#but it might not work for characters associated with longer poems or in settings where poems are usu. longer

[waifuoftomonori]

Personal Makeshift Thesaurus

The fact that it took me so long to remember which notebook I wrote this in and then find the notebook was enough of an indication that I should consider typing this up somewhere else. Warnings: it’s far from thorough; sometimes the words are only synonyms in certain contexts; sometimes they’re not exact synonyms; and not all lists may be in alphabetical order. I may update this as I learn or think of new words/phrases. Also note: these are suggestions, not limits.

“Scolding”

admonishing, admonitory, chastising, chiding, disapproving, exasperated (sometimes), reprimanding, reproving Gestures: clicking tongue, poking (other's forehead, etc.), shaking head, sighing, tsk'ing, tutting

Scent

aroma, breath, breeze, fragrance, ghost, gust, hint, inhale, odor (neg. connotations), redolence, smell, waft (v. of smell), whiff, wisp Scent Descriptors and Comparisons: animal, ashy, bakery / baking, boozy (breath after drinking, or like "intoxicating"), clean, coffee, cologne, earthy, elemental (i.e. natural, esp. when related to an element), exotic (for scents unfamiliar yet intriguing to the character), floral, fresh, herbal, incense, minty, musky, natural, perfume, petrichor, salty, sea, smoky, spicy, sulfur(-ous), summery, sweat, sweet, tea, unwashed hair / skin, wildflowers

"Polite"

careful (wording, etc.), courteous, decorous, diplomatic, etiquette (n.), gracious, harmless, humble, inoffensive, modest, proper, respectful, tactful, well-mannered

"Stifled" (e.g. a smile)

bit back, choked on, composed (expression, etc.), concealed, contained, controlled (impulse, etc.), disguised, ducked (to hide expression), fought, held back / in, hid, reined in, resisted, restrained, smothered, struggled not to, suppressed, swallowed, tickled (i.e. throat), twitched (i.e. involuntarily)

“Smooth” (e.g. skin, lips)

creamy, delicate, fine, flawless, frictionless, glossy, immaculate, lush, pliable, plush, porcelain (cliché but there it is), silky(/-en), sleek, smooth, soft, supple, unblemished, unbroken, unmarred, velvet(-y)

"Rough" (i.e. texture)

abrasive, bumpy, coarse, [x-]callused (e.g. sword-callused), friction (n.), grainy, granular, gritty, rugged, sandpaper, sandy, scarred, scratchy, stubbled/-y, studded (opt.: "with ___"), tough, [x]-toughened

“Enjoy”

adore, appreciate, bask in, cherish, delight in, embrace, indulge in, luxuriate in, melt, prefer (usu. understatement), relish, revel in, savor, succumb to, take pleasure in, thrill in, welcome

“Cause” (v.)

coax, conjure, draw (a smile, a moan, etc.), drive, earn, elicit, evoke, force, fuel (esp. for “heat” effects like blushing), impetus (n.), incite, induce, inspire, nudge, produce, prompt, provoke, pull, spark, spur, stimulate, trigger, wrest, wring (out), yank (esp. if reluctant)

“Take Care of” / Nurturing Verbs

attend to, baby, care for, coddle, cosset, dedicate oneself to, devote oneself to, diligent (adj.), fuss over, indulge, lavish (w/ attention, etc.), minister to, nurse, nurture, pamper, please, satisfy, see to, service, shower (w/ attention, etc.), spoil, tend to, turn one’s attention to, work one’s magic on, worship

“Desirous” (don’t overuse; show, don’t tell)

admiring, amorous, appreciative, approving, ardent, aroused, avaricious, avid, breathless, delirious, desperate, dreamy, drooling (over/after), eager, ecstatic, enraptured, enthusiastic, excited, fervent, fevered, feverish, flustered, gluttonous, greedy, heated, horny, hot, hungry, infatuated, intoxicated, lascivious, lewd, longing, lustful, lusting (after), needy, panting (over/after), passionate, rapt(-urous), ravenous, receptive, sensual (moan, etc.), thirsty, tingly, voracious, yearning

“Competent” (and similar)

accurate, adept, adroit, artful, brisk, capable, concise, confident, crisp, deft, dexterous, dominant, effective, efficient, effortless, elegant, eloquent, flawless, gifted, graceful, handy (casual), masterful, natural, nimble, perfect, polished, powerful, practiced, precise, professional, proficient, skilled, skillful, smooth, talented

“Mischievous” / “Sly” / Bad but in a Sexy Way

calculating, clever, conniving, conspiratorial, coy, crooked (i.e. grin), cunning, dark, demonic, devilish, devious, diabolical, dirty, evil, fiendish, impish, keen, knavish, knowing, mocking, nasty, naughty, nefarious, playful, rakish, roguish, ruthless, sadistic (bonus of already being connected with kink), scheming, sharp, sinful, sinister, smirking, sneaky, taunting, teasing, wicked, wily, wry

“Scary” but in a Sexy Way (then again, I think just plain “scary” is pretty sexy)

chilling, dangerous, dark, foreboding, frightening, imposing, impressive, intimidating, loom (v.), menacing, ominous, threatening, terrifying

“Shiver” (v.) (or similar involuntary motions of pleasure)

convulse, flutter, quake, quiver, reel, rock, shake, shudder, spasm, squirm, sway, teeter, tremble, twist, vibrate, wiggle, wobble, wriggle, writhe

Movement of Sensations (e.g., "a shiver ___ down his spine", "blood ___ her cheeks"-- adjust syntax as needed)

ambushed, bathed, bloomed, blossomed, bounced, cascaded, crackled, crawled, danced, echoed, flooded, flourished, flowed, illuminated (esp. for blush), jolted, lanced, painted (blush), poured, quivered, rocketed, rolled, rushed, seized, shivered (if not actually "a shiver"), shot, snapped, spilled, surged, tickled, tingled, tiptoed, traveled, trickled, vibrated

“Move (Over / Across)” (i.e., as of fingers or breath)

ascend, brush, canvass, chase (sth moving), climb, cross, dance, dart, descend, drift, fan (out/across), float, flutter, follow (lines of body, etc.), ghost, glide, pursue, roam, rove, run, skate, skid, skim, slide, slip, slither, trace, trail, travel, traverse

also see: “Touch” (v.) (that one doesn’t necessarily imply movement)

“Slow”

dawdling, deliberate, dithering, gradual, languid, leisurely, meandering, measured, methodical, plodding, relaxed, shambling, sluggish, steady, thorough, torpid

“Fast”

accelerate (v.), darting, desperate, frantic, galloping, hasty, hurried, instant(-aneous), prompt, quick, racing, rapid, rushed, slapdash (result of haste), sped-up, speedy/-ing, swift, sudden, urgent

“Incompetent” / “Weak” (perma. or temp.)

breakable, bumbling, clumsy, defenseless, feeble, floundering, fragile, frail, fruitless, fumbling, futile, gooey (i.e. mind or muscles), helpless, hopeless, impotent, incapable, ineffective, inept, malleable, melty (mind or muscles), mushy (mind or muscles), pathetic, powerless, prone (phys. position or “prone to ___”), puny, putty (in hands) (cliché but hot), submissive (if intentional), succumbing, susceptible (to ___), useless, vain (i.e. an attempt), vulnerable, worthless

“Stupid” (many also have fairly obvious noun forms)

absurd (i.e. a plan), asinine, buffoon (n.), daft, dense, dim(-witted), doltish, dopey, dull, dumb, foolish, gullible, half-witted, hare-brained, idiotic, ignorant, illogical, imbecile, inane, moronic, naïve, nitwit (n), numbskull, oblivious, obtuse, ridiculous, silly, simple(-ton), slow, thick (as in skull), unreasonable, unthinking (i.e. comment or instinctive reply) This is by no means a complete list. English contains a panoply of ways to insult someone’s intelligence. Why am I keeping track of these, personally? Akifusa’s degradation kink.

“Touch” (v.) (see “move over”)

brush, caress, collide, connect (with), crash (against), embrace, encircle, enclose, explore, fiddle with, flick, fold into (hands, etc.), gloss, graze, kiss (can be literal or not), make contact with, mash (against), massage, meet, nudge, play with, pluck, ply (esp. steady and rhythmic, or involving skill/dexterity), poke, press, probe, prod, pry (forceful), push, rub, scrub, smash (against), stroke, strum, tease, tickle, toy with, tweak, wrap

“Attractive”

adorable, alluring, arresting, beautiful, captivating, compelling (eyes, etc.), cute, dazzling, easy on the eyes, elegant, enchanting, enthralling, enticing, exquisite, fine, flawless, gorgeous, handsome, hypnotic/-tizing, immaculate, impeccable, inviting, irresistible, kissable, lickable (humorous), lovely, lurid (color), luscious, lush, luxuriant (esp. hair), magnetic, mesmerizing, mouth-watering, perfect, photogenic, picturesque, pleasing (to look at, etc.), poetic, pretty, ravishing, scintillating, scrumptious, seductive, sensual, sexy, squeezable, statuesque, stunning, succulent, swoonworthy, tantalizing, tasty, tempting, vibrant, vivid (esp. color), voluptuous, yummy

also see: “Smooth”; “Enjoyable” / Lust/Pleasure-Inducing (focused more on sensations than appearance, but many words can also apply to looks)

“Enjoyable” / Lust/Pleasure-Inducing

addictive, blissful, breathtaking, delectable, delicious, delightful, diverting, divine, dizzying, electric/-fying, enchanting, enthralling, exciting, fun, glorious, heavenly, infectious, intoxicating, luxurious, magic/-al, mind-melting, miraculous, pleasant/-ing/-urable, rapturous, satisfying/-factory, scandalous/-izing, scintillating, sinful, sizzling, staggering, sublime, sweet, tasty, thrilling, titillating

also see: “Mischievous”/“Sly”/Bad in a Sexy Way; “Desirous”; “Hot”; Strong (in any sense); Sexy Dom Verbs; “Shiver” (both v. and n.)

“Hate”

abhor, abominate, be disgusted by, be repulsed by, deplore, despise, detest, loathe, revile

“Gentle” (physical or otherwise) / “Kind”

angelic, apologetic, beatific, benevolent, benign, charitable, cherubic (baby/child connotations), comforting, consoling, empathetic, forgiving, generous, gracious, innocent, light (i.e. touch), loving, mild, nurturing, parental (note connotations), patient, pure, rueful, soft, soothing, sweet, sympathetic, tender

also see: “Take Care of” (most of those are on the more physical side)

“Shiver” (n.)

aftershock(s), convulsion(s), echo, frisson, quake (n.), quiver (n.), ripple, shiver, shockwave, shudder, thrill, tremor, vibration

“Body” (prob. one of the loosest categories but can’t think of a better name)

being, blood, bones, essence, figure, flesh, frame, muscle(s), nerves, physique, silhouette, sinew, skeleton, skin, soul, stature, system, veins

“Hot” (as in physical-ouch-fire-hot, not “sexy”, but most of these can apply to sexy contexts)

blazing, boiling, burning, fiery, flaming, heated, hellish, ignite (v.), incendiary, infernal, roasting, scorching, searing, simmering, sizzling, smoking, smoldering, steaming, sultry (exception on this list that’s actually used more for “sexy”), tepid, toasty, volcanic, warm

Sexy Dom Verbs (i.e., related to taking or holding control)

arrest, assert, assault, bewitch, captivate, capture, claim, command, compel, conquer, control, defeat, dictate, discipline, dominate (duh), draw the line (i.e. “this is where I ___”), drive, educate, enchant, enforce, enslave, ensnare, enthrall, erode (defenses, etc.), guide, hold prisoner / hostage / captive, hypnotize, imprison, instruct, make [x] one's bitch, manipulate, mesmerize, overpower, overwhelm, paralyze, pin, punish, puppet (v.), reeducate, restrain, seize (control, etc.), steer, stimulate, subjugate, take over, tame, toy with, train, trap, vanquish, violate, wrangle

also see: “Scolding” (for Tomonori); “Take Care of” / Nurturing Verbs (for gentle Doms, including Tomonori); “Competent” and similar (also applicable to— okay I’ll stop); “Tease”; “Pull” (phys. or otherwise); Strong (in any sense)

Dom Nouns / Metaphors / Titles

Boss, Captain, Chef, Chief, Commander, Doctor, Dominatrix (fem), -Dono (historical; still occasionally used today but not w/ same connotations), God, -Kami, Lord, Master, Milord, Mistress, Owner, Professor, -Sama (more modern), Sex God, Your Grace, Your Highness, Your Majesty

(Why are all of these capitalized? Well, I read a BDSM nonfiction book where the writer was rather adamant that all words referring to Doms should be capitalized, and all words referring to subs should be lowercase. Personally, I think it looks funny unless it's used to directly address the Dom, just like any other title, and I'm never going to stop capitalizing "Princess" even though it's a brat / sub term— at least in my fanfics, unless it’s Aki talking— but I digress.)

Sexy Sub Verbs (i.e., related to giving or losing control)

admit (entry, etc.), bend (to whims, etc.), bow (to), break, cave (to) (i.e. demands), comply, concede, consent, crack, crumble, embrace (pleasure, etc.), fold, give in, humor (bratty vibes), kneel (to), melt, obey, oblige, offer (body part, etc.), sacrifice, serve, shatter, submit to (duh), succumb, surrender, welcome, worship, yield (to)

also see: “Incompetent” / “Weak” (that comes off like I’m dissing subs, I swear I’m not, unless they happen to be into that); “Shiver” (verb and noun)

Sub Nouns / Metaphors / Pet Names

acolyte, appetizer, apprentice, assistant, babydoll, baby face, bitch, boy toy, brat, bunny, buttercup, captive, -chan, chattel, chew toy, cock puppet, cock sleeve, cock warmer, concubine, conquest, crybaby, cum dispenser, cum-for-brains, cum slut, cute little [x] (substitute pretty much any noun for [x]), cutie (esp. for "macho" men), darling, decoration, device, devotee, doll, hostage, insect (degrading), kitten, -kun, lamb, little [x], machine, marionette, mess, morsel, mount, object, ox, pawn, pet, plaything, prisoner, prey, property, puppet, puppy, servant, slave, slut, spoils, tool, toy, trophy, wild boar, wreck Note: I have seen “cocksleeve” and “cumslut” written as one word before, and I can’t tell whether I prefer it this way.

