#but i wrote it when i was twelve and it’s actually terrible

[outer-edges]

just found a lil ficlet i wrote years ago about the maydaisycoulson family unit going undercover circa s1 and getting mistaken for a biological family. my god. i am finding some Relics as i deep dive into the google drive.

[goodluckclove]

I'm having a lot of fun talking with people about why they struggle in their writing, and I figure I'd share a little bit about what would keep me from writing. It's especially relevant given how soon Blind Trust is coming out - and, like I said, if you're willing to be real to me I'll be real right back.

I'll put it under a read more, as I've had the amount of alcohol that it takes me to be extra loose - meaning half of one canned cocktail. And I don't want to freak anyone out who doesn't want to see me feel a little more angsty than I tend to be online. But as I said before, I want to be honest about the craft as much as I urge others to be.

Here we goooo. Say goodbye to proper capitalization babies, Dad's getting funky.

so i started writing when i was twelve years old. i wrote carnation, a 10k word zombie novella about thinly-veiled representations of me and my two best friends at the time fighting zombies. it wasn't very good. i never wrote anything before. i enjoyed it though, so i proceeded to keep writing, near-constantly for the next fifteen years.

here's the thing, though, and it's something i don't see a lot of elder writers talk about. probably because it's not a super pleasant thing to hear, but i'm pretty sure i could pull it off.

uh, my name is clove gardener. i'm twenty-seven years old now. and i do not think i'm that good of a writer.

i don't think i'm bad. i mean, i've been published. i've worked as a copywriter and a ghostwriter. i've written for work for a few years now, so - like - objectively it must be passable. i don't hate my writing. i think it's accessible, which is cool. but if you were to ask me hey do you think you're a good writer? i would skirt around the question without answering directly until i could figure out a way to change the subject.

at this point i don't think that's going to go away. the improvement, though, has been that i barely think about that anymore. it's like there's a little dipshit in the back of my head, and occasionally he will hiss-whisper this is shit what are you doing until I find a way to shut him up.

i kind of feel like that's just the thing that happens when you're a writer. it's the camp i'd rather be in, at least. because the alternative is that i'm a really good writer who might consider themselves capable to claim authority and tell you how to do things i actually know nothing about. i'd rather have doubt. maybe less than what i have now, but still.

writers, i think, overlap with theater kids in the sense of being dramatic little piss babies. i am proud to say that i am significantly less of a piss baby than i potentially could be, especially considering that i'm in writing and theater. but you're bound to be a little dramatic at some point.

i think in the six-ish months since i've started blind trust, i've had maybe two creative existential crises. that's pretty good. that's reasonable. and they were not too unproductive either. i've learned that you can feel whiny and pitying and scared and self-loathing, and still do the thing.

i don't think you should publish your book. cool, ryan (i named my inner dipshit ryan). i'm doing it anyway.

nobody actually wants to pay money for it. yeah, ryan. maybe.

you're a terrible writer. i like it, though. i want to see how it ends. so let's keep going.

if you're wanting to publish/self-publish, and you think you don't have a chance because you aren't a beacon of self-assurance and confidence - guess what, buddy, i don't think many of the greats were. it's almost a stereotype i've seen of famous writers also being angsty weirdos who crumble into despair because the apple they ate was slightly too mealy (this is based on nothing but i can see it happening to kafka). if you think you can't be a writer because you aren't like me - friend, colleague, son, daughter, child, we are both angsty weirdos and that's okay.

last week i sobbed because riley showed me a video where a kiwi bird was sad and we had to spend the rest of the night watching videos of kiwi birds before donating to a kiwi bird charity. i make one phone call to the doctor and i have to lie down for the rest of the day. i am kind, i am fun, i am funny, and i am also like three bad dice rolls away from a breakdown. you can be both of those things. i have nuance.

i'm fine, by the way. it's been a good day. i'm just stressed about publishing because the thought of asking people to pay Human Currency for my work makes me deeply uncomfortable. but we're going to fucking deal with that, aren't we, ryan?

i don't know if this is unprofessional to reveal, but if it convinces one person to pursue a life in writing even though they sometimes take a trip to the Panic Zone, fuck it. i'm fine, you're fine, we're all going to be fine.

we should name our inner dipshits. drop your dipshit names below. ryan is your classic little goblin, but he's dressed like an e-boy. i think he vapes. i hate him.

[beyondmistland]

I read through all your posts about Alysanne Targaryen as Maegor's daughter and am now in a rabbit hole. Thank you. I've been thinking about Maegor's wives and which one of Henry VIII's wives they represent. Ceryse is Cathrine of Aragon and Alys is Anne Boleyn. The others are hard to pin for me since there isn't a lot. What do you think? Would Maegor's reign have been more interesting if his marriages had more similarities to those of Henry VIII?

I think this is where we run into a number of problems regarding the way GRRM wrote Fire & Blood specifically and the way he setup Westeros more generally.

For one, the fairly homogenized nature of southron culture as well as the oversimplification of religious institutions and history means you can't quite get the same dynamism as from real life European history, with its dizzying array of languages, cultures, cuisines, fashions, etc., to mention nothing of the then-ongoing Protestant Reformation. I suppose GRRM could have had Maegor convert to the Old Gods a la Julian (II) the Apostate or the Drowned God (you just know the Ironborn are the one race on the surface of Planetos that would say King Maegor the Good with a completely straight face) or even R'hllor, which would be the best choice in terms of worldbuilding opportunities in my opinion.

Moving on, we run into a handful of problems with Maegor specifically, one of them being the length of his reign. Look, while I can't deny Maegor ruling for 6 years and 66 days is incredibly cheeky, it also isn't anywhere close to Henry VIII's 36 years as king. With so little room timeline-wise, there isn't a lot of flexibility when it comes to telling new stories and fleshing out preexisting ones and all that is before you factor in Maegor himself.

I won't hold back. For all GRRM's talk of moral ambiguity, the human heart in conflict with itself, good men who were bad kings and bad men who were good kings, etc., his Targaryen monarchs are, for the most part, numbingly one-note. Aegon I is a literal enigma, Aenys is weak, Maegor cruel, Viserys I a party animal, Aegon II and Rhaenyra mirror-images of each other in their disqualifying vices, etc. As I've written before with my post reimagining Maegor as more of a Ivan (IV) the Terrible figure there was room to make him a genuinely controversial figure of historiography but instead GRRM doubled down on sensationalism and apathy-inducing slasher porn for lack of a better word. The fact Maegor is also the first and last of Visenya's line just adds more salt to the wound but that's part of GRRM's more general (and for me personally, vexing) habit of keeping family trees incredibly small.

(I do recall another alternative someone once brought up to the late Steven Attewell. Namely, turning Maegor into the Westerosi version of Macbeth by way of Der Untergang.)

This brings me to my semifinal point. GRRM didn't have to write Fire & Blood as Procopius' Secret History on steroids with a dash of Suetonius' Lives of Twelve Caesars and I, Claudius (the entire Saera episode is practically lifted wholesale from the scandal that envelops Augustus' daughter, Julia) but he did, which is doubly disappointing because not only does the final product suck quality-wise as a result but also because there were so many other avenues available to him.

He could have written Fire & Blood as a proper history (with less focus on the sex lives of teenage girls for one) or as a mirror for princes or as a dialogue between two characters or even as a character study. You can even see GRRM struggling with the constraints imposed by his use of Gyldayn in certain sections like the death of Maelor and the entire Hour of the Wolf episode, where you get reams of dialogue and characterization as well as more traditional narrative trappings like build-up, mood setting, etc.

Now, to answer your actual question (lol), I don't think any of Henry VIII's other wives map well onto Maegor's. Tyanna is, more or less, his female counterpart in terms of cruelty and zero redeeming features and entirely a fantasy construct. Elinor and Jeyne are both married to Maegor for only a year (with poor Jeyne dying in childbirth because Jeyne Westerlings, like the Brackens, Peakes, and Florents, cannot catch a break in Westeros) and before said marriage takes place neither appears on the page. As for Rhaena, well, credit where its due, she was a rare (and unexpected) highlight of Fire & Blood.

Thanks for the question, anon

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

2023, it cannot be overstated, was a terrible year for me. We started out strong with an episode of True Love that turned out in fact to be entirely false and not reciprocated. (I've got over that, finally, but it was awkward... I posted about it a bit at the time, along with a lot of what I'm about to tell you.) Anyway, I also basically didn't eat for two weeks in January: only partially related to that. February was even more terrible, but with one bright spot: the terribleness pushed me to finally seek professional help for my longstanding anorexia. I was finally going to choose to recover and it would never bother me again.

Haha anyway I was also severely depressed and anxious so that happened. I had a good solid try at recovery and it seemed like it was going pretty well for a while, yay. Went back to uni after a year out, in the middle of the year. Ended up living with my brother 'just for the semester and after that you've got to find your own accommodation' (I'm still at his place). Anyway things got real bad and I honestly can't remember most of that patch, but I can still see the scars.

Anyway. You're probably wondering why I'm saying this stuff. In November, December, I can't remember precisely when, the Inklings Christmas challenge got posted.

Severely depressed, barely doing anything, only surviving and waiting for things to get better while doctors assessed me to figure out what was going on behind the major depressive disorder (spoiler: undiagnosed ASD), I said, well, why not. I still had remnants of my previous overachieving nature, so why not write something for all twelve days of Christmas, not just a single short story or scene? And I dug back in my memory for the fragments of a plot I worked out when I was twelve years old, remembered the characters, remembered that the main character was one I'd internally laughed about accidentally making autistic in the past.

So I went, what if I just pretend that the story I'd imagined was five years earlier, pretend that the novel I had never written was actually written, and write a slice-of-life sequel to it, featuring the same characters? I remember going to a session with my psych at the time and telling her about this story, but vaguely and quickly, because we were going to run out of time. I talked like I intended to and expected to finish it, but internally, I was going: I will not finish it. I've already proven that I cannot stick to things. (I have a lot of fragments of writing from that year which I will likely never finish, and which had no deeper structure than whatever occurred to my medication addled brain.)

And I went, what should I name this story? It's got to have the word Patience in there, because her name is Patience and it amuses me and amusement is running real freaking thin at the moment. I tried out several titles, none of which I can remember, and none of them suited. At last, because the word hope had been rotating within my brain for so long, I picked The Patience of Hope, and I drew graphics and titled all the chapters and did research to title them and I can't remember any of it anymore so I don't know why I gave them the titles I did.

I think I scheduled about chapter three before chapter one dropped on Christmas Day. I remember there being author's notes that at least hinted that I'd entirely pre-written it, because I'd intended to do so, when I wrote the author's note for the very first chapter. But most of them I wrote on the day they were supposed to drop.

I don't think anyone read it at the time; I certainly don't remember such a thing happening, though after it was completed people did read it, and do still. (It's still on my website, and also on my ao3 under the title mentioned above.) But I wrote it, this silly little thing that spawned a whole character and series of novellas I haven't finished yet. More than one character, actually; one of the main characters is Nathan, who didn't exist in my original concept at all. And another character mentioned is Hannah, her aunt, whose storyline is deeply personal to me.

I can't remember how long it is. The writing is at times very bad and the storyline vague and choppy. I had no true plans when I started writing that story: not even to finish it. It does qualify as a novella for length, but I forget where in that wide range it comes in. But I finished it.

That... meant the world to me, actually, in the state I was in. I finished it in January, and two weeks later I was being very seriously told by my doctor that if anything got any worse, in any way, I was to immediately present to emergency and request/demand admission. They didn't; I was prescribed medication that, this time, actually helped to manage the whole crisis thing going on, and I haven't been that close to an admission since (nor needed to be, not really).

