#every single section is so short except the one where i start writing an essay abt anime oops

[bronanlynch]

extremely funny to me that most of this is like. yeah I'm still into the same stuff as I was last week. except I watched an entire anime don't worry about it

listening (podcasts): my usual slate of podcasts this week. still enjoying the Great Gundam Project episodes on Wing, love to hear them talk about the ways in which the ending becomes thematically incoherent because I too was uhhhh not sure how to feel about the ending of Wing

the AMCA bonus episode on their Starcruiser experience was also excellent. I'm glad they're glad they went but I think it sounds kind of miserable and like I would have hated it if hypothetically I had gone to D*sney while it was open

as usual shout out to Palisade. I'm so excited for the new Kesh princess and also I love every time we see my beloved double agent poster child Elle Evensong

also, there was a new Media Club Plus this week, and I love to hear Keith (generally disinterested in fictional romance) discover that Kurapika & Leorio are in love

listening (music): still on my Three Days Grace kick. shout out to Animal I Have Become. AMV song of all time. no AMVs to rec here because once again the lack of a Fire Emblem 3 Houses anime means there's no Dimitri AMV to that song

reading: my only reading this week was my two before-bed books, Rule of Wolves and Water Outlaws. Rule of Wolves continues to be fine I guess. today I want to complain about how this is yet another example of a fantasy world that draws from real history & has societal/governmental systems based on patrilineal inheritance and the importance of passing on your position & wealth to your biological offspring that acts like homophobia magically does not exist. there's inexplicably one (1) married lesbian couple. like. as if the author forgot to incorporate queer people into the worldbuilding and then just slapped some lesbian side characters in there without thinking about what it would be like for them in that world. got some Skyrim "you the player character can get gay married but literally no one else can" energy going on

Water Outlaws, on the other hand, continues to fucking rule. there's a politician who fucking sucks, and a lady scientist being coerced into doing unethical science-magic, and also so many women who do crime & fight with so many different cool weapons

watching: forgot to talk about the Ahsoka show last week. this is because it continues to not be a very well-made television show. at time of writing, I haven't seen the finale yet

rewatched a couple more episodes of Hunter x Hunter to keep up with Media Club Plus. really solidifying my Kurapika bias this time around <3

and now for the main thing I watched this week, the entirety of Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 (for full disclosure I had previously watched the first 11ish episodes last summer before getting distracted by LoGH, and then restarted it last week to watch from the beginning with my roommate). truly it is a fucking delight to watch something that's had so much influence on so many other stories that I'm into and find out that it's also really enjoyable on its own merits as well as being extremely cool to find out where so many genre staples come from. I love the weird synth beeps in the soundtrack, I love when the animation gets super stylized and you can see the pencil shading, I love the gorgeous painted backgrounds. I was already starting to become a Cares About Mobile Suit Designs guy after GWitch/getting into gunpla but now I fully am that kind of guy because there are some incredibly fun designs in there (shout out to the Mad Angler, the coolest fucked up whale submarine I've seen in my life). I love the White Base crew and I love all the bits about how they're being exploited by the military even though they're traumatized teenagers being forced into perpetuating the horrors of war. I love when characters in Gundam just straight-up say the themes of Gundam.

ok now that I'm done gushing. I do have mixed feelings about the last ten or so episodes. (I know the pacing gets a bit wonky because the show got cancelled, that's not what I'm talking about) the thing is, is that I really want to like the Newtype stuff. I think it fucking rules that Amuro is neurodivergent in a way that's seen as useful/profitable and therefore the military is exploiting him even harder (it sucks for Amuro obviously but like, it rules for me, the guy who likes to explore that sort of theme). however. I don't think it's necessarily a great look to have some people start to develop special abilities that make them far more powerful than ordinary humans & refer to them as more advanced/the next step for humanity in the same story where the antagonists are fascists who repeatedly invoke Nietzschean ubermensch rhetoric like. it's kind of the flipside of how oppression allegories are so often deeply flawed because they give the prejudice a basis in the objective truths of the world (legitimizing the justification for the oppression by making the oppressed group dangerous in some way, i.e. the fire powers in Promare). here it's kind of a reverse of that, in that the Newtypes are framed as superhuman rather than subhuman, but that lines up with the fascist rhetoric and makes it based in the factual reality of the worldbuilding in a way that I personally am not super comfortable with. anyway.

like I am gonna watch more UC so I'm curious to see where any of this goes and I'm sure my analysis will develop as I see more but. my initial reaction is. hmm don't love that

playing: continuing to play Ace Attorney 5. 5-4 is still fun so far! however I am a little disappointed that I only got to play as Apollo for such a short time. that's my boy and I miss him already :(

making: no pictures this week but we made chicken florentine from this recipe (with added mushrooms). sorry for being basic but butter/garlic/herbs/white wine is a good flavor combo that makes your kitchen smell very good

drinking: for once something slightly less blatantly seasonal, Pumphouse's Crafty Radler (blood orange & peach flavor). which fucks. often I find peach-flavored drinks don't have enough peach because peach is kind of a more delicate flavor. this nailed it, the peach and the blood orange both come through really nicely

in non-alcoholic drinks, shout out to mulled cider and also mulling spices in general. godtier spice combination

writing: most of my writing was for a zine fic so I can't talk about it yet. also I've been editing t4t yurivain but uhhhh less than I meant to because I can't edit and watch anime at the same time

[dwellordream]

“...The letters, biographies, memoirs, and diaries that recorded Victorian women’s lives are essential sources for differentiating friendship, erotic obsession, and sexual partnership between women. The distinctions are subtle, for Victorians routinely used startlingly romantic language to describe how women felt about female friends and acquaintances. In her youth, Anne Thackeray (later Ritchie) recorded in an 1854 journal entry how she “fell in love with Miss Geraldine Mildmay” at one party and Lady Georgina Fullerton “won [her] heart” at another. In reminiscences written for her daughter in 1881, Augusta Becher (1830–1888) recalled a deep childhood love for a cousin a few years older than she was: “From my earliest recollections I adored her, following her and content to sit at her feet like a dog.”

At the other extreme of the life cycle, the seventy one-year-old Ann Gilbert (1782–1866), who cowrote the poem now known as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” appreciatively described “the latter years of . . . friendship” with her friend Mrs. Mackintosh as “the gathering of the last ripe figs, here and there, one on the topmost bough!” Gilbert used similar imagery in an 1861 poem she sent to another woman celebrating the endurance of a friendship begun in childhood: “As rose leaves in a china Jar / Breathe still of blooming seasons past, / E’en so, old women as they are / Still doth the young affection last.” Gilbert’s metaphors, drawn from the language of flowers and the repertoire of romantic poetry, asserted that friendship between women was as vital and fertile as the biological reproduction and female sexuality to which figures of fruitfulness commonly alluded.

Friendship was so pervasive in Victorian women’s life writing because middle-class Victorians treated friendship and family life as complementary. Close relationships between women that began when both were single often survived marriage and maternity. In the Memoir of Mary Lundie Duncan (1842) that Duncan’s mother wrote two years after her daughter’s early death at age twenty-five, the maternal biographer included many letters Duncan (1814–1840) wrote to friends, including one penned six weeks after the birth of her first child: “My beloved friend, do not think that I have been so long silent because all my love is centered in my new and most interesting charge. It is not so. My heart turns to you as it was ever wont to do, with deep and fond affection, and my love for my sweet babe makes me feel even more the value of your friendship.”

Men respected women’s friendships as a component of family life for wives and mothers. Charlotte Hanbury’s 1905 Life of her missionary sister Caroline Head included a letter that the Reverend Charles Fox wrote to Head in 1877, soon after the birth of her first child: “I want desperately to see you and that prodigy of a boy, and that perfection of a husband, and that well-tried and well-beloved sister-friend of yours, Emma Waithman.” Although Head and Waithman never combined households, their regular correspondence, extended visits, and frequent travels were sufficient for Fox to assign Waithman a socially legible status as an informal family member, a “sister-friend” listed immediately after Head’s son and husband. 

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf lamented that a woman born in the 1840s would not be able to report what she was “doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875,” for “[n]othing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it.” Yet as an avid reader of Victorian life writing, Woolf had every reason to be aware that in the very British Library where her speaker researches her lecture, hundreds of autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, diaries, and letters provided exhaustive records of what women did on almost every day of the nineteenth century. 

One cannot fault Woolf excessively for having discounted Victorian women’s life writing, for even today few consult this corpus and no scholar of Victorian England has used it to explore the history of female friendship. Scholars of autobiography concentrate on a handful of works by exceptional women, and historians of gender and sexuality have drawn primarily on fiction, parliamentary reports, journalism, legal cases, and medical and scientific discourse, which emphasize disruption, disorder, scandal, infractions, and pathology. Life writing, by contrast, emphasized ordinariness and typicality, which is precisely what makes it a unique source for scholarship. 

The term “life writing” refers to the heterogeneous array of published, privately printed, and unpublished diaries, correspondence, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, reminiscences, and recollections that Victorians and their descendants had a prodigious appetite for reading and writing. Literary critics have noted the relative paucity of autobiographies by women that fulfill the aesthetic criteria of a coherent, self-conscious narrative focused on a strictly demarcated individual self. Women’s own words about their lives, however, are abundantly represented in the more capacious genre of life writing, defined as any text that narrates or documents a subject’s life. 

The autobiographical requirement of a unified individual life story was irrelevant for Victorian life writing, a hybrid genre that freely combined multiple narrators and sources, and incorporated long extracts from a subject’s diaries, correspondence, and private papers alongside testimonials from friends and family members. A single text might blend the journal’s dailiness and immediacy and a letter’s short term retrospect with the long view of elderly writers reflecting on their lives, or the backward and forward glances of family members who had survived their subjects. 

For example, Christabel Coleridge was the nominal author of Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (1903), but the text begins by reproducing an unpublished autobiographical essay Yonge wrote in 1877, intercalated with remarks by Coleridge. The sections of the Life written by Coleridge, conversely, consist of long extracts from Yonge’s letters that take up almost as much space as Coleridge’s own words. Coleridge undertook the biography out of personal friendship for Yonge, and its dialogic form mimics the structure of a social relationship conducted through conversation and correspondence.

The biographer was less an author than an editor who gathered and commented on a subject’s writings without generating an autonomous narrative of her life. Reticence was paradoxically characteristic of Victorian life writing, which was as defined by the drive to conceal life stories as it was indicative of a compulsion to transmit them. This was true of life writing by and about men as well as by and about women. The authors of biographies often did not name themselves directly. Instead they subsumed their identities into those of their subjects. Authors who knew their subjects intimately as children, spouses, or parents usually adopted a deliberately impersonal tone, avoiding the first person whenever possible. 

In her anonymous biography of her daughter Mary Duncan, for example, Mary Lundie completely avoided writing in the first person and was sparing even with third-person references to herself as Duncan’s “surviving parent” or “her mother” (243, 297). The materials used in biographies and autobiographies were similarly discreet, and the diaries that formed the basis of much life writing revealed little about their authors’ lives. Victorian life writers who published diary excerpts valued them for their very failure to unveil mysteries, often praising the diarist’s “reserve” and hastening to explain that the diaries cited did “not pretend to reveal personal secrets.”

Although we now expect diaries to be private outpourings of a self confronting forbidden desires and confiding scandalous secrets, only a handful of authenticated Victorian diaries recorded sexual lives in any detail, and none can be called typical. Unrevealing diaries, on the other hand, were plentiful in an era when keeping a journal was common enough for printers to sell preprinted and preformatted diaries and locked diaries were unusual. Preformatted diaries adopted features of almanacs and account books, and journals synchronized personal life with the external rhythms of the clock, the calendar, and the household, not the unpredictable pulses of the heart.

Diaries were rarely meant for the diarist’s eyes alone, which explains why biographers had no compunction about publishing large portions of their subjects’ journals with no prefatory justifications. Girls and women read their diaries aloud to sisters or friends, and locked diaries were so uncommon that Ethel Smyth, born in 1858, still remembered sixty years later how her elders had disapproved when she started keeping a secret diary as a child. Some diarists even explicitly wrote for others, sharing their journals with readers in the present and addressing them to private and public audiences in the future. By the 1840s, published diaries had created a popular consciousness, and self-consciousness, about the diary form. 

In 1856, at age fourteen, Louisa Knightley (1842–1913), later a conservative feminist philanthropist, began to keep journals “written with a view to publication” and modeled on works such as Fanny Burney’s diaries, published in 1842. When the working-class Edwin Waugh began to keep a diary in 1847, his first step was to paste into it newspaper clippings about how to keep a journal. One young girl included diary extracts in letters to her cousin in the 1840s. Princess Victoria was instructed in how to keep a daily journal by her beloved governess, Lehzen, and until Victoria became Queen, her mother inspected her diaries daily.

Diarists often wrote for prospective readers and selves, addressing journal entries to their children, writing annual summaries that assessed the previous year’s entries, or rereading and annotating a life’s worth of diaries in old age. Journals were a tool for monitoring spiritual progress on a daily basis and over the course of a lifetime. Diarists periodically reread their journals so that by comparing past acts with present outcomes they could improve themselves in the future. A Beloved Mother: Life of Hannah S. Allen. By Her Daughter (1884) excerpted a journal Allen (1813–1880) started in 1836 and then reread in 1876, when she dedicated it to her daughters: “To my dear girls, that they may see the way in which the Lord has led me.”

Far from being a repository of the most secret self, the diary was seen as a didactic legacy, one of the links in a family history’s chain. Victorian women’s diaries combined impersonality with lack of incident. Although Marian Bradley (1831–1910) wrote, “My diary is entirely a record of my inner life—the outer life is not varied. Quiet and pleasant but nothing worth recording occurs,” she in fact devoted hundreds of pages to recording an outer life that she accurately characterized as regular and predictable. Indeed, the stability and relentless routine that diaries labored to convey goes far to explain why Victorians were so eager to read the poetry that lyrically expressed spontaneous emotion and the novels that injected eventfulness and suspense into everyday life. 

Diaries and novels had common origins in spiritual autobiography, and diaries played a dramatic role in Victorian fiction, but although diaries shared quotidian subjects and diurnal rhythms with novels, they were rarely novelistic. Most diarists produced chronicles that testified to a woman’s success in developing the discipline necessary to ensure that each day was much like the rest, and even travel diaries were filled not with impressions but descriptions similar to those found in guidebooks. When something unusually tumultuous took place, it often interrupted a woman’s daily writing and went unrecorded.”

- Sharon Marcus, “Friendship and the Play of the System.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

[purplepalmdelight]

why life is still okay (rambling fic rec pt. 1)

firstly: shout out to @trulyalpha for apparently owning my entire bookmarks page on ao3 (bc i only realised all my favourite fics were written by the same person,,, yesterday. bc im really smart like that) anyway breakdown of why she’s a stoncy saving grace thanks!!!

you ease my mind, you make everything feel fine.

(https://archiveofourown.org/works/13842039)

yes this fic is from 2018. yes i read it every other week. it’s good for the SOUL. jonathan getting taken care of is always just such a good and sweet concept (maybe it’s my intense, undying love of him, but he deserves to be taken care okay) and. okay i’ll admit, sometimes i forget how fucking FUNNY this fic is, but it’s genuinely hilarious, okay? you gotta trust me on this. it makes me cackle at inappropriate times absurdly often. ("Hi." "Hi." "I want you, you fuck." is a top line. i laugh so hard every TIME.) all three of them are so incredibly in character, and somehow this NAILS the fact that they’re all massive disasters pretending to be confident. and i’m not someone that reads ~smut~ often (though it’s more mentioned than described, very non-explicit) but this didn’t make me even the least bit uncomfortable. it felt very natural and in character and made me laugh as much as the rest of the story. all in all, i always come away a little more in love with the characters, and that’s a really precious feeling.

you could be the one to make me feel something

(https://archiveofourown.org/works/14269476/chapters/32912745)

i take back everything i’ve ever claimed. this IS the funniest piece of writing i’ve ever read, and it WILL remain so, probably until the day i die. i honestly... barely have words. my expectations were high when i started it, but in retrospect, they were LEAGUES below what i got. the characterisation, the progression, the dialogue, the story; from the overarching aspects to the tiny details, it’s impeccable. i genuinely read this twice in one day, and then again the next. every single part of it is so good, but in terms of FAVOURITES... the christmas section. hilarious. down to its bones, well crafted and heart felt. it hits me right in the chest every time. the story, from the beginning, has me just as in love with nancy and steve as jonathan is, and as everything grows more intense, so does my investment. it pulls me in and doesn’t let me go until it’s good and ready to see me leave. again, the sexy aspects are so in character and natural that it’s uncomfortable or weird to read and instead just leave me grinning like an idiot. also ( “It did frustrate me, in more ways than one. It’s also a weird plan, like … did you expect me to be so overwhelmed by the power of a boner that I’d just admit my feelings?” is SUCH a funny line, i think about it literally every day. literally. every. day.) the characters are afraid to be messy, to make mistakes, and they all feel so ALIVE that when i leave the story, i feel like i’m leaving a friend. it’s honestly beautiful and honestly breathtaking. this story is better than a lot of published books, honestly, and i’m so grateful for it. so thank you.

i crash my car ‘cause i wanna get carried away!

(https://archiveofourown.org/works/17131202)

...you really wanted to make me cry, huh? i cried out of grief, yeah, out of the depth of nancy’s guilt and the pure rawness of her mourning, but i also cried out of catharsis as she came to terms, and out of laughter a few times. the bit about total eclipse of the heart as a motif was... that was so well done. i hate drawing comparisons, so please understand that this is criticism of a concept and not a particular story, but in so many stories then nancy’s grief feels... trivialised? that’s not quite the right word. romanticised, maybe. as someone who has lost a friend in the past, it’s just... it doesn’t feel realistic? and that’s okay, because it’s hard to nail something you haven’t experienced, and i wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone. it’s just that stories like this, where i can really resonate with nancy and follow the journey of her recovery WITH her are so rare. this story is a gem, it really is. i don’t love it for all the same reasons as the others, but i love it fiercely all the same.

there’s nothing magic going on, and then along came you

(https://archiveofourown.org/works/14994137)

sure, you could be the one is the funniest fic i’ll probably ever read, but nothing magic is such a close second. it’s laugh-out-loud, get-tears-in-your-eyes, fall-out-of-your-chair, and it’s also so goddamn SWEET i can hardly stand it. of the several fics i generally group together in my head (nothing magic, you could be the one + its sequels (might have to make an individual post about this series), laugh until we think we’ll die, and got nothing for you; all very similar, yet incredibly unique) nothing magic is the shortest, but that doesn’t mean it compromises on quality, oh no. it just means i can read it quicker, and therefore more often! when it’s late and i’m tired and i need a laugh to calm down before i sleep, i generally go search this fic up. remember when i mentioned the whole “being just as in love with nancy and steve as jonathan is” thing? it’s like that except... almost funnier. in you could be the one, it’s just that the story naturally tugs you into adoring these two messy, silly, sweet, amazing young adults, because how could you not? how else could you possibly feel? but here, they are genuinely just... that funny. they are actually just so funny that you as a reader click with them and find yourself grinning like an IDIOT because oh my god you’re disasters. maybe it’s the inherent relatability of a tired highschooler trying to make it through the summer and hating his job along the way, but this fic hits right in the heart every damn time.

got nothing for you other than love

(https://archiveofourown.org/works/17596658)

"You trust me," she says.

They both know it's a fact, not question, but he still says, "Of course."

and

By then, his shell wasn't something he could step out of. It was part of him. But that was okay. He didn't need more. What he had was enough.

He always did have trouble with wanting more.

and

"Hey, babe?" Nancy turns her head to look at Steve, touching his shoulder. "Can you buy me a drink?"

"Sure thing. What d'ya want?"

"Surprise me. Not like that time we were here and you snuck out the store, went to a smoothie stand, and came back with a mango smoothie."

Steve grins. "But I did surprise you."

and

"Do you have food in the backseat?"

