#esp for the first couple hundred pages

[kestrels-nook]

I didn’t like tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow bc it made me want to call up my childhood best friend and I’m afraid of being vulnerable

[wickedpact]

You can't just drop that "I read Forces Multiplied" bomb on us and not give a ten page written reaction.

[cracks knuckles] if u insist

nicky cant drive hc: destroyed. rip. also i loved how andy and nile stole those sports cars and were being badass and driving off the bridge & meanwhile joe and nicky were just absolutely vibing in the van

'heres the thing about power: people who have it think they deserve it' [shot of police car] i see u greg

5 whole panels being dedicated to booker not being able to unlock his door. booker not even seeing noriko sitting RIGHT THERE in the window at first. incredible

noriko being 24/7 horny was surprising. like wow all of the stuff i saw she did out of context was 100% equally horny in context as it was out of context. love that for her

i didnt think the 'andy + slavery' thing was handled as badly as everyone made it out to be when telling me about it. tho from the way it was talked about i had kind of figured the conflict between andy and nile re: slavery would be really racially charged (esp considering nile is a black american and would obvs have Thoughts on the subject in that regard) but like,, done in a cringey 'a-white-guy-obviously-wrote-it' kind of way? but it wasnt that. i mean. it makes sense that andy would be implicit in slavery through the years

i mean, like she says, is that not what people just did to each other in the aftermath of battles for thousands of years? and i really like how its pointed out that it was what she was raised with (in the beginning when you see her put shackles on that guy after the battle) but she also accepts responsibility for it and acknowledges that it was wrong and not just 'what people did'.

i like how from her expressions you can kind of tell baby andy knew it was off but she sets those feelings aside bc she felt angry. it explains how she felt but didnt make her out to be blameless in it. plus i mean. i dont know, the fact that andy was involved in a lot of morally shady stuff for 7000 years is not that wild for me. if you live that long youre just Going to be involved in some shit, and she didnt even have other immortals with her as positive community influences, she literally just did whatever the fuck she wanted for thousands of years

'i was worshipped as a god once' i mean, yeah no shit she wouldve been involved in some seriously fucked up stuff, gods were fucking scary back in the day

tldr it could use some polish but it wasnt that bad

tho everything people said about moose being boring was unfortunately a little true. sorry king i tried to be interested in you

joe and nicky writing verbal fanfiction about nile and moose was iconic. 'you seeing that?' 'i am definitely seeing that'

it was also extremely funny bc that was like 60% of their contribution to the whole comic, besides kidnapping copley. they came, they wrote some fanfic, they left. kings. at least in tog1 they had an excuse to be useless bc they got kidnapped

joe just found out his old friend who he thought was dead is alive (and also probably wants to murder them) and instead of investigating with andy he stopped to help nile up. champ.

nicky shooting noriko through andy was cool. rip to the concept since it wont happen in tog2

wanna see mr ejiofor deliver this line

on that note imo copley was. weirdly enough, more interesting in fm than in tog1. to me at least. the fact that andy let him live and he was so haunted by what had happened that he came back and sought them out despite knowing they would likely kill him for it bc he wanted to not only make up for what hed done but also to tell them what theyd done for the world was admittedly more interesting than andy just kind of drafting him to the cause and him going 'okie'

i like how nicky was drawn in this one. in opening fire he looks like a blob man but in fm he looks more like a very nice grampa with a very good dye job

'theres no pain like a broken heart' andy 🥺

noriko implying andy's never drowned. .. .idk about that one, she musta drowned sometime

joe and nicky came, they waxed poetic about nile's love life, they waxed poetic about grog, and then they left.

sports bras being a reason humanity is good. i mean..... okay, yeah.

i mean. wild but you cant exactly tell her shes wrong

i liked how noriko telling andy that their purpose is to make people suffer coincides with joe and nicky finding out that they actually did good all those years

joenicky in opening fire: jail for booker jail for booker for 100 years

joenicky when copley tells them he knows where booker is: WE'LL KILL YOU WHERE IS HE

joenicky when copley comes back: if your vibes come off as even remotely rancid we Will destroy you

joenicky 2 minutes later when copley helped them find booker: he made up some ground :)))) <3 lov you j cops

theyre forgiving af

moose: how old are you?? a hundred??? a thousand???

nile [vine voice]: I M 2 7 ?

alright andy you got me there

joe texts like my aunt

i dont know why noriko drowning andy in that car tickled me. Bad And Naughty Andromaches Get Put In The Pear Wiggler To Atone For Their Crimes.

the drowning sequence was cool

copley trying to talk to andy while she was like o_o at him was great

ive hit the picture limit but id seen that panel where nicky goes 'forgive me' as he kills a guy out of context and it was HILARIOUSLY anticlimactic for me to discover that there was literally no context to it. nicky just apologizes to random people he kills. i thought that guy was someone he knew or something. nope its just Some Guy that nicky didnt know from adam

nile's complaint that andy was especially brutal to the guys on the boat... i mean. . , how exactly does one kill a man with an axe and not be brutal about it?

it was funny how noriko kissed andy and the only people who seemed surprised by that were nile and also andy

nicky and joe's complete non-reaction to finding out noriko is alive And Evil Now is endlesly funny. they just left her on that boat and neither cared. i get book and nile not caring but joe and nicky knew her, and they just have 0 input on the subject of what to do with her

pinstripe suit guy!

joe and nicky and booker packing up and leaving with nile

andy blowing up at nile was A Moment tho

i dont know, i get why people didnt like the ending but its. .. . it makes more sense in the comicverse. bc the squad doesnt really. .. interact outside of jobs? i mean, think of the moon landing story in ttt. that was booker and joe and nicky doing a job and andy only showed up a for a couple minutes after it was done. or the brunch in the first issue of opening fire. the squad arent as tight in the comic, and andy often seems to do her own thing outside of work, so andy saying 'i dont want to do work anymore' and the squad being like 'alright bye then' makes more sense in this universe than the movie one

also i feel like greg was Trying to set up a thing where nile becomes the Leader of The Squad after andy dies but like. its not very well done since. . . i mean, nile hasnt spoken to booker since opening fire, (and she only knew him A Day). and shes known joe and nicky all that time, but there isnt really anything that indicates that they have any relationship at all, much less one that's grown. in all the comicverse the only time nile and nicky speak is in FM, and in that scene nicky tells nile about noriko. nile goes from someone who needs to be set aside to have background knowledge explained to her to being the Leader of the group with nothing in between. it kind of... comes out of nowhere.

on the other hand tho... i felt really bad for andy thru the whole thing. well, i always felt bad for andy, but in this one she seemed so miserable, especially since it really felt like none of the others actually.... cared about her. when noriko came back no one asked andy how she was doing (big question ik, but it wouldve showed they cared at least), nobody ever expressed any concern for her, no one even really seemed to want to be around her. in opening fire everyone was more distant than in the movie of course, but there were little moments where she would joke with joe, or nicky would try and comfort her, or stuff like that, but in FM it really felt like they just didnt really care about her. & in opening fire it felt a lot like andy's relationship with nile breathed some new life into her, but in FM it felt like all they did was argue. i get theyre not *as* close in the comics but it really felt like the only person who cared about andy at all was noriko (which was probably also how andy felt) but it just seemed to come out of nowhere. honestly i was reading and i was honestly agreeing with andy that she might just be better off if she did just die. opening fire, on the other hand, never make me feel that way

tho everyone made it sound like when the squad split up it was one of those cursed 'the found family leaves each other at the end of the journey' tropes. but guys i mean,,, this is the second installment out of three. that isnt the End. theyll come back in the third one and Dramatically Reunite to fight some baddies (probably those 'others' noriko mentioned). im guessing yitzhak fits into that too somehow.

anyways it wasnt That Bad but it made me kind of sad and the only Sweet Found Family vibes in it were when they saved booker. also they shouldve beefed up that nilemoose romance, it underwhelmed me. 6.5/10

i also ABSOLUTELY understand all of greg's comments about how you couldnt make FM directly into a movie, he always said that it had no plot and. i get it now. it really didnt have a plot sdfghjkl

[bewires]

I was going through the first five pages of the joenicky tag on ao3, and i noticed a pattern in the fics of certain recognizable authors. I usually don't subscribed to ao3 profiles or tumblrs, only doing that with a select few and you're one of them!

Now, do you think is correct to say that the fandom seems a bit divided into top!Joe authors and bottom!Joe authors? And If yes, do you think you fall into that category?

Hi anon. Thanks for coming to check out my tumblr. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but that's a bit of a leading question. I'm going to try to answer but forgive me if it comes out a little salty.

I don't think the divide is necessarily between top and bottom. I think the divide is more strongly between 'assigning a fixed sexual position between two queer men' and 'finding it distasteful to assign that role and wanting to work against it'.

Why distasteful? Well, in the long history of fandom, almost every m/m pairing has had top/bottom discourse - i.e. which person is the 'top' and which the 'bottom'. And the main critique of that is, it's very much a roundabout way to assign heteronormative gender roles to queer men. The 'bottom' role is often characterized by being shy, submissive, sometimes inexperienced, while the 'top' role is given more allegedly masculine characteristics like being outgoing, dominant protective. If the fic involves darker themes, like non or dubcon, the top will be the aggressor. Now, I don't believe these are inherently masculine or feminine qualities. That's the kind of reduction you'd catch in a Prager U video. But I do believe that assigning these qualities in accordance with who tops and who bottoms really exacerbates already heinous gender roles and it happens by projecting them onto a queer couple, which makes it even more upsetting.

My reading of the text of the old guard is that neither character is shy or reticent or needs the other to protect them. They take care of each other; it's mutual. That's the kind of relationship you rarely see in fiction and that's what I love about it. They're equals. And that's why I don't like assigning these traits to either of them. The source material does an excellent job of not falling into these stereotypes and it's sad that as a fandom we do it anyway.

No discussion of this topic in TOG would be possible without also mentioning that beyond the sexism and homophobia inherent in insisting one character be shy and in need of protecting, there's also the question of racism to be considered.

Joe is a queer, north African man in the world's most established relationship. That is representation not seen often in fiction. What is seen often in fiction is perpetuating long-held stereotypes about north African men being hypermasculine and sexually threatening. This is a racist trope that goes back hundreds of years, and in addition to all the gender issues of assigning top/bottom roles in TOG, assigning Joe in a top role if you're using the above metrics, plays right into these stereotypes, especially when you're writing something dark wherein he is the aggressor, that again, the source material does a decent job of avoiding especially thanks to Marwan Kenzari's acting choices.

So, that's why assigning top and bottom roles is problematic and why specifically assigning Joe a solely top role is problematic. This is why I don't think I could say there is a 'top' side and a 'bottom' side. Because the issues aren't solved by turning it around and saying 'Joe is always the bottom'. This is also a misread of their characterization in my view, and it's also reductive of what it means to be queer. But tbh I haven't seen anyone championing that position, I have seen people championing the position of "wow there is a lot of top Joe content, let's write some more bottom Joe content to even it out because the fandom content is playing into some harmful stereotypes'. And that aim is then not to create the same problem but reversed, it's to treat the relationship with some nuance and show that the caretaking is mutual.

So this is where I'm at anon: I am not in the top or bottom side, I am of the opinion that assigning a fixed sexual position to a queer couple is a problematic and fetishistic (esp in context of the way fandom already fetishises queer identities) way to go about writing them and I don't want to do it, which is why I stopped tagging positions in my fic. And I am not saying I am perfect and never play into these tropes, I definitely have and I am open to criticism about it. But I am trying to do better and for me a part of that is understanding and acknowledging that yeah, it's just fanfiction, but what you read and write has an impact in yourself and your readers and I don't want my impact to be hurtful.