Sub Adjectives

adorable, caged, compliant, corrupted, cute, darling, delicate, desperate, docile (I need to remember this one), humble, meek, modest, obedient, pliant, precious, pretty, sensitive, subservient, tame, weak, well-behaved, well-trained, whimpering

“See” / “Look at” (or verbs for eyes that indicate looking)

absorb, admire, analyze, appraise, assess, canvass, caress (w/ eyes), consider, consume, devour, drink in, evaluate, examine, explore, feast [eyes] on, fix [eyes] on, flit [toward] (of eyes), focus on, gape at, gawk, gaze, glance, goggle, inspect, latch [eyes] on, leer at, lock [eyes] on, observe, ogle, peek, peer, regard, roam, rove, scan, scour (w/ eyes), search, spot, spy, stare, study, trace (w/ eyes), track, view, wander, watch, witness

Small Amount (or subtle thing)

atom, bit, cell (of body, etc.), chip, crack, crumb, drop(-let), flash, flake, flicker, fraction, fragment, ghost, gleam, glimmer, grain, hint, inkling, intimation, iota, kernel, molecule, morsel, pinprick, seed, shadow, sliver, smidgen, soupçon, spark, speck, sprinkle, tidbit, trace, trickle, whiff, wisp

also see: “Gleam”

“Tease”

cajole, egg on, flirt with (not just dialogue), goad, make fun of, mock, needle, play with, provoke, scintillate, spur (on), tantalize, taunt, tempt, torment, toy with

“Pull” (phys. or otherwise)

appeal to (the one being pulled), arrest, attract, beckon, captivate, command, compel, demand (attention, etc.), draw in, enrapture, ensnare, enthrall, entice, hypnotize, lure, mesmerize, seduce, seize, suck in (eyes, etc.), summon, trap, tug, yank

also see: Sexy Dom Verbs

“Gleam”

dance (as in eyes), flash, flicker, glimmer, glint, glisten, glitter, glow, shimmer, shine, spark(-le), twinkle

Strong (in any sense)

acute, (al-)mighty, breathtaking, dizzying, dominant/-nating, forceful, heady (as in scent), hearty, hefty, insurmountable, intense, intoxicating, irrefutable, irresistible, mind-boggling, overpowering, overwhelming, poignant, potent, powerful, robust, staggering, stupefying, uncontrollable, undeniable, unmistakable, violent, wild (if chaotic)

Small in a Way that Conveys Power, Beauty, or Utility Rather than Cutesiness (hmm, I wonder what or who could have inspired this list)

compact, compressed, concise, condensed, economic, efficient, neat, poetic, proportionate (i.e. muscles), snug (a little cutesy but not too bad), streamlined, tight (i.e. muscles), tightly-packed, trim, wiry

Wrap Around

capture, catch, clasp, close around, clutch, coil around, contain, curl around, embrace, encase, encircle, enclose, envelop, hug, seal, shelter, snake around, surround

"Kissed" (or describing movement of breath, mouth(s), tongue(s), etc. in a kiss)

bit, brushed, captured, claimed, collided, connected, crashed, dove, dug into (teeth), flicked (tongue), frenzy (n.), grazed, intertwined, joined, made out, met, mingled, nibbled, nicked (teeth), nudged, opened (lips), parted (lips), pecked, pressed, rubbed, sealed, seared, silenced (when the person kissed was talking), smashed, smooched (humor / casual), snogged (British / casual), swirled, swished, teased (esp. for tongue actions), tickled, toyed with, twined, whispered (over, etc.)

See Also: the movement categories

Verbs for Intense Stare (e.g., "those eyes ___ him / into his brain")

branded, burned, cut, drilled, hammered, harpooned, hooked, imprinted, lanced, lasered, nailed, paralyzed, penetrated, pierced, pinned, seared, shot (through), speared, stabbed, tattooed

Fucking Verbs (not verbs I’m mad at, verbs for fucking and a few activities leading up to it)

crammed, crashed, crushed, eased (into, open, etc.), entered, filled, fingered, flooded (fluids, etc.), forced, glided, ground against (hips, etc.), hammered, humped, jammed, jostled, mounted, nudged, penetrated, pierced, plowed, plunged, pounded, pricked, pumped, pushed, railed, rammed, rhythmic (adj.), rocked, shoved, slammed, slid, slipped, smacked (vocal component), smashed, speared, stuffed, thrust, worked, wrecked

Note: Most of these ended up being more forceful even though I prefer a gentler approach, because I felt that the other categories had the buildup (and other more teasing activities) sufficiently covered.

Sexual Euphemisms (for characters too modest, coy, or polite in mixed company to address the act directly)

became one, bedded, consummated their marriage, joined as one, laid together, made love, slept together, spent the night, united

Orgasm Words

afterglow (afterward), apex, bliss, climax, come (POV of more formal characters), convulsions, cum (for cruder characters), ecstasy, heights, peak, pinnacle, throes, ultimate, zenith

Note: this is not a universal solution to the “come/cum” debate by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I’m fairly sure conventional writing wisdom would suggest consistency in use above all— i.e. if you use “come” once, you should keep it as “come” throughout the story and shouldn’t change to “cum” halfway through— but character voice matters more to me than clarity. …Although I don’t think I’ve ever used “come” as a synonym for “orgasm”, either as a noun or a verb.

Note 2: A lot of "height" words work well-- reaching the ultimate point of something-- although they are by no means the only conceivable analogy.

Noises, Vocalizations, Onomatopoeias, Etc. (don't overuse, although whimpering subs are pretty hot)

breathe (e.g. as dialogue tag), coo, croon, cry (I like it better as a noun), exhale, gasp, groan, growl, grunt, hiss (of breath, etc.), huff, hum (of amusement, etc.), inhale, moan, murmur, pant (v.), pop, purr, sigh, smack, squeak, squeal, whimper, whine, whisper, yelp Note: Many of the above can be used as verbs or nouns. Not all of them can be used logically as dialogue tags (how would you inhale speech?).

Bratty Words (quotes are from the brat’s PoV)

attitude, badinage, banter, challenge (-ing), cheek, defiance, “eating out of my hand”, gall, give [Dom] a hard time, feisty (adj.), fiery (adj.), lip (specifically talking back), mischief, nerve, rebel (n., v., or adj., although "rebellious" might work better for adj.), punk, sass, spunk (use with caution, unless pun is intended), testing, trouble, “wrapped around my little finger”

"Wet"

aroused, damp (shame connotations, or am I going crazy?), downpour (n.), drenched, dribbling (small amounts), dripping, drizzling (light but heavier than a dribble), drooling, eager, flowing, fluid, fountaining, liquid, moist (not as wet— works better for sth like sweat), pooling, pouring, puddling (after it’s spilled out), seeping, slathered, slick, slippery, slobbering, soaked(-ing), sopping, torrential, trickling (small amounts), weeping

"Erect" (referring to penis)

alert, aroused, attentive, eager, firm, hard, pulsing, ready, rigid, rock-hard, standing at attention (bonus for military chars), stiff, throbbing

Dark Red (i.e., Tomonori-Red) (some formatted as “___-red”, or “red as ___”)

autumnal, autumn-red, blood-red, bloodstone, crimson, garnet (not in all contexts but works here), maple-red, momiji (maple), maroon, red velvet, sinfully

“Stubborn” / Unwilling or Unlikely to Give in

adamant, firm, insistent, obstinate, persistent, relentless, stalwart, staunch, unbending, uncontrollable, uncompromising, unrelenting, unyielding, wild

Miscellaneous Sexy Words / Phrases I Just Like

ambrosia, [x]-coated, languish, recline, recumbent, supine, in tandem (instead of “in unison”), verve

[duckprintspress]

How can I return to writing after a long hiatus?

This post is based on a conversation we had in the Duck Prints Press LLC Discord, and all contributors comments have been used/paraphrased/integrated into this post with permission. The people who contributed ideas to this post are: @nottesilhouette, @ramblingandpie, @arialerendeair, @tryslora, @deansmultitudes, @theleakypen, Owlish Intergalactic, myself (I’m @unforth), and one who preferred to remain anonymous.

Few things are harder than coming back to writing after a long period of not writing. Being creative takes a lot of energy, and starting after not doing so for a period of time takes even more energy. The writers on our Discord had a really productive discussion, where we talked about strategies we’ve each personally used to help us get our writing mojo back. None of these methods work for everyone, but if you haven’t written in a while, maybe one of these will work for you!

How to Revive that Creative Writing Spark:

doing sprints with a friend - knowing you’re all in it together can really help!

talking with writing buddies about what you’re each working on - the shared enthusiasm can be really helpful,

journaling, about daily life, or about dreams you’ve had - turning the dream into something coherent can be a great strategy (or, don’t bother, and just write it however crazily it took place!)

pick a random story you wrote in the past and read a chapter, paragraph, or 500 word segment - and look at it as a reader, say things you liked about it, praise it, emphasize the good things about your own writing.

transcribe a song with lyrics you find inspiring, or crack open a favorite book and transcribe a few paragraphs. You can even do it with something you’ve written yourself!

set a low-pressure, low-word count deadline - make it public, if you’re the kind of person that helps, or keep it to yourself.

sign up for a zero-consequence challenge, such as a bingo, or the Duck Prints Press #drabbledaysaturday prompts on Twitter - something where no one will mind if you don’t succeed, but you might find some inspiration.

create a small goal, either daily, weekly, or monthly - it can be a time frame (I’ll write for 5 minutes a day!) or a word count (I’ll write 1,000 words a month!) or even something tiny (I’ll write one sentence a day!) or a public sharing goal (post a ficlet a day!) and then do your best to stick to it, and reward yourself when you succeed.

open your ask box or otherwise solicit short prompts - for example, do a “three sentence” meme (”send me a pairing and a trope and I’ll write a three sentence fill”) or a story title meme (”send me a story title and I’ll write a little about the story I’d create with that title”) or an emoji prompt (”send me three emojis and I’ll write a ficlet”) or make your own fun one that will bring you joy (one of our writers created a “name two characters and I’ll make them kiss in six sentences or less” meme that helped them a lot)

participate in a prompt month, something with no consequences for failure but with prompts that can inspire daily ficlet.

write without editing, and just throw what you create out into the world - anything to get the words flowing.

challenge yourself to write a drabble day, no more and no less.

try changing how or when you write - get a nice journal and write by hand, or if that’s your normal, try writing in a word document instead.

write at different times of day, and see if it’s easier for you over breakfast, or after lights out, or during your lunch break, or by stealing a few minutes while you’re “on the clock” at work.

make an attempt at different formats of writing - if you usually write prose, try a poem; if you usually write really long things, try a drabble.

look out your window, or find a place you like, and just describe what you see.

do some free association exercises - for example, use a random word generator (I use this one sometimes) and then write literally whatever word comes into your head next - keep going until you fill the page, or until it starts to turn into a story, or just until you don’t feel like it any longer.

pick a random sentence (the person who suggested this often uses “Just write anything”) to be the start of a story, and “pants” your way through whatever comes next, without worrying about grammar, continuity, logic, or much of anything.

plan ahead - schedule your writing time and don’t let yourself put it off (rewards for success are always good!) and/or visualize exactly what you want to write ahead so you’re ready when you sit down.

if you get hit by inspiration, don’t put it off - even if all you do is scrawl a sentence in your phone or on scratch paper between other tasks, get it out of your head. Even a single sentence is a creation!

get out of the spaces where your usual things are - go to a park, or on a hike, or in your backyard, or even a different room in your own home, and bring a journal or phone or laptop, and see what strikes you.

pick That Thing You Haven’t Been Letting Yourself Write and ignore all the things you Think You Should Be Writing and just...write what brings you joy

fanfiction can be very helpful, especially in canon using canon-compliant ships/characterizations - there’s no need to do the heavy lifting. Even if you just write the characters going to a grocery store, or talking about what movie they want to watch, or arguing over take out - something short and sweet that’s just for fun, with no expectations for yourself or anyone else.

alternatively, if you’re the type who writes better for others and you’re feeling down - knock out anything, even something short, and post it, and take joy even in a single like or kudos. Knowing even one person out there loved what you wrote can really help.

Any or all of these may help you, but there’s one final one that I, at least, think is the most important of all - and that’s helped me most.

FORGIVE YOURSELF. You have work in progress up. It’s okay to leave them. You told someone you’d write something for them. It’s okay not to. You have a deadline looming. It’s okay to ask for more time, or to withdraw, or - in the end - it’s even okay to ghost. You think what you’ve made is bad. It’s okay if it’s bad. You’ll never be able to create when you’re raking yourself over the coals. Everyone in fandom has “been there” - has missed deadlines, has left challenges, has abandoned works in progress, have reneged on a promise to a friend to write something. Until you forgive yourself, you’ll never be able to create anything, and isn’t even a single sentence that isn’t on that Big Important Thing better than no sentences on anything?

Forgive yourself, and find that spark, inspiration, muse, whatever you want to call it - and write things that bring you joy.

We believe in you!

YOU CAN DO IT!