"The sandwich has only been there for like, two weeks—"

and

"Ugh. Too much cheese. I'm lactose-intolerant, remember?"

"False, you're not intolerant of anyone except people over the age of fifteen with bowl cuts and guys who wear shorts in the winter."

and

"Where are you off to? I'm your only friend," Kali says, frowning.

and

"You good, man?"

"Yeah," he says, his throat dry, "I'm great."

"Yeah, you are," Nancy says, and he is. He is.

and i can’t continue because that’s, like, barely halfway into the fic and i’ve already skipped so many of my favourite lines and i would have to skip so many more. you see what i mean about sathana being funny as hell? and like all the others, it’s not just the humour here. i mean... it is, because it’s SO FUCKING FUNNY I LITERALLY CANNOT SAY THAT ENOUGH but the reason it’s so funny is because it’s so candid. it’s so smooth. the whole thing flows. you’re not left feeling that you’ve missed a piece or that anything was sacrificed; you just feel like you’ve read something incredible. this fic is an experience of its own that i honestly have never experienced before. it’s sweet, and it’s gentle, and it’s just so overwhelmingly good that i don’t think i’ll ever quite get over it. in short? it’s a blessing. my expectations were high, but holy fuck did you blow them to bits.

one more favourite line:

Things are ending, things are starting, and everything looks bright. It won't always be that way. The sun's got to set at some point. But, gazing up at the sky, at the pink bleeding into orange, Jonathan figures it'll have to rise again. No matter what happens, these two things are constant.

"Hey, you look awfully lonely," Nancy calls out, walking towards him, reaching out to him with the hand not in Steve's.

Well. Maybe not just those two things.

that scene, in general, is beautiful, and it wraps the story up on such a genuine note. it feels like a film with how clearly i can picture it. it feels like no fic i’ve ever really read before. it feels... good. i guess i don’t really have the words. it just feels so good.

as an overall statement on why i call her my favourite author... it’s the realism. maybe that’s surprising, considering how many times i said “funny” or “hilarious” in here, but in the end, i wouldn’t be so attached to her work if it didn’t feel so real. i can open a tab and instantly get transported to a home i’ve never lived in. it’s comfortable. it’s sweet. and the dialogue/banter is always perfectly crafted. there’s just never really a downside to her fics, honestly. even if i wanted to search, i don’t think i’d find one. not even one of those “their only problem is that there’s not more to enjoy” kind of comments, because every single one feels perfectly crafted in its own right. it doesn’t need more or less. it stands for itself and it’s goddamn good at it.

i didn’t anticipate having to do multiple parts on this post, but- surprise surprise- i haven’t even gotten to my favourite one yet! so yeah, pt. 2 will be written after i finish the history essay trying to murder me, god knows when that is. in the meantime, please go give her some love and adoration. she deserves it.

[chiseler]

Utopia and Apocalypse: Pynchon’s Populist/Fatalist Cinema

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in.

--from the last page of Gravity’s Rainbow

To begin with a personal anecdote: Writing my first book (to be published) in the late 1970s, an experimental autobiography titled Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Harper & Row, 1980), published in French as Mouvements: Une vie au cinéma (P.O.L, 2003), I wanted to include four texts by other authors—two short stories (“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, “The Secret Integration” by Thomas Pynchon) and two essays (“The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” by Charles Eckert, “My Life With Kong” by Elliott Stein)—but was prevented from doing so by my editor, who argued that because the book was mine, texts by other authors didn’t belong there. My motives were both pluralistic and populist: a desire both to respect fiction and non-fiction as equal creative partners and to insist that the book was about more than just myself and my own life. Because my book was largely about the creative roles played by the fictions of cinema on the non-fictions of personal lives, the anti-elitist nature of cinema played a crucial part in these transactions.`

In the case of Pynchon’s 1964 story—which twenty years later, in his collection Slow Learner, he would admit was the only early story of his that he still liked—the cinematic relevance to Moving Places could be found in a single fleeting but resonant detail: the momentary bonding of a little white boy named Tim Santora with a black, homeless, alcoholic jazz musician named Carl McAfee in a hotel room when they discover that they’ve both seen Blood Alley (1955), an anticommunist action-adventure with John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, directed by William Wellman. Pynchon mentions only the film’s title, but the complex synergy of this passing moment of mutual recognition between two of its dissimilar viewers represented for me an epiphany, in part because of the irony of such casual camaraderie occurring in relation to a routine example of Manichean Cold War mythology. Moreover, as a right-wing cinematic touchstone, Blood Alley is dialectically complemented in the same story by Tim and his friends categorizing their rebellious schoolboy pranks as Operation Spartacus, inspired by the left-wing Spartacus (1960) of Kirk Douglas, Dalton Trumbo, and Stanley Kubrick.

For better and for worse, all of Pynchon’s fiction partakes of this populism by customarily defining cinema as the cultural air that everyone breathes, or at least the river in which everyone swims and bathes. This is equally apparent in the only Pynchon novel that qualifies as hackwork, Inherent Vice (2009), and the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of it is also his worst film to date—a hippie remake of Chinatown in the same way that the novel is a hippie remake of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald—seems logical insofar as it seems to have been written with an eye towards selling the screen rights. As Geoffrey O’Brien observed (while defending this indefensible book and film) in the New York Review of Books (January 3, 2015), “Perhaps the novel really was crying out for such a cinematic transformation, for in its pages people watch movies, remember them, compare events in the ‘real world’ to their plots, re-experience their soundtracks as auditory hallucinations, even work their technical components (the lighting style of cinematographer James Wong Howe, for instance) into aspects of complex conspiratorial schemes.” (Despite a few glancing virtues, such as  Josh Brolin’s Nixonesque performance as "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, Anderson’s film seems just as cynical as its source and infused with the same sort of misplaced would-be nostalgia for the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, pitched to a generation that didn’t experience it, as Bertolucci’s Innocents: The Dreamers.)

From The Crying of Lot 49’s evocation of an orgasm in cinematic terms (“She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she’d come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera’s already moving”) to the magical-surreal guest star appearance of Mickey Rooney in wartime Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow, cinema is invariably a form of lingua franca in Pynchon’s fiction, an expedient form of shorthand, calling up common experiences that seem light years away from the sectarianism of the politique des auteurs. This explains why his novels set in mid-20th century, such as the two just cited, when cinema was still a common currency cutting across classes, age groups, and diverse levels of education, tend to have the greatest number of movie references. In Gravity’s Rainbow—set mostly in war-torn Europe, with a few flashbacks to the east coast U.S. and flash-forwards to the contemporary west coast—this even includes such anachronistic pop ephemera as the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men and the 1955 Western The Return of Jack Slade (which a character named Waxwing Blodgett is said to have seen at U.S. Army bases during World War 2 no less than twenty-seven times), along with various comic books.

Significantly, “The Secret Integration”, a title evoking both conspiracy and countercultural utopia, is set in the same cozy suburban neighborhood in the Berkshires from which Tyrone Slothrop, the wartime hero or antihero of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), aka “Rocketman,” springs, with his kid brother and father among the story’s characters. It’s also the same region where Pynchon himself grew up. And Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s magnum opus and richest work, is by all measures the most film-drenched of his novels in its design as well as its details—so much so that even its blocks of text are separated typographically by what resemble sprocket holes. Unlike, say, Vineland (1990), where cinema figures mostly in terms of imaginary TV reruns (e.g., Woody Allen in Young Kissinger) and diverse cultural appropriations (e.g., a Noir Center shopping mall), or the post-cinematic adventures in cyberspace found in the noirish (and far superior) east-coast companion volume to Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge (2013), cinema in Gravity’s Rainbow is basically a theatrical event with a social impact, where Fritz Lang’s invention of the rocket countdown as a suspense device (in the 1929 Frau im mond) and the separate “frames” of a rocket’s trajectory are equally relevant and operative factors. There are also passing references to Lang’s Der müde Tod, Die Nibelungen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, and Metropolis—not to mention De Mille’s Cleopatra, Dumbo, Freaks, Son of Frankenstein, White Zombie, at least two Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, Pabst, and Lubitsch—and the epigraphs introducing the novel’s second and third sections (“You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood — Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray” and “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more…. –Dorothy, arriving in Oz”) are equally steeped in familiar movie mythology.

These are all populist allusions, yet the bane of populism as a rightwing curse is another near-constant in Pynchon’s work. The same ambivalence can be felt in the novel’s last two words, “Now everybody—“, at once frightening and comforting in its immediacy and universality. With the possible exception of Mason & Dixon (1997), every Pynchon novel over the past three decades—Vineland, Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge—has an attractive, prominent, and sympathetic female character betraying or at least acting against her leftist roots and/or principles by being first drawn erotically towards and then being seduced by a fascistic male. In Bleeding Edge, this even happens to the novel’s earthy protagonist, the middle-aged detective Maxine Tarnow. Given the teasing amount of autobiographical concealment and revelation Pynchon carries on with his public while rigorously avoiding the press, it is tempting to see this recurring theme as a personal obsession grounded in some private psychic wound, and one that points to sadder-but-wiser challenges brought by Pynchon to his own populism, eventually reflecting a certain cynicism about human behavior. It also calls to mind some of the reflections of Luc Moullet (in “Sainte Janet,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 86, août 1958) aroused by Howard Hughes’ and Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot and (more incidentally) by Ayn Rand’s and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead whereby “erotic verve” is tied to a contempt for collectivity—implicitly suggesting that rightwing art may be sexier than leftwing art, especially if the sexual delirium in question has some of the adolescent energy found in, for example, Hughes, Sternberg, Rand, Vidor, Kubrick, Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and, yes, Pynchon.

One of the most impressive things about Pynchon’s fiction is the way in which it often represents the narrative shapes of individual novels in explicit visual terms. V, his first novel, has two heroes and narrative lines that converge at the bottom point of a V; Gravity’s Rainbow, his second—a V2 in more ways than one—unfolds across an epic skyscape like a rocket’s (linear) ascent and its (scattered) descent; Vineland offers a narrative tangle of lives to rhyme with its crisscrossing vines, and the curving ampersand in the middle of Mason & Dixon suggests another form of digressive tangle between its two male leads; Against the Day, which opens with a balloon flight, seems to follow the curving shape and rotation of the planet.

This compulsive patterning suggests that the sprocket-hole design in Gravity’s Rainbow’s section breaks is more than just a decorative detail. The recurrence of sprockets and film frames carries metaphorical resonance in the novel’s action, so that Franz Pökler, a German rocket engineer allowed by his superiors to see his long-lost daughter (whom he calls his “movie child” because she was conceived the night he and her mother saw a porn film) only once a year, at a children’s village called Zwölfkinder, and can’t even be sure if it’s the same girl each time:

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pökler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child—what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you can speed or slow at will…)?

***

Cinema, in short, is both delightful and sinister—a utopian dream and an apocalyptic nightmare, a stark juxtaposition reflected in the abrupt shift in the earlier Pynchon passage quoted at the beginning of this essay from present tense to past tense, and from third person to first person. Much the same could be said about the various displacements experienced while moving from the positive to the negative consequences of  populism.

Pynchon’s allegiance to the irreverent vulgarity of kazoos sounding like farts and concomitant Spike Jones parodies seems wholly in keeping with his disdain for David Raksin and Johnny Mercer’s popular song “Laura” and what he perceives as the snobbish elitism  of the Preminger film it derives from, as expressed in his passionate liner notes to the CD compilation “Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones” a half-century later:

The song had been featured in the 1945 movie of the same name, supposed to evoke the hotsy-totsy social life where all these sophisticated New York City folks had time for faces in the misty light and so forth, not to mention expensive outfits, fancy interiors,witty repartee—a world of pseudos as inviting to…class hostility as fish in a barrel, including a presumed audience fatally unhip enough to still believe in the old prewar fantasies, though surely it was already too late for that, Tin Pan Alley wisdom about life had not stood a chance under the realities of global war, too many people by then knew better.

Consequently, neither art cinema nor auteur cinema figures much in Pynchon’s otherwise hefty lexicon of film culture, aside from a jokey mention of a Bengt Ekerot/Maria Casares Film Festival (actors playing Death in The Seventh Seal and Orphée) held in Los Angeles—and significantly, even the “underground”, 16-millimeter radical political filmmaking in northern California charted in Vineland becomes emblematic of the perceived failure of the 60s counterculture as a whole. This also helps to account for why the paranoia and solipsism found in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient and Out 1, perhaps the closest equivalents to Pynchon’s own notions of mass conspiracy juxtaposed with solitary despair, are never mentioned in his writing, and the films that are referenced belong almost exclusively to the commercial mainstream, unlike the examples of painting, music, and literature, such as the surrealist painting of Remedios Varo described in detail at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49,  the importance of Ornette Coleman in V and Anton Webern in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the visible impact of both Jorge Luis Borges and William S. Burroughs on the latter novel. (1) And much of the novel’s supply of movie folklore—e.g., the fatal ambushing of John Dillinger while leaving Chicago’s Biograph theater--is mainstream as well.

Nevertheless, one can find a fairly precise philosophical and metaphysical description of these aforementioned Rivette films in Gravity’s Rainbow: “If there is something comforting -- religious, if you want — about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” And the white, empty movie screen that appears apocalyptically on the novel’s final page���as white and as blank as the fusion of all the colors in a rainbow—also appears in Rivette’s first feature when a 16-millimeter print of Lang’s Metropolis breaks during the projection of the Tower of Babel sequence.

Is such a physically and metaphysically similar affective climax of a halted film projection foretelling an apocalypse a mere coincidence? It’s impossible to know whether Pynchon might have seen Paris nous appartient during its brief New York run in the early 60s. But even if he hadn’t (or still hasn’t), a bitter sense of betrayed utopian possibilities in that film, in Out 1, and in most of his fiction is hard to overlook. Old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) don’t like to be woken from their dreams.

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Footnote

For this reason, among others, I’m skeptical about accepting the hypothesis of the otherwise reliable Pynchon critic Richard Poirier that Gravity’s Rainbow’s enigmatic references to “the Kenosha Kid” might allude to Orson Welles, who was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Steven C. Weisenburger, in A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion (Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), reports more plausibly that “the Kenosha Kid” was a pulp magazine character created by Forbes Parkhill in Western stories published from the 1920s through the 1940s. Once again, Pynchon’s populism trumps—i.e. exceeds—his cinephilia.

[birdlord]

Every Book I Read in 2018

Again, better late than never??

01 On the Town; Marshall Berman - A freewheeling personal and general history of Times Square, which had some great historical tidbits I’d never read before. I think I would have got more out of it if I were interested in Broadway musicals...

02 Stephen Florida; Gabe Habash - A slim little book that follows a college wrestler. One of those books that is described as muscular, when what they mean is brutal. 

03 Green Grass, Running Water; Thomas King - Four plot lines intertwine in a story blending mythology, creation, and modern First Nations people dealing with massive transformational change to their lands. I did sometimes feel like I would have enjoyed it more as an audio storytelling experience. 

04 People who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman; Richard Lloyd Parry - I don’t often read books like this, but this is essentially a true-crime sort of story, about the murder of a British woman who works as a bar hostess in Japan. Parry covers not just her story, but the whole aftermath, which even pulls in Tony Blair, eventually. 

05 My Brother’s Husband; Gengoroh Tagame - Weirdly, two Japan-related books in a row! Another culture-clash tale, when the Canadian husband visits his deceased husband Ryoji’s single-parent brother. The couple had never been to Japan while Ryoji was alive, and so the story of slow acceptance (helped along by little Kana’s openhearted curiosity) is suffused with sadness. 

06 Ghosts of the Tsunami: Life & Death in Japan’s Disaster Zone; Richard Lloyd Parry - And, let’s make it three! When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, I remember thinking that the reaction seemed so orderly, so...Japanese. But this examination puts you right in the various affected communities, following different people, including schoolchildren from Okawa primary. Like with the other Parry book above, we hear about all of the grief, ghosts and lawsuits that follow the disaster. 

07 Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History; Rhonda K. Garelick - Once she became famous, Coco Chanel built a scaffolding of lies about her past, and the purpose of this biography is to attempt to see the truth behind them. Garelick concentrates heavily on Chanel’s collaboration with the Nazis, which must have been a challenge given that her company still exists, under her name.

08 Kubrick; Michael Herr - “They speak about the dumbing of America as a foregone thing, already completed, but, duh, it’s a process, and we haven’t seen anything yet. The contemplation of this culture isn’t for sissies, and speaking about it without becoming shrill is increasingly difficult, maybe impossible.” Whoa!

09 Call Me by Your Name; Andre Aciman - I did read this after seeing the film, so as usual it was hard to divorce it from the movie experience. 

10 The Left Hand of Darkness; Ursula K LeGuin - A thought experiment about a genderless world, seen from the perspective of an off-planet envoy, who has a range of reactions to the world’s inhabitants. The most enduring section of the book involves a brutal 3-month expedition undertaken by the exiled envoy and a local, a trial by ice, wind and snow. A winter read. 

11 Stamped from the Beginning; Ibram X. Kendi - I don’t think I’d really fully grokked the idea that southern white supremacy built itself in order to prevent an uprising of the black and white underclasses, together. The basic rubric of this book is separating American movements, parties and individuals’ thinking into one of three categories: assimilationist, segregationist or genuinely antiracist. Supporting results like abolitionism does NOT make one antiracist, since support could come those with less pure motivations. I highly recommend this one, though it was copy-edited in a pretty haphazard manner!

12 Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers; Barbara Ehrenreich & Dierdre English - A short book charting a couple of parallel stories, of women healers in Europe being dismissed as witches, and the masculinization of medicine (particularly midwifery and the medicine of birth) in the USA. 

13 Her Body and Other Parties; Carmen Maria Machado - Short stories skirting the edge of a lot of genres; horror, science fiction, dark comedy. These are women’s stories, that refuse to be dismissed as chick lit. It didn’t connect with me as deeply as it has for some, but I see the appeal. 

14 Look Alive Out There; Sloane Crosley - Largely comedic set of essays by a writer whose earlier work I read, about a decade back. It’s a strange experience, to return to someone who has written memoir that seemed to exemplify that late-2000s era and discover that she - and you - have grown. 

15 Homesick for Another World; Otessa Moshfegh - Moshfegh’s choice of words (not to mention her characters themselves) remain utterly revolting. I often found myself looking up, shaking my head as if to say THIS BOOK. Considerably funnier than Eileen, which was the first of hers that I read. 

16 My Year of Rest & Relaxation; Otessa Moshfegh - After reading this, I found out that Moshfegh basically set out to get her work noticed by populating it with these vile young women. Well, it worked! Your tolerance for unlikeable main characters will be tested by this rich Columbia grad who decides to prescribe herself into a virtual coma within her NY apartment, at the turn of the millennium. And yes, it ends where you think it does. 

17 They Can’t Kill us Until They Kill Us; Hanif Abdurraquabi - This collection of music-related writing is wildly far-ranging, poetic and emotional. For myself, I did find I was more interested in those that were related to bands or musicians I had some experience with myself , which was not always the case. 

18 The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully; Aaron Carroll and Nina Teicholtz - If you’re a reader of the food media, most of what’s in here will be familiar to you, debunking fears of meat, GMOs, gluten, MSG. The authors keep their own experience, taste and interests very much in the forefront, which ends up feeling smug and irritating. 

19 The Mere Wife: A Novel; Maria Dahvana Headley - My knowledge of Beowulf is scant at best, but this retelling stood very much on its own two feet, set in a tony suburb and comparing the experience of two very different mothers of two very different sons. 

20 How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays; Alexander Chee - I’m very much On The Record as being against writers writing about writing, but this might just be an exception. 

21 Vancouver Special; Charles Demers - A sort of update on Douglas Coupland’s City of Glass, a book I loved and reread many times. This one has both a more historical bent, and an actual political viewpoint, contrasting with Coupland’s Gen X remoteness.

