#in search of the cover i found the authors now abandoned blog

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[genalesnumberonefan]

All of ask Gentlae so far.

AUTHORS NOTES

So I went on the wiki here's all the info about this AU I'll refrence heavily from these events but I want you guy's to know this now cause I don't really have any faith in my writing skills

Gentale is an Undertale AU made by Youtuber . After being driven Underground, Sans and Papyrus lived on the streets for several years, scrounging for scrap and spare change just to survive. It wasn't until Sans met Asgore, who was friends with his mother, the Captain of the Royal Guard Arial, and his father, Doctor W.D. Gaster, that things began to look up.

In addition to being taken in by his father and finally having a home and a steady supply of food to live on, Sans and Papyrus also spent a lot of time with the royal family, becoming close friends with both Asriel and Chara and being considered surrogate children by the King and Queen.

Things would not stay this way forever, and much like the events of many other versions of them, Chara and Asriel enacted a plan to free the monsters, which failed. From that point onward, events began to spiral down a dark path. Asgore declared war on humanity and began to kill the children who would fall into the Underground, believing it to be the only option and slowly self-destructing as he fell further and further into despair. Toriel left Asgore and sealed herself away in the Ruins, abandoning the kingdom for years to come.

When Sans saw how Asgore was falling apart, he agreed to allow his father to perform a procedure on him to enhance his abilities to turn him into what could be considered a living anti-human weapon, as he took on the burden of killing both the Patience and the Justice souls to spare his surrogate father the pain of doing so himself. As the years passed, Sans spiraled further and further into his own depression, which was only exacerbated when Gaster attempted to kill him, forcing Sans to push him into the Core in self-defense.

It was a fateful day when Sans decided to pay a visit to the grave of Asriel and Chara, as it had been several years since the last time that he had visited, as full of shame and grief as he was. Nobody could have expected what had happened during that visit, but when Sans left, he was accompanied by the Phantom of Chara, who through unknown means had awakened and found their spirit bound to Sans.

Sans's personality and abilities have drastically changed due to Chara's presence, and more things will continue to change as time passes and the story continues onward. And Gentale was created by Gemtem and Undertale was created by Toby Fox.

I hope you enjoy this story I'm un-posting my other two stories cause to much effort so I hope you all enjoy Ask Gentale and company :3

And If y'all comment some ask i'll take those ask and put them in I have an Idea for how the story will play out on a google document so enjoy

Ps:I know I just started but I hope if this get's popular someone could make a cover on deviant art and comment it that'll be awesome and I will also be taking two elements from different ask blogs that I like such as Ask Swap Papyrus and Ask Frisk and Company so I hope you all enjoy and We must remember to stay determined.

1# who the bork are you.

Ask Gentale.

Sans was laying down in his room arguing with Chara about which food was better Chocolate Ketchup or both, and for them, it has become a daily conversation but what happens when they suddenly hear a voice in their heads asking? Hi Sans and Chara... Hello Sans said They search around the room until they see a portal open up. Sans quickly gets ready to fight summoning a knife and a gaster blaster as outcomes.

Hello Sans and then she looks at Chara and says hello to you as well Chara I am responsible for the voice in you'r heads. Or skeleton and spectral head he. The people in your head are called askers their beings from across the void and I give them the ability to talk to you think of these guys as a gift. So after this, you'll be getting a lot of questions so enjoy. I'll pop in from time to time and also here are two bracelets for you guys to put on now goodbye.

Chans: What the F-

Hope you people enjoy the first chapter of ask Gentale the first question was what I put in here and I don't have a lot of asks so until I do this will be pretty short so enjoy and stay determined everyone. So it's an hour later I checked my story to use Grammarly to help me and I got a common thanks gemtem0fan1 so I'll be publishing it right now still it's super short 

This is all so confusing?!?!?!

Sans:...Papyrus have you heard any voices at all...

Papyrus: No brother I have not found any of these voices you speak of but if they do they'll face I the great Papyrus member of the royal guard Nyehehehehe!

