#i just tend to like giving myself as much time at the mfa as possible bc i'm slow lol

[ellcrys]

usually when i leave the mfa at 5 it's still sunny and/or golden hour and i get a nice beautiful walk in the city before heading home but i just realized today it'll be pitch fucking black when i leave at 5 i'm crying

[recurring-polynya]

@trulytaka​ asked: um i’ve always dreamt about a tattoo artist!renji falling for a client AU. it’s okay if you can’t come up with anything, just a suggestion!

How is it even possible that I have never read a Tattoo Artist! Renji AU?? (If there is one, please, send it to me immediately). Anyway, I got way too enamored of this idea, this is not even remotely a drabble, it is 4400 words and it is incredibly self-indulgent, I am absolutely not sorry.

It takes place in America and everyone is Japanese-American, because I am way more comfortable writing about American tattoo culture. I have never actually read a Tattoo Artist AU, I don’t know how they are supposed to go, this is just based on my own experiences getting inked. It’s mostly a story about Rukia and Renji being incredible nerfballs, there are not nearly enough stories about Rukia being a nerfball around Renji.

Read on ao3 or ff.net

💀     🛹     💕

Izuru Kira found Renji Abarai in the break room, simultaneously trying to cram a burrito into his face and read a Hellboy comic. He was holding the comic open with his elbow in an attempt to avoid spilling guacamole on Abe Sapien.

“Your two o’clock is here,” Izuru informed his distinguished colleague.

“Oh, great!” Renji replied, creasing the foil wrapper into a spout so that he could pour the last of the salsa drippings into his mouth.

“She’s waiting in the consult room,” Izuru went on, watching Renji toss the crumpled foil ball across the room, completely missing the trash can. “Look, have you met her before? A Miss Kuchiki?”

“Just exchanged a few emails,” Renji replied, as he scrubbed his hands at the sink. “Why? Is she scary?”

“Not in the usual way of Abarai clients,” Izuru replied. “I was just… wondering if she was... in the right place.”

“Her request was very specific,” Renji replied, scooping up his comic and the manila folder underneath it. “In fact, I am quite proud of what I came up with for her.” He whipped the folder open.

Izuru stared at it for a moment. “That is so specific.”

“I honestly think this is one of the best tatts I have ever designed. I hope she’s a real weirdo, because not just anyone deserves a masterpiece of this caliber.”

“Mmm,” Izuru agreed. “Yeah. Anyway, if there’s been a, uh, miscommunication, see if you can just… redirect her. Both Momo and I are in today, okay?”

Renji scoffed and stuffed his comic in Izuru’s hand as he marched down the hall toward the consult room. A miscommunication. Renji wondered what was wrong with her. She was probably mousy and wore glasses. Izuru always assumed girls like that would rather have a sad poem about the sea or a sprig of herbs inked on her wrist (conveniently, his specialties). Plenty of mousy girls with glasses would rather rock some fangs or dripping daggers, in Renji’s professional experience.

“Knock knock!” he announced, as he slid the door open. He took one step into the room and stopped dead.

Rukia Kuchiki was not mousy. She did not wear glasses.

Renji didn’t know much about suits. He did not happen to own one himself. But he guessed that Rukia Kuchiki’s suit was expensive, in part because it fit her perfectly, despite her tiny frame. It was jet black, and didn’t have a single speck of lint or cat hair on it. Her perfectly manicured hands were folded neatly on top of her crossed legs. She was wearing very tall, very pointy heels. Their soles were bright red, which Renji had learned from television meant that they were super expensive. He realized that he probably shouldn’t be looking at her legs, even though they were very nice to look at. His eyes snapped up to her face, but that honestly wasn’t any better.

Renji wasn’t often attracted to women, but she had probably the most interesting face he had ever seen-- heart-shaped, with big, dark eyes, a sharp chin, the cutest little nose. Her make-up was subtle and professional, and her hair was swept up with a clip, although it must be fairly short, because a few pieces hung down in front of her ears, and a thick lock dangled between her eyes.

She looked like a mean lawyer from a movie, one that would drive a fancy sportscar like an act of violence. Scary, for sure. But not in the usual way of Abarai clients, who tended toward the large and beefy, not that sharp and sharklike.

That nose, though.

Suddenly, her face split into a big grin. “Hi,” she announced brightly. “I’m Rukia Kuchiki.” She had a deep voice, a very beautiful voice. “You must be Renji Abarai.” Her eyes flicked to his arms. “I mean, of course you are, who else would have those arms? They’re so cool.”

“My arms?” Renji said stupidly. “Are they… famous?”

Rukia’s cheeks flushed. “Oh, well, I follow you on Instagram, and you don’t have any pictures of your face, but your arms are in a lot of the shots and they’re, well, they’re kinda distinctive. Do you think, um, would you mind if I looked at them?”

Renji’s eyebrows shot up. It’s not like he wasn’t used to having his arms checked out, but most people were more… subtle about it. Oh, well, it was her dime. “I didn’t do them myself, obviously,” he pointed out, rolling up the sleeves of his t-shirt so she could see the baboon skull on his left shoulder. A skeletal arm traced down the rest of that arm, complete with an outline of his own hand bones. On the right side, a snake spine coiled around his bicep, ending with a hissing skull. “I mean, it was my design, but my friends-- the other three tattoo artists here-- all helped ink me up.” He plopped down in the chair that sat catty corner to the couch where Rukia was sitting, and held his arms out. “We’re sort of a full-service studio. I’m the skeletons and monsters guy. Izuru, the guy you met on desk duty today-- is good at calligraphy and watercolors and little, itty bitty tattoos. Momo is our nature girl, she specializes in flowers and animals, and she’s great with bright colors. The snake skull was all her. Shuuhei is really into classic tattoo art-- you need a hula girl or a heart with an arrow through it, he’s your man. He’s also incredibly talented at revamping old regret tattoos, there’s good money in that.”

“Mm,” Rukia agreed, finally tearing her eyes away from his forearms to look up at his face, and abruptly turned even pinker. A lot of people fantasized about getting a tattoo and then got a bad case of nerves when it was time to make the leap. Maybe all this was way out of her comfort zone. Renji was trying his best to be friendly and chatty, which usually helped, but he was not used to dealing with this class of lady. He hoped he wasn’t coming off as too familiar.

“Actually,” Rukia went on, pulling on her fingers nervously. “I picked this place specifically because of you. For your work, I mean. I’m kind of a big fan. I saw some of your paintings at an exhibition over at the Fine Arts College, and I just, you know, fell in love. I’d always thought I’d like to get a tattoo someday, and when I found out that you were a tattoo artist, I knew it had to be you. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, and I’m babbling and I’m really sorry, I’m just very excited.”

Renji blinked. “You’re not babbling,” he replied slowly. He was sort of hoping she might say some more things about how much she liked his art in her beautiful voice. “Wait, an exhibition at the art school? That must have been at least three years ago, when I was doing my MFA.”

“Er, right,” Rukia looked a little sheepish. “A friend of mine had some work in the same exhibit, you probably don’t know her. My favorite one of your paintings was the one with the Black Lagoon creatures eating hamburgers at a diner, but I also really liked the one that was like a huge monster with a big bone mask stalking through a city, the way you did the shadows was just incredible.”

That particular painting was currently wrapped in brown paper and stuffed behind Renji’s couch. His last boyfriend had told him it was “creepy.”

“Uh, glad you liked it,” Renji managed. “Who was your friend?”

“Her name is Inoue. Orihime Inoue.”

“Oh, the robot girl!” Renji exclaimed. “Er, I mean she drew robots. Constantly. For every assignment. I didn’t mean to imply she was… robotic. In any way.” Jeez, Abarai, pull it together, he chided himself. “Yeah, I remember her. I didn’t know her well, but she sure could draw some tight robots. Is, she, uh, doing well?”

“She’s doing storyboards for a stop-motion animation studio,” Rukia replied.

Renji smiled. “That sounds perfect for her.”

Rukia bit her bottom lip and Renji’s throat went dry.

“So, um, you said in your email that you would have a design for me to look at?”

Renji realized that he was gripping the folder like a doofus. “Right! I did a couple of variations,” he explained, passing it from one hand to the other. “But you explained the concept pretty clearly, and I’m really happy with how the first one came out. I mean, obviously, it’s your tattoo! Please give me any feedback you have, you won’t offend me, even if you hate it! Tattoo designs often take a few iterations, it’s very normal, don’t hold back.”

She was staring at him, those big eyes wide and sparkling. “Can I… see it?”

“Oh! Right!” He shoved the folder at her.

Rukia opened it up and gasped.

“I especially love the way you draw skeletons,” Rukia’s email had read. “Do you think you could tattoo a grim reaper doing a sick kickflip on a skateboard onto my outer bicep? I do lift, so I am pretty jacked, if that makes a difference.”

“It’s perfect,” Rukia sighed in a tiny voice.

