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kervinredfire · 3 years

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My Other Fanfics in the Future

Well, I made announcements about my 2 Loonatics fanfics-related stories coming soon. So here are my other fanfics that I am making. But before I am going to show you my other fanfics, I like to share what most of them are like. Kervinverse related. If you checked my Tumblr header it's pretty obvious.

As you may wonder what is the Kervinverse is all about? The Kervinverse is like the multiverse but with all different kinds of Kervin. Inspired by Spiderman Into the Spiderverse all the versions of Kervin contained different personalities, stories, almost the same appearance, fighting styles, and special abilities. One of the most signature outfits is the black and red formal suit.

I already made a folder in toyhouse. However, most of it are unfinished and still ongoing.

https://toyhou.se/Kervin619/characters/folder:812137

People think that those stories a self-insert but it is actually not. Me and my other Kervins are the same but they are different the appearance, abilities, and personalities. An example is Denk Ops’s Chris Danger from the WWE games. And note that this is another long announcement for the other fanfics

So anyway, here are my Kervinverse stories that I would really like to share about Wattpad in the future. So are book covers later

KERVINVERSE STORIES (Including crossovers):

Grand Theft Auto Origins: Kervin Made Liberty – Set in the GTA HD Universe. Before Kervin (GTA Online) came to the place called San Andreas, he was just a very young boy who was born in the place called Liberty with his parents. His father Claude who became rich and retired to a life crime and his wife Misty who used to be a prostitute. It was normal and happy life for him and his parents. But when years passed when he is getting older, he slowly starts to realize what kind of broken world he is living in.

Now for those who played the HD Universe of the GTA Games you know every protagonist in the HD universe like Niko, Johnny, Luis, Michael Franklin, and Trevor. As much as they have different stories and perspectives but this story about GTA OC that he was living with full of offensiveness, disrespectfulness, brutal honesty, and others. An example in GTA IV a radio commercial of Babies Overnight that said that someone was not satisfied with the baby it can be disposed of. Although it would be interesting to have that backstory for my next OC for GTA. So, this story may contain a lot of murder and crimes on what led to him going to San Andreas. So, watch out. And for those who have not played GTA Online why his parents are both Claude and Misty is because it was part of the premium edition for free in Epic Games.

Def Jam X Kung Fu Panda: Book 1 Fight for A New Fight (maybe a working title) - After the events of Def Jam Vendetta, Fight For New York, and The Kung Fu Panda Trilogy including Legends of Awesomeness. Set during Paws of Destiny Season 2 in the Kung Fu Panda universe while in Def Jam 2 years later in the year 2005 after Crow's death (Fight for NY still takes place in 2003) Kervin (Def Jam Fight For NY) the new leader D-Mob's crew but also officially known as the Def Jam Crew after Blaze appointed him to take his place. Kervin has to manage every venue, club, and arenas in New York including places that Crow took over. But in Chinese New Year there was something strange that Kervin and his crew got transported to a different universe. Including former members, fighters, and circuit fighters.

Now, this fanfiction sounded really odd. As you may know why I am making crossover fanfic of Kung Fu Panda X Def Jam? Easy. The first one is because this is what would have been my PS2 games if I ever have a PS2. I was thinking of Mortal Kombat or Yakuza for Def Jam but Kung Fu Panda is the only thing I know when I was 7 years old. The second is because back in the days Hip Hop mixed with Kung Fu was very popular. Although Def jam may be a wrestling game martial arts stole my heart in Def Jam Fight For NY. I heard about things like the Wu-Tang Clan for example but the biggest problem for me is that I am not a true fan of Def Jam because I don’t know about hip hop artists. Just only the games so I will be focusing on their video game counterparts in their fictitious manner meaning pretending real-life characters with their real name are fictional characters. So, if there and fun facts in those real-life counterparts I may add them to it like easter eggs. The third is that there are Kung Fu Panda characters that did not get enough love and mostly art. So many recognizable characters like Po, Tigress, Tai Lung, and many more have become the most recognizable characters in the movies. But what about the tv shows like Legends of Awesomeness and Paws of Destiny? One of my favorite characters of Legends of Awesomeness is Peng, in short, he is the nephew of Tai Lung and he is such an interesting character that he deserves a lot more love. While for Paws of Destiny is Xiao because she is such a cute character, so is her personality and the best character to have hugs with. So, what I am trying to say is that I need to start off with the character that is unrecognizable then bring it recognizably. I may also add characters from shorts like student Mei Ling in the future book and it would be funny and to see rogue Mei Ling. 2 Mei Lings in one. Even Su and Master Snow Leopard because are both female leopards with the same appearance and outfit. I may also include some characters from the flash game Tales of Po and may possibly rewrite them in different stories because I love the character designs thanks to Blue Maxima’s FlashPoint. And the fourth and final part is that to make the Def jam games more recognizable. Def Jam in music is not absolutely enough but video games are. The Def Jam games did not bring a sequel after Fight For NY so I might as well make a sequel with interesting and experimental crossover fanfic just like The Loonatics Road.

The Red Fox (Kingdom Force Spinoff and maybe a working title) - The Kingdom Force has 5 members defending the 5 Kingdoms. Luka the wolf who leads in red, Jabari who runs in yellow, TJ who drills in green, Delilah who swings in orange, and Norvyn who strengthens in blue. Each of the 5 drives Kingdom Riders and turns them into Alpha Mech to fight against evil in the 5 Kingdoms. But even if they save the day multiple times the 5 Kingdoms are still filled with more crime and every antagonist came back doing other crimes and evil deeds because they were not arrested or eliminated. That's is when a red fox came along...

I have seen popular fandoms in cartoons that were supposed to aim at younger kids like Lion Guard, MLP, Paw Patrol, and even Bluey. But Kingdom Force is the cartoon that did get enough love. It's like Power Rangers and Voltron but with anthropomorphic animals like Zootopia. However, the stories and episodes in the show is very confusing and give me almost a lot of questions. But I do like the character designs in the show. My favorite hero is Luka who is a leader with and cute cuddly character personality and my favorite villain Envie Fernadez which she has a pretty hot design, name and voice and so is her personality. Reminds me of Sly Cooper but I have not played the game yet. But for the red fox also OC Kervin (Kindom Force) It’s still at work.

APB Reloaded X Zootopia: Anyone Can Be All You Can’t Be: - In Zootopia “Anyone Can Be Anything” But in San Paro “Be All You Can’t Be” Zootopia is a place where vicious predators and meek prey live in harmony. This means that people in Zootopia live together without the prey getting eaten by predators and predators not getting feared by the prey. They almost eat like us, they sleep like us, they speak like us, they walk like us, they run like us, they bathe like us (well almost), and most importantly they use technology like us. While San Paro maybe has a good look to sightsee but this city has a lot of crime. Robberies, bombings, thefts, drug dealing, murders and causalities, vandalism, and much more that we can think of. But that does not mean there is no justice in this world. When the Criminals like the Blood Roses and the G-Kings try to take over San Paro? The Enforcers Prentiss Tigers and Praetorians from come and save the day. What would happen when a human Enforcer meets a police fox and a police bunny? And how did it happen? Only one way to find out.

Now this one is also a Kervinverse crossover story. It focuses on Kervin (APB Reloaded) meeting Judy and Nick. I am trying to find a way on how will they meet each other. But the only thing ideas I know is that it can be a delivery gone wrong, an invention gone haywire or maybe a criminal stole something magical that is transported to a different universe. But I have a lot of strange things in the game like the Christmas events and Halloween events. I like to see any volunteers who play APB Reloaded. And for those Zootopia fans who have not played APB Reloaded you check it here. https://store.steampowered.com/app/113400/APB_Reloaded/

Well, that is it for the Kervinverse stories. Now it’s time for the other stories that I also planned in the future.

OTHER FANFICS:

Alza Flare (Road Rovers Fan Spinoff)- Alza is a black cat born in the place in New York City, USA. He was born inside a pet shop without cat parents since he was born. His parents' status is unknown. Although he did make friends with other cats and non-cats in the shop. But it was a short while until a human customer named Drayson Flare and adopted him as Alza Flare. Alza has been Drayson's pet for 3 years and they instantly became best friends but when during the time when they are about to go home from the park. A terrible accident happened.

A long time ago I watched Road Rovers on my phone just to try something nostalgic and the show is pretty good though although there are some parts that don’t use their powers all the time. One part that caught my eye is how brutal car accident in the episode “Dawn of The Groomer” which gave me an idea of my new anti-villain OC character named Alza Flare. Sadly, he does have an image of him yet. But I will tell you that I will give you an interesting revenge story for him.

The Best Surfer In The World (Surf’s Up Spinoff. Maybe a working a title and synopsis change) - After the events of Surf's Up and Surf's Up 2: Wavemania. There was once a wolf who lives in the place of Chicago Illinois. He quit his own career due to being a rejected member of Hang 5 for being too unstable and after beating J.C. in a tournament years ago and after his early retirement, he spends his normal life as an ice cream man in his own ice-cream motorcycle with one of his own freshest ingredients and swears to himself that he would never in the waters again. Until he met a young Toyger.

Surf’s Up is my first favorite mockumentaries since I was young. It’s like you are watching animals andromorphic animals absolutely existed in the world we live in. It had an interesting story and writing so are the interesting characters. But when I watched Surf’s Up Wavemania. Well, I honestly love the WWE Superstars and Diva came into the movie but the story did not actually surprise me a lot. Even if the movie has a lot of beautiful locations it still did not surprise me enough because it is more like an adventure than a tournament. That is why I am planning to start my fanfiction in a new different approach with a real story and a real rivalry. Starting with wolf inspired and based on CM Punk during the part when he won the WWE belt against Cena in Money in the Bank when I watched it since intermediate school with a little rename change so it won’t be obvious. And of course, my Toyger OC because he would be trained by his own surfing master. Also, I added a Slam City easter egg

Fire Pro Wrestling World Origins: Story of 2 Angels – There is no synopsis of them yet. But I will tell you they are brother and sister with the last name “Angel” The brother who is a pop artist while the sister who joined a motorcycle club. What they both have in common is they both can fight. Their stories about my 2 new Fire Pro OCs will be coming soon. But they are not part of the fighting roads.

Well, that is all for all the future stories with some summaries that I really want to share coming soon. Thanks for following including Wattpad

For those who are new here follow me on both Tumblr and Wattpad with the orange word link

Feel free to donate to me in PayPal

Also making fanfic is really long to make just like making an announcement. So again. I only post all chapters in 1 book.

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buzzdixonwriter · 4 years

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My Five Most Influential

Someone asked: Who are the most influential writers in your life?

Good question.

The broad answer is that one gets influenced many different ways by many different sources. I enjoy poetry and song lyrics because they find ways of conveying the strongest emotional content in the most concise manner, music brings a sense of dramatic rhythm and fulfillment, the visual arts suggest ways of subtly adding many insights to a single strong idea, etc., etc., and of course, etc. (and that is also an example of a creative influence in my work).

But…to boil it down to those whom I most consciously made an effort to emulate, we find ourselves facing five creators that primed the pump.

This is not to say others whom I began following after them didn’t wield a lot of influence (thanx, Ernie, Bert, Jack, Bob, and Hank!) but these are the foundation of everything I’ve done in my career.

(And to those who notice a lack of diversity, I know, I know…but to be honest I have to acknowledge the truth, and the truth is for whatever reason, by chance or by choice, by fate or by fortune, these five dominated my sensibilities. I trust that I’ve grown and expanded my horizons since then, but they’re the hand I got dealt.)

. . .

Carl Barks

I loved ducks as a kid and my grandmother and aunt would always bring me a passel of duck-related comics when they came to visit.

There were some Daffy Duck comics mixed in there but while I know I looked at and enjoyed them, none of them stick in my mind like the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories of Carl Barks.

Typically my grandmother would read these comics to me and I’d imprint the dialog and captions in my brain, replaying them as I looked at the pictures over and over again.

Barks never wrote down to his audience, and his stories covered a vast array of genres, everything from straight domestic comedy to oddball adventures to screwy crime stories.

Donald and his nephews encountered dinosaurs more than once (another big favorite of mine), and Uncle Scrooge setting out to explore the asteroid belt in order to find a new home for his fabulous money bin was another tale I loved literally to pieces, but A Christmas For Shacktown remains my all time favorite graphic novel.

I’ll concede there are better graphic novels, but none of them warm my heart the way that Christmas story does.

Barks showed it’s possible to combine heart (not to be confused with sentimentality or =yuch!= schmaltz), vivid characters, and strong, intricate narrative. His plots where typically filled with unexpected twists and turns but his characters were always deeply involved in them, not just along for the ride.

He’s one of the greatest storytellers in the 20th century, and his work remains timeless enough to last for several centuries to come.

. . .

Ray Bradbury

The first Ray Bradbury story I remember encountering was “Switch On The Night” in its 1955 edition, read to my kindergarten class towards the end of the school year.

This would place the event sometime in the spring of 1959.

“Switch On The Night” captivated me because it was the first story I’d ever heard that showed what could be seen in the dark that couldn’t be seen in the day.

Even as a child, it made me realize the night wasn’t scary, but contained wonders and insights we miss in the harsh glare of day.

I don’t recall if the kindergarten teacher told us the name of the author, and if she did it didn’t stick, but boy howdy, the story sure did! Did it open the doors of the night for me, or was I already inclined to be a night person and it simply confirmed that as a valid identity?

I dunno, but I’m typing this right now at 12:24am.

And the thoughts Bradbury planted in little Buzzy boy’s brain stayed and grew and flowered, as you can read in my poem, “The Magic Hours Of The Night”.

The next time I encountered Ray Bradbury’s writing was in grammar school, certainly no later than junior high. I was already interested in science fiction by that point, and had read “The Pedestrian” in one of my school English books (we weren’t taught the story in class; the teacher skipped over it for whatever reason but I read it anyway then re-read it and read it again and again).

Anthony Boucher’s ubiquitous 2-volume A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction was in my grammar school library and in it was Bradbury’s “Pillar Of Fire” (which I would later learn was one of his alternate Martian Chronicles and a crossover with Fahrenheit 451) and in that story he offered up a veritable laundry list of outré and outlandish fiction to be tracked down and read, authors to dig up and devour.

Oh, man, I was hooked.

So of course I began looking for all the stories and writers Bradbury listed in his short story but I also began looking for Bradbury’s own work and before you could say, “Mom, can I get a subscription to the Science Fiction Book Club?” I’d read The Golden Apples Of The Sun and A Medicine For Melancholy and R is For Rocket never once dreaming that at some point in the future the roadmap Ray plopped down in my lap would eventually lead to us being co-workers (separate projects, but the same studio at the same time) and friends.

There is a beautiful yet deceptive simplicity to Ray’s work, and even though he wrote his own book on writing (The Zen Of Writing) that has lots of good insights and professional tricks & tips, he himself wasn’t able to explain how he did it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good Ray Bradbury parody.