[fremedon]

It’s almost Yuletide! This will be my 18th Yuletide! My first Yuletide story will be old enough to vote this year and I have some mixed feelings about that! But also I have never missed or defaulted on a Yuletide since, and I have to say I feel pretty proud of that. I am still pretty far down the Les Misérables rabbit hole (speaking of which, it is not too late to propose programming for Barricades!), and unsurprisingly all the fandoms I'm nominating/requesting this year are set in July Monarchy France--Les Mis canon era: Petit-Cénacle RPF, Champavert: Contes Cruelles | Champavert: Immoral Tales - Pétrus Borel, and Les Enfants du Paradis | Children of Paradise. Petit-Cénacle RPF The Petit-Cénacle was a French Romantic salon, slightly younger and considerably more politically radical than the Cénacle centered on Hugo and Dumas; it included painters and sculptors as well as writers and critics, and most of its members at least dabbled in both written and visual arts. Its best-known members today are Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Pétrus Borel (the Lycanthrope)--the last two are thinly fictionalized in Les Misérables as Jean Prouvaire and Bahorel. (It's debatable how much Grantaire owes to Gautier but it's probably a nonzero amount.) The group coalesced around Borel and Nerval as the organizers of the Battle of Hernani--a fight between Romantics and classicists at the premiere of Victor Hugo's play Hernani in 1830. Most theater productions at this time had claques--groups of paid supporters of a show or an actor, who were planted in the audience to drum up applause. For Hernani--the first Romantic work staged at the prestigious Comédie-Français, which broke classical norms so thoroughly that it no longer seems at all transgressive--Hugo and the theater management decided they were going to need more than just a claque. They recruited a few of Hugo's fans--Gautier was so star-struck he had to be physically hauled up the stairs to Hugo's apartment--to stage An Event. The fans recruited their friends. They showed up in cosplay, with the play already memorized and callback lines devised. It was basically the Rocky Horror Picture Show of its day. It almost immediately turned into an actual fight, with fists and projectiles flying. And it made Hernani the hottest ticket in Paris. This is the group's origin story, and they pretty much spent their lives living up to it. They were every bit as extra as you would expect--Nerval allegedly walked a lobster on a leash in the Champs-Elyseés, explaining that "it knows the secrets of the deep, and it does not bark"--but they also stayed friends all their lives, often living together, supporting each other through poverty and mental illness and absurd political upheaval. I'm nominating Pétrus Borel | Le Lycanthrope, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Philothée O’Neddy; you could nominate other people like Jehan Duseigneur, Celestin Nanteuil, or the Deverias, or associates of the group like Dumas and Hugo. The Canon Gautier's History of Romanticism covers the early days of the group and the Battle of Hernani in some detail. (There is also a 2002 French TV movie, La bataille d'Hernani, which is charming and pretty accurate; hit me up if you want a copy.) Other than that--this crowd wrote a lot, and they're all very present in their work--even in their fiction, which is shockingly modern in a ton of ways. For Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin has a lot of genderfeels, surprisingly literal landscape porn, and a fursuit sex scene in chapter two. If you want Nerval's works in English, you might be limited to dead-tree versions, but I highly, highly recommend The Salt Smugglers, a work of metafiction that answers the question, "What if The Princess Bride had been written in 1850 specifically to troll the press censorship laws of Prince President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte?" Borel's experimental short story collection Champavert has a new and very good English translation by Brian Stableford and is also my next fandom :D. Champavert: Contes Immoraux | Champavert: Immoral Tales - Pétrus Borel Last year I requested Borel RPF but I decided this book was unfanficcable. This year, I am going to have a little more faith in the Yuletide community. Champavert, available in ebook and dead tree form, is a weird as hell little book and probably the best thing I read last year. It's an experimental short story collection from 1830. Someone on one of my Les Mis Discords described it as "a collection of gothic creepypasta, but the author is constantly clanging pots and pans together and going 'JUST IN CASE you didn't notice, the real horror was colonialism and misogyny all along and i'm very angry about it!'" And, yeah, pretty much that, with added metafictional weirdness, intense nerding about architecture and regional languages, and the absolute delight that is Borel's righteously ebullient voice. Borel wrote for a couple of years under the name of The Lycanthrope, and though he kills the alter ego in this book, the name stuck, and would continue to be used by friends and enemies alike all his life. Pretty much everyone who met Pétrus agreed that 1) he was just ungodly hot; 2) he was probably a werewolf, sure, that makes sense; and 3) he was definitely older than he claimed to be, possibly by centuries, possibly just immortal, who knows. But, like I said, he kills the alter ego in this book: it begins with an introduction announcing that "Pétrus Borel" has been a pseudonym all along, that the Lycanthrope's real name is Champavert--and that the Lycanthrope is dead and these are his posthumous papers, compiled by an unnamed editor; the papers include some of Borel's actual poems and letters, published under his own name. The final story in the collection is called "Champavert, The Lycanthrope," and is situated as an autobiographical story, following a collection of fictional tales--which share thematic elements and, in the frame of the book, start to look like "Champavert"'s attempts to use fiction to come to terms with events of his own life. And that's probably an oversimplification; this is a dense little book and it's doing a lot. The subtitle is Contes Immoraux. It's part of a genre of "contes cruelles" (and, content note for. Um. A lot), but it's never gratuitously cruel--it's very consciously interrogating the idea of the moral story, and what sort of morality is encoded in fables, and what it means to set a story where people get what they deserve in an unjust world where that's rarely the case. I'm nominating the unnamed editor, Champavert, his friend Jean-Louis from the introduction and the final story, and Flava from the final story; you could also nominate characters from the explicitly fictional stories. Les Enfants du Paradis | Children of Paradise This is a film made between 1943 and 1945 in Vichy and Occupied France and set...somewhere?...around the July Revolution, probably, I'll get into that :D. There's a DVD in print from Criterion and quite possibly available through your local library system. (And it's streaming on Amazon Prime and the Criterion Channel.) It's beautifully filmed, with gorgeous sets and costumes and a truly unbelievable number of extras, and some fantastic pantomime scenes. (On stage and off; there's a scene where a henchman attempts to publicly humiliate a mime, and it goes about as well as you would expect.) "Paradise," in the title, is the equivalent of "the gods" in English--the cheap seats in the topmost tier of a theater. It's set in and around the theaters of the Boulevard du Temple--the area called the Boulevard du Crime, not for the pickpockets outside the theaters but for the content of the melodramas inside them. The story follows a woman called Garance, after the flower (red madder), a grisette turned artists' model turned sideshow girl turned actress turned courtesan, and four men who love her, some of whom she loves, all of whom ultimately fail to connect with her in the way she needs or wants or can live with. This sounds like a setup for some slut-shaming garbage. It's not--Garance is a person, with interiority, and the story never blames her for what other people project onto her. Of those four men, one is a fictional count and the other three are heavily fictionalized real people: the actor Frédérick Lemaître, the mime Baptiste Deburau, and the celebrity criminal Lacenaire. Everyone in this story is performing for an audience, pretty much constantly, onstage or off: reflexively, or deliberately, or compulsively. Garance's survival skill is to reflect back to people what they want to see of themselves. She never lies, but she shows very different parts of herself to different people. We get the impression that there are aspects of herself she doesn't have much access to without someone else to show them to. Frédérick is also a mirror, in a way that makes him and Garance good as friends and terrible as lovers--an empty hall of mirrors. He's always playing a part--the libertine, the artist, the lover--and mining his actual life and emotions for the sake of his art. Baptiste channels his life into his art as well, but without any deliberation or artifice--everything goes into the character, unfiltered. It makes him a better artist than any of the others will ever be, but his lack of self-awareness is terrifying, and his transparency fascinates Garance and Frédérick, who are more themselves with him than with anyone else. Lacenaire, the playwright turned thief and murderer, seems to no self at all, except when other people are watching. Against the performers are the spectators: the gaze of others--fashion, etiquette, and reputation--personified by Count Mornay; and the internal gaze personified in Nathalie, an actress and Baptiste's eventual wife, who hopes that if they observe the forms of devotion for long enough the feeling will follow. The time frame is deliberately vague--it's set an idealized July Monarchy where all these people were simultaneously at the most exciting part of their careers. In the real world, Frédérick turned his performance of Robert Macaire into burlesque in 1823, Baptiste's tragic pantomime Le Marrrchand d’Habits! ("The Old-Clothes Seller") played in 1842, and Lacenaire's final murder, for which he is guillotined, is 1832; these all take place in Act II of the movie within about a week of each other. (Théophile Gautier, mentioned but tragically offstage in the film, was a fan of Baptiste; Le Marrrchand d’Habits! started as Gautier's fanfic--he wrote a fake review of a nonexistent pantomime, and the review became popular enough the Theater des Funambules decided to actually stage it. It only ran for seven performances.) I am nominating Garance, Frédérick Lemaître, Baptiste Deburau, and Pierre François Lacenaire. You could nominate any of the other characters (Count Mornay, Nathalie, the old-clothes seller Jéricho, Baptiste's father, his landlady, Nathalie's father the Funambules manager). Gautier, regrettably, does not actually appear in the film but you can bet that's going to be one of my prompts. So, that's one good movie you definitely have time to watch before signups, several good books you probably have time for and that are probably not like whatever else you're reading right now, and one RPF rabbit hole to go down! Please consider taking up any or all of these so that you can write me fanfic about Romantic shenanigans.

[izzy-b-hands]

Writing Asks: 1, 13, 22, 44 💛

aaah thank you!!! Answers under the cut cuz u know I write a book when I answer stuff lol

1. What made you start writing?

That’s a funny one actually. I never had like, a real catalyst that made me, but there was like, a moment that made me want to keep doing it and try and make something out of it. That was about second grade, when we got those like, one sheet things shaped like other things to free write on? Lemme see if I can find a pic to put on here of one: 

Like this guy! and there’d be one for every season and the teacher gave you like an hour to free write? 

And without fail every time we got one I always had to ask for more than one page, and the teacher sometimes let me write into the next lesson, and after we got about midway through the year, she called me and my mum in after school to talk about these assignments. Me, with my undiagnosed anxiety at all of seven was in a blind panic and figured I’d somehow done them all wrong, even though I’d never gotten a bad grade on them. 

So we roll in, and I’m shocked to learn she loves my stories, thinks they are “very advanced” for someone my age (I remember that compliment exactly because I legit gave her a hug when she said it, and my teacher was thankfully sweet and chill and just hugged me back lol), and wants to try and nurture that ability in class more but also wanted to tell my mum, so she could do the same outside of class. 

That was the moment my little brain went ‘oh hey, I do really like writing and want to keep doing it. What the fuck’ except I was seven so it was probably heck instead of fuck. And I went on from there to promptly constantly get in trouble for writing in class, in the margins of my notes and in notebooks tucked underneath my class notebooks, and now here I am!

13. What’s your favorite trope? 

Oh man. I had to actually pull up TV Tropes for this, because I guess I never really actively think about it? I maybe should, but hadn’t really until right this minute!

and ngl I immediately thought of Sledgefu, so I’m gonna list a trope associated with that, which is Aroused By Their Voice (as listed by TV Tropes). I still have like, a whole thing I need to write about how Eugene both finds immense comfort in Snafu’s voice, but also when they first met, the accent just...did him in. He was lost. Let Snafu read every book ever to him, and he’d never move from his spot. To other people, upon first meeting a very happy and excited Snafu, might find the accent hard to understand right at first, but Eugene never had the issue. And the stronger Snaf’s accent, the stronger the absolutely doofy, lovey dovey smile on Eugene’s face. 

Outside of that particular ship, it’s also a trope that I myself fall for irl, so when it happens in media I’m just like ‘oh hey same hat’ and everyone likes something relatable. 

22.  How do you deal with writer’s block?

Depends on the day and my mood honestly. Like I’m still working through a major rough patch mentally rn, so even when I did write and wanted to write more I found myself not able to find the energy to do much. So I just...took a break. I haven’t written anything except one poem all week, and now that it’s the weekend I want to try writing again, but if it isn’t happening? Then I’ll step away and play a video game for a few hours and try again later. In moments like this, where my brain is focused on my depression so damn hard, this method usually eventually shakes the writing out of my brain and makes me get it down on paper. 

Other times, when my brain is in better shape, I usually just...make myself write? And tell myself that even if it sucks, even if I hate it at the moment, I’ll be setting it aside as soon as I have it done and can come back and edit it and finish it when I’m in a better state of mind. Sometimes it works, and I go back and finish it, but I also have like, ten drafts from this method that I can’t decide if I like enough to actually fix up. And maybe I never will, but at least I got the words out, I figure. 

44. Would you rather have your WIP adapted into a movie or TV show?

Oooh depends on the WIP.

 If Aten, I think it might be better as like, a short series? Netflix would probably snag it if I shopped it the right way to them. I wouldn’t want to rush it, but also I’m working on what’s going to be the last part and then I’m writing an epilogue, so I don’t know that it would ever fit to be movie length for a script. 

If like, any of my Sledgefu stuff, definitely TV series. That’s just working with the original parameters of the Pacific too, knowing that those characters fit best in the realm of a series. Plus, I could make a good number of seasons between everything I have written so far, the ideas I still have, and the AUs I have. Though I would not let it become a Supernatural, if the decline has happened then I’m not gonna like...keep dragging it on and make Joe and Rami keep filming this at ninety (except for maybe one forward flash to Snaf and Sledge as old and happy together, but there’s prosthetics make up for that, no need to keep it running until the actors are actually that old. That would be just cruel!)

My new Kingsman stuff? Definitely movie. Again, this goes with using the prior form of the art, but I just feel like it would work better and be more fun as a flashy movie. To include all the detail I want to add in, it would need to be longer movies, and more than one, but like...I don’t see the downside there lol. 

As for my other stuff...man. I could go on for ages talking and thinking about it honestly. And I have WIPs I haven’t even talked about on here that like...if I had the time, I would also write a script version of them, for film or TV. Netflix or someone get at me for script-writing is what I’m saying I guess. I’m eager and can be sustained with a 39 cent cup noodle pile in the writers’ room, so you’d be getting away fairly cheap. Hit me up!

[fromthedeskofelizabeththird]

Coming Home

January’s entry for the year of smut! I got quite a lot of requests for Eisuke and I thought he was a pretty good place to start. Halfway through writing this I realised that Eisuke’s feelings towards MC reminded me of one of my favorite Byron poems, She walks in Beauty. 

This fic is NSFW, Eisuke x MC and 18 rated.

2019 Year of Smut masterlist | My KO-FI  | AO3

They’re supposed to be going out for dinner, but MC has other ideas.

January birthdays have both their perks and downsides. For one, the line between new year and birthday celebrations grows increasingly blurred with each passing year. Eisuke, whose schedule is utter chaos at the best of times, spends much of his new year at official functions and private parties, sleeping for a maximum of three hours at a time and ignoring the growing bags under his eyes.

He has come to resent the parties now that MC is a part of his life. The alternative before was drinking alone or with a woman he’d forget come morning. These days he wants to spend every moment with her and no one else and begrudges sharing her even with relatively close acquaintances.

Today they are supposed to be attending dinner with a number of associates and he has no genuine desire to go, a fact only reinforced by MC’s concerns that she might make a fool of herself accidentally. As always, she has changed everything.

