#felt like writing a bit so here is a short paragraph. i think about Adam waiting alone in despair a lot

[gomi--neko]

Adrenaline had been replaced with numbness. He waited, waited for anything. What was once a concoction of Zep's, Lawrence's, and his own blood had dried into a chalky rust-like substance. Hours, days, or weeks had passed; Adam wasn't sure. He found himself staring at the door like a dog waiting for its owner.

[savagetrickster]

Crushing on You (HCs) | BNHA

Request: First of All, i love your navigation its really unique :) Then mhhh what i wanted to request are just some headcanons about shoto (and other characters u like) in which they get really soft zu their crush or s/o, just some fluffy things that come to your mind when u think about it uwu !and dont stress yourself with anseering this request, take ur time! 

anime  |  character(s):   bnha |  todoroki shouto, bakugou katsuki

word count: 1.9k+

a/n: thank you anon, it took me a really long time to make my current navigation; glad you liked it! sorry for the delay, i’ve been trying to squeeze in writing time between my work schedules and finally managed to complete this as well. Whew! i expanded a little more on your requests while trying not to go off-track hahah! also, i really want to add more characters but time could allow me to write for these two. hope you like my take on how they would behave regarding their crushes! i kinda rushed through this piece so the sentences may not string well together hahah and there may be some errors; it’s not beta-ed.

How did he find out about his crush on you?

Shouto is as smart as a pile of bricks when it comes to anything that isn’t…well, hero stuff? So when he harbored special feelings for you at the start, he wasn’t aware of that. Completely oblivious and hilariously dense about it.

The first few times his heart raced and his cheeks grew warm in your presence, he didn’t make the connection between these and you. He went to see the doctor thinking there was something wrong with his heart and was the reason why his face would feel warm. Nights before his appointment at the hospital, he couldn’t sleep.

It turned out that everything was fine; his heart is perfectly healthy. So the next thing he thought, making a connection to you - is he allergic to you? Or did you have some sort of secondary quirk you kept secret?

Often, he found his eyes gravitating to you, like you were some kind of magnet. You were the first thought he wakes up to and the last before he went to sleep. There were times he felt oddly possessive of you when you talked with the guys.

Despite all these, none of these made him realize his feelings for you. He passed them off as curiosity since you were the only one who made him feel strange.

He only found out why when he shared his suspicion about you  - is he allergic to you? Or did you have some sort of secondary quirk you kept secret? - with Midoriya, particularly the latter. 

How does Shouto behave around you after his realization? All the years growing up the way he did, having a crush on someone was foreign and bizarre to him. Knowing only quirk-related and hero whatnots with limited social interactions in his maturation years, he was…afraid. Afraid of his own feelings for you. He has no idea what to do and couldn’t face you without accidentally coming off as ‘curt and cold’ to you. He avoided you like you were the plague; he couldn’t help it - he felt like he could combust into flames (lol) from how much you made him blush.

You had always enjoyed Shouto’s company and admired his talents as a hero, sharing an amicable connection with him despite not being in his circle with Midoriya and the rest. You liked him. Liked him too much. 

So when he was suddenly blunt and cold to you + very obviously avoiding you, your heart broke. 

The day you confronted him out of frustration and with a broken heart, he realized how wrong he was to act like this.

>> a short fic based on the paragraphs above is coming soon!

He didn’t want to hurt you because of his own fears. He apologized to you but decided to keep his feelings for you a secret from you - the last thing you two needed a distraction like this when you should be focusing on forging your paths as heroes.

As he promised, he suppressed his feelings and maintained (struggled to) the way he was with you; simply friends.

But he definitely has a soft spot for you. 

He has developed an overprotective streak for you; his eyes were always on you. 

   he’s always the first to react if you were in danger. And if there were any stimulation exercises with the class, he would be adamant about staying near you, asking whoever who is on your team to switch with him (of course, without you knowing)

He is very attentive about what you liked or disliked. Taking notes in his head like it was his duty. 

   there was a time when he overheard a discussion between the girls and you, gushing about the types of clothes you girls like to see on a guy. Taking interest in what you like, he eavesdropped and heard you like pullovers on guys. And on the very next day, he bought himself a few, of course using his Endeavor’s credit card, and wore them as soon as they were ready to worn.

He takes very good care of you and is always concern. Too concerned for a mere friend. He is always there to catch you in case you fall.

menstrual cramps?    one day, he walked into the lounge of Class 1-A dormitory and found you clutching onto your stomach, obviously in discomfort and pain despite already taken a pain killer for your cramps. You desperately needed a heat pad to help ease the shit your uterus had to put you through every month.

at first he had thought about using his fire quirk to help you but quickly scratch that idea because he knew he didn’t have that kind of control to not hurt you by accident. The only solution is to get you a water bottle of warm water which loses its temperature pretty quickly. from then, he made it his goal to obtain superb control over his fire quirk, even to the extent of asking Endeavor for help in refining his control just for you. So that the next month when you had to go through the same pain, he was ready to use his fire quirk to relieve your discomfort.

fever?    shouto caught onto news that you caught a bad cold and were down with a high fever. You laid in the darkness of your room, feeling feverish and your body was burning up. that day, he spent the whole night in your room, tending to you the best he could. Pressed his hand to your burning forehead, ice quirk activated; cool enough to make you sigh but not too cold to freeze you by accident - having only used his ice side growing up, his control is excellent. somehow he ended up holding you, cuddling your feverish head to his body on your bed, regularly activating his ice side to keep his body cool. 

When he thinks about his future after graduation, he always include you. In fact, you are part of a much, much bigger picture in the future he envisioned.

it is in his plan to confess to you after graduation. he already knew enough about you, having paid attention and staying near you throughout after he found out that you were special to him. over time, his crush on you wasn’t as simple anymore. Something stronger and more permanent was beginning to bloom in his heart as he continued to safeguard you and watch over you like a silent guardian.

Get ready to adopt he name ‘Todoroki’ in the future ‘cause he’s pretty determined to take things further with you. First, his girlfriend and of course his wife and the mother of his children. 

How did he find out about his crush on you?

I would like start Bakugou’s part right off the bat by saying that the expression you see in the heading^ made for him is exactly how he would react once he realized he has a crush on you. 

Bakugou here looks like he is in disbelief (as if having such feelings was absurd), bewildered and irked.  Yes, damn right he will be irked. He finds harboring such feelings for you or in fact, anyone unnecessary, ridiculous and stupid. He didn’t have time for such a thing.

Bakugou isn’t as dense as Shouto about this sort of things; if he did find his heart pounding around you, he’s sharp enough to know that you had an effect on him and suspect that he has feelings for you, but this doesn’t mean he is going to acknowledge it. He would dismiss it quickly and move on to more important stuff like his goals.  One day, he grew really jealous and extremely irritated when he saw two seniors hitting on you while he was on his way to class after lunch with Kirishima and Denki. Surprisingly, he handled the situation pretty calmly despite how irritated he is. He walked forward, speeding up ahead of Kirishima and Denki and smoothly tugged you away from the persistent upperclassmen with a firm but gentle grip around your bicep. 

From that incident,  Kirishima and (sorry Kirishima is probably pretty dense about this sort of things but of course no one could beat Shouto in this area lol)  Denki being a rather perceptive guy when it came to matters of the heart, was quick to pick up on Bakugou’s crush on you. Bakugou kind of grudgingly acknowledge his feelings for you that day. Was it because his friends being pushy, constantly teasing him about it? Or was it witnessing that upsetting scene you were in? 

Maybe both? But that did not mean he was going to act on it. He is still pretty stubborn about remaining unbothered about this “useless, pointless sentiment”, quoted Bakugou pretty often to his friends. How does Bakugou behave around you? Bakugou Katsuki is a freaking kuudere - i.e.  a character who is often cold, blunt, and cynical. They may seem very emotionless on the outside, but on the inside they’re very caring — at least when it comes to the ones they love.  Though he deems his feelings for you a “useless, pointless sentiment”, it has become a second nature to him to worry about you regardless of how adamant he is about “not giving a fuck about you” as he had gruffly said to shut his friends up. 

He becomes subtlysoft!Bakugou around you. 

  he is rather toned-down and mature when it comes to you. his explosive (haha) temperament is milder and he exhibits bits of gentlemen traits around you.

  his brash, rough voice softens when he talks to you without him realizing. He is more patient and calmer around you than the rest of his classmates or even his closest friends like Kirishima. he rarely yells at you and addresses you by your name, and not insults he typically used on others e.g. extras, nerd, idiot. 

He is protective.

  he is always quick on his feet in getting you out of sticky situations most of the time. tied to being subtlysoft!Bakugou in my previous point (duh), he demonstrated his ability to be cool-headed and efficient when he got you out of the situation with the two upperclassmen. 

  sometimes if he could in stimulation exercises, he would be try to get you to come along whenever he went on his own way with Kirishima and Denki.

“stay close.” he would mutter in a grudging gruff tone as he bashfully tug you along, away from the rest of the class as we all know he always do in the canon.

He is rather thoughtful and considerate when it’s you.

  once you didn’t turn up for school and he kept glancing over at your empty desk, concerned. he found out that you were down with a bad cold and was being taken care of by Recovery Girl in the infantry. Exams were just two weeks away so he secretly took down notes for you.

When you recovered, he made fun of Kirishima’s “shitty grades” and somehow managed to get Kirishima to start a study session with you included; his main motive was so he could help you catch up without you learning about his true intentions. (kuudere much, Bakugou  -__-)

you are a priority, and eventually a goal as well.

  as bakugou matures alongside you and Class 1A through the years, he will gradually accept that life isn’t only about hero stuff, being number one or putting that stupid nerd Izuku in his fucking place.  (i love midoriya okay, this is just bakugou being bakugou hahah) Or at least he didn’t want his life to be merely about all that. You were also his goal, in fact, one of his biggest goals. He isn’t exactly a big fan of screeching little spawns of the devils but he could live with it if they were part of a future with you.

[notbecauseofvictories]

Hi Sarah! My friend and I are starting a bookclub (as much as you can with two people who aren't pressed for deadlines) and I was wondering if you have any recommendations? (That is if you have time to rec anything!) We're starting off with Deathless and have Fitzgerald next in line somewhere but I def want to try to expand the genres we read and tbh from years of following you, I trust your judgement

I don’t...like giving recommendations? At least not directly, it seems like too much opportunity for getting it wrong. Everybody has their own tastes, after all, and even the best of friends don’t necessarily vibe with what you vibe with. (I’ve experienced this with multiple friends, so I know what I’m talking about.) Truly, one of the reasons that my whole “I’m going to get back into reading for pleasure!” push has been so successful is that I only bother with books that interest me, and stop reading when they fail to catch my attention.

But I’ve now read at least 60 books in 2020, which is approximately 60 more than I’ve read in the years prior, so I’m happy to share that. Below is my list of recent reads, beginning to end, along with a very short review---I keep this list in the notes app on my phone, so they have to be. Where I’ve talked about a book in a post, I’ve tried to link to it. 

Peruse, and if something catches your interest I hope you enjoy!

2020 Reading List

Crazy Rich Asians series, Kevin Kwan (here)

Blackwater, Michael McDowell (here; pulpy horror and southern gothic in one novel; come for the monster but stay for the family drama.)

Fire and Hemlock, Diane Wynne Jones (here; weird and thoughtful, in ways I’m still thinking about)

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (here; loved it! I can see why people glommed onto it)

Swamplandia!, Karen Russell (unfinished, I could not get past the first paragraph; just....no.)

Rules of Scoundrels series, Sarah MacLean (an enjoyable romp through classic romancelandia, though if you read through 4 back to back you realize that MacLean really only writes 1 type of relationship and 1 type of sexual encounter, though I do appreciate insisting that the hero go down first.)

The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden (here)

Dread Nation, Justine Ireland (great, put it with Stealing Thunder in terms of fun YA fantasy that makes everything less white and Eurocentric)

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (VERY good. haunting good.)

Tell My Horse, Zora Neale Hurston (I read an interesting critique of Hurston that said she stripped a lot of the radicalism out of black stories - these might be an example, or counterexample. I haven't decided yet.)

The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society, T. Kingfisher (fun!)

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Karen Russell (some of these short stories are wonderful; however, Swamplandia's inspiration is still unreadable, which is wild.)

17776, Jon Bois (made me cry. deeply human. A triumph of internet storytelling)

The Girl with All the Gifts, M. R. Carey (deeply enjoyable. the ending is a bittersweet kick in the teeth, and I really enjoyed the adults' relationships)

The Door in the Hedge and Other Stories, Robin McKinley (enjoyable, but never really resolved into anything.)

The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley (fun, but feels very early fantasy - or maybe I've just read too many of the subsequent knock-offs.)

Mrs. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls (weird little pulp novel.)

All Systems Red, Martha Wells (enjoyable, but I don't get the hype. won't be looking into the series unless opportunity arises.)

A People's History of Chicago, Kevin Coval (made me cry. bought a copy. am still thinking about it.)