I’ve seen parodies that clearly are intended to evoke Ray Bradbury, but only in the same way a clumsy older relative might evoke Michael Jackson with a spasmodic movement one vaguely recognizes as a failed attempt at a moonwalk.

But, lordie, don’t think we didn’t try to emulate him, and while none of us fanboys ever came close, I think a lot of us did learn that less is more, that the right word carries more impact than a dozen paragraphs, and that there’s magic in even the most ordinary of things.

And of course I discovered the film and TV adaptations of his work, and in discovering them I also discovered that there are some things that just can’t be translated from one media to another, and that the light, effortless appeal of Ray’s work on the page (paper or pixel) can at best be recaptured with a good audio book reader but even the best dramatic adaptions -- even those by Ray himself -- are cold dead iron butterflies compared to the light and lively creatures flying about.

So eventually I stopped trying to write like him, and instead picked up the valuable lessons of mood and emotion making an impact on a story even if the plot didn’t make much logical sense.

Decades later I would become a fan of opera, and would learn the philosophy of all opera lovers: Opera doesn’t have to make logical sense, it just has to make emotional sense.

Ray Bradbury, opera meister.

. . .

H.P. Lovecraft

As noted above, Bradbury’s “Pillar Of Fire” tipped me to numerous other writers, first and foremost of which turned out to be Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Okay, before we get any further into this, let’s acknowledge the woolly mammoth in the room: H.P. Lovecraft was a colossal asshat racist.

He was a lot of other terrible things, too, but racist is far and ahead of the rest of the pack.

It’s a disillusioning thing to find people one admired as a youngster or a teen later prove to have not just quirks and eccentricities and personal flaws, but genuinely destructive, harmful, and offensive characters.

I’ve posted on that before, too.

How I wish it were possible to retroactively scale back that hurtfulness, to make them more empathetic, less egregiously offensive (in the military sense of the word), but that ain’t so.

We have to acknowledge evil when we see it, and we have to call it out, and we have to shun it.

Which is hard when one of its practitioners provides a major influence in our creative lives.

Here’s what I liked about Lovecraft as a kid: He was the complete opposite of Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury’s instinctive genius was in finding the right word, the simple word that conveyed great impact on the story, drawing the reader into the most fantastic situations by making them seem more familiar on a visceral level.

Lovecraft achieved the exact opposite effect by finding the most arcane, bedizened, baroque, florid, grandiloquent, overwrought, rococo verbiage possible and slapping the reader repeatedly in the face with it.

If Bradbury made the unreal real, Lovecraft made the weird even more weirder.

And let’s give this devil his due: The Strange Case Of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dunwich Horror are two masterpieces of horror and serve as the bridge between Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King, not to mention his creation of Cthulhu and other ancient entities existing beyond the ken of human knowledge…

…oh, wait, that’s where the story simultaneously gets messy yet provides a convenient escape hatch for fans.

While Lovecraft created Cthulhu, he did not create the Cthulhu Mythos.

That was primarily the invention August Derleth, a writer / editor / agent and H.P. Lovecraft’s #1 fanboy.

Lovecraft had some loosely related ideas in his stories and several themes he revisited repeatedly (in addition to racism).

He also had a circle of fellow writers -- including such heavy hitters as Robert “Psycho” Bloch and Robert E. “Conan” Howard -- who picked up on his ideas and, as way of a tribute, incorporated them in some of their stories.

Derleth took all this and Lovecraft’s unfinished manuscripts and short ideas he jotted down and turned it into a whole post-mortem industry, linking all of Lovecraft and other writers’ tales.

And he did a damn fine job of it, too.

So much so that the Cthulhu Mythos has taken on a life of its own, and pretty much anybody can play in that cosmic sandbox now (including Big Steve King and a ton of Japanese anime) and so Lovecraft’s works have an enormous influence on pop culture…

,,,but Howard hizzowndamsef can be -- and is -- cancelled.

Derleth and various biographers downplayed Lovecraft’s virulent racism for decades, and I don’t think Ray Bradbury was ever aware of the scope and tenor of Lovecraft’s bigotry when he name checked him in “Pillar Of Fire” and other stories.

In a similar vein Bradbury didn’t know -- because thanks again to overly protective literary executors, nobody knew -- just how big a racist asshat Walt Whitman was, either. It is one thing to call shenanigans on a Bill Cosby or a Harvey Weinstein or a Donald Trump because their egregious behaviors were noted long before they were held accountable, but quite another to do so on a creator who died while hiding their most awful behavior from thousands if not millions of fans who felt inspired and uplifted by their work.

It’s one thing to call out a contemporary bigot and not support them by not buying their work, it’s quite another when their bigotry has been shielded from view and fair minded, decent people have used their work to draw inspiration into their own creativity.

Of course, I had no way of knowing all this when I was in junior high and seriously began tracking down Lovecraft’s work.

He possessed a flair of the horrific and unearthly that to this day is hard to match (but easier to parody). He was a tremendous influence on my early writing (truth be told, I zigzagged between Bradbury’s stark simplicity and Lovecraft’s overarching verbosity, giving my early oeuvre a rather schizophrenic style) and the ideas he sparked still reverberate to this day.

If only he hadn’t been such a giant %#@&ing asshat racist …

. . .

Harlan Ellison

In a way, I’m glad neither Harlan nor his widow Susan are alive to read this.

I cherished Harlan as a friend and greatly admired his qualities as a writer.

But damn, by his own admission he should have been thrown in prison for aggravated assault on numerous occasions (he was courts martialed three times while in the Army).

We’re not talking about arguments that spiraled out of control until a few wild punches were thrown, we’re talking about Harlan by his own admission stalking and ambushing people, knocking them unconscious or causing grievous bodily harm.

We’re talking about sexual abuse and humiliation.

We’re talking about incidents he admitted to which if true put people in life threatening situations.

And yet ironically, in a certain sense Harlan (a bona fide Army Ranger, BTW) was like the U.S. Marine Corps: You’d never have a greater friend or a worse enemy.

I became dimly aware of Harlan in the late 1960s as I started diving deeper into literary sci-fi, transitioning from monster kid fandom to digests and paperbacks. Harlan first caught my attention with his macho prose (years later a similar style also drew me to Charles Bukowski) in stories like “Along the Scenic Route” (a.k.a. “Dogfight on 101”) in which Los Angelinos engaged in Mad Max motor mayhem but soon it became apparent the macho posturing was just a patina, that the heart and soul of much of the work reflected great sensitivity and often profound melancholy (ditto Bukowski).

Harlan was a fighter, and again by his own admission, he acknowledged in his later years that he was not a fighter because his cause was just, but rather sought out just causes because he knew he would be fighting regardless of his position, yet possessed a strong enough moral compass to point himself in the direction of a worthy enemy…

…most of the time.

He hurt and offended a large number of innocent and some not-so-innocent-but-certainly-not-evil people.

He also helped and encouraged a large number of others, people who had no idea who he was, people who had no way of adequately reciprocating his kindness and generosity.

He defended a lot of defenseless people.

He also mistakenly defended a lot of terrible people.

If someone tells me Harlan was a monster, I’ll agree: Monstre sacré.

What made his writing sacred was that no matter how outlandish the situation, Harlan dredged up from the depths emotions so strong as to be frightening in their depiction.

Skilled enough not to lose sight of humanity, outlandish enough to conjure up ideas and emotions most people would shy away from, Harlan hit adolescent Buzzy boy like an incendiary grenade.

Unlike my first three literary influences, Harlan was and remained active in the fannish circles where I was circulating at the time. He regularly wrote letters and columns for various fanzines, including a few I subscribed to.

In a literary sense he stood, naked and unashamed, in full view of the world, and that willingness to go beyond mundane sensibilities is what made his work so compelling.

He certainly fired me up as an adolescent writer, and proved an amalgam of Bradbury and Lovecraft that got my creative juices flowing in a coherent direction.

I don’t think I ever consciously tried to imitate him in my writing, but I sure learned from him, both in how to charge a story with emotion and how to fight for what’s right regardless of the blow back.

I loved him as a friend.

But, damn, Harlan…you could act so ugly...

. . .

H. Allen Smith

Who?

Most of you have never heard of H. Allen Smith, and that’s a damn shame.

I’d never heard of him either until I stumbled across a coverless remaindered copy of Poor H. Allen Smith’s Almanac in a Dollar General Store bin in Tennessee in the late 1960s (it was a memorable shopping expedition: I also purchased Thomas Heggen’s Mister Roberts and Let’s Kill Uncle by Rohan O'Grady [pen name of June Margaret O'Grady Skinner]).

Reading Smith’s editorial comments (in addition to his own essays and fiction he edited numerous humor anthologies) I realized I’d found a kindred soul.

Smith had a very conversational tone as a writer; his prose seemed off the cuff and unstructured, but he slyly used that style to hide the very peculiar (and often perverse) path he led readers down.

He sounded / read like a garrulous guy at the bar, one with a huge number of charming, witty (and delightfully inebriated) friends in addition to his own bottomless well of tall tales, pointed observations, and rude jokes.

Of all the writers mentioned above, that style is the one I most consciously tried to emulate, and one I seem to have been able to find my own voice in (several people have told me I write the same way I talk, a rarity among writers).

Smith was hilarious whether wearing an editor’s visor or a freelancer’s fool’s cap. If you know who H. L. Mencken was, think of Smith as a benign, better tempered version of that infamous curmudgeon (and if you don’t know, hie thee hence to Google and find out).

Compared to my other four influences, Smith didn’t need to add the fantastic to his fiction: The real world was weird and wacky and whimsical enough.

A newspaper man turned best selling author, Smith became among the most popular humorists of the 1940s-50s-60s…

…and then he died and everybody forgot him.

Part of the reason they forgot is that he wrote about things that no longer seem relevant (TV cowboys of the early television era, f’r instance, in Mr. Zip) or are today looked upon askance (and with justifiable reason; the ethnic humor in many of his anthologies may not have been intended as mean spirited, but it sure doesn’t read as a celebration of other cultures, viz his succinct account of an argument following a traffic accident between two native Honolulu cabbies rendered in pidgin: “Wassamatta you?” “’Wassmatta me’?!?!? Wassamatta you ‘Wassamatta me’? You wassamatta!”).

I’m sure I picked up a great many faults from Smith, but Smith also had the virtue of being willing and able to learn and to make an effort to be a better person today than he was yesterday, and better still tomorrow.

I’ve certainly tried applying that to my life.

Smith’s style was also invoked -- consciously or not -- by other writers and editors, notably Richard E. Geis, the editor of the legendary sci-fi semi-prozone, Science Fiction Review (among other titles). Smith died before I could meet him, but while I never met Dick Geis face to face we were pen pals for over 40 years.

Geis certainly sharpened specific aspects of my writing style, but the real underlying structure came from H. Allen Smith.

Smith’s work is hard to find today (in no small part because whenever I encounter one in the wild I snap it up) but I urge you to give him a try.

Just brace yourself for things we might consider incorrect today.

. . .

So there’s my top five.

With the exception of Carl Barks and Ray Bradbury, none of them are without serious flaw or blemish (though Smith seems like a decent enough sort despite his fondness for X-rated and ethnic humor).

In my defense as an impressionable child / teen, I was not aware of these flaws and blemishes when I first encountered their writing (primarily because in many cases efforts were made to hide or downplay those aspects).

The positive things I gleaned from them are not negated by the negative personal information that came out later.

I can, for the most part re the more problematic of them, appreciate their work while not endorsing their behavior.

Ellison can only be described in extremes, but his fire and passion -- when directed in a positive direction -- served as a torch to light new paths (his two original anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, pretty much blew the doors off old school sci-fi and belatedly dragged the genre kicking and screaming into the 20th century).

Lovecraft I can effectively ignore while finding entertainment value in the Cthulhu Mythos.

But I must acknowledge this isn’t the same for everyone.

For example, as innocuous as I find H. Allen Smith, if a woman or a member of a minority group said, “I found this in particular to be offensive” I’d probably have to say, yeah, you’re right.

But I can still admire the way he did it, even if I can no longer fully support what he did.

. . .

By the time I reached high school, I’d acquired enough savvy to regard to literary finds a bit more dispassionately, appreciating what they did without trying to literally absorb it into my own writing.

I discovered for myself the Beat generation of writers and poets, the underground cartoonists of the late 60s and 70s, Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, and a host of others, some already alluded to.

Some, such as the Beats and Bukowski, I could enjoy for their warts and all honest self-reflection.

Yes, they were terrible people, but they knew they were terrible people, and they also knew there had to be something better, and while they may never have found the nirvana they sought, they at least sent back accurate reports of where they were in their journeys of exploration.

By my late teens, I’d become aware enough of human foibles and weaknesses -- every human’s foibles and weaknesses, including my own -- to be very, very cautious in regarding an individual as admirable.

While I will never accept creativity as an excuse for bad behavior, if a creator is honest enough and self-introspective enough to recognize and acknowledge their own failings, it goes a long way towards my being willing to enjoy their work without feeling I’m endorsing them as individuals.

It’s not my place to pass judgment or exoneration on others bad behavior.

It is my place to see that I don’t emulate others’ bad behavior.

Every creator is connected to their art, even if it’s by-the-numbers for-hire hack work.

Every creator puts something of themselves into the final product.

And every member of the audience must decide for themselves if that renders the final product too toxic to be enjoyed.

#how this writer's mind works #writing #Carl Barks #Ray Bradbury #HP Lovecraft #Harlan Ellison #H Allen Smith #influences

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picturebookmakers · 5 years

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ATAK

In this post, ATAK talks about his fascinating creation process and he shares illustrations and development work from some of his wonderful books – including sketchbook pages for his forthcoming picturebook ‘Piraten im Garten’, which is due to be published in 2020.

Visit ATAK’s website

ATAK: My process is like hip-hop. Mixing and sampling.

I have a big box where I put material that I’ve found on the street or in magazines. Then in the summer, when I’m sitting in the summer house, I stick everything into sketchbooks.

These are important books for me. I often use them when I’m looking for an idea. I like to make connections between this and that.

Sometimes I steal things. Here’s an example of where I used a painting by Caspar David Friedrich in one of my images. This is a very important painting for the German culture; it’s romantic. It’s the first painting that’s like a window. You see with him and you’re led into the picture.

‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.

When I take something to use in my own work, it’s more about the idea of composition and atmosphere. It’s not just a reference that people will know.

This is the sketchbook for my picturebook ‘Topsy Turvy World’. The publisher asked me for a book for children, and as I was tired of working with long texts, I thought this one should be a wordless book, where the images tell the whole story.

We have a German tradition from the 18th century of ‘bilderbogen’. This is like the origin of comics. They’re one-page stories. I was looking at some of these and I found some interesting ideas for ‘Topsy Turvy World’.

Here are some pages from the sketchbook.

Not everything made it into the final book; some of it was too heavy for my publisher, so he kicked it out. The smoking people had to go, otherwise we couldn’t have sold the rights in America.

Then there was a problem... My sketches had a lot of life and were fully-worked, so to transform them into the final artwork was very hard. After the rough version, I had this feeling that I was already finished with the book. Making the final ‘clean’ artwork felt like a kind of discipline.