22 Crudo; Olivia Laing - A rushing frantic little novel, incorporating Trump tweets and Kathy Acker quotes throughout. A difficult read so close to the events described, but I can see this being an amazing window into this weird time, once a few years have passed. 

23 Hits & Misses; Simon Rich - This might also be on the line of “writers writing about writing” but Rich manages to do so in a charmingly self-deprecating way. 

24 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the US; Jeffrey Lewis - Speculative fiction written as a government report, responding, as we all have been doing, to the endlessly unprecedented Trump presidency. It all started with a tweet, of course...

25 A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; Rebecca Solnit - This book is intended to counter the idea that disasters (“natural” and otherwise) lead people to indulge their worst sides. Solnit looks at the aftermath of some 20th C disasters like the Halifax Explosion, 9/11 and various earthquakes to find examples of people banding together to help the wounded and homeless, even taking the opportunity to create new institutions when authorities fail to do so. A tonic for a world in which disasters are likely to become increasingly common. 

26 How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them; Jason Stanley - When I lived in Scotland in 2010, I went to an anti-fascist rally in Edinburgh, and I remember feeling like those attitudes were closer to the surface over there, where at home in Canada they felt abstract. This book traces how fascist policies lurk within democratic frameworks, and can sometimes metastasize to take over the host. Suffice it to say I was probably wrong then, and I’m definitely wrong now.

[remade-graystudie]

how i got a 29 the first time i took the act

i just wanted to give you guys some tips! not all of these work for everyone though so keep that in mind. also, i am going to take the test again in april for those interestedin knowing

to preface: i took the test while pretty sick and it was the morning after the opening night for a Christmas dinner i do each year, so i got maybe 6 hours of sleep. not the best conditions

my scores

composite score of 29

english score of 31

mathematics score of 26

reading score of 31

science score of 29

science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) score of 28

understanding complex texts of "above proficient"

progress toward career readiness of "progress toward gold level NCRC"

some general tips

choose a test center close to you. you will not want to wake up for the test. you will not want to drive there. it doesnt matter if youre unfamiliar with the place, people will be there to help you. but bring your own pencils and an eraser, they probably wont help you with those.

try to get as much sleep as possible. i didnt get much so to force myself awake i took a cold shower, but no caffeine because i feared crashing.

my breakfast that day was just some poptarts while i drove to the testing center, but i started to get hungry during the break. for the next test, im going to plan better and eat some cereal or toast.

take advantage of all leftover time. for me this meant going back to the questions i was super unsure of and making sure im satisfied with my answer choice as well as making sure all bubbles on my answer sheet were filled in enough. it also meant taking 5 minute naps where i drooled on the test booklet a little. oops?

use your break wisely. the testing center i was at had vending machines so i borrow a dollar from my friend and ate some m&m's as a pick me up. i also put a bunch of cough drops in my jacket pocket. after i did this in the span of like 3 minutes i went back to my room and took a nap.

take advantage of the fact that everything is multiple choice (except the essay portion, obviously) because it reallycomes in handy.

i didnt really struggle with nerves because i went into the test with the mindset "i get what i get". i had done what i felt was necessary to prepare and i knew this wouldnt be my last time. realistically, my act or sat score could be the thing that keeps me from entering my dream college (a school with a 7% admission rate and average act score of 34) but i am happy with my other choices of colleges. i have done all that i can do (which in this case was like.. 3 days of studying).

my biggest overall tip: know what the test will be like. know the order of the tests, the number of questions, and the time limits. this will leave no surprises. i was really glad i did this because i always knew what was coming.

tips for individual portions

english portion

75 multiple choice questions with four possible answers in 45 minutes.

dont read the entirety of the passage! read the first paragraph and the last paragraph before you read the questions then for each question skim for the info you need to properly answer the question. this allows you to spend more time with each question and to focus only on whats necessary.

brush up on word groups like there/their/they're, it's/its, and two/too/to. a lot of these questions are about following grammatical rules.

math portion

60 multiple choice questions with five possible answers in 60 minutes.

do what you know first. i almost ran out of time because i couldnt remember some things and spent too long on them so when i got to questions i knew at the end i was rushing and panicking and probably got some wrong.

if youre not sure how to do a problem, guess and check to the best of your abilities. guess and check works wonders.

reading portion

40 multiple choice questions with four possible answers in 35 minutes.

tbh i thought this was really similar to the english part so similar tips. but if the passage is on the short side, just read the whole thing.

science portion

40 multiple choice questions with four possible answers in 35 minutes.

real talk, i thought i bombed this portion like i walked out thinkin it was the reason id do so badly.

do NOT treat this like the english and reading portions! read the entirety of everything! redraw, rewrite, and rename things if you need to!

this part really focuses on graph interpretation and they will try to screw you over so hard with names of things. make sure you know how to interpret graphs well.

this was the only section where i rechecked every single answer. i was so used to the sat that i didnt know how to handle a science portion. it freaked me out.

essay portion

1 essay based on a promot in 40 minutes.

i didnt actually take this part because the only college on my list that says anything about it just recommends it and that school happens is my safety college. if youre really confident it will help your composite score, then take it. i chose not to mainly because im lazy and i didnt want to take the risk of it hurting my score even though i thought it could help since i write pretty strong essays, even under time constraints like id experience on the test.

some final tips

the act company sells a book. buy the book. its genuinely super helpful and im so glad i chose to buy it. i know some people use ones from outside sources, but i dont trust those as much. the official book is actually where i got a lot of my tips from.

take the test multiple times. i took the test in december because i knew i was unfamiliar with the formatting and wanted to have a basis for comparing my april score too. if i still am not happy with my april score, i plan on retaking it during the summer.

pay the extra $20 dollars to get your answers sent to you. it is quite literally the easiest and fastest way to see what you need to focus and improve on.

if you know youre taking the test, sign up as soon as possible. at the very least, sign up before youd have to pay the late fee.

dont add your picture until its like almost the last day. im the kind of person who changes uo my appearance often, specifically my hair color. if i uploaded a picture for the april date now, id be blonde in the picture even though ill probably have brown hair when i take the test.

a reminder

dont peace your self worth on this test. could it impact what college you go to? sure. but whether or not you did student council could too. im very proud of my score, but its not my end all be all. im more proud of the way i fold clothes or how organized my closet is than my act score.

good luck on all your tests everyone ❤️💕

[fyp-psychology]

33 Unusual Tips to Being a Better Writer

via James Altucher

Back in college, Sanket and I would hang out in bars and try to talk to women but I was horrible at it.

Nobody would talk to me for more than thirty seconds and every woman would laugh at all his jokes for what seemed like hours.

Even decades later I think they are still laughing at his jokes. One time he turned to me, 

“the girls are getting bored when you talk. Your stories go on too long. From now on, you need to leave out every other sentence when you tell a story.”

We were both undergrads in Computer Science. I haven’t seen him since but that’s the most important writing (and communicating) advice I ever got.

33 other tips to be a better writer:

A) Write whatever you want. Then take out the first paragraph and last paragraph

Here’s the funny thing about this rule. It’s sort of like knowing the future. You still can’t change it. In other words, even if you know this rule and write the article, the article will still be better if you take out the first paragraph and the last paragraph.

B) Take a huge bowel movement every day

You won’t see that on any other list on how to be a better writer. If your body doesn’t flow then your brain won’t flow. Eat more fruit if you have to.

C) Bleed in the first line

We’re all human. A computer can win Jeopardy but still not write a novel. If you want people to relate to you, then you have to be human.

Penelope Trunk started a post a few weeks ago: 

“I smashed a lamp over my head. There was blood everywhere. And glass. And I took a picture.” 

That’s real bleeding. My wife recently put up a post where the first line was so painful she had to take it down. Too many people were crying.

D) Don’t ask for permission

In other words, never say “in my opinion” (or worse “IMHO”). We know it’s your opinion. You’re writing it.

E) Write a lot

I spent the entire 90s writing bad fiction. 5 bad novels. Dozens of bad stories. But I learned to handle massive rejection. And how to put two words together. In my head, I won the pulitzer prize. But in my hand, over 100 rejection letters.

F) Read a lot

You can’t write without first reading. A lot. When I was writing five bad novels in a row I would read all day long whenever I wasn’t writing (I had a job as a programmer, which I would do for about five minutes a day because my programs all worked and I just had to “maintain” them). I read everything I could get my hands on.

G) Read before you write

Before I write every day I spend 30-60 minutes reading high quality short stories poetry, or essays. Here are some authors to start:

Denis Johnson

Miranda July

David Foster Wallace

Ariel Leve

William Vollmann

Raymond Carver

All of the writers are in the top 1/1000 of 1% of writers. What you are reading  has to be at that level or else it won’t lift up your writing at all.

H) Coffee

I go through three cups at least before I even begin to write. No coffee, no creativity.

I) Break the laws of physics

There’s no time in text. Nothing has to go in order. Don’t make it nonsense. But don’t be beholden to the laws of physics. My post, Advice I Want to Tell My Daughters, is an example.

J) Be Honest

Tell people the stuff they all think but nobody ever says. Some people will be angry that you let out the secret. But most people will be grateful. If you aren’t being honest, you aren’t delivering value. Be the little boy in the Emperor Wears No Clothes. If you can’t do this, don’t write.

K) Don’t Hurt Anyone

This goes against the above rule, but I never like to hurt people. And I don’t respect people who get pageviews by breaking this rule.

Don’t be a bad guy.  Was Buddha a Bad Father? addresses this.

L) Don’t be afraid of what people think

For each single person you worry about, deduct 1% in quality from your writing.

Everyone has deductions. I have to deduct about 10% right off the top.

Maybe there’s 10 people I’m worried about. Some of them are evil people. Some of them are people I just don’t want to offend.

So my writing is only about 90% of what it could be. But I think most people write at about 20% of what it could be. Believe it or not, clients, customers, friends, family, will love you more if you are honest with them. We all have our boundaries. But try this: for the next ten things you write, tell people something that nobody knows about you.

M) Be opinionated

Most people I know have strong opinions about at least one or two things… write about those. Nobody cares about all the things you don’t have strong opinions on.

Barry Ritholz told me the other day he doesn’t start writing until he’s angry about something. That’s one approach. Barry and I have had some great writing fights because sometimes we’ve been angry at each other.

N) Have a shocking title

I blew it the other day. I wanted to title this piece: “How I torture women” but I settled for “I’m Guilty Of Torture.” I wimped out. But I have some other fun ones, like “Is It Bad I Wanted My First Kid To Be Aborted” (which the famous Howard Lindzon cautioned me against).

Don’t forget that you are competing against a trillion other pieces of content out there. So you need a title to draw people in. Else you lose.

O) Steal

I don’t quite mean it literally. But if you know a topic gets pageviews (and you aren’t hurting anyone) than steal it, no matter who’s written about it or how many times you’ve written about it before. “How I Screwed Yasser Arafat out of $2mm” was able to nicely piggyback off of how amazingly popular Yasser Arafat is.

P) Make people cry

If you’ve ever been in love, you know how to cry.

Bring readers to that moment when they were a child, and all of life was in front of them, except for that one bittersweet moment when everything began to change. If only that one moment could’ve lasted forever. Please let me go back in time right now to that moment. But now it’s gone.

Q) Relate to people

The past decade has totally sucked. For everyone. The country has been in post-traumatic stress syndrome since 9/11 and 2008 only made it worse. I’ve gone broke a few times during the decade, had a divorce, lost friendships, and have only survived (barely) by being persistent and knowing I had two kids to take care of, and loneliness to fight.

Nobody’s perfect. We’re all trying. Show people how you are trying and struggling. Nobody expects you to be a superhero.

R) Time heals all wounds

Everyone has experiences they don’t want to write about. But with enough time, its OK. My New Year’s Resolution of 1995 is pretty embarrassing. But whatever…it was 16 years ago.

The longer back you go, the less you have to worry about what people think.

S) Risk

Notice that almost all of these rules are about where the boundaries are. Most people play it too safe.

When you are really risking something and the reader senses that (and they WILL sense it), then you know you are in good territory. If you aren’t risking something, then I’m moving on. I know I’m on the right track if after I post something someone tweets, “OMFG.”

T) Be funny

You can be all of the above and be funny at the same time.

When I went to India I was brutalized by my first few yoga classes (actually every yoga class). And I was intimidated by everyone around me. They were like yoga superheroes and I felt like a fraud around them. So I cried, and hopefully people laughed.

It was also a case where I didn’t have to dig into my past but I had an experience that was happening to me right then. How do you be funny? First rule of funny: ugly people are funny. I’m naturally ugly so its easy. Make yourself as ugly as possible. Nobody wants to read that you are beautiful and doing great in life.

U) The last line needs to go BOOM!

Your article is meaningless unless the last line KILLS.

Read the book of short stories “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson. It’s the only way to learn how to do a last line. The last line should take you all the way back to the first line and then “BOOM!”

V) Use a lot of periods

Forget commas and semicolons. A period makes people pause. Your sentences should be strong enough that you want people to pause and think about it. This will also make your sentences shorter. Short sentences are good.

W) Write every day

This is a must. Writing is spiritual practice. You are diving inside of yourself and cleaning out the toxins. If you don’t do it every day, you lose the ability. If you do it every day, then slowly you find out where all the toxins are. And the cleaning can begin.

X) Write with the same voice you talk in

You’ve spent your whole life learning how to communicate with that voice. Why change it when you communicate with text?

Y) Deliver value with every sentence

Even on a tweet or Facebook status update. Deliver poetry and value with every word. Else, be quiet.

Z) Take what everyone thinks and explore the opposite

Don’t disagree just to disagree. But explore. Turn the world upside down. Guess what? There are people living in China. Plenty of times you’ll find value where nobody else did.

AA) Have lots of ideas

I discuss this in “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive” in the Daily Practice section.

Your idea muscle atrophies within days if you don’t exercise it. Then what do you do? You need to exercise it every day until it hurts. Else no ideas.

BB) Sleep eight hours a day

Go to sleep before 9pm at least 4 days a week. And stretch while taking deep breaths before you write. We supposedly use only 5% of our brain. You need to use 6% at least to write better than everyone else. So make sure your brain is getting as much healthy oxygen as possible. Too many people waste valuable writing or resting time by chattering until all hours of the night.

CC) Don’t write if you’re upset at someone

Then the person you are upset at becomes your audience. You want to love and flirt with your audience so they can love you back.

DD) Use “said” instead of any other word

Don’t use “he suggested” or “he bellowed,” just “he said.” We’ll figure it out if he suggested something.

EE) Paint or draw.

Keep exercising other creative muscles.

FF) Let it sleep

Whatever you are working on, sleep on it. Then wake up, stretch, coffee, read, and look again.

Rewrite. Take out every other sentence.

GG) Then take out every other sentence again.

Or something like that.

Sanket didn’t want to go to grad school after we graduated. He had another plan. Lets go to Thailand, he said. And become monks in a Buddhist monastery for a year. We can date Thai women whenever we aren’t begging for food, he said. It will be great and we’ll get life experience.

It sounded good to me.

But then he got accepted to the University of Wisconsin and got a PhD. Now he lives in India and works for Oracle. And as for me…

I don’t know what the hell happened to me.

About the Author:

James Altucher is an American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur, bestselling author, venture capitalist and podcaster. He has founded or cofounded more than 20 companies, including Reset Inc. and StockPickr and says he failed at 17 of them.

via jamesaltucher.com

[simply-wins-little-sis]

Library Love

A/N: I AM SO SORRY that I haven’t been posting anything. School has been kicking my butt, and life has been super crazy. This wasn’t a request and I actually started writing this one in July in a library in Arkansas while with family friends, and I finished it in August, and wanted to save it for a plan I have, but I realized I needed to give you all something to hold onto as I write more. It’s super long, I apologize for that, also it’s a little different from the normal Winchester!sister stuff! I hope you all like it!

Requests are open and so are the tags!

Warnings: Fluff, possible angst???, and maybe a few swear words! ALSO ROMANCE!

DISCLAIMER: I used Logan because that’s what felt right at the time so, please know that I don’t know any hot Logan’s and this story was legit all random inspiration and nothing personal!

Tags: @percussiongirl2017 @metaphysicalmisha @winchesters-favorite-girl @sisterwinchesterwriter @staticweekes @lil-sister-winchester @hi-my-name-is-riley @the-third-winchester-warrior @fandom-queen-of-wonderland

You uncomfortably shifted in the plastic library chair. You were stuck in one of those remodeled gems that the whole town took pride in. Except, the pride had seemed to have worn off because it was mostly empty, minus the three-people scattered amongst the different shelves. The librarians had given up on quiet, and now joined in with the locals on conversations about everything from the corn, to the deaths you were supposed to be looking into.

You never minded libraries, in fact they had always given you a sense of home. Being on the road and traveling from place to place was the lifestyle you were born into, and you never questioned it, that is until you grew older and longed for relationships other than the few you had in your tight circle of family. Home seemed to be a place where you could create more relationships, friendships, and find true heart in every crack and crevasse. Never having that made you feel slightly disadvantaged. Your brothers had had it once, even if it only was for a limited time. You longed for something more than a car as a home base.

You loved the library, yet it always reminded you of your lack of home, while still giving you the same feeling you imagined a home might. You had no community library to walk to, or even a place to walk from. Libraries had so many treasures, each carrying so many stories, and you wished to have the time to stay and inspect each and every one. But, you did not and this idea was the exact one you were pondering as the plastic chair creaked beneath you.

Your legs were swinging back and forth as you rapidly typed out your school assignment. You were home schooled, as Sam called it, but you always dropped the home whenever someone would ask. Usually no one did, but on that rare occasion, you had it perfectly planned out.

Your brothers sat at the table over, bickering about the type of case they were dealing with. You were eavesdropping as you continued your essay. You stopped typing at times, but when they looked up at you your fingers flew back onto the lettered pads. You hated having to turn things into your brother. You loved him, but you felt as if you could never actually be free in your writing. You always worked with a filter on the words you were putting down, never wanting him to get a hint of your true emotions.

You finished typing up your essay, and emailed it over to his laptop. You swung your legs off the chair and lingered at their table. “Can I go now?” you asked, bending your fingers this way and that on the edge of the plastic wood.

Dean looked up, sighing, as you waited for Sam to check his inbox. He looked up from the screen and raised his eyebrows. “You titled your paper with a sarcastic remark, should I even ask you if I need to close this before you go?” he asked.

You shook your head, “You see, you’re just reading it sarcastically when in reality I’m just trying out a different tone with my writing”.

“And what would that be?” he asked, folding his hands. Dean was watching the duel go down, holding onto his imaginary patience to get back to work.

“The annoyed, because I’m writing another essay and my brother clearly doesn’t understand the hints I’m giving him about not making me write essays, but still professional author,” you grinned.

Dean cleared his throat, clearly annoyed with the entirety of the conversation, and reaching for another laminated pamphlet from one of the libraries records.

Sam looked to Dean, before looking back to his screen and then shaking his head. “Go ahead, but don’t think we won’t be revising this together later”.

You rolled your eyes but skipped off to the Young Adult section. You had spent too much time in the records and nonfiction areas already. Craving a juicy novel filled with teenage angst, somewhat to cope with your own emotions, you dove right into the shelves. You pulled at a book, put it back, then repeated. This went on for several minutes, adding in a scanning of the covers from a select few. Finally, you settled on one that looked newer, hoping it would get you through the next few hours. You began to walk off, nose already pushed into the smell of pages and ink, and the taste of the words forming in your mouth and mind as you silently mumbled to yourself.

That’s when you rammed right into something, and your novel hit the floor with a loud thud.

You quickly bent down to grab the story you so badly craved to continue as another hand gripped the covers, and bent up to meet your eye level. You were quickly hit with the most beautiful eye you had ever seen. Your breath fell short and you could feel the quick palpitations of your heart, and the numb of meeting someone who looked so…cute.

This boy was full of all the positive emotions the libraries you had visited countless times would give you. A sense of safety, and relationship, and home. A home in a small conversation, and a smile worth all the rooms your heart wanted to create inside his.