Today she went so far as to insist they drive together, all while giving him a twirl. He cannot deny that she looks beautiful, though he’d much rather she’d do so in the bedroom.

She put on a red dress that he bought for her; tight fitting and with ribbons at the back that he has replaced more often than he cares to remember. The ribbons are fragile and easy to tear and in the heat of the moment he cannot hold back.

Every so often he’ll catch a glimpse of her exposed back; a flash of colour in the corner of his eye. He’s sure she chose it specifically to taunt him; patting her hand against his leg every time he falls silent.

Dinner is going to be torture; a fact made all too clear as he grips the steering wheel. He’s glad that it’s dark and she cannot see how white his knuckles are or the concentration on his face. It takes all of his energy to focus on the road and every so often he chews at his bottom lip in an attempt to think of anything else. He doesn’t want to think about how hard he is; she’s teasing him on purpose and he cannot stand to let her win.

“I wonder what’s on the menu tonight,” she says, peering into the rear view mirror and adjusting her hair. “I was talking to the chefs at the hotel and they’re adjusting it for the new season.”

“Mhmmm.”

Eisuke cannot bring himself to care about seasonal menus or even their upcoming meal. All he can think about is tearing the ribbons of MC’s dress and hitching up her skirt.

“I’ve heard they have black watermelon,” she says. “I wonder how it might work in a dessert.”

“Mhmm.”

“Eisuke?”

She touches a hand to his thigh and his stomach flutters.

“Eisuke?”

“Mmm, yes?”

“You seem to be in a world of your own,” she laughs, a knowingness in her voice that only confirms his suspicions. She has intended this from the beginning and he is so happy at confirmation that he cannot bring himself to humour her and look surprised.

Calling a raincheck is almost too easy; Eisuke faking an apologetic tone and story about a prior engagement even as MC trails her lips across his throat, leaving smears of red lipstick in their wake. He does not remember pulling over; doesn’t remember travelling a quiet road and arriving at an overlook so far from the Tres Spades that he cannot make it out over the horizon.

He does, however, remember tossing his phone into the back seat and lifting MC onto his lap. She grips the steering wheel, gasping as he reaches for the ribbons of her dress. The last tie is at the back of her neck and it takes only one gentle tug to leave her dress falling to her lap, leaving her naked from the top of her head to the curve of her waist. At first she is modest, reaching up to shield her breasts from view. His response is to laugh and reach for the rear view mirror, moving it left and then right until he can properly see their reflections-MC’s parted lips and the goosebumps along her skin. He reaches around her middle to coax her hands away from her chest, grazing his lips across the back of her neck as he reaches to cup her breasts. He opens one eye to admire the view-his hands ghosting MC’s skin and lingering at the points that leave her gasping.

He is all too aware that his hands are cold and some of her gasps come from the sudden change in temperature. If anything that leaves him more boisterous, squeezing the softer spots of her body and biting her exposed skin forcefully enough to leave bruises.

“You know, I really do love that dress,” he whispers.

“Do you now?”

Originally he bought it for the colour; noticing the ribbons only after having MC model it in the store. She’s bolder when she wears it, more inclined to wear red lipstick and higher heels. Her blushing innocence only leaves him with a greater appreciation for the times she steps out of character.

He runs a hand across her thighs and the lace of her underwear.

“Now what have we here,” he breathes, tracing the patterns and slipping his fingers under the seams. He smirks in satisfaction at her gasps as he skims his fingertips across her clit, her grip on the steering wheel growing ever tighter.

He does not bother to be gentle; instead picking up an unforgiving pace that sends her bucking her hips across his fingers and against his cock. He can see her expression in the rear view mirror; eyes half lidded as she bites her bottom lip. Sometimes she sneaks glances at her own reflection; the only moments that she shows an ounce of modesty.

“Ei...Eisuke,” she moans, leaning into him and reaching down to cast aside her underwear entirely. “Eisuke, I…”

He drags her underwear to her knees and pushes her forward, giving himself enough room to reach down to his zipper. He gives himself one and then two tentative strokes before reaching up to guide her hips towards his. Her breath hitches as she sinks onto his cock and he cannot tear his gaze from the rear view mirror; away from the curve of her neck and wet sound every time she sinks onto him.

She starts slow and steady, gauging the best angles and depth. His mind falls blank the moment she takes him in completely. She’s panting from the exertion, a sheen of sweat across her body.

“Oh f-“

She’s so warm and so tight that he struggles to find words, instead reaching down and searching for her clit. He knows he’s on the right track when she hisses with pleasure and bucks her hips into his.

The car windows are foggy, leaving them closed off from the outside world. He no longer remembers where exactly he stopped the car, nor can he bring himself to care. The warm ripples of pleasure running through her as she comes and raspy sound of her calling his name are all he can being himself to care about.

He steadies his hands on her waist, easing her pace and latching his teeth into the back of her neck as his own release sets in. MC moans as he comes inside of her, staying in place as she overflows and wetness pools between her thighs.

They sit in silence, catching their breath, the foggy windows clearing alongside the fog of lust. The red marks across her skin from his teeth are only too clear to him now, along with the evening chill.

“H-happy birthday,” she pants, resting her head against the steering wheel.

The pair of them are sweaty and disheveled upon their return to the hotel. Eisuke is grateful for the private elevator and entrances, not out of modesty, but lack of desire to share the moment.

MC is tucked up in bed when he gets there, naked under the covers and helping herself to black watermelon. It’s a tranquil sight and seemingly absurd against the backdrop of the clothes they cast aside on the bedroom floor.

Her lips are sweet from the fruit and her kisses moreso. She lifts some of the melon onto a cocktail stick and guides it into his mouth.

“Well?” MC asks, watching the juice trickle from his lips to his chin.

“I think I’d rather have something else for dessert.”

“Oh?”

“What can I say,” he says, setting aside the plate as she sits up onto her hands and knees to straddle him. “I’ve got an appetite.”

They really did skip dinner and his stomach really is growling as she links her hands in his, but given the choice he would rather starve to death than go without her gentle touches.

She is all the nourishment he needs; his only constant. To kiss her is to remember himself and to hold her is to come home. 

[salavante]

that character ask thing, how about August en Zaied?? :3c

That funky, hunky elf. 

Full Name: August en Zaied

Gender and Sexuality: Male and mostly Heterosexual. I think there is the off-chance fellow that might pique his interest, but not at a frequency that I think he would self-describe himself as bisexual.

Pronouns: he/him

Ethnicity/Species: Umbran Elf. I talked about this a little bit in Ganzrig’s thing, but most people on Ismes have a different race back in their heritage at some point, and individuals will look a little more or less human depending on how many actual humans are back in their ancestry. August is on the more human-y side of the spectrum. 

Birthplace and Birthdate: I don’t tend to give birthdates to characters who do not use the same calendar systems as us. Maybe he was born in winter, ironically. August’s family formerly lived in one of the Umbran Empire’s capitol cities, and he was probably born on the family estate.

Guilty Pleasures: Not a ton. August is a very serious, dignified person and doesn’t put himself at risk of looking silly very often. He’ll smoke tobacco on occasion and likes his wine and port. He also knows how to play the accordion but just barely…which, really means that he doesn’t know how to play it at all, HAH. August also has a fondness for roses, as his mother had a garden on their old estate that she was very proud of. One thing he is guilty about is that after being exposed to and promptly rejecting most new technology…he really does prefer using an electric razor to a straight razor and no one can ever know. I think that’s his one true guilty pleasure. If someone caught him using it he’d be absolutely mortified.

Phobias: Oh wow I can actually fill this one out as god and OP intended, because August is a shipwreck survivor and now has a phobia of drowning and deep water, which is a shame because he’s a sailor by trade and formerly really loved the ocean. I do think it’s something he can work through if he tries, though.

What They Would Be Famous For: As far as August is concerned, he would prefer to not be famous for anything, ever, and that everyone would just leave him to his own business. Unfortunately, he has a moderate cult following on The Hunt for having a unique powerset and being kind of a dreamboat.  

What They Would Get Arrested For: August is fairly lawful and coolant headed, so, not a ton, but if he were doing something to ensure the safety and wellness of his family, he’d go to some pretty far lengths. There’s a perfectly serviceable AU out there where August is a mercenary, pirate or assassin.

OC You Ship Them With: August was never actually envisioned as being a ladies man, but it’s just what happened along the way. All of the ladies he has slept with in-game have been older than him, so I guess he likes mature women, HAH. I enjoy the chemistry between August and Jake’s character Elias, who is a silver tongued cannibal and a privateer, go figure. It’s kind of a classic chemistry, sailor-hero type and pirate. Many moons ago, when August was first conceived and was still a female character, his love interest was a half-orc bard named Benji, but he’s since been written out of August’s original story and has been replaced byyy….Iona Howell, August’s canon love interest. The ferocious, emotionally unstable illuminator/wizard who is trying her best to get her shit together, and August’s on and off again girlfriend.

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Pre-defection Iona was probably capable of killing August in a manic/jealous rage, though I think at the end of the day August is more powerful than her and would probably have killed her first as long as she didn’t get the drop on him. Ganzrig also threatened to slaughter and dismember him, but that’s just what Orcs do, I don’t know if she would have actually killed him.

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: August is from an early/mid 1800’s level society and so movies really overstimulate to the point that he generally avoids them. He resists most new technology at first blush and is very, very stubborn, though there are a few benefits that he cannot deny. He’s not really much of a reader either, his education stopped when he was somewhere between the ages of 12-14 so he reads kind of slow and his own handwriting isn’t very good, but that still puts him at an advantage among other sailors. He probably likes poetry because a) the ladies like to be read poetry and b) it’s something that could be easily translated into song or read aloud, which is his preferred method of receiving media. Epic poems, sea shanties, etc. August would go to a play before he would go to a movie, and would be perfectly entertained by being read aloud to.

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: August used to be an atheist before his world’s god, Al Fortuna, decided that he was their new favorite person. Now he just thinks Gods are assholes and generally does not like any media that presents gods as anything other than fickle and more trouble than they’re worth. And he absolutely, tremendously hates the idea of things being ordained by “fate”.

Talents and/or Powers: A couple fun ones! August is ambidextrous and can wield a pistol and sabre at the same time, and is in generally very nimble. But the most notable thing about him is that August possesses a passive ability called the Miasma of Misfortune, which is tied to Ganzrig’s Fortune’s Favor. While bad luck does not fall on August’s own head, he exudes an aura of bad luck to people in his vicinity, which gets worse the longer that he is exposed to them without reprieve. August has learned to manipulate the Miasma to a degree, and can either reel it in or dump all of its focus on a single target, usually ending with some foolish prick stabbing himself on ‘accident’. Celair has also been teaching him some cantrips. He is from a low-magic setting, so he is not very magically potent.

Why Someone Might Love Them: August is easy to become infatuated with, but not easy to be in a relationship with, and there is a string of broken hearted maidens behind him. He is dashing and courageous, with an intriguingly intense personality, and is confident, but not in a way that dips into vanity. He’s also very earnest, a reliable, straightforward man that keeps his head on straight and seldom shows his temper (though when he does, watch the fuck out). Though not an intellectual, August is very cunning, and has a dry sense of humor that some appreciate. He’s also quite chivalrous, and I think there is a very classical, romantic element to him.

Why Someone Might Hate Them: When I say that August is not easy to be in a relationship with, it’s because he’s a vault and values his privacy to a fault. He seldom wears his heart on his sleeve, and prefers to keep his stronger emotions to himself, for better or worse, and has trouble expressing his feelings even when it’d be in his interest to. He’s the most stubborn man alive, and would sooner double down on something than let someone he doesn’t like be right, making him just a little spiteful. August is resistant to too much external change, especially with technology. He’s also quite dreadfully serious and finds people who are too goofy kind of offputting (ex: he tolerates Wybjorn, but probably wouldn’t have anything to do with him if they did not have friends in common). Someone may also find his priorities shrewd at first glance - his number one concern is providing for his family, and so he is easily motivated by money. Because he is very private, he is not likely to divulge information on his personal life, leading his motivations often obscured and at times misinterpreted. He does not care very much about what other people think, and so seldom clarifies. 

How They Change: August changes a bit over the course of Godslaughter, but not very much, as he has mostly existed in an NPC capacity. The thing he will have to learn is to be emotionally candid with his family when he returns home, because they are going to have a lot of questions and he’s not going to want to answer any of them, but he HAS to. And things aren’t going to be the way he left them. Most of August’s challenges in this department are on the horizon.

Why You Love Them: August has a somewhat colorful meta history. He is my oldest character that I still use regularly (at over 5 years old) besides Calvin, and he was conceived at not a very good point in my life. I had been quietly struggling with my gender identity for many years, and had found myself pushing against my constraints in fiction, but by the time I got to the original August, I was exhausted and beaten down. The first pass at August was a very sad, somber character that was a lady crossdressing to work as a sailor. I’d hit on something important, but wasn’t really ready to open myself up to what it might mean, which, aside from being conceived during the worst year of my life, lead to Kismet collecting dust. Fastforward to 2018 when I was looking for Gods for Godslaughter, and remembered that I had always liked Al Fatima and Al Fortuna, and took another look at August by association. By now I was out as transmasc and decided it’d be a good step for myself to retool August into a character that I could be proud of - a confident, earnest person who wanted nothing more than to be the captain of his own fate and to protect and provide for the people he loves. I don’t really like talking publicly about my trans-ness, I (like August) have come to the conclusion it’s not really anyone’s business but mine, but my journey is inseparable from him. And that’s ok. August is my tiny hope that someday I can get a genre fiction story to a publisher that’s about a trans person, but is not about his transition or his coming out.