[mhsinjae]

cherry back at it again, my dudes, and you thought i was bad to kiha? well you haven’t met sinjae yet. there’s a lot to unpack, and he’s been through hell like a hundred times over but he’s here and you can have him. but yea so just a fair warning there that he has been through some dark shit. he’s an ex hero tho & now works part time at the red bean.

as always though, like this if you want to plot and i’ll come hit you up! but here’s his profile, his bio and his quirk information!

basics: oh sinjae | 26 | ex pro hero, supernova ( cutthroat sidekick & intern when at u.y ) | currently working part time at the red bean | quirk: explosion

also has funky mutations ( described more in his quirk shit but horns & fangs ) - which like tbh on that note, he is covered in scars that are described more in his profile

so boi grew up with all he could ever want. like good family, good life all that good shit. he got into u.y after deciding he wanted to be a hero!

he had fun there too whilst taking his studies seriously, like he was pretty well known and popular tbh and the top of his class a lot of the time. a lot of people expected him to be a dick as well bcos of his quirk ( esp bcos he has to pop it off sometimes to clear the sweat otherwise like.. dangerous, so he has a doctors note for that good shit, so sometimes just lil popping explosions ) but he’s actually like a nice dude. a good bud that would helpe where he could but was also serious about making it to the top and becoming a strong pro. hence why he picks cutthroat agency

that being said he also drew a lot of unwanted attention to himself through sports festivals and general hero work and well by the time he graduated, and was pretty fresh off the bat at around 20, he was kidnapped during his first major mission as an official sidekick and sold by villains to an illegal trafficking / fighting ring/pit run by other villains

you can probably guess where this is going, but it was brutal there. he’s killed countless and couldn’t put a name to a face even if he tried. he’d be faced with people that wanted to kill him or just survive like him and the crowd would cheer and bet. or he’d be faced with those too young and too weak and scared. he killed them all, having to be brutal against the stronger ones and the weaker ones he tended to do it quickly by snapping their neck of strangling them

they’d beat him a lot too for showing mercy and over all just be worse to him bcos he was a hero

they fought with and without quirks and usually with quirks led o him being drugged with quirk enhancers, and without he was hit with ones limiting them.. so his quirk is pretty fucked up now and it was to the point it was starting to burn him and his skin off around his hands in parts

but uh yea cue over 5 years of that plus being moved around location to location ever few months or weeks, plus lack of food, water and just proper anything and that’s what he went through

heroes eventually crashed the ring and saved as many as they could ( a lot still died, some killed themselves when they got to safety as well ). it took a few days before they realise who sinjae was when he eventually spoke to someone that he recognised bcos he refused to let any of the nurses or doctors or pros near him he didn’t know ( like he was very feral on instinct out of fear ). they all pretty much assumed that sinjae had died though at some point or another considering how long it had been and the case went cold

recovery is a lot, like he’s still going through it obvs and he’s dealing with like a lot still, but he was in a group home for a while with others from the pit but in recent weeks he’s been allowed out to live with a pro he trusts with the confirmation that he’ll continue going to appointments and check ups and stuff

either way, it’s been around a year now since he was rescued and he’s doing better than he initially was, but at the same time he’s still not. like sometimes the old him sorta comes out, but he’s also changed a lot and there’s a lot to unpack there. like his flight or fight instinct is a lot to handle now depending on how good or bad a day he’s having

he does work at the red bean now tho, which tbh he’s only been there for like a week or so since they had to make sure he was gonna be okay but he works part time and only day shifts when there’s a good few people on with him ( workers there will be aware of it all or enough )

also as a general sorta note, he p much hates his quirk now too bcos of 1. the pain is causes him. 2. the noise it makes ( like that freaks him out now ). 3. reminds him how easy it was to kill people with it. 4. he has lost a pretty decent chunk of control over it -- before he used to be able to not link it to his emotions, but now it’s like he thinks one thing and suddenly sparks are popping. because of that and in general how he looks ( he’s heavily scarred as you can imagine ), people that don’t know him sort of assume he’s violent or using his quirk to intimidate. he isn’t

which on that note he comes to u.y at least a couple times a week for private quirk training bcos of all the shit with his quirk and how his control is fucked and his fear and shit. but in general he feels safer at u.y since he knows the staff, it’s a pretty safe location in general and just he knows that there are enough people there to help and stuff

but uh yea.. he’s getting there tho? he’s doing his best but it’s a lot and it’s not good or easy 

connection ideas tho since i suck at plot pages: obvs people he went to school with, heroes he worked with, heroes that were a part of the raid, people he works with / or regular customers, tbh people that maybe knew someone else that was in the pit, someone younger that might remind him of someone in the pit ( probably turns to a more protective plot but could’ve started out angsty? ), angsty but an ex he was with at the time he disappeared, ex fans, students he’d probably seen a lot when he’s at u.y, people that are a dick to him, negative plots in general my brain is too much to think of exacts, protective friends, people he feels comfortable with, someone that goes on walks or hikes with him. and anything else you can think of!

[scarletrebel]

⭐star⭐ waffle at me about your favourite lines youve written

ohhh friend you have opened a pandoras box and i hope you are ready also thank you aha

so i started…….. picking some lines and made the Executive Decision to just do one fic because i was planning on doing a couple from a handful of fics but turns out im far too prone to waffling about this kind of stuff because i love picking things apart and figuring out why they work because i love fuckign words and the things they evoke and stuff so yeah this is just some fave lines from most recent fic, requital. 

this was part of a ‘directors cut’ writer thing and if anyone has any more prompts, feel more than free to send them my way! 

Requital, Chp. 1: 

His honesty, wrapped tightly underneath a chivalrous act; a throwaway comment to soften the exposure of such a question, draws her closer.

She kisses him, and hopes that even though the motion is countless in the amount of times they’ve come together, that the answer is plain enough. A claim, she hears her own words in her head, tasting the tobacco of his morning cigarette on her tongue, the warmth of the pull at his hands on her hips.

so whilst i cant say this section was directly inspired by the ecdysis book, what i can say is that there is definitely some influence going on here, in particular these two lines from the page ‘synesthesia’:

“Wu Ming is a bonfire in the darkness, and she crawls toward his warmth.”

“Wu Ming leaves his questions by the wayside as he is drawn inexorably into the gravity well of her desperate honesty.” 

and thats not something i realised until i was writing the final draft, and im pretty pleased with myself considering not only is requital going to examine some of the similarities between avia and drifter, but also the fact that ecdysis is probably my favourite book. i mean…… ‘drawn inexorably into the gravity well of her desperate honesty’ what the FUCK KIND OF LINE its gorgeous i cant deal with it or this book or this page or how desperately gorgeous the tragedy of drifter and orins relationship is 

also…… look. im a hopeless romantic. always have been, probs always will be, so when i say avia and rook are soulmates i mean it in the cheesiest way possible. right before this is rook feeling a bit self-conscious about the whole awoken engaging thing, and theres no way avia can actually put into words how irrevocably in love she is with rook. so she kisses him, and hopes beyond hope that she can put those feelings into motions if not words. i also enjoy the small bit of possessiveness that came out of her too, because the whole ‘claim’ thing with the awoken was there since the first draft but this section came in the final edit, she thinks of it so casually but when she goes on to say that she’d actually duel anyone who came between them i…….. would not put it past her to be 100% down to do that. 

rook isnt a bonfire in the darkness, he’s an anchor in the deep, a solid tether when the sea becomes a storm. 

(ayyy where the FUCK WAS THAT WHEN I WAS WRITING THIS) 

Requital Chp. 2:

Here’s the thing, if you’ve gone through the trouble of decrypting this (a fortified certain-eyes-only encryption that took me a couple of hundred years to perfect, thank you very much), it at least means you’re interested, so hear me out.

i like this line a lot, for a few reasons. drifter knows avia well enough at this point to be well acquainted with her temper and lack of time for dealing with his nonsense. it’s the first flick of the coin between the two of them, drifter laying the proverbial gauntlet down and at the end of the day, its up to her whether or not she picks it up. 

and she does, avia asks levi to decrypt it, and the first thing she sees is drifter acknowledging that shes done so and asking her to at least hear him out. he’s kind of caught her out, and she can respect that even if thats not at the forefront of her mind. avia also has her own brand of curiosity when it comes to people like the drifter, so this is kind of the first inkling of that. and it also (i hope) makes you wonder if drifter is aware of that curiosity that she has, if he sent the message decrypted on purpose to get her interested. 

She smiles at the note, throws her legs over the bed and stretches around a yawn. Five minutes later, Levi puts her in her armour.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stick around?” The Ghost asks. “We don’t have anything urgent to do. There’s breakfast here.”

Avia hums, considering. She moves into the kitchen, glances over the fridge, the cupboards. She looks then onto the sofa, the sprawled pillows, untidy blankets. Suddenly the armour on her body feels heavy, out of place, like the metal has no right being somewhere like this.

“No. I’m not hungry, let’s go.”

“Okay,” Levi says in that tone of voice that lets her know they aren’t buying it. “Should we walk, or transmat?”

Avia notices the balcony door is still open. She walks over and closes it, the streets barely alive as one or two civilians walk to and fro, glancing idly at each other as they pass. “Transmat.”

avia immediately makes an comment about being all domestic with rook in chapter 1. its just not something that suits her in her own mind, and that line (even though i havent waffled about it bc dear god theres too much here already) was something i immediately knew i wanted if i was going to write a day of domestic bliss with her and her fiance, because i knew it’d be a hard thing for her to just get on with like a normal person aha. 

so, we get this part in chapter 2. the domestic bliss is over, and what avia knows best, what shes always known best, is a set of armour and getting back to work. however this part of herself contradicts that which she’s experienced for the past day, and especially the line ‘Suddenly the armour on her body feels heavy, out of place, like the metal has no right being somewhere like this.’ i put in to really reinforce that idea. its not the metal that feels out of place in this scene, its the person in the metal. and her eagerness to transmat straight to the tower rather than walk through the peaceful city streets shows her tendency to run from such thoughts.

this part came really naturally, actually. its a small snapshot into a bigger struggle avia has with herself (especially given the dreaming city, the reef, petra and now potentially going back to the worst part of the shore with drifter) of where she belongs, and more importantly, if she deserves to belong. which is why levi talks to her in that tone because they know what shes doing, theyve seen it so many times before – avia in a scenario that resembles something normal and running from it with no one around to stop her, because in her subconscious she doesnt believe she deserves it. 

“Ada-1, I believe, has fully settled into the Tower. She becomes more and more tolerable of the Guardians by the day. And with the discovery of Niobe labs, her mood has been favourable.”

i had no idea how fun scarlet was to write until i got to this part. she almost has her own language, really. writing ‘im really proud of ada because i spent all morning with her and she was only snippy with like two guardians and shes been really uplifted and im really happy for her since they found niobe labs’ in scarlets own ‘okay but heres the relevant information’ way of explaining things is a challenge but FUN. like, really fun?? 

because scarlet wouldnt be mentioning adas mood if she didnt care, ya know? and its not that she cant say that longer thing about being proud and stuff, its just that she doesnt see the sense in it and its not important information. like, if avia and eden were to spend a dedicated amount of time whittling her down she would absolutely say ‘i am so proud of ada and also i wanna smooch her face how do i do that as an exo’ but its just not a thing for her. but part of the reason why ada and scarlet being together was an idea that i had was because i imagine that line of thinking probably suits ada. 

“It was at Ada’s request. I had more knowledge of the area in its current state, and felt more comfortable talking to Ikora and her Hidden agents than Ada did…”

supportive exo girlfriends. that is all. man ive gotta write more about these two

“Hmm,” Ada wears a concerned stare masked behind a formal rigidity that Avia knows her Warlock teammate best for.

if im being honest, i just really enjoy this line. i imagine its hard for exos to show concern, esp a character like ada and my girl scarlet, so avia has spent a lot of time dissecting certain facial cues and yeah im proud of how this description came out aha

…as if she hadn’t spent the past few months clipping sidelong comments and threatening him when his Gambit veered out of the realm of her control.

avia is a control freak. plain and simple, and i wanted to make that as obvious as possible considering this sentence is only a few away from avia choosing to go and talk to drifter. 

there’s a certain amount of ‘i need to understand this thing that i have limited knowledge on so i can predict/control/plan for it in the future’ in how avia views drifter in general, its a kind-of warlock way of thinking about things but the big difference is avias need for control in these situations is a) selfish and b) only applies to things that she knows she has a good chance of understanding/taming. shes not going around learning about the hive because she has a good understanding that thats a cosmic threat that can only be defended against until it comes. drifter on the other hand is on her doorstep.

i also really loved the contradiction in putting ‘gambit’ and ‘control’ next to each other in a sentence, i kinda hoped it showed how conflicted avia is about going and talking to drifter, and maybe even how naive it is of her to think that it could turn out okay. 

She was incensed, maybe, at the way he spoke to Ada, needed to go and stomp the idea out of his head but he got her talking, like he does

i like this line bc its avia acknowledging that she knows how shes viewed. she knows everyone sees her as a hot-head, she knows her anger veers away from her sometimes and whilst she’s gotten better at getting a handle on it, it’s still an aspect of her that people who dont know her well enough find it hard to get past. 

i also enjoy how new people to this fic/avia in general might not know that this is a big part of her? so she’s trying to use it as an excuse, ‘well no one can blame me if i say i got really mad because thats what i do’ and it (hopefully) tells new people about that aspect of her character without having to show the worst part of it, the convo with ada being an introduction to it i guess – especially since the past few scenes have seen her a lot softer than im used to writing aha. 

“Dammit,” she mutters under her breath. And walks towards the Drifter before she can make a better decision

fun fact – this line was originally ‘and walks down the corridor before she can make a better decision.’ 

i changed it because i wanted to make it more obvious that avia is making a conscious decision to choose drifter, that she’s walking towards a path that she knows is not a good idea. it provides foreshadowing for the allegiance quest and referring to him as ‘The Drifter’ cements it as an idea that she’s walking towards and not necessarily a person. 

[felixthekoala]

Random Tag!