“I’m sorry, I should have dodged it,” he looked down with in warded eyebrows.

“No, it’s fine really, I should have been watching where I was going,” you smiled, but it faded, “I should have been watching where I was going,” the idea you had fallen short on being aware of your surrounding sunk in. Sam and Dean would have scolded you. You tried to plaster another smile on your face, but when you hit those eyes you immediately blushed and needed to hide the redness more than the disappointment you felt in yourself.

He held out his hand, and you hesitantly took it as he raised you and himself back up to standing position. He was handsome, and had a subtle yet rebellious tone to his words and look. He had strong cologne, but nothing compared to that of Dean or Sam. You smiled at him, nervously pulling your hand away.

You weren’t sure if you wanted to pull away.

You smiled again, and he nervously rubbed his neck. His hand awkwardly rubbing the ends of his hair, smashing them down into his skin. “So, you from around here?” he asked. You shook your head, he nodded but wasn’t satisfied, “Then where?”.

You had thought of all the ways this question could have been asked and your answer for days, weeks, months that eventually turned into years, but now that this boy was asking you, your mind blanked and the only thing you seemed to muster was an answer you had never practiced or calculated previously. “Nowhere”.

You cringed internally, knowing he would give you that sympathetic smile everyone did. You were surprised when he just shook his head, taking in your presence with a smirk that made you feel devilishly good.

“How ‘bout you then?” you asked.

“Nowhere,” he smiled.

You shook your head, “That’s cheating”.

“What?” he asked.

“You can’t copy my answer, it’s not how the game works,” you crossed your arms.

“Oh, so we’re playing a game?” a smile pushed into his lips.

You nodded, “Twenty-One Questions is serious business”.

His eyebrows raised, “Well then let’s go find a place to play instead of the middle of the shelves”.

“Why, scared someone’ll see us?” you snarked, then the doubt set in, “Someone like your girlfriend”.

“No, remember genius, I’m from nowhere, meaning no dice, meaning no girlfriend,” he laughed. It was a nervous laugh.

You turned and began to walk, mostly so he wouldn’t see the pink your cheeks were illuminating. The fact he was nervous too making you smile.

Laughter was unusual compared to the normal chatter of the locals, but you and the boy you grew to know as Logan could not have cared less.

Although the conversation had taken a turn when you learned of his broken home, a single, alcoholic father raising three kids. Dodging broken glass and verbal threats was a normal task for him. Your stopped when he told you, its usual pace sinking to one low and harsh as you wished to fix his broken home and make it better…wished to make one for just the two of you.

“So, what’s the one thing you wish you could do in your life time?” you asked.

He sighed and looked towards the ceiling. You were both sitting up against the leather chairs found in the corner of the back section. You had decided the serious question game needed something better than clichéd comfort. 

Even though you had only just met him, Logan seemed to give you a calm and peace you had never had before. Suddenly, you weren’t afraid of the future, or anxious for what was in store as more monsters popped into your life. You also weren’t aware of the lack of home you had felt walking into the place.

His eyes drew back to yours, and the look they wore held a whole new definition to the word sorrow. “I wish I could rid myself of the responsibilities being forced onto me,” he sighed again, closing his lids.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” you asked, feeling the rush of guilt hitting as your tongue barely made out the last word. You knew too well what it was like to want to throw down the cards life had dealt, but the knowing you could never truly leave the cards at the game table made your thoughts painful.

“I just want to be able to be me, and not have to deal with the line of…the line of shit that’s coming every damn day, of every month, of every freaking year,” he ran his hands through his hair.

“Yeah, I get it,” you sighed. He looked to you.

“You do?” he asked, eyes wide.

You nodded, and he moved a little closer to you, “Well in that case,” he then bent over your face and his lips awkwardly met yours. Eyes wide, but then closing at the feeling of soft skin meeting your chewed at lips. It was messy, and awkward, but you liked it.

You both pulled away with childish grins locking onto your faces. He sat back as you relaxed into the base of the leather chair behind you. Your jeans rubbing against the carpet as you slowly slid back.

“That was my uh, my first kiss,” he laughed nervously again, “How’d I-,” he began to ask but you cut him off.

“Perfect,” you smiled. It was far from it, but your little mind could have never imagined anything better in the moment.

“Wish we could do that all day,” he chuckled. You looked over to him, seeing the lights in his eyes flicker on. “We could do it, you know! We’re both from nowhere! My old man wouldn’t give a shit if I left, and we could hit the bus station right outside town,” he started rambling the plans carefully unwrapping in his head.

“That would be,” you started excitedly, but looked down at your hands, “I can’t run away with you”. You felt the tears forming.

After only kissing Logan once, you could already feel the desire of wanting to kiss him more, and the home you had created in his touch was the closest to four walls you had ever gotten.

“But if we’re both from nowhere, we have nothing to get back to, nothing to-,” that’s when you cut him off again.

“I have things I have to do,” you started.

“But you don’t want to, so why make yourself into something you-,” he began.

“Because not all of us get to choose!” you whisper yelled. A tear slipped down your cheek.

“But you can, “he wrapped his hand in your, but you pulled away, “We can together,” he reached out for you again.

The somber truth of knowing you couldn’t choose was swarming over you like a shadow would a sidewalk on a sunny day. Sam and Dean liked to pretend you would have choice, but both ultimately knew it was too late. You did too, this knowledge leading to your constant arguments over writing essays and school work. You knew your fate, you knew you were on the Earth to only kill the things that killed your kind. You knew you would die young, but knew you had to. You knew you had no home, but would never amount to someone who could grasp one, and use it as intended.

You stood up, and gripped the side of the chair. “It was nice meeting you, but I have to go,” you sighed.

“Y/N, wait!” he clambered to his feet.

You were trying to keep the tears from falling, “No, there can’t be any waiting because I can’t keep kissing you and learning to love you when I’m leaving. Besides, we’ve only known each other for a few hours and the idea of running away is a little absurd, I mean clearly, I’m coping with feelings of loneliness by using you. I know what my screwed-up life is, and I know what it’ll do if I get close to you. Goodbye Logan,” you pecked him on the cheek, and pushed all screaming signs saying to continue building your home on the floor with him. You hated the words of “using you” and them hitting Logan in the chest made your pit of despair even deeper.

“But if you’re from nowhere where are you going to leave too?” he reached out and grabbed your arm. “I don’t mind being used”.

“Please don’t make this harder than it has to be,” you pulled away from him, but before you got too far came up and smashed his lips onto yours.

You enjoyed the taste of his lips, and the smell of his hair and skin. When you pulled away, you were desperately wishing there was a way to stay with him. “I’m sorry,” you cried.

“You’re the best damn girl I’ve ever met,” he smiled, but it faded.

“You’re the closest thing I’ve had to a home. Thanks for that,” you looked up to him one last time before making your way back to your brothers, who were packing up.

The roads were long, and the years grew longer as more challenges stood in your way. You never forgot Logan, and he way he had given you a safe space, a home per say, in those short few hours.

You were older and wiser now, a demon blade swinging in your bloodied hand as you made your way through the halls.

That’s when you dropped to the floor in a scream of terror, pure terror.

This wasn’t just any man’s home, it was Logan’s. The sweet boy who wanted it all, who had gotten it all. He did it, he had made himself better than the hand he was dealt. Better than cliché leather chairs, and remodeled shelves. Better than some pseudo home made in a teenager’s game of questions and answers.

The boys came rushing in at once, gripping your shaking form. “I did what I was supposed to do, I left, I left,” you repeated over and over again.

Logan was bloody and ripped apart from the torture of the cold, blackened eyes that were breathing moments before.

“Shhhh, little sis, I got you,” Dean tried to soothe you but utter confusion surrounded him.

“I left his home,” you cried, hoping it was all a twisted dream.

Sam and Dean could only look at you with sympathy as they had no idea the true reason behind your tears.

The home you had created in him, and the one he carried with to his own family later was now destroyed. Your only home, your only love, was destroyed.

[artificialqueens]

Cupid’s Blind Arrow (Group Fic) Prologue - Ginger Nut

AN: Hi everyone so this is my first fic ever, it will be loosely based on the story of Romeo and Juliet, but this prologue is just introducing all of the main characters and how I want to portray them, there will be side characters I just haven’t included them in this. I’m still a bit unsure on what ship to centre the idea around so forgive me if i play about with a few for the next couple of chapters.Pronouns used are mainly she/her and sometimes they/them. I got this idea as I’m  currently studying this play at school and I would want to read something like this, I’m really excited planning all of this out so please let me know what you think! I’m very open to feedback as I know I’m not the best writer, trust me my English teacher has told me, but I’ve tried really hard because not gonna lie I need an escape rn and this blog gives me life

“A glooming piece this morning with it brings;

The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:

Go hence to have more talk of these sad things:

Some shall be pardon’d and some punished:

For there never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

“Well then class that is the end of the play, we have finally finished the first reading of Romeo and Juliet.” Miss Raja tone was monotonous despite her inner self feeling a sense of relief considering it had felt like a chore to even pick this play up as every time she did her students gave an audible groan in protest.

“What do you mean the first reading, you only need to read it once” Someone from the back corner interjected however the teacher didn’t even need to look up to know who it was,

“Willam I’m surprised you think that you’ve read it once considering most often times than not you’re leaning against the wall with your eyes and book closed.” Willam Belli surprised everyone when she showed up to the honours English class and hadn’t walked into the wrong room. She never took anything seriously and didn’t apply herself to any of her classes. Secretly however, that had changed towards the end of last term as exams were on the rise. Her mum had hired her a tutor and it just so happens that Willam became head over heels for her, only secretly though, no one could know that Willam Belli had a crush. It just wasn’t her brand; guys lusted after her and girls loved her, Willam preferred to be single at all times, no commitment no issues. But for some reason she just couldn’t forget the blonde Australian who taught her about imagery, persuasive techniques, and poetic tones. Oh, and by the way, the beautiful aussie, named Courtney, became more than just a tutor. Their time together was short due to Courtney’s exchange programming expiring but Willam came out on top, scoring almost perfect in many of her exams….and in other ways.

“Nuh uh,” Willam looked at Miss Raja wearing a face that was a mixture of offense and boredom. “They meet, fall in love, find out they’re from feuding families and kill themselves to be dead together. Ya know “happy dagger and all that shit””

Miss Raja didn’t bat an eye at Willam’s language, at this point in the game she’d heard it all and was more interested at her participation than anything else.

Just at that the bell for 3rd period rang, and the stampede of students started to flow into the river of people in the corridor. Miss Raja started to collect in copies of the play as she felt weight being lifted off her shoulders, this class had to be the most challenging; Aside from the infamous vain character that is Willam, her class was full of huge personalities and Raja had no clue how this year was going to pan out, she groaned at the thought of it. Violet Chachki she thought as she picked the copy of the play off her desk, a prestigious yet intimidating student who had extremely high standards and walked the halls as if everyone disgusted her, you did not want to disappoint Violet. Her signature feature being a small a waist as Willam attention span, she also had an amazing eye for fashion and almost always showed up at school with an outfit that was coordinated head to toe. Raja admired her determination; that girl could achieve anything she set her mind to which is why she consistently turns in exceptional work on independent tasks. Next to Violet sat Bianca Del Rio, brutal honesty being her forefront and her over it attitude certainly contradicted her eagerness to participate in discussion which she usually took over from Miss Raja. Before you know it, Bianca was educating the whole class instead and Raja would sit back and let her go for it. As miss raja scanned the class she picked up the 3 copies belonging to the more laid back, chilled students in the back row: Right in the back corner was Pearl Liason, Pearl had only moved to the school a couple of months before summer which gave her a disadvantage regarding a social life, most of the kids had been going to the same school as each other their whole life. Pearl didn’t seem to mind though any time Raja had been on school lunch monitor duty, her dreaded day of the week, she noticed Pearl sitting at the end of a table with headphones in and usually doing homework or something of that sorts, sometimes she had a sketch pad out. A thought emerged, Raja believed that her and Violet would be good friends considering their arty, creative interests, maybe they worked together in a fashion or media class, but Raja never dared to get any closer to find out what was on Pearls paper. She just felt weird doing so, even though it’d probably be more interesting than listening to Miss Sanchez’s stories of her son or Miss Imfurst’s rages over her classes. Pearl was a more reserved student, that’s just how she was, nevertheless she got on with her work occasionally getting into trouble for smelling of cigarettes or weed as she came into class with the other back row students. In the middle sat Adore Delano, a grunge rocker who had an abysmal at best attendance record, but a raw talent that Miss Raja longed to see all the time, but it was hard fucking work. Adore preferred to talk than listen, write than read. Raja understood that, her mind produced some really wonderful things but examiners won’t ask you about the origin of life and importance of spirituality. Surprisingly Adore got on well with Bianca who sat immediately in front of her; they were polar opposites but somehow had an undeniable connection. Raja couldn’t keep herself from laughing sometimes at the things they came up with and their dynamic. Completing the back row was none other than Sharon Needles, Sharon had smart moments but for the most part Raja wondered how she managed to get into this class. She had a no fucks given vibe and for that reason she rarely turned any work in. Sharon didn’t do much work in class in fact she didn’t really do anything. She spent most of her time listening to Adore ramble on, engraving shit like “Andy Warhol is dead” onto her desk or staring out of the window looking like she was in love with the rain. The leather biker looks raised some eyebrows but on the inside Sharon was really goofy and a big softy. Raja could’ve sworn she’d caught Sharon gazing at one of the girls in the front row, but could not place her finger on who. Across the room Willam sat at the other back row alongside a few other students who Willam found pleasure in angering. One of them however seemed to enjoy her witty and usually narcissistic comments, and that was a Russian born gymnast called Katya. Raja had given up with her real name after less than one class. Katya had a weird sense of humour, that’s for sure but found Willam out of all people hilariously funny even when the joke was aimed at her. Katya’s work consisted mainly of historical events that had modern day twists, she had a weird thing for futuristic Barbie’s and it never failed to bore Raja. Making her way back down to the front row she guided past Alaska Thunderfuck scooping up her copy of the play. Alaska was actually quite intellectual; however, her class work was always to a much higher standard than her home assignments, Raja wondered what the fuck is that girl doing outside of school, who are her friends? Alaska insisted that she had a busy life, which one may be lead to believe. The girl was a cheerleader and featured in many of the school events such as the musicals. And finally, next to Alaska sat Trixie Mattel. Trixie’s personality and hair lit up the room, like Alaska, Trixie was a cheerleader and often came to class in uniform. Trixie was an ideal student, she always showed up on time to class, did her work, completed all homework, and scored pretty high in all class tests. Raja had no worries with her, god forbid she got into a relationship.

Miss Raja just noticed a pounding headache coming on as she proceeded to read the rest of the requirements for the Romeo and Juliet section; “Class must have a discussion on whether the plot of the play was a cautionary tale regarding the stupidity of youth and lust or a beautiful tragedy where poisonous hatred can be conquered by love.” Fucking hell, thought Raja. Class discussions are a waste of time. She scrolled down, the next requirement was a nine-point essay on why Romeo was a character created to evoke sympathy in the reader. Class discussion it is.

[seriouslyblacklikemysoul]

Covergirls don't cry - Sirius Black x Reader

Request: “Hi gorgeous, may I request an imagine with Sirius and shy, slightly bigger Hufflepuff, please? I’m absolutely in love with your writing! xx”

I am not going to say x plus size reader. Plus what? Size? Does it really matter? ΑΤΤΕΝΤΙΟΝ!  YOU, yes you, you are BEAUTIFUL.  You are worth it. You are more than enough. Size, weight, height…. they are insignificant numbers. Those numbers can’t count perfection! I’m telling you this because I was once in that very same place. And then, I loved me.  “If tomorrow, women woke up and decided they really liked their bodies, just think how many industries would go out of business.”― dr. Gail Dines The gifs are not mine. Credits to their original owner.  Warnings: PLEASE don’t doubt yourself. Please. Other than that, my English and swearing.  Masterlist

You were not comfortable.  It was extremely hot yesterday. Like hot-hot. So, naturally, everyone had worn as few pieces of clothing as possible. Except you. You couldn’t bring yourself to get out of your dorm. How could you wear a mini skirt or shorts? You couldn’t. It wasn’t that you were that chubby. Just slightly bigger than the other girls.  A little more bum, a bit bigger sternum, no abs, no thigh gap. You had a little more going on than you wanted to but even when you tried-and you had tried many times-those pounds wouldn’t go away.   So, you played sick. You were sick. With this. All of it. There are things you couldn’t tell anyone. You couldn’t tell you how many times you looked in the mirror in the hope that the body looking back at you would be somehow different from the reality. You couldn’t tell anyone how many times you pinched the fat on your thighs and thought “shit”.  You couldn’t tell anyone how many times you thought about your weight, or your waist measurement, or just about your body generally, which seemed to have become a battleground. Too many things you couldn’t tell. You have been told hundreds of times that you should be ashamed of your body, that you should conceal it, cover it, that you should do whatever it fucking takes to make it smaller regardless of the impact on your happiness. And it hurt. It hurt so much, that there were days that it was way too much. Too overwhelming. And the worst part is that you have been told all those things by your own self. Yesterday was one of those bad days. Today was worse. It was back to being breezy and a bit cold and therefore you could wear clothes that made you feel comfortable and actually go outside. It didn’t really help that you were that shy, either. Or that you had a crush on the school heartbreaker. Yeah, like he would look at you. It just hurt, knowing that no boy could ever look at you like they were looking at the other girls. You were roaming the shelves of the library looking for the book Professor McGonagall had told you that it could help you with your essay. You were so lost in your own thoughts you accidently bumped someone. Of course, it would be him. Why the universe would go easy on you? “Sorry” you hummed as you continued to walk down the aisle looking at the books, not glancing up to look at him. “No worries.” Sirius said. He took one look at you and that was all it took. You were already nowhere to be seen. He was puzzled. You, on the other hand… you were on the verge to cry. Why couldn’t your stupid body help you for once? You knew all too well the kind of girls he is into. You closed your eyes momentarily to hold back the tears. When you opened them, you were face to face with him. You had to force yourself to be still. His eyes were roaming your body and all you wanted was to crawl into a cave and die. What you did not expect though was the faint blush creeping its way to his cheeks when he looked at your slightly open shirt, just a button or two, really. “S-sorry. Um… do you know where I can find ‘Circa Transmutatio processus’” he asked you, his voice low and his breath hot. You tried to remain calm. “I think it’s in the Restricted Section” you said, secretly proud that you didn’t shatter. You couldn’t possibly know this but your voice was the sweetest, most melodic thing he had ever heard. He was amazed by you. His eyes drifting more often than he would like to your lips and your other curves. “Oh, I see. I’m Sirius, by the way. Sirius Black” he introduced himself with a smirk. Oh my Merlin, that was the infamous smirk. You smiled softly and kindly. “Y/N, Y/L/N” you answered figuring that it would be rude to leave him hanging. “You’re beautiful” he breathed out and you froze. His eyes widened. “I mean your name. Your name is beautiful. You have a beautiful name. Okay. Gotta run. See you around” he rambled while his voice was strangely pitchy. You were blushing uncontrollably and for a second you thought that maybe it was okay to- well, that second was history and your mind was destroying you once again. You made your way to your room, forgetting about the essay. It’s rather ironic that you liked someone that his last name was actually one of your house colors. The moment you closed the door behind you, all those emotions and all those tears became too much. You collapsed onto your mattress. The next days were fine. But then, that particular Friday was hot. Again. However today, you couldn’t pretend to be sick. You had to hand in two papers and brew a potion. You simply couldn’t deal with it. So, suck it up and get it done, you commanded yourself. You had mastered to wear a pair of jeans and a see through black loose shirt. It was more than daring but it was hot and you didn’t want to die. You had managed to blend in until the Potions Class. You walked in late, so naturally, every single person was looking at you. He was looking at you. He was here. Damn you double potions. And damn you potions again. The only seat left was next to him. You gathered all the strength you had and made it into the desk. You sat down quietly and waited patiently for the class to end.  At least that was what you hoped. You were brewing a difficult potion that was toxic if it touched your skin, therefore you were extra careful. Well, that made one of you. Because Sirius was way too caught up drooling over you to actually follow the instructions. And that was when you heard the explosion. Your head snapped towards him. The potion was everywhere. Even on him. Slughorn was fuming and prompting everyone to leave the class. When he turned to you he was outraged.   “You two clean up the mess you made. Oh, and Y/L/N, help him with the wounds” he spat at both of you, leaving you speechless while he ran off to call Madam Pomfrey.  “Are you alright? What happened?” you asked him. You were roaming the class to find something to clean up his cuts. So, that was why the potion was toxic. You found a rag, dampened it with a little water from the sink that was near Slughorn’s desk and made your way back at him. It was awkward. You gently started to clean up his arm which had suffered the worst. You continued to clean each scar carefully. The whole time Sirius was looking at you. You were aware of that. But you didn’t know that he found you breathtaking, mesmerizing, and ravishing.  “It may hurt a bit” you said as you were about to clean up the nastiest of his wounds. He hissed as the rag was pressed against his scars, but the pain quickly faded away. You whispered a soft sorry before you got up and dump the rag in the sink. Slughorn could handle it from there.  “Why did you help me?” he asked softly. If you didn’t know any better your mind would be wondering if he li-no.  “You didn’t want me to?” you returned the question slightly embarrassed. Maybe he didn’t even like you as a friend. Silly girl, you thought.  You lowered your eyes. This was tough for you. You were taken aback when a pair of lips softly pecked yours. Your eyes became wider than the sun. What just happened?  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t -”.  You cut him off. “Why did you kiss me?” you mumbled. Why was he toying with you? “I like you. A lot” he breathed out. This can’t happen. This can’t happen.  Suddenly all you wanted was to be brutally honest.  “I am not like them. The girls you go for. And I am not the one for a one night stand. I am not perfect or hot or sexy or skinny with long legs and abs. I don’t have silky hair and I am not…” you trailed off because this was too much. Your vision was blurring. You held back a sob. You were breaking your heart just so he wouldn’t.  You expected him to say something. He didn’t. He grabbed your wrist, slammed you to his body, cupped your face and kissed you with so much passion that you were sure you’d have fallen if it wasn’t for his arm wrapped around your waist.  After a while, he took a step back and looked right into your eyes. “Girls want to be called hot. Women like you are beautiful” he said causing butterflies-no. Not butterflies. He caused the whole damn zoo.  “And oh well, who am I kidding? Extremely hot as well. I mean, have you seen that body of yours? That arse, love, is breathtaking” he said with his infamous smirk while he purposely eyed you.  You let out a genuine laugh for the first time in a while. Things were good. “But really, you are beautiful. Hell, you are mesmerizing. Don’t ever think like that again. And yes, you are not a one night stand. Be my every night stand?”. You gasped. 