My original paintings are always much bigger than they appear in the books. I never work to the correct size or format.

I often sell my paintings, but here is one I’ll never sell. It was done for the first children’s book I made, called ‘Comment la mort est revenue à la vie’ (How death came back to life), written by Muriel Bloch and published by Thierry Magnier.

It’s an important painting for me. I came from the comic world – black and white graphics – where I would draw out the whole scenes with all the details. In the middle of working on this painting, I had to go out to buy some food, and then I came back and thought, “Oh, it’s enough.” There’s a big difference when you work with colour. It’s like a sound, like a kind of music. This painting was very important for me in understanding colour.

Before I start working on an image, I often have a rough idea of what’s going to happen in the scene, but I leave a lot of space for other things to come in... And when I’ve started to work, I might see something in my studio or in a book, and it goes into the image.

I like this open process. And I like to be surprised. It’s very important for me that I don’t know in the beginning exactly what’s going to happen.

My way of painting is very old school. Traditional. Sometimes I paint over the top of something and you can see the trace of it behind. You can’t really fake things like this on the computer. For me, my original artwork is more important than the finished book. I once had an interesting discussion about this with Blexbolex. It’s completely the opposite for him: he sees his books as being the original artwork.

After ‘Topsy Turvy World’, I made a book called ‘The Garden’.

The original German edition was almost like a book for bourgeoise women... But for the French edition, they reimagined it for kids. It’s much bigger; you can really go inside. And the French publisher asked me to make some flaps to open up on the pages, which were not there in the original edition.

The sketches for ‘The Garden’ are almost nothing. It was very important that I didn’t repeat the process of ‘Topsy Turvy World’, where the sketches were very close to the finished artwork. I couldn’t work like this again. So the sketches here are very loose, but I knew exactly what was supposed to be in the pictures.

Working like this, you must have a very strong relationship with the publisher – one of absolute trust. I also have big problems with deadlines; I’m always late. With this book, my publisher Antje Kunstmann was so good. She phoned me every morning: “Hallo, here is Antje!” It was so important to know she was there, almost like a mother. It was a similar story with Wolf Erlbruch and his book ‘Duck, Death and the Tulip’. He was working for four years on this book. In the end, Antje came to his home and was waiting on his sofa for two days to take the last drawing!

The latest children’s book I made is called ‘Martha’.

I started working on it after reading an article in National Geographic about the passenger pigeon. I was fascinated. Because it’s a real story, it was not easy for me to make this book. It’s easier when I’m given a text because I have more distance.

Again, I worked very loosely in my sketchbook. These sketches are just indications – so I know something is here or somebody is there. It does help me that things are more open.

I don’t have sketchbooks where I draw from reality. I’m not good at this. You’ll never find me sitting in a crowd, making sketches. I watch and I observe instead. And I have books where I write ideas or note down interesting forms and shapes that I see.

Here are some pictures from ‘Martha’.

And here’s an idea for the dust jacket, where the kids could cut and draw on the paper, and make origami out of it to give a kind of rebirth. Martha is gone, but maybe she’s not gone if the kids could bring her back. The publisher didn’t go for this idea.

I went to art school but never finished. Just after the Berlin Wall came down, I was studying visual communication. There wasn’t a good atmosphere at my art school. I wanted to find like-minded people and work as a team, but it felt like most of the students were only interested in being artists, but not in working together. Then my daughter was born, and I never finished art school.

I’m now teaching art as a professor. The other teachers have diplomas, and I feel like I’ve come from the working class. I do like intellectual work, but when I work with students, I want to see something. I can only talk about what I see. I need it very visual. It has to catch me.

From when I was nine years old, I wanted to be an illustrator. In east Germany, illustration was a part of publishing. All the novels had illustration. It’s still unique now to see this, but in east Germany it was normal... So my plan was always to be an illustrator. This way I could wake up when I wanted, have no boss, listen to my music all day, and make my own work.

Speaking of music... The type of music I listen to when I work depends on the specifics of the book. For example, I made a book for Nobrow called ‘Ada’ (from a word portrait by Gertrude Stein). The idea for the artwork was to make handmade pixels, so I listened to a lot of electronic music; ping–ping–ping! It’s about energies. And for me, the music is also very important because I travel a lot and it can be hard to come back to your work – but when I listen to the music, immediately I’m back in the project, in the zone. It’s all connected – the music with the book.

Here’s my playlist for ‘Martha’.

Distortions – Clinic Go – Sparklehorse & The Flaming Lips VCR – The XX Song For A Warrior – Swans Avril 14th – Aphex Twin Quiet Music – Nico Muhly First Song For B – Devendra Banhart Last Song For B – Devendra Banhart How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? – Al Green Ash Black Veil – Apparat I Know They Say – Spectrum Opus 55 – Dustin O’Halloran Lost Fur – Karen O & The Kids Unfinished Business – The Go-Betweens Sometimes – My Bloody Valentine Lies – Sin Fang Bous Debussy: Suite Bergamasque, L 75 - Clair De Lune – Alexis Weissenberg Nimrod (Adagio) – David Hirschfelder Atmosphere – Joy Division Still Life – Elliot Goldenthal The Lake – Antony & The Jonhsons Flying Birds – RZA

I used to make hardcore comics with friends. This was our first, which we made before the wall came down. My work has changed completely. I can’t understand this now; it’s like another man made it! And they are not funny. It’s a very small humour; you really have to look for it.

Then, after my daughter was born, I did my own comic series called ‘Wondertüte’. In the comic scene, everybody told me that this wasn’t a comic. But for me, it was totally a comic. I liked the comic medium, but I didn’t see why there had to be only one way. From all my old comics, this is the one I like the most.

The idea comes from the ‘learn English’ books we had in school. It’s a bit like a poem, but with a more open structure. I think my older work was very closed, and this comic is where it really started to open up. I made it for me, not for the mainstream. I got no money for it. But you could find it in kiosks. Somebody told me he saw it in a kiosk in a very small village. He said it was very important to see this comic displayed in-between all the nice, fancy stuff... My audience is not many people, but they are passionate.

I don’t really consider myself as a children’s book illustrator; it’s not like this. But it gives me a lot more freedom. Some of my friends find themselves working on one comic for years! I respect this, but for me that’s like a jail. With comics, you have to take such care with narration. You go from one panel to the next panel to the next... The comic medium is a question of time. In a children’s book, the reader looks at one page for perhaps two minutes or ten minutes. They go deep inside. It’s a completely different work. Also in a children’s book you have a stage; it’s really like theatre.

I also think it’s very important in children’s books that you read the book again and again. You read a comic maybe once and then you kick it out or you give it to somebody. But a children’s book is like a ritual between parents and kids.

This is a cover version of the German classic book ‘Der Struwwelpeter’.

The stories here are new and full of humour. I made this book with Fil (Philip Tägert). It was after ‘Topsy Turvy World’, and for me it was so important that I could be free with the pictures. The publisher said make what you want. And it felt so good.

There are hundreds of different versions of ‘Der Struwwelpeter’. As with the ‘bilderbogen’, this was like the beginning of comic stories.

I once found an old version of the book from Denmark with an extra chapter. They didn’t trust all that dark stuff and they made up new stories. So in our cover version, we had this idea to make one chapter where literally nothing happens! We tried to make it as boring as possible, with the pictures saying exactly the same thing as the words. It was so hard to make a boring illustration! It’s really not easy!

My new book will be published next year. It’s for my little son; he’s three years old. You could see it as a connection between ‘Topsy Turvy World’ and ‘The Garden’. It’s called ‘Pirates in the Garden’. The German title is ‘Piraten im Garten’, so the title is like a poem; you hear it and you don’t forget it. I like this title very much.

This book will will be very simple, a bit like Sesame Street. One word on each page, so you make associations between the word and the image, and the parents can talk about it with their kids.

I’m working in the sketchbook at the moment, and I want to make the sketches really good. For ‘The Garden’ and ‘Martha’, I kept the sketches really open. But for this one, no. I know this is going to be my last book for children. And it’s for my son, so I’m going to make it special. In the future, perhaps I’ll make art books in small editions, more paintings, stuff like this, but not books in a commercial way again.

When I made ‘Martha’, I was thinking, “who needs this?” It wasn’t mainstream and I was so confused. It’s different from when someone asks me to make a cover or a painting; I’m never thinking about who needs this. But this was different. Sometimes you just don’t know if what you’re doing is important or not. So I was kind of depressed working on that book. This is the main reason it took me such a long time.

I sometimes feel very alone working as a children’s book illustrator in Germany. My style is not at all mainstream and I always just made my books for fun. It was never a big passion of mine to make children’s books for my whole life. But I always liked the roots.

So for my final children’s book, ‘Piraten im Garten’, I will make it for myself and for my son.

Illustrations © ATAK. Post edited by dPICTUS.

Buy this picturebook

Verrueckte Welt / Topsy Turvy World

ATAK

Jacoby & Stuart, Germany, 2009

A fantastical picturebook where mice chase cats, penguins live in the jungle, and cars fly! There’s few things that children enjoy more than catching grown-ups telling fibs. Discarding what’s obviously wrong is how they find out what’s right.

It’s a time-honoured children’s game; ATAK’s just given it a new twist, using lots of classic tall stories, and adding a few new ones as well.

German: Jacoby & Stuart

English: Flying Eye Books

French: Editions Thierry Magnier

Spanish: Fulgencio Pimentel

Italian: Orecchio Acerbo

Norwegian: Magikon

Slovak & Czech: Baobab

Portuguese: Planeta Tangerina (Portugal)

Portuguese: Companhia das Letras (Brazil)

Dutch: Boycott Books

Chinese (Simplified): TB Publishing Ltd (Everafter Books)

Buy this picturebook

Der Struwwelpeter

FIL & ATAK

Kein & Aber, Switzerland, 2009

Like a rock band covering their favourite songs, ATAK and FIL tackle the classic stories of Zappelphilipp, Hans-guck-in-die-Luft & Co.

And just as a Heavy Metal cover might sound harder than the original, you’ll also find tighter morals, harsher imagery, politically incorrect humour, and that ever-so-subtle touch of evil that has been pervading this book for more than 160 years.

German: Kein & Aber

French: Fremok Editions

Buy this picturebook

Der Garten / The Garden

ATAK

Verlag Antje Kunstmann, Germany, 2013

In silence, the garden wakes up. Thus opens this picturebook by ATAK, as an invitation to walk in a garden with a thousand surprises – a haven of peace, populated with animals and strange characters.

You’ll discover with wonder, the treasures and the tranquility of the garden, and you’ll observe the seasons and the passing of time.

German: Verlag Antje Kunstmann

French: Editions Thierry Magnier

Spanish: Niño Editor

Portuguese: Companhia das Letras (Brazil)

Korean: Bear & Cat

Buy this picturebook

Martha

ATAK

Aladin Verlag, Germany, 2016

Martha tells the tale of the extinction of North America’s native Passenger Pigeon – its shockingly rapid decline caused directly by humans – and is told from the perspective of ‘Martha’, the last of the species who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The story begins with a feeling of greatness and awe, describing flocks of birds that were once so numerous that they would darken the skies for days, their beating wings as loud as motors.

German: Aladin Verlag

French: Les Fourmis Rouges

Korean: Sanha

#germany

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scifimagpie · 5 years

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Game of ZZZs: How Long Stories Ruin Everything

I've been putting this one off because I was kind of busy writing an 18-part series deep-dive involving journalism and undercover work, but since Lindsay Ellis has released her video essay conclusion, I have finally put my thoughts in order.

youtube

So, today we're going to talk about something contentious. I have no issue with books being long, or shows being long, or movies being long - but at the same time, I do. And yes, I know some people adore epic scale stories for their own sake. Not everything needs to be a thousand-page-long ten-book series with three spinoffs and prequels. Oh, sure, market forces and advertising play a role in this, but creators still participate in it.

But sometimes a story isn't long because it needs to be, it's long because the writer thinks it HAS to be. From my personal experience as a reader and writer, and especially as an editor, I've come to some conclusions about how stories are artificially extended. And in a world of global warming and climate change, shouldn't we be fighting waste everywhere, on every level?

Now, a certain show ended its eighth season not long ago; Big Bang Theory came to a whimper of a close after ten seasons, and Veep - which I only heard about towards its grand finale, alas - has also finished up a seven-season run.

I'm not saying all of these shows participated in various errors. I'm saying pretty much every show, book, and movie series will partake in them eventually. So how do we do better than the bad ones, and how do we echo or even improve on the good ones? We can't fight what we don't know about, so let's get into it.

Spacing

Everything happens, but not right away. No, the important events are distanced from each other, to the point where there are long stretches of dead zones or deserts of nonsense in between them. I'm not talking about character interactions as nonsense here, but unfortunately, a lot of authors seem to think that they count, and that human drama isn't interesting enough to be a climax. Older fantasy works--cough, cough, Wheel of Time--can be particularly bad about this. The problem with spacing out events and using human drama between the big McGuffin/army-driven fights is that readers get frustrated by the human drama rather than finding it rewarding. Or worse, they find the army and McGuffiny-crap a distraction from the human stuff.

Padding

I know about this issue from the inside. Bad Things that Happen to Girls started off as a book called Foreverland, and then was untitled for a while before getting its current name. It went through two full rewrites before arriving at its current published form. When I wrote it at first, I thought it absolutely had to be a long novel, with lots of details about the girls' lives and a slow-burn breakdown, then an extended road trip in the middle and a bunch of scenes about their experiences in university.

I didn't realise I was padding it, but when I experimented with radically decreasing the timeline of events, I had a revelation. I didn't need years and paragraphs on paragraphs chronicling their lived experiences, full of pointless dialogue and meandering descriptions. All I had to do were give little samples and important moments, and that would get the idea across. Sometimes a flash reveals more than a long exposure shot, to put it in cinematic terms.

Cramming

EVERYTHING MUST HAPPEN AND IT MUST HAPPEN NOW AND HERE ARE TEN NEW CHARACTERS AND A NEW SUBPLOT AND HOLY CRAP WE MUST MAKE UP FOR WRAPPING UP TOO MANY THREADS AT THE END OF THE LAST SEASON OOPS.

The caps lock here was entirely necessary and appropriate, because with cramming, the story often feels like it's shouting at you. (Probably in German.)

The biggest problem with cramming, too, is that it requires glossing over things. If readers get interested by a small detail, they might end up screaming, "wait, go back!" long after the author's moved to another topic, or three other topics. Finding the balance between this and padding can be tricky, but the best solution I can offer is "external perspective." Get someone to read over your work, and when they lose attention, that's time to cut. It's a trick I often use with editing manuscripts - the minute my attention wavers, I mark it, just in case.

Crashing

this tends to happen to shows that have lived past their expiry date. Supernatural is a fine example of this. This is where "shark-jumping" tends to come into play; characters do things that go against their nature and development for the sake of jump-starting a narrative or adding some excitement.