So The Patience of Hope is very special to me, as you can see, because I completed it at a time I felt so strongly that I couldn't complete anything except - well, I don't suppose I have to elaborate. It's a fun, fluffy little story with underlying angst and stress and grief but above it all, it's cheerful. A romance begins, which surprised me, because I was literally just writing whatever came into my head, and apparently what came into my head was a character who hadn't been previously mentioned or thought of, asking Patience out on a date.

And the way Nathan accepts and understands and loves Patience for herself and not for what he hopes that she will be (if my phrasing seems odd, it's a Carpenters reference - "Love Me For What I Am") was healing to write. The entire story was written between when I started being assessed for ASD and when I was officially diagnosed, and I can really really see in Patience's words what I felt and still do sometimes feel - the hesitation and uncertainty and distrust of oneself. She was the first character I ever wrote who was stated to be autistic, though I'd written ones before deliberately making them autistic in my head, but they never said they were autistic on the page.

I don't remember the timeframe of the next bit, but there was a writing challenge to write a novel from start to finish in - six months, I think? It was a while. - and I saw it and went, oh, I could go back and write the novel about Patience that I first conceptualised.

Which I did, over the next few months. From start to finish, that draft is eighty-four thousand words in its current, unedited form, and I expect it to end up somewhere between eighty and ninety thousand - I always edit down on a sentence level, and up on a scene and chapter level, so it tends to balance out somewhat. Especially the earlier sections, it's pretty sparse before I hit my stride, and I also struggled to finish it in a way that felt satisfying to me, and I need to build up the community aspect more - and introduce her aunt Hannah more throughout.

What's the novel about, you may ask? And don't ask for the title, because I made a working title, and I haven't figured out a proper replacement yet. The novel is about Patience at a younger age, I forget what; early teens, I think, self-isolating and shy and scared and very very rigid. (It's a lot of fun comparing the Patience of this novel to the much more relaxed, but still characteristic Patience of The Patience of Hope five or seven years later. She's the same person, only grown up rather, and in a very positive way.)

In a mechanism I haven't yet worked out properly and will definitely be rewriting, she unexpectedly gains an adoptive sister, Rhona - named after a tea cosy in a pattern book I used when I was eleven or twelve to knit an atrocious and very wonky stuffed dog. Anyway, Rhona is a bit younger, a bit more extroverted, a bit prettier and a bit more new and exciting. And a bit disruptive to Patience's neatly ordered life.

Cue emotional explosions I'd compare to Holly and Lucy in Lockwood and Co., and say it was based on that, if I'd read that before I planned this book out. Rhona is doing her best to fit in to the family, but she's also showing up Patience's inability to fit in, so there's insecurity tying in to it.

Patience spends most of the book hating her with a passion of greater or lesser intensity despite everything Rhona tries to do to bridge the gap. And then, in a move unrepentantly stolen from Jean Webster's Dear Enemy, the house burns down. Oh, the horror! Oh, the shock! Oh, the fact that Patience was the only one within range of Rhona and had to drag her out! Oh, the hospital whump afterwards! *coughs* Forget I said that last one. Anyway Rhona gets off pretty lightly, while Patience... does not get off so lightly. She spends a while in hospital, but luckily, the combination of everything brings her and Rhona together finally, and they all live happily ever after.

Well, that's what the original plan said, anyway. Back when I was twelve and didn't know interpersonal dynamics.

While it's true that the house burning down and everything associated with that does help Patience and Rhona to get along better, that's not the end of the book. The house burns down at the turn between parts two and three, fifty-three thousand words in. Any mathematicians reading this will observe there are still thirty thousand words to go. There are nine chapters in each part.

The last three chapters total fifteen thousand words between them. My original plan calls for three thousand word chapters. Again, the mathematicians are going to observe that this doesn't add up. These chapters average out five thousand words each.

That's because I really wanted to mention one specific character earlier in the novel, who gets a passing and no longer timeline compliant mention in The Patience of Hope. Patience's aunt Hannah, who, yes, I named after myself, and who also struggles with anorexia nervosa.

Chapter twenty-five is titled, "A Will to Live". Originally intended to be about Patience's depression following her discharge from hospital after the house burned down, and then regaining her mental equilibrium, it became a bitter sarcasm that hurt every time I re-read the title while I was drafting it.

(I did cry quite a bit about this, including while actively writing. Sobbing and still writing the next sentence. I hope it comes across in the final work.)

Because Hannah does not win her battle. She is not a success story, or a happy ending, or a triumph. She dies alone in an apartment that hasn't been cleaned for weeks, fridge almost empty: two days before she's agreed to go into treatment. There are three big killers in anorexia: suicide, heart failure and malnutrition. And Hannah Shepherd dies of heart failure, leaving, as I heard in a video I strongly do not recommend, recently, "a bleeding, girl-shaped hole in her family".

It's traumatic and horrible and full of grief, but they manage somehow to go on. Patience is kept in the dark as to what's going on, at Hannah's request; she just knows that she died of some sickness. After all, she's at THE prime age to develop an eating disorder of her own, and even though you'd think someone dying would make you reconsider, unfortunately, eating disorders are mental illnesses and don't discriminate. (Besides, I wrote this story, and Karen Carpenter is a special interest of mine. Doesn't stop me relapsing.)

And then three chapters later (though, realistically, I'm going to rearrange the chapter balance to add at least one more here, since I struggled to fill a few of the chapters in terms of word count), the story's over, and everything is okay - just okay, not good, but with hope that it will be.

The first draft has been finished for - I don't know how long. Looking back to former posts makes it seem like I finished it on the last day of April last year, which would make it eight months and 21 days since I completed the draft. I think that's long enough to go back and redraft, don't you? I was working on continuing to draft Vaniah's story, but given that it's not singing to me right now, maybe I should jump in to editing this and see where I get to - I can always go back to Vaniah and Anneka instead, even though I've left them at a profoundly difficult spot. (While we're on the topic of dying from anorexia? Yeah. Except that is a story of recovery and hope.)

All that to say, you might hear more about Patience, and Rhona, and Jude, and Marcia, and Hannah, and Nathan, and everyone else that makes that story what it is, soon. I've been thinking a lot about it lately, and I really do think Patience's story needs to be refined, so that eventually I can show the world. If anyone wants, I can pull out excerpts too, if I'm brave enough. Please tell me your favourite aspect of this story, whether the novel or The Patience of Hope or whatever it may be. Ask me questions. I can ramble. Please.

[chaoticdelinqueerwithglitter]

I can't stop thinking about the Kurokawa siblings in the OG-timeline

Of course, Tokyo Revengers manga spoilers, be aware!!!

Okay, bare with me because I'm gonna try to explain my point. Maybe I'm just trying to cope with Tenjiku animated because just thinking that Emma and Izana never saw each other in this time-line broke me.

(always broke me, but the anime is re-opening the wound >.< )

(I'm just blaiming this freaking and sad openning)

We all know what will happen in this time-line, right? But I always wished that in some other time-line, Izana kept his promise, that he come back to Emma. Because he promised to her and there is no way that I could believe that in a time-line where his not blinded by his rage to Mikey, he will not try to find Emma.

Okay, we all know this, right? Here is where my theory starts (remember, this is me coping).

What we actually know about the Original time-line? (besides is fuck up xD)

Mikey's accident was the 30th of July in 1999.

Mikey's death the 20th of July 4 years later, in 2003.

We also know that in the other time-lines, Shinichiro came to see Izana at the orphanage when Izana was around ten years old, so in 1997 (also, Shinichiro still have his high-school uniform and looks like a teenager, what makes sense because his supposed to be seventeen there).

We also know that grandpa Sano is death and Emma ran away from home. What is fucking tragic and concerning because in that moment Emma is only 11 years old (her birthday is on November).

(yes, I put a lot of kid Izana because his adorable and he deserves the world xD)

So, here goes my theory:

Izana probably started to freak out when suddenly Shinichiro stopped visiting him and writing him letters. Probably, in some point, Shin wrote him a short letter explaining that Manjiro was sick and he had to take care of him (maybe it's being months since the accident, the canon show us that Shinichiro was only focused on Manjiro after the accident).

We can all imagine how that felt for Izana. Remember that he's still a kid, twelve years old, so he doesn't understand the gravity of Manjiro's situation. He just feels like his being replaced. So, in some point, Izana snaps.

I can totally picture kid Izana going to the hospital to see Shinichiro (probably follow by a poor Kakucho that even being the smaller, knows this is a terrible idea). Maybe Izana wanted to confront Shinichiro, maybe he wanted to confront Mikey (he doesn't know his real state). But once he see Mikey's room, once he see the reality of what happened... He just can't be mad. Because he's a kid with mental health problems and his seeing the non-brother that he wanted to hate paralyzed in a hospital bed. So he will probably have an emotional breakdown.

So in my head-canon, he starts visiting the hospital more. Never showing to Shinichiro that he was there, always trying to keep it a secret, even if he doesn't understand why (Izana being obssessive is canon, we know).

In some of this secret-visits... He sees Emma. And Emma sees him. Remember, they are still kids, maybe it's being a year or two since the accident, so 2000, 2001? Izana will be fourteen, Emma ten. So it's awkward at the beginning, but they start to talk.

I can picture them walking in the gardens of the hospital, being uncomfortable with each other at the beginning. But slowly, Izana starts to remember his little sister. His promise to came back for her. And Emma is clearly not being taking care by Shinichiro at this point (not judging Shin, it is what it is)

So, when grandpa Sano dies, who was the only adult taking care of Emma... Emma didn't just ran away. Izana took her. Izana came back for Emma and refused to let her in and empty house with an absent brother and the ghost of the other. We already know that Izana took Kakucho from the orphanage when he went out of juviee, so this is not out of character for him. Izana would do the same for Emma if he ever saw her being neglected in the original time-line.

So yeah, I found the time-line where the Kurokawa siblings story doesn't end up that freaking traumatic.

In the original time-line, Izana came back for Emma, he keep his promise.

(so now I'm going to pretend this is canon and not cry with Emma in Tenjiku)

[setaflow]

🔫 FREEZE this is a STICKUP

gimme 5 great lines that you wrote (whether you’ve posted them or not) and 5 great lines someone else wrote (whether published or fanfic) and nobody gets hurt!!

P.S. If one of lines isn't a Tom Robbins quote, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with myself. (I say this as a joke, but also...)

YES OFFICER SORRY OFFICER

Frankly I could've filled the entire second section with Tom Robbins quotes I loved, but I limited myself lmao

5 Great Lines I Wrote:

Johnny’s come to realize a long time ago that most folks tend to employ a geocentric view of Night City— it’s the center of the first world and thus all fads, conflicts, and politics are destined to fall into orbit around it. He likes to think he’s grown out of that mindset, that he’s wizened up enough to see past the veneer, but it’s hard to see the city for what it is some days and not think of it as the nucleus in the great big slow-decaying cell of what used to be modern day America.

Untitled WIP, Cyberpunk 2077

The afternoon air tastes of lethargy— the kind of lazy day you take when there’s little to do and even less worth mustering the strength for. Nothing’s stirred outside besides the occasional gust of wind, a pair of blusterous boots kicking sand up and down the main thoroughfare.

Untitled WIP, Cyberpunk 2077

The look on Hellman's face seems to've transcended terror and looped straight around to piousness, as though God Himself had strolled through the door and asked to bum a cigarette.

The Wheel of Fortune and the Hanged Man, Cyberpunk 2077

No words are exchanged, no gazes are averted. For one split second, V feels doubt creep in, wonders if she should adjust her aim and do it proper this time— no harm, no foul, right? What kind of wolf has the rabbit in its jaws and refuses to bite down?