[myfriendpokey]

Pacy Pacy Push

I wish I knew enough poetry to understand the significance of the line break, or whether that significance really did change over time as I imagine it did, in the transition from registering some shift of timing in a mostly oral tradition to being the more disembodied, ambiguous component of a textual one. I think especially of the gradual shift from the manual carriage-return of a typewriter into the return key, one which could sit along the keyboard with all the regular characters in a way which emphasized its interchangeability as a text-symbol with all the rest, being added to the list of combinatoric possibilities inherent in all those discrete little boxes. I don't know if poetry is now primarily a typographical convention but I think that's how most people currently grow fully aware of it for the first time - not by reading something but by playing around with the return key in some word processing tool, realising the hazy received image of "a poem" can be applied in ways which are real and surprising, realising that sometimes a couple of presses of the return key are enough to turn potentially any possible text into a new one which can be read in a different, potentially more intense way. The suddenness and arbitrariness of the break gives the sense that anything can be broken up into more or less interesting fragments, while the associations of the line break with other forms built to knit together such fragments (grocery lists, paraphrase books, newspaper columns, etc) suggests the same might be possible with all this new material. At once the sense of estrangement, of old material experienced in a new way and with new possibilities opened up, and  also the sense of reconciliation, of being able to re-house all the various scraps of attention and affect thrown up by everyday life in some new and durable structure, one which could continue to highlight their specificality while at the same time allowing them to be connected to other forms of experience and of being. Of course there might well be minor issues in practice, as you find the line break alone is not wholly sufficient to connect ALL forms of material in an interesting way without further refinement, but the shape of it is there, something simple enough but with enough potential that you could keep fine-tuning it forever, deeper and deeper without ever hitting the floor....

Since this is a videogames blog I will spare you having to wait for the inevitable segue into Platform Masters but I guess the value of a hobby-horse is that it can take you wherever you want. And I DO feel like there's a similarity, for me at least, when pacing and the weird things that happen to it in a game engine have been maybe the central motor that's kept me interested in this format... I think that "interactivity" occupies the same place for videogames as a line-break does in poetry, that they have approximately the same promise and appeal, and that the precise nature and consequence of that interactivity are of less import than the way that it's positioned when breaking up two blocks of content. In another form you have "ah, who's there?" followed by "help, i've been shot!" in a more or less relentless and implacable way, regardless of what kind of metaphorical or POV movements might happen in between. In videogames it's more like "ah, who's there?" followed by the yawning, unfillable gulf of disembodied time while you wait for the player to do something -- or like a space where time ordinarily would be, nothing passing, events happening but in such a modular and indefinitely reproducible manner that it's hard to link them to any actual sense of temporal movement -- just this blank, watchful abyss, as everything seems to hover in place, until you hit the button -- and only then, if you're lucky and whoever's playing it hasn't walked away, do you get "help, i've been shot!". It doesn't matter how brief the pause for input was between them - the fact that control over pacing was, for however brief a period of time, suddenly pulled from the fiction's internal structure and ceded to some exterior presence while the fiction itself sat there doggedly idling is enough to sever all sense of causality between the two events. They both happen, but are no longer connected in time - they float vaguely in the same vicinity as one another, but the order and relation in which they occur is now just a tentative preference among many. Anything touched by the dread hand of agency becomes slightly off, slightly jumbled as a presence - like in Kleist's essay on the marionette theatre, the slightest touch of selfconsciousness is enough to throw things out of whack. Something happens in the transition between timeframes, the game's internal clockwork pacing and that of the player, some hiccup of nonmeaning, which shifts the emphasis of everything around it - like the lines are all there but the cadence is different in a way that's difficult to fully anticipate. Everything takes an extra half a beat to sink in, all the dioramas you put together in the engine become shuffled slightly out of recognition, everything's held in suspense, if only for a second, half a second, before your eyes refocus and everything becomes just what you'd expect.  I think the way that different timeframes can intersect and play off each other - the internal sense of timing in a novel, say, or a pop song, versus that of lived experience - is an essential part of how they function as mind-expanding tools, as objects that refract or distort experience in ways which allow it to be grasped better as a thing in itself to examine and think about, and that the main formal pull of "interactivity" for me is the way it gives a whole new set of ways for one sense of time to fuck with and grind against another. I don't think the discrepancy itself has any great import or value to it but it's like that bit of grit inside a clam, the momentary irritation of which is enough to call forth all the snot of consciousness in the effort to contain and re-frame the invader. Dismantling recieved meanings is only part of the process - the second part is the interminable process of trying to connect them up again, in better and better ways, and the constantly expanding museum of failed prototypes that results is maybe a more accurate and interesting depiction of how the mind deals with the world than efforts at personal "soul searching" can ever truly stand to admit.

I'm interested in form in videogames but it's always form of a type that's always disavowed, which you could call the form of practice. I'm thinking about kids cracking open Game Maker or RPG Maker for the first time and discovering some basic effect that "works", that is compelling in some hazy and dubious way. It's fun to walk around the map as a little guy - great! How can I sustain that experience, how can I amplify it? Let's add more and different places where you can walk around, let's add text to give a compelling emotional arc to walking around, let's put in little setpieces to break up the walking around part so that it feels even more refreshing when you finally do get to walk around again. All recieved ideas pulled arbitrarily in from what's around you in the effort to plug some glaring void in the affective landscape, some experience you don't know how to deal with. Sometimes the indiscriminateness of the pieces thrown in can themselves lead to interesting or charming juxtapositions, but mostly it's not enough, and the question of form comes in again as a potentially infinite set of strategies not just for ordering and organizing some experience but also for trying to connect that experience to other conceptions of value, or experiences of the world, in a way which necessarily involves reconsidering those other conceptions and experiences in addition to whatever you were originally trying to draw out. I think that form is most interesting when it's most visible, and that it's most visible as a set of transitory Mouse Trap-esque attempts to outflank the unknown. Less the value of some specific form than the formal imagination in itself, as it multiplies some benign little experience into universes of alterity, block worlds, lava worlds, ice worlds, on and on... not some fundamentally illustrative attempt to use form to express some preexisting (usually banal) thesis but an approach that would make use of the material, external element of something existing as a work in itself to examine the sparks of thought that the brain throws off as it butts against a particularly recalcitrant wall, sparks which are rarely confined to the work itself but tend to seep into and mutate within other corners of the waking life. I think one of Jack King-Spooner's kickstarter updates around Dujanah was about a minigame where you battle your way to the top of a tower because "there's something satisfying about that kind of structure." I agree & think there's something about the image of this spectral tower, hovering in the plane of forms as a potential container and reshaper for anything and for for nothing in particular, which is more plaintive and more valuable than any more specific or metaphorical usage.

I guess this whole thing is an attempted answer to the famous "why is this even a game" perennial - not just to the idea that anything which doesn't revolve around "choice" (ideological buzzword of the Californian Ideology) is not sufficiently attentive to the properties of the medium in which it's working but also the idea that flatgames, visual novels, walking sims etc have to remain as mute "experiences" without any further formal or theoretical interest as structures. But I think part of it as well is that I don't feel very interested in any medium-specific criticism, or the effort to imagine some magical new feature in whatever format most interests you that has never before been seen in any of the other ones (the absence of which does not seem to have been missed particularly in the millenia of human experience before it was invented). I suspect that following computer games and VR and whatever else we'll start to see an uptick in the rate at which these new media are discovered from within the tech industry, and also an increase in the extent to which they're owned and controlled from the beginning by those interests, eager to demonstrate their total newness to the stockholders and to consequently throw under anything which doesn't stay on-brand. Maybe this is paranoid, but I'd appreciate an effort to de-value "the medium" a little bit, to undercut the idea that these magical alien formats somehow have some intrinsic property of value to mere human concerns (theatre is about... time! film is about... motion!) rather than that they're idiot, mute refractive materials which were pressganged into human usage according to both historical opportunity and the usual contradictory morass of motives within that. So I don't think the interactivity of videogames is very new or else that the dissonance provided by that interactivity is very new. Better to think of it like the carriage-return key: the sudden new emphasis on a property already latent, and the new accessibility of that property to bored and toying kids, waiting on chances to scheme.

[jonryatrash]

Aria, Arya, and ASOIAF

Recently in Jonrya chat I threw out a question about whether anyone had considered the association between Arya’s name and an aria, and the role that it might play in the title: A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s been something I’ve mulled over for a while now. After posing the question, @bloomray and I had a conversation about the possibilities. You can see her awesome meta on Arya/aria here.

I appreciate a lot in bloomray’s analysis, though I’m also interested in what it might mean for Jonrya as a couple. I figured I would offer a kind of “yes, and…” meta to go along with hers, and this is said meta broken into five topics. More than anything, this is a thought experiment. I’m just throwing ideas and evidence to support said ideas out there. I’m not really sure I have an investment in this other than for the enjoyment of it. It’s not a matter of proving anything to be true for me.

A Song of Ice and Fire

First, I want to talk about the title itself, and I think we need to deal with the title itself in two parts: (1) it’s appearance in the narrative, and (2) it’s source for inspiration. Here, I’ll deal with the title as it appears narratively in ASOIAF itself.

The phrase “song of ice and fire” only appears three times across all of GRRM’s published works. All instances occur in A Clash of Kings in Daenerys IV and V. Here’s the first:

“’He [baby Aegon] has a song,’ the man [Rhaegar] replied. ‘He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire.’ He looked up when he said it as his eyes met Dany’s, and it seemed as if he saw her standing there beyond the door. ‘There must be one more,’ he said, though whether he was speaking to her or the woman in bed she could not say. ‘The dragon has three heads.’”

The second instance isn’t of any real significance, just a reiteration of what Dany saw. The third instance—occurring during the same conversation as the second—we learn the following from Dany and Jorah:

“’What is the song of ice and fire?’”

“’It’s no song I’ve ever heard.’”

What do we get from this? For me, the most important thing is that we have no real answer in the text itself to the question of what the song is. It’s not an existing song that anyone would know well. So it must be a prophetic song then, and one that belongs to the prince that was promised and will tell his tale.

I hesitate to attribute a song of ice and fire to any of the other prophecies swarming about in ASOIAF. I do think it’s safe to say that a comet is somehow involved in the story of TPtwP/asoiaf because of Rhaeger’s reaction to the comet on the night Aegon was conceived. Other than that, I’m not touching these prophecies with a ten-foot pole. Things become far too unreliable and conflated when discussed by different characters.

At this point—looking over the evidence we have—I’m not entirely convinced that the ice and fire being spoken of is Jon. A lot of fans like to attribute the title to his story because his parents are Stark and Targaryen, ice and fire. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to associate him with it, but I don’t think it’s the best explanation.

Honestly, I think the ice and fire itself might refer to the coming Others/dragons, or the Long Night / Red Comet. I actually prefer the latter because of the Frost poem, which I’ll get to in a minute. But we might think of the Others/dragons as the military generals representing the ice/fire sides.

Frost

“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost is meant to have inspired the title of ASOIAF. Basically, it’s an incredibly short poem about how the world might end—in ice or in fire. Ice also gets associated with hatred, and fire with desire. The end is rather anticlimactic; Frost says either works for him.

The backstory is a little more interesting. According to Wikipedia, Frost was inspired by a conversation with the preeminent astronomer of the time about how the world might end. The answer? Either the sun will explode and take out Earth, or Earth will escape the explosion only to slowly freeze to death. Immediately upon reading this backstory, I thought of the red comet that appears in ASOIAF. The characters seem to think it’s a sign of something to come, some part of a prophesy. Instead, I wonder if we might think of it as the sun/fire in the Frost poem—the fiery force threatening Terros/Earthos.

Others have argued that “Fire and Ice” is a hyper-compressed version of Dante’s Inferno. As someone who digs the Inferno, I’m here for this. Again, check out the Wikipedia for the poem article for more details. The take away from this is that fire becomes associated with the sensual—lust, taste, greed. And as we descend further into hell, it gets colder and the sins become sins of the mind—reason and thought, hatred.

The takeaway? I think we need to read the title on multiple levels, the first primarily with the threats to Terros/Earthos itself. Then we ought to look to a second layer—the magical representatives of either form of destruction. Then perhaps a third—the other, human players, and how these players might align with the parts of the title.

 The Waterstones Letter

I bring up the Waterstones’ Letter only to show that the series was already titled A Song of Ice and Fire when the original plot was still in play. And in that original plot, Martin describes the following:

“Arya will be more forgiving [of Jon’s inability to help the Starks]…until she realizes, with terror, that she has fallen in love with Jon, who is not only her half-brother but a man of the Night’s Watch, sword to celibacy. Their passion will continue to torment Jon and Arya throughout the trilogy, until the secret of Jon’s true parentage is finally revealed in the last book.”

At this point, we might say that the original plot is no longer in play. Things have changed in significant ways, certainly. I think the broad strokes are still there, to be honest, and people have written compelling meta on whether the Waterstones letter still holds water, as it were. I can still see a lot of the major plot points in what we have published currently, and I do believe that Jonrya could very well still happen.

For my purposes here though, we only need to agree that at the time of the title’s creation the story was deeply involved with a Jon/Arya(/Tyrion) romance plot / love triangle. From here, I’d like to address the third level of the title’s possible meaning: the human players and their roles.

 Jon

I think the one thing fandom can happily agree upon is that Jon’s birth is the merger of ice and fire. The house sigils and associations prove that much. If we think about the bit in “Fire and Ice” where fire becomes associated with the passions and senses, and ice with hatred and reason, we might see further parallels between Rhaegar and Lyanna’s union.

Confession: I don’t think Rhaegar/Lyanna happened because of mutual love, and there lies my bias. That being said, I don’t think my bias colors this reading too significantly. In the reason/passion framing of the Rhaegar/Lyanna narrative, Rhaeger represents sins of the mind—obsession with prophecy, for one. He knows he needs a third head of the dragon, and he knows that another child would surely kill Elia. For her part, I think Lyanna was probably in love with Rhaegar’s sad eyes and handsome looks. I don’t think she really thought through anything. Hell, if she hated Robert for his infidelity, why would she become the other woman to Rhaegar/Elia? That doesn’t make sense. I’ll be generous here and say that Lyanna ran away for what she thought was love, rather than being kidnapped. If you’re willing to buy what I’m selling here, I think the parallels play out quite well.

Personally, I’m more apt to associate Jon with ice and fire in this manner than some of the others. That, on this very human level it works out, makes the rest fall into place for me. In this sense, perhaps Jon really is the ice and fire represented in the title. (In the narrative’s song of ice and fire that belongs to TPtwP, it’s a little harder for me to figure out because we don’t know if he was born around salt and smoke for one thing).