Oh, the shark-jump. That's worth a mini-section of its own. Honestly, most shows either end or jump the shark in order to keep going. There's no such thing as a perfect writer or a perfect story; mostly because these things are subjective, but partly because keeping all the balls in the air for a story is just plain hard.

Endless escalation

Science fiction authors are prone to this, and so are epic fantasy authors. In an effort to keep reader interest, stakes rise and rise and rise, and then lose sight of the human scale of things. The problem is that stories are made of people, and if you forget about the people, you don't have a story anymore.

As with Cramming, this can lead to glossing over interesting bits as well. The full impact of a big change or shift isn't always felt if we rush to the next big, shiny thing. In real life, though, long-reaching consequences of events can have ripples for decades or even centuries. The Magna Carta was a big deal when it was signed; the effects of the Spanish Inquisitions, the Crusades, the unification of China (which happened more than once), the Viking cultural expansions, and the colonization of North America (by which I mean the land-theft and genocide of Indigenous peoples) are all still talked about to this day.

Bad things that happen to characters need room to resonate. PTSD and trauma are not only interesting, they're natural, and even when people mostly recover from them, they leave a lasting impact. Let your characters get wrecked by something. Have characters reference things that have happened. Let characters get fatigued, collapse, and have to fix themselves. It'll not only demonstrate the actual impact of your events, it'll keep you from having to throw together another big, shiny thing to make the story more exciting (looking at you, Avengers series and mainstream comics).

So, what tends to actually cause these writing techniques behind the scenes?

Burnout or boredom

One of the most difficult and important factors - one which arguably contributed to the absolute mess that was the GoT finale - is just getting tired of your own damn story. When this happens, authors and creators will end up trying to revamp something with weird new twists partly to keep themselves interested, might engineer an awkward left turn to justify a foreshadowed plot element, or might just do a half-hearted wrap-up of the previous plot elements.

Here's the thing - audiences don't always consume stories at the same rate as authors write them. Many times, readers or viewers will stumble on a work and binge it in a relatively short time, so what took years for the writer will take months, at most, for the consumer. This can make tonal clashes very jarring.

In other cases, an author will abandon a series due to writer's block or life events - a sin of which I, cough, am guilty - and then try to pick it up later. This will still impact the story, often negatively. Maybe one has just gotten well and thoroughly tired of the subject matter, or it's been done to death in the popular sphere. It doesn't really matter - either way, authors are subject to the world around them, and sometimes, the only way to deal with burnout or boredom is rotating to another project. That's fine - the only issue comes when the first project is completely abandoned, and languishes, unfinished.

Societal changes and personal development

I'm combining these two because the world around us affects us, and sometimes, we even affect the world. If you'd told me that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were going to rise to power during my lifetime, I wouldn't've believed you. To many, it sounded like a bad dream. Well, here we are, and the long night has not yet come to an end. Using art to cope with dark times and critique them is a long-celebrated human trend, and there's no reason to stop now. Sure, we might fear our work aging poorly - but stories that try to be timeless always age anyhow, and an earnest time capsule often lasts longer, because it can tap into the problems of an era (which echo forward, as discussed in the section above).

If you'd told me that I'd be able to deal with my family issues in a more satisfactory way, I might have believed you - but realising the impact of that on my writing both as a Game Master and an author is another matter. However, the additional perspective and maturity of healing has, rather than distancing me from characters' struggles, provided additional objectivity and even empathy. Fixing ourselves and healing doesn't "take away our artistic magic" - far from it. If anything, getting over issues unlocks the ability to deal with them in fiction much more effectively.

Disillusionment and insecurity

These are nasty brain demons, all right - perhaps one has taken a look at the broad span of one's work, compared it to one's goals, and feels they are just - well, left wanting. Every creator struggles with this at some point, whether crafting a story for a D&D party or for hundreds of readers or thousands of viewers. The only way to deal with it is with external perspective and turning to objective sources of both external critique and validation.

After all, we tell ourselves things that may or may not be true all the time, and measuring them against the perceptions of the audience can drastically correct things. Your readers might just be happy to see the characters get married - never mind that it took you five years to write about them getting together. And even if they don't like something specific or complain about it or nitpick - hey, they're coming back. You compelled them. Even if the readers, say, abandon their fandom and proclaim it a trashfire - they're still paying for or giving your story attention and money. And ultimately, from a marketing perspective attention is always neutral or positive - even if that attention is controversial - because it increases profits.

How do we even begin to fix all this?

But. All hope is not lost.

By acknowledging burnout, boredom, disillusionment, insecurity, personal development, and societal change - the factors which often lead to writing shortcuts detailed in the previous section - we can compensate for the natural creative struggles by accepting and anticipating them.

Try to write books in a series in a continuous stretch when possible, making it harder to lose track of the tone or style or character journeys. Plot things out, and get yourself a hands-on editor and/or extremely trustworthy beta-readers. And forgive yourself for screwing up - then get back to writing. At least, that's what I'm doing!

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people's manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing *

* Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

#game of thrones #how to #advice #writing #editing #beta reading #list

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thrcshold-blog · 6 years

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i’ve been laughing at this gif for five minutes straight, hELPSFDKJGSDF

hey guys !! i’m kat, 21 yo struggling uni student from east coast canada who’s whipped for fromis, boa and brockhampton and currently ignoring finals prep in favour of typing my soon-to-be bland and long-winded intro ! sjfkgdf so i’m gonna get to the point as quickly as possible and present my messy sagi baby, zoe who’s kinda just. cracked tbh. you can check out her ( slightly unfinished ) stats HERE, and like this or im me if you’d like to plot !

EDIT: btw, my d*scord's EXO'S BITCH#2030 if anyone wants to hmu over there !

< park jiwon, cis female, she/her, twenty-one > welcome to the witching community of chicago, ZOE RYU ! you’re a HEDGE WITCH right ? some of the locals around here have described you as being RESTLESS and CANDID, but others have said you’re PERCEPTIVE and VERSATILE. i guess i’ll have to see for myself. now, being a hedge witch, i hear you excel at DREAM MANIPULATION. the chicago witching community prides itself on having skilled witches so make sure to keep practicing ! < kat, 21, nt >

so i still haven’t figured out the full backstory with her but i’ll edit this a little later when i have my wits about me sjglfgd

that aside, zoe grew up with her parents in a suburb of halifax, canada and it was a fairly simple life they had — papa ryu's a hedge witch and is just living a chill life as a cop.. just handling a lot of petty crimes and traffic violations bc i’m p sure halifax is about the same criminally as my own province dklgsg

and her mom’s a green witch who’s like, the closest thing to a hippie that you can get given she’s got a policeman for a husband sgkdfjsgfdkl anyways she did her own Thing by running her family’s little garden centre uptown before delving into a venture with a uh, microbrewery

that whole set up sounds Dumb but. one of her parents has to be cracked like zoe in some ways and it clearly won’t be her dad so ! moving on !

sdfhjhgsh so zoe was a middle child with an older brother and twin smols of opposite sexes, and the only one of the four to end up becoming a hedge witch, or showing signs of becoming one i should say, like her dad ! she was always an imaginative and creative kid — something her mom especially let her expand upon — and a little wise beyond her years

she often had vivid dreams and, in her soon-to-be proven crackhead fashion, would tell them in a dramatic, outlandish way

the bitch was born to be a Loud theatre kid. anyways DKSFGJDSGFK

her dad saw this and other little things as a sign that she might just become a hedge witch like him and was Hyped, so like any proud parent he.......... kinda projected buT with good intentions

ig ?? idk but yeah, a hedge witch she would become sdglkgdk

she did delve into her powers and was interested in being a Good little witch, but she likely didn’t make it her top priority if the rest of this intro will be anything to go by

her school life was p ordinary, she was extroverted and enthusiastic but so fucking Annoying all the same

performed decently but def excelled in language arts/english. not just saying that bc Me but —

joined the drama club in high school and was a little thespian until she graduated and headed off to uni at acadia for an arts degree !

but after a couple of years, and despite the friends she had there, she took a step back. def the type of person to wanna escape and explore, and her studying so close to home limited her ability to do that

so she moved to chicago like, a couple of months before tr*mp became president-elect bc she would’ve cancelled everything, demanded her deposit back, had she arrived after that SKLDFGSDGFL

her brother had been a little more focused on his abilities than she had been at the time, and had visited a couple of larger witching communities to idk, see what they were like ?? since theirs was quite small in comparison; and he told her about them only for her to decide to check one of them out for a bit

and she picked chicago bc....... tbh she only really picked chicago on a whim, and her weird love for that one episode of victorious with trina doing her one woman show might’ve played the smallest role in it all KDSGJKDSGF

so she’s been here for a couple of years now and had started her studies again a couple of months back at a uni near her little apartment ( haven’t checked out possible places to add to her stats just to have a uni Set, so i’ll do that later gdklsdg )

and that’s really it for her bg !

PERSONALITY, SPECIALTY BG AND OTHER SHIT

so she needs action or something of interest in her life to keep her Up, but the feeling can fade quickly

like i said, she left her province — and country — to experience more, both in her abilities and in general; and while the latter is a little defunct given her time here already, whatever else comes with it tends to keep her from wanting to run off to the next enthralling adventure as soon as she possibly can

she also can’t sit still for v long if we wanna keep this short and show less Grand ideas sgdklfg

given her partially goofy ass, it’s hard to fathom her as being a blunt, serious or even snide person, but she can be given the situation or..... perhaps it’s just how she is in the moment sdjgsfdg

zoe does, however, show her blunt side in a more quick-witted, casual way than serious so it’s unlikely that you’ll see her act up, and uncommon but definitely not rare to see her be mature and handle shit accordingly

idk if that made sense but we’re gonna keep going for now sdgkjgdf

she’s a solid, loyal person, but she’s also quite observant and wise — well, wise when she wants to be anyways

and she’s definitely NOT a mary sue, but she is, as i said in her app, versatile

she’s adaptive in certain settings and situations, she doesn’t limit herself in what she can and can’t do and is a semi-functional multitasker DGKHJDF

the second thing prob has something to do with her ( over ) confidence but anyways

uhhhhh last but not least, she’s a Crackhead.

SFJGDDFSG

she’s a living, breathing level 4 shitposter and my patience is definitely gonna wear thin with this brat, i sweaR

tho at the end of the day, she’s chill despite it. by some miracle at least

when it comes to dream manipulation, she’s always found it to be cool

and one thing that makes it rewarding and interesting is how it would help her little sister with nightmares when she started becoming proficient at the actual manipulation aspect of it

bc who wouldn’t use a power to help a distressed kid :(

eventually it’s escalated to her just chilling with her mom in her dreamland bc phone and skype calls are boring af and not enough for them to be dumb bitches together sdgfklsgfdj

and to just fuck around with her neighbours and what not. in a good way

........ for the most part, the witch can’t guarantee that the rude girl down the hall won’t see her long-time crush run off with zoe out of subtle revenge for knowingly closing the elevator door in her face when she had her arms full of grocerieS —

and while it is.. p invasive, it also fuels her creativity by using some elements as inspiration for her writing

it’s an ethical dilemma that she wrestles with, rest assured folks

what else, what else.............

she’s good with her family if i didn’t imply it enough

she’s bi but..... girls disappoint her far less than guys so she has a Preference DJFGSKGDKF

likes to act like she isn’t a massive party girl but, she’s a massive party girl

how else will she release her pent-up energy ?? sgkjhgsdj

loves garlic fingers, but bc america’s behind on shit from what ik, she’s as disappointed as i am that she has no access to them

spits.

honestly, she’s just v atlantic canadian when it comes to food, her fondness for fog and the ocean and neither are Really a thing in this part of the states so she’s struggliNG still

uh, feels like the only one who’s following a more...... human life path, one not as connected to magic as other witches she’s met, and feels a tad embarrassed bc of it, but it’s what she feels most comfortable with

loves horror movies and halloween, is That bitch who laughs at the former and goes all out with the latter

thinks virginia woolf is a legend and is Right in doing so SGKDJFGD

idk what else to add so let’s end it here !

forgot to mention that i don’t have her plots page finished, so i’ll link it when i do !

#haze:intro #╳┊: — these are stacy's baby ! •「 ooc. 」#this took me.... hours to finish bc i kept getting distracted fgkhdfsdghfj #anyways icb i forgot that d*scord's a thing #yikes sdfgjkjsgf

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miasfilmprojectblog · 2 years

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The CRIT!

I was not heavily involved in the post production process. Drafts of the picture edits were sent to me, to which I provided feedback on. The main challenge we had was getting the edit down to our time limit without sacrificing quality, so I suggested various cuts we could do to accomplish this. Perhaps, however, I should have been more involved in the post production process as it was communication issues that led to our film being unfinished for the viewing to our class and lecturers. It was very disappointing not being able to show a quality piece for our weeks of hard work. However, we had a week to fix it, and I believe our final product is a significant improvement.

Critiques about my role (Production Designer)

1. A change in the actual layout of the scene, rather than just costume, would have helped give a clearer distinction of different days. This is something I definitely agree with, and wish I had thought of sooner. I didn’t want to alter the set too much as we only had until 3pm to shoot, as the pub opened and members of the public would come in. Therefore, we had to get everything wrapped up before then. Keeping this in mind, I thought it was best to make minimal changes to the pub, such as shifting furniture around, and hanging up a few photos. I do believe it would have been worthwhile, however, to have a few holiday decorations hanging around, or something like that to make the passage of time clearer. It also would have signified a greater passing of time, which would make the story more believable. Paul gets sick quite quickly in the matter of three days, and differentiating these days in different seasons would have made it easier to digest.

2. The characters don’t feel like they belong in that setting. Changes to the story and production design would have helped this. I do agree with this comment to an extent. Due to a change in our location in pre production, we had to rush to find somewhere else that could accommodate our shooting schedule. The Raging Bull was the only option. After a few script rewrites and costume changes, we tried to make do. I changed Dave’s costume and colour palette in particular to match the set, and be a bit more sophisticated to make them fit in a bit better. I also had the extras wear casual clothing to make them stand out and seem more out of place. I did not want to alter the actual set too much as we only had a limited amount of hours each day, and I did not want to waste time we didn’t have in a longer set up and take down of the set. Therefore, I tried to implement smaller changes like moving some of the more “abstract” arts and furniture out of the way and replacing them with framed newspaper articles, and more simple pictures.

Critiques about the film

Unfortunately, the film was not at a stage to be viewed by the time of the crit. It was very disappointing not to be able to showcase our weeks of hard work, and be proud of the final product. Here are some notes we got on the general film in different departments:

Positives

1. It feels cinematic - particularly in the dream sequence. The clash between tones made it very jarring and stood out. I agree. I liked the colour palette in the film overall, and loved how the autumnal and winter colours clashed with one another. The change in aspect ratio for this dream sequence was great as well, as it distorted the physical setting and made it seem as though we were in an alternate place altogether.

2. The performance from our actors were good, bar a few critiques from Paul’s actor. There was a particular enjoyment and commandment for their performances, specifically from Dave, in the shift to the dream sequence.