Rain in the Desert, Chapter 17, Cyberpunk 2077

The sun and the moon were never supposed to meet. They were only supposed to follow after the other, never actually crossing paths. Two entirely separate lives, pulling and pushing on each other from a distance, content just to be as they are and never anything else. When people first saw eclipses, they interpreted them as a sign that the world was ending. Fuck. Fuck. The world has already ended so many times, and he’s still here. Alone. At the brink of everything he’s ever known, at the brink of leaving it all behind for good. And all Johnny Silverhand can think about is how to explain that he loves and hates and deeply fucking misses some stupid merc he never should’ve met who didn’t know how to cut her losses and just let him die.

In Medias Res (Here, Besides the Rising Tide) (WIP), Cyberpunk 2077

5 Great Lines Others Wrote:

"He’s twelve years old, and this summer he learns that people will always choose a simple lie over a complicated truth, because the lie has one unbeatable advantage: the truth always has to stick to what actually happened, whereas the lie just has to be easy to believe."

- Fredrick Backman, Us Against You

"The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh-so very seriously."

- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

"There comes a point in life when you've seen so much that hardly anything surprises you or bothers you, and that's a shitty moment. Wisdom is so terribly overrated."

- Drew Magary, The Hike

“People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”

- Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

"Trees fall with spectacular crashes. Planting is silent and growth invisible."

Richard Powers, The Overstory

[bluejay-07]

2, 12, 14, and 31 for the fic author ask game?

2. Which of your fics is your pride and joy?

It has to be my Max/River series—it feels like my best work in the Mars House fandom. It was fun to write, it’s fun to see what other people think about it, and it’s fun to re-read!

12. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

I don’t actually know! Probably some terrible-quality Harry Potter fanfiction scrawled in Crayola marker when I was like eight lol. If we’re talking fic that actually got put on the internet, though, then an awful Hamlet/Horatio oneshot. I wrote it when I was like twelve (yes, I know—I wish I could blame it on some outside factor but I was just a deeply odd child lol) and it was about Horatio talking to Hamlet’s ghost.

14. What makes you happiest? Comments, kudos, Tumblr asks?

I just find it flattering that people like my stuff! I do, however, save all my comments emails to reread. I also really love getting Tumblr asks, even if it does sometimes take me a bit to respond (sorry!!)

31. What fic meant the most to you to write?

Either Emergency First Aid or, surprisingly, Stupid Fucking Democracy. Stupid Fucking Democracy was an attempt at taking back control of my life in a situation that I had no power over—maybe writing Mars House fic is a cringy coping mechanism, but it’s my cringy coping mechanism, damn it. Emergency First Aid was emotional because it felt like the end of an era; I had planned it since the beginning as the end of this series because at a certain point it gets really dull to string out mutual pining forever. But when I posted it, I still felt really emotional about it—when I wrote the first one, I’d never considered I’d make this much of an impact on the fandom! I’m grateful to everyone here for humoring me.

[g3n3s1s-l0v3]

got anymore yronica hcs :3 ... also maybe some becca ones !! / nf

I'm gonna eat them btw . uur hcs are so good .....

ok. this is my second time answering this cuz i wrote it almost all out and TUMBLR DELETED IT ALL ABSJHDKWKWKKZ. anyways…. I LOVE BECCA BECCA PRESCOTT MY BELOVED I LOVE U BECCA BARK BARK BARK VARK

YRONICA AYALA

scared of fish. loves going to the ocean with her gals and taking hundreds of photos but absolutely hates (at least live) fish

makes callum take her out on fancy dates once a month; doesn’t even really care about the date part just likes being able to take photos in expensive restaurants + likes bragging to her friends

loves rollercoasters (especially when she was young) but kind of stopped going on them when a friend laughed at her for how messed up her hair got after going on one when she was twelve

loves spicy food (its the main type of food her parents cook lol)

lives with parents + grandpa

makes fun of smokers but vapes occasionally when she’s really stressed

favorite fruit is apple (specifically granny smith)

makes fun of callum + aaaqil when they sit ‘too close’/brush hands/are generally in close proximity; does same things with eman

severe astigmatism but thinks glasses look bad on her so she refuses to wear them, resulting in lots of migraines and headaches. the cycle repeats

loves sitcoms

refers to callum as her discord kitten in her head; has only said it once (1) to eman on accident. refused to talk to her for two days after that.

mom is a chronic smoker

actually ive decided that yes im gonna giver her the chocolate allergy cuz. i mean, its such a common food thats in so many ‘gift’ type treats…. valentines day my beloathed…. so she kinda just. ignores it. but then gets sick cause duh. she’s allergic (PROJECTION BEAM BLAST)

made fun of people that dress ‘emo’ until she met eman -> hasn’t dont it since

heavy alcohol tolerance -> sometimes challenges eman to drinking games when they’re at parties together and almost always wins (sometimes she lets her win…. sometimes)

bad handwriting when she was young -> forced herself to learn cursive and almost never writes print

has a pet hamster

studying to be a nurse -> wants to work specifically with the elderly

lana del rey fan. favorite song is pretty when you cry (sigh… she’s just like me fr… ignore the projection happening here)

BECCA PRESCOTT

loves rainy weather; hates thunder. not scared of it per se, just feels like it ruins the vibes

terrible at arcade games, especially racing games. really competitive though, so she steers clear of them for the most part as to not totally freak out on her friends when she inevitably loses)

bad grades….

smokes pretty frequently. never around gavin though

has never drunk alcohol. never ever. really wants to though

very protective of her friends and family (obviously…. thats kinda part of the whole final girl thing lololol)

calls gavin ‘dipshit’ when its just the two of them

knows how to use a gun (very well) ((specifically a pistol but has messed around with rifles when out hunting with her grandpa)

dog person (husky, specifically)

loves music, especially indie and rock. big fan of britpop too.

hates the sight of blood (the type to get nauseous when seeing it) but learnt to power through that after the whole thing with wren went down

went to the circus a lot as a kid and loved it

hates the feel of cotton + very picky when it comes to clothing

has celiacs disease but not technically ‘allergic’ to anything else

learnt how to throw knives in the mist; plans to one day get revenge against wren

wrathful woman. god bless.

doesn’t read too much but has an appreciation for the classics

trust issues.

favorite food is bacon

took latin in highschool

doesn’t really understand ‘modern’ technology but does her best to figure it out

had a boyfriend before getting sent to the mist -> not necessarily still loyal to him per se, but feels mentally too old for most people in the mist and feels weird about dating other people

knows tae kwan do

born and raised in the midwest usa (northern kansas)

(yro. if u send me a ask for rose hcs i will absolutely do it. i just want a silly picture like the ones u keep sending to go with it. :3) ((actually ANYONE PLEASE SEND ME RQ’S IN MY ASK BOX I LOVE WRITING. can you guys tell im a fic writer….))

[mitochondriaandbunnies]

You Should Watch Wiseguy:

The show that changed the face of television while no one was paying attention

If you've ever watched and enjoyed anything that gets tossed around as “prestige television—”  you know what I’m talking about— long form narratives, high stakes, actors with something to prove— shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, etc.— you have Wiseguy to thank. While largely forgotten by mainstream audiences (for a variety of reasons, including sheer lack of availability), Wiseguy was one of the first non-soap-opera shows with a fully serialized story— one that expected you to see every episode, in order. When it began airing in September of 1987, really the only other thing on TV like it was Michael Mann’s Crime Story (also worth a watch), and Crime Story would be canceled before Wiseguy even hit its second season.

Writers, actors, and industry types of all kinds cite Wiseguy as a major influence— Vince Gilligan and Tom Schnauz credit watching Wiseguy in the 80’s as why they cast Jonathan Banks as Mike— Chris Carter hired writers from Wiseguy when he started the X-Files— actors like Stanley Tucci made their names on the show— and hell, David Chase wrote an angry letter to the New York Times claiming he was absolutely under no circumstances at all influenced by Wiseguy ever, which feels like the kind of thing you don’t need to write a letter about if it’s true. 

Of course, just because something is influential doesn’t mean it’s good. 

Wiseguy is really damn good.

Much like Miami Vice (and some of the later shows that took influence from Wiseguy), Wiseguy takes the position that there’s very little difference between criminals and the police, and that the justice system is wildly ill-equipped to create justice. Mafia movie blood, with all its inherent moral ambiguity, runs through Wiseguy’s veins, and then after episode nine, it asks you to think about how that blood would pump in a different milieu— corporate espionage and the destabilization of the global south by American capitalists, insular rural politics and the easy rise of small-time dictators, congressional politics and Twelve-Angry-Men-worthy courtroom drama, the music industry and the cutthroat disposal of talented young people. Money and power structures are always suspect, and good-hearted tough guy lead Vinnie is constantly torn between doing his job, doing the right thing, and doing the thing that makes sense to him emotionally.

The show is heartfelt, tense, funny, and above all else, incredibly human. The characters behave irrationally— they self-sabotage, they struggle with moral decisions, they lash out at people they care about— because they’re people, not plot devices. Little things will come back to haunt them, often many episodes later, in believable and sometimes gutting—but rarely shocking— ways. Despite this realism, and a deep sense of cynicism about our institutions, Wiseguy never falls into the trap of wallowing in grim bleakness. The writers and the actors clearly believe in people— it’s a show that says— ‘yeah, the world sucks. So how do we keep going, together?’ The characters are lovable not because they’re all good, but because you feel like you could know them, with realistic flaws and foibles and senses of humor. Sometimes it’s a little silly, and sometimes it’s a little melodramatic— but it works, because sometimes that’s how real life is, too.

Wiseguy is four (well. three and a half) seasons [cross out— and a terrible TV movie that disregards canon], and is notably divided into 4-11 episode arcs within those seasons, and occasional “breather” episodes between arcs. It’s actually a brilliant bit of plotting that I wish more shows would do today— it allows for overarching narratives and real stakes without running into DBZ-like “the next threat has to be BIGGER and MORE DANGEROUS” power level bullshittery that’s common to a lot of long running serialized shows. One of my favorite aspects of this design is that the cast partially rotates every few episodes, but the show still expects you to remember what was going on with the characters from the previous arcs— because they often return later in unexpected and narratively satisfying ways.

The three characters that remain more-or-less consistent throughout the show are Vinnie Terranova, an undercover agent for the Organized Crime Bureau, Frank McPike, his handler, and Dan “Lifeguard” Burroughs, the OCB call-center operator who gives Vinnie field instructions. 

Vinnie Terranova is just on the border of thirty when the series begins, a gregarious kid-from-the-neighborhood, just out of a cover-establishing 18-month stint in prison. He is a bundle of contradictions— quick to fall but slow to trust, a practicing Catholic who chose a job in the field of lying and murder, a 50’s hood irritated by bigotry. Vinnie is both far smarter and more sensitive than anyone gives him credit for, which is both his greatest strength and his fatal flaw— empathetic undercover agents burn out fast. He spends a surprising amount of the series trying and failing to quit his job. He has a marshmallow center, a steel-trap mind, and the general affect of your cousin who dropped out of college to marry his pregnant high school sweetheart. He also has no idea that his type is “angry asshole” and keeps being surprised when he falls for them. 

Frank McPike is a curmudgeon's curmudgeon, a career fed with a chip on his shoulder, a fathoms-deep sense of cynicism, and a collapsing marriage. He and Vinnie begin the series at odds, and as you watch the first few episodes, you're going to seriously struggle to believe me when I say that the affection between Frank and Vinnie becomes the absolute thematic and emotional heart of the series. Frank is also a genuine oddball failing to pose as a tough guy; he makes noises, he lurks in strange costumes, and the words he chooses when he’s irritated beggar normal human understanding.