Tagged by @yoonelf 

ily girl <333

(I also was recently tagged by A TON of peeps but sadly it got buried in my notifs so I can’t find who all tagged me :(  But I kinda meshed multiple together bc they were similar?  So this is like a hybrid)

How tall are you? 5′10

What colour are your eyes? green-blue (they change color a lot, so sometimes they’re more green, sometimes they’re more blue)

Do you wear contacts and/or glasses? Not really?  My parents bought me glasses for my less than 1/4 prescription in one eye just bc it was free with insurance?? idk lol

Do you wear braces? no 

What is your fashion style? It depends on the season, like summer I wear jean shorts and crop tops and sundresses and converse and platform flip flops and fall and winter I wear sweaters and jeans/leggings and uggs.  I always wear off the shoulder tops, though.  they’ re like my go-to style

When were you born? March 30

How old are you? 17 (younger than all of stray kids I know -_-)

Do you have any siblings? older sister

What school/college do you go to? it’s called International School

What kind of student are you? I finished 1st semester Junior year with straight A’s, but my gpa is like a 3.87??

What are your favourite subjects?  Choir and French

What are your favourite movies? Oh god, I love so many movies.  I love every single marvel movie, LOTR, Disney movies (esp Mulan, Moana, and Hercules), 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s the man, oh and I also like a lot of DC movies like Suicide Squad

What are your favourite pastimes? writing, sleeping, playing with my dogs and cats, sleeping, texting my friends

Do you have any regrets? oof so many XD

What is your dream job? idk, like unrealistically I’d love to be a singer/actress, but I know I’d never make it.  More realistically, I’d love to do something that would let me travel and see the world, like a Disney Park travel blogger or something lol

Would you like to get married? yes, but I’m still young rn

Do you want kids? How many? yes, 3

How many countries have you visited? USA, Canada, Mexico, France

What was your scariest dream? oof I have too many omg.  the scariest realistic dream I had was that I got pregnant and the cops were after me bc I was a minor

Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend/significant other? nope, (I’m gonna die alone I just know it XD)

Put your playlist on shuffle and without skipping list the first 15 songs:

(I did my driving playlist which for the most part isn’t English bc it helps me not zone out while driving)

Stuck On You - Up10tion

Transformer - Exo

Silver Spoon - Bts

PACE - 3racha

Love Me Right - Exo

Baby Don’t Like It - Nct

The Eye - Infinite

Campfire - Seventeen

Yestoday - Nct

Awaken - Stray Kids

District 9 - Stray Kids

My Page - Nct

Small Things - 3racha

No More Dream- Bts

Nxt 2 U - 3racha

Song stuck in your mind: Rewrite the Stars 

Last movie I saw: Coco

Last thing I Googled: Sray Kids Caitlin I hate myself omg

Other blogs: @cursedstraykids (don’t look at it, it’s very cursed XD)

Do I get asks: recently I got over 200 in like a few days!!  But before now, it was occasional.  Like not every day, but sometimes I’d get quite a few in a day or something.

Why I chose my username: I had a bunch of urls saved and I made a poll for which one people wanted me to change mine to and felixthekoala won.

Following: 300 blogs

Average amount of sleep: 6-8 hours I’d say?  Idk it depends

Lucky number: 3

What am I wearing: A blue cami and yoga pants.  So fancy.

Dream job: Something involving travel.  (singer/actress as well)

Dream trip: Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Japan, Korea, China, Italy... the list goes on XD

Also I’d love to go on a trip to every Disney property in the world!

Favorite food: Broccoli!!! Also I love Thai food and Kalua Pork.

Play any instruments: Piano

Play(ed) any sports: Used to play soccer at a level down from professional (very competitive).  I had to quit because I was constantly injured.

Hair color: brown (soon to be brown with rose gold ombre!!)

Most iconic song: Hellavator by Stray Kids

Languge you speak/ are learning: I speak English and have taken french for 8/9 years and lived in france for a couple weeks.  I’m not really learning other languages but I kind of pick up on bits and pieces of other languages that I hear, and I watch a lot of foreign movies and tv shows so sometimes I like think in this language called Korfrenglidutchese XD.  Basically I know random words/phrases/exclamations in Dutch, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Italian (I only know the Italian prayer my papa taught me and the curse words he taught me, even though I’m Italian XD), and German.  And it gets hard when in French class I can’t remember the English or French word for blood, and all I can think of is the Korean word...  Stuff like that.  (even though English is my first language XD)

Random Fact: I made a fool of myself on live tv XD  (but that has also not been my first time on tv lol)

Describe yourself as asthetics/things: amusement park roller coasters, Hawaiian sunsets with explosions of color, fuzzy socks and throw blankets, piano cluttered with hundreds of papers of sheet music and chords & lyrics, koalas.  (That’s it.  Just Koalas.  I am a koala. XD)

Tagging: @doublekn0t @realstraykids @maaatryoshka @kpop-stole-my-lyfe @minhomygod @straycuties @bangchanmix @bangchant @bangchcn @meatmeinthemiddle-mark @strgaykids @himeaegyo @hey-hey-chan @jiisung @xxstraykids @s0ftminho @busanjeongin@awoojinstan @bangchanstic

[agwood511]

My Writing Process

Everyone has their own writing style, their own process they go through to complete their novel, WIP. When my passion for writing started, I wrote a series of books (trashy, twilight-esque, vampire novels) and I blew through the series, writing a total of six books each one being around two hundred pages. Not once did I stop to think about outlining my work before writing it or do any kind of planning. It was a research and fact-check as you go type of process and it worked really well for those books. I’m proud of them and I wish I had saved them onto my new computer. 

Since that series, I’ve refined my writing process quite a bit, and this works better for me with all of the stories I’ve come up with since then. Now I am absolutely obsessed with outlining my WIP, and I get super excited when I finish an outline. It feels like I have my book already laid out in front of me and I just have to go in and add detail. My outlining process has several steps in it.

The summary -- The first thing I do is write down my story idea/the summary of my story so I have a general sense of direction. Writing it down gives me a clearer sense of what I’m expecting of my story. I make sure that the idea has a beginning, middle, and end.

Character & World Building -- Before I go too deep into the story development, I like to name and create backgrounds for my characters and any places/worlds I need for their story. It’s a great time to do some preliminary research as well, especially if your book takes place in a real location/time period. Giving the characters a name, physical description and background really helps when you’re writing your story, because you have layers of character development already and a better understanding of how each character will behave.

Chapter-By-Chapter -- Once I’ve made up my main and secondary characters, I start working on a chapter by chapter summary. Each chapter is broken down into bullet points of what I want to see happen during that chapter. Sometimes if I’m not sure how to break the story up into chapters, I’ll write an in depth summary of my story first (an expanded version of step one). I really like planning chapter by chapter because it makes writing the book so much easier, I know exactly what I’m doing and I don’t get lost writing unnecessary scenes that I would be takin out of the story later anyways.

Writing the first draft -- Now that it’s planned out down to the chapter, writing the first draft of your story is a breeze. Planning things out this way, I find that I can knock out a couple completed chapters a day. The planning ends up being the most time consuming part, and then the book is finished in a matter of weeks. In the long run it saves time, and you can work a little longer on the editing portion of the writing process. Reading through your completed novel, esp. after outlining the whole thing, at least I find that I usually have less to edit and I have a better story overall.

Now, having said all of that, I’d like to repeat that everyone has their own writing style and process to get their WIP finished. I also think that a lot of the process really depends on the kind of book you’re writing. Just like with my earliest book series (never to be published) sometimes breezing through it with no planning is the right way to go. It’s totally up to the author. However, if you’re interested in outlining your work before writing it, or if you already outline it but you want to try doing it a little differently, I hope this helps you. I know it works really well for me.

[velvetchen]

Anonymous | pt. i

[ back to masterlist ]

Scenario: Tumblr AU Pairing: Chanyeol/Reader Word Count: 1671 Rating: T 

Summary: You just shot to tumblr fame when the latest chapter of your webtoon went viral. Messages start flooding in – hundreds of people saying things good and bad alike. One anon catches your eye, and you find you just have to reply to them… 

next part >>

You found out when your friends all started calling you. That morning, you woke to your phone bursting with notifications – your twitter, tumblr, texts, everything. You picked up your friend Jia’s next call, your groggy hello met with the sound of her excited screaming. “Y/N! You’re famous! You’re all over the internet today?”

Groaning, you rolled over and checked the time. 8:37, too early for anything. “What?”

“I said, you’re internet famous,” she said. “Strawberry Shortcake just hit it big.”

That shot you awake. You jolted upright and pulled your laptop towards you, logging in and opening your tumblr. “What? Oh my god.”

“I know!” Jia squealed. “Oh my god! You totally deserve it, Y/N, you’ve worked so hard on it. Congratulations!”

Your activity page had numbers you’d never seen before. Reblogs with comments. Your inbox, full. You felt dizzy. “I’ll call you back, Jia,” you said. You didn’t wait before you hung up.

What had just happened?

Opening a new tab, you typed ‘strawberry shortcake tumblr’ into the search bar – and nearly fainted at the results. The first link was your tumblr. The second was an article about it. About you. About your webtoon.

You didn’t know what to feel. The webtoon you’d been working on for more than six months, so far resigned to a few reblogs and barely more than five hundred followers, was suddenly famous.

We Can’t Get Over This Super Cute Romance Webtoon, And Chances Are You Won’t Either

Strawberry Shortcake, a super sweet love story written and illustrated by the owner of the strawberryshortcakecomic tumblr – known only as S – is something we just can’t get enough of. The cute story, light humor and to-die-for cold-hearted, bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold love interests will have you rushing through the chapters and smiling like a fool. The webtoon is available in English on Tumblr and translated to Korean on LINE Webtoon.

You scrolled down to the comments.

iluvBTSxox: aha wow so cute ~ ^o^ prettyboy88: ㅋㅋㅋ so nice blossom3bunny: i love it so much, thanks mika-chan for recommending it~~~

So that was how it had gone viral. Mika-chan, another webtoon artist, ultra-famous for her anime-style webcomics on LINE and tumblr. You felt flattered beyond belief. Immediately, you pulled up her tumblr – and there it was – her reblog of your latest episode along with the caption “one of my favorite webtoons ;o;”.

strawberryshortcakecomic asked: mika-chan!!! Thank you so much for liking my webtoon ;;;;;; I’m so happy you liked it <3 I hope you enjoy my work in the future too!

You’re welcome ㅋㅋㅋ it’s very cute

You couldn’t believe she had replied to you. Much less reblogged your work. It felt surreal. Opening your tumblr inbox, you got to work answering, still on the high of your newfound fame.

Anonymous asked: author-nim~~~~ the last chapter is so nice, please update, when does jinho take yoon ah on the date

I will be updating soon! thank you for liking it

Anonymous asked: that lake scene is so sweet omg

Haha I know right! Thanks :)

Anonymous asked: I CAN’T WAIT ANY LONGER OH GOD THE FEELS!!!

You won’t have to wait much longer, the next chapter will be up soon !!

 You moved to the kitchen with your laptop, setting it down on the counter and opening the fridge to get some yogurt and fruit for breakfast. You sat back down immediately, intent on answering as many new messages as you could.

snsd-superfan asked: i love jinho he’s so hot ugh

;)

Anonymous asked: mika-chan brought me here and can I just say I’m in love with you and your work

Thanks! Love you too anon

The next message stood out, because while so far you had only seen one-liner compliments and messages about your work, this one was much longer. You read on, intrigued:

Anonymous asked: Dear S, I’ve been following you almost since the beginning of Strawberry Shortcake and I wanted to congratulate you on your newfound and very well-deserved fame! I know how hard you’ve worked and how much effort you put into making the chapters for us, your readers. I’m so happy to see you get the fame you were destined for! Now, about the last chapter, hmm. I feel like something is going on with Seong-jin...is he plotting something behind Yoon-ah’s back? Sincerely, C

You thought a minute before you wrote out your reply, pausing in between words to make sure it was perfect. This ‘C’ person had obviously put a lot of thought into their message. At least that’s what it looked like.

Dear C, Thank you very much for your long and thoughtful message! Honestly, I feel extremely surprised. I don’t know what to do with all this fame, haha. I’m so flattered you think I deserve it, and that you’re a long time fan. How long have you been here?

As for the plot...you’ll just have to wait and see. I have a lot of things in store for Seong-jin!

Love, S

You continued scrolling through your inbox, but that was the only message of its kind - which only made you more intrigued. When a reply popped up, you felt yourself swell with a strange excitement.

Anonymous asked: Dear S, you’re very welcome for the praise ^^ I’m sure things will only get better from here. I meant it when I said you deserved all the fame. I’ve been following your blog since the third or fourth episode I think. That was a long time ago! You’ve come so far since then. Your art has improved a lot too. I can’t wait to see what you have planned for Seong-jin. He’s my favorite character (yes, I don’t like Jin-ho! I think he is too perfect...something’s wrong...haha) Sincerely, C

Was it too soon for you to reply? Shrugging, you started typing anyway.

Dear C,

Aw thank you, you’re making me blush lol. Thanks so much for your support! And wow, since the third episode? I don’t even remember that far back, you’re right when you say we’ve come a long way. Thanks for the comment on my art, do you really think so?

