the statement was literally in english.

What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?

It was either ATLA or Beyblade. Imports from FFN seem to think ATLA. It was a poetry set. Which is funny bc I don't write poems normally.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

This is like asking me to Choose a Favorite Child. And it's very difficult. I have a Real love/hate relationship with most of my works. I'm... going to tentatively say Keep the Home Fires Burning, which is a PolySTQ piece I wrote for the Qrowbang. I love the way this piece came together and I was very proud of how even though it Could have exploded to epic proportions I still got it done within the expected frame. It could have been longer, or deeper, it could have covered more. But I was happy with it, and while those things are all true... I don't think I'd change anything if I rewrote it under similar circumstances.

Tagging: If you see this and want to do it, go for it!