We don’t get to know Dan as quickly or as deeply as we get to know Vinnie and Frank (in fact, he’s introduced as “Mike”), but he’s the man behind the curtain, a guiding moral and emotional star for Vinnie, a talented musician, and a cheerful face with a lot of anger bubbling just below the surface. He offers life advice even as his own home life is in constant meltdown, and loves both Vinnie and Frank with a fierce, sarcastic weariness. Dan is also an amputee, and his disability is portrayed with respect and without pity— a rarity for television even now, but especially in 1988. 

You’ll absolutely fall in love with these three, but one of the things that makes Wiseguy so special is its fantastic supporting cast. The world is fleshed out and lived in, and you get the distinct sense that all the recurring characters have their own lives we don’t get to see off screen. There’s Carlotta— Vinnie’s mother, as contradictory and sharp as her son, Pete— Vinnie’s brother, a progressive basketball-playing priest, Roger Lococco— a killer-for-hire who refers to every person on the planet as Buckwheat, Rudy Aiuppo— an elderly don with the heart of a trickster spirit, and a whole host of others who enter and exit the narrative throughout the arcs of the show. There are also a whole host of wonderful arc-based characters played by incredible actors, journeymen and and famous alike— including turns from Tim Curry, Debbie Harry, Jerry Lewis, Stanley Tucci, Patti D’Arbanville, Stephen Bauer, and Billy Dee Williams. You can tell everyone involved in the show had a fantastic time working on it, and nearly every actor who comes aboard really puts their whole Wisegussy into it gives it their all.

You notice that as I’ve been speaking, the lights have dimmed slightly, and the strains of an organetto have started to play quietly in the background. A man in a rumpled suit is smoking nearby, though you are fairly certain smoking indoors hasn’t been legal in a number of years. I pass you a plate of espresso and biscotti. 

Let’s talk arcs.

The first arc of the show, known as the Steelgrave arc, is a lot of fans’ favorite arc of the show, and for good reason. Vinnie infiltrates a New Jersey mob organization, and gets very, very close* to this man:

Sonny Steelgrave, human Knife Cat, is a complicated man, and Vinnie has complicated feelings about him. He’s very nearly a co-protagonist to Vinnie in this arc, and the show artfully toes the line between condemning him and making it clear that he’s not always entirely wrong. Vinnie’s goal is to get Sonny into prison and take down the entire family— how and whether he achieves this goal is best left unspoiled. Sonny may not have been the first complicated, likable villain on television, but his arc is intense, heart-wrenching, and splendidly morally grey. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that the Steelgrave arc is the best nine hour mob movie ever aired on television.  

*I’m really not kidding about the closeness. There’s an episode where Sonny announces he’s getting married and literally all the other mobsters are like ‘oh, now I understand why Vinnie has been in a bad mood all day.’ They are as close to canonically in love as a federal agent and a mobster have ever been portrayed on screen.

Lest you get Kevin-Spacey-jumpscared, the following arc unfortunately has Kevin Spacey in it. Thankfully he plays a slimy sister-kissing coked-up hypercapitalist, so it’s fairly easy to just hate his character in the same way you hate the actor and move on with your life. 

This arc, the Profitt arc— in which Vinnie is tasked with taking down a wealthy business mogul who is suspected of drug-and-gun-running— is, for many fans, a close second to the Steelgrave arc. It’s an interesting change of tone and locale, and introduces Roger Lococco, who is a really stellar supporting character. Personally, I rank a bunch of other arcs above Profitt, because no matter how much I like Roger, Mel and Susan are bananas, and they wear out their welcome before they exit the narrative. Regardless, it’s a stylish arc— one that rather  kicks truth, justice, and the American way in the teeth— and Mel’s machinations have serious reverberations later in the show. The Roger subplot is also genuinely excellent, and good old Corey Matthews’ Dad plays him with aplomb.

Back home, after trying to quit his job and failing, Vinnie has to deal with a threat with much smaller, but far more personal stakes. A white supremacy group has moved into his neighborhood and is attempting to recruit working-class Italians to their cause, pitting an older immigrant group against a newer one, pitting Catholics against Jews, and pitting a previously “ethnic” group’s newly acquired “whiteness” against people of color. I have mixed feelings about the Pilgrims of Promise/White Supremacy arc, because it’s truly quite good, and it pulls no punches about the kind of people fascists are and prey on, but it’s also exceptionally fucking upsetting that nothing has changed at all since 1988. Literally you could remake this arc word for word today and a) it would be exactly as believable, and b) your show would be immediately boycotted and canceled for being too “woke.” Great writing, great stakes, great character motivation; so, so uncomfortable to watch.

And then Ken Wahl breaks his leg in real life, and they have to replace him for a few weeks. 

The Garment Trade arc starts off pretty promising— Vinnie meets with the son of a clothing manufacturer, they have great (borderline meet-cute) chemistry, it’s a wonderfully New-York-in-the-80’s kind of storyline, Jerry Lewis is there, and I think it’s the only time I’ve ever seen Sukkot represented on TV— and then Vinnie has to leave for the next four episodes because of Wahl’s broken leg. They rewrote the arc on the fly, and considering that, it’s pretty good. Jerry Lewis is still there, and he gives the serious, dramatic performance of a lifetime, and Stanley Tucci chews scenery as The World’s Slimiest Businessman. We meet Vinnie’s childhood bestie, “Mooch,” whose actor, delightfully, starred beside Ken Wahl in 1979’s The Wanderers. My beautiful and talented wife Joan Chen even shows up for an episode. However, all of this is undercut by the lack of Vinnie; his replacement, a semi-retired agent named Raglin, is… a bit milquetoast. He’s okay, and he’s given some interesting backstory in his final episode, but he’s no Vinnie.

Once again sporting a functional leg, Vinnie returns, and my favorite arc other than Steelgrave follows. 

In the Dead Dog arc, Vinnie has to pose as a music producer, because the OCB traded an airplane for a music label. It’s the dumbest, most fantastic plot device of all time, and brings me incalculable joy. I literally made Dead Dog t-shirts because I love this stupid fake music label owned by a fictional government agency so much. 

The Dead Dog arc sees Vinnie at his happiest (the poor man really, really just wants to quit undercover work and stop being involved with Murder Organizations), and the crime he’s investigating is… wait for it… bootleg CDs. You would think this would be a ridiculously boring premise for an investigation, but the Dead Dog arc has Tim Curry, Debbie Harry, Glenn Frey, and Patty D’Arbanville playing a cadre of unhinged music industry moguls all attempting to stab each other in the back, and it is exactly as chaotic as you would expect based on that cast. This arc also had a bunch of original music produced for it, which is extremely fucking cool, except that then the studio lost the rights to the music it created and this arc became inaccessible and unwatchable except through circulating the tapes, so to speak, of early 90’s TV rips. (The irony is not lost on me that the arc about the Evils of Piracy is the arc that one must pirate.) Miraculously, in the last year, Wiseguy’s rights have been renegotiated, and the newest sets of the show have Dead Dog restored. Accessibility via streaming is still a bit of a mixed bag— the episodes were streaming on Tubi and Youtube briefly, but now appear to have been taken down again.

After his turn as a surprisingly successful music producer, Vinnie returns to his roots: the mob. In the Mob Wars/Trash Wars arc, Vinnie unintentionally becomes the temporary leader of the local mafia commission (I will not spoil how.) The OCB wants to use this as an opportunity to take down the entire organization from the inside out, and Vinnie must deal with mafia backstabbing, pressure from Frank and the OCB, and surprisingly personal stakes. It’s an unspectacular but solid arc that regrounds the series, and the interpersonal aspects of the story— and its examination of fathers and sons and generational inheritance of social rules and expectations— are excellent. The Mafia Wars storyline won’t blow your pants off, but it’s thoughtful and well-executed and reminds us of who Vinnie is and where he came from.

What follows is another of my favorite arcs, referred to as the DC or Counterfeit Yen arc, but perhaps better described as the Mr. Terranova Goes to Washington arc. Vinnie is summoned by the federal government to investigate counterfeiting, and thus unfolds a multinational conspiracy that ties back to the Profitt arc. Much like the White Supremacy arc, this arc is distressingly current— Vinnie is a patsy for a group of corrupt republican senators who want to destabilize the currency of a perceived East Asian economic rival. It’s Yen here, but all you’d need to do to bring this arc into 2023 is swap out references to Japan for China, because the American government has changed very little from the 80’s and has to be awful about some country somewhere or, I don’t know, a bunch of horrible old racist politicians will shit themselves. Vinnie enters talking like Jimmy Stewart, and leaves with one more thing to be crushed and disillusioned about. We get some riveting and stomach-churning courtroom drama, the bad guy turns out to be capitalism all along, and Frank threatens to shoot a Howard Hughes stand-in on a ski lift.

And then somehow we end up in Twin Peaks. The Lynchboro arc predates Twin Peaks by a whopping two months, indicating a total coincidence of premise similarities, but it does take place in a corrupt rural Pacific Northwest town unduly influenced by one large family/company, wherein an outsider has to investigate a tangled conspiracy and deal with strange townsfolk and some spooky happenings. There’s no way either show could’ve plagiarized the other— they were assuredly written and in production at the same time— but it is deeply bizarre. In the Lynchboro arc, Vinnie goes undercover as a local beat cop, and finds himself faced with both a serial killer and a land-rights and building-contracts espionage plot. He also has to deal with Mark Volchek, the ostensible “owner” of the town, and his eccentricity and decreasing grip on reality. Roger returns, and Vinnie must finally confront the enormity of his trauma. One major character is literally brought back from the edge of death by another character’s crushing love for them, expressed via church bells. It doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, but it doesn’t not, either.

And then Ken Wahl quit.

Season Four begins with a deeply depressed, heavily bearded Frank struggling to find the will to live after Vinnie has disappeared. (I don’t think I’m really at risk of spoiling anything serious by saying that we are “supposed” to think Vinnie is permanently gone, but that there are a huge number of blatantly spotlighted contradictions in that story. Wahl left on decent terms, and I firmly believe the Wiseguy staff was expecting to eventually win him back to the show and have his absence turn out to be a ruse. Unfortunately, Wiseguy got cancelled before this could happen.) Frank spends the first (and only complete) arc of this season investigating his partner’s disappearance, eventually working with the supposedly-corrupt DA who helped establish Vinnie’s cover back before Season One. 

It’s not an uncommon opinion to say, ‘hey, just skip S4’— and honestly, if you chose to watch S1-3, you’d have consumed a wonderful story with a reasonably coherent ending. But I don’t actually hate Season Four. The “new Vinnie—” Michael Santana, played by pretty-boy Scarface alum Stephen Bauer— is exceptionally likeable, and he brings with him a new set of characters who are also quite compelling. Furthermore, if you’re a Frank fan, he really gets the spotlight in this season, and if you’re a Frank/Vinnie fan, Vinnie may not be around, but Frank’s despair is really fucking something else. It’s almost worth it just to see him lie to the FBI and tell them he “never crossed the line” of professionalism with Vinnie.

Unfortunately, the next arc sets up something really compelling and unique, but it’s only 3 (unaired on TV) episodes, and ends on a complete cliffhanger, because the show was unceremoniously cancelled. After his niece is shot in the midst of teenage gang violence, Michael teams up with Billy Dee Lando Calrissian Fucking Williams to investigate red-lining and racist underfunding of schools. Oliver Stone shows up in the last like, ten minutes of the last episode?? I would be all over this storyline if it wasn’t just dropped like a moldy tomato, but I guess that’s what fanfiction is for. It’s not how Wiseguy deserved to go out, but hey, it was really aiming for the stars even as the plug got pulled.