The Sol Majestic, Ferrett Steinmetz (charming, a sf novel mostly about fine dining)

House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune (immensely enjoyable read, for all it feels like fic with the serial numbers filed off)

The Au Pair, Emma Rous (not bad, but felt like it wanted to be more than it is)

The Night Tiger, Yangsze Choo (preferred this to Ghost Bride; I enjoy a well-crafted mystery novel and this delivered)

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin (unfinished, I cannot fucking get into Le Guin and should really stop trying)

The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo (enjoyable, but not nearly as fun as Ghost Bride - the romance felt very disjointed, and could have used another round of editing)

Temptation's Darling, Johanna Lindsey (pure, unadulterated id in a romance novel, complete with a girl dressing as a boy to avoid detection)

Social Creature, Tara Isabella Burton (a strange, dark psychological portrait; really made a mark even though I can't quite put my finger on why)

The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins (slow at first, but picks up halfway through and builds nicely; a whiff of Gone Girl with the staggered perspectives building together)

Stealing Thunder, Alina Boyden (fun Tortall vibes, but set in Mughal India)

The Traitor Baru Cormorant; The Monster Baru Commorant, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson (LOVE this, so much misery, terrible, ecstatic; more here)

This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone (epistolary love poetry, vicious and lovely; more here)

The Elementals, Michael McDowell

Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (didn't like this one as much as I thought I would; narrator's contemporary voice was so jarring against the stylized world and action sequences read like the novelization for a video game; more here)

Finna, Nino Cipri (a fun little romp through interdimensional Ikea, if on the lighter side)

Magic for Liars, Sarah Gailey (engrossing, even if I could see every plot twist coming from a mile away)

Desdemona and the Deep, C. S. E. Cooney (enjoyed the weirdness & the fae bits, but very light fare)

A Blink of the Screen, Terry Pratchett (admittedly just read this for the Discworld bits)

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (not as good about politics and colonialism as Baru, but still a powerful book about The Empire, and EXTREMELY cool worldbuilding that manages to be wholly alien and yet never heavily expositional)

Blackfish City, Sam J. Miller (see my post)

Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan (didn't finish, got to to first explicit sex scene and couldn't get any further)

Prosper's Demon, KJ Parker (didn't work for me...felt like a short story that wanted to be fleshed out into a novel)

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik (extremely fun, even for a reader who doesn't much like Napoleonic stories)

Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone (fun romp - hard to believe that this is the same author as Time War though you can see glimmers of it in the imagery here)

A Scot in the Dark, Sarah MacLean (palette cleanser, she does write a good romance novel even it's basically the same romance novel over and over)

The Resurrectionist, E. B. Hudspeth (borrowed it on a whim one night, kept feeling like there was something I was supposed to /get/ about it, but never did - though I liked the Mutter Museum parallels)

Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (he's a better ideas guy than a writer, though Hell Is The Absence of God made my skin prickle all over)

Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (fun, very much a throwback to my YA days of fairytale retellings, though obviously less European)

Four Roads Cross, Max Gladstone (it turns out I was a LOT more fond of Tara than I initially realized - plus this book had a good Pratchett-esque pacing and reliance on characterization)

Get in Trouble, Kelly Link (reading this after the Chiang was instructive - Link is such a better storyteller, better at prioritizing the human over the concept)

Gods Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips

Soulless; Changeless; Blameless, all by Gail Carriger (this series is basically a romance novel with some fantasy plot thrown in for fun; extremely charming and funny)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James (got about 1/3 of the way through and had to wave the white flag; will try again because I like the plot and the worldbuilding; the tone is just so hard to get through)

Pew, Catherine Lacey (a strange book, I'm still thinking about it; a good Southern book, though)

Nuremberg Diary, GM Gilbert (it took me two months to finish, and was worth it)

River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey (I wanted to like this one a lot more than I actually did; would have made a terrific movie but ultimately was not a great novel. Preferred Magic for Liars.)

Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (extremely fun, though more trippy than Gods and the plot didn't work as well for me - though it was very original)

The New Voices of Fantasy, Peter S. Beagle (collected anthology, with some favorites I've read before Ursula Vernon's "Jackalope Wives", "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" "The Husband Stitch"; others that were great new finds "Selkie Stories are for Losers" from Sofia Satamar and "A Kiss With Teeth" from Max Gladstone and "The Philosophers" from Adam Ehrlich Sachs)

[undyingsunshine]

YESSSSS YOU’RE BACK AND TAKING ASKS

14 and 15 for the most recent post, and I’m gonna come back with more too

Here we go!!!!

14. At what point in writing do you come up with a title?

Honestly, it usually differs from piece to piece! Usually, though, the title comes last! (Though I do have a short list of potential titles for Li Cu fics stored away, most of which are just lyrics from songs xD Whether I end up using them or not, only time will tell!)

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

All of these tend to give me a bit of trouble xD if I was to rank from hardest to easiest however, I think I'd say titles are the hardest and tags tend to be the easiest. For summaries I usually just slap a portion of the fic in and then add a small almost-summary below it, mostly because I feel like giving a sample of the fic will be more effective than trying to give a succinct description? Kind of shows you what you're getting into before you've even clicked xD

Titles, I use a lot of lyrics from songs, especially ones that I think fit with the character. Though, this does sometimes mean my titles are... long and it can make it a little awkward when trying to talk about the fics themselves. xD

Examples include;

"Come with me, I promise the water is fine..." Which is a lyric from God Bless Eric Taylor by Marietta, a song that I relate to Li Cu somewhat.

This next one is the title of a chapter instead of a whole fic, but I'll count it anyway xD Chapter 2 of I'm Here is titled: "I have this dream that I'm hitting my dad with a baseball bat and he is screaming and crying for help..." which is from the song Father by The Front Bottoms.

I ideally try to make it so that the lyrics also match up with the contents of the chapter/fic. I'm Here's second chapter is all about Li Cu's nightmares, so I thought the title would be pretty fitting xD Honestly, thinking back maybe I could've added more types of dreams.... Ones that fit that title even more.... Small rewrite of that Chapter perhaps? I don't think it would be that different, but still... Would add more angst onto everything xD

The title for "Come with me..." Also sort of relates to the contents of the fic, but moreso in the following line that appears in the summary: "I need something else to comvince me I won't die."

Honestly these lines could have me ranting a whole lot, especially in relation to Li Cu. Just makes me think of all his conflicted feelings, and how he must feel when he drags his friends into the mess he didn't even make. (And these feeling really would increase after Su Wan blames him for the snake bite and getting Shen Qiong inveolved, and during just... the entirety of the time he, Yang Hao, Su Wan and Liang Wan are in the desert together. (ESPECIALLY when Yang Hao is being absolutely mistreated by the 9 families, like sheesh.)

It's just a whole lot of guilt, but also maybe some stubborn determination? Li Cu is very adamant on living just to spit in the face of everyone around him. Existing out of pure spite, but with friends involved, it's more like he's existing to fulfil a purpose? One that he feels like he's bestowed upon himself. Not Wu Xie, or Rishan, or anyone. Just him. He stays alive so he can protect his friends. He'll keep them safe, he'll get them home alive. He has to. And he knows that he will. Or else, what is he even persevering for? "I need something to convince me I won't die." In the fic, this could also be referring to Wu Xie, as he kind of marks safety by the end of the drama. Wu Xie being there means it's okay. It means he doesn't have to fight anymore. And in the fic, it also means that Li Cu can let go. Of Everything. Permanently. (I have so many branching ideas based on that 300 word demon of a fic, you wouldn't even believe)

ANYWAY I'LL STOP RANTING ABT THAT FIC MAYBE I'LL TALK ABOUT THAT FIC MORE IN DEPTH SOME OTHER TIME IF PPL WANT IT.

As for tags, I struggle mostly because I never know what's okay to tag? I'm afraid of tagging a fic with something if the content of that particular tag doesn't show up all that much in the fic? Unless it's something that's a potnential trigger, and then I'll tag it, even if it's small. Just ot be safe. But like. Characters, I don't tag unless they're actually there and present and doing something. If they're mentioned, I tend to not tag them since it's not all that crucial? For people to know they show up for a second? Idk, I like to be as succinct and precise as possible with my tags, because I know how annoying it is for tags to be clogged or for fics to have too many tags xD

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

I have a few, surprisingly! I'll choose two, both from the second chapter of I'm Here!

"Each one makes him wake up, terrified and shaky and wanting to hide or just outright stop existing; to become intangible, untouchable, safe. Of course, he can't actually do that, so instead he pushes the fear down and suffocates it before burying it in the backyard of his mind in the hopes it'll never be dug up again."

Something I try and do while writing is find ways to explain how I. Just. Experience life? (This is also present in Chapter 1 with the line "Further frustration gathered in his chest, making it tighten with stress before it shot up into his throat". Just little things that I've never really seen in words before? That I feel but never know how to accurately describe.) There's always the whole "let the void swallow me/him/her/them whole" thing in media that I love because, honestly, mood. But I guess for this I just wanted to word it differently? In the way I felt was most accurate to myself. Just to be in a state of which nothing can get you, be it life or that one imaginary demon that you sometimes think is lurking around the house at the convenient time of 3 AM, Y'know? When real life becomes TOO real and you just want to blip out for a second, just pause everything and have a moment to be free of everything xD

I also just kind of like the metaphor(?) with his fear. Trust Li Cu to not only associate feelings with violence, but also treat his feelings violently xD I feel like I'm not the best when it comes to imagery and creative expression, especially through words. I point out the obvious, the facts, a lot, both when speaking normally and in writing, and it takes a bit of time for me to remember that I'm writing a story and not jotting a list of events xD So anytime I actually come up with something more kind of creatively written, I feel particularly happy with myself.

"He can't even fully comprehend what's been going on - everything feels bizarre and just out of reach, moreso than usual - but what he does know is that Wu Xie is here and he's angry. The man stands above Li Cu, his cold calculating eyes burning him with wordless accusations that, despite their ambiguity, feel justified. There's guilt, desperation and denial crashing inside him like waves assaulting a rickety raft on a stormy sea. What these feelings are for, he doesn't know. It makes him want to plead for forgiveness all the same."

Let's be honest, Li Cu probably has way too many mixed feelings on Wu Xie. The man who simultaneously built him up and destroyed him. The man who caused him agony, but is also probably one of the best things to come into Li Cu's life??? Like damn, I think I'd be pretty conflicted if I was Li Cu. And things only get worse when, in this fic's timeline, Wu Xie essentially ghosts Li Cu out of guilt for what he did to the kid. This is taken wrong by Li Cu, and he ends up feeling abandoned. By his own kidnapper. I just feel like this snippet is pretty okay at capturing all the blame he puts onto himself, and captures some of the trauma that comes with the events of Sha Hai as well. I just kind of like how this paragraph turned out in the end. xD

6. What character do you have the most fun writing

LI CU!!! Absolutely Li Cu. I don't know exactly what it is but it just. Clicks with me? Or at least the version I write of himd does, it's probably not even close to Li Cu's canon portrayal xD Maybe it's because of the fact that I'm also an angsty, angry 19 year old that I feel as such? It's much easier to put myself in the mind of a teenage boy rather than a 40 year old man xD In terms of non DMBJ writings, I have OCs that I love writing for! Funnily enough, one is an angsty 19 year old boy with a lot of self-worth issues (ringing any bells?) and the other is an angry, confused and conflicted character that was modified to be a kind of living weapon, but had since escaped and repressed all their memories of what happened. Though, the memories eventually start to resurface and they begin to question themself a whole lot, with flashbacks haunting the corners of their mind and driving them deeper and deeper into guilt-filled despair.

In general, angsty characters with a lot of conflicted emotions are super fun to write for! To flicker around from thought to thought and dive into all the hidden feelings that a character can have. It's just super enjoyable for me xD

[thats-h0w-th3-light-g3ts-in]

This Is Me Trying Bobby and Alex

This one opts to destroy those stupid webisodes they thought were a good idea ... enjoy! Everything in this story that sounds like Taylor Swift lyrics are Taylor swift lyrics and do not belong to me. Everything else came out of my messed-up shipper head!

I’ve been having a hard time adjusting. I had the shiniest wheels, now they’re rusting.

“Bobby..“ Alex was quite shaken seeing her former partner standing outside her apartment. It was 11 pm and she had actually just changed into her pyjamas to go to bed, when the doorbell rang. Since Bobby had decided to go to Maine to write a book and she herself transferred to the Counter Terrorist Squad she hadn’t seen him. She’d been mad he’d left just like that. She’d actually thought he was getting better with going to therapy and getting along really good with Dr. Gyson. Alex and Bobby had a good time working together again after the short hiatus they’d had, but it apparently wasn’t enough for him. He had handed in his notice rather suddenly and taken off, throwing Alex into cold water once again. It had been almost six month and she hadn’t heard from him once except from that Christmas card he’d sent her. She’d tried forgetting him throwing herself into a relationship with Adam, a firefighter she met one night in a bar. She’d probably known it from the start but only lately she had admitted to herself that he wasn’t the right person, and they wouldn’t have a future together.

I didn’t know if you care if I came back. I have a lot of regrets about that.

“You’re back.“ She heard herself saying as in trance. She’d lost herself in Bobby’s all too familiar, brown eyes as soon as she’d opened her door. So often she’d tried not to think about him, to enjoy the time with her new lover, to just get Robert Goren out of her system, but she couldn’t. Every time Adam kissed her neck or squeezed her hand she’d just wished he was someone else. She did not want to believe it but it became crystal clear the moment Bobby appeared before her eyes.

Pulled the car off the road to the lookout. Could have followed my fears all the way down. And maybe I don’t quite know what to say, But I’m here in your doorway.

“I am…“ Bobby replied, nervously fidgeting a stack of papers in his hands. “I finished the book, I wanted you to be the first to read it.“ He reached the manuscript to her. “Are you insane?“ Alex breathed angrily. She bit her lip as not to either punch him in the face or start crying. Bobby looked at her frowning. He took a step back, away from her. He knew he’d screwed up.

I just wanted you to know, that this is me trying. I just wanted you to know, that this is me trying.

“Look, I know you’re upset but can I just come in for a second? Hear me out and then you can throw me out?“ Bobby begged her, piercing her eyes with his. Alex stepped away from the door although she promised herself not to. He followed her rather halfhearted invitation, and was left standing lost in the midst of Alex’ apartment. She shut the door then walked towards the other end of the room not saying a word.

They told me all of my cages were mental. So I got wasted like all my potential. And my words shoot to kill when I’m mad. I have a lot of regrets about that.

“I’m sorry I never called.“ He kew it was a weak thing to say but he didn’t know how else to start. He’d been going through situations like this with Dr. Gyson a million times and he knew he should just tell Alex how he felt about her but the words wouldn’t form. It was like desperately trying to draw something from memory but all that comes out is a messy doodle. “It’s fine I figured you must have lost my phone number and my address but then there was that Christmas card, how thoughtful.“ Alexes words were the ones shooting to kill now, but Bobby knew he deserved it. All she wanted to see those past six months had been the eyes she was staring into right now. Now, she just wished they wouldn’t be so wonderfully, corruptingly intimate.

I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a square. Fell behind all my classmates and I ended up here. Pouring out my heart to a stranger, But I didn’t pour the whiskey.

“I … I had to do it my way. I had to do it like this or not at all. This book is the only reason I am able to stand here right now and it was the hardest thing I ever had to do.“ Bobby clenched the paper stack fast in his hands. “We’ve been there Bobby, we’ve been there before and honestly, I don’t wanna go there again so why are you here? You want me to read your book? Leave it at my coffee table and I’ll get back to you in the next … say, six months.“ Alex turned herself away from her former partner feeling the tears creeping up on her. She wiped them away as quickly as they poured out of her eyes. She had given him a million chances and she had always told herself one day it would work, but she’d always been left bloody, broken and bruised lying on the floor like one of their many murder victims. She was not gonna let that happen again, giving in and pretending like everything was fine.

I just wanted you to know, that this is me trying. I just wanted you to know, that this is me trying. At least I’m trying.

Bobby could feel her tears burning in his mind and he sat the manuscript down on the little desk next to the door and walked out. Alex flinched as she heard the door shut. She turned around hoping despite everything she’d just said Bobby was still standing there, his brown eyes screaming at her from afar like they’d always done. They weren’t. He wasn’t. There was nothing but silence. She walked towards the door clutching the knob. She pulled all her strength together not to open it again. Instead she leaned herself towards it breaking down sobbing. She wiped her wet face, her chest was jumping up and down as her heart raced like a rocket. She picked up the manuscript Bobby’d left fo her. She let herself fall down to the floor right there and then and bended back the first page.