 Arya and Jonrya

As @bloomray describes in her post, Arya also functions as a balance in the narrative. I’d also add to bloomray’s post that Arya is the product of a union between North and South—a union made as part of the Southron Conspiracy. The conspiracy also puts some important events into play, much like the union of Rhaegar and Lyanna. In this sense, the timing is ripe for a prophetic moment.

One thing I love about Arya’s name and the play with aria is that it’s antithetical to her character; she’s not a lady and does not like songs. Ned tells her that she’ll marry a king, etc, but baby Arya is very much anti-ladyship at the start of the story. Maybe she will marry a king. (Curious, also, that Ned says a king when the only king around is Bobby B and the crown prince is promised to Sansa. What’s up with that GRRM?). The point is that it’s contrast, but perhaps indicative of the role she might come to occupy in the future.

Now in terms of Jonrya, Arya is Jon’s everything. Literally just read any book chapter from Jon’s perspective for evidence. This theme of Jon and Arya’s relationship has continued through ADWD, which is why I believe the original endgame for them might still be in play. One of the key points in the Jonrya narrative is when Jon begins to break his oaths and take part in a war because of his sister. He can’t bear the thought of Arya in Ramsey Bolton’s bed. And he dies for it. And that death is going to be important, far more important than the show adaption would have us believe. Jon died for Arya, a girl named after a type of song. That love—and if you want to call it brotherly-sisterly affection, whatever—but that love is what will set Jon on a path to save the world.

I don’t think it’s too extreme to think that Jonrya’s love is what truly allows the song of ice and fire to come to fruition in later books.

Will they live? Who knows.

But their love is life changing.

In the end, I don’t actually believe that every little thing I’ve written here is even realistic for GRRM to have thought of. That’s not really how writing works. But I do think there can be some truth to it in broad strokes, and half the fun of meta and theory building is working with the source material like this. If you made it this far, thanks for entertaining my ideas. 

[micaramel]

Artists: Evgeny Antufiev, Lucy Bull, Horia Damian, Louise Giovanelli, Rodrigo Hernández, Jill Mulleady, Lin May Saeed

Venue: Air de Paris

Exhibition Title: El oro de los tigres

Curated By: Ana Mendoza Aldana

Date: January 4 – March 14, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

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

Images:

Images courtesy of Air de Paris, Paris. Photos by Marc Domage.

Press Release:

The yellow sun pursues its slow course behind the horizon.

The last amber leaves have carpeted the ground, retaining in their belly the echo of a warmish autumn, ahead of the imminent ashen snow.

Other hints of ochre are stirring, in the form of flowers, trees and yellow shrubs with yellow thorns. You could count the thousands of seeds and acid spores till you lose count, till you lose your mind.

When a fire burns out, still further away, the flames revive. The rumbling of the earth lights up the dusk. The sand in the hourglass has formed its pyramid.

In their cage Borges’s golden tigers retrace yet again the path ∞ times taken, obstinately fulfilling their repetitive destiny with frenzied determination.

Maybe their stripes are hiding the divine writing (1) .

Deep in the heart of the threads stretching from grandmother to father, from father to son, the cells multiply their degeneration. The emerald rims of the nebula are already impinging on the retina and the globe is covered with thick fog. Blindness sets in as the pages of the endless library are overlaid with a fine blue dust, and yet the yellow remains, in, scattered constellations.

* In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times (2). *

Jorge Luis Borges is famous for the density and brevity of his narratives, peopled with mirrors, labyrinths and his vast love of philology. For him time is a spatio-temporal continuum (3). Between June and August 1977 Borges (1899–1986) gave a series of talks at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires. La Ceguera (Blindness) was the seventh and last of these talks (4). La Ceguera begins on a personal note: Borges learned very young that he would go blind. In the talk, as in El oro de los tigres (1972)5, the poem written some years earlier, he pays tribute to this blindness, describing it not as a slow descent into darkness (as if someone were little by little putting out the lights), but rather as the gradual loss of colour.

Le Rouge et le Noir, as he says in his talk, are the colours he misses. He is never immersed in total darkness: the world seems to him swathed in a blue and a green that have lost their vividness, and a dirty grey has taken the place of white… Yellow alone has conceded nothing to blindness. Its brightness and sunny radiance remain intact. Thus it becomes a faithful companion, ready to resurface in the writer’s happiest memories: contemplation of wild beasts in the zoo, with the gold of their downy skin teasing his child’s eye.

Long after these talks, over a year ago, yellow suddenly started popping up everywhere for me too: in the demonstrations that shook France in November 2018, and since then in the equivalents that seemed to be rumbling in other parts of the world, like the aftershocks of a single earthquake. In Algeria, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile; in feminist writings of more than a century ago (1) ; in the fires consuming chunks of Amazonia, California, Australia; and at the very moment of this writing, in the dead leaves blanketing the footpaths of Paris.

A recurring yellow become embodied, physical hypertext: a revealer of the waves buffeting our reality.

The artists invited to take part in this exhibition have in common a relationship with time going beyond the immediate and the instantaneous. Their work has its roots in the literature and the fables of ancient civilisations, and the archetypal forms they have given rise to. An overlaying of a past and stories converging with our present.

Evgeny Antufiev (1986, Kyzyl, Russia) has an innate practice of art. The Russian artist is particularly interested in eternity and in etiological tales (his work is nourished for example by the legends of the nomads of the Touva region in Siberia where he was born) that he reinterprets in his own manner. Often embellished by semi-precious stones, bones or animal’s teeth that he collects, Antufiev’s sculptures retain the marks of their handmade craft.

Lucy Bull’s (1990, New York) virtuoso paintings call upon the history of painting and abstract art. The works she produces are hallucinated visions that seem to float between dreams and the digital images produced by artificial intelligence. In her paintings, although mainly abstract, we could almost see flowers blossoming, fish swimming, insects swarming, or tigers lurking ready to ambush us — we almost see them move, we almost hear their wings or fins agitating, we almost anticipate the tearing of their claws.

Romanian artist Horia Damian (1922, Bucharest – †2012, Paris) lived and worked most of his life in Paris. His work is mostly interested in simple forms and colors that reflected his interest in cosmic landscapes, stellar architectures and invisible geometries, and the connections between the macro and the microcosmos. The Hill or La Colline is one of his main projects as bear witness the quantity of preparatory sketches drawn. The Hill both a sculpture and a place, a yellow work of obvious spiritual elevation, was installed in front of the Guggenheim in New York in 1976.

Louise Giovanelli’s (1993, London) paintings draw inspiration as much from the cinematographic culture than from Renaissance paintings. From canvas to canvas, the same image might appear with some small variations: sometimes the surface of the painting has been scratched, the color altered, almost as if each painting was a different print of one single photograph or if each canvas was a projection of a movie whose film had been damaged by the passing of time. On a single painting can then coexist the snapshot of Elizabeth Taylor’s tracheotomy scar and a devotional image of a martyr’s beheading.

Rodrigo Hernández’s (1983, Mexico DF) sculptures, volumes and paintings function as a compendium of meaning. A same idea, a word (its definition, the way it is written) or an image, is explored simultaneously from different angles. The simplest forms can thus embody a plethora of of mental associations. Hernández’s pieces can be apprehended as a work-word-image-porte-manteau…

Times are dark in Jill Mulleady’s paintings (1980, Montevideo), where different time periods coexist (their architectures, their characters fashionably dressed, their food, their excesses, their domestic or wild fauna) always in a disturbing manner. In Fight-Or-Flight a giant rat rides a horse over a random city: maybe the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have a different face than the one we were expecting.

Lin May Saeed (1973, Würzburg), addresses the human-animal relationship and the animal liberation movement. Her works often crafted in Styrofoam — a material that because of its very slow decay will persist longer than wood, iron, marble, and most noble materials generally used in classical sculpture — borrow their aesthetics and vocabulary from ancient civilizations and thousands of years old mythologies, imagining a future where animals and humans now coexist in peace.

  1  In The Writing of the God, a god of a pre-Columbian civilization has hidden a sacred phrase capable of staving off all the wrongs of the end of the world in the spots of a jaguar. Jorge Luis Borges, La escritura del dios, in El Aleph, ed. Emecé, 1949

2  Bertolt Brecht, Motto, in Svendborgdigte, section II, 1939

3  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.” Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, Emecé, Buenos Aires, 1996. 816 p

4  The conference can be watched in its entirety on Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLjd2eo62II

5  El oro de los tigres, ed. Emecé, 1972, 168 p

Link: Group show at Air de Paris

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2vXBgCM

[jillmckenzie1]

Interview with Colorado Book Award Finalist, Adam Houle

As I read Stray, I noticed that region plays a significant role in the work. How do the collective settings of Stray influence its thematic undercurrents? How did these various places influence you as a person and in turn as a writer?

I like things grounded. Region gives a shape to our lives; our rhythms and patterns are, partially, governed by where we are. I don’t want to put too big an emphasis here, but I think that where we are carves out who we are. Maybe that’s too much. Put another way: place shapes vision. All places has contours, physical, emotional, spiritual. And we can connect with that, we can interrogate it, we can hold up those patterns for comparison with our own patterns, our own impressions on just what the heck is going on. Maybe that’s happiness: finding that your contours align with the contours of your physical place — your mind works alongside the orders and disorders of a place, and you find a richness, a distinctiveness that resonates. And when I try to give that voice, I find my way into a poem.

For me, Stray tries to order and shape those places, both physical and psychological. To give shape to the experiences — mine or otherwise — means I’m trying to locate something quite swift and fleeting. It slows me down and lets the associations rise and fade. What’s left is the poem. What’s left is a voice that catches the song, and in the song the place is memorialized, the players, too, and in the making of the poems, I’m working toward that intersection between the things of the world and the way they perfume and shape our mental space.

Place for me is always about alignment and experience. Growing up, I felt Eastern Pennsylvania was so busy, so future-oriented, I couldn’t catch my breathe. So, I moved to Colorado. Then to Utah. It was in Colorado that I felt different rhythms were possible, and that I could build a life around that. There were good people who had found that too, and they helped me a lot. Ultimately, I went back to Wisconsin for college. And I liked it. In college, once I opted for an English degree, really smart, kind professors and writers gave me the permission I needed to sit with experience and work to get it shaped on the page. That’s a roundabout way of saying that I carry it all with me, and, in my poems, try to give it a manageable shape, a structure that resonates and might last.

Stray offers remarkably lucid glimpses into the inner-workings of your life and thoughts. How do you choose your subject matter? When do you know an experience or thought is the seed for a poem?

I think poems are an offshoot, a lucky but necessary byproduct, of paying attention. So, I hope that I foster an aesthetics of attentiveness, of allowing the phrase, the line, the grammatical sentence shape the thought and to let the thought follow those contours. I sensed running in the background, though. Snippets of poems I’ve read, lines I’m working on, and the like. And something I’m coming to realize is that I was always measuring and shaping and letting language take up a lot of mental space. So, for me, getting serious about writing poems let me have a place to put all the work that was going on anyway. It was a such a jolt when I realized that I could do that — that I was allowed to shape language in all its strangeness and elegance and griminess, and try to give all that a structure. I take time in the morning — sometimes a lot of time, sometimes a little — to write. I don’t have to have a draft every day. I don’t worry if I don’t transfer work from the notebook to the screen. I trust my experience and my response. And when poems begin taking shape, I’m ready. So that process has given me allowance to sit quietly, to feel my way through experience, and to avoid trying to rationalize my responses to the world.

Those small snippets of an image, of a bit of phrase I like, or when something holds my focus and blurs out the rest, that’s the start of something. So, the subject matter is plucked from this and that. I don’t really know why something catches my eye and ear. I like things, though. I’m always inspecting small stuff I find throughout the day, and I’m an indiscriminate absorber of information. I listen to almost anyone talk about stuff that matters to them; I’ll also give just about anything a few minutes read and a lot more time if I like it. All those ideas, responses, and experiences have their worth. They’re valuable to me, and if they end up in a draft, I’ll know they grafted onto something in me that needs to be explored and held up to let breathe and mingle with the rest.

Though much of the work seems autobiographical, several poems, such as “THE FUTURE TIMBER BARON WRITES HIS NEW WIFE” and “YELLOWKNIFE GIRL AT THE TIMBER CAMP” inhabit other perspectives. How do you go about researching and assuming those voices of “otherness”?

Those two in particular were part of a much longer concept that I abandoned along the way. I hope that respect and love gird those poems. Thinking of the timber trade historically, it was a rough go for everything involved. With “The Future Timber Baron Writes His New Wife,” I was interested in bad hope. He’s a dodgy guy, feeling himself deprived but driven and single-minded, despite the intrusions of the world outside what he sees as the necessary work at hand. “Yellowknife Girl at the Timber Camp” is a poem about a different type of hope. Right or wrong, by the poem’s close, she’s identified the dangers she believes will ruin us. “Cook Takes Stock after the Ice Road Fails” offers a response to both the Future Baron and the Yellowknife Girl: when everything is lost, we have to look elsewhere, beyond our striving and what we think is ours. Those are very human dramas. They are painful and hopeful and endlessly playing out. As I worked on that sequence, I wasn’t looking for the sweep of large events. I wanted the small moments, the little despairs and hopes. Those are the ones I identify with. When I assume those voices, I want to be mindful that I’m working from a place of respect and love, and that what they say echoes within my own experiences.

As a poet and fiction writer, how do you feel your poetry informs your prose, and vice versa? How would you describe the different mediums of expression and the different messages that result?

I’m a poet first. I’m more suited for the measures of a line than those of a paragraph. Something about the emptiness after a line, between the line, hits right for me. I think of it as the space where the words continue casting themselves. That said, working on fiction or nonfiction is both terrifying and exhilarating. I love the mind at work in really good essays; Thomas Lynch’s work comes to mind — there’s a smoothness and rightness to the language, a sensibility that gives expanse to tinker and rethink. I live with a fiction writer, and the way Landon explains story is far smarter and insightful than I could ever hope to be. And something she said about character and desire fired me up to get some stories in the hopper. In “Pitch Man” I wanted to explore what I felt about Billy Mays, the OxyClean (among other products) infomercial guy. I always really liked him for some reason. I liked the carnival barker, the sturdiness of his pitch. That short story, for example, let me inhabit that world, and it felt better, more accurate in prose. I read as much fiction as I can. And I find that the expanse of a prose gives me permission to think about the movements of a life on a larger stage. Poems teach me about precision. When I see prose that isn’t working for me, it’s often because I feel like the architect has forgotten the grace of a beautiful doorway’s finial work, like the work never got past a damn good blueprint. But a blueprint’s not the thing or even a committed rendering of the thing populated with human heat and small edging details that stick with us. So, I try to keep these lessons in mind during the revision process — what does prose teach me about poetry? How can poems help prose?