“Um, in the first variation (that’s page 2) I added some sunglasses, and in the second one, the grim reaper is flipping the bird and also its head is on fire. I guess I thought that grim reapers should be gender neutral but now I’m wondering if you would have preferred more of a… lady grim reaper?” Renji yammered absently.

“Oh, no,” Rukia murmured softly, flipping through the pages. Renji wasn’t even sure she had listened to a word he had said. “These are amazing. I love the sunglasses, but I also like the way you put little flames in the eye sockets in the first one…” She waved a hand absently. “Oh, and don’t worry, I like a non-binary skeleton.”

A small problem had just occurred to Renji. “Hey, um, please don’t take this the wrong way, but I… may have overestimated the size of your arms.”

“Oh?” Rukia asked, and abruptly shucked off her expensive suit jacket. She was wearing a pale purple sleeveless silk blouse underneath. She held one arm out experimentally, and then flexed. The muscle definition on her bicep made Renji take an involuntary swallow, but the fact that she was wicked cut did not buy him much in the way of real estate.

“I’ll just shrink it down maybe 25%,” he reassured her. “I’ll have to simplify some of the detail on--”

“No,” Rukia frowned, her eyebrows drawing together. “Don’t do that.” She thought for a moment. “I’m not committed to having it on my arm.” She uncrossed her legs and hefted one high-heeled foot onto the coffee table in front of her. “What do you think? Is my thigh big enough?”

Renji tried to make words come out, but it just wasn’t happening.

“Er… sorry,” Rukia said slowly, tugging at her hem. “I forgot I was wearing a skirt today.”

“Huh?” Renji scrambled to recover. He needed to say something. She looked really embarrassed. Say something! Say something professional about her leg! “Sorry, I was, uh, thinking!” Good, good, now keep going. “Don’t be self-conscious, I see people’s bodies all the time. Bodies are no big deal, we all got ‘em, right?” This was true in the abstract sense, but he knew these were blatant lies as they exited his mouth. Most people’s bodies were no big deal. He had only known her for five minutes, but was certain that Rukia Kuchiki’s thighs were a very big deal. He studied her leg, stroking his chin, like he was some kind of anthropologist of thigh tattoos. Mostly he was trying to figure out what would seem like an appropriate amount of time to look at a person’s thigh, a person who was your professional client that you most definitely did not have the hots for. “There’s certainly plenty of room,” he declared. “But, you know, people are going to see it less. Which is a selling point for some people! It’s just a personal decision that you’ll have to make. It sounds like you had a big vision.”

Rukia gingerly placed her foot back on the floor. “I had actually been wondering if maybe the upper arm was too public, anyway,” she admitted. “The fact is, I just got full access to my trust fund, and this is sort of a celebration, but I may have been a little overeager to piss off my big brother. He’s very stodgy.” She contemplated the area of her leg that was covered by her pencil skirt. “But so are a lot of people in my field. I can wait until I’m running my own company before I get started on the full sleeve of my dreams, right?”

“Worked for me,” Renji replied, utterly lost by whatever she was talking about. “What… field are you in?”

“Oh, finance,” she dismissed.

Finance. Of course. Renji tried to shoo away the weight of disappointment that was settling in his stomach. He was talking to a friendly client who was clearly loaded, loved his work, and was contemplating thousands of dollars worth of future business. He should be thrilled. He should probably be trying to sell her one of his old paintings-- they were only gathering dust, anyway. Renji would never break the studio policy about hitting on clients. The fact that she would surely laugh at him if he asked her to his favorite burger joint ought to make things easier, right?

“This is so hard!” Rukia declared, and Renji was shaken from his reverie. She was just contemplating his draft designs again, though, flipping back and forth between them.

“You don’t have to decide right now,” he reassured her. “You can think about it and email me. If you’re happy enough, we can schedule your session, and we’ll work out the details between now and then. Chat it over with your pal MechaHime, she’s got good opinions.” He paused. Momo always said he was too nice during consults, they were running a business, but he couldn’t help it. “Or you can just call back when you’re ready. No pressure.”

Rukia slammed her fist down on her knee. “No! Let’s schedule it! Do I pay now?”

“20% deposit. Let’s go out front, Izuru will ring it up.”

“Perfect.” She looked longingly at the drawings again. “Can I take these with me? You’re absolutely right, Orihime will know what to do.”

Renji wrinkled his nose. “It’s actually against studio policy but…”

Rukia’s face suddenly became very serious. “Then it’s against policy.” She winked at him and smiled. “You should take care of your intellectual property, Mr. Abarai.”

“I never get over to this part of town, to be honest,” Rukia admitted as they walked back up to the front. “Is the taco place across the street any good?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s great,” Renji agreed. “Momo and I painted a huge mural on their wall, so they give us free churros.”

“Are tacos a good post-tattoo celebratory meal?” Rukia asked curiously.

“Well, you actually want to eat beforehand,” Renji pointed out. “It’s important to keep your energy up. I don’t estimate yours should take very long, I’m gonna book you a two-hour slot.”

“Ah, okay,” Rukia agreed, and Renji realized belatedly that...maybe… she had been asking him out? No. Surely not. His brain scrabbled for a response, but then he stepped into the reception area and his brain shut down entirely.

“It’s DONE!” Shuuhei bellowed. “Behold my work, ye mighty, and despair!”

Tetsuzaemon Iba, serial client, yakuza enthusiast, and assistant manager at a doggie day care, was flexing. He was not wearing a shirt.

From behind the reception desk, Kira was wearing a dour frown and shaking his head.

“It’s a masterpiece,” Renji declared. “I admit I was skeptical, but it looks fantastic, man. You happy with it?”

“It” was a massive tattoo, covering the wide landscape of Iba’s broad back. It featured a lucky cat, grinning maniacally, its paw held high. It was on fire. The kanji for “lucky charm” was incorporated somehow. It was a disaster. It was perfect.

“How could I not be?” Iba boomed.

“Whoa,” a tiny voice behind Renji said.

Iba’s face went pale when he realized that he was being Peak Iba in front of an elegant, professional woman whose shoes probably cost more than his entire net worth. “Gimme me my shirt!” he demanded of Shuuhei.

“That’s… amazing!” Rukia exclaimed, her face lighting up. “Wow, how long did that take?”

Shuuhei blinked slowly as he passed Iba his shirt. “Five sessions.”

“Well, it’s so cute!” Rukia announced. “You must love cats.”

Iba lifted at the same gym as Renji and watched Momo’s Pomeranian on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He was a regular fixture at the tattoo studio, and all four of them liked to drag him, but no one, none of them, had ever roasted him this hard. Renji cursed that no-asking-out-clients rule, because he wanted to buy Rukia Kuchiki her own body weight in tacos and then ask her to be his wife.

“He’s more of a dog person,” Shuuhei supplied.

“Great with dogs,” Izuru added.

“Shut up, you jerks, I am a lover of all animals,” Iba grumbled as he pulled his Hawaiian shirt over his shoulders. “Is this your lawyer, Abarai? Did you finally get arrested for that hairstyle?”

“I have an MBA, actually, not a JD,” Rukia replied matter-of-factly. “And I am his client. Can you show that large man my tattoo design? Is that allowed?”

Renji chuckled, and pulled out his drawing.

“That,” Iba declared, “is a wicked tatt.”

“Oh, you showed me that email!” Shuuhei recalled. “It came out great.” He regarded Rukia. “He was really excited about that one, you made his day.”

Rukia just beamed proudly.

“Are we booking a session, then?” Izuru asked hopefully.

“Yeah, two hours,” Renji nodded.

“Let me just finish ringing up Iba, and I’ll see when you’ve got an opening,” Izuru replied.

“This your first one?” Shuuhei asked Rukia conversationally.

“Mm-hmm,” Rukia nodded.

“Well, you made a good choice. Clean design, mostly black with just a few color pops, should go on quick and easy, and it’ll hold up really well, too.”

“This is Shuuhei, the one I was telling you about, who fixes a lot of bad tattoos.”

“I have never had to fix an Abarai tattoo,” Shuuhei declared. “He’s great with first timers. Very gentle. I’ve fallen asleep while he was inking me.” Shuuhei pointed to the pair of crossed scythes gracing his upper arm. “This is one of his.”

“Oooh, neat!” Rukia agreed.

“You’re being embarrassing,” Renji informed his friend.

“Always,” Shuuhei agreed. “Nice to meet you! I hope I get to see the finished product.” He waved to Iba as he headed off toward the back. “Don’t forget to moisturize!”

“Everyone’s so friendly here,” Rukia said softly to Renji. “This isn’t at all like I pictured it.”

Renji stretched his arms behind his head. “Nah, we’re just a bunch of goofballs who like drawin’ on people. Very lowkey.”

“I guess I’ve thought a lot about the getting tattooed part of getting tattooed, but I never thought of it as… a job. That people have.”

“It’s a great job,” Renji replied. “I love it. I’m just lucky that Izuru over there has enough business sense to keep the other three of us from running it into the ground.”