I should be offended you don’t like Jin-ho, but maybe you’re on to something ;) kidding, kidding, I don’t want to give away any spoilers. Seong-jin is my favorite character too, he’s very close to me. He was the first character I came up with for SS. At first he was going to be my main character but I made Yoon-ah the main character at the last minute.

Love, S

Anonymous asked: Dear S, I clearly remember the day I found your comic. It was actually reblogged by one of my real-life friends. I was crazy about webtoons so I was super excited to find a new one to read. You didn’t disappoint :) Am I really on the right track about Jin-ho? I mean, he is a vampire, but he still doesn’t have any flaws. I’m guessing that’s intentional. Maybe he’s hiding some dark secret lololol. I hope Yoon-ah ends up with neither of them though, they’re not that nice to her :( Sincerely, C

Dear C,

Oh, please thank your friend then! They must have known me from my other blog ^^

You’re right, it is intentional, but there aren’t any dark secrets coming up...yet. Haha. Jin-ho is that very cliche k-drama character isn’t he! Hot and cold and handsome as hell. I have a lot of fun drawing him. ;) And yeah, neither of them treat Yoon-ah right, but that’s plot progression for you. I’ve already confirmed on this blog that she will end up with one of the two. The ending is still a long ways away but I hope it’s satisfactory!

Love, S

Anonymous asked: Dear S, yes, I’ve been following your other blog too since then! You’re very private haha. But you’re very nice and friendly too ^^ Jin-ho is total eye-candy! My friend has lots of screenshots of all the shower scenes lol. She sends them to me. He is definitely a cliche character, but those can be very fun to read and write too. Even if there aren’t any dark secrets I’m sure he’s still hiding something. Oh well, I hope Yoon-ah ends up with the right one then. I like her a lot and hope she gets a good relationship. I don’t doubt in your ability at all to come up with an amazing ending :) Sincerely, C

Dear C,

Am I private? I guess I must be, since I don’t even have a proper pen name! Aww, you think I’m nice and friendly, thanks, you’re not too bad yourself :)

Your friend has good taste lol. I’ll draw more shower scenes just for her ;) You’re right about cliche characters not having to be one-dimensional. I put a lot of thought into Jin-ho when I was creating him and he’s actually very similar to me. Stubborn, secretly caring, introverted (unfortunately not I’m not as hot lmao). You seem to know a bit about this writing thing, do you write?

Yoon-ah will get the happy ending she deserves! She’s my precious little flower baby.

Love, S

 Anonymous said: Dear S, it’s okay, you can be as private as you want,. I’m just warning you that fans can get a little crazy about finding out who you are...so be careful. No, I don’t write, unless you count writing music, which is a lot different from making webtoons I imagine :) Are you really similar? I guess I’ll have to start paying more attention to Jin-ho from now on. Sincerely, C 

Dear C,

Thanks a lot for the warning! (wow, do you have experience with this fame thing?) I know, just a couple of hours since the explosion and I’m already getting hate. Writing music could be like making a webtoon, hmm...you’re making a story without words. Or with only dialogue. Huh, I guess not really.

Oh no, have I revealed too much? ;)

Why don’t you come off anon? I’d love to talk to you some more.

Love, S

a/n so a little background - like all the scenarios i’ll write this is set in an ambiguous location with no set culture/mix of cultures, so you can take it to be anywhere (i intended korea). webtoons esp. romancey webtoons however are pretty popular in korea so a bunch of the comments and etc will be like on a korean website. after this part the story will mostly be told through a collection of messages, articles, posts & dialogue. also i know asks don’t let u write that much but bear with me ok

[reclaimthestreetssydney]

A vague timeline since 2014

Winter 2014: With Tony Abbott fucking the place up and the success of March In March, it felt like it was time to mobilise again. Reclaim The Streets Sydney crew are assembled. Planning begins. September 6, 2014: In what we thought would be a one-off celebration of community power & contempt for cars we staged a march from Camperdown Memorial Park to Cook Rd (off Addison rd) with a couple of hours dancing on street behind the Vic on the park. Bubbles ensue. Rumour begins to brew about Westconnex related destruction planned for St Peters. December 13, 2014: “Fuck it, we’ll take one of the streets they’re flattening local houses to widen”. Poor communications between cops leads them to think we planned to stay in the park. lol. While the forward commander was arguing the point, 1,000 protesters danced onto the road. January 24, 2015: Residents are given formal notice that their homes are less important than tollway profits. Sometime between January 24 and February 1, out front of a warehouse at 2am: “Yeah mate, ‘King Street Crawl’ would be a great name for a Westconnex demo. Cause it’ll slow it to a crawl…get it? get it?”

February 1, 2015: Captain Newtown gives a rousing speech and 3000 take to King Street to protest the new toll road. The Lord Mayor and the Member for Newtown address half the crowd at the end. The other half is racing down a makeshift slip n slide on the hill next to the brick pits. We earn a Telegraph double spread “Dirty Little Anarchists”

March 22, 2015: RTS forms a Road Bloc at the second March In March. June 27, 2015: “You know what’d be cute? a tour of the areas affected by Westconnex including botanical exploration, poetry readings, kids being adorable, a treasure hunt, and a sing along to Slim Dusty outside the Town and Country”. Roads Minister Duncan Gay did not respond to requests to ‘have a beer with Duncan’. Fun Fact: there was a dinosaur native to St Peters. Look it up. Sometime after June 27, around 10:05pm the RTS Crew run out of wine…

September 13, 2015: The first lockout protest dances from Hyde Park to Taylor Square via Kings Cross. “You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Paaaaaaaartteeeyyy” blares out of the DSS drum n bass rig down George Street. The Surry Hills forward commander sniffs every drink at Taylor Square, highlighting the message.

December 12, 2015: “I spose the lockouts and Westconnex are related…in both cases it’s big money screwing small communities…fuck it, lets run a combo demo down King Street onto Alice Street”. 1,500 people agreed, and we were joined by the anti-racism rally. The Public Order and Riot Squad were caught on film eating fairy floss.

February 9, 2016, 11:52am: NSW Premier Mike Baird is silly enough to gloat about the lockouts on Facebook, creating a social media/media shitstorm. Jansen Brown wins the hashtag trophy with #casinomike. Casino Mike resigns less than a year later.

Sometime between February 9 and March 19, inside The Rocks Police Station: RTS Crew: “there aren’t enough police in NSW to stop 15,000 protesters marching onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge” Duty Inspector: “yes. But we’ll have you in court for months after.” RTS Crew (aside): “not having broken arms and thousands in legal fees sounds preferential. We can always come back with 50,000” RTS Crew to Inspector: “How about the Casino…”

March 18, 2016, in a pub in Enmore cash exchanges hands: “get 40”. March 19, 2016: The rave from Town Hall to the Casino attracts 20 stages, over 100 artists and 5,000 protesters. A giant polystyrene turd is dumped on top of the STAR sculpture out front and 40 rolls of toilet paper are launched at the casino while the crowd chants “Mike Baird’s a wanker”. Punters place bets on racing vibrators with fake money and the sun sets over the festival as it ends in a park next to the harbour nearby.

It was around this time that the Newtown community started to notice the effects of lockouts on their own neighbourhood. On June 5, 2015 Stephanie McCarthy was bashed at the Townie. On April 10, 2016 Isaac Keatinge was beaten on the street. We took these pretty hard. The first Keep Newtown Weird & Safe came together over the following two weeks. Everyone was encouraged to wear whatever they wanted. We billed it as a ‘giant fuck you to anyone who ever tried to make you fit in’. The weather wasn’t kind, but hundreds came out in defiance. We decided it was important to run it every year, for us. June 18, 2016: Broke but not Broken was launched in the lead up to the election, in an attempt to bring the conversation around to absurdly high rents and cost of living. It didn’t work, but we were still happy to have a party in the warehouse homeland. October 1, 2016: The Save Sydney Park Festival failed to save the parts of Sydney Park that are now Westconnex. Also, a bunch of industrial land that could have been bought by the council to make up for the lost green space will instead become apartments for the wealthy. March 19, 2017: Keep Newtown Weird & Safe 2 marches down the whole of King Street and parties on into the night in Sydney Park.

September 7, 2017, 2.15pm: The High Court of Australia fails to stop the Marriage Equality Survey from going ahead. September 23, 2017: 2000 postal voters turn up for our get-out-the-vote Festival in Prince Alfred Park, Signed Sealed Delivered. A perfect day ends with a killer set from Paul & Jonny.

November 13, 2017: A clearly bemused Supreme Court of NSW pressures NSW Police to accept one of the compromise victory party routes we’d offered earlier in the day. When asked why we need to be on that particular part of Oxford Street, our witness in the stand said ‘that’s where all the dirty gay bars are, and that’s what we like’. In his ruling, the judge criticised the marriage survey and reaffirmed our right to protest and party.

November 15, 2017: we won, duh. Under the watchful eye of every cop in the metropolitan region, 3,000 revelers met us at Taylor Square in the early evening and a further 7,000 flooded onto Oxford Street the moment we got moving. We kicked on at Hyde park for a bit and then sent everyone off to their beds/clubs. Special thanks to the sound systems (esp Syd Def Jam & RPK) that hung in there with us, we know you got dicked around heaps but we didn’t really have much choice, the cops really didn’t want us there and made life as hard/vague as possible in the lead-up.

December 12, 2017: In a change from our usual mass mobilisations, we thought we’d go fuck with an inner west council meeting. The Deputy Mayor, Julie Passas, had been super homophobic to someone in our community and the Mayor, Darcy Byrne, was covering for her. We turned up with 30 ‘please resign’ posters with differing rainbow backgrounds. Julie didn’t bother to show up and Darcy ran away when we started asking questions.

January 19, 2018: While we were preoccupied with the marriage equality campaign, Sydney Council slipped in a bunch of new Alcohol Free Zones. So obviously we needed to stage a picnic in an Alcohol Free Zone to show how stupid it is to regulate adults like this. With bands.

January 26, 2018: Crew postered and marshalled for the FIRE’s Invasion Day Rally in the Block. There’s another Keep Newtown Weird & Safe coming up on the 22nd of April, and there might be more actions after that, who knows. If there are, www.reclaimthestreets.com.au should redirect to the relevant facebook event page.

[l0chn3ss]

I got tagged by @happyisahabit, a space fool, a pumpernickel, a baker who has yet to give me baked goods, please give me a cupcake

1. How did you come up with your username and what does it mean?

because anabell is love and anabell is life

2. Which fanfic of yours has the most feedback? (bookmarks/favorites, follows/subscriptions, visitor hits, kudos)

uh... good question

seems like Fleeting has the most reviews and faves with a STAGGERING 26 reviews HAHAHAH

3. What is your FFnNet/AO3 profile icon, and why did you choose it?

@xwynn sheds a tear every time but i goddamn love it

4. Do you have any regular/favourite commenters?

Yeah dude @fluffypuppy77 and @quantamtheory1 for sure, something about seeing them warms my heart tbh. and then those i can’t find on tumblr but are active on ffnet are “Whispered Winters” and “8YearsOfMaka”

5. Is there a fanfic that you keep going back to read again and again?

i’ll be real, i haven’t read much fanfiction lately, but if you force me to put a name on something then i’d say any of @happyisahabit‘s works

6. How many stories are you subscribed to? How many do you have bookmarked?

they’re pretty much outdated and irrelevant now

7. Which AU do you find yourself writing the most?

mythology, fantasy, supernatural, fae, witchy, magical; because i always return to my roots

8. How many people are subscribed and bookmarked to you in total? (you can view this on the stats page)

listen, im thankful the maker of this ask game put where you can find it, but i can’t be arsed to check xD

5 mins later: i found it, but look im so pleased Total views to Profile Page : 1,881 that’s a beautiful number. a really good number. a mirrored, symmetrical number. i like that shit. NO ONE ELSE VIEW MY PROFILE FROM NOW ON. IF THAT NUMBER CHANGES I’LL CRY.

9. Is there something you’d like to write about but are afraid of people judging you for it? (Feeling brave? If so, share it!)

I’ve always wanted to write obiyuki or like z.//e-ki or rusa the og ship id die for, but, one is too old shit, two im not quite there with character understanding and world competence yet but soon i’ll show up, and three the fandom is crazy and i wouldn’t touch it with a 10 meter pole. guess which.

10. Is there anything you would like to be better at? Writing certain scenes or genres, replying to comments, updating better, etc.

to echo liz, FINISHING MY WIPS???? and also writing cute smooches would be cool tho, but im too busy writing angst for that

11. Do you write rarepairs or popular ships more often?

i feel attacked by question eleven and i don’t like it’s tone.

12. How many stories have you posted on FFNet/AO3 to this day (finished and unfinished)?

69 stories on ffnet :) hehehehehehehehehe 69. + 1 cuz i posted one more a couple of days ago. i think there’s a disproportionate amount of unfinished fics to finished fics there too. it’s like schrodinger's cat at this point to my poor subcribers: am i gunna post a new fic or update an old one? if i don’t post you’ll never find out

@rebornfromash​ look hehehe 69

13. How many stories do you have saved in/with your writing program?

don’t.