And it’s hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound. It’s hard to be anywhere when all I want is you. You’re a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town. And I just wanted you to know that this is me trying. (And maybe I don’t quite know what to say)
 I just wanted you to know, that this is me trying. At least I’m trying.

The time had stood still as soon as she’d lain her eyes on the first paragraph of Bobby’s book. The first words she consumed were 'For my partner’, and it was as if someone had pushed a knife through her stomach. She devoured paragraph after paragraph like she was born to do so. She had never thought Bobby was even capable of producing words like this. To the world it might have been a manifesto, the story of a scared little boy who’d grown up to be an even more scared man, but to her it was a confession. Every line and between was what she never knew Bobby could feel. Suddenly, she felt embarrassed for having sent him away. It felt like she knew everything now, everything she’d always wanted to know, everything she’d ever wanted him to say. Hour’s had passed in minutes and her eyes were burning like fire. All the water coming out of them couldn’t extinguish it. She dropped the manuscript upon the last words she’d read and realised she hadn’t moved an inch. She was still occupying the same spot she had placed herself in after Bobby’d left. Without even thinking she grabbed her car keys. She manoeuvred her car as if pulled by invisible strings. She didn’t even know Bobby still had his old apartment but she knew she had to try. She walked up to his door and rang twice - three times as if the building was on fire. Her heart was pounding in her throat and although she couldn’t be sure someone would open she felt he would. The seconds she waited felt like hours in the dim-lit hallway of Bobby’s apartment building. The adrenalin rushed through her veins like lightning as Bobby finally pulled the door open. His eyes hung heavily in his face and the angles of his mouth were bend downwards. Alex could now see how sad, exhausted and tired he looked. His eyes, however, lit up as soon as he realised it was Alex standing in front of him. She wouldn’t wait a single second longer. As if he was the opposite pole of a magnet she shot towards him, pressing her lips on his. He embraced her, a bolt of lightning shooting through every last corner of his body. He was convinced he would never let go of her ever again. Their faces parted for just a moment, but their eyes locked even harder. Bobby wiped a strain of hair out of Alex’ face and pulled her head closer to his again. She felt Bobby’s beard on her skin and tasted his breath. She decided then and there she never wanted to not feel his warm hands pressed against her back, his body close to hers, his breath on her face. Bobby pulled her inside his apartment not letting go of her lips on his. He slammed the door shut. She knew it now, she knew he was trying, that he’d been trying all those years. She knew now, that he, in his clumsy and pathetic, self-loathing way had always loved her. Giving her the book to read was the greatest love confession anyone could have ever made. She saw it now and she couldn’t really understand how she didn’t before. Tonight she had decided to make the first step and she had not been wrong. She found herself in Bobby’s bed entangled with him, her body pressed against his and it was the most enchanting and miraculous she had ever felt. His hand was gliding through her hair, hers was clutching his shoulder blade like holding on to an angel’s wings taking her to heaven. They were united in blissful euphoria, closer than they had ever been, so wonderfully together and beautifully in love. Nothing mattered at that moment to either of them, but the other. No job, no fire-fighters no past wounds. All the scars she had from being left broken by him were mended with every time she felt his sweaty body clutching tightly against hers. All the trauma, all the doubts he had ever had felt so silly now that he felt like nothing could ever pull them apart. He wanted to feel every inch of Alex’ body forever one with his own. He felt like a child on a ferris wheel ride, so beautiful, so perfect yet so innocent. Feeling the endorphins racing through his body like fireworks, until the wheel finally stops and you are on top of the world only the stars above you. His very own ferris wheel ride ended with Alex finally laying her head down on Bobby’s chest. None of them lost a word, Bobby kissed her hair holding her closely. After a while he could feel her head getting heavier and her breathing more even and peaceful. She had fallen asleep but there was no way he could. He stared up on the ceiling feeling blissfully complete having Alex’ body so close to his. A thousand thoughts ran through his head but they were all overruled by the remarkable memory of their first night together.

[goodticklebrain]

Q&A August: Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company

They say you should never meet your heroes, but obviously “they” were never enlightened enough to consider Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company a hero. Like many Shakespeare geeks, I was exposed to Reduced Shakespeare Company’s performance of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) at an impressionable young age. Once the DVD came out, I watched it over and over again, soaking up the irreverence and affection for Shakespeare like a sponge. It never occurred to me that I would one day meet the curly-haired pompous idiot in the black pants whose antics had entertained me so much, let alone be lucky enough to call him a friend, but that’s exactly what has happened.

I first met Austin (after exchanging mutually admiring tweets with him) in April of 2016, during their world premiere of William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) at the Folger Library. I was prepared to be utterly starstruck, but Austin was so wonderfully down-to-earth that within minutes I felt like I’d known him forever. Totally lacking the pomposity and idiocy of his stage persona, Austin was overwhelmingly encouraging and supportive of my work, immediately welcoming me to play with him in the Shakespeare comedy sandbox. I had literally just started working full-time on Good Tickle Brain, so his enthusiasm meant the world to me.

I could gush about Austin for many more paragraphs, but I’m sure you’d rather hear from him, so here he is, my Comedy Fairy Godfather, in his own words!

1. Who are you? Why Shakespeare?

I’m Austin Tichenor, a playwright, director, and actor. I'm the co-artistic director of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, a three-person comic theatre troupe that reduces long serious topics into short silly comedies.

My first exposure to Shakespeare was undoubtedly in the original series of Star Trek! I read Shakespeare in high school English classes and got to see fantastic productions of Shakespeare at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and the Berkeley Reprtory Theatre, but I didn’t get to actually WORK on Shakespeare until grad school where I both played Claudius in a production of Hamlet and reduced my first Shakespeare (it was a directorial exercise: a five minute reduction of Much Ado About Nothing). My first professional theatre job was creating plays for young people so I went to Shakespeare immediately, creating 45 minute cuttings of Much Ado, Midsummer, and The Tempest.

So the opportunity to join the RSC in 1992 and perform its signature work The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) (written by the RSC’s founders) in London’s West End for eight months combined all my theatrical loves: smart silly comedy, non-realistic theatricality, and Shakespeare — which is kinda redundant, now that I think about it

2. What moment(s) in Shakespeare always make you laugh?

My favorite moments are typically when characters make incredible discoveries about themselves, and these are usually comic. Malvolio’s “I am…happy!” Terrible actor Francis Flute fully committing to the moment on “Dead, my dove?” Benedick’s “There’s a double meaning in that.” Hamlet toying with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or telling Claudius he “shall nose” the dead Polonius as he goes upstairs. Olivia’s “Most wonderful!” when the penny drops and she realizes “Cesario” is actually Viola (and Sebastian’s twin).

3. What's a favorite Shakespearean performance anecdote?

I have two!

1) We were performing William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) for the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference — the savviest and most knowledgeable group of people I’ll probably ever perform for, ever. I was playing Richard III and limping downstage to say my first line, one of the most famous first lines in all of Shakespeare. But I was distracted because I saw there were people sitting on the sides and I didn’t want to limp too far downstage for them to see — and in my distraction I said, “Now is the moment of our...” As soon as the word was out of my mouth, I knew I’d blown the line (it’s supposed to be “Now is the winter of our discontent”) and I knew I couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t happened; not in front of that crowd, not in our style of show. So I quite audibly said, “Oh f&$# me,” and limped back offstage to come in again. This time I said the line right and emphasized the first word: “Now is the winter of our discontent!” It brought down the house and everyone asked whether I’d planned it. Sigh…no, I hadn’t.

Mya interjects: I was in the house for this performance and this moment remains one of the highlights of my theatre-going career. What Austin neglects to mention here is that Reed, who had been left alone onstage after Austin had retreated, went over to the wings as if to confer with Austin, and said, sotto voce, “No, I don’t think anybody noticed.”

2) We were performing The Complete Works on a stage that had a little runway that circled the orchestra pit. In one of the scenes, Adam Long (one of the RSC’s founding members) decided to hop over the pit, from the stage to the runway, and he ended breaking the runway floor and falling through the boards. Thankfully uninjured, and delighted that he had this opportunity, he immediately uttered the immortal words, “Don’t worry, it’s just a stage I’m going through."

4. What's one of the more unusual Shakespearean interpretations you've either seen or would like to see?

I’m glad that nowhere in here have you asked what my favorite play is. I don’t have favorite Shakespeare plays, but I do have favorite productions. Here are two:

1) The Folger Theatre at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC’s production of Love’s Labor’s Lost was delightful from start to finish: Incredibly smart, wildly funny, and wonderfully charming. The director and her team made the King’s desire for “a little academe” quite literal by re-creating the Folger Library’s handsome reading room onstage. (I wrote about this terrific production here.)

2) The Chicago Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest, co-directed by Aaron Posner and the magician Teller, turned Prospero into an actual wizard and filled the production with literal magic. (There must have been magic in Shakespeare’s original production as the First Folio has a stage direction that mentions that characters disappear by means of “a quaint device”. Teller filled his production with many quaint magic tricks and devices!) With music by Tom Waits and great comedy from its clowns, it was the most entertaining and completely realized production of The Tempest I've ever seen.

Favorite moments?

When Henry IV (Jeremy Irons) slaps his snotty son Prince Hal (Tom Hiddleston) in The Hollow Crown adaptation of Henry IV, Part 1 taking him (and the audience) by total surprise.

When Francis Flute’s (Sam Rockwell) emotions bubble to the surface unexpectedly in the ridiculous “Pyramus and Thisbe” in the film version of Midsummer.

When Juliet (Claire Danes) stirs and almost wakes up in time to prevent Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) from killing himself in Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet.

When Antigonus (Gregory Linington) distracted the Bear, dooming himself but preventing the death of Perdita, in the Goodman Theatre production of one of my least favorite plays The Winter’s Tale.

5. What's one of your favorite Shakespearean "hidden gems”?

The hidden gem of Shakespeare is actually right out in the open: He’s written incredibly theatrical plays, filled with rich and elusive characters that still fascinate us 400 years later, and even the most serious of his plays (including his Histories and especially his Tragedies) contain more comedy than is generally realized (or pulled off). Shakespeare was a showman whose livelihood depended on entertaining his audiences, so he created plays filled with music, devices, comic bits, fascinating characters, time jumps, changing perspectives, and shifting tones that are always serious (especially his Comedies) but never solemn.

(You don’t ask what my Shakespearean pet peeve but here it is: Productions that lack urgency and ignore the above, as in: Comedies that are beautiful-looking and melancholy but not funny. Histories that ignore the comic chaos that Shakespeare layers in. Tragedies that are one-note, over-the-top, and not in any way believable. Romances that equate pastoral with languid and not compelling. Argh.)

6. What passages from Shakespeare have stayed with you?

Oh so many...

Beatrice’s “Kill Claudio,” which comes seemingly out of the blue and yet is so right.

Falstaff’s honor speech, when done right, in front of a live audience.

And I find Miranda’s “O brave new world that hath such people in’t” just incredibly moving. (I’m always moved by Joy. Tragedy can suck it.)

Mya interjects: “Tragedy can suck it” might be my new personal motto now. Thanks, Austin.

7. What Shakespeare plays have changed for you?

Henry VI, Part 1. Reading it again recently, I was struck by the level of chaos Shakespeare depicts in a kingdom struggling without a ruler. It’s almost like Monty Python meets Veep: Sentences can’t get finished because people are running in and out, declaring “I’m in charge! I’m in charge!” with grand impotence. Of course Shakespeare would write it like that: He needed to entertain his audience, who were probably also nervous about their aging queen who had yet to declare a successor. Shakespeare created a chaotic warning that England shouldn’t descend into that kind of comically dangerous madness again — a warning that wasn’t really heeded, unfortunately.

8. What Shakespearean character or characters do you identify the most with?

Having played so many of them (albeit in reduced forms), that’s a tough call. But because I’m also an actor and a playwright, the ones I probably identify with the most are Shakespeare's seemingly autobiographical ones: Peter Quince, the only (I think) actor-playwright in the canon. Hamlet, the Danish prince with surprisingly strong opinions about theatre’s power and how certain speeches should be played (and how annoying comedians can be). Benedick, who struggles with his writing so comically. Suffolk, who in Henry VI, Part 1 declares, “I’ll call for pen and ink and write my mind.” And Bottom, of course, who thinks he can play anything.

Mya interjects: PETER QUINCES OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

9. Where can we find out more about you? Are there any projects/events you would like us to check out?

I’ve spent the last several years doing incredibly deep dives into Shakespeare, across many media:

My RSC partner Reed Martin and I wrote Pop-Up Shakespeare, an incredibly fun (and useful) introduction to the Bard’s life and works with beautiful, amazing, and funny illustrations by Jennie Maizels.

I contribute monthly essays about the intersection between Shakespeare and popular culture for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog.

My weekly podcast (now in its 13th year) is a backstage glimpse into the life and works of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, featuring interviews with our many comedian, actor, playwright, author, director, composer, dramaturg, and artist friends and many many deep dives into matters Shakespearean.

Reed and I also wrote the definitive irreverent reference book, Reduced Shakespeare: The Complete Guide for the Attention-Impaired (abridged), which is still inexplicably in print (perhaps cuz it’s definitive).

We also wrote the stage play William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) (“An absolute resolute hoot of a bawdy comedy of errors!” Broadway World), which premiered at the Folger Theatre in 2016, has toured the US and the UK, and is available for licensing via Broadway Play Publishing.

And in November 2019, the RSC will perform the international premiere in Israel of our brand new script Hamlet’s Big Adventure (a prequel) — what would happen if Tom Stoppard wrote Muppet Babies. It’s the comedy of the Prince of Denmark!

If after reading all this, for some insane reason you still want to get in touch, come find me here on Twitter. I think Mya will agree that it’s a much more civilized and fun place than its reputation suggests.

(Back to Mya) Thanks so much to Austin for taking the time to answer my questions! If you want to HEAR us actually talking to each other check out:

Reduced Shakespeare Co. Podcast #493

Reduced Shakespeare Co. Podcast #532

Reduced Shakespeare Co. Podcast #653

Q&A August continues next week with two phenomenal women who are using Shakespeare to build the most amazing things.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/2/20 “See You on a Dark Night” by Ben Peek

so crack out your old Bauhaus CDs, cos it’s vampire time!

”See You on a Dark Night” by Ben Peek was in last month’s Nightmare Magazine, and largely convinced me that if this little 31 day fiction experiment works, I should totally subscribe to that magazine.

You can read this one for free right here:  http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/see-you-on-a-dark-night/

I’m a fan of John Joseph Adams as an editor, though I’m biased, he did pick one of my stories for one of his big omnibus anthologies and we had a professional relationshp for a while which consisted of him very politely hounded me to cash royalty checks and me earnestly letting him know I would get around to doing so, like, very soon. This was years ago. He likely doesn’t remember and I would not blame him. He edits for several magazines and publishes and things, and I consider him close to Datlow as an editor of my generation can be (and I was never close to Datlow when I edited fiction. It’s a bigger compliment than it may seem.)