“Poetry” can, at times, seem to be a rather ambiguous, umbrella term. Thus, oftentimes poets and readers must forage and forge for their own identifiers. How would you describe your own aesthetic?

I’m not worried about schools of thought very much. I want to get the poem into a shape that feels authentic, though crafted, to me, that sticks around in my mind like a little incantation or prayer. That’s what attracts me to the poems I like reading — they are immediate, they are aware that they’re shaped in some way, and in that awareness they shape the reader. Maybe they just bend us temporarily, but I don’t think we ever bounce fully back after a poem works on us. We accrue poems and parts of poems, and it helps inform the work we try to write. I think of my aesthetic as one of attentiveness, of taking up disparate impulses, thoughts, reactions, and trying to give them a field of expression.

Tell us the story behind the story: how did Stray get published? Do you have any other projects in the works?

So, when I moved to South Carolina to start my teaching gig, I thought it’d be a good idea to get serious about sending Stray into the world. I went the contest submission route. After the manuscript was a finalist or semi-finalist at a number of contests, I revised and rewrote. I had the book in a shape I liked. The sections felt good. The individual poems felt good. I had some really great friends and colleagues from grad school to exchange manuscripts with, and I’m grateful to them and to my mentors at Texas Tech, Northern Michigan University, and the University of Wisconsin — Green Bay for their support and their sharp eyes as they helped me shape the work over the years. So, there it was, what felt like a real-live book. A friend told me about Juan Morales’ The Siren World with Lithic Press. I read Juan’s book and loved it. The poems are fantastic, the design was thoughtful, and the layout was committed to showcasing the poems in their space. So, I sent the manuscript to Danny Rosen, the publisher at Lithic Press. I think he was suspicious at first, but the poems won him over, and that was that. To have Stray named a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards meant a lot to me. If I trace the poems back to their earliest whispers, they owe a lot to my time living in Colorado and the space that my life their let me work in. Right now, I’m working on some new poems and revisiting some earlier stuff that didn’t fit with Stray but are still on my mind. I don’t know if they’ll shape up and cohere, but I’m trying to be spacious with my expectations, taking more risks, letting these drafts be tentative and incomplete and not forcing the issue.

What poets inspire and/or influence you? What are you reading right now?

Right now, I’m reading Jessica Cuello’s Hunt and Moby-Dick. Cuello takes chapters from Moby-Dick and re-envisions them into sharply considered poems. It’s so good, but I’m taking my time with it. When I revisit works that meant a lot to me, I come back to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. I reread Yusef Komunyakaa’s work. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Black Mesa Poems is another. I reread Erica Dawson’s Big-Eyed Afraid recently and was deeply moved by the sharpness. Jack Gilbert’s work meant a lot to me during my undergraduate years. There are sections of Paradise Lost that I’ll reread every day for stretches. I’ve also been really interested in the work that’s going on in Columbia — it’s about an hour’s drive for me, and I’ve got to hear some really good stuff. I’m always open to work that’s being done with integrity. I don’t love it all, but I’m glad it’s being written and shared.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/interview-with-colorado-book-award-finalist-adam-houle/

[vileart]

Toujours Dramaturgy: Erratica @ Edfringe 2018

Using the 19th century ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ illusion, a man and woman uncover a story of loss, regret and unresolved trauma. Directed by Patrick Eakin Young Assembly Roxy: 2 – 27 Aug  (not 13 & 20), 3.00pm

Incorporating dance, physical theatre, video art and an era-spanning set of opera, Toujours et Près De Moi blurs the lines between past and present, reality and illusion, to explore a couple’s – or former couple’s – story of absence and heartbreak. The Victorian music-hall illusion of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, which creates moving 3D images by projecting on to a large piece of glass, is used to invoke virtual representations of the two unnamed characters’ past selves.  The figures interact with the set, each other and the real-life actors with uncanny realism to suggest a relationship fractured by loss, absence, heartbreak and regret. Can we start by talking about the illusion? That sounds as if it will be something unique at the Fringe. Where did you discover this trick, and why did it appeal to you for contemporary use?

I taught myself how to make a Pepper’s Ghost through internet research and trial-and-error. It’s actually a very simple technique, and has been used since the mid 19th century. The contemporary innovation, which was not my own, was to use video projection. The main issue has always been getting a mirror big enough. I started by using actual glass mirrors, then commercial window film, but now we’re using professional grade mylar. There are companies that make these illusions commercially on a big scale. It’s mostly used at trade expos, to make cars or planes or other products appear and disappear onstage. But there are some theatre companies that use it too, like 3Legged Dog in New York and Lemieux Pilon 4D in Montreal. Obviously magicians still use it. (Our current mirror was bought second hand from a magician!) They used it in Ghost the musical on the West End, and then it sometimes gets used in big stadium music acts, like when they made a hologram of Tupac for Coachella a few years ago.

The one innovation that I seem to have stumbled on in my trial-and-error tinkering is how to make the holograms seemingly interact with objects. Every other peppers ghost I’ve ever seen, the image always appears in a black space. But I discovered that if you place objects in the right place in relation to the projected image, they can look like they are touching. This is what I particularly love about the holograms in this piece, because they interact with real objects—the figures jump in and out of boxes, climbing on them, hitting them—it gives them a real sense of presence and weight. But they aren’t touching! In fact the image that you are seeing is a reflection and isn’t in the space. The two performers can’t even see the holograms at all. They spend the entire time looking at an empty space, moving objects around the table. But to the audience it is totally convincing.

You mention the operatic soundtrack: at what point in the process did the soundtrack start to be developed, and can you tell me about how it spans eras - and why opera?

I call the piece a holographic puppet opera, but technically, it is none of those things! A pepper’s ghost is an illusion, not a hologram, the video projects are not really puppets, and there isn’t any actual opera. But somehow, that does seem to convey what the piece is. 

All of ERRATICA's work has music at its core, and almost always the human voice. When I started this project I wanted to make a piece that could be performed with either recorded or live music, and specifically unaccompanied voice. I worked with a brilliant composer and conductor, James Weeks, who leads one of the UK’s top contemporary vocal ensembles, EXAUDI. He started to suggest composers and pieces that might be of interest. I had in mind Monteverdi Madgrigals, but James pointed me towards Gesualdo and from there to Sciarrino. I put together a long playlist of options and then started to whittle it down to the 11 musical pieces in the show. The works that I chose in the end span from the middle ages to the 2010s. But they all have some connection to the themes of the piece—loss, memory, and the persistence of the past. The title, Toujours et Près de Moi, comes from a piece that James wrote called Complainte, which takes up a long section in the middle of the show. It’s a setting of a poem by Mary Queen of Scots (written in French) about the death of her husband and how his memory is always close to her.

In this way, the music actually preceded the creation of the show itself. I had an idea of the subject matter of the piece, and with my playlist, I'd mapped out a kind of emotional dramaturgy. Then, with the performers, we devised what actually happened in the scenes.

It sounds as if it is pretty lucky that the dance section is also physical theatre, because this work feels very cross-genre. Would it root it in any particular tradition, and how does it relate to other works that you have made?

All of my work is cross-genre! Aside from having music at their core, ERRATICA projects regularly involve dance, puppetry, physical theatre, and technology. Our last piece, Remnants, had 4 singers, a dancer, and recorded voice-over. We did an installation opera, La Celestina, at the Metropolitan Musuem in New York, which was for polyphonic voice over a twelve-speaker array and projected shadow puppets, and we’ve even made an interactive pinball machine. So everything we do is a bit hard to categorise.

I think this piece makes sense as both physical theatre and dance. There is no text, so all the storytelling is done with the body. There is dance in the holograms, but I would say that the real choreographic feat is performed by the live actors. They have to enact complex choreography, moving boxes and placing them in the exact right place, looking and reacting to the holograms which they can’t even see. Its just not at all the kind of choreography that you associate with ‘dance’ and if everything is working properly, the audience doesn’t really see it as such, they just think the performers are reacting and interacting with the holograms.

In terms of the narrative and themes, what inspired the production, and do you have a particular process of creation (is it devised by the performers or runs to a pre-ordained script... that kind of thing...)

When I started working with Pepper’s Ghosts I was living in Johannesburg in South Africa with my wife’s family, although we weren’t married at the time. My wife had stomach cancer, and we both moved there from New York where we were living so that she could go through treatment and be close to her family and support networks. Thankfully, she made a full recovery, but it was a very scary and traumatic time. I made my first Pepper’s Ghost while I was there, a table-top installation called Corpus Sed Non Caro. After she recovered, we moved to London, and I decided I wanted to make a longer piece involving Pepper’s Ghost and live performers.

The video for the piece was created ridiculously quickly, in two weeks with three performers. As I mentioned, I had a soundtrack and a basic story in mind, but we devised the scenes together. The box choreography was created at that time as well. Most of my pieces are developed through a combination of devising, scripted work, and composition (since they’re always musical) and are always very collaborative. My new work generally develops over an extended workshop process, often taking up to two years from initial investigation to opening night. This piece is different in that it is the record of a single condensed creation process. Because the video can’t be changed, in a way, I created a kind of script that I’m having to reinterpret each time I produce the piece. With every successive production (this is the 4th iteration) I’ve changed and improved the storytelling of the live actors, but always within the constraints of the video. This time, we’ve also introduced additional sound design to conjure the world of the show more vividly.

There seems to be some kind of discussion in the work about the interface between time, memory and desire: am I right or well off beam here?

Toujours et Près de Moi is very much about that time in my life when my wife was sick and how it has continued to affect me. In that sense it is a very personal project, but it is also about memory in general, and the ways that trauma and our past can haunt us. At the centre of the piece is a couple, a Man and a Woman, who, in some kind of magical theatrical way, find themselves in a space where holographic versions of themselves romp around on a table playing out their needs, desires, fears, longings, and ultimately affection for each other. In the first version of the piece the actors on stage and in the holograms were the same, but now I use older performers in the live portion. It actually works much better, to really draw the distinction of these people looking back on their past. Pepper’s Ghost is a medium that by it’s nature is about presence and absence, and therefore about memory. Ghosts are fundamentally about traumas that persist in the present and about the ways that the past will not be forgotten. This exists both on a social level, and on a personal level. I think desire is a very important part of the piece as well: the desire to be loved, the desire to be heard, the desire to be connected, but also the desire to remember. There is a pleasure that we get from remembering, even things that upset us. It’s not only that the past will not go away, but that we refuse to let it.

from the vileblog https://ift.tt/2Ah3f1B

[elmertyrell094-blog]