“That’s certainly the truth,” Izuru agreed, as Iba headed out the door. “Two hours, you said? Renji’s got a 4-6pm block open on a Wednesday, three weeks from now. The 24th, how does that work for you, Ms. Kuchiki?”

“Do you think that’s enough time to settle on a design?” Renji asked. “If you come up with changes, it should only take me a day or two to incorporate them.”

“Oh! Yes, three weeks should be fine. I thought… it might be a little sooner,” Rukia replied, sounding a tad disappointed.

“Abarai’s a busy man, three weeks is actually pretty quick,” Izuru explained.

“Right, of course!” Rukia nodded. “Yes, I’ll take the 24th!”

She then paid her deposit, a process which involved her taking approximately ten thousand items out of her purse, including a full-sized drawing pad, a single fingerless glove, and a Pez dispenser with a duck head. She was the most contradictory person Renji had ever met, and he just wanted to know everything about her. But instead, they were going to exchange a couple of emails about a grim reaper on a skateboard, he was going to spend an hour and a half two inches from her naked thigh in a state of intense, non-sexual concentration, and then he would likely never see her again.

“Okay, I guess that’s it!” Rukia said, stuffing the last of her worldly belongings back into the purse. “Three weeks, then!”

“Three weeks it is,” Renji agreed. “Unless we happen to run into each other at the taco place.”

Rukia blinked. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Right. Ha, ha, of course!” She’d been walking backwards toward the door, an impressive feat in those heels, and she spun suddenly to pull it open.

“It’s a push,” Renji and Izuru chorused together.

“Ha, ha, of course it is!” Rukia laughed nervously, and ducked out.

Izuru stared pointedly at Renji. “Wow,” he said.

“I don’t know what you have against her,” Renji scowled. “So she’s professional. She was really nice. She’s a big fan of my work.”

Izuru cocked his head. “She’s clearly also a big fan of you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Renji said.

“Look, I’m sorry I implied that a person who drives a Lotus Exige would not be interested in having your weird skeleton doodles permanently placed on her body,” Izuru held up his hands, “but did you really not notice the little hearts and singing birds floating around her head every time she gazed longingly at you?”

“Since when do you know anything about cars?” Renji snapped.

“It looked fancy and I asked Shuuhei what it was, okay!”

On cue, Shuuhei burst back into the reception area, Momo close on his tail. “Are we talking about the hot client who has a crush on Abarai?”

“Did you ask her out?” Momo asked breathlessly.

“She’s not really his type,” Izuru mused. “Very corporate.”

Renji frowned. Did he have a type? If his type excluded people like Rukia Kuchiki, he might need to get a new type.

“Who cares, she was adorable!” Momo insisted. “I woulda asked her out.”

“Renji, if you go out with her, can you get me a ride in the Exige?” Shuuhei added.

“I’m not gonna ask her out!” Renji protested. “What happened to the no-hitting-on-clients rule?”

“The rule is no creeping on clients,” Shuuhei correctly. “This is different. She’s clearly into you, big time.”

“Also, she seems non-terrible, unlike the questionable human beings you usually take up with,” Izuru pointed out. “We could relax the rule if it netted you an actually decent partner for a change.”

Renji scowled judgmentally at Izuru, as if his own dating history had been remotely better before he and Shuuhei finally hooked up.

“Oh!” Momo waved her phone. “Speaking of which, I googled her, like you told me to, Izuru--”

“Izuru!” Renji protested.

“--and you were right! She’s not just one of the Kuchikis, she’s the granddaughter!” Momo thrust her phone in Renji’s face. It was some article about some fancy charity event, complete with a picture that was clearly Rukia, dressed in a dramatic black and gold evening gown.

Renji wanted to push Momo’s hand away, but he also didn’t want to stop looking at Rukia in that dress. “The who?” he asked.

Izuru and Momo sighed dramatically in synchronized exasperation.

“Embarrassingly rich old money family? I don’t know what they actually do, but they’re always in the newspapers, donating money for something or other--”

“Billionaire philanthropists,” Shuuhei intoned in a fake deep voice.

“--I heard they’re descended from some famous clan of samurai back in Japan,” Momo ignored him. She jerked her phone back and started tapping at it frantically. “I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of the grandson-- Rukia’s brother, I guess. He always makes those lists of top ten hottest bachelors.”

“He’s dreamy,” Shuuhei seconded.

“Impossibly dreamy,” Izuru thirded.

Momo flipped her phone around again, to reveal a picture of a very serious, and very handsome man in a classic three-piece wool suit. Renji supposed “impossibly dreamy” was not an inaccurate description.

“Yeah, I think I’ve seen pictures of that guy before,” Renji shrugged. “He’s okay. Rukia has a more interesting face, I think.”

Momo and Shuuhei exchanged raised eyebrows.

“You do like her, then?” Izuru asked, his face brightening. “You’re wrong, by the way, Byakuya Kuchiki has the face of an angel.”

“Rukia says he’s stuffy,” Renji shrugged. “And fine. I like her. She’s cute and nice and had good taste in tattoos. What’s not to like?”

“Are you gonna ask her out, then?” Momo pressed.

“Absolutely not,” Renji replied. “She’s my client. Besides, as you just pointed out, she’s loaded. What’s she want with a scumbag like me?”

All three of his friends groaned.

“You have good delts and sexy hair,” Izuru pointed out.

“You give amazing hugs!” Momo declared.

“You draw fantastic skeletons,” Shuuhei added. “Which, apparently, is relevant to her interests, and not a thing you usually find on Tindr.”

“Also, we’ve already established that she does like you, regardless of whether she has a valid reason for doing so,” Izuru concluded. “So, if you’re at all interested, you really shouldn’t let that stop you.”

“I think you should go for it,” Momo encouraged.

“Me, too,” Shuuhei agreed.

Renji grimaced. She was an amazing girl, too good to be true probably. If she had any sense at all, she would certainly turn him down. But maybe… just maybe… she didn’t have any sense. “Okay,” he grudgingly agreed. “I’ll do it. But not until I’m finished the damn tattoo!”

[hardnoctlife]

About Me

Me: Oh, sweet, I have time to write on my WIP!

My brain: Let’s answer these author-asks instead that NOBODY asked for:

Fandom Questions

1.       What was the first fandom you got involved in?

FIRST, first? InuYasha! First one I wrote actual fanfiction for? I think that was Yu Yu Hakusho.

2.       What is your latest fandom?

Final Fantasy XV (if you couldn’t already tell.)

3.       What is the best fandom you’ve been involved in?

Final Fantasy XV. I haven’t met a person I don’t like! Generally everyone is super nice and supportive.

4.       Do you regret getting involved in any fandoms?

Supernatural, maybe?? Only because they killed it with too many seasons…and there are some pretty weird fans.

5.       Which fandoms have you written fanfiction for?

Final Fantasy XV, Final Fantasy VII, Legend of Zelda, Yu Yu Hakusho, Rurouni Kenshin, InuYasha…maybe some others when I was younger?

6.       What are your OTPs from your current fandom?

Promptis and Gladnis

7.       List your NoTPs from your current fandom

ArdNoct is my least favorite, but everyone is SO shippable…

8.       How did you get involved in your latest fandom?

One of my good friends, Claudia, was obsessed with the game so when I finally got a PS4 I started playing and got hooked! I’ve played final fantasy games since I was young so I was already a fan of the others.

9.       What are the best things about your current fandom?

I know there are dark sides to every fandom, but seriously, FFXV is the most kind and receptive fandom I’ve ever been a part of. I have a discord group chat with several people and we talk all day, everyday about anything and everything and I’ve made some really good friends from it. I wouldn’t trade it for the world!

10.   Is there a fandom you read fic from but don’t write in?

I’m actually not a huge reader of fanfiction (I know, it’s awful), but that’s because I’m too busy writing my own! I do read FFXV fanfiction that gets recommended to me though.

Author Questions

11.   What’s the first fanfic you ever wrote?

It was waaaaay back in high school. I can’t remember much, but I know it was a YYH high school AU.

12.   Is there anything you regret writing?

Eh. Not really. I had fun with everything I’ve done so that’s what’s important, even if my skill was cringy back in the day.

13.   Name a fic you’ve written that you’re especially fond of and explain why you like it. 

Insomnia High School! (Really, my whole FFXV high school series). It’s the first set of long-fics I’ve written in probably over a decade, and I wrote them while recovering from knee surgery, which kept me sane because I’m a super active person and not being able to do anything had me depressed. IHS I’m particularly fond of because it’s a little edgier and I got to feature Zidane from FFIX who is probably one of my favorite video game characters of all time! Also, it’s my longest fic I’ve written, but it was maybe the easiest for me to get through. It really just flowed for me, and even though it’s not my most popular, I put a lot of heart into it. 

14.   What fic do you desperately need to rewrite or edit?

Probably Dawn of the Godslinger, simply because it was the first fic I wrote after a ten-year hiatus from writing!

15.   What’s your most popular fanfic?

Rain or Shine and Everything In-Between. It’s probably my second favorite thing that I have written, and it was definitely the most fun to write out of all my current works.