3. The story itself was beautiful. The choice to use older characters in a film with strong coming of age themes was a good choice, and unfortunately not something done. I agree. While I love a good coming of age story, they are mainly centred around young, white, middle class characters. It’s nice to see them catered to a different demographic, something which I think our writer and director, Lilith, did very well. The dialogue in the film was great. It didn’t feel too much, which is what we feared for in Dave’s dialogue. Particularly since Dave is very quiet, uttering limited words in other scenes. Ian, our actor playing Dave, did a good job of making this change believable, and the switch back and forth was seamless. His tenderness and caring heart came across very well, especially in silent moments.

Improvements

1. The biggest critique we got, of course, was the sound. It was unfinished and unsynced, which was a big let down.

2. The distinction between days isn’t clear enough. The main improvements in this would have been in production design, as I have mentioned above, but other things in post could help, such as music playing in the background.

3. The story, while very sweet, may have been a bit too much to fit into a six minute time frame. We did not get as in depth a look into Dave and Paul’s friendship as we would have liked. The suggestion we received was to cut more content out, and replace instead with longer shots and moments on Dave and Paul. I agree, and it is something we were definitely having trouble with during the post production process.

4. Certain handheld shots feel out of place. I agree, particularly with the shot of Dave walking away in the dream sequence. We view this from an odd, shaky frame coming from underneath Dave’s chin. It was very unalike the other, steady shots we were used to which threw me off a bit. I would have liked it better if it was from a higher angle, and maybe not over Dave’s shoulder.

5. This one wasn’t a critique from the class (or perhaps it was), but there were some points in the editing I thought were a tad bit jarring. Specifically, the timing of some cuts. A good example is when we cut from the third to the fourth scene. We had just ended the dream sequence. A longer pause on Dave as the bartender puts the beer down, and a longer silence of contemplation would make it a bit less jarring, and would allow the audience to sit in this surreal moment for a bit longer.

While we did leave the crit feeling quite disheartened. We were quite upset at how the edit was done, and the lack of progress, particularly in sound, that had been made. I wish that our editor, Bronte, would have come to us sooner if she was having timing issues that we could have helped her resolve. We were quite rightly upset, particularly at the fact the film was not double checked before screening. However, we have a week to fix it up, and I’m excited to make some major changes and make sure our beautiful story is communicated well.

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dust-mun · 6 years

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!! COMMISSIONS OPEN !!

Um... Well, kind of. Really, I’m going to be doing commissions to help a friend of mine pay for her way out of a hell of a household she lives in. I don’t know how much it costs, and quite frankly, I don’t care. She doesn’t deserve to be in the place she’s in.

Her post detailing her situation can be found here.

As for what I’m doing, I’m doing full-body drawings, headshots, and sketches, all with optional simple backgrounds.

What I’ll need is either a ref of your character (preferably colored), or a detailed description of your character. Even characters made in dollmakers are something I can use, so long as I can get a good idea of what you want.

Keep in mind that I have school and my own life to think about, and so it may take me a bit if it’s a complicated project. My Patreon can be found here, and it’s really the only means of payment I have, as I am not old enough to open a PayPal as of yet. Following that, I will give the funds to my friend. I expect payment before I begin work on the art.

Note: I will not accept NSFW commissions. I will, however, draw furries, Pokemon, humans, animals, etc, and simple backgrounds.

Examples of my art (and prices) under the cut:

Edit: Okie, I’m just gonna add commission prices here just to clarify. I should’ve put this in the original version. The variable background prices are based on how much effort it’ll need.

Sketch: $2.25

Colored: $4.25

Shaded: $5.50

Background: +$0.75-$1.25

Sketch: $1.00

Colored: $2.25

Shaded: $3.50

Background: +$0.50-$1.00

Kitteh I drew, as well as testing out a new way of drawing animals. Full View

An unfinished reference of my sona that I made. It’s still in the sketching phases of being made. Full View

A smol glitch chimera that I made. I’m pretty proud of the effects I have in this one. Full View

One of my more odd characters. A glitched chimera that I made. Full View

My first actual gif in ages that I put a lot of effort into, though gifs will not be available for commissions. Full View

A picture I made of two of my characters. Partially testing out my ability to draw backgrounds and to use blurring. Full View

A picture of one of my characters that I’m really proud of the effects for. Full View

Something a tiny bit older than the last one. Say hello to Beta Nightshade!

A mix of venting, trying to make something positive, and me testing out the watercolor brushes.

A chimera I made for one of my many roleplay blogs. Full View

Just a bit of venting I did, inspired by Rebecca Parham’s video. Full View

A fusion I did for a Pokemon Fusion challenge. Full View

Smoky Quartz from Steven Universe. Full View

Two characters of mine, Drake and Flurry. Full View

Old art where I tested out some Paint Tool SAI settings.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day.

- DustFox

#dustfox rambles #dustfox commissions

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nocornersuns · 3 years

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Ever-so-helpful Art on a Cart tips and tricks!

This year, like many art teachers across the land, I've been displaced due to Covid restrictions. Once again I am forced to manage a days worth of art making onto four wheels.

Oh man, teaching art on a cart sucks. I've written about that before, but I never really explored the actual tangibility and organization that goes into actually teaching on a cart here on the blog. Here are my helpful tips and tricks from unfortunately many years of experience.

Things on my cart at all the time during Covid restrictions:

Pencils (if they need one I let them keep it)

Sharpies with two containers. They return them to the “used” container when they are done. I usually wipe them with a wipe when I need them again.

Tape

White Glue (This is mostly for my demonstrations since I hate glue sticks)

Glue sticks ( I have a million. I keep a box on the cart and if a kid doesn’t have glue I just let them keep it)

Scissors (I have adult scissors and an assortment of random kid scissors. Again, I have a million, so depending on the kid, I just let them keep them. So many times this year students will tell me they do not have glue and scissors. This is rarely the case. Usually their desks, backpacks, coats, and crates strapped to their desks are so full and such a mess that they don't want to look for them. My response lately is, "I guess you just have to sit there then" and miraculously they find them.

wipes/paper towels/Kleenex

Magnets

A few crayon boxes. (These are my plastic boxes of random crayons. This time of year they are missing a lot of colors. I will just give them the crayon to keep if they need it.)

Sorted Oil Pastels with two containers - like if we are using white, I pass them out then have them return them to a “used” bin to quarantine for a few days

A box of “Free Draw” paper. My kids have sketchbooks but since they have been with them all year in the classroom, they are mostly all filled up. I keep the shoebox of paper for early finishers.

Regular 80lb paper and some construction paper for projects. (I try to bring what I need, but in case of emergency’s I have extra on the cart.

Your computer, class rosters, water bottle. These need a place on your cart, even though they probably go with you. I got a water bottle with a pop up straw so I can just tuck it under my mask to drink!

I set up two carts at the school I'll be teaching at in April. One for upstairs, one for downstairs. Both of these carts are pretty small and not ideal, but we are hoping the situation is temporary!

Things in my apron

Over the summer I sewed an apron. I edited the template a little and made big giant pockets. It's been great, and now I realized I need another one for my other school beginning there art cart life... but I don't want to give up an entire day sewing another one. So, I got this one off Amazon.

Pencil

Notepad (for writing notes to teachers about stinkers, or more commonly writing words on if a kid needs to spell something 😂)

Bandaids

Sharpie

Hand sanitizer/hand lotion

White board marker ( I usually erase with a paper towel)

Magnets

Big rubber eraser.

Usually a pair of kid scissors too for easy access

Keys or ID.

My phone - my schedule is crazy. I literally set recurring alarms for every class for when it is clean-up time. Which, isn’t fun on a Monday when we don’t have school… But, it helps a lot. The kids know that means it is clean-up time and hopefully that gets me able to move to my next class in a timely fashion. Although, it’s impossible to end one class at 11am, when the next one starts at 11am. Especially when teachers are super slow coming back to the room.

Not to be a downer, because who knows how long this situation will last, but lots of people will try to convince you that art on a cart is fine. It's not. Delicately complain that your students are not getting a quality art program as often as you can.

Yes, kids can do amazing things while you are teaching off of a cart. No, you shouldn't just sacrifice your skills and decide the projects are going to be crap all year. However; you are going to make yourself crazy trying to do the same things you once did in your classroom off of a cart. You will be disappointed and frustrated.

Then you will get used to it. Don't forget though, this is not how it should be.

More tips:

I still have access to my art room - which is great! I do all my planning in there, eat my lunch, and use it as my home base throughout the day. I have taught on a cart where I didn't have a "home base". I would shove my coat and purse in a storage closet or weird filing cabinet in the hallway. That is definitely not ideal.

I use a plastic 10 x 13" sorting tray for each class to keep all of their project stuff in. I have a little alcove of supplies where I park my cart. If I’m not seeing that particular class, I will leave their bin in the alcove area. I also put some milk crate things there that hold the other supplies we’ve needed more routinely like sorted cups of (like warm and cool colors), boxes of colored pencils (I have enough so they do not have to share). I also have a bin with watercolor stuff that I can pick up and take to a room. It has my wc brushes, paint sets, a roll of paper towels, water cups, and a pitcher since we don’t have sinks in our rooms. This is also a problem when a whole class has dirty hands from pastels. I’ve been using the wipes and have them clean their hands then table with the wipes. If I’m out of baby wipes or Wet Ones - I have given them the Clorox wipes and said they were for “Fingertips” and tables since they aren’t supposed to be used to wash up skin.

If you do decide to water color paint - my best solution so far has been to pass everything out then walk around with the water pitcher to fill cups - like a waitress filling up drinks. When they are done I have them “carry their painting like a pizza” and put it on the dry rack I have in the hall. It is a small stand alone rack and I have it centrally located in the hallway outside the younger kids’ rooms. I let the big kids just walk to it when they are done. Then I can clean up their stuff. I dump all the dirty water back into the pitcher and stack the cups etc. None of my classrooms have a sink.

Passing out other supplies, or letting kids choose things has become pretty much nonexistent. I have spread papers out and try to call them up individually to pick a piece- but they touch everything. They can’t make up their mind, then they want to change it, etc…. With the little kids, if it’s random colors or something- I just past them out randomly. I don’t even let it be known that they have a choice. With the older kids I’ve walked around and made them tell me what they wanted and I gave it to them and tell them they can’t exchange it. For a few construction paper projects I’ve actually divided papers and things into baggies or clipped them, and passed them out like that. Then I know they all have the right sizes/colors.

Another not so flexible thing is if kids have been absent. I have more unfinished projects than usual because I may not have the supplies with me they need and there isn’t extra time for them to finish. My older kids who have had to quarantine have been good about doing their work at home since it’s on their google classroom anyway.

When I taught on a cart before, each classroom teacher had a box in their classroom for all of the projects we had been working on. Like a large flat portfolio box. This was nice because I could also keep resources and things in it and had a little more control with what was going on. I didn’t want to be touching or passing stuff out this year at all so I got the kids these 11 x 17” folders to keep next to their desks. They all have crates strapped to their desks to hold stuff since we are not using lockers. The folder fits good between the crate and desk. At the end of the year they will just take them home with all their stuff inside.

Because the desks are spread out you will probably not be able to wheel the cart into the room and you will probably not have any counter space, and everyone’s technology will be set up differently in every room.

And one last thing...If you haven’t been with the kids too much when they are wearing masks, you might find that you do not know who is talking to you- like ever. I still hear a question and look directly at the wrong kid to answer it. 🤷‍♀️

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#art #art education #artsed #arted #art teacher #education

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soundrooms · 7 years

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Soundrs: Ignatius

My name is Steve. I release electronic music as Ignatius. I’m also part of a duo called Cascade Data along w/ friend and fellow musician Jason Goodrich who releases music as TechnicolorYawn. I’ve also collaborated with Jason Ploekleman and released music as Exeisms. I guess all of this music would get lumped into ‘experimental’ but it’s all pretty accessible and is variations on downtempo, hiphop, ambient, electro and techno. I run a label called Buried In Time which is where most of this music is released. I’ve also made a couple commercial sound libraries. I have some experience working in commercial recording studios but left that life in 2001. Since then i’ve had 9-5 jobs and currently work in a synth shop in Portland called Modular8.

http://ignatiusmusic.com

http://buriedintime.com

• What are your inspiration sources?

I get inspiration from lots of places. Reading, movies, friends, new sounds… There’s a lot that happens in Portland and on those rare times when i do leave the house and go to some event i generally come away inspired… but also labels like Raster-Noton, PAN… The Synth shop i work at, Modular8.com, also has a well curated record section. A lot of things come through there that i’ve never heard of. On that recent Pharmakon record there’s a track called ‘Nakedness of Need’ that changed my life for about a month.

Lately i’ve been inspired by some recent live sets from Anon (Anna Sitko) and Baseck. I’m also still pretty gassed by the 2015 Autechre live sets. They played two shows here on consecutive days and I went to both. They released a bunch of those recordings from that tour and i’ve played them a lot. Richard Devine played here a couple years ago and that set has stuck with me. It was a Trash Audio synth meet/party and there were performances that night. He spent four or five hours patching up his rig in a back room where the synth meet was happening. His set was really lush. I guess i get inspired by people doing stuff… Making music, art or whatever they’re into and just forging ahead with whatever their thing is. I try to keep working regardless of how i’m feeling or what’s going on in life. I have some chronic health issues that sometimes leave me spun out and frustrated or just make normal daily life more challenging so getting to that baseline for normal functioning takes a lot of effort sometimes. I have some friends in similar situations and they persist and overcome their situations. So, there’s different kinds of inspiration of course. Making music is kind of an inspiration feedback machine when it’s working well. If i’m making tracks i like and learning new things all the time then that kind of feeds itself.

• Tell us something about your workflow.

I often have no idea what tempo i’m working at. I don’t think about genre. I just start making music and whatever comes out is what it is. Of course i push things one way or another and have my own aesthetic i apply to things but i rarely sit down with genre in mind. Mood is another thing though so if i’m angry or sad or anxious that tends to come out in the music or a sound or a whatever. I split up my work flow sometimes. Basic tracks or jams on machines that then get edited in Ableton and mixed in Logic. If i’m working all in the box though i’ll mix as i go because it’s all part of sound design that way anyways.

• How would creative rituals benefit your workflow?

I don’t know. I think it’s best to just keep working. I don’t have many rituals for workflow… I just start somewhere. I try not to get bogged down and just try to make it all a learning experience. Maybe it doesn’t generate a song but nothing is wasted. That two hours you spent doing some complex thing with gear or plugins or automation or whatever might come back around some other time and be useful or lead somewhere else. I guess one thing i do is take time not to actively work on a song and just work on making synth patches or editing or exploring a processor with no song or bigger idea in mind. I tend to think in long term. If i make a lot of tracks then the chances improve that some of them will be good. So i like to make tracks. In the end that’s what it’s about for me. Folders full of tracks. Though i haven’t been sitting on many lately. They all seem to find their way to Bandcamp.

• How do you get in the zone?