Oh, and if anyone tells you there’s a 1996 TV movie, no, there isn’t.* 

(*The movie is so deeply mediocre that it’s worse than any of the controversy surrounding Season Four. It essentially retcons all of S4 and, frankly, really the last few episodes of S3, and presents a bland, uninspired “getting the gang back together” story that retreads thematic materials from the show without saying anything new. Vinnie has apparently been doing wiretapping for 6 years, which is completely at odds with everything we know about his character, and he and Frank are treated as “dinosaurs” that the OCB doesn’t know what to do with, and yet they are also simultaneously the only ones who can take care of a nearly-kidnapped child. It’s rushed, it’s emotionally hollow, the actors are phoning it in, and it ignores all of the character development from the series in a way that renders its plot nearly nonsensical. Furthermore, Ken Wahl had been in a seriously disabling motorcycle accident a few years before, so his apparent discomfort and stiffness throughout the film is because he’s genuinely in significant pain. Don’t watch the movie. You can always write fix-it fic for how Vinnie manages to come back after Season Four. It’s much harder to write fix-it fic for boring character assassination written by the 'due-process-is-for-pussies-and-torture-works' 24 guy.)

One of the other delightful things about Wiseguy is that Vinnie is both a big softie and yet is also saddled with a bizarre sort of erotic smolder, and therefore he has ridiculous chemistry with basically half the cast of the show. Vinnie very much seems a guy like you could say some blandly nice things to and buy him dinner, and you’d wake up, exhausted and satisfied, the next morning to him cooking breakfast. You’d think, wow, this guy is so thoughtful, he must be the one— and then you’d turn your head and he’d have immediately been seduced by the next schmuck down the line. He’s a good boy, but his “acceptable romantic target” sensors are so wildly mistuned as to render him, affectionately, a tragic slut. Will he end up with a mobster? One of a number of widows? His boss? No one knows but god.

Vinnie is also heavily bi-coded— his relationship with Sonny is almost explicitly romantic, he calls out Roger for homophobia (in 1989), one of his old friend asks if the reason he’s not married is because he ‘likes boys,’ and he doesn’t say no, and he has a borderline I-love-you moment with Frank. The boy just wants someone to love him, goddammit. 

I’m also really not kidding about Vinnie and Frank developing into the emotional core of the series. They live together for a period of time. They both imply they can’t live without the other. They go shopping for Dan’s birthday together. They pick up Frank’s ailing father from the nursing home together. Frank picks out Vinnie’s tie.

You pick at the plate of spaghetti that appeared in front of you, unsure of either its provenance or why it came after dessert. It’s the best spaghetti you’ve ever had, and that frightens you, somehow. 

I lean in close to whisper to you about crime. You note that at some point I changed into a pinstriped suit. You don’t remember me changing, or even getting up— you console yourself with the notion that maybe I’d been wearing it from the start, even though you know that isn’t true.

So, the thing about Wiseguy is— well— it’s more available than it used to be. The whole series was recently released on blu-ray, and both that set and the most recent DVD sets actually have every episode, a change from the previous releases. As of August 2023, all of the series except Dead Dog is available, legally, on Youtube. This is a vast improvement from even two or three years ago, when multiple episodes weren’t available through any means but blurry, VHS-tracking-laden downloads of TV rips. 

Unfortunately, the most recent renegotiation of the series home video and streaming rights still failed on the music rights front. Dead Dog has been spared the hammer, but there are still places where the series has gaps. Notably, there’s an episode (Stairway to Heaven) where Frank murders a jukebox, and looks completely fucking insane, because the original (thematically meaningful) music the jukebox was playing was replaced with generic elevator music. Worse, the final episode of the Steelgrave arc (No One Gets Out of Here Alive) is missing two musical cues: in one instance, Sonny himself is singing, in a fit of mania, and the footage has straight up been cut from the episode because they couldn’t get the rights to The Young Rascals’ Good Lovin’.  Equally egregious, The Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin, which originally played over nearly a minute of sustained, silent eye contact between Sonny and Vinnie— has been replaced with the Wiseguy opening theme. It renders a scene which should be quite clearly devastating and unsubtly romantic instead utterly awkward and bizarre. It’s hard to demonstrate just how jarring the change is unless you’ve seen the scene, but suffice to say that everyone I know who has seen both versions— in either order— has expressed horror and bafflement at the substitution. 

Which is to say: there’s a couple of episodes of Wiseguy you’re probably going to want to locate those shitty old TV rips of. It’s worth it, even if it seems like it wouldn’t be.

I place my hand over yours. You jump a little. I have a number of large, dark-stoned signet rings, and my hand is strangely cold. 

I make you an offer you can’t refuse.

You’re going to watch Wiseguy. 

[catch-me-hello]

No Mercy: Episode 10: Confetti at a Funeral

Settle in, class, because we have a LOT to cover today. It’s the final mission and the reveal of Monsta X. We’ll find out what happened to those who were cut from the show. We will also learn how this show revealed way more about the Korean psyche than I had expected. (I had expected none.) It’s been a lot, so let’s just dive right in.

We kick off with a highlight reel. The original twelve. The K-pop Thunderdome. The sailor hats. The cranky expert guy (remember him?), the abs, the rotating number badges, the confessionals, the slingshot move, the shopping districts, the amusement park, the barbecue, the timelines from hell. I can’t believe I’ve covered all this in a two-week period. Seriously, I just looked at the calendar, and I wrote the Episode One recap two weeks ago. I was so young and well-rested then.

So now we’ve arrived at the CJ E&M Center. The show has built a whole new stage for the finale.

This place is HUGE. Exactly how big is this television station? Never mind – that’s not important. Do you realize what this MEANS? (tingling with excitement) It means I get to come up with a new venue name! Let’s see … the stage is massive, with tall LED panels reaching to the ceiling and glowing steps leading from a higher stage in the back to the main stage up front. This is wild. This is exciting.  It’s big enough for chariot races. This is … THE K-POP HIPPODROME.

Oh come on, that’s a great name. I originally was going to name it the K-pop Big Top, so consider yourselves lucky.

Back to the show. Our boys, dressed in black and white outfits, are waiting backstage to perform for the crowd they can hear screaming and cheering. There are 600 people in the audience this time. We see them lined up around the block with their banners and lightsticks and signs and cute animal masks. We watch them file into the Hippodrome and surround the stage. A lot of their signs glow in the dark, which is really cool.

When everyone is in, the lights go down to start the show. Are we really moving forward with this? No flashbacks? Dare I hope? YES! The LED screens light up to introduce our trainees like they are already major K-pop stars. We are watching a live concert about to begin. This is over the top, and I love it. Stage fireworks shoot up into the air. No Mercy did not skimp on the stage production.

The LED doors open, and our nine trainees stand like rock stars before their adoring fans. I know it’s the end of the line for #GUN and Seokwon, but at least they get to be a part of this amazing performance and see how much the fans love them.

Hyolyn is back at the judges’ table, as well as Mad Clown, a guy I’m actually going to miss. What a weird dude. We get some information flashed on the screen, saying that these finalists have survived three months of missions. Three months of living crammed together in that dorm, rehearsing at the North Pole, doing confessional interviews, being told by their own mentors that they’re terrible and deserve to be eliminated … (sniff) good times.

K.will welcomes the crowd. We learn that the winners will be chosen by 50% audience votes and 50% judges’ votes. And, of course, because No Mercy loves faking us out, we are doing a flashback after all. I will not miss the raging alcoholics at No Mercy who created this show’s timeline. I hope they all find recovery.

Our trainees are at a photo shoot for 1st Look Magazine with their celebrity mentors. This magazine features famous celebrities and models, so they’re very excited to be included. They look amazing, as always. We then move to the North Pole for final mission rehearsals. Junggigo meets them there. He tells them that in order to find the seven who will form our final band, the mssion will be a 3:3:3 unit battle. And the teams are:

Unit 1: Kihyun, Wonho, and Seokwon

Unit 2: Shownu, #GUN, and Minhyuk

Unit 3: Jooheon, I.M, and Hyungwon

We start with Unit 3. At first, I’m a little concerned that Hyungwon’s low, mellow, smooth vocals wouldn’t hold up against the combined force of Jooheon and I.M’s rapping, but it sounds like they’re trading lines. I can’t wait to see the final performance.

We see our team backstage at the Hippodrome. I.M says, “I wish people would see me as No Mercy’s I.M instead of the guy who came in midway through.” I.M, soon they will be seeing you as the savage maknae of Monsta X.

Time for the performance. They are doing Yella Diamond’s “Interstellar.” We start in pitch darkness with a single flashing light in the middle of the stage. A slow, sexy beat brings Jooheon to the stage as the LED walls show a universe exploding around him. The beat picks up, he starts to rap, and we are off and running.

Hwungwon joins him and trades lines – a smooth vocal and then a rap line, and back and forth. I love it. Then the LED doors slide open, Jooheon yells out I.M’s name, and here he comes, rapping, “No mercy, OK I have no mercy.” Chills. Total chills.

The crowd is swept up in this. Hyungwon comes back and holds his own against the power rap duo. He’s the smooth, soulful center that the rappers swirl around, physically and vocally. He looks more confident than I’ve ever seen him on this show. The song is a total groove, and it’s over far too soon.

The judges, who are giving their critiques in front of the audience, agree with me about Hyungwon’s confidence, and I love seeing him get singled out for praise. They loved the whole performance. This and the prison break are my two favorite performances from this series.

Now for Unit 1: Kihyun, Wonho, and Seokwon. They’ve chosen the song “Hug Me,” by Crush. We see them rehearsing with the female dancers. (These dancers were also with Unit 3, but they mostly marched around in space uniforms with blank expressions, like the models in Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” video, so I didn’t mention them. They really weren’t necessary.)

Wonho is in full flirt mode with the dancers. Kihyun and Seokwon are blushing and stammering, which is kind of weird for K-pop idols. Later, when they are in a confessional together, Wonho says the theme will be “sexy.” Seokwon agrees and then blushes again. Wonho demands to know how Seokwon is going to pull off “sexy” if he keeps blushing like that. “I mean, I’m BORN sexy,” Wonho says. “I’m NATURALLY sexy, so I don’t know how to ACT sexy.”

Wonho, as someone writing from the future, I am happy to report that you have not changed. I’m hoping you never will.

We go back to the Hippodrome, and our boys are dressed in all black. Wonho stands up, and his jeans are so tight, I don’t know how he was able to sit in the first place. They hit the stage, and we’re swept up in a steamy R&B grind. Kihyun and Seokwon seem to have found their swagger, and of course, Wonho is in his element. The girls in the audience are swooning.

The dancers are way better utilized in this performance. In Unit 3’s performance, they felt more in the way.

There’s an interlude where the guys dance in a maze of green lasers, and it’s electrifying. I really hope this is an age 20+ show. This is the sexiest I’ve seen Wonho all season, and he doesn’t show his abs once.

When it ends, the girls in the first few rows may need medical attention. Mad Clown is the first judge to weigh in, and he has nothing but praise. Now I may need medical attention. He says he “had a lot of fun” watching the performance, and then he smiles. Mad Clown, you are a deeply bizarre man. I do hope our paths cross again in my recaps.

Okay, now for Unit 2: Minhyuk, Shownu, and #GUN. We flash back to rehearsals. I will not miss the North Pole. When No Mercy packs up and leaves this place, it needs to be torn down and replaced with a tanning salon. Anyway, Unit 2 renames themselves Age Flip as the result of a rock/paper/scissors game, the stakes of which I do not understand, and I’m pretty sure if the translator writing the subtitles tried explaining it, my screen would just be a wall of text.