14. Do you write down story ideas, or just keep them in your head?

i have sticky notes, note cards, notebooks, dump docs on both google drive and word doc and notes on the iphone, slipped pieces of papers jammed into books, and friends who i just burst in and go “hi i have an idea and im going to use the ctrl f function to document my shit”

if i keep it solely in my head then it becomes lost and no longer a concept

15. Have you ever co-authored a story?

yes i have :) good stories, better partners

16. How did you discover FFNet/AO3?

i think my very first time i ever went on the site was caused by @roni-westbrook, a dramione fic called harmony

17. Do you consider yourself to be a popular or famous author in your fandom(s) on FFNet/AO3?

nah

18. Do you have a nickname or fandom name for your readers?

Thirsty Monsters From The Loch. Sip Sip Bish.

19. Was there an author who inspired or encouraged you to write?

one day i took at look at myself, and i went, “are you ready to truly become fandom trash?” and an answer came almost immediately, “hell yeah”

20. What writing advice would you give to a beginning author?

Write. For. Your. Self.

i can’t say that enough because if you decide to let your audience dictate what you write and how well you write and how you feel about your writing due to the lack of reception or lots, you’re just entering a world of hurt. one day you may feel great about your writing because you got over a hundred notes, only to realize that you get at most about 30 for a popular ship and good idea sometimes and can’t figure out why. one day you may feel fabulous about your fic you worked hard on and love what youve done with it, only to see no one else cared. i’ve seen so many friends in pain from this, and i know that pity reblogs and reviews from me are only going to solve a problem in the moment and not in the long run.

you gotta be your own number one fan, realize who youre writing for and why youre writing. and alternatively if you write something for just a remote group of friends or even just one person as a gift, then please realize that their response and reaction will mean more to you than hundreds of others who simply stumbled upon it. ok?

21. Do you plot out your stories, or do you just figure it out as you go?

i plot the skeleton most of the time, but then let the writing dictate where it’s going to go next. yeah you heard it here folks, my plot writes itself, because that’s how you get a realistic and non forced narrative

22. Have you ever gotten a bad comment on a story? If so, what did you do?

wow have y’all ever read that shit fic from 2015 that people took way too seriously? but that’s really it, im truly lucky

23. Is there a certain type of scene that you have a hard time writing? (action, smut, etc..)

A C T I O N

24. What story(s) are you working on now?

this is a call out post and i don’t like this.

25. Do you plan your next project(s) before you finish your current ongoing story(s)?

number twenty four and number twenty five are conspiring against me and i feel attacked

26. Do you have a daily writing goal set for yourself?

Absolutely not because I either do 8K in a night or 10 words in a month and there’s zero ground inbetween

27. Do you think you’ve improved as a writer since you first started?

both yes and no because i’m extremely lucky to have been able to have a great running start in 2015, but i think i plateaued as an author in terms of quality

28. What is your favorite story(s) that you’ve written?

Fleeting is still by far my favorite story because not only is @captainpomelo a great person to work with but also i still think about it to this day, my goal for 2018 is to finish it

29. What is your least favorite story(s) that you’ve written?

shit.fic.of.2015.

30. Where do you see yourself (as a writer) in 5 years?

like, better, hopefully

31. What is the easiest thing about writing?

lyrical writing esp when it’s 3 am and im listening to “i will survive” on repeat

32. What is the hardest thing about writing?

not writing passive voice

33. Why do you write?

it looked fun, and boy was i wrong. it’s suffering.

Lemme get those tags in shout out to everyone previously tagged plus @lucyrne @sabraeal @ilarual @sahdah @fullmetalgrigori​

[ricekrispyjoints]

author about me

Tagged by @frenchibi​ !!!

1. How did you come up with your username and what does it mean?

no it’s not about weed my dad used to call me ricekrispies because of how easily i can crack a lot of my joints. he said i “snap crackle and pop”. so that’s me !

2. Which fanfic of yours has the most feedback? (bookmarks/subscriptions/hits/kudos)

my absolute fave iwaoi piece that i’ve written, Learning to Walk (So that We Can Run) i’m so proud of it and so glad that it’s gotten so much love

3. What is your AO3 profile icon, and why did you choose it?

it’s a manga cap of oikawa going “so fun~” bc i love my son xD

4. Do you have any regular/favourite commenters?

i’ve had a few people who will like, go through and read all my stuff in one go? and tbh i don’t get a lot of comments so really my favorite is everyone who decides to actually comment xD

5. Is there a fanfic that you keep going back to read again and again?

There’s like. so many. i have literally over a hundred haikyuu fics bookmarked alone.

6. How many stories are you subscribed to? How many do you have bookmarked?

according to ao3 i have 12 pages of subscriptions xD some of those have been abandoned i fear but i refuse to unsubscribe in case they return from the dead! bookmarks i have..... idk probably about 200 across all fandoms? the majority of that is haikyuu, but my yoi collection is growing.

7. Which AU do you find yourself writing the most?

i’m not really sure... lately i’ve been working on a lot of trans hc’s, but of my published stuff idk if there’s really a pattern

8. How many people are subscribed and bookmarked to you in total? (you can view this on the stats page)

116 user subs, 1936 bookmarks

9. Is there something you’d like to write about but are afraid of people judging you for it? (Feeling brave? If so, share it!)

at this point i’ve already crossed into writing smut, which was like fear #1 xD

10. Is there anything you would like to be better at? Writing certain scenes or genres, replying to comments, updating better, etc.

I just want to get more stuff written and published! i have so many more ideas than what i’ve actually put out there because I tend to bite off more than i can chew with some AUs...

11. Do you write rarepairs or popular ships more often?

i feel like i write majority iwaoi but of my published stuff it’s only 5/14 haikyuu fics?? xD my drafts folder, on the other hand.... i have a couple “rarepair” ships that i’ve written for (kurodai, hanamatsu) but i think the majority is popular ships

12. How many stories have you posted on AO3 to this day (finished and unfinished)?

19 (but i orphaned a bunch of old johnlock fics lolll): 14 haikyuu, 3 snk, 2 yoi

13. How many stories do you have saved in/with your writing program?

uhhh 122 for fanfic, 84 original

14. Do you write down story ideas, or just keep them in your head?

usually write them down, but sometimes i like to leave them in my head while i kind of play with different ideas, before it becomes a solid story

15. Have you ever co-authored a story?

not yet, but @frenchibi​ and i are gonna do something together !!

16. How did you discover AO3?

probably through tumblr? bc i was living my life on ff.net until suddently ao3 was like. everywhere xD

17. Do you consider yourself to be a popular or famous author in your fandom(s) on AO3?

lmao no not at all xD

18. Do you have a nickname or fandom name for your readers?

pfft no

19. Was there an author who inspired or encouraged you to write?

i don’t really remember? i’ve been writing (non-fandom) since i was a kid, but i don’t know what got me started. childhood is kinda hazy for me D: now, my friends have been a huge inspiration to keep me going, helped beta things for me, bounce ideas around... that kind of thing :)

20. What writing advice would you give to a beginning author?

start small. i mean yes, there are people who are successful at like “this is my first fic ever! it’s an 80k wip!!” but i highly recommend starting with shorter stuff. get a feel for world building, character development (esp if it’s original writing!), and oh my gosh endings ?? the worst.

also just write what you love. if you want to hc everyone in the entire show as a bunch of trans gay people, then do it. who cares if that’s “unrealistic”. who cares! if it makes you happy, do it.

21. Do you plot out your stories, or do you just figure it out as you go?

depends. for short one shots, it’s usually like “oh what if this happened!” and then i just write it all out. for longer things or multi-chapters, i like to outline where i’m going, major plot points, etc. for my longest fic to date (152k) i had a separate like 20k document of backstory, character info, etc.

22. Have you ever gotten a bad comment on a story? If so, what did you do?

happily, no. i’ve had a couple of comments with like, suggestions or polite criticism, but never of the work in general and always really kind and well-meaning.

23. Is there a certain type of scene that you have a hard time writing? (action, smut, etc..)

smut continues to be a challenge, tho i like to think i’m getting better at it? and angst. i love to read it, but i don’t think i’m so good at writing it.

24. What story(s) are you working on now?

currently editing my nanowrimo project, rising, which i have now posted chapter 1 of!

25. Do you plan your next project(s) before you finish your current ongoing story(s)?

i have so many pans in the fire it’s crazy but i do prioritize one particular story at a time

26. Do you have a daily writing goal set for yourself?

honestly no. during nanowrimo i did, but i’m in grad school and unfortunately personal writing has taken a back seat to that

27. Do you think you’ve improved as a writer since you first started?

oh my gosh yes yes yes. a million times. i started when i was like. a child. i have read some of my old stuff and Y I K E S. cringey.

28. What is your favorite story that you’ve written?

definitely my knee surgery recovery fic, but followed closely by an original piece i wrote about my mental illness.

29. What is your least favorite story that you’ve written?

um anything i wrote for the bbc sherlock fandom i orphaned many moons ago. xD

30. Where do you see yourself (as a writer) in 5 years?

i want to get back into a little of my original stuff again, but hopefully continue writing fanfic.

31. What is the easiest thing about writing?

sometimes when you just get into the flow of it and it feels like no time has passed but you’ve written like 4k in one go xD

32. What is the hardest thing about writing?

endings. i don’t know how to finish a story. two of my nanowrimo projects (original fiction) just. are sitting on my comp. unfinished. it hurts :(

33. Why do you write?

because i think language is amazing and i like bending it to what i want to express

thank you so much for tagging me, this was fun and a great way to procrastinate my homework

i don’t really know a lot of authors?? so if you are an author and want to do this, i am officially tagging you :D

[faithfulnews]

Work, Play, Poetry

Work, Play, Poetry

By Anthony Domestico

March 4, 2020

The life of the late novelist Robert Stone was filled with improbabilities. As Madison Smartt Bell puts it in his new biography, Stone, whose globe-spanning novels took on American history and the American soul, had “a taste for marijuana and alcohol (and for quaaludes and opiates).” In the 1960s, Stone was friends with Ken Kesey; you can imagine how much imbibing that entailed. While in Vietnam on a reporting trip, he experimented with heroin. (He “snorted, smoked, [and] possibly drank it on one occasion,” Bell writes.) Yet Stone lived to the ripe age of seventy-seven, writing a strong novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl, two years before he died in 2015. “A connoisseur of women of all varieties,” Bell writes, perhaps a little too forgivingly, “Bob was far from above the occasional fling.” He had an open marriage—so open that he had a child with a family friend in the 1960s and a tempestuous affair with a younger writer three decades later. Yet he stayed with his wife Janice for fifty-five years. By Bell’s reckoning, and it seems accurate, theirs was a happy marriage.

But the most pleasant surprise, for me at least, was the decades-long friendship Stone had with Marilynne Robinson. What a literary odd couple they make: Robinson the proud Calvinist and Stone the lapsed Catholic; Robinson known best for her quiet, lovely novels about mid-century Iowa and Stone known best for his wild, prophetic novels—A Hall of Mirrors (1967), A Flag for Sunrise (1981), and others—all probing the manic brain and corrupted heart of American empire. What must the two writers have talked about? The nature of God, I’m sure. (Stone in an interview: “As a result of having been a Catholic, I’m acutely aware of the difference between a world in which there’s a God and a world in which there isn’t.”) The nature of craft, I imagine. (Stone taught at Johns Hopkins and Yale, among other places.)

Bell was friends with Stone, and his affection for his subject comes through. Writing in the first person, Bell recreates trips the two took to Haiti and conversations they had about fiction’s moral purpose. Despite this love, though, Bell doesn’t hold back, especially when it comes to the suffering brought on by Stone’s addictions. The last hundred or so pages are difficult to read, an onslaught of car crashes—Stone was a terrible driver, even when sober—narcotic dependence, increasingly frequent falls, and an attempted suicide. Stone was charismatic, everyone agrees. He was also destructive, to others occasionally and to himself consistently.

Bell is an accomplished novelist in his own right, and Child of Light, like a good work of fiction, lives through its details. Stone “huffed as much oxygen as possible in a back room of Politics and Prose” before giving a reading. David Milch, the producer of Deadwood, put Stone on the payroll at his production company to give him something to do, and some money, after a stint in rehab. Annie Dillard and Joy Williams vacationed with Stone in the 1990s. (Dillard and Stone went white-water tubing in Missoula and saw a brown bear.)

Stone’s writing offers an imaginative record of America’s political and spiritual dimensions: “That is my subject,” Stone wrote, “America and Americans.” Bell reads this wild life and lasting achievement with grace and sympathy.

Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone Madison Smartt Bell Doubleday, $35, 608 pp.

  Baseball here is a business, and Nemens gives it to us from all angles

Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is the best baseball novel ever written, and I won’t hear otherwise. But The Cactus League, the first novel by Paris Review editor Emily Nemens, is also very good.