I have no idea. I try to unplug now and then and go on a long bike ride or do some other thing not music related but generally i like to have a big block of time to be in the studio or sit on a couch with a laptop or drum machine. That’s really all i need. But if i’m not feeling like working on stuff for whatever reason then i don’t force it to much. I will push myself and go in the studio and do something just as a way to forget about whatever is going on in life and to be productive because i find it actually works well for that kind of thing. Have a lousy day or get some bad news, the studio is a good way to cope with that or get through it. A few hours in the studio has a way of turning things around. I often will record then put all the files in the laptop and sit on the couch w/ headphones w/ some Syfy or anime like Ghost In The Shell or Akira or something dark on the TV at low volume. It’s like having a fireplace going; flickering in the background while i deal with edits or arranging. Sometimes i need to decompress from life before going into the studio or doing any real work so sometimes i end up sucked into a ‘media night’ watching a movie or a show or whatever.

• How do you start a track?

Any of a number of different ways. Often just jamming with gear or software. I like to change environments for making tracks though i’ll also focus on one piece of gear or process to make stuff. Having too many options can be paralyzing so i try to limit what i’m using at any one time or on a given project. Though, changing work environments helps me feel unstuck and seems to help breaking habits and routines. It’s a fine line though. When i make a sample library, once it’s finished, i generally end up throwing a bunch of those sounds in a sampler and having a go with them and that usually leads to tracks or several versions of one track. So, between the modular, the Octatrack and a computer i have starting places i’m comfortable with because they’re all different enough. There’s so much to do/try in a modular system though that i often just start patching. I try not to think about it. It’s better for me to just start something. It’s easy to overthink things so it’s best to just start something and let it take shape or experiment freely w/o any real goal of making a track. sometimes there’s all kinds of mental gymnastics i do in life so i have to just chuck that and simplify and get something done.

• Do you have a special template?

Not really. I guess default DAW templates are a thing but i haven’t customized them too much. They just represent connections to synths and stuff in the studio. So they’re a convenience. I will build up templates in the Octatrack depending on what it’s patched into. Recently i got a Eurorack module called the DublDecca and it’s made for integrating the Ocatrack with Eurorack modular so a template in the Octatrack is necessary to get the data out of the Octatrack and into the modular for routing LFOs and trigs and notes etc…

• What effects do you put on the master channel?

Usually Cytomic the Glue. Sometimes the limiter from Fabfilter but only just to catch peaks. I don’t compress a lot on the master channel because i like to get things mastered later and I don’t want to squish stuff and make the mastering engineer’s life harder. Besides, the mastering engineer will do a better job of that than i can. I did recently get the New Fangled Audio plugin bundle so will check those out during a mix next time around. They’re pretty amazing plugs. Lot’s of uses for creative processing and sound design.

• How do you arrange and finish a track?

Sometimes it’s a performance straight to stereo mix. Usually i multitrack so i can move things around a bit and cut out some mistakes or leave in mistakes! Often i just do long jam sessions then ruthlessly edit out what doesn’t need to be there. But it really depends on the track. Some times it’s all in the computer so arranging is a different thing than if i patch up the modular and jam with it. That’s all real time and there’s no timeline or anything… It’s just feel and turning knobs and patching cables. Generally things end up in Ableton for editing then go into Logic for mixing. The collaborations i’m part of are all data swapping of projects in Ableton.

• How do you deal with unfinished projects?

I don’t! I leave them there until they want to be finished. I have a hard time abandoning a track or idea so have to finish it or it bugs me. Unless it’s just really bad… Then i often chop it up and use it for something else. If something isn’t working out then i save it as it is and move on to something else. Then sometime later.. months .. years.. I’ll have some time where i feel like going through old projects and that is often when things get trashed for good or finished or repurposed.

• How do you store and organize your projects?

Redundant raid backups. Usually i have a folder full of current things i’m working on and another that is versions of finished tracks. But once they get released they are potentially online forever. But i have redundant back ups or finished and in progress tracks as well as sample libraries.

• How do you take care of studio ergonomics?

I used to rearrange the studio a lot. It’s been in its current state for quite a while. I rearrange the modular often though just to focus on different modules and see what having a different group of modules together will lead to. I like to have the thing i’m really interested in right in front of me though. I also like a clean desk. I don’t have a lot of synths. Not a big rack of them. A few desktop synths and few older cheap FX boxes. It’s all routed into a patch bay. I use an analog mixer. It’s easy and fast to patch things around w/ the patch bay. I just have all the inputs and outputs staring at me.

• Tell us something about your daily routine, how is your day structured, how do you make room for creativity?

I try to work on music or music related things after work every day.. or most days.. then late into the night when the schedule and life allow. I tend to get pretty miserable if i’m unable to work on music for a length of time so i need to make sure i get some creative time regularly. I have to be disciplined but i don’t obsess or try not to and i make room for other things and get some exercise and have some fun going cycling or something.

• Share a quick producing tip.

Always be recording. Don’t start jamming until you have your DAW recording the output of your hardware. Focus on modulation. Don’t discretely program everything. Make a really long pattern and loop it.. add some delay in it somewhere.. go lay on the floor and let it loop a while. Eventually you’ll hear it in a different way and what to do with it will become obvious. Tracks know where they want to go sometimes. Also, be ruthless w/ editing. Don’t try to fit it all in one track. If you have a bunch of good ideas for a track then make them all as different versions of the same song. Remix yourself. Change the tempos in your default DAW templates.

• Share a link to an interesting website (doesn’t have to be music related).

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

• List ten sounds you are hearing right this moment : )

Ancient Aliens Broadcast Season 12 Ep. 2, water boiling in the kettle, my neighbor remodeling his house DIY style so those sounds come through the earth and i can hear them.

If you want to get featured, send a message here on tumblr or an email to [email protected].

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coffeeandcalligraphy · 7 years

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8 things finishing my 8th book taught me

*I wrote this post on the 16th of October, for the record!*

Hey People of Earth!

So just like in the post I wrote up in January when I finished my seventh novel, this is kind of nuts to say, and I didn't think I’d be writing this for another month, but uh.

I finished my eighth book.

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I’m going to quote past me in that particular post (which you can read HERE) because if this isn't scary accurate, I dunno what is:

So I kind of made a stupid, somewhat fleeting goal this past Friday, as I usually do. And that was to finish this book at all costs.

It doesn't *really* surprise me that that I finished my seventh novel, and then my eighth under the same parameters, lol. (Both were finished on Sunday nights too, I believe?)

I genuinely can’t believe this book is over. It’s been eight months of writing this novel (HA eight months for my eighth book) and I can say I’m genuinely so sad it’s over. I walked around today feeling like I lost an important part of myself which is really dramatic seeming as though I just finished the book, but I hope someone out there relates.

I started this book right after finishing my seventh novel (book four in this series), and I’ll be honest--I was so scared about writing this book. Book seven gave me a really hard time, and I almost thought I’d made a mistake in a) continuing this story and b) taking it in the direction I did. I couldn't evade fear when writing this novel. Starting it took me a while because it was so nerve-wracking to think it could be as much of a struggle as the last. I didn't want to fail because I knew if I did, I wouldn't be able to pull myself out of that rut, and then end up with an unfinished series.

Annnnnnd then I started my Doing the Write Thing updates, and all of that worry faded a bit. I started DtWT at a little under 10k words, and reached a little under 160k through that series. It kept me accountable. It excited me, and more than anything, motivated me. I know I mentioned this in DtWT #61, but thank you again for supporting that series so much, and for reading those posts. Genuinely, it means a lot to share my work with you, and to see my work improve as each post passes. I really don't know if I would’ve finished this novel without that series. It really kicked me into the gear of writing again, and gahhhh, thank you again.

FOSTERED #5 houses some of my best work, but most importantly, taught me so, so much, and so, here I bring to you, eight things finishing my eighth novel taught me.

1. I really care about writing.

This is my eighth book, and I can confidently say this is the only one in which I cared about the writing from start to finish. (Sounds strange, but I’ll explain.)While writing is a lot of things, at its core, writing is writing, and it took me eight books to really immerse myself in words and enjoy using them as tools to create something beautiful. I crave beautiful prose—a desire I didn’t really feel until writing this book. Making sentences read and sound like art is what I strive for now.

From books 1-6, writing wasn't my top priority. Telling a story no matter the quality was my priority, and while that isn't wrong, I think working with that mindset for so long wasn't becoming enough for me. I needed to re-evaluate, and really focusing on the craft of writing, rather than storytelling was what I needed. Of course, writing also includes good storytelling, but I feel, looking back on it, that until halfway around book seven, I didn't even think about the writing. I didn't edit it all that much, and most importantly, didn't care about writing. I liked words, yeah, and enjoyed creating the random nice sentence here and there, but I didn't view it as something I could use to create art. Now, good writing means a lot to me, and while I don't think my writing is perfect, and could use improvement, I’m so happy with the improvement I’ve made and the love of actual writing I’ve procured start-to-finish through it. :)

2. Sometimes acceptance takes time.

Book four of this series (my seventh novel) took me a very, very long time to accept, and even after I’d written it, I wasn’t confident in the route I’d taken it. I still had the same worries when writing book five and it took a whole lot of crying to realize that I’m very proud of how these last two books turned out. I’m an emotional person, but don't often show my emotions, so it’s sort of funny looking back how much I cried when writing this book, HA. I had a lot of worries about this novel, and my anxiety was eating me alive every time I wrote it. That was my issue in the beginning, but I found, the more time went on in writing this book, the more I accepted it, and the more I grew to really love it. So, if you’re in a position like me, and you’re seriously not feeling your book, sometimes time is the best remedy.

3. Moments like these are the ones you need to cherish.

When I was writing the last paragraph or so of this book, I got really emotional (lol how do I say that without sounding melodramatic). I didn’t cry or anything, but it felt like I was losing something. It was bittersweet. I’ve never felt this way before when I’ve finished a novel. It’s honestly usually been me moving onto the next book the same day or the next day, or feeling content.

But this… was something else. It was letting go of something I loved so much. I learned through this book that every time you write your book is time you should cherish. It’s something you spend a chunk of your life on. Moments happen around your book, and your book is there with you to experience them. This book in particular holds such a strong place in my heart because it gave me--as cheesy as it sounds lol rip--some new hope.

I learned to love the book I write when I write it even if it’s a pain. To cherish my time with this book, and to take my time. It hurt to finish it, honestly, I guess it’s particularly angsty for me to say I feel this grief for something that hasn't left me. I’m so glad it’s done, but it was like closing the door to a chapter I didn’t want to end. It had to end in that spot, rightfully so, but I wanted to hang onto it for as long as I could. I genuinely appreciate every moment I had to write this book, looking back. And I’m so happy I learned so much through it.

4. Taking your time isn’t a bad thing.

This sort of bounces off that last one, but this is a lesson I learned the hard way. My average drafting time before I wrote my seventh book was 3 months. This book, as I mentioned, took me eight months, and before then, the longest it’d taken me to write a novel was six months, and that was the hardest book I’d ever written. A big issue I had when I was writing book four in this series was that I felt as if taking three months longer than my average to draft was a telling sign that I was struggling with the book. I can pretty much say writing this novel was a bit of a breeze (it had its moments, but overall), and taking my time helped in terms of quality. A disclaimer, the time it takes to write a book varies from writer to writer, so this is completely personal, but I feel like taking a little longer writing this book realllyyyyyyy amped it up in the prose department.

Not to roast past me, but yooooo my older books lacked a lottttttttt of literary merit, like where is the good writing cuz I see none, lol. Not to say this book is amazing and the writing is excellent, but I do see a substantial improvement from my older stuff. So yes, initially when I started writing this book I was keen on finishing it in three months and rushing it so I could just be done and write something else. But as time went on, I realized that there is no rush. Even though I constantly feel at rush in my life (for mental health reasons I don't want to get into now, but if you’re curious, let me know!), I learned to take it slow. Enjoy the writing process, and create something at the end of the day, regardless of how long it takes.

5. I’m growing up.

A common question I posed while writing this book to myself and to my sister was well where did all the fun times go? Books 1-3 in this story are pretty juvenile—more banter between characters, ‘missions’, and so on, but as I aged, I found those things dried up and turned into just straight melancholy? (lol) I don’t have many if any fun times in book five, not in the sense I defined fun times as at least in the past. This series has spanned five books, and three years of my life, so I’ve done a lot of growing up since writing the first one. Its message and morals have gone from super obvious to pretty ambiguous, and the lines of morality have been blurred quite a bit (which I enjoy incorporating into my writing now). Right and wrong aren’t as easily spotted (and tbh this book is totallllyyyyy not suited for a YA audience lol content is hella graphic but), and a lot of it is rooted in the darkest corners of the human mind. I don't know if 13-year-old me would’ve expected these books to wind up in this path, but 16-year-old me is cool with where it is. I left a lot of me in these books, and pretty much grew up with them. It’s strange to have captured so much growth of myself personally in these novels, but this is already something I've learned to cherish.

6. I might actually be a true Pantser (but we’ll see)

So if any of you have been following this blog since the good ol’ 2015 days, it’s common knowledge that I made it clear I was a Pantser. I pantsed everyyyythiiiiingggg. In recent years, I’ve decided to start outlining projects I plan on publishing (for the most part, excluding ALANNIS) just so I can see what I’m getting into before I start. The FOSTERED series, since it’s all personal stuff, isn’t going to be published. I pants these books, but occasionally, and I found this happened a lot more with book five, I’ll write up ‘scene screenplays’ which are basically just the bones of a scene.

OH did I find out that writing with a guideline does noooottttt work for me. I’m not going to say anything here is permanent, but I pretty much realized my writing with my outline VS without one is drastically different... I’m not actually happy about this discovery to be honest, as I've already started outlining a couple projects, and the struggle was so real when writing with an outline for this novel. I really do hope this is not the case, and was just subjective to this book, but yes, this was a major lesson I picked up on when writing this particular book (and I reallllllllyyyyyyyy hope this changes)!

7. I like writing really sad, dark things

This is sorta morbid, I’m sorry, but I’m really into writing all things dark and upsetting and overall, enjoy a darker tone in my writing. I noticed, if I had any ‘happier’ scene, it’d take me a little longer to write/I had more trouble writing it. Don’t know what that says about me, but as someone who is sort of naturally on the darker side (edgy af the edge is real), it makes sense that I do enjoy the not so pleasant sides of the mind, and life. Or, I’m just really angsty, and angst (poetic angst in this book, I’ll say) is all you need. Love is all you need more like angst is all you need.

*angst*

I don't think there’s anything particularly wrong with enjoying writing darker things, and I noted that I often struggle writing joy. Honestly this is just sad, lol. (But I mean look at my boi Edgar, he wrote lots of dark things and I mean that's my dude now speaking of Edgar, the epigraph of this novel [which I’m including, even if the others don’t because epigraphs are aesthetic goals] is an Edgar quote and Edgar is my bro.)