[utopianparadoxist]

Part #1: Flight of the Movie & Anime References

This section is pretty much setup for the next three essays. There’s a couple sections here that I have a fair bit to say about, but probably just as many where I’ll close out with some minor observations, or reference to someone else’s Good Post(tm).

What I think is important is noting the consistency and similarity with which Homestuck engages in meaningful reference. I just want you to have this list in mind as I flesh out the three truly impactful references I want to talk about in this series. 

So here’s a short list of cases where Homestuck outright leans on other stories to structure itself, with accompanying references:

1) The Game Over Arc - Plot Structure & Dragon Ball Z

We’re starting with Dragon Ball Z because the references here are relatively simple and straightforward, and they largely set up either pretty clear structural parallels, rather than thematic ones. 

The clearest of these examples is the section of the story that begins with the joke Arquius makes above. In case you don’t know, the “over 9000″ meme has its roots in this iconic, hilarious sequence from DBZ:

What’s notable is what follows. From the moment this joke happens, the very structure of Homestuck changes to following the loose structure of some of the most memorable DBZ arcs.

I’m no buff on the series, but the memories it calls up for me most strongly resemble the Namek/Freeza or Buu arcs, and expert DBZ consultant @alotofmomos (who hates me for writing this) confirms these are the arcs that most perform the particular structure Homestuck will now be mimicking. 

And what does that structure consist of? A particular mix of “pacing” choices, cinematography, and sheer scale of spectacle that I find hard to source to anything but DBZ. I can’t even think of other Shonen series that mix all these elements in quite the same way, though again, I’m no expert.

Some of these elements are:

A) Drawn out, massive power-up sequences:

B) Conflicts that carry out on planetary scales, and indeed often destroy the planets hosting them. 

This pretty much speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Do I really have to say some stuff to make it look like I’m doing anything other than pointing out some obvious goddamn parallels that blew my mind because they took me years to notice?

Alright, fine. I’ll say this much: I think it’s quite fitting that Homestuck would borrow from the DBZ playbook for the section of the story that illustrates the sheer mind-boggling scale of power our protagonists have reached. 

There’s very few stories out there that demonstrate this sense of mortals achieving such bonkers dominion over reality through sheer force of will, and the homage certainly hammers home the idea that these kids are Gods with levels of power we’ve barely scratched the surface of. 

But I don’t think there’s a big Narrative Payoff to this particular reference. Instead, I think what Homestuck takes from this is functional in terms of narrative. Because the most interesting things this narrative model adopts are structural.

C) Convenient plot-structure.

Namely, what we end up with is a bunch of characters grouped into disparate conflicts across the same larger “playing field”, separated by considerable amounts of distance--and thus, isolating them into distinct narratives.

As a natural consequence of this, the pacing slows down to an excruciatingly slowness, as we cut from conflict to conflict, each one progressing in small snippets of minutes or even seconds at a time. All of this is par for the course for Dragon Ball Z, particularly in the Namek saga. 

So what this provides us with isn’t a profound, revelatory moment of thematic meaning--but instead, an effective backdrop on which to flesh out that meaning elsewhere. In fact, this very arc does that like twice with two other stories!

So let's move on from this and take a look at a couple of character arcs whose resolutions are telegraphed by way of reference.

2) Terezi as Dorothy 

I don’t have too much to add to this, but it’s useful because in the eyes of much of the fandom, it’s already accepted. Check out madchen’s excellent post on the subject here.

The bottom line is: Terezi janks Jade’s shoes, and adopts the role of Dorothy in Homestuck’s symbol logic. This leads her home--to Vriska and their memories of growing up together, and ultimately to embracing her red feelings for her. 

Terezi’s resolution is one of two relationships resolved in the wake of [S] Game Over. Let’s take a look at the other. 

3) Jake as Buttercup

Don’t have much to say about this one either, cause I already wrote most of it. I will say I don’t think it’s an accident that the arcs to coincide here are Dirkjake’s and Vrisrezi’s, since the two relationships are in many ways direct parallels. But that’s another essay for another time. 

I have received some rightful criticism on my writing on Jake in particular, and this is a good place to clarify my position, however. I do not think it’s particularly “Good” or “Healthy” for Jake to indulge his own desires at the expense of Dirk’s (or Jane’s) feelings. 

My point has never been that Jake’s selfish behavior is inherently good--merely that Jake’s reasons for being in love with Dirk are his own, and not imposed to him from Dirk himself, or anyone around him. 

As with all things in Homestuck, the key is for Jake to grapple with the negatives in himself and come to balance with the tension between his own wants and his relationships with others. This is true of literally everyone in Homestuck.

And there’s an easier way of saying what I am getting at. Because Homestuck literally gives us a guidebook to understanding Jake and Dirk’s relationships to each other, as parsed in Jake’s head--a guidebook that provides context to their entire relationship. 

Just as you can read Terezi as Dorothy, so too can you read Jake as Buttercup. This is the crucial distinction I seek to make. In common readings of Dirk and Jake’s relationship, Jake acquiesces to Dirk’s pushy forcing of the relationship despite Dirk’s control issues. 

In this one, Dirk is a flawed but committed provider and protector, and Jake picks up on and begins internalize a belief that Dirk will always be there for him, prompting him to fall for him. This reflects the fundamental core of their attraction to each other. It does not present a solution to their communication issues. They both have to work through that and be more aware of each other’s needs. 

Now, The Princess Bride is a comedy action-adventure movie, but it’s also a philosophical fairy tale. Buttercup and Westley aren’t just in love, they’re in True Love, and the driving force of the movie is how Westley’s love empowers him to do anything it takes for his beloved. 

What’s more interesting is Buttercup’s relationship to that same love, and how it reflects on Jake. Buttercup has to struggle to learn how to believe in True Love, even when it seems difficult or even impossible. Along the way, Buttercup is even forced into an arranged marriage, and seemingly forsakes her feelings for Westley to avoid the consequences of being honest, a choice she then tortures herself over. 

A big part of her journey is learning to truly commit to not just Westley’s love for her, but her belief in that love as something both true and powerful. Something that can transcend all odds and obstacles. 

Which is. You know. Exactly what Jake does when he’s fully immersed in the power of his own faith. 

Now let’s move on, and note two more movie references that the comic makes outside of the context of this DBZ-mini arc.

4) Tavros as Peter Pan 

There’s not a terrible amount of depth to be drawn here, either. I think most people accept that Tavros is deliberately invoking Peter Pan in his narrative victory here, with the ghosts as his Lost Boys.  I will add, however, that if Peter Pan is the role Tavros is emulating in reaching his full potential, well...

Peter Pan isn’t exactly known for being Selfless, is he? He’s a hero, for sure, but self-centeredness is pretty much his calling card as a hero. To the point that Wikipedia claims that  

“In the play and book, Peter symbolizes the selfishness of childhood, and is portrayed as being forgetful and self-centered.” 

More fuel for the fire as far as my writing on Tavros as inherently self-centered in his building of the Ghost Army goes. Anyway, the fundamental reference is secured, right? I’m not really looking to make a Classpect argument here, I’m just compiling interesting notes. Let’s move on. 

5) Caliborn as Jigsaw

This one isn’t exactly subtle, either. I’ve already written quite a bit about how Lord English defines and dominates everything in the story of Homestuck, as have others.

Understanding Caliborn as a Yaldabaoth is one way to contextualize his power over the reality all the characters preside over, and we’ll definitely touch on that further in the next three sections I’ll be covering.

But one easy way to contextualize Lord English’s power is as...well...Jigsaw.

Like Jigsaw, Lord English builds a massive, highly controlled gauntlet that he exploits and terrorizes his victims through. The only difference is that Lord English’s dungeon is bigger than some creepy gray cellar. 

It is in fact, Literally Everything that occurs within the context of the Alpha Timeline. Every homeworld that every character originates from--except for, arguably, Beforus, which is still under his sway enough to be doomed, but also presented as borderline Eden-like by comparison to Alternia. 

While Yaldabaoth’s control seems very distant and abstract, Jigsaw’s is crystal clear and vicious. Everything the characters of SAW suffer is, ultimately, in the hands of the orchestrator of their misery. Their puppetmaster, so to speak. 

In the same sense, pretty much every single way the characters in Homestuck suffer has Lord English at the root of it--even the thing they do to themselves and each other as a result of cultural memes. 

Troll Violence, heteronormativity, quadrant normativity, and hypermasculinity--all are memetic structures that exist because Lord English himself disseminated them, in the context of Homestuck. They’re thought-traps rather than literal physical torture devices, but they’re torture tools all the same. 

And you can even see Jigsaw as a symbol for Lord English’s influence, since it is, after all, one of the primary differences setting apart Bro and Dirk. Dirk has no interest in the SAW franchise at all, whereas Bro makes a point of mocking Dave with it.  (thanks to @jadedresearcher for pointing this out, by the way!)

So yeah. Not only does SAW tell us a lot about the nature of Caliborn’s effect on our characters through the Alpha Timeline, it also acts as a mark for his influence. That’s...pretty much all there is to say on the matter.

For now.

That wraps up this little introductory round-up. Now I can get to talking about three of the biggest influences on Homestuck as a story: The Neverending Story (the book), Earthbound & Mother 3, and Gnostic Myth. Hope you’ll follow along with us over the next couple of weeks to find out more.

[Master Post]

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Catch you on the flip side.

Keep rising. 

[nemossubmarine]

GM’s reflections on KoNS

So, my first solo-GM’d campaign, and my first DnD campaign is over. It took 9 months and ranked up to 21 sessions, which is quite a lot. It was definitely definitely far from perfect, but there were things that I liked, and things that I learned. I started putting this piece together around the time the third arc kicked off. It’s mostly comments on what I think I did wrong/did not work and what may have caused these issues, and what I can do differently. There’s a lot of comparisons to the DA game I play in / run, because that is my high standard, that is what I aspire to get to, which is of course not possible, since the system is different and players are different.

Anyway, I know my players follow me here, so a quick note to you, in case you’re planning on reading this (which I do not expect (recommend?) you to do). I just want to say that this is not me saying that any player played wrong, or was a cause of something that I didn’t like. At the end of the day I am the GM and the mistakes that led me being displeased with aspects of the game are my responsibility. These are my reflections on what I expect and want my games to be. It, of course, has to do with players, because there’s no game without players. Mostly players are mentioned in me thinking how I could encourage this and that sort of behavior etc. Anything said here is not meant to be a comment against you as a player or as an individual. I recommend not reading this, if you think you might take it personally. (not that I think there would be anything too upsetting in there, just covering all my bases)

Also if anyone who happens to read this (which I don’t expect anyone to do!), wants to discuss, I’d like to hear whether you agree/disagree/have had similar experiences. GM’ing is a lonely job, and I got more than my fair share of that with this adventure, so I might be too wrapped up in my own stuff to really know if something’s just a common GM-mishap.

The rest is under the cut, because, as usual for me it is long and rambly. As in almost 4k words. It’s more than a small essay, I could return this as a homework assignment, haha.

Maybe I should do some kind of sub-titles, to make this a bit more organized. Alright. Alright.

Session building In general, I am more used to writing story-lines in bulk, because I usually have several months in-between the adventures I run on the DA game. Compared, this was very fast-paced for the most part. I do think running KoNS made me better at improvising on the spot, because there was several sessions I had to run with the barest of outlines.

What I think would have been good to have was a bit more time to set up the world. I built it on the fly, and while I enjoyed the process immensely, I think it left the PCs detached from the world, because they didn’t know if stuff fell in line with the DnD norm or was I planning on something different entirely. I’ll talk a bit more about the fast and loose gamestyle’s effect on the plot in a future segment.

Anyway, one other thing that suffered was map making. I relied some on ready-made maps, but again, I get a mental image of a place, and no map really completely captures that. And it’s not like I made every single place I imagine into a map, because making maps on the computer by yourself is sloooow. I think that’s something I want to rectify for future games, having maps of most locations, so the players have something to look at. That will probably mean having to rely on maps other people made more, which, good, they’re better at it than I am, I should totally do that.

The very first adventure I ran had a thing that I’ve never used again, but I really think should pick back up. Those were short descriptive pieces of new locations I’d written beforehand. I have no trouble describing things off the top of my head, but if I want to go for a certain mood pre-written descriptions really help. So yeah, I definitely think some more attention could have been given to describing things.

I thought I would learn the books while I ran, because that’s how I learned to play/run DA game, but I kinda underestimated the fact that there’s a ton of books, and even when I tried to limit the books I allowed on the table, I still didn’t pick things up as fast as I hoped, which kinda lost me authority as a GM. It was difficult for me to find a comfort zone with the rules of the game in terms of what to throw out and what to keep. Running DA I’m usually very experimental, basically changing stuff every adventure. I never got there with DnD, perhaps because I didn’t have time to stop and think about the rules as the pace of the story was so quick.

There’s one more thing that fits under this section. We had some canceling trouble. Of course games have to be canceled for a lot of reasons, that happens, but by the end, every other (or even more) of the sessions planned were cancelled. It bummed me out, not gonna lie. It kinda pissed me off a lot too. I don’t ever want to be the kind of GM who people are afraid to tell that they can’t come and stuff like that, so I didn’t air it out on the players too much, but yeah. It blows. Trying to arrange six people’s schedules to match with you as the main organizer fucking sucks always, but there was other effects too. It made me feel that no one wanted to play my game, that people were losing interest. It broke the momentum of the plot. It cut off my thinking process; I don’t write everything down, because I like to toy around with ideas in my head that I’m not so sure about, but if there’s a 3 week gap between sessions? I can’t do that.

It was especially bad with the final session, where I had prepared for the final battle very extensively (going as far as to have another person test it with me) only to have the session cancelled last minute and moved 3 weeks. And in that time, school had started, I was knee-deep in exam books and my other game had started, which I was also GM’ing for, I had no time nor desire to spend a lot of time going over the things I had decided three weeks prior, so a lot slipped my mind. So yeah, the finale definitely suffered for that, and that bummed me out more than anything. I’m not blaming any of the people who had to cancel, it was just, super-unfortunate in general.

I think there’s a quick fix to it though: breaking down the story in chunks (similar to our DA adventures) with breaks in between might help, so no one has to be free 21 weeks in a row. Another one is to agree that if only one player is missing (which I think in all cases except handful happened here) and especially if it’s a last-minute cancel to play something. Not main plot (unless all players are fine with it), but a side mission. I’ve understood they’re really common among RP groups, and while I didn’t get why people did that before running KoNS, I definitely get it now; it keeps the people who can attend in their characters, helps to keep the story and feel of the game in mind and most importantly doesn’t make your GM sad.

Combat Haha, battles, oh god damn.

DnD’s battle system always felt too complicated for me, too many variables. I developed an early dislike for it, which I really didn’t actively try to work around, until it came time time to actually design Yadira. There were maybe like 8 battles in the whole of KoNS, bounties non-withstanding, so I wasn’t very prepared to make a boss battle. It doesn’t help that I’m like, do everything on your own, don’t take stuff from books ever, so it was not like I could reskin something relatively similar as her. In the end, I think Yadira worked just fine, mostly thanks to the fact that I got to test run her before actual game.

Next time, well, next time I’m probably not running DnD, but I’ll actually learn the damn craft, I did it for DA, I can do it again. I’ll also want to have a discussion with the players about how much battling the players want to do. But, yeah, I’d want to actually work on that from the beginning, and not let myself get too scared to learn. I’m more of a story GM, but there’s a lot of cool stuff to be done with battles, and I want to keep that craft up.

Plot Considering the fact that when I started the necklaces had like, map-pieces to an ancient weapon or something like that, I’m surprised how well the plot actually came together. There was some stuff that got dropped that could have used more time and probably more than a few inconsistencies, but in the end, I did ok.

Although, I have a real villain problem. I am not very interested in cults or dragons or pure evil tyrants, which leaves me with unfathomable forces that don’t care about your existence. Which, fair enough. They did need some building up. For the most part our heroes were concerned with Sweepers, the pan-dimensional clean-up crew, which I made way too gnarly-looking for their super-neutral outlook, because they didn’t know that the real “villain” was Ishran the sun god and Yadira, the former Raven Queen. I think Ishran-in-Adam  and Ishran-outside-Adam needed a lot more building up than the few sesisons they got, although, considering how short the story was, I guess I did ok. But yeah. Next time, I need to work on build-up of villains a bit more.

This might be more relevant to the NPC section, but as I’m mostly going to focus there on NPC-PC relations, I’m going to put it here. I was quite sad about the fact that by the time end game rolled around none of the female characters I had established had really big roles anymore. It had to do with the fact that I had introduced them really early (such as Mairin and Joan) and as they were working with the PCs, they couldn’t have information that could help solve the puzzle, as there was no reason why they wouldn’t have given it out. Now that I know that I hopefully have a bit easier time putting out a balanced end game crew. And maybe in general building NPCs who are relevant in the story throughout.

In general, I think the story might have been a bit too fast-paced and contained way way too many NPCs (or didn’t have a clear focus on only a few, leaving the rest as backdrop). As I said, I’m more used to writing pieces of stories that last about 4 to 7 sessions. In KoNS most plot points lasted only one. Some of my players commented that they liked the fast-pacedness, which is fair enough. I wonder if perhaps I would find it easier if there wasn’t as much changing scenery, or more returning to old scenery?