If Nemens’s debut is not quite in the same league as The Universal Baseball Association, that’s partly because it’s playing a different game. Coover’s is a postmodern novel about the postmodernism of America’s pastime. (We often care less about the game itself than about its statistical representations—batting averages and win shares.) Nemens’s is a work of straightforward realism. Baseball here is a business, and Nemens gives it to us from all angles: superstar outfielders losing fortunes at the gambling table; groupies hanging out by the bullpen; agents hushing up scandals; elderly stadium organists whose stiff hands can’t hit the keys they once could.

The Cactus League takes place in Arizona during spring training. Each chapter, nine in all, follows a different figure associated with the imaginary Los Angeles Lions franchise. Most of the particulars are right. Nemens knows that Notre Dame’s baseball team is in the ACC, and she nicely skewers the increasing encroachment of hot tubs and goofy sound effects in new ballparks. A lovely small detail: Jason Goodyear, the book’s self-sabotaging superstar, gets a signature sneaker—“the first time they’d named a shoe after a ballplayer since Griffey.”

Not everything works. No fan would call a pitcher a “fastballer,” as one character does. (At least it’s not “speedballer,” à la Bruce Springsteen.) No partial owner could demand that a prominent outfielder be traded because of sexual jealousy—and then have it happen within days. (Partial owners don’t have that much power; star players don’t get traded overnight, especially when their replacement has only played college ball.) Such details wouldn’t much matter in a postmodernist romp. They do here.

But the pacing is good and the prose generally strong. Nemens refuses to engage in the romanticizing many fall into when spring comes around. Bartlett Giamatti famously and poetically said that baseball “is designed to break your heart.” After all, Giamatti rhapsodizes, “the game begins in spring…blossoms in the summer…[and] leaves you to face the fall alone.” Fair enough. But Nemens shows how baseball also breaks your heart for more prosaic reasons: because rotator cuffs fray, because spring-training towns are depressing, and because billion-dollar franchises don’t give a fig about poetry.

The Cactus League Emily Nemens Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27, 288 pp.

  In baseball, there can come a point when you’ve so often been described as underrated that you cease to be underrated. Trot Nixon, for example: a decent right fielder in the early 2000s who Red Sox fans so often dubbed underrated that he became overrated. Charles Portis, the Arkansas-born novelist who was famous for being underrated and who died on February 17, never suffered this fate. There’s a certain kind of greatness that, no matter how many times we remark upon it, will always be underrecognized.

People who know Portis, whose out-of-print novels were reissued in the 1990s, probably know him as the author of True Grit. It’s a great novel, and it’s been made into two great movies. But every shaggy-dog story he wrote, every picaresque comedy of American naiveté and dreaminess, was great. His sentences display a funny, poetic, loose yet disciplined, absolutely American prose style. Since his death, fans have been passing around some of their favorite passages. Here are a few of my own. From The Dogs of the South: “I don’t believe we’ve ever had a President, unless it was tiny James Madison with his short arms, who couldn’t have handled Dupree in a fair fight.” From Masters of Atlantis: “It’s not healthy, locking yourself away in here so you can eat pies and read all these monstrous books with f’s for s’s.”

Rest in peace, Charles Portis.

The Dogs of the South and Masters of Atlantis

  For decades, the poet and critic Paul Mariani has been a shining light for those interested in the Catholic imagination. We can hear Gerard Manley Hopkins, that great poet of the dark night, when Mariani laments no longer being able to see the “greengold grass, / glistening the bright skin of the copper beeches.” And we can hear Hopkins again, that great poet of the shining day, when Mariani describes “know[ing] that somewhere, now as then, the wind keeps whispering still”—the Holy Spirit moving and transfiguring always, even when we can’t sense it.

Mariani’s new work of criticism, The Mystery of It All, is a twilight book. Its epigraph, addressed to his wife of more than fifty years, begins, “Moon, old moon, dear moon, I beg you / answer when I call out to you.” Its final sentences read, “‘In His Will Is Our Peace.’ The very words I have etched into our gravestone.” In recent years, the eighty-year-old Mariani has been diagnosed and treated for brain cancer. This gives his epilogue, titled “On the Work Still to Be Done,” particular force.

Yet what is most striking about this book is how buoyant it is, how joyful is its account of a life of reading and writing. Hopkins, Stevens, Berryman, O’Connor: they’re all here, and Mariani attends both to their smallest formal decisions and their most expansive metaphysical concerns. “I have read and taught Stevens for over fifty years,” he remarks. “He is someone who never ceases to delight.” Great critics are able to turn the readerly delight they experience transitive: to explain it, yes, but also to pass it on to the reader. By this and many other standards, Mariani is a strong critic.

Here he is on Hopkins’s darkness: “All is unselved, untuned, and, just as violin or catgut strings go slack, all clear voweling lost, so do we, the words themselves as if swallowed, until ‘all is enormous dark / Drowned.’” And here he is on Hopkins’s sacramental, perceptual joy: “Look at the Welsh farmers with their horses in the countryside about him, breaking up the moist clods of earth: how the light shines upon them, catching the quartz glints, in an instant turning them into diamondlike shards of light—‘sheer plod’ itself doing this, allowing the plow and the sillion both to shine in God’s light.”

Even and especially in twilight, Mariani shows us the light.

The Mystery of It All Paul Mariani Paraclete Press, $25, 240 pp.

  Even and especially in twilight, Mariani shows us the light.

Hopkins, who broke and remade form in almost everything he wrote, would have loved the poet Jericho Brown. The Tradition is Brown’s third collection of poetry. It’s also his best—the most interesting in form, the most wide-ranging in reference, the most daring in its wedding of the private and public, the spiritual and the sexual.

Brown has talked about reading T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” obsessively while working on this book. Eliot’s influence can be felt in this collection’s sense of tradition speaking to, and being changed by, the present. Eliot’s ghost is here. So too are the ghosts of James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, and Essex Hemphill.

Brown writes several poems in a new form he calls the duplex: a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues. “Though I may not be, I do feel like a bit of a mutt in the world,” Brown has said. Queer, black, and Southern, he wanted to create a form that felt as unlikely as himself. These duplexes work by repetition and reconfiguration. Here’s a snippet:

                        My first love drove a burgundy car.                         He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

Steadfast and awful, my tall father             Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.

Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

As seen here, Brown often writes about trauma: the trauma of being a hurt child or a hurt lover; the trauma of being black in America (“I promise if you hear / Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me”) and the trauma of being queer in America (“My man swears his HIV is better than mine”).

But The Tradition also gives witness to joy—in sex and language, in the traditions of black art and the black church. Brown was raised Baptist, and you can hear this legacy in his imagery and music:

                        Forgive me, I do not wish to sing                         Like Tramaine Hawkins, but Lord if I could                         Become the note she belts halfway into                         The fifth minute of “The Potter’s House”

                        When black vocabulary heralds home-                         Made belief: For any kind of havoc, there is                         Deliverance!

That duplex I quoted from above begins and ends with the same line: “A poem is a gesture toward home.” Brown finds a temporary home, a form of deliverance, in and through tradition in its many forms.

The Tradition Jericho Brown Copper Canyon Press, $17, 110 pp.

Go to the article

[likelovelikesuicide]

Malec - Rant - “True Love Cannot Die”

Ok so… Since 2.10 first aired I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the “I love you” scene between Alec and Magnus. Some seem to think it was too early in their relationship, not fully true or that it was done for the press or even shock value. Also, prior to the episode airing there were a lot of people insisting that Magnus and Alec would break-up following the “fight” over Izzy’s yin fen bullshit.

However, I think the point of their relationship was always this. A story of intense, raw, open, honest, true love from the start. And they both knew that going in...

 Click it or ticket (I did warn you it was long) 

When Alec met Magnus in 1.04 - his world shifted, brightened. We see him really smile for the first time. He’s clearly attracted to Magnus immediately but it’s complicated, he had already accepted that this would never happen for him and the internal struggle he had ignored for years wouldn’t be any easier to get over now than it was when he was a kid. But what if he really could have what he always wanted? Cause... Hey...

When Magnus first saw Alec he KNEW - without even speaking to him, Magnus felt something for Alec the first time their paths crossed and being hundreds of years old he couldn’t help but be curious as to why his body, his heart, his very soul would spark with sudden feelings for this random boy, and a Shadowhunter at that… and after all these years, how could he not chase after that feeling? Anyone would… and goddamn if Alec didn’t look cute when flirted with...

In 1.05 they agree to a date but Clary happens.

In 1.06 their connection becomes palpable after joining together to save Luke. When everyone else leaves, Alec stays with Magnus - I think it’s important that Magnus was completely straightforward with Alec about his feelings from the start, because Alec is the most straightforward, to the point, on mission guy and he never would have read into anything if Magnus hadn’t explicitly and openly told him “for almost a century I’ve closed myself off to feeling anything for anyone... you’ve unlocked something in me” - and the next words Alec is able to say to Magnus are “Look, Magnus, I wish…”  - this small conversation established a mutual attraction, acknowledged requited feelings (and they apparently spent the night together, talking and drinking and flirting and gimme this scene please) it should also be noted that Alec went to Magnus’ despite his orders to stay out of downworld affairs and he acknowledged that he didn't do it for Jace. He did it after being told he was being pushed into a marriage by his family for the clave despite what he wanted - also he liked Magnus.(everyone saw their connection immediately btw)

1.08 brought the wrench into play - Alec was expected to marry a nice shadowhunter girl and take over the institute, as was his birthright and Lydia must have seemed like a perfect solution. They could marry and run the institute and he need never worry about feelings between them…

However, in the following episodes it becomes clear that Alec couldn’t blindly follow the orders of the Clave while also being true to himself. He had no choice but to push Magnus away, but he never expected to find himself battling against Jace and Izzy… however he was determined to follow the plan he had laid out for his life. To do his duty, to honor and restore the Lightwood name… Even as the thought of Magnus nagged at his mind, he pushed forward. Magnus didn’t make it easy on him though… throughout Izzy’s trail and the lead-up to the wedding, he refused to let their connection be forgotten. He wanted Alec for himself, dammit and he wasn’t backing down without a fight.

The thing is, Alec would have married Lydia that day if not for Magnus showing up. In his head he knew marrying Lydia was the right thing to do, for his family - but in his heart and soul he wanted Magnus, it wasn't until the moment that Magnus appeared in the hall that Alec’s head finally found his heart. Because this wasn’t about his family, this wasn’t even about Magnus (well not completely) this was about him. His life. Alec. the boy who wanted to love another boy. And now that boy was here, offering him all of it. He just had to stop… and take it.

So Alec stepped off the altar and kissed Magnus -  He kissed Magnus to thank him, for not giving up on him - he kissed Magnus to show his parents that they couldn’t control this part of him, because this was what he wanted. He wanted a guy, and that guy happened to be Magnus (the High Warlock of Brooklyn) Bane - He kissed Magnus because they had both waited long enough. Then he asked him out for drinks. Good on you Alec!

1.13 was a bit of a rough patch as they dealt with other people's drama and started to actually feel each other out - They both acknowledged that moving forward with this would be complicated for a million reasons. And yet they remained by each other’s side…

As they worked together through s2a they established a comfort and care for each other, a growing respect and a level of security. So when they both agreed to pursue their feelings further in 2.06, they were on level ground and together they chose to dive in. It is clear from the start that they both wanted to be together, in a relationship… a serious one. Neither is looking for a fling or a one night stand or any of that - if they are doing this, they are all in and they both wanted this. Naturally, after time together (traveling, dates, etc.) their mutual desire led them to move forward (and I know a lot of people had issue with the 2.07 “sex scene” but that’s another conversation) - not only intimately but publicly as well.

I think it’s underappreciated that the moment Alec was asked to throw a party for Max, a party specific to his people, his world - he went to Magnus as his partner - because “this, us, it’s not going away” - and they hosted the party as a couple. Together. That is a sign of commitment, and devotion to each other that can’t be overlooked, especially given that traditionally Magnus wouldn’t have even been allowed to attend the shadowhunter party. They present themselves to their conflicting worlds as partner's.

2.09 Both of them realized something was up with Izzy and it’s going to take me a long time to forgive her for all the shit her little drug addiction has caused but … after yelling at Magnus, only to be pushed away by his selfish drugged out sister, Alec finds himself smack dab in the middle of an assault on the institute.

And the next thing he knows he faced with the very real possibility that he’s lost Magnus. For Good. There was every chance that his boyfriend was amongst the dead in the institute and Alec had left him pissed off for something that wasn't his fault…

It’s Canon that Alec spent hours searching, knowing he might find his lover’s dead body at any moment. And he's clearly desperate when he exits the institute with the light of dawn, still searching, at a loss for what to do - So when Magnus finds him, having Alec immediately confess that he’s in love with his boyfriend, was not at all far fetched to me. He’s been in love with Magnus since he kissed him at the wedding .. perhaps longer. And Magnus has been in love with Alec since first sight, because he had the benefit of knowing what the feelings were, how they would grow if explored…

They were always going to fall in love, they both knew that. And more to the point, they both WANTED to fall in love with each other.