The song they have chosen is “So Good” by Jay Park. I like the song, but it’s obvious why #GUN is going to be eliminated. The poor guy just isn’t a dancer. He needs to debut as a solo rap artist.

We get to the stage. This is the most elaborate set design yet – a city street with a marquee and street lights. They have male dancers this time. This is a bright, happy pop song. This puts me in such a good mood. They throw roses out to the audience, and I’m surprised none of these girls have been carried out on stretchers yet.

The performance is not as high-energy as the first two. The song choice may be partially to blame since it’s not very challenging. It just feels a little off. Even watching backstage, Jooheon comments, “Shownu tried to be a lot brighter than he is.”

The feedback from the judges is the same. Honestly, if I were watching No Mercy when it first aired back in 2015, my predictions for the eliminated trainees would be #GUN and Shownu. Thankfully, the judges see the potential in Shownu better than I would have.

Hyolyn says that #GUN should have worn a suit like the other two. The writing is clearly on the wall for #GUN. I respect him for trying the boy band thing, but he’s more of a hardcore rapper.

It looks like we are going to get one more performance from the entire group of trainees. We flash back to the North Pole, where Shownu, Jooheon, and Wonho are watching music videos for inspiration. One of the videos is EXO’s “Overdose,” which is one of my favorite songs and videos from that group. EXO is also one of the first groups that got me into K-pop, so this is a nice bit of nostalgia.

Back to the Hippodrome. K.will announces the final group performance. The song is “No Exit” by Rhymer. The stage lighting is stunning. The dancing is stunning. This looks and sounds like an honest-to-God Monsta X song. The pyrotechnics kick the energy up even higher.

It’s a brilliant final performance, ending with a real bang. I can feel their exhilaration and exhaustion as they take their final bows. Rhymer, one of the judges, praises their performance and says, “If you get eliminated, come to Brand New.” Wow. That’s his own label.

We all know what’s next. Time for the voting. The members line up onstage and say their final words of thanks.  I really think Hyungwon believes he won’t be in the final group. There’s a quiet resignation about him. I’m getting that vibe from Minhyuk as well.

They go backstage and wait while the audience and judges vote. Each ballot has all nine trainees’ faces, and voters mark the seven they want to be in the group. The production team interviews some of the women in the voting audience (I hardly see any men). They offer words of support and encouragement to their favorites. Finally one girl just shrieks, “Goooooo!” Yes, sister!  I’ve felt that way all season. Let’s do this already.

I’m guessing the judges heard this woman from all the way in the balcony, because they decide it time to form the band. The trainees return to the stage.

Now, here’s where the vibe drastically changes. The audience is not there when the judges announce the winners. The room is silent except for the tense music No Mercy plays over the proceedings. I was expecting the audience to be there to cheer the winners. Without them, this whole thing feels different. Yes, seven trainees are finally about to debut and have their dreams realized. But two of them are about to be devastated in a way that only K-pop trainees can understand, and the silence of the room is really underscoring that.

In American shows, contestants audition, and if they get picked and don’t win at the end, they may be upset, but it was a fun ride for however long the show lasted. On Korean shows like No Mercy, these are trainees who have been in the system for years. This is a chance they’ve sacrified their youth to finally get access to, and if they don’t make it, they have to question whether it’s worth putting themselves back into the system again. This is a way of life that doesn’t really happen in American show business.

As an American, I could spend my entire life trying to make it into show business in Los Angeles or New York, but I would decide my own schedule. I would have a personal life while deciding what auditions to go on, which part-time job to take to keep me financially afloat, and when to take days off so I don’t burn out. That is not the life of a K-pop trainee. If you make it into the trainee system of an entertainment company in Korea, they own you. They own your time, your energy, how many hours you sleep, and whether or not you get one or two precious days off a year. Many trainees have their cell phones taken away. I can’t think of any system in the United States that does that, or even if it would be legal for them to do that. As with many other things I’ve seen on this show, there would be lawsuits.

So when the winners on No Mercy are chosen, it’s not a huge spectacle. When a winner’s name is announced in this finale, the winner does not cheer and dance, because it means that the other trainees just watched another spot get taken away, and the winning trainee is VERY aware of that. This may be an extreme way of describing it, but to me, it looks like survivor’s guilt is mixed with the shock of realizing they’ve won. And to help preserve whatever dignity they can for these trainees, the show takes the audience out of the room.

I wanted to write all this to explain where my head was at while watching the winners get announced. So now that I’ve turned this into a total bummer, let’s see one of the best K-pop groups in music history come together! Yay?

K.will gets ready to announce the final winners. Each one will walk down the steps and stand on a lighted platform. The annoucements begin:

Number One: Jooheon. Boy, did he keep that promise to guard his Number One spot. All the way to the end. He bows, thanks the judges, and makes his way down to the first platform.

Number Two: Shownu. He looks stunned. No more standing back to watch others debut and walk away, surrounded by fans. It’s finally his turn. Not only is he about to debut, he’s going to be a dad to six crazy kids.

Number Three: Kihyun. Makes sense that the mom would be next. He is overcome with relief.

Number Four: Hyungwon. I really wanted to see his reaction. Those beautiful eyes widen in shock.

Number Five: Wonho. And now I’m about to cry. All I can think about is his mom. He’s fighting back tears. And it’s at this point that #GUN knows. I can see it in his face.

Number Six: I.M. When his name is first called, we don’t get a close-up shot of his face because he’s got his hood pulled up, and besides, his reaction is in the way he staggers backward a step. He seems dizzy. He collects himself and takes his place on the platform, keeping his head down.

Number Seven: Minhyuk. He’s frozen in shock.  Seokwon has to nudge him to get him to move.

Seokwon and #GUN are devastated.  Just a few feet in front of them, all the spaces are taken. They both thank the judges for the opportunity and leave the stage.

We are left with seven shell-shocked trainees, and I’m realizing that they are still not a band. They will need to bond and become a family. Right now, they’re a mess. Kihyun struggles to speak and then just bends over in tears. Jooheon, who has been looking back hopefully at #GUN after each name is called, turns his back to the camera as he cries over his friend not being chosen. I.M keeps his hoodie on and his head down. Even the judges look drained. This is the most traumatized winners circle I’ve ever seen.

K.will tells our band that there’s a lot of work ahead of them. The debut may be guaranteed, but not the success. The judges congratulate them, and now silver confetti rains down from the ceiling. It’s a bit jarring, like a celebration at the scene of an accident. Our idols-to-be shake off the survivor’s guilt and transition into people who realize they get to call their parents with the good news.

We do get to end on an upbeat note, one that brings a smile to my face.  Offscreen, the group has been told the name of their band. They gather in front of the camera to introduce themselves with their band name. They are clumsy, all bowing at different times, completely out of sync. They laugh, and Jooheon says, “We’re a mess!” But they pull it together, and we get this great shot:

And boy, did the fans ever support Monsta X.

Okay, so let’s find out what happened to the trainees who got eliminated along the way, according to what I can find on the web.

Kwangji and Yoosu After being eliminated in Episode 5, both Kwangji and Yoosu completed their military service. Both have been mostly quiet since then.  According to posts on his Instagram account, Kwangji seems to be building a small home studio.

Minkyun (Mosquito) Minkyun was eliminated in Episode 7, but he’s doing fine. He moved from Starship to WM Entertainment, took the stage name MK, and debuted with a group called ONF (pronounced “on and off”). He’s a lead vocalist and sub rapper with the group, and according to Wikipedia, he eventually dropped the stage name and went back to using his real name, Minkyun. He did have to put his career on hold to complete his military service. He was discharged in June 2023, and ONF made a comeback in October 2023. As I type this, ONF will be releasing their eighth EP Beautiful Shadow in just a few weeks.

Yoonho (the fossil) Yoonho was eliminated in Episode 9, after being the first one to show kindness to I.M and surviving that weird prank his bandmates played on him. He also left Starship and joined A Team Entertainment, and after so many years as a trainee, he joined a group called VAV (Very Awesome Voice) in 2017.  The band had already debuted, and he took the stage name Ayno. He had a big role as the group’s main rapper, dancer, vocalist, and visual. They had some moderate success and won a couple of awards in 2018 and 2019. However, just last month, A Team Entertainment announced that they were terminating the group’s contract. No word on what Yoonho will be doing next, but I’m rooting for him.

#GUN Good news here. #GUN stayed at Starship, and happily, he debuted in 2016 as a solo rapper. He has released several singles, his first one (“Crazy Guy”) making it to number five on the South Korean music charts. He also did two collaborations with Mad Clown (that really surprised me) and others in 2016, with one song going to number twelve and the other to number six. As far as I can tell, he’s still making music, and I hope his mother and grandmother are happy and well.

Seokwon Things initially went well for Seokwon. After No Mercy, he got his military service out of the way, and then he moved from Starship to RAIN Company. He finally debuted in March 2021 with a group called Ciipher. He was the group’s lead vocalist under the stage name Tan. Ciipher had a couple of their songs hit the top ten on the South Korean charts. They also won a Korea Culture Entertainment Award in 2021. However, in August 2023, he and several other members left the group. I can’t find what he’s doing now, but thanks to the overabundance of information about K-pop celebrities available online, I can tell you that his blood type is B. Tragically, his Myers-Briggs Personality Type is not available.

___________________________________________________

Next up, I will be recapping Wild Idol, the show with real outdoor survival challenges that brought us the group TAN. I will be taking a break first to go outside and touch some grass.  I’ll be back in early April.

WHEW.

[pridepages]

Mythtaken

I just finished Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood. I have thoughts...

Here there be spoilers!

In the words of an internet philosopher: were you obsessed with greek mythology as a kid or were you straight?

Like many a young sapphic, I've had a passion for the figures of myth: Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, Penelope, Ariadne, Circe...So when I heard there was a new novel out there putting the women of The Odyssey front and center, I knew I had to read it!

I found myself pretty much alone in my excitement.

I missed the tempest around this book when it hit shelves back in early 2023, but here's the drift:

Lies We Sing to the Sea was marketed as a sapphic reimagining of The Odyssey. However, author Sarah Underwood went on record with a student publication saying she'd never actually read The Odyssey.

This caused about as much hand-wringing and circle-jerking as you might imagine.

Well, as someone who has read The Odyssey (twice), I can tell you with authority:

Fuck Homer.

Sarah Underwood did not actually need to read 'the original' to write a novel that addresses some of the poem's most glaring weaknesses.

Here are a few reasons why:

Lies is not a reimagining of The Odyssey.

That was a poor choice of words made by some marketing person who probably didn't even read the manuscript. Lies is, at best, a very distant sequel to the poem.

Set hundreds of years after the reign of the mighty Odysseus, Lies imagines an Ithaca that is still laboring under Poseidon's curse. The mechanism for this curse hinges on one of The Odyssey's most horrific and least-mentioned moments.

It is canonical that when Odysseus returns to 'clean house' of the evil suitors who have been pillaging his home and harassing his wife, he makes a point of executing any of the maidservants of the house who were 'unchaste' with them.

Let that sink in for a minute.

We're talking about women--girls, really, let's be honest here--who have no social standing or currency. They are there to serve. Their mistress, the highest ranking woman in the house, has done nothing to get these men to leave. Apparently, she can't. So if these men can take and take from her...

...how exactly could any mere servant say 'no'?

Admittedly, I'm imagining a worst-case scenario here. So let's imagine a slightly better one. Let's imagine that these girls went willingly...

...So what?

Odysseus sluts it up and down the mythological Mediterranean for ten years and four hundred pages. He has affairs that last for literal years with some of these women. But, apparently, somehow it's okay when he does it. When his serving girls do it--for subsistence or pleasure--they are dishonoring the king. The underlying logic being: because he owns them and they are an extension of his honor and manliness.