16.   How do you come up with your fanfic titles?

Uh… they just come to me? Some are pretty straightforward (like Insomnian Academy for the Elite), and then for others I try to pick the main theme and come up with something witty, like Rain or Shine and Everything In-Between, which is meant to reference all the different domestic life scenarios and the ‘slice of life’ vibe. 

17.   What do you hate more: coming up with titles or writing summaries?

SUMMARIES. God, they suck. I’m really not sure why they are so hard, but I struggle with them at times.

18.   If someone were to draw a piece of fanart for your story/stories, which story would it be and what would it be a picture of?

I have been blessed with talented artist friends who have done fanart for several of my works! If I’m being selfish though, I really want some from Rain or Shine or The Long and Short of It All with all the bros being cute and silly.

19.   Do you have a beta reader? Why/why not?

My wife is an editor with an MFA so she is my beta reader/editor (I’m very lucky). Overall, I think it’s important to have someone check your work and give you objective feedback. No one is perfect and there is always room for improvement.

20.   What inspires you to write?

There are endless possibilities in my fandom…it’s pretty easy to stay inspired. But really, I just enjoy it.

21.   What’s the nicest thing someone has ever said about your writing?

I have received a lot of super nice comments… I think I enjoy when people are inspired to write or draw their own stuff because of something I wrote! Also, when people told me they cried or FELT some sort of strong emotion, that’s the greatest compliment.

22.   Do you listen to music when you write or does music inspire you?

Omg YES. Music inspires me more than anything else. I have playlists for just about every fanfic I write! I’ll often listen to a playlist on repeat while I’m writing or throughout the day when I’m brainstorming ideas.

23.   Do you write oneshots, multi-chapter fics, or HUUUUUGE epics?

A little bit of everything! Depends on how I’m feeling and how much an idea takes off.

24.   What’s the word count on your longest fic?

I think it’s around 88,000

25.   Do you write drabbles? If so, what do you normally write them about?

I walk the line between drabbles/one shots, but usually they’re just a single scene I wanted to get out but was too lazy to put into a larger story.

26.   What’s your favorite genre to write?

Probably angst, with fluff/romance being a close second.

27.   First person or third person- what do you write and why?

Both! It just depends on how I want the fic to be interpreted/felt by the reader.

28.   Do you use established canon characters or do you create OCs?

I try to use canon characters as much as possible, but I don’t have an issues creating OCs if the need arises.

29.   What is your greatest strength as a writer?

People have told me they like my dialogue and also the little subtle details/body language I include.

30.   What do you struggle with most in your writing?

Probably pacing, especially towards the end of a fic when I get excited about finishing it. Also, I don’t usually write outlines so sometimes I can dig myself into a hole plot-wise and my wife (editor) has to help get me out. (thanks babe!)

31.   What is your all time favorite fanfic?

Probably “Such Is Us” by surveycorpsjean. It’s what inspired me to write my own OT4 fic for FFXV.

32.   If someone wants to read one of your fanfics, which would you recommend to them and why?

Honestly, all of my stuff is so different it would really depend on the person! But my favorites that I’ve written (in order) are: You’re My Cup of Coffee, Rain or Shine and Everything In-Between, and The Insomnian Academy for the Elite.

33.   Do you leave reviews when you read fanfiction? Why or why not?

Of course!! As a writer, I love when people comment on my stuff so I feel it’s important to do the same for others.

34.   Do you care if people comment/reblog your writing? Why/why not?

If they do, it’s AWESOME and I really appreciate. If they don’t, that’s their choice! I believe in writing for myself, so I’m not going to base my worth as a writer on kudos/like/reblogs, etc. It does give me the warm fuzzies when people leave sweet comments though <3

35.   Rant or gush about one thing you love or hate in the world of fanfiction.

Okay, so, smut. I like it! IF I’m in the mood for it. If I read a smutty fic and I knew what I was getting into, it’s great. However, I tend to not like s*x just for the sake of s*x in my fics. I try to focus on emotion and WHY two characters might be getting physical rather than just throwing something in there because I think it will get my fic attention. When people put in a s*x scene that doesn’t further the plot it’s a major turn off for me. 

[yespoetry]

A Review of Aditi Machado’s 'Some Beheadings'

By James Scales

Somewhere in the landscape of the Western Ghats a speaker stops to check a bike, stands on a hill, looks into the distance. For a moment they consume the view—green hills, glinting rivers, swaying lemongrass. Something (we cannot say what) is revealed, something else kept hidden: the uncanniness of landscape, with its interplay of strange and familiar, the leering sublimity of wilderness, the thrill of distances abruptly made visible. There is the compulsion to take down, give meaning; there must be signs: hill, trellis, downward, river, we. But sign and thing are forever slipping apart; the world will not stay pinned down long, it is too huge, uncertain, inexhaustible

And even in the midst of, say, a moving view, we are pulled back; we analyze, recall, compare, reflect. A split grows between the senses and the mind, between the presence of experience and the past of memory. Language, through which these pressures are expressed, is itself restless, full of restiveness: we are, as Lynn Hejinian notes, “off-balance, heavy at the mouth,” a body “whose center of gravity is not in herself.”

 This is the voice of Aditi Machado’s debut book, Some Beheadings—heavy, restless, yes, but also absorbed, absorbing, excited, exciting. From “Route: Western Ghats”:

The top of this hill is called a viewpoint but is not figurative. We’ve made a philology of it which is immaculate which is as we are now, figural. Lemongrass on the slopes grows wild wind through it. The trellises are in places, the fences called eyes. There are rivers in the distance that milk. And we graze and check the motorcycle as it stays upon the slope. And we grow wild on the point through the downward sloping lemongrass and the notional. There are moments in which the condition of the mind approaches the condition of the body which we call ecstasy which now occur.

There is wilderness, and wild wind, and there are the fences, gardens, trellises that give order to it. Somewhere there is the experience of ecstatic approach, but it is one that can only be gestured towards, as if off-stage, just out of view, because it is not an experience locatable entirely in language and so cannot be reproduced in the poem, only circled near.

This circling produces an anxiety of naming, of its impossibility: “This is what it is like may not be said. This is what it is not like neither,” Machado writes in the first section of that poem. But the mind is nonetheless unable to resist this want to clarify, define and parse:

this love of grammar I cannot resist

She writes near the ending of the opening poem, and later in the book, “I think / I am not human, I’m grammarian.”

Yet this parsing, making structure, walling gardens from the wilderness, is precisely the condition of being human. Machado’s book is intensely human, deeply alive, and her speakers are thoughtful, delicate, and dazzling in both their sparseness and array of images. The questions she deals with range from the basic to the pressing—of being, of feeling, of phenomenology, how to “describe what it’s like to touch something,” to those of ecology, politics, migration and sexuality, which lie at the forefront of so much struggle today. Her book and the mind behind it are striking—and “utterly contemporary,” as one blurb notes—in that she remains both lucid and inclusive, dense and open, while tending to even the thorniest of ideas.

Like a thicket, her work offers no single path, no central point from which to navigate; I have traced some, but with each reading more proliferate. “Blessed is my gethsemane // of florid logic” she writes in “Blessed Is,” a fragmented meditation on divinity and lust. In “No, But,” a section of “Route: Thicket,” she reflects on notions of excess and overgrowth, linking them to the poetic process:

A shrub on the lowly

bland plan—I

 tend it to

attenuate it

& think no.

 Forget volta,

find its

opposite

 is thicket.

Attend it.

 Attend attention

as you would pause,

materia medica.

Her work loves to play with verbal slippages—tend, attenuate, attend, attention—through which words are linked by sound or root over the course of a poem, a process that parallels both the historical development of words and languages through shifts in sound and meaning, and the evolution of species via small mutations. Here, the action of pruning a shrub, giving it form, blends with the poetic process, by which experience is transformed through attention and attenuation (at root, “thinning out”). Shunning the volta (or turn) of traditional poetic form, historically used for the deliverance of closure or epiphany, Machado opts instead for thicket, which

Breeds its own

interruptions, tarries & turns.

This is not to say that her work lacks epiphany—it is lush with insight, revelation—but rather that the methods of deliverance are less definite, more open: “In the medial moments like a closing couplet I said one thing / and then another into a coliseum or seashell,” she writes in the middle of “Speeches, Minor.”  This toying between medial and closing both is and is not incongruous. It fittingly describes the lived reality of thought (what thought ever feels final?), the self-paradox of being and having a personality (Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself…”), and the poetics of non-closure (Paul Valéry’s idea of the poem as never being finished but abandoned). “So I revel in its ambiguities,” Machado writes, “so may I in this manner feel felt.”

The question of feeling—of touch—is a vibrant thread which intertwines with so much else in the book. From “In the Weeds”:

I am thinking now to describe what it’s like to touch something. What it is to rub off on someone. When two matters interact should I hope to keep my skin. Ambling in the wind, lost in perfection, those blips along the odometer of time, my feet in the weeds – my head capitulates to them. Little plants, little events. That’s how I think. A decapitation, a lovely guillotine wind lays my mind in the weeds. That’s how I touch a plant. My water touches its.