 Now, I want to put it out there that the real issue here is the faulty timeline of the show overall. - When you consider all the things that Alec and Magnus have done together (traveling, shopping, sharing personal stories, all the sex, established the loft as home, fighting the war, dealing with their own lives, etc.) - these things require a certain level of extraneous time that simply doesn't exist in the canon story. Everything is always happening 1 day to the next with little to no breaks between the episodes or scenes and THAT is why the timeline of their relationship doesn’t work. Their timeline is not a story issue, it’s a pacing issue that affects the whole show, including all characters, plots and relationships.

Look, we all know I have no life and during the hiatus I did a full scene-by-scene write-up for timeline reference from episode 1.01 to episode 2.10 (it’s legit like 25 pages people, I’m seeking professional help) but for real, Clary has known she was a shadowhunter for, at most, 2 months. And that is pushing it, I’m not kidding. The timeline will never make sense, but as a faithful viewer of both LOST and GLEE, I’m totally used to dysfunctional timelines by now. TV Writers don’t write based on following a 24 hour, 7 day a week concept (unless you’re Jack Bauer) - they write scenes, they fill in the story and the editors splice it together in a way that pulls the audience in… rationality (and continuity) is often left on the editor's floor in favor of drama, and progression of plot.

My point bring, Magnus and Alec shared strong, intense, undeniable feelings from the moment they met. They both wanted to pursue those feelings from the start, despite the complications (Alec agreed to the date in 1.05, damn you Clary) - and they stood by each other through a whole lot of nonsense to get to the point in 2.10 where Alec enters the Opt center and the possibility that he’s lost Magnus hits him for the first time. - Now, Magnus had already almost lost Alec several times, so he was somewhat atoned to this feeling - But for Alec, the idea that he could lose Magnus was new and as he said, terrifying. Esp. given that Magnus is immortal. When Magnus admits he's afraid of losing Alec in 2.07, it seemed silly to him because Alec never considered losing Magnus now that he had chosen this. He didn't need to, his boyfriend is immortal … Plus you have to take into account what Alec considers love - he loves his brother and sister, he loves his parabati. These are people he would lay down his life for, they are the people he trusts to have his back. And Magnus has become one of those people to Alec. He is where Alec goes when he needs advice, or just a break - plus, he brought Alec a kind of happiness he never dreamed he would have. Even his parabati can feel that Alec is happier with Magnus… he wanted this - In a way, the confession was a long time coming for Alec and Magnus, but they both wanted to get there, together.

[kemetic-dreams]

Declassified CIA Documents Show Agency’s Control Over Mainstream Media & Academia By Waking Times Media May 18, 2017 Arjun Walia, Collective-Evolution Waking Times Media A declassified document from the CIA archives in the form of a letter from a CIA task force addressed to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency details the close relationship that exists between the CIA and mainstream media and academia. The document states that the CIA task force “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation,” and that “this has helped us turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success” stories,’ and has contributed to the accuracy of countless others.” Furthermore, it explains how the agency has “persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.” Although it is a document outlining their desire to become more open and transparent, the deception outlined by various whistleblowers (example) requires us to read between the lines and recognize that the relationships shared between intelligence agencies and our sources of information are not always warranted and pose inherent conflicts of interest. Herein lies the problem: What is “national security,” and who determines that definition? JFK bravely told the world that the “dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweigh[] the dangers which are cited to justify it.” He also said that “there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.” “National security” is now an umbrella term used to justify concealing information, but who makes these decisions? You can read more about our world of secrecy and the Black Budget here. Not only are countless documents classified every single year in North America, but false information and “fake news” are routinely dispersed, mainly by mainstream media outlets — a reality that is clearly conveyed in this document and has been expressed by multiple mainstream media journalists themselves. And as with the NSA surveillance program that was exposed by Edward Snowden, it’s a global problem. Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, a prominent German journalist and editor for more than two decades, is one example. He blew the whistle on public television, stating that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agencies under his own name and that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job. (source) Sharyl Attkisson and Amber Lyon, both well-known mainstream media reporters and journalists, have also exposed funded movements by political, corporate, and other special interests, and have revealed that they are routinely paid by the U.S. government as well as foreign governments to selectively report and distort information on certain events. (source)(source) Let’s not forget about Operation Mockingbird, a CIA-based initiative to control mainstream media. The document not only outlines the CIA’s role in media, but also the entire entertainment industry in general, lending further weight to revelations offered by celebrities like Jim Carrey. He appeared as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live, saying that, “For years now, talk show hosts, people on television, people in sitcoms have been, hired by the government to throw you off the tracks, to distract you, to make you laugh and stuff like that, make you happy and docile so you don’t know what’s really going on.” While some question whether he was merely joking, the facts still remain. Another celebrity, who was clearly serious, is Roseanne Barr, who referenced the CIA’s MK Ultra mind control program — a previously classified research program through the CIA’s scientific intelligence division that tested behavioural modification and perception manipulation on human beings. What we seem to have here is an attempt to manipulate public perception of global events through mainstream media and news publications. But what’s perhaps most interesting is the fact that a lot of people are now waking up and seeing through many of these lies and manipulation tactics. Instead of just blindly believing what we hear on television, more people are starting to think critically, do independent research, and examine a wide array of sources and information. So many opportunities have emerged within the past few years allowing others to see this more clearly. One was the recent “fake news” epidemic, where evidence surfaced exposing information that threatened the global elite. Wikileaks is perhaps one of the greatest examples. For mainstream media to basically label everything else as “fake news” was quite ironic, given that it seems the majority of people consider mainstream media themselves to be the real “fake news,” and this is now even more evident given the information presented above in this article. The documents also touch upon the fact that they are constantly in touch with the entertainment industry, giving advice on scenes and direction, as well as how things happened in certain situations. Personally, I feel the industry is largely used to push propaganda, like patriotism. Patriotism is pumped into the population to support a large military in the name of “national security.” We are being fooled, wars are not waged for defence, but for offence and to push forth political agendas. So you see, there are multiple reasons for these CIA connections to various industries. Academia From a young age we’re taught that getting an education is the key to living a good life. Getting a decent job, making good money, even finding the right partner — all depend on following a certain path. Yet many concepts and topics are, as previously illustrated, kept from public viewing, and this includes plenty of important science. The U.S. intelligence community investigated parapsychology (ESP, remote viewing, telepathy, etc.) for more than two decades, for instance. Russell Targ, a physicist who has spent several decades working in a U.S. government program exploring these concepts, recently shared his experience doing so in a TED talk that is now approaching 1 million views. Another great example of Black Budget science comes from Ben Rich, the second director of Lockheed Skunkworks, who worked there from 1975-1991. He’s been called the Father of Stealth, having overseen the development of the first stealth fighter, the F-117 Nighthawk. Before his death, Rich made several shocking open statements about the reality of UFOs and extraterrestrials. “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do it.” “We now have technology to take ET home. No it won’t take someone’s lifetime to do it. There is an error in the equations. We know what it is. We now have the capability to travel to the stars.” “There are two types of UFOs — the ones we build and the ones ‘they’ build.” To read more about those comments and examine the sources, you can refer to this article that goes into more detail about it. Information like this, including testimony from hundreds of others, suggests that the “classified world” is much more advanced than our mainstream one. This particular document states that the agency exposes administrators of academic institutions to the agency on a regular basis. Obviously, as with any other job, the CIA would be looking for what they consider to be qualified individuals. But the document does outline its close relationship with academia in general. This is because certain developments and information that stem from academia could threaten national security and therefore must be kept out of the curriculum, and the public domain. Take, for example, documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that reveal how the U.S. government has been using a secret system to withhold the approval of some applications. This 50-page document was obtained by Kilpatrick Towsend & Stockton, LLP, who commonly represent major tech companies that include Apple, Google, and Twitter (to name a few). You can view that entire document here. (source) The program delaying patent applications is called the Sensitive Application Warning System (SWAS). Usually when an application is submitted for a patent approval, it requires a couple of examiners who work with the Patent Office to go through their process of approval. This process usually takes one to two years, but applications that are filed in SAWS must be approved from several people, and can be delayed for a number of years. One great example (out of many) of delayed patent applications comes from Dr. Gerald F. Ross, who filed a patent application for a new invention he had devised to defeat the jamming of electromagnetic transmissions at specified frequencies. It was not until June 17, 2014 (almost 37 years later) that this patent was granted. (source) It’s important to note (as reported by the Federation of American Scientists — see annotated bibliography) that there were over 5,000 inventions that were under secrecy orders at the end of fiscal year 2014, which marked the highest number of secrecy orders in effect since 1994. (source) Steven Aftergood from the Federation of American Scientists reports: The 1971 list indicates that patents for solar photovoltaic generators were subject to review and possible restriction if the photovoltaics were more than 20% efficient. Energy conversion systems were likewise subject to review and possible restriction if they offered conversion efficiencies “in excess of 70-80%.” (source) This is all thanks to an act many people are unaware of. It’s called the “Invention Secrecy Act,” and it was written in 1951. Under this act, patent applications on new inventions can be subject to secrecy orders, which can restrict their publication if government agencies believe that their disclosure would be harmful to national security. (source)(source) Final Thoughts So, as you see, science and academia in the mainstream world can only go so far. We continue to rely on government institutions to define truth and reality for us, to outline the limits of what is possible. In many instances, these places to which we go to “learn” are actually diminishing, not supporting, our creativity and critical thinking skills. That’s not to say that there aren’t good aspects of the experience, but overall, we are not accessing our full potential. When information is hidden from us as well as manipulated at the same time, it’s only going to spark more curiosity among the people. And that’s one aspect of the current shift in consciousness that’s happening on our planet. We’re beginning to see the human experience in a different light, and starting to recognize that the time for change is really here. What are we going to do about it? This article (Declassified CIA Documents Show Agency’s Control Over Mainstream Media & Academia) was originally created and published by Collective-Evolution. ~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…

[timothyakoonce]

Transcript of How to Produce Content with a Limited Budget

Transcript of How to Produce Content with a Limited Budget written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John: We all need content but what does it take to produce content when you have no budget and no resources and no time. We’re going to talk to Chris Moody about producing content with little budget.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Active Campaign. This is really my new go to CRM, ESP, marketing automation, really low cost, any size business can get into it, starting at like $19 a month. You can keep track of your clients, you can see who is visiting your website, you can follow up based on behavior. Check out active campaign, there will be a link in the show notes but it’s ducttape.me/dtmactive.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, this is John Jantsch and my guest today is Chris Moody. Among other things, he is the content marketing leader at GE Digital. So Chris, thanks for joining me.

Chris: Thanks for having me John.

John: So you know most of my listeners, many of my listeners are small business owners or marketers, working with small business owners and so let’s set the table straight, I mean we’re thinking you know, GE Digital, you got essentially leader GE Digital with content, you’ve got unlimited resources to execute on content but tell me what the reality is for what it is — you know what does that look like for your role.

Chris: Sure and this role specifically I — the title is concept marketing but right now I’m an individual contributor. So that would be the first caveat to say okay there’s some limits of resources and one guy trying to organize a lot of stuff around content marketing right now there are ways we work cross-functionally and tie into other resources but when I first started I actually didn’t have a budget. And this budget season we will have some budget to put towards content marketing but the challenges are extremely different. I came from an acquisition at Oracle which was an Oracle marketing cloud where I running marketing for a content marketing start-up. And we had quite a bit of budget to put towards content because that’s what we were doing, we were marketing to marketers. And now at GE Digital you know we’re trying to close million dollar deals. So you don’t really tweet your way to a million dollar deal or blog your way to a million dollar deal necessarily which puts a different set of constraints on how we try and align marketing to actually driving revenue here.

John: Well let’s start of by — and I know this is an impossible question but at least from your point of view you know, what is — how do you define content? You know when somebody says — when you tell people you’re a content marketing leader I’m sure they’ll like, what does that mean? So how do you define content or can you?

Chris: Sure. I think — Just broadly, it’s essentially everything that we do as marketers. And content marketing is used as a term to categories a certain set of activities but everything we do is a form of content. Every email that we send, every webinar that we do, every presentation that we create, all of this is content marketing and that’s one thing that… it’s not necessarily e-books and whitepapers and blogs, it could be emails and turning your emails into a source of content. So I look at it in the broad sense of the word and say it’s everything that we do, everything is a source of content whether we define it that way or not.

John: Yeah I have been for the last couple of years referring to content as the voice of strategy. And I think that’s sufficiently broad enough but that to me is what it really is. It’s just the various ways you communicate your overall marketing or business strategy.

Chris: Right. I love that.

John: So everybody needs content. I mean as we started talking you know it was fashionable five/six years ago to talk about content as king and I talk about it as content is air now. It pretty much powers every channel. So — but it’s also hard and expensive. So what is a personal on a limited budget to do?