Fucked up, right?

For the crime of having their bodies 'used' by other men, Odysseus literally has Telemachus hang them.

Double fucked up.

So what does this have to do with Lies? Underwood imagines that Poseidon is furious that the 'great hero' Odysseus does this. (He was pissed off at Odysseus before for other reasons, but it's perfectly in character for a greek god to get petty and find reasons to stay mad.) So Underwood's Ithaca labors under a curse: every year, Poseidon threatens the island with ravaging storms unless they repeat the cycle and sacrifice twelve chosen girls. There is but one way to break this terrible cycle of shedding innocent blood: the sons of Odysseus must make a willing sacrifice.

Lies picks up in the voices of three narrators: two girls who were executed--bodies dumped in the sea--and resurrected by Poseidon to break the curse, and the last prince of Ithaca.

All of this to say: Underwood doesn't need to have read The Odyssey to tell this story.

All she had to hear was this horrifying footnote in this epic poem about this vainglorious bastard and think 'That's fucked up. What if I wrote the revenge story?'

And she did.

2. The Odyssey--and Greek Mythology--is inherently sexist.

Like I said, I loved greek mythology growing up. But the older I got, and the more I read, the more I realized that women don't really have a place. Their sexuality is policed. Their power is suspect. To be 'good' meant subjecting yourself to becoming some man's property to win or lose as he chose. To seek any kind of autonomy or freedom meant being 'deviant.' And even if you did manage to scrape out some kind of independence, it meant you had to remember your place. (Even Athena was subject to Zeus.)

So for all the people wailing about how Underwood was disrespecting the source material by refusing to read it...

So what? The source material disrespected us first.

The ancient stories are all about men and their great deeds. Women are, at best, footnotes. Underwood did not need to read over four hundred pages to get that message. And she didn't need Homer to tell a story that gave voice to characters who never had a voice in the first place.

It's like people have never heard of fanfic!

Fanfic was in part born out of a need for marginalized people to give themselves a space in existing stories. That's effectively what Underwood did. She didn't choose to write about a goddess or a witch or a queen...

She wrote about the nobodies.

She wrote about servant girls who, at best, were accorded a handful of lines and no names in the original text.

She thought they deserved a say.

So who gives a fuck what Homer had to say about them? He never gave a fuck about what they had to say!

Which brings me to my last troubling thought...

3. This whole thing highlights the miserable gendered double-standard that still exists in fan spaces.

Sorry, purists. But do you know what you sound like? Every time you criticize Sarah Underwood for not being a 'real' Homeric fan, you sound like those gatekeeping dudebros who insist women prove their credentials before even allowing them a seat at the table.

So she didn't read The Odyssey. Who cares? It's not that great a book anyway!

But you know what's a really good book? Lies We Sing to the Sea.

It's haunting and poetic. It speaks of sacrifice and longing. It's tragedy and star-crossed love at its finest.

It has unapologetically queer girls taking their lives into their own hands.

It demands that men be accountable for the suffering they cause women.

It cries out for justice for people who never wanted to be fighters and martyrs but just wanted to live, gods dammit! But the world didn't let them, so now they have to pick up the fight so that future generations won't have to bear the pain.

It's a gorgeous novel.

And the thing that gets me the most is that people sank it using this 'purist' argument...but I'm not sure they would have if it had been written by a man.

Out of the depths of my mind every time I read another wanky thinkpiece on this incident rises the suspicion: people might have thought this author was bold and brash, or at least excused, if she were a man.

They would have shrugged their shoulders at bad marketing.

They would have hailed him a hero for pointing out Homeric shortcomings.

The purist arguments would have washed away.

Instead...

Well.

I'm not saying you have to agree with my take on the text or love this book. But I would suggest that if the thing that stayed your hand was a bad faith criticism that the author didn't do her homework...

Maybe you have to consider what lies have been sung to you.

[goodluckclove]

I have a project that I started for Nanorimo. I won Nano but after it was over I lost the motivation to write the last of the first draft. I think it’s a combination of not knowing exactly how to end it, not a lot of people to share it with, and being worried that I’m gonna re-read what I have and just find it bad.

Hello, Friend! Please, sit down. Take a deep breath. I'm going to say a variation of a form of writing advice that I'm sure you've heard a lot, but I'll hopefully elaborate it to the point where it clicks. I actually started writing through NaNoWriMo, it was a really great way to build up the muscle of consistent practice. Did my first six or so novels like that. Fun!

But I have good news and bad new about your first draft. The bad news is that it probably isn't perfect. The good news is that that's a great place to be in.

For one thing, NaNo specifically is not a traditional way to write a very stable first draft. People will spend years on what you've done in 30 days. To compare them is comparing your blanket fort with someone else's McMansion and thinking "dang what if my blanket fort never has faux-Roman arches".

Some people say their first drafts are perfect. This confuses me but I accept it and believe them when they say it. I do think that these people are not talking about drafts they carved out of word-flesh in a month or less. That's an entirely different game to play. When you hear people talk about how you're supposed to have a shitty first draft it could be hard to swallow. We don't want to feel like we put in all this hard work to make something shitty. So maybe I can say it a different way:

Your first draft is the skeletal structure of the story as a whole. It is the frame to what you're trying to achieve.

And I can say from experience that not liking your first draft doesn't feel the way you might think it will if you go at it the right way. I've written twelve books and there's only maybe two that I read fragments from and genuinely cringe. And even then there's still stuff I like about it.

Maybe you went into some kind of fugue state for a month and wrote a bunch of stuff that you hate every part of. You're a big high fantasy fan and you wrote a gritty detective novel. You love Dark Academia romance and when you read your NaNo you find it is just a list of every slur you could think of and new ones that could be added to the lexicon. If this happens to you then yes, your first draft is objectively terrible and you should probably take yourself to the hospital.

More likely your thoughts will look like this:

Maybe I should cut this. It's not really needed.

Oh I forgot the protagonist has this specific trait, I should remember that and incorporate more in the rest of the book

Hah yeah I see where I was going with this.

I should add more details about this concept, considering I now know about this other concept.

Hah man that's a lot of typos. (Assuming you're like me)

These are the types of things I have thought when I looked over literally every first draft I've ever edited since the dawn of my time as a writer. You are not likely to rend your clothes in shame and burrow underground. Even if you find some weird shift that happens in NaNo novels, like the genre or tone changing midway through the document - professional writers do that too. It can be a more efficient way to explore the space you're working it.

It can be a really interesting challenge! It helps too that you took some time off - I try and take at least a week between draft edits, even though it can be painful. You'll be able to see it with fresher eyes.

My usual strategy for editing my own drafts is to read from the top with curiosity and excitement and treat it like a puzzle. Is this what I want? Can it be better? Was there something I missed? Incidentally, when I'm stuck at a point in the novel I use the same trick and it helps every time. It's how Chuck Palahinuik did Fight Club!

So yeah you already did a huge thing by finishing a NaNo. Why not take a look back, if not just to enjoy the crazy and chaotic fruits of your effort?

Also - in regards to people not reading your work. Out of 12 novels I've probably had 3 read all the way through. It can suck, but it's okay and it doesn't mean they aren't good. Validate yourself and enjoy your own writing and start putting shit online/self-publishing/querying to take a chance!

[wingedflight]

Throwback Thursday Sunday

Tagged by @bywayofmemory to share an older fic I still love!

Let’s travel way back to 2011, which is when I wrote Faded Pages. (I bring it up now bc I was literally just talking about it the other day, after not having thought about it in years!)

Faded Pages is a one-shot about a boy named Gregory who goes to Narnia and discovers by way of an academic book that the Golden Age Kings are the Pevensie boys from school. In the process of confronting them, Edmund learns that the angsty poems he wrote in his teens have been over-analyzed by academics (which has always always been my favourite part because OH THE HORRORS).

The mirror melts to liquid to allow his hand through. Even half-expecting this, it startles him; Gregory jerks back only to stop before the tips of his fingers lose contact. He can't afford to miss the opportunity to get out, get back – not now.

But even the knowledge of the mirror's destination doesn't stop the shudder of apprehension. Gregory glances behind him once more at the tightly-packed linen closet and thinks of where he wants to go – after all, it would be just his luck to be taken to some other strange universe rather than the dormitories of Hendon House. It is not that he holds any particular fondness for the school, but Gregory has been out of his element for days now, and he wants the comfort of a familiar setting.

As if the sudden partiality for Hendon House means something to the mirror, Gregory's hand is suddenly pulled forward again, arm disappearing into the silver liquid. The pull quickens, becomes stronger – he fights against it even knowing what is happening. And then, with a sudden surge of power, the silver rises up to meet him and Gregory falls forward into the dark shadows of a familiar broom closet.

When he had first gone through, it had been a smooth and painless transition. This time, it is as though the mirror is not quite ready to release him. Gregory's foot catches on the bottom rim of the frame and he trips forward, reaching out too late to catch himself. His hand scrapes against a shelf, his other arm catches against a broomstick. There is a sudden clatter as various cleaning supplies rain down upon him, and in the chaos, Gregory stumbles forward and straight into the door. The latch slips, and in a strangely deliberate way, the door slowly swings open to deposit Gregory in the middle of the dormitory hall.

He picks himself up gingerly, checking arms and legs and head for damage, but it seems that the only harm he has caused has been a catastrophic mess. For a brief and terrible moment, he thinks the book has been left behind, but there it is, half-hidden in a pile of sponges. Gregory snatches it up and dusts it off, tucking it beneath his arm before turning back into the hall.

And there, like a ghost in a navy robe, stands Edmund Pevensie himself.

Way back when I wrote this, I’d had plans to do a longer story all about Gregory in Narnia at the time of the Telmarine invasion. Maybe, twelve years later, I may actually get to that. Hmm. 🤔

Tagging @eidetictelekinetic @oakashandwillow @rustedeaglewings and anyone else who wants to play!

[justaloreaddict]

Heh, so I wrote this a while ago and while I'm still fairly proud of it I feel a little silly about writing it in the first place.

A passing reunion

Maxwell stepped onto the station dock behind his superior, glancing around furtively in his helmet. The dock was abuzz with activity as people of all species unloaded and loaded ships also docked at the station. He followed his superior up the dock and deeper into the hive of activity.

“I’ve got some business to attend to elsewhere, meet me back here in four hours.” His superior stated, gesturing to a standing map a few feet ahead.

“Yes ma’am.” Maxwell nodded once before striding off into the crowd to look around, removing his helmet as he did so.

There were quite a few shops lining the streets as he wandered, but none of them really struck his fancy. Mostly businesses selling various goods he wasn’t in the mood to buy. He’d been saving up for some better armor anyway, so it was best not to spend too much.

As he was passing a tacky souvenir shop, he noticed a familiar outline amongst the shoppers. As he walked closer he recognized the voice. Immediately he smiled and entered the shop, quieting his footsteps a little out of habit.

“Castor?” He asked, surprised.

The man turned his head, a large and familiar crooked grin spreading across his face.

“Maxwell!” Castor straightened from viewing some of the colorful wares.

“Castor! Dude, it’s been years! How’ve you been, man?” Maxwell grinned, opening his arms and pulling his old friend into a firm hug. Castor clapped him on the back then they released each other.

“I’ve been good! Not much to complain about really. You?” Castor nodded his head as he spoke.

“It’s been…a lot. But hey! What brings you here?” Maxwell asked.

“Oh you know, gotta resupply somewhere.” Castor shrugged. “Hey, why don’t we go catch up over a drink?” He gave a friendly slap to his friend’s left shoulder.

“Sure.” Maxwell shrugged, nodding his head. “I’ve got a few hours to kill.”