8. I love this book so much, and if I could go back and tell myself I would have when I started it, I would.

I worried a lot when I started this novel. I worried it would fail, that it would get nowhere, that it would end unfinished, that I’d taken it the wrong route, that it would take too long to write, that I wouldn’t enjoy what I was writing, that the plot was dumb, that I focused on the wrong things, that the first chapter wasn’t strong enough, and a whole other laundry list of worries pretty common between writers. I really would go back to my past self and tell her not to worry. To tell her that just because she wrote this book and said she wouldn't, doesn't mean the product would be shitty. I’m genuinely proud of this novel, and I don't know if I’ve said that in a long time. I’m happy I wrote it. Happy I poured eight months of my life into it, and most importantly, am happy it taught me so many valuable lessons. I’m happy I got to connect with you on another level through it, and happy I carried it with me through this stage of my life. It saw my hatred, and my worst moments, my great moments, my worry, and every other emotion I also tried to share on here. Books are books, but this one felt like a friend. I’m sad to lose my friend now, but I’m thankful for the time we spent together. This got all sappy again, but yes. Thank you, book. I will miss writing you, lol.

So that’s it for today’s post. I had a blast writing this. It’s always a nice reflective period to go back in time and really point out what exactly I learned through this journey. I think this novel shaped me a lot as a writer, and I’m happy to move into other projects without it, because I feel like I know a lot more than I did before. Thank you for being on this journey with me, and for reading through everything that happened in these last eight months. I truly appreciate everything you give me, and couldn't express my thanks enough.

Aaaaand before I leave, a mega thanks to my dudes who continuously supported this journey: @sarahkelsiwrites, @sssoto and @shaelinwrites for listening, encouraging, and teaching me so many things about writing.

See you in the next one. :)

--Rachel

#Writing

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zuzuhe · 7 years

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1. Jack’s Sister’s name is “Mary Overland”.

The fandom came up with the fake name “Emma” from either the marvel character named “Emma Frost”, or Emma was just a common name back then. (There have been other nicknames, like Jill as in “Jack and Jill” too.)

Originally when asked, William Joyce said her nickname was “Flee”, but later contradicted himself in saying “Flee” was Tooth’s sister’s name. Either way, “Flee” was merely a nickname. It was later revealed her name in the movie would have been “Mary Overland”. This seems to be the most plausible name because William has a knack for naming characters after his family. His son is named "Jackson”, and his daughter’s name is “Mary Katherine”. I think its safe to say Mary Overland is indeed her true name.

2. Tooth’s Human Form

Tooth was drawn as a human child in the books, but in the “Creating an Epic” (behind the scenes content in the ROTG christmas edition) we see a movie version and an older version of human Tooth animated in 2D at the end of the credits. There have been many conceptual forms of Toothiana, but this is the first human design pushed enough to make it featured near the end of special content. I’d like to consider this human design canon.

3. Tooth’s sister: “Vanish”

Vanish has had a lot of controversy behind her character. William Joyce had stated Tooth has a younger sister named “Vanish”, yet not such character has ever been alluded to in the book series or movie at all. “Flee” was a nickname mistakenly given to Jack’s sister, but William later noted “Flee” was supposed to be associated with Tooth’s sister “Vanish”, which would seem more plausible since ‘Flee’ and ‘Vanish’ have the same meaning.

However, her name “Vanish”, and her existence as a whole is questionable. There have been several other images/contexts in concept arts where this image of ‘Vanish’ is merely a book design of Tooth’s mini fairies; this has also claimed to be merely a concept design of Tooth herself, and there’s also been an odd framed picture of this image with a name plate that reads something along the lines of “Tippy” (?) the Tooth Fairy.

Vanish is by far the strangest case in this fact list. Its unknown whether she truly is canon or not even within the books. Its unknown whether this situation will ever be cleared up.

(also I added a picture I drew of Vanish myself with colors just because I think she’s cute regardless of her controversy)

4. Jamie Bennett’s Parents

Jamie’s mother has a straight up model in the concept art book. However, unbeknownst to many, a concept art image of his father and mother(without glasses) can be found in the ROTG Jamie’s Room Previs Reel here. (scroll down for it) I found this intriguing, for the movie typically keeps the parent’s faces out of view. Also, its worth noting that in that picture, we see another character’s head out of frame to the right next to Jamie, whom I assume is Sophie, but her hair isn’t a light blonde. Also, its interesting to note that Jamie’s mother is considered a single working mom in the official movie. So at some point the ROTG writers must have taken Jamie’s father out of the picture, and I’ve always wondered why.

5. Pitch’s Uniform

In the books, Kozmotis Pitchiner is known as a general. I’ve seen many fan designs of what his armor could possibly look like, but there’s been two concept images of William Joyce’s for Pitch, one of early possession where he still wears his uniform, and one of late possession. These two designs are akin to heavy machinery, and the left one (his golden age uniform supposedly still upon him) looks similar to a pirate with that eyepatch. I wish we see a true untainted golden age Kozmotis drawn by William someday.

6. Jack’s Staff: “Twiner”

It was mentioned a few years ago by William that Jack’s staff was actually alive, and went by the name “Twinetender”, however in his most recent post on instagram, he has now toned down the name to simply: “Twiner”. He is said to be a branch broken from an ancient willow that resides upon an indigenous native american burial ground. Twiner is supposedly a spirit that possesses great strength fueled from the deceased warriors he shared the land with when he was still part of the great willow. In the movie, its clear Jack’s staff is just a piece of wood that amplified his power, like a wizard’s wand, useless without its wielder.

7. Beardless North

(or rather hairless North) is just something I threw in there, since many people, (such as myself) have difficulty figuring out the shape of North’s head when I draw him. Knowing his exact ear and chin shape will help, and it could help people whom wish to draw North younger too, as he were so in the books.

8. Mother Nature’s name

This is actually quite common knowledge, but “Seraphina Pitchiner” is a widely used name for Pitch’s daughter in the books. The ROTG wiki page had proclaimed the name came from William Joyce in one of his interviews, but I, and many others like the wiki admins, have done thorough research and have found no such evidence. “Seraphina” was such an adopted name and very space-like, when her true name came out in the books as simple english ‘Emily-Jane’ many fans became upset and confused. I am unsure if William has been confronted about the ‘Seraphina’ controversy, but in all honesty with his name mishaps that have happened with Jack and Tooth’s sisters so often, I would actually not be surprised if there was indeed a time William claimed her name to be ‘Seraphina’ and later changed his mind. I will edit this post if William comments about this situation. I hope we get clarity sometime for this.

9. Unappreciated Settings

In the “Creating an Epic” and in many concept artist portfolio pages, there’s heavy background concept art that involves Sandman’s original ship/island/cloud, and Bunnymund’s original unnatural tunnel system. There’s even been clearer designs of Pitch’s layer, and Jack’s home town. There was a concept artist hired who even did work for the Nightmare Galleon and golden age space ships for the movie’s early concepts. There’s so many more out there, I hope people appreciate this extensive and intensive world building as much as I do.

10. Unreleased

Its been nearly four and a half years since ROTG was released, and in many behind the scenes videos, I spotted tons of blurry unreleased concept arts that look intriguing and fantastic. Surely there’s other story boards and scenes that have been unreleased out there. Take a look here, this is a bad gif, but its a scene where Pitch appears to be talking in the light:

This is from the “Creating an Epic” , but notice how this wasn’t in the movie, and yet its fully rendered and even as lighting. William Joyce had mentioned a long while ago that Dreamworks actually had shorts in the making of ROTG. One was about Pitch, and the other was about an egg that escaped the Easter Massacre. These shorts were discontinued despite William claiming they were 50 to 70% done, and Dreamworks has refused any further attention to be placed upon their ROTG works. (one of these shorts he claims to be about Man in the Moon, but that was done by HIS studio, not Dreamworks. So its questionable if the Pitch short was really done by Dreamworks or not, but there’s no doubt the egg was by Dreamworks since it was directed by the art director and not William) but now I can say there’s no doubt there IS alternative unreleased material for ROTG out there: shorts, deleted scenes, or otherwise. Its been kept from the fandom for years, which is sad to me. Especially since Dreamworks has made it clear they don’t ever want to come back to this. So all this data and art is just lying around rotting in their studio at this point, when there’s plenty of fans out there who would pay money to just get their hands on one unfinished short released digitally. Hell, I would.

This post is brought to you by the same person who did the GOC / ROTG distinction a long time ago. I meant to make this post forever now, and I’m actually procrastinating from school just to do this haha.... but even though the fandom is kinda dead, ROTG still has a place in my heart, and I feel like many people have just left because there’s no new materials. But the Jack Frost book will soon come out within the next year, and I hope this post sparks some interest and spreads information, since I’ve known many that are confused by William Joyce’s claims lately. But thank you all for reading! <3

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angeltriestoblog · 5 years

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I watched a couple of movies! (Part 1)

Back when I regularly had the luxury of long breaks, I spent my days binge-watching films, as you can see from my extensive knowledge of 80s chick flicks and all the cheesy tropes and disgustingly adorable, predominantly white leading men that come with them. Sadly, a side effect of growing older in the digital age seemed to be the diminishment of my attention span: the only things I could focus on were academic requirements, simply because I had to. But, thanks to several factors—the suspension of online classes, the sudden annoyance I developed towards Barney Stinson that prompted me to discontinue How I Met Your Mother, etc.—I decided it was high time to rekindle this lost love. So, here is an unsolicited review of the 17 films I managed to finish in a little over a week! Rest assured, I tried my best to venture out of familiar territory and brush up on some of the more cultured picks, according to Letterboxd, at least.

Bar Boys (2017, dir. Kip Oebanda) ★★★

The film that kickstarted everything, which I never would have seen if the director had not uploaded the full version on YouTube. This well-meaning tale of four best friends (Carlo Aquino, Rocco Nacino, Enzo Pineda, and Kean Cipriano) and the challenges they face in law school—terror professors, fraternities, and financial difficulties included—does have a lot of heart, and is sensitive enough to show how the effect of this experience differs depending on a student's background. But, what it lacked for me was a certain degree of specificity: I think the same premise would have been applicable in med school, or any other post-graduate degree for that matter. So, why did the characters choose law? I also would have appreciated some commentary on the shortcomings of the country’s justice system, and further fleshing out of the characters so the audience could have seen why we could count on them to fill in the gaps.

Legally Blonde (2001, dir. Robert Luketic) ★★★½

The rating might be surprising, considering that the courtroom scene was responsible for the short law school phase I had in Grade 5. As if I could ever make use of the rules of haircare in an actual cross-examination. Of course, I am compelled to admire Elle (Reese Witherspoon) and how her motivations for going to Harvard shift from winning back a boy to discovering what she never knew she had and using these gifts to help those around her (especially the manicurist, who I feel was given way more exposure than what was due to her). Ultimately, though it was inspirational at some points, it felt too good to be true and impossible to relate to. (But then again, shouldn’t there be a willing suspension of disbelief when consuming forms of media such as this?)

Lady Bird (2017, dir. Greta Gerwig) ★★★★★

I’ll probably end up making a separate post dedicated to this movie and how it singlehandedly called me out, as a sensitive, occasionally self-important product of an all-girls Catholic high school. For now, I am forced to condense my overflowing feelings into a couple of sentences. Lady Bird takes place over the course of the titular character's senior year, a pivotal moment in the lives of all teenagers. But, instead of focusing solely on the formulaic firsts like the normal coming-of-age film would, it shines a light on her dwindling relationship with her equally strong-willed mother. Saoirse Ronan’s colorful performance as the human embodiment of my pre-teen self's conscience, and Greta Gerwig’s tremendous ability to make even oddly specific scenes speak to any viewer shine through and speak to me the most, and easily make this gem something I will be recommending this to anyone who bothers to ask for as long as I live.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018, dir. Bryan Singer) ★★★

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding Bo Rhap, particularly its failure to portray Freddie Mercury in a manner that does him justice. While I understand that it is a valid concern for fans of the band, I admit I don’t know enough about who he was as a person to criticize the film in this aspect. Regardless of its factuality, this still was just average for me, the typical rise-and-fall type of biopic that is indicative of a rockstar’s legacy, but with laughably faulty editing. The redeeming factors were Rami Malek’s brilliant portrayal of the legend himself—his Live Aid performance gave me chills that lasted the entire 20 minutes, how alarming—and, obviously, the soundtrack that I kept on loop for several days.

About Time (2013, dir. Richard Curtis) ★

Apparently, this movie focuses on Tim (Domhnall Gleeson), who discovers at age 21 that the men in his family have the power to time-travel and thus revise and repair certain parts of their lives. He uses this to address the fact that he’s never had a girlfriend, and effectively so as he ends up bagging Mary (Rachel McAdams), a charming American who is the settler in this relationship by default. But, of course, this gift is not without its dire consequences—or at least, that’s what it says on Wikipedia. It’s hard to trash on this and admit that I bailed halfway because so many of my friends swear by this. But, I just couldn’t stomach the lack of chemistry between the two leads; the surprisingly boring dialogue for a screenplay crafted by Richard Curtis of Notting Hill fame; and the story that, although bore enough of a resemblance to “The Time Traveler’s Wife” to be interesting, was still not powerful enough to sustain my attention.

Your Name (2016, dir. Makoto Shinkai) ★★★★★

I’m a huge fan of plots that are sure to make my eyes swell and heart hurt—I can’t explain the psychology behind this either. So when this was recommended to me and I had made it through an hour without shedding a single tear, I was prepared to be disappointed. But, the events leading up to the conclusion proceeded to rip me into shreds, as if to taunt me and say, “You asked for it.” Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi) and Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki), teenagers living on opposite sides of the country, suddenly start switching bodies following the appearance of a comet. This unexplainable phenomenon causes them to forge an unbreakable bond that transcends the very limits of time and space. I know the description is not much, but it’s best to experience this unique plot for yourself. Besides its storyline, its charm lies in its excruciating attention to detail in depicting life in urban and rural Japan, both in the realistic animation of one picturesque scene after another, and the use of cultural elements to arrive at a twist viewers will not see coming.

Booksmart (2019, dir. Olivia Wilde) ★★★★½

I can't summarize what I imagine Booksmart to be for teenagers in the future, so here's an entire scenario: It's the year 2070. Two young girls of around 16 are sprawled on their bedroom floor, watching this on whatever device they use for streaming. (Maybe it's from an LCD projector embedded in their foreheads, who knows.) The credits roll, and they instantly think to themselves, "Man, we were born in the wrong generation!" (They simultaneously think of doing a high-five, and without raising their hands themselves, it happens because that's technology.) Anyway, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) are best friends who played by the rules all throughout high school and realized too late that they could’ve afforded to have a little more fun. On the eve of their graduation, they decide to cram four years’ worth of adventure in a single unpredictable and outrageous night, getting to grips with everything that comes their way in an exceedingly comedic yet refreshing fashion. Also, the protagonists have such a genuine and wholesome relationship: the way they hyped up their most ridiculous looking outfits, or overshared borderline uncomfortable stories is honestly my personal definition of an ideal friendship.