Chris: I think the first step and this is something that Marcus Sheridan has been saying all along; answer questions. For some reason, unbeknownst to me, FAQ pages have gradually disappeared from websites and it became less fashionable to have frequently asked questions on your site. And I know that people turn each question into blog posts which is definitely a best practice. But if you’re not answering every single question that your customers and prospects have and making that content available, someone else will. And the best educator wins and that’s something Marcus has preached, so that’s the first thing I mean interview everyone you work with, talk to sales, what are their most common objection, that’s where I would start just asking the questions. But a lot of it is philosophical and the mindset. I think as marketers, we’ve become entranced by the next big thing. And watching companies that do amazing content regardless of budget and resources right, we woke up to LinkedIn and Hubspot and some of the pioneers of inbound marketing and the great e-books that they create. And sometimes that just doesn’t work for your business. And the approach of trying to hit a home run with everything that you create is one that gives me a lot of angst and drives me crazy because we are not all LinkedIn or Hubspot and sometimes that won’t even work as well as other things in your business so keep a voice and an ear to the ground and understand the voice of your customer, what do they want? What questions are they trying to answer and then you can figure out the best form-factor for that piece of content. But that’s really where everything starts, it’s answering the questions of the people who can drive revenue for you.

John: Yeah and I think another thing that gets really lost in the conversation about you know, more content is more content, is that I think we have to get very good at figuring out what content we need for where the buyer is in a lot of content like blog posts you know maybe are great for awareness, maybe for a little education but you know, don’t we have to actually think about all the intent for our content and create different forms of content for trust building and conversion and nurturing and I think that conversation seems to get lost often in the idea of content just being blog posts.

Chris: That’s exactly right. And that’s where my head is now at GE Digital. I mean we have TV spots, everybody knows General Electric. Pretty much everyone in the world has heard of Thomas Edison. So it’s a completely different set of problems and challenges and opportunities for me as a content marketer to say, “Okay. I’m not trying to tell everyone who GE is or even necessarily who GE Digital is. I’m trying to solve the problems of our customers. And what are those? How do we get content in front of them? ” And how do we interact with sales to make sure that that’s actually getting in front of the customers. And how do we create a strategy for sales where they’re looking for our content, not necessarily us sending that out to them and this is the big thing at Oracle too. You’re marketing your marketing is something no one really talks about, it’s always what’s your most popular blog post, which for me, it’s the blog post about getting sued over a blog post, which is a whole other rabbit we could go down. But I don’t… I don’t necessarily understand why so often we forget what is most important and that’s driving revenue. And it may have nothing to do with blog posts depending on your business and for me right now, my head is not around blog posts, my head is around how do we teach industrial manufacturing companies how they can optimize their productivity because a 1% improvement can be hundreds of millions of dollars. So how am I going to do that as a marketer?

  John: One of the other challenges I see a lot of companies struggle with is you know, content production is a pretty good sized job yet they give it to you know one maybe part-time person in some cases. How do you get — you know and a lot of times that part-time person doesn’t you know they don’t have sales conversations or engineering conversations and so it’s very difficult for them to even produce the content. So how do you make content everyone’s job?

Chris: I think your analogy, your metaphor earlier you know content is air. I think that’s a perfect approach because I’ve always viewed it as kind of this glue or some type of material that transfers across everyone because the job of anyone in content is to figure out what challenges are there for their potential customers and how do we best meet those challenges and no matter your industry, you’re working with subject matter experts. And you know, I’m surrounded by PHDs and people who’ve invented terms you know, acronyms used in manufacturing, some of the people who invented those are peers. And sure, I’m maybe one person but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk to them and try to understand hey, what are you hearing from the customers? And it’s not this formal process, it can just be an email or a phone call, a message on slack. It could be any way of communication. But just checking in and saying what are you hearing? And you can start to put that in Excel or whatever and aggregate the most popular responses. It doesn’t have to be a formal process and I think too often we stay in the marketing bubble and we don’t venture out of that bubble to talk to other people. But almost every time I’ve ever approach anyone in sales or customer support or services and said hey, I’m trying to create content that will help us close deals, I’d love to understand some of the pain points and where you see opportunities, they perk up, they want to have that conversation and that’s how you turn everyone else into content practitioners. You help them understand you know, we can talk on the phone for 30 minutes and record that and then I can go back and create in written form or maybe we do a podcast, like we’re talking on the phone right now and this is a form of content, you’ll turn that into a blog post and then you’ll share it on social media. It’s the exact same approach but there’s this fear of the blinking cursor and I think that’s the laziness of many of us in our profession is to say, hey Joe, I need you to write a blog post. Hey Joe, I need you to write a white paper. And when you stare at a blank word document or blank Google doc, it’s completely different to saying I’d love to ask you some questions and really understand what you’re encountering. So that you know, journalistic approach I think it turns everyone into content practitioners because they don’t necessarily have to write it.

John: I think to some degree it’s a culture shift in an organization too because so many people have you know, marketing known’s marketing people are over there producing all the content and I think you hit on a very good point, I think there’s a lot of people that would love to be asked because they actually do have better insight into the customer or better insight into the challenges of the customer and so you’re almost doing a disservice to the organization but not including them.

Chris: I completely agree and the sad reality of marketing right now — I mean the a group did a study a couple of years ago and 80% of CEOs aren’t satisfied with their marketing teams. 80%. And when you think about that what are the reasons? And when you dive into that it’s usually tied back to revenue or profitability or understanding the numbers. And for us to assume that we have the answers and we can you know figure it out with Google search or Google trends, which sometimes those are indicators. But in many industries, they may not be as digital savvy as marketing to marketers. So that may not be an accurate trend line. It may be people inside the walls and talking to them. So I completely agree with you. It’s a disservice not to talk to those folks and it’s not something that’s hard to do in practice, it just requires picking up the phone or walking somewhere else in the office.

John: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Thriveleads. This is a tool that we used on the Duct Tape Marketing website thoroughly for content upgrades, for slide-in boxes, actually we even used the visual editor for all the pages and landing pages that we designed. So go check it out at ducttapemarketing.com we’ll have a special link in the show notes for today and check it out.

So you mentioned answering questions is a great way to generate or get ideas for content. I will tell you another way that I’ve used for years with organizations is you know those engineering folks or sales folks or service folks probably are sitting on a treasure trove of content in their sent email.

Chris: Yep.

John: So you know again another great place to go and find you know highly technical answers and consultative you know approaches that you probably can turn into things — and in many cases probably repeat themselves.

Chris: That’s exactly right. I mean how many times have we sent emails and then you know you’ve sent it, but you can’t find it. And you search and you search and you search and you can’t find the exact one. One thing — we had a customer that was a large seller of tires online, which that narrows it down to two really. So you can figure out which one. They set up a system where they BCC’ed every email and it was specific to each sales rep. But it put it into the marketing platform but it put it into a content marketing system for a marketing manager could strip out the personally identifying information and say, alright instead of this thing, dear John, here are the three best tires for your Honda Odyssey in the Winter – they turn it into a blog post; three best tires for Honda Odyssey in Winter season. Or something like that. And then they go through and they add pictures and links to the store and every link has a trackable code that attributes to the sales rep. So what actually happened there is those emails they were sending that died in their inbox, they turned into blog posts and then the blog posts can get pulled into emails and marketing automation and anytime someone clicks to buy, the rep got paid. And that’s a very simply cycle to create. So I’m with you, I think that’s one of the single biggest opportunities because someone will say oh I can’t right, I’m not a content person. And then you ask them how many emails do you send a day and I guarantee you they’re sending tons of emails so I complete agree with you there I think that’s a great thing to recommend to anyone.

John: Another thing that I again, I work with so many business owners that getting them to do this is really tough so I try and come up with as many shortcuts as possible or ways for them to leverage what they’ve already done. And so I’ve been preaching this idea of planned repurposing, so in other words, if you’re going to write — you know you write one big blog post about seven ways to do X, Y and Z and then with the idea that all seven of those will eventually become a blog post as well. Any thoughts on ways to get more efficient like that? Chris: I think that’s a great way to do it. Plan out the pillar piece and then the smaller pieces. You know another thing, most people don’t go back and look at the content that’s being created. And there’s always this assumption that everyone has seen it. I hear this at every company I’ve ever been, oh we’ve used that, we’ve used that in that campaign. Right, but what’s your open rate? What’s your click rate? There are so many people that have never seen anything.

John: Yeah there’s no question. In fact, another really great tactic for someone who’s been producing content for years is to go back and re-optimize and all of that, update it, freshen it up, get rid of the bad links, change the images is a great way to take a piece that maybe has been serving you for years and bring it back to new life.

Chris: I completely agree and we ran into this at Oracle, we combined social and content into one group. And it was a net new team and the first year we create tons and tons of content and then the next year we came back and said we’re creating 25% of the content we created last year and there was an initial freak-out, but we had a baseline, we had analytics, we could track what was working and the waterfall approach to leads, and we went back and updated lots of things and everything you said we did and then you know, updating statistics and the introduction, the look and feel and the design or turning it into a different form factor, take the blog post and make it an e-book or a slideshow presentation. And that’s something that — it’s just sitting there and I don’t — I’m not necessarily sure why we do it, it feels like it’s when we default back to activities based marketing, so not thinking about what are ways we could save time and energy but there’s so much content that we could continue to use. If you’ve ever created content, you can go back and search for that and something from 2014 is probably 80% accurate for 2017 with just a little bit of polish.

John: So this idea of you know everyone’s finally come around to I need to produce content. A lot of the folks out there you know leading the charge years ago are producing tons and tons of content I mean Hubspot’s probably producing five new e-books every week it seems like. You know are we at a point where people are just — it almost becomes worthless because there’s so much of it? We can’t consume it, we can’t even filter it? Or where do you think we are with the state of content?

Chris: I go back and forth on this. I know you’ve had Mark on the podcast, Mark Schafer and he coined the term content shock and there are many elements of that that I agree with because there is an abundance of content. But there’s not always an abundance of relevant content. Especially tied to the buying’s journey which you were talking about before. I mean if someone’s comparing products and they’re at that last stage in comparing your marketing automation to another person’s marketing automation or your jet engine to another jet engine regardless of what it is, to throw your hands up and say well yeah, people have already created that content, I think that’s another fallacy. It’s something where if they want to know it, you will continue to research it. If you’re buying a car you don’t get fed up and close your laptop and say you know I just can’t read any more about Camri versus Accord, you want to read everything until you feel comfortable with that decision because everyone knows the stats too. So much of the buyer’s process is done before you ever talk to anyone. So no matter how much content gets created there’s always a need for relevant content.

John: Let’s end up today with — I always like to talk to people about tools. What are some of your favorite tools for consuming, creating, tracking content?

Chris: You know I’ve kind of turned into a curmudgeon a little bit with this. I guess Mark was right with the content shock. I’ve started to parse down and surprisingly enough, I’m using LinkedIn and Facebook a lot more than I ever thought I would. And the reason for that is everyone’s already curating the content. If you build a decent network — I don’t necessarily have to go outside and use tools and set up RSS readers and try to parse through content. If I’m surrounding myself with smart people I can pull on what they’re creating. Because many of them are much better than I am at that, you know one example — well obviously Duct Tape Marketing I’ve been following that for years but look at what Scott Montey has done you know his weekly digest… it’s gold. I don’t think I could do that if I spent an hour, two hours a week trying to find the best content. So it’s the whole you know, the five people you spend the most time with, the profound impact it has the Jim Rohn quote — that may be a copout answer but Facebook has been a great tool for me because I surround myself with people who are much smarter than I am and I defer what they’re curating.

John: I think you’re actually identifying a pretty significant trend. I think a lot of people are. I think they’re even some statistics that suggest people are doing fewer and fewer searches because of you know, instead of turning to a search engine they’re going to Facebook or as you said, LinkedIn and just looking at the groups they belong to or the folks that they follow. And I think that’s probably something we’re going to see more and more of that Facebook groups have actually made Facebook more useful again. Chris: Yeah I completely agree with that and you know I watch TED talks, I’m a sucker for those and I know some of them are old and outdated but that’s something that I like to do, TED talks and podcasts. That probably is the original source where I go through and watch those and I even watched an old Tony Robbins one and there was quote which was exactly what we’re talking about, he said casually, almost a throwaway line, “The defining factor is never resources, it’s resourcefulness.” And I thought that was one of those Ah ha! Moments where I paused the video and switched to that tab or whatever I was doing and wrote that down because I think no matter the size of the company, how much money we have or how many people we have, even with $100 million budget it’s the execution that makes the difference. So that resourcefulness and taking some of the tips we talked about today, that’s what can really differentiate you, regardless of what your company sells or does.

John: So true. So Chris, where umm — would you suggest people who would like to engage you or find out more about what you’re doing, where would you have them check you out?

Chris: Sure. I’d probably say LinkedIn. Connect on LinkedIn or Facebook, either one it’s just Chris Moody so Linkedin.com/Chris Moody. I have a blog where I don’t really blog frequently that’s Chris-Moody so if you want to go to Chris-Moody.com and read about me being sued over a blog post which is still the number one blog post that’s a pretty entertaining sort.

John: Well great we’ll actually put those links in the show notes as well. So Chris thanks for taking a moment to share about content and content marketing and hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road soon.

Chris: Thanks for having me John.

from Duct Tape Marketing https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/transcript-produce-content-limited-budget/