Peek is a writer I’ve never heard of because of the whole living-under-a-rock-for-the-last-20-years thing I’ve hinted at. But apparently he wrote some books! Fantastic. I’m not at all resentful.

Right, I was working on that. That’s why I’m doing this “31 days of fiction hell” thing.

Right.

Anyways. There’s now a two-day theme with Kristi DeMeester’s story yesterday and this one today. You see I kinda hate vampire stories. And I loved this story because it’s a vampire story.  Before we talk about the whole thing, let’s focus on that opening paragraph:

W— went to the vampire club a couple of nights after E—’s death. It was on M— Street, in an oddly-shaped bar. When W— gazed at it from the outside, when he stared through the dirty windows and advertisements, the old stools and tables looked like the rotten teeth in a giant’s mouth.

There’s a thing about stories that always stuck with me - a quote from one of early pulp writers in the 1940s and 1930s - and I can’t for the life of me remember which one, which went like this: With every story, 100% of the people will read the first sentence. After that it drops off: the majority of readers will read the next sentence, less readers will read the next one, and so forth, until you get to the percentage that gets to the end. So, according to this forgotten-by-me author, you gotta sell that first sentence. And when you can’t do that, sell the first paragraph. To me, Peek sells that first paragraph very well. I think a number of people will be turned off by the names (W--- and E---- and so forth) - but to me they remind me of early modern short stories that blanked out the full name so the author and the reader could pretend these were real people whose identities we were protecting. I love that stuff. The rest of the story crafts a careful narrative around W--- and Z---, a girl he meets, and to a lesser extent, E---- - his former mortal lover. The rest I could explain, but not in a way that really told you why I like it so.  And I do like it so. While DeMeester yesterday wrote a tight and clear narrative where the prose felt like a mastiff straining at its leash, Peek’s writing is somber and sober, through a veil of anhedonia. Most good vampire stories are about power and sexuality in some way, and this is, too, but it’s also about the passing of time and the fading grasp of life. I’ll be thinking of this one for a while. I love the world building that happens here. A lot of world building is very obvious stuff, the prose practically screaming “Take some notes, dammit!” but not here. Good fantasy, and I think especially dark fantasy, leaves you wanting to know just a little bit more about the parts that aren’t explained. To me, this story does that. So yeah, thumbs up from this jaded bastard. Tune in tomorrow, where we find out if our reviewer protagonist can do this for three days straight - will he crack from the strain? Run screaming into the void, never to be seen again? We shall see!

[undeadwicchan]

I would say it's less EF's mourning a character that never existed and more like Adam just wasn't... A character. He just was. He existed for no other reason than to be a tool for development. The White Fang plot was entirely shelved and given to Ghira, Kali and Ilia to resolve it off-screen in the V5 finale. You have to at least agree there is a discrepancy with how Adam was written in V2 and how he ended up being like.1/2

And also I don’t see people shitting on Ilia for ALSO being an adult of age during the Adam Trailer. I see people calling Adam a pedophile grooming a young and impressionable Blake, which he may have been doing, but we don’t know because again he just… Is. He has no backstory, no true motivation, no… Essence. Ilia is better but let’s not excuse her just because she’s a girl and female characters seem to get preferential treatment in the FNDM. She, too, was doing the same to young Blake. (2/2)  

(Okay, so it took awhile to answer this ask because not only this anon wrote me two paragraphs for this one so I wanted my response to be longer than usual. But, I accidentally refreshed the page while answering this ask, so I lost a bit of motivation, and now I’m writing all of my responses to any asks on Google Docs from this point on.)

I will agree that there is a bit of discrepancy in his writing. Let me start with Volume 3’s Adam.

Volume 3 Adam was a mostly calm and collected high ranking member of the White Fang with the Vale branch under his leadership. He didn’t want any part in human affairs at all, especially if it’s going to concern the wellbeing of his fellow faunus brethren. While on the other hand,  he was violent  and hostile towards humans, showing a complete lack of compassion towards them. He didn’t seemingly show any care regarding Blake leaving either until he rencounters her while he’s at Beacon and harming other innocent people.

Now I’m clearly not defending Adam’s actions here as I most definitely have been calling him out on his abusive shit. However, I would like to analyze his little “I will destroy everything you love” promise towards Blake is not just out of him being petty, but going by how the White Fang runs things when there’s a traitor or someone that tries to leave the White Fang. A example on one of them being Tukson. Tukson was a former member of the White Fang and tried to go into hiding after leaving, but then ends up getting hunted down and killed for doing so. Sienna threatens Adam with execution for bringing in a human in their base of operations and considers it a act of betrayal towards the White Fang. It’s terrifyingly considered the NORM around their organization to do something like that. However, Adam went even further with Blake’s punishment for leaving the White Fang. Instead of outright killing her as per apparent code of conduct within the White Fang, he promises to kill everything she loves. So she can know how it feels to be truly alone and perhaps beg for death or/and forgiveness from him. It’s a incredibly cruel and abusive promise towards Blake and just shows how merciless, cold, and sadistic Adam can be towards even someone who he used to consider ‘dear’ to him. He wanted to see Blake suffer for her betrayal plain and simple. What a “lovely” guy he is.

Now THIS is where they messed up. Adam’s combat prowess and how powerful he is. He easily tosses aside Blake like her combat prowess was nothing compare to his own which makes sense considering he was her mentor, but the power gap between them was insanely huge to the point it felt like he was more of a near-end game boss. And, then came the part where he easily slices Yang’s arm off. He even casually cuts down a Grimm that went towards him. And the fact that CINDER didn’t even want to use force with Adam until she got at least half of the Fall Maiden’s powers says a lot about how strong he really is. Adam is a incredibly competent fighter this is supported furthermore during his own character short on just how easily Adam tosses aside his enemies like they’re nothing compared to him. In Volume 4, it was reported that any huntsmen or police force that tried to apprehend him has been met with brutal force by his hand meaning he’s clearly stronger than the average huntsmen. With this imagery and knowledge they added for him, CRWBY had to keep him an incredible threat towards our heroes right? Well…. Then comes Volume 5’s Adam.

There were indeed some considerable changes to Adam (and not just his clothes), as a character and as a fighter. First off without hardly any proper context on explaining his new behavior that came about. Adam went from what I described him as in Volume 3 to a incredibly hot-headed, conceited, with a lack of compassion for anyone but himself, and was willing to harm other faunus for his own selfish goals. Like Sienna Khan for example, whom he was willing to kill off with no remorse merely in order to have Salem no longer worry about Sienna’s compliance and Adam would become the new High Leader of the White Fang. Another thing is that Adam is way more mentally unhinged and incredibly willing to go to war with humanity alongside Salem if it’ll mean that humanity will serve the faunus as the end results. And the reasons why? There’s nothing to explain this change because all we can do is assume on what changed him, like I’m assuming that Salem and Adam actually had a talk at one point in Volume 4 that was never shown. Not only that, but he’s incredibly obsessed with Blake like as many said he’s acting like the “crazy and obsessive ex-boyfriend’. Had Adam not tried to send assassins at Ghira and Kali, I doubt Blake’s plan would work and Adam would have been able to destroy Haven as he had planned with Salem and the other members in her circle. Hell, in his own words to Blake back in Volume 3.

“I will make it my mission to destroy everything you love.”It was HIS OWN personal mission yet, he didn’t bother to travel down to Menagerie to do the job himself once he learns of Blake’s location? Volume 5 did have some questionable writing every now and then but, this. Yeah…I don’t even know…

Now this is the part where I’ve heard fans say “Adam was nerfed!” and I agree very much at this portion of Volume 5 (I’d argue while in Volume 6 that Adam wasn’t nerfed and was just blinded by so much rage, he became reckless). While I do so much love how Blake told off Adam, her abuser, and it was a strong point for Blake’s character in the series. This also hurts how much of a threat Adam is, especially considering from what we were told and and seen about how powerful he is as a fighter in Volumes 3 and 4. Volume 5’s ending was rushed quite a lot with so much getting resolved fairly quickly, I was honestly expecting Adam’s time as the High Leader of the White Fang to go on for so much more longer. I would like to point out is that, wouldn’t have Adam noticed something is wrong by now when Corsac or Fennec didn’t attempt to contact him for a whole month? But, that’s just me. The whole White Fang plot line was done after five volumes and it honestly didn’t feel as satisfying as I thought it would have and feel it should have at least concluded during the Atlas arc considering that’s where the most discrimination against the faunus is at.

Now onto Ilia. I don’t think she did any part in grooming Blake at all compared to Adam who was heavily implied for it considering she might have been roughly the same age as Blake, and even then she never really had any intentions to do so. Let me explain about their ages, using Adam. In the first scene of his character short. Look at Adam’s coat, you don’t see ANY patterns on it, not even his own emblem was on there! Let’s go to the next scene which is where it appears the other White Fang members are already wearing masks that were probably Adam’s little heist buddies back in Mantle. Not only does Adam have his markings on his mask, but his emblem and that dash of white are on his coat. Ghira was still the High Leader here, and then when we move onwards to the scene with Adam and Blake. Where there still aren’t any new additions to Adam’s coat, meaning their conversation in Forever Fall took place a long time ago because this was way before Adam was promoted to lead the Vale branch. Yet, if we look at Blake she doesn’t look younger at all. I personally, wouldn’t determine their age based on their character model when Adam hasn’t really shown to not age a day, and we can only tell just by how many patterns to his coat he added. It would really help if we knew the exact age for both Adam and Ilia.

“But, Barbara and Arryn said–” Look, I take VA comments on characters with a grain of salt to be honest. I’d feel more comfortable if I heard it from Miles or Kerry on how old Adam actually is. Especially considering the RWBY Wiki actually removed Adam’s age because of this.

Honestly, I don’t understand why there’s been hate or backlash on Ilia for supposedly ‘stealing’ Adam’s role? Am I the only Adam fan here that likes Ilia? Adam wasn’t going to be redeemable or have a redemption arc, he may have had a extremely traumatic and abusive past, but again that doesn’t excuse his actions towards others.

While it would be nice to learn more about Adam’s backstory and motivation, this is Ruby’s, Weiss’s, Blake’s, and Yang’s story where they are the main characters after all.

[gumnut-logic]

Gentle Rain (Part Eleven)

Title: Gentle Rain

Warm Rain Series

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine | Part Ten | Part Eleven 

Author: Gumnut

3 – 7 Feb 2019

Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go 2015/ Thunderbirds TOS

Rating: Teen

Summary: Sometimes it is so gentle, you don’t realise it is happening.

Word count: 3218

Spoilers & warnings: Virgil/Kayo, Scott/OC, Gordon/Penelope, spoilers for Warm Rain up to this point in the timeline.

Timeline: Six months after ‘The Proposal’, almost a sequel.

Author’s note: For @scribbles97​ I have been staring at this forever. RL has been kicking my butt and I keep finding myself falling asleep while trying to write only having written a paragraph or two. So basically I’ve been staring at this for far too long. I hope you enjoy it anyway. Many thanks for all your wonderful support. This fandom and its fans are amazing.

Disclaimer: Mine? You’ve got to be kidding. Money? Don’t have any, don’t bother.

-o-o-o-

If it hadn’t been Christmas Eve, Kayo would have been inclined to stay in their rooms. She would have most definitely preferred Virgil to sleep as long as possible, and if he had stayed asleep, she would have left him there. But at seven in the evening, he woke foggy, realised what time it was and was adamant that they needed to make an appearance.

He still looked half dead, but admittedly that may have been something to do with the mess of hair on his head. He was also stiff as a board and was moving awkwardly, but his mood was cranky and he growled at her at least twice at the mere mention of anything related to his injury, so she left it. Perhaps Scott could kick his ass.

She followed Virgil down to the comms room, knowing his target was none other than the first coffee pot to cross his path. Stepping into the room, she caught the tail end of a question.

“...Why didn’t you call me?”

“Because you didn’t need to know. You’ve done far too much already.” Em paused. “And I wasn’t ready to tell you.”

The tableau leapt up and slammed into her retinas.

Kip Harris.

Damn.

She had been distracted. She hadn’t been able to warn Em. She knew about their relationship, of course, and had intended to take her aside and speak to her about it. Then Broome happened, and Virgil.

Damn. She was slipping up.

“Virgil?” Scott.

“Before anyone asks, I’m fine, I just need coffee.” And she watched as her fiancé scanned the room, looking for that fabled pot.

“Here you go, sir. Just as you like it.” Parker appeared as if from nowhere and Virgil pounced on the mug of liquid ecstasy in his hand.

Kayo turned away, refusing to be baited by her lover’s relationship with coffee.

Em was pale, sitting in her hoverscoot beside Scott. Her brother caught her eye and she was immediately pinned. Scott was not happy. No doubt there would be hell to pay later. The man hated not knowing and the Kip Harris and Em Harris surprise would have royally pissed him off.

“But tell me, honey, are you okay?” Kip’s attention was narrowed on his niece.

Em held up a hand. “I’m fine, Uncle. I promise. Scott has me well in hand.” She forced a smile.

“Oh, he does, does he?” That narrow beam of attention hit the eldest Tracy brother between the eyes.

“Yes, sir, I do.” And those blue eyes blazed back, defiant.

“You better, boy.”

“Uncle Crispin!”

“Kip, dear, put away your dynamite. Scott’s a Tracy. There are none more honourable. You should know that.” Her grandmother’s faith echoed around the sunken lounge.

Virgil, probably purposefully ignoring them all in favour of his coffee, groaned unconsciously as he folded himself onto one of the lounges beside Scott.

Immediately the older brother’s attention dropped Kip and narrowed on the younger pilot. “Virg, are you sure you’re okay?”

Virgil sighed as he leaned back, closing his eyes, coffee still in hand. “Give me a minute. I’m still fuelling.” He took another gulp of the very hot coffee and groaned obscenely.

“God, Virg, get a room.”

“Already got one, Gordon. Don’t like it? Find your own.” Another gulp and a sigh. “Parker, marry me.”

Kayo, sitting down beside him with her own cup of coffee, kicked his boot. “You are taken. Though that may change in the near future if you don’t stop making love to your mug.”

Gordon snorted his own drink and spluttered all over himself.

Virgil startled. Foggy brown eyes found hers and they were suddenly full of apology.

She frowned.

“Heard you had a bad one this morning.”

Virgil’s attention was immediately diverted, ever attentive to his hero. Kayo resisted rolling her eyes.

“Cyclone off Broome. Had a bit of trouble retrieving the module from the ocean surface.”

Kip was peering at him closely. “You’re lookin’ a little peaked there, son.”

Kayo eyed Virgil again. He was still a touch pale...

“I’m okay, Mr Harris.” Virgil took another gulp of coffee and hid behind his mug.