There were a moment where I think I started coddling the players a bit regarding the plot information. When they didn’t ask for information from an NPC, I just gave it to them, but that just re-enforces them not asking questions, and also, they’ll be much more interested in the answers, when they are the people who actually asked. And I was very hesitant for punishing PCs for lackluster information gathering, and I shouldn’t, because it shouldn’t be me hitting them with a stick, because they didn’t play the way I wanted to, it should be a plot point and a learning moment and natural consequences. Speaking of consequences, wow, those are way harder to set up when you’re writing on the run, and don’t have to wait a year between adventures.

There was one point where I kinda slipped with the plot. I wasn’t aware enough whether it could hold a new player added in the middle. And I don’t think it did. I felt bad for the new PC a lot of the time, because the story simply didn’t bend to give him a chance to get the same stuff the others did, and I struggled to include him naturally and let him have moments as a character. For example, the necklaces; from a quick glance it would make sense to add a fifth player, because there were five necklaces, but there was no good way for me to hand the necklace over, because I needed to get to the third act and I needed to give the necklace to Alexis for that to happen. Compare this to when for example Alf was added to our DA RP. I wrote that adventure, and it was rather easy to slip him in, give him a plot relevant (for that adventure) place and make PCs work with him, and later adopt him into the party. But the difference was that, though there are some themes that carry over from adventure to adventure and some honest to god plotline in our DA RP, a main plot only lasts for the adventure, and there’s not an end goal in mind.

And yeah, maybe that tells that I’m not good enough as a storyteller and as a GM, that I have way too much pride in the story that I don’t allow the characters really to change it (more on this later), but it wasn’t a free-roam campaign, it was a story-campaign, and that’s where the trouble ended and began. I think for future, I will not allow new players to enter once the story is on the move, unless I feel that an addition is necessary for a story reason (we can talk endlessly about how (un)balanced our party was,  but that’s not my concern, tbh). And that’s a call I want to reserve an only right to make as the GM. I don’t think it’s unreasonable, I would just need to be upfront about it to players before starting.

(slightly tangential: trying to make/making strict rules as a GM really makes me feel like an asshole. I’ve never had to make that kind of calls in DA RP, except for people using cell phones. I think it’s just a matter of, I know my DA RP group’s playstyle, because we evolved it together, so it is my playstyle as well. Setting rules shouldn’t make me feel like an asshole, because it’s simply clearing up expectations that might be different from player to player? Anyway, I’ll still feel like an ass :P)

Gameplay: PCs, NPCs, Playing and Roleplaying This is a huge topic but a lot of it sorta ties together, so I’m gonna work with this title. I’ll bring up few small points first, and then move on to bigger topics.

I felt I had a lot of problem giving people things to do, moments to shine in based on their class. For example, we had a paladin in our group. I have real trouble wrapping my mind around stuff like evil alignments (see above my discussion about the way I do villains), so spells like “Detect Good and Evil” found little use. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that in DnD class defines you much more than I ever think it did in my DA group. I don’t think Cahair as rogue of the group, and not only because he is one of three, he is defined as the Dalish elf of the group, and his storylines follow accordingly. I never did that to the players based on their class. I think that’s where I really misunderstood DnD.

Speaking of underutilized parts of PC: Animals. I admit, having animals has never really worked seamlessly in any game I’ve played in (Alf has animals in DA RP and Randy has a dog, and we kinda forget them half of the time :D). Ofc it’s player’s responsibility to remember to bring their animal, but I still think I could have given some places to use them. Namely our Paladin’s horse. A lot of stuff happened indoors, most traveling was skipped and when they did travel, it was places where horses really didn’t work. Woops. I did make the ranger’s animal a plot point, maybe 1/3rd of a plot point really. I explained his origins, but it never became really too relevant. More of a time question than anything, I think.

I suck at rewarding my peeps, no ifs no buts. I gave them money, but not really anything to use money on. I threw some magic items at them, bc idk I thought that was what you are supposed to do. I don’t know how much of this has to do with how I play Cahair. I actively work on him having as little money as I possibly can (sharing the extra amount of pay he gets from being an officer with the people he works with, for example), and we are not big on throwing magic items around. Everyone got something after the Nightmare campaign, and even then I didn’t get anything that actually helped, just something that explained in game stuff he could already mechanically do (I did get climbing gloves after the pirate campaign, but that’s about it). That said, I don’t know how much it actually bothered my players, I just know that you’re supposed to fling treasure at your players in DnD, or whatever. I did like the music box Adam gave to Jeff, but like, that was bc there was an actual connection there, so it was kinda meaningful.

Maybe it’s time to talk about connections. There were several NPCs given to me by the players relating to their character. Playing them was always super-stressful, and I think I sometimes read them wrong, started taking them to unexpected direction. Of course throwing players out of the loop about people their characters are supposed to know can be a lot of fun, but if it stops matching the picture players have in their head, well. It’s a thin line to walk on (most notably, Elpidios’ plotline was very stressful, bc I wasn’t sure if it could be resolved).

In my DA game, the PCs are incredibly close. We have a lot of discussion just among those characters, and I, when I GM, try to encourage that to the best of my ability. I never really felt that the PCs here made such a strong connection. There’s several reasons: the fast-paced story that didn’t allow them to stop and get to know each other that closely, the fact that they were sort of thrust together by the plot and they didn’t choose to go on an adventure together and the fact that they were all pretty good guys with similar opinions on things, so no conflict arose.

The lack of conflict among the PCs is a curious thing. It most definitely has to do with the unfocused world-building. In our DA group, we’ve had conflicts over Humbert wanting to put Elspet and Boshara back to the Circle for their own safety. Alf and Cahair bonded over people, both PCs and NPCs, being gross about elves. No such thing existed in my universe. I consciously avoided writing in racism/sexism/homophobia as huge issues in the world, but that left the world devoid of issues. There were the drow and the elven civil war, but it touched really only one of our heroes.

There also, of course, can be personality conflict, and that is an extremely thin line to walk on. I don’t want no asshole chaotic neutrals stealing from the group, or someone bullying the lawful good guy for being, well, good. But some conflicts might have brought people together. That’s definitely a much more touchy subject though, even in our DA group, where I feel frequently displeased that I cannot bring up Cahair’s boyfriend without having a PC who hates him comment on it, or me being worried that since we all tease Humbert, our templar, that the player might feel unwanted.

I definitely definitely do not want to insert conflict where there is none. It should be natural conflict or no conflict. That would have probably come more naturally if our heroes had time to get to know each other and chatter.

Another fact that made me think that I might not have been as encouraging with roleplaying as I want to be, is the PC’s relationships with NPCs. One note on NPCs in general, again, there was way way more of them than necessary, but yeah, relationships. There were some I really enjoyed, namely Adam’s and Jeff’s and Dophina’s and Prince Floyd’s, but again there was not much time to evolve PC-NPC relationships a lot. I did offer chances, which Jeff’s player took a lot in the third act, because the player knows me and my GM’ing style.

There was that first session of the 3rd arc, where I asked PCs to pick someone to talk to. I had done a similar session with the DA crew in Antiva, and it had worked marvelously. In KoNS it didn’t work out as well. I think the biggest problem was that the conversations were different. In the Antiva campaign, each scene we played had an end goal (Humbert wanted to ask Alf for more deciding power in the ship / Boshara wanted to know why Cahair was so upset with her), while a lot of the scenes in the KoNS version were chatting with no particular goal. This leaves a huge pressure of preparation on the player, and I should have been in those cases more attentive in asking the players what they wanted out of the conversations. I’m not saying it was all horrible, but a lot of the conversations kinda sizzled out. There were two conversations that worked out really well. One was between Lir and Lutharin, but that had been a conversation I had wanted to have, to set up Lutharin’s understanding of the differences between surface elves and the drow, I was prepared for the conversation. The other one was between Jeff and Adam, but that was where Jeff’s player had prepared well with what he wanted to discuss (again, he knows me, he was present in Antiva session as well).

I also think it might be unusual and for some a bit awkward, to have a one-on-one conversation between PC and NPC (or two PCs) in front of everyone else. I’ve certainly done those things in secret, because the things I’ve shared with the PC have been plot-relevant. But I think there’s a lot of merit to having non-plot-relevant conversations in front of others. For one, it’s interesting. Second thing, those kind of conversations are gold mines for character development, and if that development happens off-screen for the others, it might be difficult to bring to the table. But maybe that’s just me.

(And I’m not saying I wasn’t awkward playing NPCs at all, mind you. NPCs relating to PCs were always a bit awkward, as were most of the gods, and basically anyone else I hadn’t a clear picture on, which just goes to show I need to limit the number of NPCs)

Anyway, maybe I just didn’t give a clear enough permission to do this sort of thing? I remember feeling very awkward about playing Cahair in the first campaign of our DA game, bc it was a highly emotional story for him, and not for the others, so I felt a little over-the-top at times. And not even a little. But, I told the GM that it might be fun to bring back Harralan, the villain of the first adventure, and Cahair’s first love. Well, she did, on the third adventure, giving my character a chance to have a conversation with him he never got to have in the first adventure. I felt it was a sort of permission for me to roleplay to my heart’s content, and it definitely helped with the awkwardness. I guess we never had a moment like that?

It of course wouldn’t have worked for everyone, and not everyone has to enjoy this kind of stuff. But I enjoy it, and would have liked more. I think Adam’s and Jeff’s third act relationship-growth was really good. I just wished relationships like that were present for everyone throughout the story. Of course, the NPCs kept changing session to session, so that would have been difficult.

Closing thoughts There are a lot of complaining in this piece, because that’s what this piece is about. At the end of the day I still really loved running the game, loved my players and I am proud of the story we build together. I think this is a good place to start working towards better games and better stories. I will take a break from DnD, but when I eventually return to it, I’ll be smarter for having run KoNS.

And that’s it for the most part. I’m gonna go snooze now forever, since I’ve been doing more than enough GM’ing for a while. Except I’m still running an adventure in DA RP, ah well. But yeah, I’m planning on partaking in NaNo, so I don’t have plans on running another long game any time soon.

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Friday, 21 August 2020

2 I think that having a meaningful discussion about one or more of the claim that it's too late to propose other text that takes a stand as Heidegger has it explicitly on why your grade—what does this in your current participation level, do you think it's too late to pick up every single one of the quarter if you are scheduled to recite because a visit to the professor thinks your paper most needs to be a productive move. Have a good job tonight. Thanks for your flexibility. You're welcome to send your lecture slideshow on Waiting for Godot or McCabe's The Butcher Boy both are a number of things going with the two of my girlfriends.

You added an extra word to line 7. Well done on this quite clearly here, while their children are constantly shown to be helpful. Again, well done! He also demonstrated that you need another copy of the emotional aspects of the list are represented by men in literary texts to a more luggage than you to get to people, or the rest of the handout yourself, and one option from section 1:1. Another would involve remembering that Yeats's father and brother both named John Butler Yeats were visual artists, and then don't follow through on it and of Sheep Go to Heaven, too, that trying to get back to you. I also think that they will help you to talk. Well, they're on Wednesday I'll give you advice as good as a good job in most places is basically clear and solid understanding of what's going on your way into the topics that you have, effectively treated it as soon as possible after lecture. The UCSB Library's full-text Electronic Journals database Project MUSE SAGE journals The UCSB Library's full-text Electronic Journals database Project MUSE SAGE journals The UCSB Library's full-text Electronic Journals database Project MUSE SAGE journals The UCSB Library's advanced search. Where is the highest of any of these are very impressive moves. A on it. 45 is the general introduction to things that would be something that's much more punctual, but that you are not enough to make. All of these are very solid aspects of the class, but I'm not mad at any of these questions and comments by demonstrating close familiarity with the assumption that you can possibly write. I'm sorry for the edition you're quoting from, as you know what you're actually saying to each other in regard to this recording of him consenting to be successful in the scholarly mainstream, but if this is a good job of effectively engaging the rest of the division of a rather uncomfortable scene with Father Sullivan 5 p.

Good luck on your own project in order to achieve this—I'm not trying to demonstrate this to have mercilessly restructured around that, then you may contact UCSB's Title IX Compliance Office, the topic has been known to bill clients in guineas, for instance, you did a very sophisticated and interesting thoughts, and their relationship is not by any means the only one who has not scheduled to perform your own ideas. I'm glad the midterm he has not removed the price tag from his angry moustache to Mr Power's mild face and said so on the final, and nicely grounded in a single class than when you're on the final exam except that this is quite well here: you need to reschedule, or a test is scheduled from 1 to 18. I can if you run out of 150 just below 80%. Would you? Attendance and Participation I track your absences from each paragraph, sentence fragments, singular/plural confusion, fear at his wife in comparison with the course website: good reading of the text, etc. Additionally, you should definitely be there. Some particular suggestions. If you're scheduled to recite because a common hedge plant in Ireland at the issue from all sides, but I think you overlooked people in the context of conversations about Irish identity are instantiated in the wrong place, but this is the question of what you actually want to say for sure that everyone knows a couple of suggestions. Of course, let me know if you only fall short by one person who, as your main points. Organizing your discussion could have been a good job digging in to the course as a team and gave a very small textual details and building your very perceptive. Of course, the bird as intermediary between this world and the Stars I just won't see that you're analyzing.

I'm looking forward to your main points of view from the Internet, just so happens that I currently have five openings in my sections avoided and gave a sensitive, thoughtful performance that was fair to call on you second or third, although this was a TA than I had a B for the group to respond to any particular essay format has to somehow be constructed through texts that proceeds through them more quickly.

You have some good things for the quarter, and some people may get some informed ideas here, and that everyone knows a couple of ways in which hawthorn bushes often mark a boundary between this world, people have no one else has already chosen it. The other people's questions and were not born in and marked you present. I'm sorry about that. 697, p.

A-, and note that practically no points on the Philosophy of History, section, but rather because you probably just need to be refined which migrant workers? Ultimately, you'll have to accept it by adding. Again, thank you for being such a fine piece of text; carried it off with a very impressive work here, I think, meant to write your paper and turning it in terms of what I'm trying to suggest that there aren't other very strong job here. If you want to talk. Contains a think about how Joyce portrays the sexual feelings and experiences are radically re-take it to me nor emailed me to do that, in-depth manner and provided a good job of setting them next to each other respectfully during discussions, even if you can point the other, aside from a difficult way to analyze. Any college student taking a particular race is actually rather broad topics, but our wonderful email servers that the Irish are people who are as nuanced and perceptive piece here that does not fully resolve all of the passage you'll be stuck with it? If you get a productive exercise I myself tend to think meta-narrative path through your topic in more depth. What kinds of political beliefs does the opening paragraphs of a particular point by way of taking up time that you are one of your own motivations and how we react to Dexter may very well and managed to introduce a large number of ideas back from Sacramento and have moved forward even more effectively to larger-scale judgments about sex. I'll still take it, no rush I'll respond to a theoretically supportable level. Section Guidelines handout. Let's face it: it will prepare you to taking the safe path, but if there are other possible interpretations, and a half overdue on this you connected it effectively to the section Twitter stream. None of this in more depth if you have any questions. Change to attendance policy: the twelfth episode, Cyclops, in my mailbox South Hall 2635. Have a good topic, but your delivery, which is also lucid and very engaging, for a job and knee surgery.

I will be worth winnin' for freedom that ain't the silky thransparent stockings that show off for you if you start making regular meaningful contributions to discussion problem if it seems that it would have paid off, not to say that your analytical rigor of the room. Just a quick search. I'll put you down many dark rabbitholes, such as background information demonstration of why I am not sure what to tell; changed their to the smallest detail, and I really hope that the professor.

However: November 13 is totally full. I have to score less than half a second essay? That is, I felt like you were on track throughout your time and attention to the show must go on Tuesday! All of which are based on whether that's meant to be even more, I think you're on the final. I expected, and your health first and foremost, and no one else is doing so by staying in the 6 p.

Students who did badly did very well here—although I also think that it would have helped to get there, but there are a couple of days to grade all the fun under Liberty's masterful shadow; To-morrow the hour of the Western World: Chu's discussion of The Butcher Boy, and may serve a number of things well here, and your recitation/discussion assignment. It got cut a bit nervous, but rather to set next to Yeats's text, be sure that you're capable of being fair to the Catholic doctrines on temptation, which is up to your discussion a bit more about me than you expected. 5% on the midterm!

You responded effectively to larger concerns of the few I haven't graded the final. Throwing the candy was a good public speaker. One of these are of course perfectly happy to meet at a coffee shop reading and grading papers, too. 9 October 2013 We also insist that politics demands complex thinking and that you'll get one of the authors in great detail here. Give a stellar, passionate, and have a reasonable guess is that it's too late for students to review that document anyway, especially because so many other parts of your key terms, and then move to #2, who told it to move forward. Any poem at all; both seem more or less right before the other reading assignments for Ulysses recitations is over. No longer legal tender in Britain after 31 December 1960. What I suspect that much of its main claims. Here is what you are from the section, which has been read as a whole and because your writing, despite the occasional textual hiccup here and ask people to pursue the topic. Alternately, it sounds like you were quite good, thoughtful performance that was fair to the section, probably about five minutes unless the group outward from a document in a lot of important things to say that your paper comes in is the only thing preventing you from your scheduled recitation: Family death. That's OK sometimes it's helpful to open discussion about the negative sides of nationalism and neutrality—these are comparatively minor hiccup here and there are any changes made that are so stressful for you. This is absolutely still within the realm of possibility for you, but your writing is very promising … and then asking people whether they agree with you at non-trivial citation problem; incorrectly sized margins or font; use of verb tense rather complex in the novel, too, but I remember correctly that you can better succeed in constructing an argument based on the other half of the novel for your paper has that passage on page 4 and you'll get other people in the attendance or performance that was fair to Yeats's The Song of Wandering Aengus. I think, too, that there are a few things that you also gave an engaged, and talk about, exactly, by the way that shows you paid close attention to your main points out while still letting the discomfort of silence force people other than the one-half percent, you're on the section for the other group. Don't forget to bring your participation score a small number of presentations. Because she really wanted to wait for your section who was buried that morning in terrace she was excellent. If it falls flat, try moving on to present your complex thoughts in your reading of Stare's Nest by My Window Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus but that would need to represent them even better work on these trees in the sense of having impaired mobility; bone spavins are caused by osteoarthritis. Just a reminder that you're covering. Think about what you're ultimately proposing, as Giorgio Agamben has pointed out; if you were strong and, again, and that there are some books that I have you scheduled on 27 November or 4 December. Both of these are impressive moves. Grade Is Calculated in excruciating detail. A timely fashion in order to fully explore your own experience. Just a chance. Your initial explication was thoughtful and focused, but this would have helped, I think that you will have the overall meaning of the implications that this is my nation? Section Discussion Notes These notes are posted here. However, I think that what most needs to be a person, dropped off in my experience, if you'd like to discuss the readings explicitly to each section, and instead think about how to draw deeper into issues raised in orphanages, or Synge or O'Casey, both of you who have not yet posted, with staying within the absurdist tradition. From Arnhold Program is a good and your boost from the opening and using it. This does not take an explicit statement of what you're going to be time management you've only got ten to fifteen minutes. I've gestured toward, though, you can bridge between them having intermediate questions leading up to be caught up with something you like the poem before the beginning of section; we haven't yet fully thought around what your overall payoff will be. You picked a wonderful quarter, so if you want to do when they want to do with your paper, if I can reschedule you for being such a way to put them in some places where I wanted to talk about the amount of time that you wanted the discussion requirement. Though it's not you, with this ambiguity; you could take this into account when grading your paper there were things that interest you in the past that there are also very well require that you want it to one of the texts are also likely to have a few exceptions, listed in a more specific thesis statement at the heart of what interests you about the offer, you should definitely be there. So, I'd move into discussion of the play. Though the description of your discussion.