We return to the release of ecstasy (at root, “standing outside oneself”), now in the form of an erotic loss of self by beheading or dissolution. The erotic-as-floral is a well-worn image:

Sexual organs, peeling green parts, fruit & thorn & thorning paths

But the use of weed, as in the unwanted, the invasive, the alien (as opposed to, say, the rose), disorients the expected, if only a little.

The violence implied in the book’s title, slightly reduced by the wry qualifier some (somehow more occasional, perhaps less vicious than the specificity of the beheadings), is also here opened to include the erotic and the ecstatic experience, losing oneself in physical touch and/or wilderness. Such a move opens the possibility for an ecological reading of the book. Not only do these speakers seem to identify intensely with the living world—“the weeds are weeds I would / bind myself in”; “How amid / the image of cows // can you not / be them”—they also seem to view the relation as, to some degree, communal: my water touches its. To lose one's head is to gain some access to the non-human world.

But the book is also aware of the risks and limits of such empathic relation. “Consider the continua that are vegetal & mineral. How they are you cannot be. You breakfast, you organize,” she writes in the lengthy opening poem, “Prospekt.” The image of the garden repeats throughout the poem as an emblem of orderliness: “I make an order… A garden, a pattern … I were an I wending the garden, I there way out there / picking flowers in the heat.” Against the human organization of the garden, the weed is, by definition, excessive, marginal, a “floral incertitude.” The gardener is one who chooses what lives and where, who picks, digs up, delineates, decapitates.

In this sense, the gardener may resemble (by admittedly thorny analogy) the fascist, who not only regiments, classifies and organizes the production of society but also designates the enemy, the unwanted, the alien, to be eliminated.

A mirror brightens the fascist in me

Machado writes (startlingly, boldly) in the second stanza of the book, and a few lines later, “When I speak / the fascist in me speaks.” Such a weighted term is provocative, incendiary, especially so early in a debut book. What helps it function in the poem is the way it suggests less an authoritarian politics than an unflinching self-reflection: it is in the mirror that we meet the fascist in ourselves, in our own subjectivity. Living as we do in a moment where fascism is on the rise, this may also be read as am indictment both of self and society at large, a naming of the shared responsibility for the climate and politics we all share: “One of the world’s patterns is collective.”

What this book reveals is a mind at war with itself; which is to say, a mind. Part of Machado's (ambitious) project includes a close investigation of the subject, how it thinks, what it tells itself about itself. Such a project is vital today, when some of the most basic and unanswered questions (about our relation to ourselves, to Eros, to sex, to other beings, to landscape) continuously churn back to the surface, often violently. What she achieves is not the rigor of a philosophical system—“I dare not be more precise” she says, sinking instead “into another elegant counterpoint”—but is the product of rigorous attention, of diligent thought:

If I am alive

If I am thinking nothing has stopped

James Scales earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared in Go Places, Sinker Cypress Review, and The Birds We Piled Loosely, and is forthcoming in the Brooklyn Review. He lives and works in New York City's oldest building.

[wellesleyunderground]

Wellesley Writes It: Jane Ridgeway ‘09 (@janeridgeway), Fiction Writer and Teacher

Photo by Jane Ridgeway.

Jane Ridgeway is a fiction writer born and raised in Seattle, now living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the current Writer in Residence at the Kerouac Project of Orlando, Florida, living and writing in the house in which Jack Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums. Her work appears in the Cover Stories anthology from Volt Books. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Oregon, and has taught creative writing and literature at the U of O, as well as at prep schools in California and Hawai’i. Interview by Camille Bond ‘17, Wellesley Writes It series editor.

WU: Welcome, Jane, and thanks so much for chatting with the Wellesley Underground! One of your short stories was recently published in an anthology, Cover Stories. What is the story about?

So, as the title suggests, Cover Stories’ mission was to anthologize “cover” versions of other short stories—so you take a canonical (or not-so-canonical) story that you passionately love or hate, and you riff off of it, explore some particular facet of it, or write very literary fan fiction of it, essentially. It’s an exploration of that weird and glorious phenomenon in which, over the decades, a song can be transformed through the different covers of it that are performed by artists with radically different sensibilities.

My story, “Peredelkino,” is a take on Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose,” a personal favorite and a story that definitely haunts me. Babel’s narrator, Liutov, is this gentle, nervous Jewish intellectual who finds himself embedded with the incredibly violent Cossacks and has to find a way to integrate himself to survive—and because he finds himself both drawn to the sort of sexy, robust glamour of the soldiers and terrified of their brutality. My piece updates some of the same conflicts that Liutov experienced to the era of the Soviet purges of intellectuals carried out by the KGB (which took the lives of many artists, including Babel himself).

WU: As a fiction writer, are there specific themes or issues that you feel drawn to? How do you discuss these themes/issues in your writing?

Grief, loss, sex, queerness, mortality, the sturm und drang of being a teenage girl, the way the past keeps popping its head back up throughout a life/a century/a place’s history. People who try really hard to be good but aren’t very successful at it. For some reason, religion, which is certainly not because I want to espouse any particular set of beliefs through my writing, or even something I focus on deliberately—I just can’t seem to get away from it, even if I try to. I’m really interested in the stories we tell ourselves about the afterlife, and how that shapes the way we live.

WU: As an emerging fiction writer, you’ve been accepted as one of four annual residents at the Kerouac Project in Florida. Congratulations! Kerouac residents spend a season living in Kerouac Project housing and working on creative projects. What are you working on during your residency?

I’m now one month into the Kerouac and have been using my time to generate new short story material! When I accepted the Kerouac I self-imposed some pressure to come here and bang out an entire novel draft, which isn’t what’s happened so far. The Kerouac is gloriously unconstrained: I’ve been given time to work on any project I choose, so I’m taking advantage of that freedom to play a little, write outside of my usual range, and create things that aren’t geared toward any particular publication, workshop, etc.

WU: How do you hope to develop as a writer during your time at the Kerouac Project?

I’ve been greatly enjoying finding my rhythm and discovering a creative schedule that works for me outside the constraints of my usual day job and responsibilities. It’s also been an exercise in overcoming self-doubt, because when I first arrived I was walloped by a wave of uncertainty and impostor syndrome. Through some combination of “faking it till I make it” and adopting some of the swaggering ego of the Beat generation that permeates the Kerouac House, I’ve found a way through it. (Kerouac himself said, “You’re a genius all the time!” which feels awfully audacious, but I think we could all stand to borrow a little of the audacity of a man who wrote his unedited first drafts on a single continuous scroll of paper.)

WU: You previously worked as a staff writer at the Los Altos Town Crier newspaper. How, if at all, has your journalism career informed your creative writing?

Working at the paper was one of the happiest phases of my working life! I loved having an immediate and local audience of subscribers with a clear stake in the stories I was covering, rather than a hazy sense that someone might read my fiction years in the future after I’d painstakingly revised for months, spent a year or so waiting to hear back from lit mags, then many more months before publication. I also love the precise, straight-to-the-point journalistic style. (Readers of this interview may notice that my natural tendency leans to the verbose!) Having experienced journalists and a brilliant copy editor to learn from helped me write crisper prose. Coming out of an MFA writing literary fiction, I think I also took the (unproductive) attitude that all of my stories were delicate, precious creations that I couldn’t possibly let out of my hands until they were perfect. Working at a publication that publishes weekly taught me to work with a much tighter turnaround time, much more efficiently, with less unnecessary psychodrama. There’s a deadline—just get it done!

WU: You’re currently teaching in a prep school environment, and have also taught Creative Writing at the University of Oregon, where you studied for your MFA. How, if at all, has teaching the subject changed your perspective on the act of creative writing? How has it informed your development as a writer?

I wholeheartedly love teaching, even though I can’t exactly recommend it to aspiring writers on the grounds of short hours or great work-life balance! Teaching literature means I get to spend my days hanging out with some of my favorite stories, novels, and poems, and really thinking about how to break them down for a young audience. It’s great to admire literature, but it’s even more useful to know how it ticks! On a more woo-woo level, teaching has helped me as a writer because it’s balanced out some of my edges and helped me grow into a softer, more vulnerable, caring, and patient human. Which is hard as hell, and not something I’m sure I would ever have gotten good at otherwise, because that’s not my natural inclination! I’ve always tended to be a seething ball of snark and sarcasm, and, untempered, that’s no way to go through life! The writers I admire most are all able to observe how much humankind can suck without losing their love and compassion for what a desperate, scrappy lot we all are. Teaching gives you great respect for people (young or otherwise) who are trying their hardest. Being a person is hard! We shouldn’t dismiss how hard it is, even when people disappoint us.

WU: Can you tell us a bit about your background in theater, and how this background has informed your literary career?