When Harry Met Sally (1989, dir. Rob Reiner) ★★★★½

Despite this film’s constant presence in every “chick flicks you must watch” list I’ve bothered searching up, I spent a huge chunk of my teen years in constant protest against the decision to cast Billy Crystal as the male lead instead of, I don’t know, literally any other actor on the planet. But, once I finished it, I realized that he’s a much better fit than I thought. The laidback Harry to Meg Ryan’s finicky Sally, both of them spare no effort exploring and debunking truths and misconceptions about modern relationships: examples of which are the idea of being high maintenance, and the quintessential question of whether a guy and girl can ever be just friends. Although their dynamic is the definition of slow burn, audiences can’t help but earnestly root for the pair—the frustration brought by the several almosts pay off in the end, as they lead to one of, if not, the most romantic love confession scene.

Hintayan ng Langit (2018, dir. Dan Villegas) ★★★★½

This tale adapted from a play by no less than Juan Miguel Severo is set in purgatory—a grandiose art museum-four star hotel hybrid of sorts—where souls can stop and rest while their papers for entry to heaven are being processed. It is here we meet Manolo (Eddie Garcia) and Lisang (Gina Pareno), ex-lovers with unfinished business. Things admittedly start off a bit slow, but it's understandable since there needs to be ample provision of context regarding the standard operating procedures of this unique waiting area. Once that’s done, the focus stays on the main actors, who drive audiences to tears with their powerful performances, and thought-provoking questions on matters of betrayal, forgiveness, and the afterlife. The ending had me rocking back and forth like a baby, my shirt soaked with tears, so do take heed and stock up on tissues!

The Social Network (2010, dir. David Fincher) ★★★★★

Within its packed first 15 minutes alone, you can easily see what makes The Social Network an example of cinema at its finest: an intoxicated Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) hacks into the websites of all Harvard dorms to create Facebook’s oldest ancestor from scratch, in an attempt to get back at his ex-girlfriend. The atmosphere is tense, the dialogue is loaded with witty one-liners and powerful insight, and the actors are so in touch with their characters they practically fuse into a single person. This remains consistent for the next two hours or so, making for an enjoyable and fast-paced, yet still informative glimpse into the human side of what is arguable the most powerful company of this era. I also heard that it’s much more fun if seen with the cast commentary on, so I’m gonna have to find a copy of that for myself!

Pretty in Pink (1986, dir. Howard Deutch) ★★★★★

I’m cheating here, I know: this has been a long-time favorite, but I guess I can still give a review if I was still 15 when I last saw this. Andie (Molly Ringwald) and Blane (Andrew McCarthy)’s classic “poor girl + rich boy = happily ever after” story is masterfully tackled by John Hughes, who manages to inject equal amounts of swoon-worthy romance and biting criticism of the inherent class divide in society. Others would argue that Duckie (Jon Cryer), Andie’s devoted best friend, is the true star of the show, and while I do agree that he has his shining moments (if you listen closely, you can hear Try A Little Tenderness playing softly in the background), I sadly inherited my mother’s adoration for Andrew, which I will pass on to my child and so on—truly the defining characteristic of our lineage.

St. Elmo’s Fire (1985, dir. Joel Schumacher) ½

I understand that being an adult in the Real World is bound to come with some grave mistakes and lapses in judgment. But, not a single character in this friend group redeems themselves by the end. While Ally Sheedy’s Leslie and Mare Winningham’s Wendy were just borderline forgettable (why did the latter even end up here with the Brat Pack?), Judd Nelson’s Alec cheats on his girlfriend and believes that marriage is what will make him change his ways; Rob Lowe’s Billy neglects the family he didn’t plan on having by fooling around with other women and making a home out of his favorite bar; Demi Moore’s Jules relies on cocaine and extramarital affairs to hide trauma she refuses to process, and Andrew McCarthy’s pretentiously cynical Kevin suddenly claims he knows what love is when Leslie pays attention to him for 10 minutes. But, none of them compare to Emilio Estevez’ Kirby, the sociopath obsessed with a girl he barely knows. It honestly resembles some sick contest of how many problems this gang can cause before they end up behind bars, with the last scene being a lazy and rushed attempt to wrap everything up, in the name of this surface-level “friendship”.

Before Sunrise, Sunset, and Midnight (1995, 2004, 2013; dir. Richard Linklater) ★★★★★

Guess it’s better to admit it now, but I made this post as an excuse to rave about how beautiful this trilogy is, the most authentic depiction of love in its purest form. Sunrise has been recommended to me by both friends and the Netflix algorithm, but I put off watching it again and again and again. I mean, what could I possibly get out of looking at two strangers roam around Vienna? Well, to answer that question: quite a lot. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy)’s relationship spans an entire trilogy, and throughout that period, they manage to define then destroy the idea of having a soulmate to call your own in approximately six hours. But certain constancies are present in each movie: the emotion intense even in the smallest of gestures (you don't understand the anguish I feel when the scene at the listening booth randomly pops in my head), the dialogue truly thought-provoking and natural, the settings so picturesque, and the chemistry of the actors so electric I have trouble believing that the director didn’t actually invade the personal space of a real couple and eventually get issued a restraining order.

High Fidelity (2000, dir. Stephen Frears) ★★

I’d like to think of this as an essay: I'm confident that the introduction is the protagonist Rob's soliloquy on his five biggest breakups to understand why he’s so flawed that everyone always leaves him, and the conclusion his attempt to win his ex Laura (Iben Hjejle) back. But as for the body, I’m not entirely sure. Interspersed between these moments are thoughtful top five lists of anything that can be enumerated, and occasional banter with the employees at his record store that may be charming, but do not enhance the film in any way, shape, or form for me. Also, I normally enjoy seeing John Cusack onscreen, but more often than not, he was nagging in front of the camera instead of talking to the people around him; no wonder his relationships failed!

Scott Pilgrim vs the World (2010, dir. Edgar Wright) ★★★

I wanted to enjoy this so bad, I swear! Sadly, the one thing I gained after seeing this is knowledge of where the “I’m So Sad, So Very Very Sad” meme came from. I get that it’s supposed to resemble a comic book or video game, and maybe the reason why I failed to appreciate this as much is because I was never a fan of either. I found the prolonged action scenes surprisingly boring, the storyline too fantastic, and the whole quest of having to defeat seven monstrous exes for the hand of a manic pixie dream girl not worth it in the end. Although I can’t give it less than three stars given its impressive visual effects, and appeal to the entire Tumblr community (gamers on one end, millennial film connoisseurs on the other), it’s definitely not something I would watch a second time.

There will surely be more where that came from! (I mean it. Since completing this post, I’ve finished another five films.) If you wanna keep tabs on what I’m watching without having to wait on another post, you can give my Letterboxd a follow. Wishing you love and light always, and don’t forget to wash your hands and pray for our frontliners!

#recs #angeltriestoblog #life dump #movies #movies to watch during quarantine #or at least movies I'VE watched over quarantine #so far #17 films are u CRAZY!!!!#i have carpal tunnel #quarantingz

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hrk4 · 5 years

Text

The year that was...

Dear Friends:

Season’s Greetings!

Ten years ago, in December 2010, for the first time I wrote my reminiscences of the year. It was inspired by a short photo-blog that my friend Aditya J. wrote after his first few months in Seoul, where he had been sent onsite. Looking at my work over the past decade through my writings should have evoked in me some sort of emotional response, be it joy or disappointment or pride or despair or even disdain. I read through all the older posts (which, in total, came to around 10,000 words) and by the time I was done, there was a strange feeling of “Ok, fine, but never mind. What next?” It was not apathy, for I undertook most of those activities with genuine interest. It was also not dissatisfaction, because I’ve accomplished a fair deal in ten years given my limitations and circumstances. It was more an acceptance of what has happened without any sentimental coloring added to it. There was inexplicable sense of detachment; a feeling that these memoirs are those of a familiar character but not me.

When I started writing these end-of-the-year e-mails—initially to a small group of family and friends, and later online—there was a need for me to prove to the world that I was indeed doing something of value, especially given that I had quit a mainstream career and was pursuing my interests full-time. It was perhaps a plea, a boast, a shout that was aimed at bringing people’s attention to the fact that I was not wasting my life but actually doing something worthwhile. By the end of the following year, I seem to have realized that it was really pointless trying to prove anything to anybody. However, this cute little exercise in self-awareness was captivating for the sort of perspective it offered me. And I decided to write it again. And again. And again. For ten years on the trot. It is now aimed merely as self-reflection and I post it online simply because there are a few people who have shown interest in browsing through these yearly jottings of mine. Maybe there is yet a self-indulgent streak in me but I suppose this annual drill has a modicum of value.

In the grand—and painfully slow—process of the maturing of the mind, I found (to my utter surprise) that a few precepts that I had known in theory for several years seemed to be slowing blossoming into practice. More and more I moved towards my sva-dharma, my innate nature. I began refusing opportunities, staying away from certain people, avoiding particular institutions, putting a stop to certain activities – basically saying No! to anything that took me away from my natural temperament. I was also privy to several episodes in the lives of my friends where they suffered a great deal simply because they went against their fundamental nature. Only now do I truly understand what Krishna said in the Gita when he said, “The dharma of another is dangerous!” I also began realizing the value of being more inclusive and getting work done rather than trying to do everything myself. I ended up doing something that I had deemed impossible when I was a college freshman.

One accomplishment that I’m genuinely glad about this year is losing fifteen pounds (at least it sounds more than seven kilograms!) Mostly thanks to the persistence of my friend Shreesha and the good nature of people around me who allowed me to act whimsical with regard to food and pushed me to exercise. Another is the publication of the Bhagavad-Gita Audiobook, which appears as a series on Shaale. I had recorded this with Jurgen Nigli and Somsubhra Banerjee in 2015–16 but had somehow not found the time to edit and bring it out. I’ve started publishing it from Gita-Jayanti 2019 and it will run as a series with 20+ episodes (a new episode every Saturday).

This year I was involved with the production of quite a few books, the prominent ones being Art Gallery of Memories – Volumes 1, 2, 3 (by D V Gundappa), Evolution of the Mahabharata (by S R Ramaswamy) and Shiva Rama Krishna (by Shatavadhani Dr. R Ganesh). I designed a bunch of books and also worked on the digitization of portions of some Sanskrit texts. I made my Kannada writing debut with an essay I co-wrote with my friend Vikram for the anthology ‘ನಿರ್ಲಿಪ್ತಿ.’ I got a chance to present a few lectures and workshops through the course of the year for variegated audiences on different topics. I also attended two excellent workshops on Indian temple art and architecture.

My unfinished projects and failed schemes are, quite naturally, far more in number but I’ve learnt not to take those too seriously. One year’s failure is another year’s success. One year’s incompleteness is another year’s discretion. This became amply clear when upon the request of my colleague I prepared my curriculum vitae after a gap of seven years.

In April 2019—along with a group of friends—I completed reading the five-volume pièce de résistance of Bharat Ratna Pandurang Vaman Kane – History of Dharmaśāstra, which runs into some six thousand pages. The study group started in October 2016 and met once every week. We read fifty pages before every session and met every Wednesday night for a few hours, discussing the nuances with rich insights provided by all participants. I continue to be a part of several study groups with friends, which is really a wonderful way to spend ‘social time’ without feeling guilty for having wasted the hours and yet having a great deal of fun. As part of these study groups, I got the chance to read two classics – Macbeth and Parva. महापुरुषसंसर्गः कस्य नोन्नतिकारकः? (When has the company of a great person ever failed to elevate the lives of others?)

A few months after I finished reading the History of Dharmaśāstra, I had the golden opportunity to meet P V Kane’s grandson in Pune (along with my friends Kashyap and Raghavendra). He shared wonderful stories about his grandfather and was glad to hear about our study group that read the entire work from cover to cover. Sudha Murty, the chairperson of the Infosys Foundation had invited the Prekshaa team for dinner to her home and we had a great time interacting with her as well as with N R Narayana Murty and Rohan Murty about a variety of topics related to culture. Along with my friends Arjun and Kashyap, I had the great fortune of visiting Dr. S L Bhyrappa’s home twice this year.

I had the remarkable experience of encountering the works of two great artistes of our time: I saw a couple of dance concerts of Dr. Padma Subrahmanyam, who is a phenomenon in the world of dance and culture. No music, no film, no drama can come anywhere close to watching her perform live. I say this as an ardent connoisseur of all these arts. I got the chance to see the paintings of Sri. G L N Simha and also meet him briefly. A most unassuming man, he has painted some of the finest works related to Indian traditional texts.

2019 was a year of meeting several friends (who don’t live in Bengaluru) and of making new friends. It was also a year of losing many elderly relatives and friends. We can’t avoid old age and death but we sure can prepare for it better.

As always, my year is incomplete without a certain amount of travelling. Apart from trips to Ajanta-Ellora, Belur-Halebidu, Chennai, Harihara, Hampi, Kanchipuram, Mysuru, Panjim, Pune, and other smaller towns and villages, I had the chance to visit two important pilgrim centers – Prayagraj for the Ardh-Kumbh Mela and Kanchipuram for the darshana of Atthi-varadar. Although I’m rather faithless in many ways, it was fascinating to see the devotion in millions of our people. It is rather discouraging when I come face to face with the truth that simple faith of the so-called ignorant masses is what keeps Sanatana-dharma alive and not the kind of stuff that I do. That said, I can’t not do what I do because my joy lies here :)

I look forward to 2020 with a hope to cultivate more focus, more stillness of mind. Can I be happier for longer? How can I be more mindful on a daily basis? Can I live with lesser? How can I best choose my projects? – these are the sort of questions I shall probably be grappling with through the year.

One more year has whizzed past. Perhaps I’m just getting used to the speed. Or perhaps I’m somewhat more confident of slowing down in the future. Who knows what’s in store! I smile as I look towards tomorrow.

Wishing you and your family a joy-filled, healthy, and prosperous new year!

Cheers, Hari

PS: At the start of the year, India’s political situation was rather dicey. The country was going to have the once-in-five-years Lok Sabha elections. PM Narendra Modi had done a decent job during his first tenure (2014–19) and there was not a single leader in any party (including his own) who came close to him in terms of either integrity or skill in implementation. The opposition parties were threatening to unite across board with the sole agenda of defeating Modi. Inspired by what Dr. S L Bhyrappa told me and my friends when we met him in 2018, I called for a meeting of a few friends on Republic Day 2019. We all had the same goal: to get Modi re-elected in 2019. To ensure that we don’t have a hung parliament and to give another chance to a politician who had done something positive after ten long years of absolute corruption, deceit, and anti-nationalism, we wanted to work in our own humble way. Starting from that meeting on a warm Saturday afternoon, we went a long way in our campaign. It was entirely funded and run by volunteers who came together of their accord. What we did in terms of the details is unnecessary here but it came as a huge relief that Modi & co. stormed back into power in May 2019. The extraordinary work that they have done in the past six months makes me feel that everything we did during those early months of the year was worth it. Things are not perfect but at least we can be happy that the best people among the ones available to us have been elected to the highest offices of the country. I don’t know what value I added in the process but the process added a lot of value to me!

#memoirs #newyear

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