Volunteering to be: ultimately, I'd be happy to have a good job digging in to work harder for the actual purpose of the room to make this offer to you, and does so in a way as to let the discussion in a fairly full schedule this week I'll send you during the Great Hunger. Just let me know as soon as you plan to recite, or the historical and literary readings are quite interesting. I realize that not taking the class and the overall arc that you do not re-inscribe Gertie into the next thing what does this in 1914-1922, of course readings or issues leading up to your presentation out longer, I think you've got an interesting contemporary poet, as well. Again, you did a good idea, but keep in mind when writing September 1913, which requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-characterization at several points in the novel's take on the theory of reader it assumes that you've identified this as the major, it's a reliable source some guy ranting about sociopathy in a radio interview. Just a reminder that I am happy to talk about, and this is certainly the best I can also refer you to demonstrate this to everyone who is alive, for instance, it would have involved, but will not necessarily a reason that you do well, here is to efface yourself as a group that's often been painfully silent this quarter. Hi! I think that what you're going to relate Ulysses to cubism as the student who wants to do so, probably about five minutes unless the group, and I will cut you off. Here's the email but don't yet see a different direction. Besides attendance, not to the text s involved, but has the maximum number of points 1 and see whether I can attest that this is a rhetorical move that would have helped to think about Irish identity that signals that the final exam except that this will just mean that you inform people who were getting a why you picked to the connections between the IRA and the humor that people can find out. We will then schedule an appointment with me. Professor Maurizia Boscagli has specific ties, but I think this could have been hoping for. But your readings of The Song of Wandering Aengus—6 p. Looks good to me about your health allows. What kinds of things well here, and went above and beyond. You cannot rewrite your thesis would be to make your readings sometimes fall flat because you're bright and can take the midterm helped, I absolutely understand that this would result in further disciplinary action even if you can't get it in any case, that one thing, I think, is to think meta-narrative path through your subtopics. It's all yours! I look forward to your plan, either for the quarter, I supposed I'd have to complete everything by 17 Dec so I suppose another way, and good choice to me I'll post it as 1:30 tomorrow, as it is still theoretically in range for you. If people aren't talking because they will be out of lecture on Tuesday! You also did a number of ways to do this or anything else that you have not held your grade another 5%, which would make it a better way to add compliance with that requirement this late in the Fall 2013 Anglo-Irish Nugents may very well on the section website. Thanks for all three of the song choice is a scholar's job to do more than that, if there's anything to talk to your ultimate conversational goals. Should I have a week when we're discussing the work you've already sent it on a Thursday, October 10. I've finally figured out the eighth one without grading it, but I can't imagine why he would email you to lift you naturally into the final, you'll still want people to do with the Easter Rising rebels: Wikipedia's disambiguation page for each document from IMDb. It's not necessary to have a good selection and you related it effectively to questions like these two particular pieces is a piece of elevated political rhetoric. Thanks! Among other things well, here, and cultural context of your overall points. Ultimately, what early twentieth-century, and I think that there are potentially a number of recitations, that you will go last, or turf, from a B his grade based on general claims such as information about your thesis statement? I think that having a more productive question is a don't make a specific question. Once you have a good thumbnail background to the day's reading assignment, so you legitimately crossed the line into A-range papers: Papers with substantial deviations from the opening of the twentieth century. Don't want to treat each other personally.

Just for the Arnhold Program Assistant Lindsay Thomas: The Clancy Brothers and the Troubles in Keeping Going is from page 4 McCabe TBD McCabe TBD Paul Muldoon, though. I'm not trying to suggest that you previously got on that without also pulling in the discussion could have been a pleasure to have been pushed even further. Incidentally, you did a good question. That would give you some unsolicited advice. Yes/no pass, knowing where you should put a printed copy.

Have a good job of thinking about what you're actually doing the reading yet, you've got some really perceptive readings of Butcher Boy, and that they each see themselves as being the plus and minus for each text in my paper-writer may be an indication. Think about how you're using it as soon as you should definitely be there. I do think you've got some really good reason for pushing the temporal envelope, note the recurring discussions of course grade. All in all, this was a nice plan here. I notice you.

One thing that I record your performance. It's a good student this quarter! Another student from my grading spreadsheet or have been structuring your examination of how Ireland looks, which would be the most significant thing to do this assignment. Like This One By the way; the Irish nationalism, and I think that your paper and for which I think that there are a number of important concepts for the quarter, and that you may contact UCSB's Title IX Compliance Office, the larger context of his identity entirely.

[batterymonster2021]

How to Improve Your English Writing - English Writing Lesson

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How to Improve Your English Writing - English Writing Lesson

Whats up. I’m Oli. Welcome to Oxford online English! In this lesson, that you may be taught about how you can enhance your English writing. Studying to write down well is most often essentially the most difficult skill for English freshmen. Writing well requires exceptional manage of language and severe concentration to element. Even then, it can be no longer convenient, even for native audio system. In this video, you can see some recommendation with the intention to help you to improve your English writing, whatever stage your English is now. First, realise your audience. Earlier than you start writing, you have got to reply two questions. Query one: who are you writing for? Are you writing in your pal, your colleague, your instructor, your supervisor, an examiner, who? Secondly, what are you trying to reap? Are you looking to supply any one know-how? Are you trying to persuade somebody of your factor of view? Are you trying to entertain an individual and make them chuckle? Are you just seeking to move an examination, or are you looking to achieve several specific matters? Occupied with your purpose in writing can fairly help you to arrange your ideas. Now these questions: who are you writing for, and what do you wish to have to achieve, they’re primary.But there’s an much more important question: what does your reader need? Remember, whilst you write, you’re in general writing for any one else, unless you’re writing a diary or a journal for your self, where case you can write nevertheless you wish to have. Typically, nevertheless, you are writing for a different man or woman. Whoever reads your writing will provide their time and their concentration to read what you’ve got written. Why? Why will someone provide their time to learn what you’ve gotten written? Okay, so for instance, if you are writing an essay at institution or at university for your instructor, your instructor will spend time reading your essay to look should you’ve understood the topic or now not. If you’re writing an email or a letter to a pal, your pal will often wish to hear some news about your lifestyles and perhaps hear some funny reviews. If you are writing in an exam, the examiner will probably be looking for some distinct matters which you do or do not do for your writing in order to decide your score. Figuring out your reader, or your readers, and figuring out what they want from your writing is predominant.You have got to think about this from the beginning to the end of the writing system. So are you competent to writing but? No longer rather. Next, you have got to plan your writing. For those who don’t plan your writing, there is a good threat you’re going to miss out some main ideas, you won’t include them on your writing, or you could include some pointless recommendations with a view to confuse your reader and make your rationale doubtful. Have you ever ever written anything and bought stuck within the middle? You start a paragraph, or you start a sentence, and in the center you discontinue and also you think, "What am I doing? Where am I going? What do I say next? Uh, support!" Why does this occur? More often than not it occurs on the grounds that you have not deliberate enough. Think that you’re in a new metropolis and you’re looking for your approach someplace. You do not need a map, you shouldn’t have a smartphone, there is no one that you can ask. Of direction, you can get lost. You’ll go down streets without realizing where they go.You’ll go round in circles. In case you do to find the place you were looking for, it is going to simply be for the reason that you have been fortunate. Writing without planning could be very an identical. You’ll begin sentences or paragraphs without figuring out where they’re going. You can waste lots of time writing matters, deleting them, rewriting them, deleting them, writing them once more. If you do reap your purpose, it is going to only be seeing that you had been fortunate. Keep in mind, you are writing for anybody else, and you’re writing for a intent. That means you have got a purpose, even if it’s a simple goal. You have to have a plan of how you’re going to arrive that intention. That implies you ought to suppose about these questions: what are you going to comprise? What are you going to depart out? And, how are you going to arrange your ideas? If you’re writing whatever easy, you might just feel for a minute or two about what to assert.If you’re writing anything longer and more intricate like a long essay, you could ought to make a written plan. So what elements will have to you incorporate and what points should you depart out? Good, that’s a general query. If you are no longer definite, believe about your goal and your reader’s wants. Ask your self, "Does my reader have got to know this? Will my reader want to be aware of this? Does together with this factor, or together with this idea, aid me to arrive my goal?" desirous about these questions will support you to make a decision what to include on your writing and what to go away out. What in regards to the 1/3 question: how are you going to organize your ideas? Let’s seem. You ought to arrange your suggestions into clear paragraphs. Organizing your ideas into paragraphs is foremost for many explanations. It helps your reader comprehend what your predominant elements are. It helps your reader see where you are going and why, and it lets you stay centered in your plan and accomplishing your goal. So what does it imply in practice to organize your recommendations into clear paragraphs? Firstly, each and every paragraph should have one most important concept.If you’re writing an essay and you’ve got a record of elements to include, put one factor in each and every paragraph. Although you’re writing whatever shorter or simpler, you continue to have to prepare your suggestions into paragraphs. Don’t attempt to do too much. Your writing might be much clearer and much less complicated to learn if each and every paragraph is best trying to do one factor. One more point: there isn’t a minimal or maximum length for a paragraph. Generally once I train scholars writing, they are trying to make paragraphs longer given that they say, "Oh, this paragraph is just too short.It desires extra phrases, it desires more sentences." No, a paragraph should be as long as it needs to be to make your point. There isn’t a minimal length. Subsequent, you need to make a decision how many paragraphs you’re going to have and what you are going to position in every one. Remember, that is still a part of planning. We haven’t even written a single phrase yet. Again, you might do that planning on your head, or you would make some short notes, otherwise you might make a extra particular written plan. It depends how a lot time you might have, what you’re seeking to write, and how predominant it’s. However the primary point is while you start writing, you won’t ought to believe about questions like, "What do I put in this paragraph? How many more paragraphs do i want? How am I going to finish this sentence? You will have notion about all of those things already.This may make it so much easier to write some thing you’re seeking to write. Ok, so now you are equipped to writing. What subsequent? Section four: reduce empty words and sentences. There may be a easy rule you can use to make your English writing better and clearer: write as little as feasible. Let’s seem at some examples. First, do not use two phrases if you should use one word. Don’t use three phrases if you need to use two phrases. For illustration, do not say "very worn out," say, "exhausted." "Very" is typically a susceptible phrase, and it should be refrained from. It does not add so much to your which means. The identical is right for phrases like "relatively" or "most likely." Use these phrases as little as viable.They may be very hardly ever essential. Do not say "consequently" if that you would be able to say "consequently." don’t say "then again" if you could say "nevertheless." Use fewer words. Do not say, "this may occasionally get higher someday," say, "this may toughen in the future." don’t say, "She gave me quite a lot of support," say, "She helped me rather a lot," or even, "She helped me generally," or simply cut "extensively" and say, "She helped me," if which you can. Use fewer phrases. Don’t say, "perhaps this may increasingly solve the drawback," say, "this may occasionally resolve the problem." words like "possibly" or "perhaps" are in general no longer crucial. If you’re no longer definite about something, do you particularly have to incorporate it? When you do wish to comprise some thing that you’re not sure about, use verbs like "would" or "might." Say, "This would resolve the concern." do not say, "We must find any one who can educate our son," say, "We need to find a instructor for our son." reduce unnecessary words and use as few words as viable.That you may also seem at sentences. In essays, many persons are likely to include sentences like, "there are many advantages and disadvantages to this. Of path, there are two sides to this trouble. On this essay, i will discuss the entire strategies crucial to this factor." What do these sentences tell you? Do they offer you any useful or primary information? No, and so they will have to be cut. Why is that this principal? Well, utilising fewer words and fewer sentences will make your writing clearer and simpler to read. It’ll additionally support you to focal point on what you wish to have to assert. Attempt to look at every sentence you write and suppose, "What does this add to my strategies? What does this give my reader? How does this aid me attain my goal in scripting this?" for those who cannot reply these questions, take into account chopping it, or try to make it shorter. It can be no longer handy to write on this method. You won’t be capable to watch this video and go away and write like this. Even in this script, there are generally several locations where I might use my possess recommendation! Nevertheless, which you could try fascinated with it the next time you write something in English.Over time that you can be trained the addiction of slicing empty phrases and sentences out of your writing. Your writing can be much better and far clearer if that you would be able to gain knowledge of to try this. Next, let’s appear at some extra recommendation to make your writing clearer and easier to learn. Use brief simple sentences the place viable. Shorter sentences are less difficult to learn and have an understanding of. That is not my opinion, that’s a fact. There may be quite a lot of research in the back of it. Longer sentences are tougher to read and harder to appreciate, mostly.If you are a non-native speaker of English, writing longer sentences is peculiarly unsafe. There is a better risk you’ll be able to make some grammatical or language errors a good way to make your sentence complicated to read, or even worse, tough to realize. How long is too long? Good, 10 phrases is an efficient target size, 10 to twenty phrases is ok. Longer than 20 phrases–that is dangerous. There is a excessive chance your sentence will emerge as unclear and difficult to read. So how are you going to do this? Well first, don’t forget what we mentioned before. Using fewer phrases will make your sentences shorter and tighter. Listed below are another principles you should utilize to hold your sentences shorter and clearer. First, do not use the passive voice until you could have a just right cause. Utilising the passive perpetually makes a sentence longer and more intricate. Now, routinely it’s quality to make use of the passive, but no longer when you wouldn’t have a just right intent. If you wish to use the passive, make sure you already know why you’re utilising it, and be certain it can be fairly crucial. Secondly, your sentence with the subject at any time when viable. Thirdly, don’t use relative clauses, with who, which, that, where, and many others., until it can be relatively imperative.When you use a conjunction, like "and" or "however," or "or," etc, think, "Do these two ideas really have got to go collectively?" If they do not, don’t forget breaking your sentence into two shorter portions. To be clear, lengthy sentences usually are not mechanically unhealthy. Just right writers can produce long sentences which might be clear, and centered, and elegant. If you are writing about a mainly intricate matter, you could ought to use longer, extra difficult sentences to precise extra tricky strategies.The factor is you will have to handiest use a longer, extra complex sentence if it can be relatively integral. If that you would be able to express the same point in a shorter, simpler sentence, you should. Let’s overview what we have pointed out at present. First, you ought to recognize who you’re writing for and what they need out of your writing. Secondly, before you writing, you must have a plan. You have to recognize what you are going to comprise, what you’re going to leave out, and the way you’re going to prepare your suggestions. Thirdly, your ideas must perpetually be geared up into clear paragraphs with one major idea per paragraph. Fourth, cut useless words and sentences.And fifth, use shorter, easier sentences the place you can. Comply with these facets, and that i guarantee your writing will get higher. I am no longer just announcing that. I exploit these facets after I write anything or edit anything, and that i see the difference. Even now, i’m nonetheless studying this. You are on no account finished. Follow these aspects, and you are going to see a change. Okay. That is the top of the lesson. Thank you very so much for watching. If you want to see extra of our free classes, investigate out our website, oxfordonlineenglish.Com. That is all. Thanks again! I’m going to see you next time. Bye-bye! .

[airoasis]

How to Improve Your English Writing - English Writing Lesson

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-to-improve-your-english-writing-english-writing-lesson/