Em was eyeing her uncle and Virgil with a frown on her face, her eyes darting back and forth between the two of them.

“Virgil? Kayo? Could I speak with the two of you for a moment? In my office.” Scott’s expression was ominous. She vaguely wondered what his reaction would be if she said no.

But Virgil was moving, his body almost visibly creaking as he staggered up and off the lounge still clutching his coffee mug. God, she wished he could have stayed in bed.

Scott gripped Em’s hand. “I’ll only be a moment.” He directed his hoverchair up and out of the lounge circle, heading for the elevator. Virgil followed, his body loosening up as he gained momentum. Kayo fell in line at a more sedate pace.

The elevator ride was silent.

Scott was obviously beyond pissed. This wasn’t going to be fun.

And as soon as that office door was closed, she was proven right.

“Why the hell have you kept me in the dark?”

“What?” Virgil’s bewilderment was obvious.

“Did you know Em lost her legs in Perth?”

Virgil blinked. “Well, yeah, didn’t you?”

That brought Scott up short. “No. I did not.” A glare. “I didn’t even know she was a paraplegic.”

“Really?”

“I never met the woman until today! Do you have any idea how it felt to discover her injuries like that? I don’t think it is unreasonable that my brother and our security officer keep me up to date on important matters.”

“I thought you knew.” Virgil’s eyes were wide.

“Well, I didn’t! And this Kip Harris relationship was the icing on the cake.”

Her fiancé’s eyes widened even further. “What? She’s related to Kip?”

“Her uncle. You didn’t know that?”

“No, I didn’t know that! What am I? Your local fountain of information? I was asleep when Kip arrived, for goodness sake. I’ve said two words to the man.”

“Kayo knew, though, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question as his accusing gaze landed on her.

“I knew. I was going to speak to Em, but I was otherwise detained. My apologies.”

“And when were you going to tell me?” Those blue eyes were accusing.

“I wasn’t. It is not my information to share. None of it affects or even relates to our operations. She checks out. Penelope double checked and agreed. Sighting her personal information does not give me the right to share it with all and sundry. If she had been a threat, Scott, of course, but she is not. She is simply a private individual who has been through no small amount of hell in her life and you should be respecting her privacy.” Her lips thinned as she glared at the man. “If you want to know more about Em, ask her.”

A large hand took hers and she turned to discover her favourite pair of brown eyes supporting her calmly. Kayo frowned, she felt oddly protective of Em. She could understand Scott’s anger, but she felt defensive as if the man was intruding. She adored her big brother, but the man could be an ass sometimes. A thumb caressed the back of her fingers.

Scott stared back and forth between them, his lips pursed.

“Scott, are you okay?” Virgil’s baritone was soft, his thumb didn’t stop moving.

Scott glared at his brother. “I’m fine.”

“Bullshit.” The expletive punctured the room. The hand in hers squeezed gently and let her go.

A brief flash of request in her direction from her lover, and she got the message. She didn’t even bother to say goodbye, simply slipping out of the room with a gentle smile at Virgil.

This was brother territory.

And besides, she needed to check on Em. Who knew what Scott had put her through with this.

-o-o-o-

The door shut behind Kay and Virgil felt the loss immediately.

“Where’s she going?”

“What? Did you want her to wait for a dismissal?” Virgil’s tone was sharp.

Scott’s brow crinkled. “What’s got into you?”

“You.”

“What? Why?”

“You tell me.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Preferably something about what the hell is going on with you.”

“I’m fine.” His brother turned towards his desk and to Virgil’s amazement, activated the holographic interface and started shuffling icons.

Virgil’s palm came down on the off switch with a sudden crack. “No.”

“What the hell?”

“Scott, you are my brother and I love you more than my life, but, god, you can be an ass.”

“Says the master of all asses.”

Virgil blinked, frowned, and bit his lip. “Uh, you want to try that again?”

Scott’s eyes were wide. “That so didn’t come out the way I expected.”

“I didn’t think so.” Virgil sighed. “C’mon, Scott, what’s bugging you?”

His brother sagged in his hoverchair. A frustrated sigh.

Virgil grabbed a chair and slapped it down beside his brother and took a seat...slowly. Goddamnit, he was getting sick of that ache. Now was not the time. A flinch at the wrong moment and his brother would be all over him.

This was about Scott, not about his injury.

“Is it Em?”

The flash of blue in his direction most certainly confirmed it, but his brother turned away again.

“Scott?”

Apparently, the far wall was extremely interesting. His voice was quiet. “I like her, Virg.”

Virgil couldn’t help but smile. “Well, that’s great, Scott.”

But the expression on his brother’s face was anything but happy as he turned to face Virgil. “We had some great conversations in the hospital. Her sense of humour...” Scott smiled, seeing something other than the room. “She has me laughing despite everything.” Thoughtful. “And she is strong. Oh god, is she strong.” But his eyes shuttered before turning to Virgil again. “Do you have any idea what it was like to meet her this morning, so happy to finally see her, only to discover how injured she is?”

Virgil frowned. “It doesn’t make her any less of a person, Scott.”

Blue eyes flared. “Of course not! It’s was just...it was like she was injured then and there in front of me. I had an...assumption...and fate may have taken her legs long ago, but at that moment, they were taken from me.” He looked away. “And god damn it hurt.”

Virgil shifted in his seat. “You more than like her, don’t you.”

Scott looked up at him, lips thinning, before looking away again and saying nothing.

He placed his hand on his brother’s shoulder. The muscles under his fingers were strung like piano wire. “What else?”

The shoulder flexed. “She lost her legs because of me.”

A sigh. “She lost her legs because a building fell on her.”

“She did damage to herself to get to me.”

“She did what she had to do. It was not your fault.”

“How can you say that? I was supposed to save her.”

“But she saved you, and in the process had to make a shitty decision. But it was her decision. Don’t take that away from her.”

“Virgil-“

“Scott, do you blame Kayo for my injury? Do you blame her because I ripped open my ribcage saving her life?” He pinned his brother with his eyes.

“Of course not!”

“Then how can it possibly be your fault that Em lost her legs saving you?” A breath. “In fact, it was nobody’s fault, just shitty fate kicking our asses yet again.”

And there is was. Scott’s anger flaring up behind those blue eyes. But this anger was healthier than the despair that had leeched into his voice. This was determined anger, strong anger.

The anger that kept his brother going.

“Now, I don’t know about you, big brother, but I am starving.” He pushed himself out of the chair and held back yet another grimace as pain lanced up and down his side. Blue eyes frowned at him. “I am going downstairs and I am going to eat some of that delicious food John ordered.” He gripped his brother’s shoulder again. “And you are going down there to dazzle that lovely young woman with that weaponised smile of yours.” He grabbed his coffee cup off the edge of the desk. “There will also be more coffee. Definitely more coffee.”

“You are still an ass.”

Virgil snorted. “Yeah, but I’m good ass.” He smirked. “Just ask Kay.”

-o-o-o-

By the time Virgil and Scott re-joined the family downstairs, Grandma had laid out all the evening’s food.

And tied Alan to a chair to keep his fingers out of it.

“Aww, Grandma!”

“You will sit there, young man, and wait for your brothers. We have guests, where are your manners?” She was gazing up at Kip who had approached and wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

“They were eaten by the black hole where my stomach used to be.” Virgil, still unseen by his youngest brother, had to laugh at the expression on Alan’s face. A pout mixed with frustrated anger and longing for the food in front of him. “Where the hell are they?”

“Right here, little bro.” Virgil snorted at him and waltzed past to have at the food.

“Oi, young man.” He was thwapped by a delicate hand. “Guests first.”

“Yes, Grandma.”

Kay eventually rescued him, and Virgil was happy to see Em doing something similar for a blushing Scott. He eyed Kip and Em during the night as well, his artistic eye finally seeing just the touches of resemblance. There wasn’t much. Where Kip was dark, Em was pale. Where Kip was white haired, all trace of his original colour gone, Em’s hair was a cloud of wavy almost black hovering around her head. Em’s pale blue eyes couldn’t be further from Kip dark brown. Not to mention Em’s Australian accent going up against Kip’s American twang, there was no comparison. But there was something in their faces, just an echo of similarity, barely there that labelled them as family.

As the evening moved on, a comfortable swell of conversation bounced about the room. Kay kept him company all night. He suspected she was hovering over him regarding his injury, but he didn’t have the energy to challenge her, and besides, he loved her company regardless. Em stuck with Scott mostly, the chair-bound pair quite cute in their attachment. Further observation convinced Virgil that Scott was seriously attracted to this woman. He was attentive and smiled softly from time to time, something in his eyes. It got to the point that Virgil had to look away or embarrass himself. There was definitely something there.

He couldn’t help the warmth that welled inside at seeing his brother happy.

When Em wasn’t with Scott, she was with Kay. The two of them sat on a couch at one point chatting away quite happily.

Virgil couldn’t help but grin at that as well.

Gordon spoke often to Penelope. In fact, the aquanaut never seemed to be very far away from the blonde woman. It left Virgil wondering if he was missing something, but Penny didn’t seem to mind.

If he hadn’t gone outside for a fresh breath of air at around ten, he might have never ascertained what exactly was going on between those two. As it was, he was glad he couldn’t actually see them. Hearing them was intrusive enough.

“Pen, I...”

“Gordon, what exactly are you worried about?”

“I’m not worried.”

“You’re fidgeting.”

“I-“

“Gordon, I have been waiting for you to kiss me for over a year now. If you don’t action that want I’m going to- hmph.”

The sounds that followed didn’t need subtitles.

Virgil crept back inside.

Grandma, on the other hand, was anything but subtle. At one point she jumped on Kip’s lap and kissed him madly in full view of everyone. There were several good-natured groans.

John couldn’t help himself and kept the desk holographic interface running. Grandma coaxed him to the lounge conversation several times, but the man seemed chained to the desk and kept returning. He also appeared to be talking to someone...a lot. Virgil grew suspicious, but didn’t comment. He didn’t think Eos would cause quite that kind of smile on his brother’s face, but if it was someone else...well, Virgil could always third degree him later.

All in all, it was a pleasant evening. But as it wore on, he found himself flagging. Between the pain in his side and the strain of the day, despite his nap earlier, a comfortable conversation on the couch eventually drifted into sleep.

He woke to a not so gentle nudge from Kay. “C’mon, love, let’s get you to bed.”

He blinked, only half awake. His family was smiling and smirking at him. Damn. “I’m fine.” He struggled to straighten up. His side screeched at him and he groaned.

“Oh, for god’s sake, Virgil.” Her glare was ready to rip his face off.

“Okay, okay, I get the message.” A large hand, Kip’s? Was helping him off the lounge. “I’m going...going.”

Kay was there and they were leaving the room. “Merry Christmas everyone.” A range of well wishes and the elevator ate them.

Kay kissed him, her hand on his cheek. “You big idiot.”

“Wha-?” But he was really too tired to care.

They made it to their rooms. Clothes off, pyjama bottoms on. Bed.

He curled up beside Kay and let sleep take him.

-o-o-o-

The beep was soft, barely loud enough to hear, but it woke Kayo without a problem. It was designed to do that.

Beside her, Virgil slept on, the same beep equally designed not to wake him. In fact, he didn’t even know of its existence. Kayo planned to keep it that way.

Slipping out of bed, she padded barefoot out of the room and closed the door behind her. Secure in the knowledge of the room’s soundproofing she grabbed her comms and, keeping both her voice and the volume low, answered John’s summons.

The clock on the wall said 3.26am.

“Kayo?”

“This better not be a rescue, John.” The pause at the other end of the line confirmed her suspicions. “No, I’m sorry. He is not going out.”

“Kayo, you know I wouldn’t ask if I had a choice.”

“There is no choice involved. You can’t ask him this.”

“Honestly, I don’t want to, but his engineering knowledge and equipment is needed.”

“Send Brains.”

He fell silent.

“John, he is exhausted and in pain. He is not going.” Final word.

“Copy that.” The line went dead.

She sighed. Virgil would not be happy, but he would just have to live with it.

Better grumpy alive than happy dead.

She turned off her comms and threw the dress over the back of the lounge.

A drink of water and she killed the light, tiptoeing back into their room.

He was softly snoring.

Despite herself, her heart warmed at the sound. Drawn to him, she climbed back into bed and wrapped herself around him, her face buried in the back of his neck. He didn’t even stir. God, she loved him.

And be damned if she would let his job throw his life away

After all, it was hers.

-o-o-o-

End Part Eleven

Part Twelve

[hindbodes]

The Floods: Lost ...its structural integrity somewhere back there

Colin Thompson has been a great illustrator for children’s books, and occasionally a very neat author. But don’t let that cloud your judgement, because this novel is exactly as bad as it looks. The illustrations here certainly aren’t his best work, but lately they have been his only work, as his art style has morphed into this flat, computer-generated collage of photos and gritty rubber humans.

By the time it was over, this book put into me more than four instances of something in the narrative being overpowered, at least one pretty big continuity error, numerous typos, and even that thing the author sometimes does where he uses the wrong name to address a character. It also, of course, had the usual Belgian racism, because Colin Thompson still hates Belgian people for some reason.

If you’re not familiar with The Floods, it’s a gross children’s novel series about these morally dubious witches and wizards - a family - who do gross and sometimes epic shit, with very few reality-limitations put in place. I’ve been following it for quite some time.

Within the first two pages of the main story of Lost, Colin Thompson abruptly establishes that two of the main characters - and I’ll get back to you on how “main characters” is a weird concept in this series - got married and had a kid, who not only was very developed for a baby, but could literally talk in every word of the English language within a month of birth. Which is something that I expect by the next book to become another thing Colin Thompson completely forgets.

The book is about two women, Edna and Maldegard, keeping themselves occupied by traveling all over the country of Transylvania Waters and giving streets, towns, and mountains their own names. Because there weren’t any before. Which concerns me. I don’t recall the third-book-prequel having no names for anything, and I hope I just didn’t notice. In short, they’re mapping Transylvania Waters for the first time.

One thing I’m quite grateful for is that sometimes Colin Thomspon does designate things that The Floods are incapable of. The list is short, but the things that are on it really help. One of them is this thing in The Floods: Lost where Winchflat is super powerful at creating technology and can make a machine for anything, but there’s a really bizarre shack in the middle of a courtyard that he can’t penetrate or even use X-rays to look into. It’s one of the more Douglas Adamsian parts of CT’s bibliography. One time a paper booklet in a library told me that if you’re looking for more authors like Douglas Adams, try Eoin Colfer or Colin Thompson. The way I see it is more “Eoin Colfer is the poor man’s Douglas Adams, and Colin Thompson is the very poor man’s Eoin Colfer. Colin Thompson is also a very rich man’s surreal weirdo and therefore quite often worth it”.