“Great! I know a place with some interesting drinks.” Castor gestured for Maxwell to lead the way out of the shop.

Maxwell obliged, then fell into step on the left of his friend as they forged their way through the crowd. They talked a bit about what they’d been up to since they’d last seen each other, interspersed with Castor pointing out shops of interest or to avoid for one reason or another. That one has terrible customer service, that one’s sorta illegal maybe, that one’s got an owner with a great personality, that one has killer deals but trashy products, etc, etc. Finally they reached their destination; a smoothie stall with a flavor list compartmentalized by species.

“They’ve got somewhere near one hundred and twenty flavors of smoothie. Twelve for each of ten known species. It’s crazy.” Castor mentioned. “The best thing though is to try flavors for other species. I’ve tried one or two flavors. I don’t recommend that one though.” He pointed to a flavor marked under ‘Volus’. “Makes your tongue numb and everything tastes like bacon.”

Maxwell laughed. “Doesn’t sound too bad actually.” He chuckled.

“You think that’s funny? No one could understand me for the rest of the day!” Castor laughed too.

“Maybe you should get it again.” Maxwell teased, playfully punching his friend in the right shoulder.

“Naaahhh, I don’t like bacon that much.” Castor shook his head, smiling.

“Fine. Which should I try, you think?” Maxwell glanced over the overwhelming list of flavors.

“Hmm… you try that one-” Castor pointed to one under ‘Turian’. “And I’ll try this one.” He moved his hand to indicate a flavor under ‘Elcor’. “Then we can swap and try both.”

“Sounds good to me.” Maxwell grinned.

Ten minutes later the two were sitting in a plaza area on the side of a step, sort of out of the way. It was a lot to catch up on, having not seen each other for five years. Three hours flew by, and Maxwell shot up when he noticed the clock on one of the columns.

“What’s wrong?” Castor asked, standing as well.

“I totally forgot! I gotta go. I’ll get in trouble if I’m not at the sign by the docks in ten minutes!”

“Shoot! Uhm… Quick! This way!” Castor indicated a direction with his head before taking off at a light jog.

Maxwell followed, a little confused but relieved that Castor was trying to help. They wove between main roads and back alleys, getting spat out at the docks seven minutes later.

“Thanks man. I owe you one.” Maxwell clapped Castor on the shoulder.

“See you later man. Hopefully soon.” Castor said a bit sadly, catching his forearm. They gripped one another’s forearms for a second, then Maxwell ran off towards the sign, shoving on his helmet as he ran.

[stesierra]

How would you like to see the book I can't publish? It's a book about disability and societal injustice and gay teenagers and terrible diseases. I'm proud of it but I wrote it in a time before OwnVoices and I don't want to take money away from writers who actually are physically disabled. But maybe it's okay to share it for free. YA fantasy that would definitely be banned in Florida.

CAST OUT

CHAPTER ONE

The smell was like nothing I'd ever encountered. It filtered through the hood of my cloak and the silk mask over my nose and mouth, and it filled my lungs the way the sun fills your eyes when you stare at it.

On my shoulders, my parents' hands weighed heavy and warm. My father's trembled.

I was not trembling. I was sixteen today. Full-aged. Full-aged women walked with their heads held high and uncovered. They looked at the world around them, at anything they liked, without worrying they'd see something that would blight a growing mind.

It wasn't gawking to stare around at the gold-plated columns, the silk-draped ceiling, and the obsidian stairs. It was being adult.

We mounted the stairs, my parents a step ahead of me.

At the top, sentinels framed the ivory entrance. Straight whole tusks made up the door, each twice my height and lashed together with silver wire. As we reached the top landing, the sentinels seized silver handles and pulled. They moved like mirrors.

The doors swung wide. A fire smoldered in the entryway, set in a grate lined with silver fish. We walked around it, onto a tiled platform that stretched into the heart of a triangular chamber. Down below, twelve robed men and women sat cross-legged on the floor. White triangles of linen capped their heads.

The Justry.

I took a deep breath. The smell was stronger here. It was a mineral scent, but sweet, almost cloying. I felt a little dizzy.

My parents' hands squeezed my shoulders. Then Father pulled my cloak away. Mother stripped off my mask. For the first time outside of my home, I stood exposed in nothing but my linen camise and baggy calsounds, which belled out all the way down to my slippers. My scalp felt the kiss of fresh air, even with my black hair braided and bound tight to my head. I stood proudly. I wore my best clothes, dyed red with madder and embroidered by Father's hand. I'd even scraped the paint from under my nails.

When my parents returned to my side, smoke choked the air, and the cloak and mask were gone. I would never wear them again. I wanted to skip and jump, but the eyes of the Justry were on me.

The youngest of the Justry rose, a woman no more than seventeen. The justa's skin was the same brown as the powdered cuttlefish ink Mother bought me. A touch lighter than my own.

The woman spoke, but I fixed my eyes on the crimson pillow she held. On the pillow sat a little golden jar.

Mother nudged me. I looked up.

The justa's mouth moved with ritual words Mother had already taught me. "As I have seen revelations, dear one, and been made pure, so will you. The first revelations are always the strongest." She smiled, revealing teeth a shade brighter than her white lip salve. "Are you ready?"

I nodded.

The justa reached down with white-nailed hands and lifted the golden lid. I caught a glimpse of a little cone, which sent up tendrils of glowing green like the essence of life itself. Oracle ore.

Then the smell caught me.

It swept me out of my body and up to the ceiling and through it, like I was no more substantial than a soul. It sparkled and churned and danced in my lungs, and I danced and churned and sparkled in the air above the city, a leaf on the wind. A grain of sand being melted to glass.

I felt as though I could shatter.

Lights burst behind my eyes like lost stars, and they showed me wonders that flashed by so fast I missed half of them. Underground caverns and winding tunnels that burned with their own greenish light. Gold-fronted mansions that lined the curve of a manicured hill. Huge automas, in shapes of animal and human and nothing living, with joints that moved smooth as oil. Their intricate, glowing guts.

A pale-faced woman with a jutting chin and stub nose, her low cheeks framed by mousy brown hair. Her eyes were the green of malachite pigment and old copper and the little cone evanescing on the pillow in front of me.

I fell into them.

I fell into myself.

I knelt between my parents on the platform. I had not moved except to fall. The justas still surrounded us, and the woman with white lip salve had replaced the lid on the golden jar.

Her smile at me was tender. I was too dazed to read her lips, but I could envision in signs what she said; Mother had drilled it into me. "Well? Child, tell us of what you have seen, and be welcome to adulthood."

I let my parents haul me to my feet. My knees felt like pudding. I closed my eyes, and Mother and Father steadied me with their hands.

"It was amazing," I said to the justa. And I laughed. "It was beautiful. More beautiful than anything I've ever seen. And the taste– it was like waterfalls in the mountains, or the way a diamond must taste. I've never seen either, but I've read–"

Mother's hand clamped down on my shoulder. Father's had fallen away. Something was happening. Something was wrong. I opened my eyes.

The justa's mouth was moving. I'd missed the first part of the sentence. But I read the last of it on her lips and guessed the rest. "–She will be cast out."

My hands clenched in dismay. "What? No, you can't! I saw the revelations! I saw!" I needed to taste it again. I needed the justa to lift the cover over that little glowing cone and let me suck its magic into my lungs.

The justa shrouded the golden case with a sleeve and stared at me with narrowed eyes. "Silence your child, perfectas. Her voice saddens this body."

Mother pulled me close. She spoke – her chest reverberated against my back – but I couldn't see, even without my hood. My eyes had frozen on the justa's mouth. I caught every twitch of her lips, as though I had known and read her face for years.

The justa replied, "She is an imperfecta. The law has no leeway." Her eyes turned towards Father. He must have said something. "Take comfort. There are always miracles. Perhaps the Great Unknowns will hear your prayers and cure her."

I set my jaw. "I don't need to be cured. There's nothing wrong with me."

The justa ignored me. "You may have one night with her before she is escorted from the city. With our blessings."

A drop splashed the back of my neck. Mother was crying.

The justa lifted a hand. "Walk in perfection."

My parents led me away.

#

They didn't speak to me until we were home, inside our own entry chamber, which I'd painted myself a year ago. I stopped just over the threshold, brushed by the draft of the door swinging shut behind me. My hands swept the air, agitated, too fast. "They aren't really going to make me leave, are they?"

My parents turned towards me. Tears glistened in the cracks of wrinkles that hadn't been there that morning. "Zisha," Mother said, her hands cupping my face. Was this the last time I'd see my name on her lips?

"They can't throw me out," I signed. "Not just because I talk strangely."

Father and Mother exchanged mournful glances. Father signed, "Little bird, they knew it wasn't only your voice."

"Just because I'm deaf? Because I can't hear?"

Mother stepped back, freeing her hands. Her fingers twitched a subdued answer. "Yes, dear one."

My face felt hot and sticky. Tears ran down my cheeks. "All those years you spent coaching me on how to talk properly, how to read lips. They were for nothing?"

Father signed, "We hoped your training would fool them. But–"

"It didn't."

"You have a beautiful voice, dear one," Mother signed.

"The Justry didn't think so."

Mother bit her lip. "They are all fools."

I signed, "Tell them I'll stay inside. I won't take revelations again. No one needs to see me–"

"They know you are here now," Father signed. "They won't let you hide."

I swallowed. Sniffed. "It isn't fair."

Father shook his head. "I will pack a bag for you, little bird. Go pick your favorite books from the library." He strode away, his back as stiff as the benches lining the entry hall.

I sank into one and signed weakly, "He's thinking of books? Now?"

"You will want them," Mother signed. "You will not find any outside the Plenary Cities. They cannot read, out there."

"Can they even paint?"

"Not like you, love."

I hugged my knees to my chest, pressed my face against them. Tried my voice. "I don't want to go there."

Her hand brushed my back, but I did not look to see her reply. I didn't want to see it.

I wanted to stay.

@anonymousfoz

@moremysteriesthantragedies

@elizababie

@sm-writes-chaos

@bellascarousel

@palebdot

@Hyba

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@macabremoons

[wordswithkittywitch]

Inktober 16- Angel

This is Angel, an OC I made when I was seventeen. And yes, she scores as 52 on the Mary-Sue Litmus Test.

A quick rundown of Angel's story: Angel wakes up naked in an alleyway in a permanently night-time, seemingly abandoned city. She quickly discovers the city is populated entirely by goths with superpowers and one ten-second memory of their lives before waking up naked with superpowers.

The series focuses on the gang warfare between The Black Candle, Three Stitches, Painted Black and Kryptoknight. Kryptoknight is a single person, no one wants to deal with him because he's just a really unpleasant person and also his superpower is no superpowers work around him, so he's not part of a gang. There's also a neutral group called The House of Smoke and Mirrors, but they turn out to actually be one couple.

It's also worth mentioning that the couple that comprise The House of Smoke and Mirrors are in their late thirties, the main villain, Macabre, is in his forties, there is one twelve-year-old and everyone else is between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five.

It is extremely clear that Angel, Sandman, Kryptoknight and Phoniex were based on me and the rest of the actual love square I was in at the time. And, like everything I wrote at that age, it was pretty much a form of self-flagellation as I wrote terrible things happening to characters based off of myself.

It is also worth noting that I renamed Phoniex pretty much this morning. While I was working on this picture, I just couldn't deal with the fact that I named a character Kopii Krow. Who dressed like the Crow, came back to life like the Crow, and was very clearly based on my high school crush.

This is what I mean when I say that being cringe is an important part of development. It's just part of being a teenager. It's healthy.

Killing yourself off repeatedly in everything you write might not be, though.