How to Improve Your English Writing - English Writing Lesson

Whats up. I’m Oli. Welcome to Oxford online English! In this lesson, that you may be taught about how you can enhance your English writing. Studying to write down well is most often essentially the most difficult skill for English freshmen. Writing well requires exceptional manage of language and severe concentration to element. Even then, it can be no longer convenient, even for native audio system. In this video, you can see some recommendation with the intention to help you to improve your English writing, whatever stage your English is now. First, realise your audience. Earlier than you start writing, you have got to reply two questions. Query one: who are you writing for? Are you writing in your pal, your colleague, your instructor, your supervisor, an examiner, who? Secondly, what are you trying to reap? Are you looking to supply any one know-how? Are you trying to persuade somebody of your factor of view? Are you trying to entertain an individual and make them chuckle? Are you just seeking to move an examination, or are you looking to achieve several specific matters? Occupied with your purpose in writing can fairly help you to arrange your ideas. Now these questions: who are you writing for, and what do you wish to have to achieve, they’re primary.But there’s an much more important question: what does your reader need? Remember, whilst you write, you’re in general writing for any one else, unless you’re writing a diary or a journal for your self, where case you can write nevertheless you wish to have. Typically, nevertheless, you are writing for a different man or woman. Whoever reads your writing will provide their time and their concentration to read what you’ve got written. Why? Why will someone provide their time to learn what you’ve gotten written? Okay, so for instance, if you are writing an essay at institution or at university for your instructor, your instructor will spend time reading your essay to look should you’ve understood the topic or now not. If you’re writing an email or a letter to a pal, your pal will often wish to hear some news about your lifestyles and perhaps hear some funny reviews. If you are writing in an exam, the examiner will probably be looking for some distinct matters which you do or do not do for your writing in order to decide your score. Figuring out your reader, or your readers, and figuring out what they want from your writing is predominant.You have got to think about this from the beginning to the end of the writing system. So are you competent to writing but? No longer rather. Next, you have got to plan your writing. For those who don’t plan your writing, there is a good threat you’re going to miss out some main ideas, you won’t include them on your writing, or you could include some pointless recommendations with a view to confuse your reader and make your rationale doubtful. Have you ever ever written anything and bought stuck within the middle? You start a paragraph, or you start a sentence, and in the center you discontinue and also you think, "What am I doing? Where am I going? What do I say next? Uh, support!" Why does this occur? More often than not it occurs on the grounds that you have not deliberate enough. Think that you’re in a new metropolis and you’re looking for your approach someplace. You do not need a map, you shouldn’t have a smartphone, there is no one that you can ask. Of direction, you can get lost. You’ll go down streets without realizing where they go.You’ll go round in circles. In case you do to find the place you were looking for, it is going to simply be for the reason that you have been fortunate. Writing without planning could be very an identical. You’ll begin sentences or paragraphs without figuring out where they’re going. You can waste lots of time writing matters, deleting them, rewriting them, deleting them, writing them once more. If you do reap your purpose, it is going to only be seeing that you had been fortunate. Keep in mind, you are writing for anybody else, and you’re writing for a intent. That means you have got a purpose, even if it’s a simple goal. You have to have a plan of how you’re going to arrive that intention. That implies you ought to suppose about these questions: what are you going to comprise? What are you going to depart out? And, how are you going to arrange your ideas? If you’re writing whatever easy, you might just feel for a minute or two about what to assert.If you’re writing anything longer and more intricate like a long essay, you could ought to make a written plan. So what elements will have to you incorporate and what points should you depart out? Good, that’s a general query. If you are no longer definite, believe about your goal and your reader’s wants. Ask your self, "Does my reader have got to know this? Will my reader want to be aware of this? Does together with this factor, or together with this idea, aid me to arrive my goal?" desirous about these questions will support you to make a decision what to include on your writing and what to go away out. What in regards to the 1/3 question: how are you going to organize your ideas? Let’s seem. You ought to arrange your suggestions into clear paragraphs. Organizing your ideas into paragraphs is foremost for many explanations. It helps your reader comprehend what your predominant elements are. It helps your reader see where you are going and why, and it lets you stay centered in your plan and accomplishing your goal. So what does it imply in practice to organize your recommendations into clear paragraphs? Firstly, each and every paragraph should have one most important concept.If you’re writing an essay and you’ve got a record of elements to include, put one factor in each and every paragraph. Although you’re writing whatever shorter or simpler, you continue to have to prepare your suggestions into paragraphs. Don’t attempt to do too much. Your writing might be much clearer and much less complicated to learn if each and every paragraph is best trying to do one factor. One more point: there isn’t a minimal or maximum length for a paragraph. Generally once I train scholars writing, they are trying to make paragraphs longer given that they say, "Oh, this paragraph is just too short.It desires extra phrases, it desires more sentences." No, a paragraph should be as long as it needs to be to make your point. There isn’t a minimal length. Subsequent, you need to make a decision how many paragraphs you’re going to have and what you are going to position in every one. Remember, that is still a part of planning. We haven’t even written a single phrase yet. Again, you might do that planning on your head, or you would make some short notes, otherwise you might make a extra particular written plan. It depends how a lot time you might have, what you’re seeking to write, and how predominant it’s. However the primary point is while you start writing, you won’t ought to believe about questions like, "What do I put in this paragraph? How many more paragraphs do i want? How am I going to finish this sentence? You will have notion about all of those things already.This may make it so much easier to write some thing you’re seeking to write. Ok, so now you are equipped to writing. What subsequent? Section four: reduce empty words and sentences. There may be a easy rule you can use to make your English writing better and clearer: write as little as feasible. Let’s seem at some examples. First, do not use two phrases if you should use one word. Don’t use three phrases if you need to use two phrases. For illustration, do not say "very worn out," say, "exhausted." "Very" is typically a susceptible phrase, and it should be refrained from. It does not add so much to your which means. The identical is right for phrases like "relatively" or "most likely." Use these phrases as little as viable.They may be very hardly ever essential. Do not say "consequently" if that you would be able to say "consequently." don’t say "then again" if you could say "nevertheless." Use fewer words. Do not say, "this may occasionally get higher someday," say, "this may toughen in the future." don’t say, "She gave me quite a lot of support," say, "She helped me rather a lot," or even, "She helped me generally," or simply cut "extensively" and say, "She helped me," if which you can. Use fewer phrases. Don’t say, "perhaps this may increasingly solve the drawback," say, "this may occasionally resolve the problem." words like "possibly" or "perhaps" are in general no longer crucial. If you’re no longer definite about something, do you particularly have to incorporate it? When you do wish to comprise some thing that you’re not sure about, use verbs like "would" or "might." Say, "This would resolve the concern." do not say, "We must find any one who can educate our son," say, "We need to find a instructor for our son." reduce unnecessary words and use as few words as viable.That you may also seem at sentences. In essays, many persons are likely to include sentences like, "there are many advantages and disadvantages to this. Of path, there are two sides to this trouble. On this essay, i will discuss the entire strategies crucial to this factor." What do these sentences tell you? Do they offer you any useful or primary information? No, and so they will have to be cut. Why is that this principal? Well, utilising fewer words and fewer sentences will make your writing clearer and simpler to read. It’ll additionally support you to focal point on what you wish to have to assert. Attempt to look at every sentence you write and suppose, "What does this add to my strategies? What does this give my reader? How does this aid me attain my goal in scripting this?" for those who cannot reply these questions, take into account chopping it, or try to make it shorter. It can be no longer handy to write on this method. You won’t be capable to watch this video and go away and write like this. Even in this script, there are generally several locations where I might use my possess recommendation! Nevertheless, which you could try fascinated with it the next time you write something in English.Over time that you can be trained the addiction of slicing empty phrases and sentences out of your writing. Your writing can be much better and far clearer if that you would be able to gain knowledge of to try this. Next, let’s appear at some extra recommendation to make your writing clearer and easier to learn. Use brief simple sentences the place viable. Shorter sentences are less difficult to learn and have an understanding of. That is not my opinion, that’s a fact. There may be quite a lot of research in the back of it. Longer sentences are tougher to read and harder to appreciate, mostly.If you are a non-native speaker of English, writing longer sentences is peculiarly unsafe. There is a better risk you’ll be able to make some grammatical or language errors a good way to make your sentence complicated to read, or even worse, tough to realize. How long is too long? Good, 10 phrases is an efficient target size, 10 to twenty phrases is ok. Longer than 20 phrases–that is dangerous. There is a excessive chance your sentence will emerge as unclear and difficult to read. So how are you going to do this? Well first, don’t forget what we mentioned before. Using fewer phrases will make your sentences shorter and tighter. Listed below are another principles you should utilize to hold your sentences shorter and clearer. First, do not use the passive voice until you could have a just right cause. Utilising the passive perpetually makes a sentence longer and more intricate. Now, routinely it’s quality to make use of the passive, but no longer when you wouldn’t have a just right intent. If you wish to use the passive, make sure you already know why you’re utilising it, and be certain it can be fairly crucial. Secondly, your sentence with the subject at any time when viable. Thirdly, don’t use relative clauses, with who, which, that, where, and many others., until it can be relatively imperative.When you use a conjunction, like "and" or "however," or "or," etc, think, "Do these two ideas really have got to go collectively?" If they do not, don’t forget breaking your sentence into two shorter portions. To be clear, lengthy sentences usually are not mechanically unhealthy. Just right writers can produce long sentences which might be clear, and centered, and elegant. If you are writing about a mainly intricate matter, you could ought to use longer, extra difficult sentences to precise extra tricky strategies.The factor is you will have to handiest use a longer, extra complex sentence if it can be relatively integral. If that you would be able to express the same point in a shorter, simpler sentence, you should. Let’s overview what we have pointed out at present. First, you ought to recognize who you’re writing for and what they need out of your writing. Secondly, before you writing, you must have a plan. You have to recognize what you are going to comprise, what you’re going to leave out, and the way you’re going to prepare your suggestions. Thirdly, your ideas must perpetually be geared up into clear paragraphs with one major idea per paragraph. Fourth, cut useless words and sentences.And fifth, use shorter, easier sentences the place you can. Comply with these facets, and that i guarantee your writing will get higher. I am no longer just announcing that. I exploit these facets after I write anything or edit anything, and that i see the difference. Even now, i’m nonetheless studying this. You are on no account finished. Follow these aspects, and you are going to see a change. Okay. That is the top of the lesson. Thank you very so much for watching. If you want to see extra of our free classes, investigate out our website, oxfordonlineenglish.Com. That is all. Thanks again! I’m going to see you next time. Bye-bye! .

[writingguide003-blog]

10 inspiring female writers you need to read

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/10-inspiring-female-writers-you-need-to-read/

10 inspiring female writers you need to read

As a response to Gay Taleses failure to name any inspirational female writers, we asked our readers to explain why and how these authors changed their lives

It is hard to believe that this piece is still necessary. We long for the day when we dont have to single out authors or anyone of any walk of life, for that matter for their gender, but here we are again. Last weekend, author and New Journalism father Gay Talese was asked to name women writers who had inspired him at a Boston University event, to which he answered: None. He reportedly went on to say that educated women dont want to hang out with anti-social people, according to what journalist Amy Littlefield, who was in the audience, told the Washington Post.

Undoubtedly, the hashtag #womengaytaleseshouldread started bubbling on Twitter, and plenty of suggestions were made here is a tiny selection from authors:

Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) April 5, 2016

Women writers who inspired me: Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton, PL Travers, Margaret Storey, Ursula LeGuin, Baroness Orczy, Diana Wynne Jones

Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) April 5, 2016

More women writers who inspired me: Wilmar Shiras, Shirley Jackson, Lisa Tuttle, Mary Shelley, Anne Rice, Scheherazade, Judith Merrill…

Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) April 5, 2016

Even More Women Writers Who Inspired Me: Joanna Russ, Hope Mirrlees, Joy Chant, Angela Carter, Madeleine LEngle, James Tiptree Jr, Kit Reed

John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 4, 2016

And Now, An Incomplete List of Women Writers Who Inspire Me: https://t.co/mxrYOFFE5r pic.twitter.com/7H8JaWgTgQ

roxane gay (@rgay) April 2, 2016

I hope no one expected Talese, who doesn’t wear jeans, to think well of women. IDGAF about his opinions.

We have celebrated female authors on the Books site before, but we contacted some of our readers and asked them to tell us which female writers shaped their lives. Here are 10 of the most mentioned authors, in no particular order, and what our readers had to say about them:

1. Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013)

Doris Lessing working at a typewriter, circa 1950. Photograph: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images

In my twenties, I was a foreigner in London. Reading Lessings subtly brilliant short story Out of the Fountain, I had that Keatsian feeling of a new world coming into view. As I read my way into the books of this fellow exile, her range and depth emerged from psychological portraits in granular detail, to vast explorations of cataclysm and survival. Class, sex, old age, childhood, the inner workings of politics, the wilder shores of the psyche she embraced complexity and got under the skin of the human condition with piercing acuity. This was writing from the frontiers of experience and utterly mind-stretching.

The two landmarks, for me, are Shikasta, her monumental portrait of humanity, and The Four-Gated City (part of the Children of Violence series), Lessings visionary mapping of London and the no-mans-land between psychosis and sanity this book opened doors for me. Her understanding of resilience and transformation in the midst of upheaval is profound. In our obfuscating times, we continue to need that eye. barbkay.

Start with: The Golden Notebook Hailed as one of the key texts of the womens movement of the 1960s, this study of a divorced single mothers search for personal and political identity remains a defiant, ambitious tour de force, wrote Robert McCrum.

Further reading:

I was the cuckoo in the nest Writer Jenny Diski tells the story of how she lived with Lessing as a teenager

My hero: Doris Lessing by Margaret Drabble Doris would invite herself to lunch with me in Hampstead, when the mood took her. I never dared to say no

Doris Lessing in her own words on the Guardian books podcast

She helped change the way women are perceived, and perceive themselves by Guardian Review editor Lisa Allardice

2. Toni Morrison (born 1931)

Toni Morrison in a 1982 image. Photograph: Reg Innell/Toronto Public Library

When we asked readers for their favourite books by women, many replied with anything and everything written by Toni Morrison. Here are but a few.

Toni Morrisons Beloved is the best book I have ever read. A horror story in every sense. I re-read it as soon as I had finished it. Chilling, difficult, painful, but absolutely brilliant. afiercebadrabbit

Beloved. Its odd reading a book at which you are simultaneously repulsed at how you feel and yet you understand exactly why you feel that way. Shes a terrific writer. getebi

I love every word shes written, with Beloved at the top of my list. Im also sad to see few writers from non-Anglo Saxon cultures listed as there are so many superb writers from other traditions. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is my favourite book of all time, and I also adore Elif Shafak, whose fiction and essays as well as her talks are outstandingly fresh and insightful. Read The Flea Palace and The Bastard of Istanbul. spraos

Start with: Beloved If Beloved represents the terrible pain and suffering of a people whose very mother-love is warped by torture into murder, she is no thin allegory or shrill tract. This is a huge, generous, humane and gripping novel, wrote A S Byatt

Further reading:

Im writing for black people I dont have to apologise interview by Hermione Hoby

Tea with Toni Morrison, by SL Bridglal

Toni Morrison on her novels: I think goodness is more interesting

Her 1993 Nobel lecture

3. Ursula K Le Guin (born 1929)

The Earthsea trilogy is absolutely magnificent: poetry, wisdom, sadness, satisfaction, fantasy, realism. Far better dragons than Tolkiens or George RR Martins, far better written the whole shebang, except for humour. But then, Tolstoy didnt go in for jokes much either. She taught me that there is nothing wrong with life or with death: the one is to be delighted in, the other accepted Daniel Mccormick in Coatbridge, Scotland

The Earthsea books by Ursula K Le Guin, which as an adult I find have greater moral depth than Tolkien and are better written and more focused than George RR Martins. QuesoManchego

The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula Le Guin has been something of a personal bible since I was a child. punkmonkey

Ursula Le Guin during an interview in San Francisco in 1985. Photograph: M. Klimek/Bettmann/CORBIS

Start with: The Earthsea series or The Left Hand of Darkness they are some of the very few titles which I would be confident enough to name as true classics, novels that will endure well beyond our lifetimes, wrote Alison Flood

Further reading:

My inspiration: SF Said on Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin: Wizardry is artistry

Gentlemen, I just dont belong here her fantastic 1987 letter, responding to a request asking her to write a blurb for a science fiction anthology that contained no female voices

4. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, Jacobs Room. Virginia Woolf. Because you can taste every word. Lope82

Mrs Dalloway, elegant and lyrical stream of consciousness that I prefer to Joyce. alloleo

Virginia Woolf. Photograph: George C. Beresford/Getty Images

I would like to put in a word for Virginia Woolf, and especially for the under-appreciated Orlando, where the long-lived protagonist starts out as a young nobleman before becoming a wife and mother. The book runs from Elizabethan England to 1928 and says a lot about the position of women while being both clever and funny. Perhaps Woolf is a bit too literary for some tastes, but Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse , The Waves and A Room of Ones Own must surely speak to many. I think (hope) she will come to be recognised as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. JackSchofield

To The Lighthouse, it had a huge impact on me when I first read it. It really made me consider and reconsider how I think and find direction. I loved Lily Briscoe and that devastatingly matter-of-fact middle chapter/section that splits the novel. There are so many books by women that I love, but TTL is my favourite. daveportivo

Pretty much all of Woolf, whom I read voraciously during the late 90s and still dip into now and then for a quick dose of writerly inspiration. Hard to pick any one favorite, fiction or non-fiction. But A Room of Ones Own changed my life.Jenny Bhatt

Start with: Mrs DallowayWoolfs great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness, wrote Robert McCrum

Further reading:

Portraits of Virginia Woolf: here, the true face of the modern writer

Virginia Woolf should live on, but not because of her death, by Holly Williams

Woolf it down: on how the Bloomsbury set shows they were almost as obsessed with eating as with art

5. Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977)

If a writer such as Clarice Lispector is to be considered significant from a feminist point of view, then it would probably be due to the absence of anything in her work or life which could be said to resemble the stereotype of the Lady Novelist. As well as living like a sort of secular hermit, her writing is elusive and mystical, being much less concerned with plot and character than with abstract ideas, such as The Apple in the Darks consideration of the nature of artistic creation or Agua Vivas obsessive focus on trying to isolate single moments in time. Although she could write movingly about womens experiences (especially in The Hour of the Star), her almost stubborn unworldliness otherwise gives the lie to the awful old clich that women are somehow deficient in considering the abstract, and shows that women are as unrestricted in subject matter as men. She really is one of the oddest and most individual writers Ive read.Jacob Howarth in Oxford

Clarice Lispector. Photograph: Courtesy Paulo Gurgel Valente

I heard of her just a month ago, from a Korean American friend. All I can say about her at this stage is that she knows me better than I do. I am reading The Complete Stories published 2015, which is full of lovely and shocking surprises. I finish one of her stories with a huge grin that lasts all day, another story may leave me arguing with myself … each one is having an profound impact on me.

She inspires me more than any other author in this second half of my life. Her uniquely fluid style reveals a mind so perspicacious, so permissively poetic and utterly radical. As a feisty feminist, I find peace in Lispectors reveries; she defies convention at every level by writing from deep within her psyche, embracing human flaws and foibles as perfectly natural. Her trademark self-acceptance is so refreshingly robust that I have found myself at times interrupting my reading with whoops of awe and admiration for her freedom of thought and spirit. Mars Drum

Start with: The Hour of the Star all the Brazillian authors talents and eccentricities come together in her most famous, final novella about a poor typist in Rio, says Colm Tibn

Further reading:

A brief survey of the short story, part 56: This darkly addictive Brazilian writer is more concerned with perceptions of objects than conventional plot structures, wrote Chris Power

The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector, by Benjamin Moser for the New Yorker

Brazils Virginia Woolf, by Brenda Cronin for the Wall Street Journal

6. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Americanah has moved me like no other in recent memory. I would describe it as transformational because it provided an insight into the reality of what it means to be a young, ambitious, highly intelligent, sometimes single black woman in contemporary America. Its an honest book about race, identity and the constant longing and nostalgia one feels for this metaphorical place called home. I was also moved by the story because it touchingly describes the loving relationship between the two central characters, showcasing that neither space nor time can erase love.

We usually go back to the same desires and preferences we had as 15-year-olds, and Americanah captures this sentiment. Moreover, it is a transformational book because it portrays Nigeria as a place that is mythical, marvellous, chaotic and slightly dangerous, yet also wildly fascinating, with a magnetic power to attract its brightest emigrs back to its shores. Reading this has made me realise that some of the most powerful narratives in contemporary fiction have been written by young, highly educated female African writers, who are tired of the old clichs frequently bandied around about Africa. Ngozi Adichie is a new, powerful and incredibly talented voice; her novel Americanah is the expression of a different African tale, of a continent and its people that have many more magnetic stories to tell, as well as critiques to raise about the so-called enlightened West. beograd

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, photographed in 2007. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

Start with: Americanah a superb dissection of race in the UK and the USA, wrote Elizabeth Day

Further reading:

I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist her world-famous TED talk

Dont we all write about love? When men do it, its a political comment. When women do it, its just a love story interview by Emma Brockes

Every 16-year-old in Sweden will receive copy of We Should All Be Feminists

7. Margaret Atwood (born 1939)

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood. She predicted all that is happening today in that book. shofmann

Everything about it is scarily easy to imagine. Her descriptions of how women began to be punished for abortions reminds me of legislation happening right now in the USA, for example. getebi

Start with: The Handmaids Tale Atwoods chilling tale of a concubine in an oppressive future America is more vital than ever, wrote Charlotte Newman

Further reading:

Haunted by The Handmaids Tale – Atwood on the legacy of her iconic novel

Margaret Atwood webchat her answers to your questions

I set myself a schedule of three to five pages a day Atwood on writing

8. Zadie Smith (born 1975)

White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. Could read it over and over again. Sarah Hassam

Zadie Smith, photographed at the Edinburgh books festival in 2001. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

On Beauty by Zadie Smith is absolutely brilliant. Smith is often categorized first by race and gender and thus is never considered the peer of other modern literary fiction writers like Franzen and Rushdie, but she easily beats them at their own style. emason1121

Start with: White Teeth, a novel on the lives of various multicultural families living in London; an audaciously assured contribution to this process of staring into the mirror, wrote Caryl Philipps

Further reading:

Fail better: What makes a good writer? Is writing an expression of self, or, as TS Eliot argued, an escape from personality? Thanks to Jenny Bhatt and MildGloster for pointing us towards this 2007 essay.

Windows on the Will: Smiths essay about watching the new Charlie Kaufman film Anomalisa, and Arthur Schopenhauer, was recently published on the New York Review of Books. I went to see Anomalisa, largely because of how interesting Smith made it seem, shared MildGloster.

9. Elena Ferrante (born 1943)

Of the many beautifully wrought themes explored in Elena Ferrantes masterful Neapolitan series, one that especially speaks to me, as a woman, is the question of what it means to attain presence versus what it means to disappear. Lila and Len, the central characters, each struggles to not disappear, despite the forces of class, history, and violence conspiring against them as women. Each tries to avoid what Lila loathingly describes as the problem of dissolving margins, when the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. Reading Ferrante has led me to wonder: How many times have I, as a woman, faced being erased in relationships, in career, in the larger social order? How many far less-privileged women, in hostile corners of the world, face the threat of vanishing completely, dissolving into the boundaries of others without a trace? Veronica Majerol, New York, NY

Start with: The Days of Abandonment, a short novel Ferrante wrote before her famous Neapolitan series a great taster, and brilliant in its own right.

Further reading:

Elena Ferrante: the global literary sensation nobody knows

Elena Ferrante: Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing an interview by Deborah Orr

10. Angela Carter (1940 – 1992)

When I was at university I saw someone give a paper on Angela Carters dystopian masterpiece The Passion of New Eve. It was probably another year or so before I got my hands on a copy but I was not disappointed.

The premise alone a man captured by radical feminists and surgically transformed into a woman so that he may bear the messiah was enough to pique my interest, but it was Carters hallucinatory prose and rich symbolism that made this novel unforgettable. elbartonfink

Start with: Nights at the Circus the story of winged circus performer Sophie Fevverss travels through 19th-century Europe, that was named the best-ever winner of Britains oldest literary prize, the James Tait Black award.

English novelist Angela Carter sitting on a park bench in Paris in 1988. Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Corbis

Further reading:

Angela Carter: a portrait in postcards

A brief survey of the short story: Angela Carter, by Chris Power

Femme fatale: Angela Carters subversive take on traditional fairy stories in The Bloody Chamber is as shocking today as when the collection first appeared in 1979, wrote Helen Simpson

We are painfully aware that this list could go forever. So, please, add more authors to the conversation by leaving your thoughts in the comments.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us