Colin Thompson has a serious problem with “show, don’t tell”. I know that sounds crazy, because of how this is a book and “that’s how books work”, but I assure you that Colin Thompson still manages to abuse saying what happened instead of describing events like they’re actually happening. The last four Colin Thompson novels I read felt like almost the entire thing was a timelapse of seasons passing, and things end up being incredibly dialogue-driven.

100 pages of saying what happened later, interesting events in the story start to happen. There seem to be a number of villains in this sequel, and an asshole shapeshifter who’s in the form of a house, with a downright cannibalistic monster wife of his who he wants freed from prison, is the first one to make an appearance.

I don’t want to spoil how they take this man down, but it’s partly redundancies in writing and partly some pretty funny ideas that didn’t end up fully-fledged in my opinion. It sounds like a spoiler that I reveal he’s disguised as a house, but don’t worry, the book makes it incredibly obvious before telling the audience the reveal about four paragraphs later.

While that’s going on, there’s this subplot about how Mordonna and Nerlin, the parents, are trying to set up parliament in Transylvania Waters, to give the illusion to tourists that the country is a democracy or something. They live as kings and queens in a castle, and it’s not, but that will become clearer soon.

For some reason, CT goes ahead and chooses nerds as the acceptable target for narrator’s abuse, and the minor characters for the role of trying to set up a political party of the people.

Colin Thompson makes a pretty good point about how parliament sucks, especially when he says it’s because one party spends 3 or 6 years doing one thing, and then somebody else gets voted in and spends the same amount of time doing the opposite, but I don’t think the scene where Mordonna’s seven grotesque children suddenly walk in and get rollcalled just to form a bigger political party - The Royal Party - than the nerds’ one so that the nerds don’t get to have any say, sets a better precedent for the future. These characters? Well, the Floods are a pretty established large family, but they only used to get the spotlight. Nowadays, Colin Thompson always pushes his original main characters out of the spotlight, and other characters become “main” characters, purely as a freak accident. The book doesn’t give a single line to Valla or Merlinmary.

After the shapeshifter thing is resolved, the next villains are all Winchflat’s fault. Using a bunch of bones they found, this overpowered joke of a scientist character uses his cloning machines to bring fossilized creatures back from the extinction of time. Somehow, they are developed and aware enough to function in this new world quite quickly, not going into shock from the changes made to the world or having to relearn the alphabet.

First, Winchflat brings back an intelligent chicken, who starts a conversation with Winchflat. Of course this means Colin Thompson is gonna throw down that Ethel reference, because he sure loves his Chicken Named Ethel. He also brought back a whole bunch of regular chickens, oddly enough.

Basically, the chicken Ethel has delusions of grandeur and wants to be the rightful leader of everything in sight. This is a pretty funny prospect, but if the joke was handled right, it would still be spoiled by the overdose of characters-finding-it-funny-themselves-and-laughing. So I guess it wasn’t handled right then...

Naturally, the chicken gets totally dominated by The Floods, because of course it did. That’s how it works. Winchflat’s next mistake is to bring a four headed accountant - homo calculus - back to life, which actually ends up being a lot scarier than one would expect.

Good Stuff, Bad Stuff

This book isn’t perfect, but there’s at least one thing in there that considerably had an effect on me when I read it. I’ve already said a lot of bad stuff about this book. There is good stuff in it. I will tell you that thing.

As it turns out, that four-headed accountant from the pre-historic ages that Winchflat reanimated wasn’t just a joke about how “accountants suck” but actually something quite sinister, even bringing up a few dark implications about how the world used to be.

The creature’s name is Fiscal Matters, or just Fiscal. He has four bald heads, a cut moustache on each one, and pairs of glasses. Kinda looks like a caveman. His complusion is to count things, regardless of the value of what he’s counting. All homo calculus do that, and earlier on it’s said that many species went extinct because this behaviour bored them to death.

Winchflat talks to Fiscal for a bit, and then some pretty scary revelations happen. First, Fiscal thinks Winchflat is a servant to him, because apparently in the past, all witches and wizards were servants to his race. You can only wonder what kind of batshit insane forces were powerful enough to subdue the race that Winchflat comes from, but anyway...

Fiscal, second, wants Winchflat to open the strange room in the middle of the courtyard. You know, the weird one that Winchflat can’t open. Winchflat tells him about that, but then Fiscal says “I know how to open it.” So whatever’s in that crazy fucking shed, Fiscal knows what it is and wants to get in. It’s made worse by the fact that Fiscal Matters is getting increasingly aggressive with his “servant”.

The last one is that inside the weird room is a thing called The Ark of the Incontinent. The book never reveals exactly what it is, what it looks like, or how it got its name, but Fiscal wants to go in there so he can contact the rest of his species in outer space. They’re still alive and out there.

The resolution to this arc is pretty anticlimactic, but still unsettling. Basically, after Winchflat tells Fiscal to stay there and not open the door so he can walk away and consult his family, he gets back to find Fiscal counting stones on the shack. Counting how many stones are in the wall is the only way to access The Ark of the Incontinent, and Fiscal can’t, because the amount of stones changed over time and there’s no longer as many in the wall as there are supposed to be.

By the end of the book, Fiscal is still there. He’s still counting, and still hasn’t got into the shack. The Flood family just leaves him to his own devices, and feels perfectly secure about letting somebody with membership of an advanced, dangerous race keep trying to open the one doorway to contacting that race and unleashing war on the planet. Mordonna messes with Fiscal by changing the amount of stones in the walls randomly every now and then, but I think you can imagine how eventually that might turn out to be a bad idea. The probability involved sounds very dangerously high to me.

Lost

Guys... I don’t know. I have been reading this book series for a very long time, and wonder sometimes why I put so much effort into it. I always tell myself “this book will be the last one I read” but it never sticks. I guess I just still think there’s something in there that’s entertaining for me, and maybe there is. I don’t know if I want to continue reading until the very last book or not.

Bottom line is, it’s SBIG. SBIG at best, really. You read what I said up there, you know what’s wrong with it. And I think previous Floods books were better. But lately, as I finished reading this book, I’ve felt more interested in reading the next one. Colin Thompson finally gave continuity nods to things like The Knights Intolerant, which is a really big step forward for this series and means future books might have something I want to read. Read the book if you must, but I’ve been down the path of reading a sequel book before reading its pre-books. It doesn’t go well.

Your alternative is to read 9 big-text-novels until your quest to read the comedically-bad Lost pays off, but I think you have to be a pretty big Colin Thompson fanperson to want to do that. You either read one book in the middle and feel confused, or you read all of them in order and feel disappointed.

You know, fuck it. I’ve been told that books will set you free, and my eyesight and quota-for-consuming-fiction aren’t getting any better - I should just borrow the next book. I should borrow The Floods 11 and do something with my time that involves entering a weird and fantastical story. No more days of nothing but videogames, browser feeds and let’s plays...

[softtofustew]

or maybe that’s how it has to be // notes & ending ment

pairing: kang younghyun / park jaehyung

genre: angst ; fluff 

summary: death calls childhood friends jae and brian on christmas eve. willing to make the most of their next twelve hours, they find their ways with each other — and perhaps learn how to really, truly live life on the day they’re going to die.

NOTES & ENDING MENT (2018)

hello, this is chien // on writing this christmas x death soulmates!au work, this is one of the biggest challenges i think i’ve faced in terms of writing. whilst i’m still young and brooding (i believe i am much younger than the average age of fanfiction writers… or at least the majority that i am familiar with), writing has always been here for me. i started writing fanfiction back in february of 2018, and thinking back to it, i never thought i would put out thirty (30!) works out in a span of a couple of months.

this work is particularly special to me, mostly because i’m pouring a lot of time into this baby, and because it’s posted on brian’s birthday, or as an early merry christmas.

i would just like to share some thoughts and words on ‘or maybe that’s how it has to be’, and some insight on its ideas and perimeters. if you haven’t read it, it’s here.

one; setting & perimeters

dealing with this has always been a bit of a wonder. where am i placing them? where are they going? if you notice, i’ve left this city ambiguous, though the names of the characters (minjoon, byungho, jaejoon etc) mentioned imply that it is, in fact, korea. 

as for the perimeters of the story, they are not mine to boast. they are, in fact, a work of adam silvera’s. if you follow me on twitter, i have mentioned him countless times as i wrote this work. his work is called they both die at the end (review). i shall talk a bit more on the book, and how i adapted its ideas.

the story is of two boys, two strangers, who receive individual calls about their imminent deaths in twenty-four (24) hours, the caller being ‘Death-Cast’. they meet through an app called ‘Last Friend’ (think tinder but for people about to die and try to make friends). they meet, and they spend their last day together.

once i’ve laid out these perimeters, you can see how i integrated them into my work, but tweaked a lot of the details. firstly, they die in twelve hours. why? because i don’t think i would’ve written out a whole twenty-four hours. for silvera’s work it was possible because he intertwined plenty of different points of views of different people. 

also, jae and brian are childhood best friends. i feel like them as strangers would’ve taken a lot for them to develop in such a short span of time. seeing someone from your past and reuniting with them (especially if you’ve loved the other before) i feel is more of a sentimental kind of bond over strangers!jaebri. this, of course, does away with the ‘Last Friend’ app entirely.

i never expanded on Death-Cast, but that’s because the book itself never expanded on it. also, i wanted to focus mainly on the events of the whole work. if i had had more time, i think i would’ve expanded on the background of the work, but all’s well that ends well.

two; characters

of course, it’s jae and brian! throughout this year, i’ve loved writing jaehyungparkian. there are certainly lots of reasons behind this, of course. the main one is because these two truly have a lot of chemistry irl - their backstories, their conversations, their meaningless banters on vlive etc. writing fanfiction of them never gets boring, honestly.

though it’s not obvious, i depict jae as the introvert (which is, anyway, his personality, INTP) and brian as the extrovert (who is also extroverted irl). as in the second-last scene, wherein brian asks jae what they would’ve done on their last day if they hadn’t met each other, it’s true: jae would’ve holed up by himself, brian would’ve hung out with wonpil but would never really give that true goodbye, because goodbyes are always the hardest. 

although i know there was that one christmas brian spent alone, i can’t imagine jae willingly putting up a physical fight with someone haha. 

meeting each other and catching up and everything in between works for the both of them. i love them in this work, and i hope you love them, too.

three; events

it goes without saying, doesn’t it? two childhood friends meet, spend half a day together, kiss and fall in love. cliche, i know. 

i’ve always been fond of soulmates! AUs. when i reread adam silvera’s work, i felt compelled to write a soulmates trope, but with a twist - death soulmates. clearly, it’s not a real term inculcated into my work - it’s just what jae and brian label it as. there are countless reflections in the work, wherein either or both of them think about what a miracle it is to coincidentally see each other on the day they die.

for such events to occur, you hafta make it realistic: brian gets into a fight with minjoon, in a city far from his own home, so it’s not considered ‘unrealistic’ of the both of them meeting in the same city where they both live in. it gives the sense of a coincidink to the audience, without making it too… faked? yeah.

minjoon and his gang (all made-up characters) are the cherry on the top. in adam silvera’s work, the two boys faced one of their ex’s current boyfriend and his gang. there were guns involved, but i like to keep things simple and legal (considering that this is, in fact, set in south korea.) so, on top of going to places they want to go before they die, they’ve got to square off minjoon and the gang.

as for the events, as for where they went, there’s nothing coherently ‘special’ about them, other than the sentiment behind visiting these places. i feel the plot was more of a long, drawn out build-up to the ending scenes, wherein they both knew that they loved each other and such. 

four; process

so how did i write this? this is the first time i skipped out a portion of the work to write the last few scenes first, then returning to the middle portion, and also the first time i had an alternative work.

starting it off, my first draft was a sketchy 7K-word baby before i took the first few paragraphs and rewrote it. i felt it was waayyy too forced (and way too much to handle and so i rewrote it. this baby is my second draft, and x1000 wayyyy angstier than the first child. to know more about her, scroll down to five)

as for the second (and final draft, the version that i posted) i’d finished until the coffeehouse scene when i went ice-skating with my family. of course, i’ve never gone ice-skating, and so i shuffled along the railing for three hours. during the only time i fell down, this dude helped me up (read: semi-cute dude with skating skills to die for). being me, i struggled to my feet - and slammed into the railing, skates sliding apart from each other. thus, i pulled off a nothing-less-of-gorgeous crashing stance while holding onto the railing for dear life. (which is why i never engaged in small talk with semi-cute dude. read: he skated off.)

i incorporated that into my work (except, brian doesn’t skate off after jae crashes into the railing), and i started off there, all the way until the last scene. 

and then i went back to the middle of the work and started writing. again. lol.

five; the alternate version

the first draft was… complicated. there were many different elements used in my first baby before i scrapped it. the first two scenes are exactly the same, word-for-word, but beyond that was completely and utterly different.

alternate version: jae and brian didn’t meet at the convenience store. they met at a bus stop, prior to brian’s fight with minjoon. they only went to the convenience store after a few more scenes, where they bumped into sungjin. in this version, brian and sungjin made up - they buried the hatchet between them.

also, jae’s parents did die too, in this first draft - but he wasn’t legally an adult in this version. instead, he had foster parents living on the outskirts of seoul. after meeting at the bus stop, him and brian took the bus to visit them so jae could leave their gift in the mailbox. 

also, if i had continued with the first draft, you’d be reading about sungjin realising that brian had cheated on him when they were still together! and then that’s the reason why minjoon hunts him down for a second fight. yeah. that was… unexpected. thank goodness i didn’t bulldoze through that; that would’ve been one hell of a world for me to handle, phew.

from this, you can see that my… ideas weren’t planned. i was literally going with the flow. this alternate version is even weirder than 5sos’ alternate version of she’s kinda hot, which is kinda saying something, isn’t it?

six; did they die, or did they die?

most of you would believe that they died. the last line clearly states “the last thing jae sees before his eyes is brian, brian, brian, before his world is consumed.”

but the thing is, i never said ‘and they died in the end.’ before his world is consumed. consumed by darkness? or purely just him shutting his eyes? maybe his heart stops, but beats again? maybe brian gets him out of there? truly, i’ve left the ending  ambiguous. in other words: whether they died or not on christmas day is unknown, and i’ve left it up for you to decide. 

this was one of the things i thought over the most. logically, they can’t escape from the fire, but then again, who knows? with something like Death-Cast in their alternate universe, perhaps there’s some otherworldly force? ;)

seven; quotes & inspiration

i couldn’t resist adding several quotes from they both die at the end! jae’s ment to brian, several lines in the works, some of which can be found here. if you recognise which i quoted, that means you reeaaally read thoroughly heh.

as for writing itself, there were times when i was stuck on words, which is alarming because i hardly ever get writer’s block (weeps aggressively). so i would like to thank errie, my fav internet moot, for always being there halfway across the globe to listen (read?) to my rants about the work, and for always encouraging me with her eagerness to read the work itself. and also, teenie has been a great inspiration, indirectly inspiring me every time i reread one of her works (senpai, if you ever see this, i love you). 

last note

i would like to end this by thanking everyone who has made me writing fanfiction (regularly!) an actual hobby i enjoy this year. when i first started off, i never expected to even get a handful of kudos on my first fic. admittedly, there are some works i’m not particularly satisfied of, and sometimes i wonder whether i thought of quantity over quality of the works.

everyone has their own writing style, as i do too. my kind of writing style is descriptive, long sentences. i think sometimes my long sentences are a tad too long and break away the impact of the words, which is something i feel i should work on. but writing fanfiction, truly, has improved my writing so, so much, and i’m immensely thankful for all of your comments and feedback on my writing. 

i have a couple of goals in 2019: to write a couple more jaehyungparkian ideas that i have out (pretty sure i needa start on this that i’ve been hinting since god knows when), to finish the parkbros au and to improve the impact of my writing style, and to broaden my genres of writing. throughout this year i’ve mainly been writing fluff, angst, humour. i plan on writing wayyy more action and thriller, because those genres need looooots of brushing up on (this one, i feel, was very amateur but a lot of y’all liked it hahaha so i don’t know). OH! and to plan out my works before i write them kekekeke.

in conclusion, thank you, thank you, thank you. i love you all so, so much. i will be back in 2019 with new and improved ideas to write

[serenataichou]

flower

SEVENTEEN FANFICTION: WOOZI X READER

PART 1 >> PART 2 >> PART 3

AU, ANGST, SLIGHT LANGUAGE

SUMMARY:

You stare at him blankly from across the street. He knows you don’t want the surgery, is that why he is telling you this now? Tears slowly stream down his face, you want to cross the street and wipe them away but you remain still. You’ve never seen him cry. Not even when he first found out about your disease.