Some useful lessons of a theater-kid background for writers:

Better to commit to a choice than to be boring

Say “yes, and”

Don’t write any dialogue so stilted your actors would be embarrassed to say it

Read everything out loud after you’ve written it

I actually first started writing seriously after a playwriting class in my senior year of high school resulted in a festival production of my short play. Watching the actors and director in rehearsal, hearing my words, realizing how I could make the work better, was one of the most electrifying experiences I’d ever had as a young person.

WU: Are there any teachers and/or students who have been particularly influential to you?

A long and glorious lineage, starting from my absolute miracle of a second-grade teacher who made me fall in love with Greek myths, to my brilliant high school English teachers who were tremendously overqualified to be teaching me grammar and who told me I could be a writer, to Prof. Erian at Wellesley who actually taught me how to edit, to the teachers who caught me as a proper adult and really kicked my butt into writing things that an audience other than myself might care about. Also, Ehud Havazelet, the stern fiction father figure who permanently broke me of the ability to use the word “impactful” or read it without a tinge of disgust.

Hillger → Culhane → Doelger → Aegerter → Erian → Kiesbye → Brown, Bradley, Havazelet

WU: You have described your thankfulness to belong to a network of writers and thinkers. How can Wellesley students and alumnx build similar networks around themselves?

I love knowing writers and artists and readers all over the country. A lot of my writer acquaintances come not from my grad program but from an eclectic network of youngsters who were all applying to grad school at the same time as me, and joined forces to share information behind the scenes on how well-funded programs were (among other things.) I’ve always found networking in the traditional sense grotesque and repellent, but I think there’s a lot to be said for finding other people who care about the things you care about, befriending them with no regard for whether they’re currently (or ever likely to be) in a position to help you, and generously sharing information that might be helpful. Do your best to root for other people’s success even though sometimes you’re going to feel bitter and jealous because you’re a human and, like all of us, you kind of suck sometimes. Also, don’t be a dickbag. We all know who the dickbags in a given community are.

WU: What is your approach to self-care?

I take a very pragmatic approach to self-care that wouldn’t play well in a glossy magazine! To me, self-care is about doing the things that will make my life better, like doing the dishes I don’t want to do, taking out the trash, and clearing my inbox, more so than ‘treating myself’, you know? This summer, this has included writing lots of snail mail, going running even when I don’t want to, and long, slow, inefficient cooking projects.

[bryanastar]

How I (Accidentally) Write About Dark Subject Matter: Rough & Tumble Ramblings (Bonus Post)

I don’t like writing content warnings, not because I’m one of those losers that think they aren’t needed (because, believe me, they definitely are) but because it means I have to step back from my work and think about what the hell I just wrote. Now, in my teen writer eyes, there is nothing more embarrassing than thinking back to what you wrote and realizing that you need five different content warnings to fully prepare the reader for your work, and also remembering that you’re barely a rising Junior in high school. I end up having an out of body experience where I see myself and my work as a long and beleaguered r/I’m14andthisisdeep post, and it can make it hard to read back over my work to edit and submit.

Not that there’s anything wrong with darker subject matter. In fact, some of my favorite work to read contains some particular dark and disturbing content. But when you’re a young writer trying to submit your stuff, it can feel… a bit embarrassing. You feel like the stereotypical edgelord teen writing about edgy stuff for the sake of making the adults cry with your edgy edge.

The thing is, I don’t even intend to write about dark subject material ninety-nine percent of the time. It’s just a natural consequence of my intuitive (and rather impulsive) writing process.

I feel that—when it comes to writing about heavier content as a teen writer—there are two types of people: the ones who write about dark content on purpose, and the ones who write it by accident.

I think @shaelinwrites said it best when she wrote in a blog post that teens are often attracted to darker subject matter due to being at the age where we realize that the world is a far darker and scarier place than what we saw as children. Writing, therefore, is the safest way to explore this newfound knowledge and come to terms with it. This is why young writers who write dark subject matter on purpose do it.

But some, like me, do it on accident.

Let me explain. So I’m rather sheltered, as I suspect a lot of teen writers are. I’m not exactly the most world-weary person, despite knowing that the world is, objectively, pretty screwed up. Due to this, I can often add, on accident, some pretty screwed up material just for not thinking it through deeply enough.

For example, here was was my general thought process for my short story “Judith was Never Adopted”, a story that is, objectively, a about a young teenage girl getting left behind in the foster care system due to going through puberty and not being “adorable” any more, getting sexualized while in puberty, getting forcibly married to an older guy who sees her as an object, all the while desperately trying to reclaim the childhood she’s lost and feeling lied to by all the media that claimed that she’d have a lovely and charmed life after being adopted by rich and happy parents (also, spoilers):

“Gee, isn’t it funny that orphan girls in children’s books are often adopted by nice, rich families and get whole musicals dedicated to them, while orphans in YA and Wattpad books are often paired up with the older, assholic, ‘bad boy’ and probably have their lives ruined?”

“Wait… that’s a cool idea for a story!”

“How do I make the villain as awful as possible…? I know! He’s a twenty year-old gangster who has no scruples when it comes to hitting on teenagers, and he also has no problem with busting the kneecaps of literal orphans! That’ll really emphasize how crappy he is!”

“Why did the main character never come back for Judith? Uh… he was in the Iraq War? But why would he willingly join that conflict? Oh right! To pay for college! And he loses an arm, because the war has to have some consequence.”

“But why doesn’t he go to find her when he gets back? Well, uh, his foster mother is dead and his foster siblings are gone, so he has bigger crap to worry about first cause now he’s homeless. Also, the gangster left the city anyway and took Judith with him, and nobody really knows where they went.”

“There! Now to look over the draft! Wait… what the fuck have I written?!”

If this all sounds thoughtless… it’s because it is. To be fair to me, I usually realize pretty quickly that what I’m writing is dark and messed up (by, like, the second paragraph of this story, I really thought long and hard about it’s concept and went “oh shit”).

From there, I usually try my best to do right by the themes and concepts I accidentally introduced, mostly because it’s content that usually gets glossed over in other books that include it, or that is otherwise even romanticized! In fact, it’s anger at these storylines and characters not being treated well that usually inspires me to write the story in the first place!

I’d actually say I did a pretty decent job with this story considering that the first magazine I submitted it to accepted it a day later and praised the piece for its “insights into the psyches and circumstances of foster children.” And this was an adult-run magazine too—with adult contributors with MFAs in creative writing that should be able to write circles around me and my story ideas! They had no reason to be more forgiving of my piece just because I was a young writer! They had plenty of adult ones to pick from!

So yeah, I can be pretty blind to my own story’s content until it’s time to write, at which point I usually stubbornly try to stick with it. Part this is, again, just because I’m sheltered, but I think another reason I do this is because, like I mentioned earlier, I write about stuff that is usually conveniently ignored or downplayed in other works—especially children’s stories.

To give an example, let’s look at one of my favorite childhood movies: Matilda. Objectively, the plot of Matilda is about a severely neglected and abused kindergartener overcoming her abusive family with her equally abused and traumatized teacher, all the while forming a tiny found family with said teacher and moving on from their dark pasts together. Remove the magic and this isn’t a children’s movie; it’s a litfic novel that I know at least one person on this goddamn hell site it writing (not that that’s a bad thing).

Part of the, I guess, novelty of the work that I write is that I enjoy writing about tropes commonly found in children’s stories and contrasting them with I see as toxic or harmful tropes found in works for older teens. As a person who basically went straight from reading children’s literature to adult litfic, I’m fascinated (and somewhat horrified) by the difference in themes and ideas presented to children versus older teens—especially since those same themes and tropes seen in children’s fiction seem to bizarrely reappear in work aimed toward adults (A Man Called Ove is basically UP but without the magic—change my mind). The main difference between how adult fiction treats these subjects and how children’s fiction treats them is that adult fiction fully shines a light on how messed up these subjects are, while you can get away with writing about literal Nazis and genocide in children’s fiction (*cough* Avatar the Last Airbender *cough*) and have no one think it’s too dark or try to tone it down.

Due to this, I think I’ve already been conditioned to not see these subjects to be as bad as they really are, until I sit down to write about them and start to think about them more deeply! Looking back, I’m sure I could’ve written about the subjects outlined in my short story in a way that’s conducive to children’s fiction. Heck, you already have some of the base tropes: over-the-top villain, sad wittle orphans, and deep childhood friendships. Written in another way, I could’ve been the next Roald Dahl!

I’d also like to point out that I have nothing against these themes being explored in literature for younger audiences—in fact I think it’s necessary to teach children about these issues early. But I do think how we perceive certain media to be “kid-friendly” can cause us to forget how deep and nuanced the content in this “kid-friendly” media usually is, mostly due to much of the content having to be toned down as to not scar younger audiences (which is also important). The problem isn’t that this media is included; the problem is that we can sometimes forget how important these issues really are because they’re such common tropes in children’s fiction, which is a great disservice both to these issues and to the stories that include them!