Education PSYCH 625 Data For The Behavior Sciences Entire Training course

An indigenous coming from Puerto Rico, Ms. Norma Casas has actually been actually an instructor for over twenty years. Lots of guys have had their ears stretched to show their virility as well as sex-related functionalities, although this is actually certainly not as considerably a main reason today as it was actually many years earlier. In today's electronic planet, buyers are regularly being actually bombarded with notifications off a selection of brand names; this is why this is actually so important to appear the mess in a meaningful means. D. One team of grown-up guys was taught in reducing their hypertension whereas yet another was not provided any kind of guidelines. I have loved the simplicity, appeal, and psychological intensity of Meaningful Food items Stories. Drop-off pick-up (DOPU) gives a straightforward model for requests to send CCDAs to individuals (HealthVault customers) for Meaningful Make use of functions. Rather than getting mesmerized in the buying frenzy from various other winter season holidays, spend time pondering ways to make your holiday season spiritual and also significant. Monitoring and also anticipating these will permit you to grow closer as well as create more significant connections with the ones which are actually essential to you. There's an easy first-level solution: The look for significant work need to be actually guided by where you look for meaning. Finally, if you prefer to make up a purposeful eulogy for your father, you additionally have to consist of a number of your father's success or exclusive capabilities. I've never readied at accepting compliments, yet I decided it was actually time to learn how to say thank you" to their kind phrases. That is actually an obvious simple fact that when we slept last night we were actually no longer mindful of the episodes in our settings and also means that whenever fatality happens knocking at the door, no Jupiter in the world can cease that off performing its job and that is the main reason why our company should all perform our ideal to ensure that we help make fairly a meaningful influence in the lives from whoever comes our method and also, certainly, is actually the essence of individual quiet co-existence. Coupling words, as an example, either synonymously or even with their resisting definitions, like reasonable" as well as upright" or guy" and girl" assists our company remember records even more simply because they are certainly not simply but significant however concurrently relative to various other phrases or information that our team already understand off the past. Relevant interaction campaigns like this build up the emotional bond in between the brand name and also buyers, placing Petrobras as a vital recommendation for Brazilians. I am actually Dr Francesca Zampollo, and I perform a mission: accumulating Meaningful Food Stories. Certainly not amazingly, a number of the absolute most significant brands have actually changed their markets or are going through a transformation. The exact same thing goes with labels of your youngsters, exclusive dates, portraitures from your familied member, animals or perhaps beloveds, homages to your (deceased) relatived (their name, portraiture or even a sign) and so forth ... Even a wonderful sketch of your prediction is much more relevant in comparison to an arbitrary tattoo design. Sara de Dios is actually supervisor, international business advancement at Havas Media as well as global head of relevant brand names, leading the team's effort worldwide. If the body weight loss for his team on the chocolate-only diet plan is agent of body weight loss in a big populace of middle-aged men, a. Bob wishes to understand. Offering an absolutely one-of-a-kind teacher present isn't really as difficult as this seems to be if you cease thinking about gifts as factors," as well as as an alternative consider what might be purposeful to the instructor's life. Some labels have managed to break free from their field constraints that exist in markets such as economic solutions and also electricity, as well as existing reliable, significant marketing methods. Few seen that the context in which words run relies on the private meanings of these phrases. Although ear gauging has actually been actually traditional one of males and females from the Masai people in Kenya, boys have actually been increasingly hesitant to use the practice. It is actually not unusual that it signs up in our purposeful Brands Mark as the best meaningful brand name around all markets. To girls that is actually methods from beautifying all of them, while males think that uses them better toughness. In the event you loved this information along with you wish to acquire details about yellow pages advert james nesbitt (sollievodaldolorealcollo.info) generously pay a visit to our web site. Latest CMS updates to the Meaningful Make use of requirements have simplified the core and also food selection steps to 10 objectives, with one or many solutions per purpose. However that is changing as customers start to ask for that labels have an additional transformational role in our lifestyles and also the concerns that are purposeful to our team. This is actually not to mention you should keep secrets off the girl you have loved, or even are seeking to have a purposeful partnership with. There are actually other wonderful man Hindu titles to decide on along with lots of significant interpretations consisting of Aashish (True blessing), Bijoy (Packed with pleasure), Chiman (Curious), Deep (Light), Ekagrah (Focused), Gandhik (Scent), Hardik (Loaded with love), Jawahar (Treasure), Mitrajit (Friendly), Navrang (Multicolored), Paran (Life), Rasul (Angel), Sadhil (Perfect), Tuhin (Snowy), Umang (Wish), Vatsa (Kid), and also Yamir (Moon). Though DC singles are very likely to permit you to approach all of them at a bar without being actually harsh or also cold, individuals that have the tendency to be very most receptive at pubs are actually certainly not always the people you want to possess a significant connection along with. Some skin specialists state that Meaningful Elegance can certainly not undo the effects of sunshine harm even with item claims. This will definitely make your poems even more relevant as well as allow you to feel far better concerning your work. So why certainly not share your best favored quotes with your loved one therefore you can easily take pleasure in speaking about deep blue sea meaning it possesses all together. That will discuss why Cindy Crawford's Meaningful Elegance items target the exact same skin issues old like fine lines around the lips and eyes, lines, dryness, in different ways, and with different points from emphasis as compared with Victoria Head's Reclaim. Thus, while experiencing a challenge from selecting a relevant present, the first step is actually to determine the type from the gift. There are actually several articles that Dr. Peter Bender, took note speaker, has actually published relating in great detail these individual kinds and these works are actually readily available on his web site; The four bird icons embody specific continuous attributes and also characteristics that prevail across these individuality styles and folks with usual character types, occasionally group with each other like birds carry out. A lot of major organizations utilize this design of characteristic training to reinforce their leadership and also purchases teams. Knowing more concerning individual styles and the attributes that prevail to those individualities can easily provide you a purposeful understanding in to cultivating better associate connections within the work environment and also customer partnerships in the business market place. With christmas time expressions prices quote on clear glass, embellished with gorgeous ornaments, you may communicate your love and devotion with the medium of the stunning X-mas present. Relevant use of electronic health document pinpoints a collection from concerns centered on improved individual engagement; decline from racial disparities; enhancement of performance protection and efficiency from the care delivered; as well as the boost in overall populace wellness. The melon, which is given the most credit rating for Meaningful Elegance's success is none of the key components listed. Therefore, range, change and also diversity, these are the words that are at the heart of in the house plant effectiveness. It's only not that relevant making one more flowerpot from coffee, to clean off yet another table, to assist another customer return one more product. The other day, for instance, I carried out certainly not begin this write-up that you know right now (called Inspirational Lifestyle Quotes to assist You Live Your Life NOW!). This allows an extra running rhyme and may be made use of to incorporate a soft emotion with its own phrases.

[allisonswrittenwords]

I’m gonna write this recap after all!

Like many, I was sad to hear of the death of Mary Tyler Moore earlier this week.  Though I was born in 1982, long after both of her hit sitcoms were off the air, I am one of those people who loved not only the theme song, but the moment where she excitedly throws her tam in the air.

And earns the death stare of all death stares.

That’s perhaps as immortalized as MTM throwing her tam!

One of my friends is currently watching The Dick Van Dyke Show (another program with an equally bouncy theme song, and an equally barrier-breaking role for Mary Tyler Moore), so I decided there was no time like now to start watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  Because I’m watching three shows already (actively working on Psych, Sliders, and The Flash), and that is just not nearly enough.

“Love Is All Around” is the pilot episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and aired on September 19, 1970.  I looked this up – it premiered on a Saturday, which is surprising to me.  I’ve always known Saturday to be a historically bad night for television.  During most of my childhood, with the exception of The Golden Girls and Empty Nest, I never saw Saturday as a good night for any show, except for of course, Saturday Night Live, and I’m not even liking this show in its current form.

46 years ago, I guess Saturday night wasn’t a happening night?  Or everyone just really wanted to watch Mary throw her tam in the air.  I have no idea.

She didn’t need to watch.  She lived it!

Anyway, at the risk of death stares from people other than old ladies in kerchiefs, let’s get this started. As the pilot episode begins, we are immediately drawn in by that snappy theme song.

I never noticed this (and probably because I didn’t pay attention to the lyrics), but during the first season, the lyrics assure us that “You might just make it after all.”  Maybe its me, but that doesn’t feel positive.  “Might” implies that “Mary may not have a chance!”  I’ve only heard the version where she “made it after all!” which is obviously more positive and speaks volumes of the actual success of our character.  If you ask me, Mary Tyler Moore “made it after all” by breaking barriers in two different decades and on two different and very successful shows.  So a lyric change was definitely warranted!

At the risk of this turning into a rant on suppressing women via theme songs, let’s move on to the actual episode, shall we?

After that snappy theme song, we open on a large house in winter (my mom was telling me on the weekend that the house just went on the market) and our heroine, Mary Richards, is arriving at her new apartment, along with friend Phyllis Lindstrom, who is showing her the apartment.  Tagging along is Phyllis’s daughter, Bess, who doesn’t understand why she has to call Mary “Aunt Mary.”  She also doesn’t why understand “Aunt” Rhoda (“that dumb, awful girl Rhoda”), isn’t able to have the apartment.  You see, Bess likes Rhoda and thinks she is funny.  And as you’ll find with the pilot, you probably won’t like Rhoda either – apparently the character did not initially test well.  That changed pretty quickly (being an establishing episode), and audiences warmed up to her because of the belief that if a kid could like her (you’ll figure out Bess as we go through the episode), then an audience could too!  She got a spin-off, so how bad could she have been, you say?

You’re curious to see where this is going, right?

Anyway, Phyllis signed a year’s lease for Mary to live there, just to keep Rhoda out of there.  But Rhoda is pretty steadfast in her belief that she will get the apartment.

Proven by this.

Rhoda is outside cleaning the windows…on the apartment she felt she was due to get. It turns out that Rhoda Morgenstern is a brash New Yorker who believes this once-vacant apartment is hers. Um, Rhoda dear, you have an apartment here.  In the same house.

The two don’t meet on the best terms, and Mary winds up telling her (and Phyllis) about the circumstances behind her moving to Minneapolis (her doctor boyfriend didn’t want to commit).  Rhoda further tries to convinced Mary that the apartment is hers because she spent a month’s salary putting carpet in (not true), and isn’t willing to budge on her wanting of this apartment.

Phyllis offers to have Mary stay with her that night, and Mary says she has several job interviews in the meantime.  We don’t see the several, but we do see the one we’re required to see.

Mary arrives at WJM-TV’s newsroom, where she is greeted by Murray, who informs her that the Secretary job has been filled. Mr. Grant says he will see her anyway, as Murray sing-songs “It’s been FILL-ED!”

Lou meets with Mary, and decides he needs a drink, but decides to have coffee instead after Mary asks for a “Brandy Alexander.”  The Secretary job has been filled, but has another job that he would consider her for.  And of course, he asks her the important questions: “How old are you” and “what religion are you.”  You know, the really important questions.

The 1970s, people!  These questions were important!

Lou likes the neighborhood Mary lives in, since it has some of the best saloons in town.  Mary informs Lou that the questions he asks are not allowed, so then he sarcastically asks her marital status.  Mary doesn’t want to answer those personal questions, and informs Lou of such.  And then comes one of the most famous pop culture quotes of all time, but was at the time just a simple line of dialogue.

“You’ve got spunk!”

“I HATE SPUNK!”

But, obviously he is impressed, and hires her for an Associate Producer job – it pays $10 less a week than the Secretarial job (but if she can get by on $15 less a week, she can be a Producer).  He gives her a trial run, beginning with the next day.

And no handshake.  The 1970s.  Catch the inequality!

Meanwhile, back at the house…

Bess and Phyllis have finished setting up Mary’s furniture (Bess coordinated the setup herself – such a clever girl!), and Mary tells Phyllis some “shattering” news: Mary’s ex-boyfriend is coming to see Mary, thanks to Bess, even though Phyllis reminds her it was “mother’s news.”  He’ll be coming the following night.

The next morning…

Rhoda bring a locksmith to change the locks on her apartment, and then spots Mary, all primped despite the morning.  After a lovely misunderstanding (and the locksmith not wanting any involvement in “breaking and entering”), he leaves.  Rhoda informs Mary that she hopes things work out for Mary and her ex-boyfriend…so she can have the apartment.

Mary informs Rhoda that in spite of everything, Rhoda is a hard person to dislike. Rhoda leaves on that, but not before telling Mary that she moved to Minneapolis because she couldn’t find a place to live in New York City (why Minneapolis, I have no idea!).

But now it’s time for work!

At WJM…

Mary is sharpening pencils, which is far beneath even what a Secretary does in their day-to-day, so for an Associate Producer, it is even worse!

Lou needs to see Ted Baxter, to which Mary jumps eagerly at the chance to retrieve him from makeup.  Lou, however, objects and sends someone else.  Mary asks Lou for more work, and begins to question why she got hired, to which Murray replies that Lou was “probably bombed” at the time.

Ted arrives, and yes, that IS Ted Knight.  And he’s wearing a makeup bib.  You see, kids, Ted is tad um, what’s the word.  Ego-driven.  And vain. And he can’t pronounce anything worth a damn, so Murray refers to him as the “Marcello Mastroianni of Minneapolis” newscasters (because he has trouble speaking English too).

Lou’s wife calls to speak to him, since she is leaving to visit her sister for a month, but he says he’ll speak to her when she gets home.  There’s more important business to be had – seeing what words Ted pronounced incorrectly recently…which includes “Chicago.”  Lou pulls the makeup bib off, with Murray informing Lou that Ted wore it halfway through the newscast the previous evening.

Mary receives a phone call from her ex, Bill, and invites him to visit her apartment that evening.

Phyllis believes that Mary will be getting back with Bill, and then marrying him, all because of this visit.

The door buzzer reveals a surprise at the door – a bombed-out-of-his mind Lou Grant, who is upset that his wife is gone for a “whole month” (but yet, he didn’t want to talk to her when she called), but Mary believes the visit is more sexual in nature (“That’s it, I got the job because of my great caboose!”).  Lou decides to write his wife a letter…on Mary’s typewriter.

Then Bill, Mary’s ex-boyfriend (though they never call him “ex” – was that forbidden in 1970?) arives at the apartment.  While Drunken Lou is still there.  Mary is smitten by the roses Bill got her (“Roses in winter!” to which Lou drunkenly repeats and types it into his letter to his wife, among other aspects of the conversation.  Mary sees a note attached to the flowers, but Bill is adamant she doesn’t read it.  And I could see why: they were “borrowed” from a patient at the hospital.  Uncle Buddy, the note says.

Makes the poem given to Matt and Julie’s mom on the Christmas episode of It’s Your Move seem like the greatest gift ever, right?  At least that was addressed to the correct person…and personal!

Bill and Mary talk about the subject of marriage, and Mary says she waited two years.  Um, wow, give her an “A” for persistence, some people wait longer.  1970, folks.  Bill tells her that he is there because he “loves” her, but he says it quite awkwardly.  But Mary decides a relationship with Bill just isn’t meant to be, and says “goodbye,” without having to really say goodbye.

And of course Drunken Lou needs a stamp.  Because timing is everything, right? And speaking of timing, it is time for Bill to leave…forever.

Bill leaves, but not before encountering Lou at the door.  Mary gives Lou a stamp (at first, she gives him a Christmas Seal, a sign of the times, folks).  Lou, in his drunken wisdom, says Mary didn’t lose much, but Mary knows the opposite is true – he lost out on a great wife.  Mary feels terrible (“rotten”), but lucky.  She WILL make it after all!

Lou leaves, but not before encountering nosy Rhoda at the door.  She tells Mary  “if that was Bill, you’re not missing much.”  Rhoda heard the whole thing, thanks to a heating duct that goes “all the way up” to Rhoda’s apartment.  And as the chords of the closing theme begin to play under the scene, we see Mary and Rhoda talking to each other, and perhaps the beginnings of a beautiful friendship are blooming.

She’s gonna make it after all, folks!

And with that, the closing theme of the show, the credits, and the knowing that Mary Richards, single and 30 years old (they really drove that fact home alot in this episode, but I guess it was the times?), with her Associate Producer job, her good looks, and fierce determination, was going to do what the theme song declares…in season two.  Because the theme song in season one sings an entirely different tune, and there is no “might here,” just “will.”  She will make it after all!

I’d say she is off to a great start.  And I’m seven episodes in and LOVE this show, so obviously it is off to a great start for me too!  All seventies jokes aside – I’m a child of the 1980s and the world I came of age in is totally different from the one people like Mary Richards (or even my mom) had to work in.  I find it hard to believe how different the world was for a working woman (or a single one, for that matter) in 1970, but how far women have come in those years.  We definitely have Mary Richards (and of course, the woman responsible for her growth, Mary Tyler Moore!) to thank for that progress.

Just think, she would turn the world on with her smile for seven more years, and she was just getting started!

And with the throw of our tam (or rather, the click of the “Publish” button), I close out my tribute to Mary Tyler Moore, and the show that really helped moved single young women forward in the world.  Thank you for that ability, Mary!  You DID make it after all! :-)

Still not amused.

Recap – The Mary Tyler Moore Show “Love Is All Around” I'm gonna write this recap after all!