You are in the bathroom, coughing out hydrangea petals. Your chest and throat burn but the petals do not stop. You know you need to leave, the fan meet should be over in several minutes. It takes you a few moments to get yourself settled down. You flush the toilet and quickly come out of the stall to wash your face. Once you open the door you come face to face with another girl, her expression is one of sorrow and terror as she holds some of your petals in the palm of her hand. A shock of mortification shoots down your spine, tears prickle your eyes. A complete stranger knows your darkest secret. Clutching your bag you run past her, out of the bathroom. She comes after you but loses you in the outgoing crowd.

You run into the closest alley you can find. Your hands shake as you pull out your phone.

Me

We’err fruends, rihgt? Uou love me? (11:34 pm)

A cheap way to get yourself to calm down, but you don’t need your disease and anxiety to act up at the same time.

Adam

Of course I love you. What happened? Is it your anxiety? :( Call me. (11:34 pm)

As soon as you read those words, the petals making their way to your throat die down. Even though it is not romantically, he does love you. It should be enough. It has to be.

Without hesitation you press the call button, he picks up immediately. “So for breakfast today I managed to convince my roommate…” He begins to tell you all about his day, knowing that his rambling will comfort you more than him trying to pressure you to tell him what is wrong. By the time you get home, your hands are still enough for you to get the key into the keyhole on the second try. You throw yourself and your bag on the couch. You close your eyes, letting yourself be absorbed by Adam’s words.

Eventually, you two start discussing his paper. Though it’s much later for him than for you, he knows all too well that crying makes you sleepy so he’s not surprised that you keep yawning. “Thanks for your help Y/N, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you,” he flinches at his words. It sounds like he was talking about something more. He knows that he has to be more careful with his words, but he also knows that reassurances are something you need. He wants to stop hurting you, but he also needs you in his life. You don’t answer back, paying closer attention to your end he can hear your soft, even breaths. He sighs in relief.

His mouth stretches into a fond smile before he hangs up. Looking at his phone, he sees that he has quite a few unread text messages. He huffs in frustration toward himself, you two talked for hours but he didn’t manage to pick up the courage to tell you. Not that he would have anyways, you weren’t in a stable emotional state.

Rose

Did you manage to finish your paper? ;o (12:47 am)

Adam

Yeah, Y/N helped me with it. It came out great, I just wish there wasn’t so much of a time difference. I’m so tired D: I hope you’re not still awake, see you tomorrow babe<3(: (2:52 am)

Jihoon tries looking for you in the crowd when they say their goodbyes, but he can’t find you. He frowns to himself when he remembers that you didn’t feel well. Afterwards, they still have other schedules to attend to, but that doesn’t stop him from continuously checking his phone.

Night comes and he finally gets to lay his head on his pillow. He starts to think that maybe he was too forward. But he knows himself well enough that if he hadn’t taken that risk then he would have never done anything. Jihoon eventually reasons with himself that you are resting as you seemed ill. 

He smiles a bit to himself as he thinks about your short interaction. Somehow his mind starts imagining about how your future interactions will be like, a small blush forms on his cheeks when he catches himself.

“I hope you feel better soon, Y/N,” he whispers to himself before closing his eyes.

When you wake up in the morning, your throat and stomach is sore. You don’t feel like getting up, fatigue settling heavily in your bones. You almost trip over your bag while getting off the couch. The bag falls and your album slips out of it onto the living room floor. You pick it up, your original excitement of going to the fan meeting is now overshadowed by the pain you felt from your disease. Your grip on the album tightens a bit. You take a deep breath to stop your self-resentment from bubbling to the surface.

‘Don’t open it until you get home.’

You suddenly remember Jihoon’s words. Your mood quickly shifts to eagerness. You literally have no idea what he could have written. You two did speak a bit longer than what was usual, well at least you think you did. Either way, you wonder what you could have said that enabled him to write such a private message?

You shake your head, obviously you are just overthinking as always. You open the album, your eyes are immediately drawn to the small paragraph on the page:

I’m going to be honest and tell you that I noticed you as soon as I looked into the crowd. You were sitting, waiting for the fan meet to start. You had your earbuds on and were bobbing your head to the music. It made me wonder what you were listening too. When we talked, I was amazed by how much you love music. I’d like to talk to you about it more, of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

XXX-XXX-XXX

Seventeen’s Woozi

Your mind is blank. You re-read it a few times to make sure it says what it says. You sit down and take a few moments to think. Maybe the stereotype response of a fangirl would be to immediately text their bias. But stereotypes tend to be wrong. Being friends with anybody who had some sort of fame would shine the light on you as well. No matter how careful you are, it is inevitable for some fansite or news site to snap a picture of you. You don’t think your anxiety could handle that sort of pressure. There’s also hate that could be thrown your way by possessive fangirls, your heart isn’t made of glass but there are things that can really hit you where it hurts.

On the other hand, you haven’t made any friends since you came to South Korea. You are far too shy to approach your classmates, you feel like they will think of you as some koreaboo who just came here to be closer to their precious oppa. While Kpop did introduce you to South Korean culture, you are well aware that South Korea isn’t some mystical land of Kpop and that it definitely has its problems like any other country does. But that’s not something people will see right away and you’ve never really been the type to be persistent.

But this time, someone is approaching you.

[chocobutt-trash]

Hiya! You write beautifully and you're probably sick of me saying that by now because I say it all the time and every comment I make on all your fics.. But there's many times when I'm engaging with your writing that I need to pause and just say "wow." So it got me thinking that you've probably read a lot of interesting books and I was wondering if you would share some of your favorite fiction titles. It's almost blasphemy to talk about non fanfiction on tumblr but I am quite curious. Thank u

*waves*Hey there - thanks so much for this ask, it’s something I relish being asked because there’s nothing I like more than talking about my favourite books ;)

First off I’m still super flattered you enjoy my writing so much! I have a long way to go before reaching the calibre of those I look up to, but with more practice, and wider reading, there’s always the chance, haha.

Blasphemy? Never!

So: books and authors I adore.

Right up at the top we have to have Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Mantel’s prose is absolutely exquisite, and she’s one of the most enjoyable authors around. Wolf Hall is the first in a fantastic trilogy covering the rise of Thomas Cromwell to power in Tudor England, but honestly, Mantel could write about de-greasing a kitchen sink and the prose would be so damn delightful I’d read it and weep. Here, we have a hefty tome that is, essentially, a history book, and the most stunning thing is that she’s reconstructed as much as possible of the events and scenery as was at the time of the Tudors. She really got inside Cromwell’s head to write this book, and he’s such an interesting character. We often hear of the Henry VIII story from either Henry’s point of view, or those of his wives (particularly Anne Boleyn). But this, now, this comes from the unexpected track. Born to commonfolk in a small London suburb, Cromwell was never meant to gain entry into the inner circles of the English Court, and yet he ended up influencing the political and religious direction of an entire nation. This is a fantastic character study of a shrewd, down-to-earth, ambitious man, who is at once a man of the people and yet so hard to fathom. Damn, just talking about it makes me want to read it again.

Filth, by Irvine Welsh, is a mainstay of mine. It’s written entirely in Scots dialect, so if you’ve not the background, you may need a translator. But Filth, like all Welsh’s novels, is amazing in its characterisation. It deals with an ordinary policeman in Edinburgh, Bruce Robertson, who, we slowly come to realise over the course of the novel, is completely morally corrupt. And it starts out with little things. Little, ‘oh, he’s probably being a bit of a jerk’ things. Little redeemable things. And since it’s all from his point of view, you’re along with him for the ride. Having a villain as the main character, first-person, and having the rabbit hole be such a subtle slip, does interesting things to your brain, to the point where, as a reader, you almost start waving away some of his actions, and part of it’s due to the sort of language Welsh employs. I love this fact, because you see how easy it is for people who do terrible things to get away with it. To make you want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Just in case they can be redeemed. There is also a hefty dose of psychological horror and existentialism, with a side order of magical realism as the tapeworm that lives in Bruce Robertson’s gut starts talking to him. The further he gets down the rabbit hole, the worse his mental health becomes. And, of course, this is Irvine Welsh we’re talking about, and I don’t think there’s even enough tags on AO3 to warn you of all the horrors this book contains within.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, has been one of the biggest influences on my writing style. McCarthy has an incredibly unique style. It’s bare-bones writing - he need not spell out anything for the reader, and this goes to the point where he doesn’t even use speech marks to delineate conversation. The structure of the writing alone is so flawless that you don’t even need it. It’s an exercise in creating a stark, vivid post-apocalyptic world with the bare minimum of ingredients. Word choice, sentence structure, emotion. His style really isn’t for everyone, but it is so clever and utterly delicious. I read the entire thing on the verge of tears, I was so worried for the kid in the story.

Amrita, by Banana Yoshimoto, is actually not Yoshimoto’s best work in terms of style (her short story collections Sleep and Kitchen are better), but it’s such a work of art that it stands as my favourite of hers. It’s about a young woman who wakes up after being in a coma, having lost certain parts of her memory. There’s a sister who died, a younger brother with problems of the parapsychological variety, and a healthy dose of magical realism. It’s all washed over with this serene sense of nostalgia and anticipation, and on every page I felt like I was on the brink of an entirely other world, that I could just look at the world slightly differently, and it would shift.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami, is an experimental masterpiece. I love the fact that I basically read the entire thing and it was so well-written I didn’t even question the fact that nobody in the novel has names. That’s right, nobody’s name is mentioned even once. And there’s at least a dozen characters. This is an outstanding book that influenced anime creator Yoshitoshi ABe (creator of Serial Experiments Lain, and Haibane Renmei), and it’s utterly fantastical and out there and thought-provoking, which is not what one might necessarily think for a novel that opens with a man musing at great length about what sort of sofa is best to sit upon.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (no, not the comedian, the other one), is also experimental in nature, and is sublime in the way it packages up its stories. Mitchell has an immense amount of talent; there are multiple plotlines that spans centuries and he is somehow able to write convincingly well in each genre style, from nineteenth-century colonial memoirs to ‘70′s crime drama to futuristic post-apocalyptic fiction. I read a lot of ship logs from century-old expeditions, and the segment The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is absolutely spot-on. There’s real beauty in this book, and please, for the love of god, read the book rather than watch the film, because beautiful as the film is, it does not come close to capturing that sense of wonder that the book does.

Dune, by Frank Herbert, has to be up here because not only is Dune a fantastic example of eco-fiction, but Herbert breaks the cardinal rule of not having more than one point of view in a paragraph and somehow I still love him. Conventionally, I prefer sticking to a single point of view in an entire scene, because otherwise the narrative is messy, and not in a fun way, more in a kind of sticks-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth-like-mashed-potato kind of way. Bleh. However, Herbert routinely switches perspective in the same scene, sometimes during the same paragraph, and occasionally during the same sentence. He’s pretty much the only writer I can stand who does this (barring Stephen King on the odd occasion) and it’s mainly because one of the principal themes in Dune is the use of Bene Gesserit magic, which is a glorified way of saying ‘using psychological warfare on others’. Words are a weapon, and it’s imperative to the plot of the story that the reader sees the effect of these words on the characters’ mental states. So yeah, it’s meant to be a sci-fi eco-warrior novel, but it ends up immensely psychological. And that is a very worthwhile read.

I think I’ve covered the main ones that tend to hover up near the top of my mind. Again, thank you so much for this ask, it was great fun to answer.

[neurotribe]

“I don’t see colour” or The Complicated Dishonest Politics of Identity

I didn’t blog last week because this post took me a lot longer to write than I thought. So please accept this post as last weeks and this weeks reflection. It’s quite long so grab a coffee or tea, and settle in for a bit of a read.

I was on my way home from a conference I was speaking at some years ago. It was a Melbourne December so for my northern hemisphere friends, that means one of the hottest months of the year.

In the warmer months, I tend to keep my hair quite short. This time, my hair was clippered to the point of almost being bald. I had a serious case of the five o’clock shadows and in addition, I tend to tan quite significantly during the summer months, a benefit of my Maltese genes.

So there I was, stopped at a set of traffic lights at a busy intersection in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. It was hot, the window was open, my elbow sticking out the side of the car probably listening to a 24 hour news station, nerd I know.

It took a few seconds for me to hear the yelling over the sound of the radio. I looked out the window and I could see the source of the yelling. It was two, twenty something white Caucasian males. The seemed to be yelling and it appeared to be aggressive. I turned the sound down and listened.

“Go back to where you came from you f***ing Arab!” they yelled. I looked in the opposite direction trying to find the target of their vitriol. I was the only car in this part of the intersection waiting for the lights to change. I looked back at them and once again in the opposite direction, thinking now that their target was someone walking on the other side of the road. I scanned the footpath and it too was empty as far as the eye could see. As I looked back at the young men still screaming, it suddenly dawned on me, they were yelling at me.

It was half way through December 2005, a time when Australia was experiencing a thing we now call the Cronulla Race Riots.