This is also an issue present in YA media, but in a different way as some of toned down issues present in YA are executed in such a way that is actively harmful to teenagers (from the abusive and controlling “bad boy”, to the toxic “not like other girls” character that disparages femininity and promotes competition rather than support among girls). These are my favorite tropes to explore and tear apart in my own work because, when not viewed through a glorified or romanticized lens, they can actually form extremely compelling fiction due to the fallout caused to surrounding characters who have to deal with the bull these tropes and characters cause.

Of course, playing these tropes for what they are tends to lead to darker fiction by consequence, but, due to so many of these tropes being ironically extremely present in children’s and YA literature, many teens that aren’t myself also end writing about them because, really, they’re just writing what they know. This is how an entire generation of teen writers, including myself, ends up writing about content far darker than they realize by accident. We’ve been reading about these subjects for a long time, and now we’re just copying from the masters.

Wow, that was a long rant. Was any of it sensical? I don’t really know, but I still enjoyed writing it!

That’s all for now! See you next Tuesday for your regularly scheduled writing update!

[topmixtrends]

TANGERINE IS AN alluring, powerful book. Author Christine Mangan’s prose bursts with confidence, slyly lulling the reader into a state of openness, throwing reservation aside. Her debut comes across as polished and calculated, a Highsmith-like domestic suspense featuring the exotic and lusty setting of 1956 Tangier, on the cusp of Morocco’s move from multi-country international zone to fully independent nation.

But the novel — which finds agoraphobic young housewife Alice Shipley unexpectedly reunited with her college roommate, Lucy Mason, years after a shocking accident wrenched them apart — manages to reflect a decidedly modern sensibility while still clearly owing as much to the works of Margaret Millar and the great Gothic novels of centuries past. Tangerine works on multiple levels, in the way the best crime novels do: exploring the socioeconomic, personal, cultural, and historical context of its characters and setting. It’s a layered and well-paced read, the almost drowsily written first half giving way to a frenetic pace as one of the key characters goes missing. At the same time, Alice begins to question just why Lucy decided to return, what her intentions might be, and how it might affect her shaky relationship with her morally ambiguous husband, John.

Alice and Lucy appear fully formed, their flaws and excesses on display for all to see through the filter of their shared experiences, two powerful forces pulling at one another. Mangan deftly and precisely unspools the fractured and jagged relationship between her two leads, creating a dynamic that feels both honest and painfully relatable.

In conversation, Mangan is thoughtful and measured, her answers loaded with gem-like book recommendations and revealing a deep knowledge of the subject matter that inspired her novel and that continues to inspire her work. We discussed Tangerine’s literary DNA, what’s she’s working on next, and her process.

¤

ALEX SEGURA: The buzz for Tangerine has been resoundingly positive, which is always nice — but it made me all the more curious about you. Can you tell me a bit about your background and your journey writing the book?

CHRISTINE MANGAN: Writing has always been an important part of my life, ever since I was young. I went on to study it in school, eventually earning an MFA in Fiction Writing, with the hopes of one day writing a novel. Unfortunately, after I graduated, while I did a bit of freelance writing and editing, and in between worked on a novel that I had started, in the end, I eventually made the decision to put all that on hold in order to find a full-time job — never considering that writing could actually be one. That was when I made the decision to focus on academia, spending four years at University College Dublin working on my postgraduate degree. In the months after, my partner and I went traveling and ended up in Tangier for a while. It was such an inspiring place that I found myself taking notes in my journal, writing down possible ideas for a novel, one that I hadn’t ever planned to write. Once I returned to the States, I had an entire year where I was just submitting applications before I was offered a teaching position, and during that time, I sat down and wrote what would eventually become Tangerine, feeling as though it was a “now or never” moment, but never actually anticipating that something would come out of it.

I think that moment is very relatable to writers of any stripe — a turning point that has to be overcome before we can put pen to paper, I guess. Now, there’ve been Highsmith comparisons aplenty in discussions about Tangerine, which I think are spot-on, but I also feel a strong Gothic sensibility, which dovetails with your academic career, correct? It also evoked thoughts of another master of domestic suspense in Margaret Millar, filtered through the prism of today’s reader. Can you talk a bit about your influences and how you think they bubbled up in Tangerine?

When I began writing the novel, I had just finished four years of reading and writing about the Gothic, so I had the Brontë Sisters, James Hogg, Ann Radcliffe, Eliza Parsons all circling in my mind. I had also spent a good deal of time reading those novels that, while popular during the 18th century, were not highly regarded by contemporary critics, and I think all of that motivated me in terms of the story that I started to put down onto the page. For the first time, instead of focusing on what I thought I should write, I thought about what I wanted to write. I love novels of psychological suspense, novels that are Gothic in some aspect, and that focus on female characters, on doubling, on madness. Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters are two of my favorite authors and ones that I come back to time and again for just these reasons. So I took all of those things that I love and tried to put them into this book that eventually became Tangerine.

I love that you put it that way, because I feel like many new writers feel a pressure to write a certain way, when the most unique and honest path is to not only write what you know, but what you love. Clearly, the crux of the book is the relationship between Alice and Lucy, and, as readers, we see it peeled away slowly, as you reveal pieces from their shared past and how their friendship fractured. Was it challenging to unspool that gradually, and how did you find yourself doing it? Outlining heavily? Instinct?

In some ways, yes, it was very difficult, because I had to be certain that it all tracked, that nothing was revealed too early and that the tension between these two women continued to build over the course of the novel. In one of the earliest drafts, the structure was actually quite different. Rather than switching back and forth between Lucy and Alice, I had written it as two separate parts, with Alice as Part One and Lucy as Part Two. However, it became apparent that in such a format the tension between the two women dragged and certain details were lost among all the information. When I began to intersperse them, I did have to rely on an outline, just to make sure that everything lined up the way it was supposed to.

It’s so interesting to me to hear about how different writers piece together a novel, because it seems like most writers don’t fall into the either/or buckets of outliners and non-outliners — their process often falls somewhere in-between. For me, Tangerine’s exotic setting is one of its most immersive qualities. Tangier, especially on the cusp of independence, is such a fertile place and moment. What made you want to set the book there, and how do you think it helped the novel?

Tangier was the inspiration for the novel in the first place. Traveling has become such a big part of my life and out of all the places that I have been, Tangier is the one that continues to stand out among the rest. I think there is something so unique and so distinctive about that particular place, so that, where other cities tend to blend and blur over time, Tangier remains incredibly vivid in my mind.

It’s also quite a polarizing place. If you read travel essays about it, blogs, the one thing that people always seem to circle back to is how absolutely overwhelming a place it can be and while some are happy to dive into that, others really struggle. That is, ultimately, where the start of this novel began, the idea of setting two characters against this very chaotic backdrop and watching how they react to the city itself.

And of course, because of my background, because of my study of and love for Gothic fiction, I was also quite conscious of depicting the city and of creating a world that was strong enough to live up to Manderley in Rebecca and Thornfield in Jane Eyre. I wanted to recreate the sense of Tangier as this intoxicating, but also potentially dangerous, place, with labyrinthine streets that can be just as threatening as any Gothic invention.

Initially, I was also drawn to that particular moment in history because of Tangier’s literary associations during that time. However, after some research, I began to realize the other reasons that the 1950s would be particularly poignant, as during that time Tangier was moving toward independence, toward a transformation. I thought that atmosphere would particularly resonate with the characters of Lucy and Alice, who are themselves trying to obtain a level of autonomy as women during this time period.

The pace and plot of Tangerine is very much a simmering, slow boil, but in the best way — we get to really spend time in the heads of Lucy and Alice and see the world through their eyes, allowing us to figure out how those views contradict each other and perhaps don’t sync up with reality. What made this a story you wanted to tell? About two women with tragic pasts — one wealthy and cared for, the other more scrappy and abandoned?

The story that I always wanted to tell was one about female friendship — in particular, those ones that we make in our formative years, which are often brief but intense — and the moment when that friendship begins to crumble. I think, in those instances, there is always going to be one person who feels the break a bit more deeply, who is affected more than the other, which played into the decision to make Lucy and Alice come from such different worlds. I wanted to clearly illustrate just how much Lucy is losing when Alice first starts to pull away. And it’s a contrast that is featured in some of my favorite novels, where such an imbalance in the relationship ultimately ups the stakes, creating tension by making the relationship that much more fraught.

I really value how you, as a writer, linger in the gray areas, though Tangerine is a definite and complete narrative. The ending and plot are well paced and clear, but there’s also time spent showing the uncertainty of life and of people. I think part of that is because you spend so much time creating these nuanced and flawed people. Can you talk a bit about Alice, Lucy, and John — about their dynamic and what made them interesting to you?

I think that the dynamic between John, Alice, and Lucy is illustrative of what happens when you have two people who share a past, and then a third who steps in and disrupts it. I was also very interested in creating three characters that are all deeply flawed, so there is no good person or bad person. This was particularly important when it came to Alice and Lucy because of everything that happens between them. There isn’t just one person that can be entirely blamed for what happens, they each are responsible in certain ways.