Chara: So when are these "askers" gonna pop up

Sans: (thinking)*I don't know Chara but Papyrus hasn't heard anything *

Action: As sans is talking to Chara he grabs some ketchup and a MTT bran chocolate bar.

Papyrus: Sans is that one of the chocolates Mettaton gave me?

Sans: Yes but tibia honest bro it's fine cause this chocolate's an impasta

Papyrus: oh my lord sans you told this pun a few days ago. But it's fine I'm going over there tomorrow.

Sans: I'd bet a Mettaton that'd you'll have fun bro.

Papyrus: Okay Sans that one was good but now I'm off to do a skeleton of training with undyne too so I'll be back at nightfall so goodbye NYEHEHEHEHE.

Sans: So Chara I 'v drunk my ketchup you can take over for your chocolate

Chara: Yes let's go partner and Metta has the tastiest chocolate.

*Chara possesses Sans*

S̸̡̹̈́̿̈́̑̊̈a̴͎̿̓̽̽ň̸̳̠͈̘̥͇͓̈́̌̍��̏͠s̷̺̳̤͒͐̋͆͒̀͝_:Chocolate yes *num num num*. This is so good.

S̸̡̹̈́̿̈́̑̊̈a̴͎̿̓̽̽ň̸̳̠͈̘̥͇͓̈́̌̍̂̏͠s̷̺̳̤͒͐̋͆͒̀͝:: So how long until these "askers" arrive who knows.

*Chara has stopped possessing sans*

*Suddenly a voice appears shouting in their heads*

AgnieszkaKrekora4 question for Sans: who do you like more, Chara or Alphys, maybe ketchup? (OMG reminded me of the Sans x ketchup joke.) question for Chara: what do you like and hate about Sans, and if you were a real human alive, would you date him?

Sans: I like Chara more but yeah Alphys and I go way back she helped me out when I was younger... actually we use to date now we're just friends pretty sure she got a thing for Undyne now but uhh I go over and watch some anime with them every once and a while.

Chara: I like that he lets me possess him. I hate that he doesn't love chocolate and he says too many puns sometimes and if I was a real human then Absolutely not (maybe a bit we've known each other for long enough so I don't know)

*In this story Chara is a tsundere*(A tsundere is someone who has a crush on someone but will never admit it)

Gentem0fan1So I have a few questions for you guys to answer How did you guys meet? Do you guys switch on eating papyrus's spaghetti? Do You know who !@#$%^ is And that's it?

Chans:... How we met I think we both remember it like it was yesterday. It happened a month or so after Chara's death and we moved to Snowdin then I went to visit Chara's/my grave and I/he found my ghost and once he went to my body I woke up cause our souls are bonded. So once that happened he could see me and we've been partners ever sense.

Chara: Sans why do you go to Toriel we both know it's her and we both know that she remembered you.

Sans: yeah I was planning on it I kinda just forgot.

Chara: sure partner anyways Sans let's go to Metta's and get some chocolate who knows maybe these voices will annoy 'em to.

Me: hi my favorite/only commenter akakrekora now we can annoy Mettaton remember drink water comment lot's of questions and such and I will be getting some plot around the fifth chapter so I saw 19 people read my last chapter currently so all of you guys start commenting questions to the characters. I write this on a google document so I can save all of you'r questions for different characters like if you have a good question for Toriel or Undyne comment it and i'll copy it down in my document so once we meet 'em I can give them the question or just go and comment questions ask them if they did this before make me caesar out Gaster or you can summon items for different characters they might not instantly happen but they'll appear eventually I promise (Disclaimer Of this book actually gets popular (which it probably wont I wont have every ask cause there'd just be to many) etc, etc Now that my rant is over guys girls non binary pals hope you enjoyed please comment IDRC about you guys voting I only care about you guys commenting it's important for these type of stories. So enjoy and good night/day and bye 

Meltdown

question for Sans: if you and Chara are soul bonded, can you Tease her soul half by touching. licking and biting to see if Chara is sensitive to such actions? However, knowing life, you too will probably feel the same as Chara, and do you, like classic Sans, consider Chara a demon.