Putting on my best Aussie bogan accent, I yelled out “I am mate, back to Diamo! Cheers!” “Diamo” being the truncated version of Diamond Creek, a very white settler suburb close to where I live which ironically has experienced a shift in demographics since that time.

I didn’t really think about the incident until after the conference. I had some time to reflect and as I did so, in particular in the light of national events surrounding the riots, I realised the effect that this and many other incidents prior to and since that one continue to have on my sense of identity.

You may have missed something significant last week. A question was asked on the ABC’s Q&A program (you can see the question here, skip to the 32 minute and 15 second mark). The white, middle class Australian man who must be at least in his 60′s asks, “After working and paying taxes for about 50 years myself, I believe that no person living in Australia today should be entitled to any special benefit or recognition, which is based not simply on need or achievement, but on race or how long their ancestors were here. What do the panel think of that?”

The host threw to Sami Shar. Lucky bloke. I thought he responded well given no notice and the incendiary nature of the question. “It is easy to dismiss the value of race when it is not something that has been a defining aspect of your life, when it’s not something that has been used to vilify, deprive and destroy community ... when you’ve never had that kind of vilification ... it’s easy to say it’s a fair go, everybody is born equal, and “I don’t see race”.

In the US, yet another Trump inspired political firestorm is unfolding, this time as a result of a tweet telling four congresswomen of colour they should go back to where they came from.

I am not sure if you have heard of the term “identity politics”. The phrase, these days is often used in a pejorative sense however that was not originally the case. Back in the 1970′s was articulated as a framework that helped “those feeling oppressed by and actively suffering under systemic social inequities to articulate their suffering and felt oppression in terms of their own experience by processes of consciousness-raising and collective action.” The intent of identity politics was a mechanism that was "seen as ways to gain empowerment or avenues through which to work towards a more equal society.”

If you could for a minute, put aside your thoughts and feelings regarding the phrase for a minute.

Think with me for a minute.

If there were a mechanism that could help us see the systemic ways in which we could clearly see that for example black women experienced a significant and disproportionate level of violence over and against that experienced by other demographics, surely we can agree that this mechanism is a good thing? If this lens helped us to see dynamics at play that we were unable to see prior to the introduction of such lenses, again surely that would be a good thing? If this lens enabled us to begin imagining solutions that empowered this demographic, and helped us collectively move towards a more equal society, again surely we would consider this to be a good thing?

Now remember, prior to the previous paragraph, I said that in order to see the goodness of such a mechanism we would need to park our bias concerning the mechanism and the name of this mechanism, namely identity politics. So if you can’t quite see the goodness that I am referring to in the above paragraph, perhaps skip back up the article and try again?

Regardless of how you are feeling at this stage of the post, this was exactly the intent of the origins of identity politics. Namely:

A framework that helped us see something that we could not see before and,

Once seen, solutions could be conceived of that would move us towards a more equal society.

Arguably, identity politics as a mechanism is responsible for some of the most significant social transformations during the last four decades including but not limited to the ongoing struggle for women’s rights (in all spheres), the civil rights of minority groups and the civil rights of those who do not conform to gender or sexual “social norms”.

Fast forward four decades and we have all sorts of people using the phrase identity politics negatively, almost as a profanity. The arguments against identity politics are many including but not limited to:

It is a concept that emerges from Marxism, Socialism (insert whatever “ism” will gain the most negative of reactions in the audience that the critic seeks to persuade),

It is destructive,

It is negative,

It divides people rather than bringing people together.

The use of the phrase “identity politics” and the associated negative attributions are one of the quickest ways of shutting down debate around who holds power and more importantly alternative visions to the status quo that may emerge after honest reflection.

And it is the lack of honesty in these criticisms that angers me most.

Those who seek to criticise identity politics as a divisive tool are employing the very same mechanism they seek to discredit in their attempts to discredit it! In their attempts to discredit identity politics, critics use a specific form of identity politics referred to as “white grievance” or “white identity” politics, a form of identity politics!  

Professor Ashely Jardina, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University noted that Trump’s “go back” tweet was a strategic and well thought through strategy designed to speak directly to the anxieties of two groups of people:

"The first subset are white voters who are racially resentful, who have hostility to voters of colour, they don't believe they play by the rules," she says. "Telling women of colour in Congress to go back to the countries they come from is going to resonate with racially prejudiced voters."

It will also play well, she says, with a different subset: voters who are worried about the changing demographics of America but don't harbour the same hostility towards racial minorities."For these voters, the idea elected officials don't uniformly look like them is symbolic of the loss of political power that white Americans have enjoyed for a long time."

So critics of identity politics,

using the very same framework,

on the basis of an identity “white anxiety” or “white grievance”,

on the basis of the fears of real or perceived loss of power,

and therefore as a consequence of using identity politics to clearly articulate the fears experienced by this demographic,

attempt to shut down debate arising as a result of identity politics.

Dishonest. Brilliant. But yeah, dishonest.

It seems to me that when one group becomes aware to their lack of power, and when that group seeks to find it’s power, and when a society needs to adjust and specifically when those who are accustomed to having a monopoly upon power find themselves in a position of needing to share their power with others, well quite frankly it gets ugly.

Case in point the national debate surrounding Australia’s treatment of Adam Goodes as a result of the release of the documentary The Final Quarter.

So where to from here? I have four thoughts (and an optional fifth):

1) The dishonesty needs to be exposed When those who attack the use of identity politics use the exact same tactic, well firstly, to be totally honest, I congratulate them. Well played. However the fact that they are using the same strategy to reinforce the status quo, that dishonesty needs to be exposed.

2) Be compassionate when dealing with people who are afraid (including yourself) There is something exhilarating about discovering and beginning to use ones power. Conversely there is something quite terrifying to discover that you are about to lose power, especially if the power you are about to lose was something that you didn’t realise you had and the imminent loss comes as a surprise. I have written about this before. The full post appears here. This quote which I used from that post speaks to this phenomenon well:

“To the privileged, equality can feel like a loss. Over time I have come to the idea that independence requires equality and, therefore, a sense of loss for many.” - Jesse Alan Downs

3) Holding power as opposed to holding power to account I am a geek, I have noted that several times. So to make this point, I reach to sci fi, in particular The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In describing the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, the writer reflects they are simply "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes".

Revolutions are dangerous things. How many times do we need to go through he cycle of replacing one set of ruthless dictators with another? How do we move towards a more equal society if the process requires creating a new minority without power?

This is the trickiest of issues. Why? Because in order for minorities to take their place in a society and be involved in wielding power,  those with a monopoly on power need to have the wisdom and courage to recognise this and relinquish their monopoly. That takes a profound kind of leadership. Which brings me to my final thought.

4) Encouraging and getting behind honest, compassionate and wounded leaders of the status quo I jumped into my car and therefore came part way into an interview. I thought I recognised the voice of the person being interviewed but couldn’t quite place it. I listened to this political leader discussing identity politics. They noted the when identity politics are used in ways to identify those who suffer and help us imagine alternative futures, identity politics is a good thing. However when identity politics are used to divide groups of people and deny us the ability to imagine creative solutions, it was a bad thing.

I listened to this interview for about twenty minutes and only at the end, discovering that the person being interviewed was Barnaby Joyce. That’s right, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia who lost his seat because he was a dual citizen of Australia and New Zealand, only to win the seat back and then lose his position as Deputy Prime Minister because his affair with his former staffer and expected child became public news. (And so on and so on and so on).

It struck me as I listened to Joyce describe the ways in which identity politics helps us see groups who suffer that we are unable to any other way, and then to creatively imagine solutions, I was listening to a man who had experienced not just one, but several national humiliations. (I couldn’t find that interview, if someone can, by all means let me know and I will post a link to this article. However, I was able to find this article that you might find interesting.)

Another powerful white male who has given me pause to reflect upon the judgementalism I carry in my own heart is Eddie McGuire. There were many moments in the Adam Goodes doco that moved me. One of them however came from an unexpected place. There is a very short scene, where McGuire, after making several racial gaffes has had a moment to reflect publicly on the effect of his casual racism on Adam Goodes. Suddenly Eddie struggles to find words and chokes up with tears that he tries to hold back. He stands emotionally in the place of “the other”. He realises that he has hurt another human being in a way that will most likely leave a mark for the rest of his life. Yes Goodes may heal, however whenever Eddie interacts with Goodes, he will be mindful of the scar on Goodes’ soul, a scar that he inflicted. So as I have reflected on this doco, the world we find ourselves in, and as I have despaired at the apparent lack of a way forward in this tribalised world, I wonder if part of the way forward is to look harder for and then encouraging the honest, compassionate, wounded leaders of the status quo, or at the very least, looking for opportunities for their formation?

5) Optional fifth thought I have a fifth thought, exclusively for my sisters and brothers of the Christian faith. I have spoken at length with many a sister and brother in Christ about this stuff. One of the most demoralising things is the idea that issues of race are not “core gospel concerns”. In many of those discussions, Paul’s statement from Galatians is cited: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” as thought this somehow confirms the fact that this collection of my thoughts in this post is at best peripheral and at worst irrelevant to the practice of the Christian faith. However, after reflecting on Paul’s words and more importantly the context, I realise that they cannot be used to dismiss the issue. Paul in Galatians is taking on the fact that everyone seems to have succumbed to the negative dimensions of identity politics, in the way that Barnaby Joyce warned about in his interview. When you work your way through Galatians, everything up until this statement, it is clear, Paul is not commanding people to cease and desist. He is not telling people to cease playing the worst kind of identity politics game. He is in fact offering us a vision of what could be, a vision of a community where many tribes, tongues and cultures come together, as equals under the lordship of the only person we can trust to hold power, therefore relieving us of all of our fears.

[liasfinalportfolio]

The Reading Profile Draft #3

The Reading Profile

At any given point in everyone’s lives, one tends to wonder about their identity. From how other people look at you to what your religious identity is, wondering about ourselves is one of the things that makes us human. Yet while wondering all that, my Identity as a reader is something that I never put much thought in.

I didn’t read many essays before this, however it seems like I enjoyed reading the essays more than I initially thought. I seem to frequently question what type of reading I like. On almost all essay responses I mentioned point of view: wondering which is the best one, which do I enjoy the most.  

The conclusion -something I came up with at the very last response- is that no point of view is my favourite. The writing style of the author is what makes a piece enjoyable for me, not the point of view.

I never mentioned it, but as mad as it may sound, I actually wasn’t sure a writing style existed.

Now it seems so obvious, but a couple months ago the idea of a writing style was a foreign concept on my mind.

I knew art styles, however while I believed different feelings could be expressed through writing, the styles (depending on the point of view) where practically the same.

If I am being perfectly honest, I am not aware why I thought that at all. It all seems so clear now, so many books I have read in the past are drastically different. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events for example, is drastically different that, say Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (both favourites).

The fact I just didn’t think there was a difference absolutely baffles me.

When I first started with the first essay ‘Eat, Memory: Orange Crush’ I didn’t find anything surprising, or complicated. The way it was written was not amiss to my usual non-fiction reading material. I could relate to the feelings of shame the author (YiYun Li)  had while she was younger, and her situation was similar enough for me to feel a sort of kinship.

The next essay I read was ‘Street Haunting’ by Virginia Woolf. Here I had a small realisation on the wonders of writing. The essay was written on 1930, and it almost felt like a form of time travel, being on the shoes of someone from the past for a short while.

I came to realise the writing style of Woolf in this particular essay, almost felt like a song. It was poetic and illustrative, something I noticed I enjoy reading.  However lovely it may be though, I did get confused at times, the many metaphors forcing me to read a couple paragraphs more than once.

I made it clear that I like straightforward, first person books, however I also enjoy reading other things, such as the nonsensical style authors such as Douglas Adams and Lewis Carroll seem to enjoy.

Another type of writing I am fond of are the fan-made works you can find online. Things such as theories, what-if scenarios (especially if they turn on a giant story) politics on non-political works of fiction (ie. Harry Potter) and more, seeing the fan’s perspective on books I like is always an amazing experience.

In regards to ‘Seeing’ I once more felt the writing style seemed like a song, a poem or a rhyme. In my original response I wrote Dillard somehow managed to paint a beautiful picture in my mind. Which made me wonder if the fact I relate beautiful writing with songs and paintings, has something to do with the fact those two (music and art) are the fields I lean towards the most.

Beauty in words is a thing, but although you can read the words, I feels like it probably isn’t a visual kind of beauty. More conceptual and abstract perhaps. Song lyrics can be that way as well, but usually they’re joined by a melody which gives you an emotion to feel.

Art such as paintings and drawings on the other hand, offer different type of beauty, a visual one.

It’s the same with a very beautiful person (Marina Diamandis and a young Winona Ryder comes to mind), a beautiful place full of nature or a particularly adorable young animal. Just looking at them, at the beauty that someone (either God or an artist. Although it can be said God is an artist) created.

When even the imperfections look fitting, the thing you’re admiring just looks so perfect and beautiful that you get pleasure (not the sexual kind, but rather the fulfilling one) just from looking at them.

I’ve realised I’ve gone off on a tangent. I could keep talking about beauty in all its forms, what it truly is, and if it’s even real for ages, however that wasn’t what was (unintentional alliteration) asked from me so I digress.  

The next essay was ‘Knoxville’. It probably was my least favourite essay, not because it was badly written, or anything similar, but rather because it made it quite easy for me to get lost. Although I really enjoyed certain scenes, this one in particular:

The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out. Also there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand. The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge. They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night.

After reading ‘Knoxville’, I thought that perhaps I just understood essays written by females better (one of my weirdest theories if I’m completely honest) but the next essay (Joyas Voladoras) proved that theory completely wrong.

It is more than a bit obvious that I enjoyed this one the most. Perhaps it was the fact I could listen while I read. It made focusing on the words an obligation, unless I wanted the recording to get ahead of me.

While it probably wasn’t the shortest, it definitely was the one I read the quickest; again, hearing the words she read spoken making it easier to understand and stay on track.

I now wish everything could be both heard and read at the same time. Using two of my senses made everything so much easier, and it is not only on written media. When I’m watching videos I also tend to turn captions on, they make everything much easier to understand.

What I probably enjoyed the most, is probably that it seemed like a mixture of things; between animal facts, the author’s opinion and the slightly philosophical questioning, the essay was a very delightful read. The fact that he compared the hummingbird’s heart beats and the blue whales, something I’ve done before, albeit with different animals, just made it much better.

All in all, reading all this essays has been a learning experience. I’ve learned a lot about writing, and myself. One of the things I noticed, was that I tend to get distracted every few minutes if I’m not really focused in what I’m writing. Using the Pomodoro technique has been a huge help. Music helps too, depending on my mood and the kind of music. As I write this, I’m listening to music and yet it hasn’t really distracted me like other times.

I hope with this I might be able, if not fix my problems, at least make them less potent.

[jillmckenzie1]

Interview with Colorado Book Award Finalist, Adam Houle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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