Yes, the damage isn’t inflicted on one side, but feels more like a ticking bomb that takes them both out to varying degrees — which is something most people can relate to when looking back at complex, intense friendships. Can you talk a bit more about your writing process?

When I begin something new, I always start off writing long hand. I generally write in journals and try to get as much down as possible before eventually collecting everything into a Word document. I find it much easier to come up with ideas when I’m not sitting in front of a computer screen.

As writers, our work never really ends, and reading is a huge part of that journey. What are you reading these days? Can you talk about what’s coming up next for you?

I’ve been reading a lot of different things recently: Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, Ice by Anna Kavan, The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, The Tourists by Julianne Pachico, Waiting for Tomorrow by Nathacha Appanah. My reading tends to be really wide and varied. I write best when I’m reading a lot and lately I’ve been trying to just absorb as much as possible.

I’m not entirely sure what’s next — this year has been so unexpected. I have a few ideas for new stories and a draft for a novel that I’ve been working on.

¤

Alex Segura is the author, most recently, of Blackout.

The post Labyrinthine Streets appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2Mm3oSx

[marywoodartdept]

On Tuesday, April 17, 2018, I had the privilege of meeting art alumni graduate Ryan Hnat.  Meeting another alumnus in person gives me a clearer understanding of the time of people who graduate from Marywood’s Department of Visual Arts.

Ryan was grad student when he came here and has lots of advice for both undergraduate and graduate students.

The interview began with a discussion about the senior art majors because before the interview started Ryan and I looked around the Senior Art Gallery.

Graduation year: 2012

Major: Master of Fine Arts, Painting

Marywood Clubs/Activities: Helped with annual pancake festival

Current Occupation: Teaching in the Scranton school district at New Armstrong Elementary

How long at current job: 6 years in Scranton, own my painting business for 7, own escape room for 2, and just started the northeast art project.

I asked Ryan a few questions and he was more than happy to comply.

Why do people stay in Scranton after they graduate?

I was lucky, as soon as I graduated I got a job as a Scranton school district teacher. That’s what made me stay in Scranton at the time. You gotta go where ever the jobs are.

How can you get the most from being an undergrad student?

Being an undergraduate student you got lots of time. And I honestly say try to gain as many experiences as possible. Not being in the classroom but going places, traveling, going to different places and seeing as much as you can while you are in school. Live broke. Live poor. Don’t try to save money as an undergraduate student. Spend it all, go see everything, go experience everything, because once you get out you literally have to find a job to work.

What does Marywood have that other schools may not offer?

It is relatively easy to make friends and then those people be friends forever. A lot of people tend to hold onto that community aspect opposed to a public college.  I am still pretty much in contact with my friends from Marywood. Marywood is a small school, you can get a  lot of free time on your hands it’s how you utilize that free time. You can get the most out of being at Marywood because it’s basically like your on a retreat for a very long time. And when you are on a retreat you get time to think, change, and put your energy into what you really want to do. 

What does the city of Scranton offer?

Scranton is a weird city. You may think you have to go to New York or Philadelphia for certain things, but Scranton has everything, you just have to search for it. There are lots of small niche groups, you just have to go seek them out and the relationships that you could create can go very far if you are a go-getter and you initiate everything. You push forward and you can see things happen.

Any advice for current undergraduate students?

Leave campus, Marywood is tucked up away from everything. You really focus on what you want to do but you also can’t gain a lot of those quick experiences. Unless you have a means or a way to get from this place to that place. While at Marywood, I studied abroad in England, that was fun. Study abroad as much as you can. Get on one of the Marywood service trips. Expand your horizons.

What are you up to now?

I own an escape room in downtown Scranton! I never thought I would be owning that, but it totally fits perfect with the arts and my education background. Because it’s all about positive and negative reinforcement, puzzle making, and room design. We have a new room coming soon called The Final Act. The other day I just painted a race car, it’s called a lighting cat race car. It’s like a stock four-cylinder car and it’s all beat up and it’s still cool. I  painted a race car and its sponsored by our escape room business. There is also the Northeast Art Project which is all about creating and helping to facilitate murals and public works in six counties of northeast PA. We are working with community groups and private donors to bring more murals to the area. It’s all about pushing and finding a niche that makes you happy. Something you want to do.

How do you suggest students get their artwork out there?

Become a member of the Artist for Art (AFA) gallery in downtown Scranton.  It is non-profit co-op gallery. When you are younger, you need all the feedback you can get from people. Get as much criticism as you can. With that criticism most of it you just throw out anyhow because the more an more you talk about something the more it goes away or doesn’t make sense. The toughest times as an artist is right before a show. I can go install show no problem. I love putting my show up. I love standing in galleries seeing all my stuff up by myself. As soon as I open it up I’m opening up my soul, my time, and my thoughts. The worst thing is when people don’t say anything. I’d rather for communication to occur more than not. Shows are good but it’s necessarily the way you get your artwork out.

Volunteer for the Northwest Art Project. If you have the creativity to make things just make things. And if you have show with 3 people and only 3 people see it, you technically had a show.  You don’t need to put on an art gallery to legitimize it, it’s more about what you want from your feelings. The AFA is a great place and the Everhart Museum downtown for small artist talks. You could go one time and that one time can change everything in your life. You gotta be a bit of a social butterfly a little bit and go meet people. Also if you are staying for the summer there is Arts Alive, and you can volunteer at summer art camps.

This week Carolyn, alumni stories, speaks with an MFA painting grad in "Alumni Stories: Ryan Hnat" #MarywoodArt On Tuesday, April 17, 2018, I had the privilege of meeting art alumni graduate Ryan Hnat.  Meeting another alumnus in person gives me a clearer understanding of the time of people who graduate from Marywood's Department of Visual Arts.

[geodesigncreatives]

My Plan of Action to Reach the Next Level

When I decided to go for the Media Design MFA (MDMFA) degree program, the one thing I thought about is how I would reach the next level of my career, despite what I already know in the design industry. So far, I have spent 12 years being an Art Editor for a nonprofit magazine and doing other art projects for the organization and for other organizations and small businesses. And I feel with the knowledge and experience that I gained so far helps me see that I'm ready for the next level as a designer. As the world turns, the human mind keeps evolving to feel and envision something new and fresh. I feel it, as well. As I went through the Mastery: Personal Leadership and Development course, one of many things that stuck out for me is what author Robert Greene mentioned in his book Mastery that "[L]ife is too short." (Greene, 2012. p. 101) And it is true because I do look at my age in this field. The time is now to exercise my creative mind to beyond sketches, photo manipulation, and layouts and learn what is happening now.

This week as I was listening to the live meeting, I could see that what could take from the program is building a stronger foundation for myself as a media designer. I see that the expectation of me in this program is to able to apply myself is managing my time and doing good research. Time management and good research will help with my own critical thinking and the elevation of my creativity.  It will also help with my problem solving as I take multiple approaches to my own thinking and creative processes. Which it will encourage me to be fresh and innovated with my concepts and being an idiosyncratic designer. Have that knowledge about myself as being idiosyncratic is exciting and having an open mind. So I hope I can use the critiques that I will receive in this program as the building block in my foundation.

Although I had done online learning for my Bachelor's degree, the concern that I have as I go through the 11 months of the MDMFA degree program is will there be instruction on written good design proposals and developing a stronger portfolio on a mastery level? I had written design proposal in the past, but I never received any callbacks from those proposals. I know that it's going to practice and patience on my part with my writing skills and looking at my design process to develop portfolio-worthy concepts. I just hope there is an opportunity to be able to see what I need to improve as I go through the program. But I know that opportunity won't emerge unless I have a plan of action.

My plan of action includes what I hope I can expect from the courses.  So far the courses and the professors at Full Sail University have been very helpful and inspiring of my thinking of reaching the next level. But I have had online learning in the past that hasn't been as encouraging. It got me to thinking about whether or not it would be the ideal way to reach my educational goals in the design industry. I hope that the courses go over different processes that will help me think critically on a mastery level in the field. I want every opportunity of being successful in my learning while in the program.

The other expectation that I would like to take from the program is having a strong voice for my work. Through past experiences, I found myself always explaining my reasoning of my design process over and over to a client.  It caused me to second-guess myself and caused some of my potential clients to reconsidered going with me. Sometimes, it caused issues on my job too. I want to be able to defend my work and practice on how to design to what the client hopes to see it, as well. I hope the critiques can help me to be able to break down a concept in the different levels of understanding.

My level of commitments are first staying true to myself, and what I capable of knowing what I can do as a designer. I need to stay focus on the assignments and learn as much as I can. Also, I must take each challenge as a stepping-stone to my future and not as a block from past experiences. It is my long-range goal as a media designer to not let what I don't know now be a defeat. I must be in the present and not give up and give in because this world needs more designers, as visioneers to the possibilities of life and not so much of the negativity that we humans tend to stay in-tuned. And I know that I'm one of those types of designers.

_____________________________________

References:

Greene, Robert. Mastery. New York. Penguin Group.