Chans: You... want us to try soul touching

Sans:IwouldneverwanttotrysoultouchingwithCharaunlesstheywantedtobutIwould'ntImeanwer'ejustfriendsImean.

Chara:NO I don't want to think of Sans touching my soul (but what if *Lewd thoughts* )

Author/A:After Chara ahd these thoughts she was a ??????%

Chara had this blush and was curled into a ball

They sit at a chair

They try to gain there mental sanity back

Narrator... 10 minutes later

Chans: The other question

Sans: A Demon... no I'd never think of Chara as a demon they did some bad things in their psat or why they fell down here but there not bad hell they know more about me then Papyrus.

Chara:*crying* thank you Sans you are the most important person in the world partner I don't know where i'd be without you.

Narrator 10 minutes later.

Sans:... Chara we need to make a plan for once Frisk comes back...

Narrator:... wait why are we changing P.O.V's this is important... oaky To ohh Papyrus's and Undynes traning.

Undyne:Papyrus you go tthis cut those things down

Narrator...Tomatos

Papyrus: Yes after this I sha'll be able to serve my brother the most magnificent of spaghetti for his birthday and Alyphys sha'll bring the cake correct.

Undyne: Yeah Alyphs Metta and I made it

ASkers: Papyrus challenge: confess your love to Mettaton.

Undyne challenge: Kiss Alphys next to Sansa for 20 minutes, with breaks for gasps.

Papyrus:Who said that ahhthese mst be the voices Sans told me about this morning.

Askers:Papyrus challenge: confess your love to Mettaton.

Undyne challenge: Kiss Alphys next to Sans for 20 minutes, with breaks for gasps.

Undyne:(A twenty minute make out session with Alphys)... *Lewd thougts*

Undyne: To do all those we'd have to be dating hell mabey we'd be married

*Fantasy vision*

Undyne.exe has stopped working let's end the chapterhere guys sense evreyone's broken now...

So I google it Sanses Birthday andbefore it was july second and Chara's was July seventh and because of that I couold of had a good Toriel scene where Toriel and Sans eat Pie with eachother and just talk with Chara just watching but now what was said before disappeared and it's now stated that Classic sans birthday is on April 1 but i'm lazy so the chapter after Sans B-day it'll be Chara's B-day than Papyrus which i'll probably let y'all add stuff to it and so i'm just gonna make the fact that Sanses Birthday is july 2 Chara's is july 7 and Papyruses is july 10. So hope you enjoy

Y'all know the drill COMMENT I don't want to start making my own asks and I don't want to selfmake the story go forward I want you guys to ask genuine questions about literally anyone I save those questions

And here are the questions from my only commenter so far lol on the doc for once I introduce those characters

HUH

After last chapter

Sans: hey chara after this i'm just gonna take a shortcut

Alphys: OH MY ASGORE I- Sans dang it    

Sans: sorry Al so as you know if you hear-

4th wall: from AgnieszkaKrekora4 try not to stutter after kissing Undyne, you can cover your face with your hands if you're shy.

Alphys: voices right because Sans I just heard a voice in my head and it said Undyne was going to kiss me. 

Sans: yeah um I can't explain it well how about Miss.Messanger.

Messanger: Heya GTsans 

Sans: GTsans?

Messanger: It means Gentale

ANyways I'm kind of bored so i'm gonna be sending someone here enjoy and happy birthday sans.

Author note... Hey fellas so I got demotivated cause only one person was comentig like I have around 75 views some of you guys could comment it hurts but yes enjoy another ask series ask you'r choice 

You guys can choose an AU and i'll make a ask here can't just be one person it has to be a full AU so bye and I hope you enjoy and yeah i'm back 

The game begins

Anyways hope you guys enjoyed and I'm sorry about how long this is not rediculously long but yeah and heres the link to the wattpad port of my story i'll have another story on ao3 but don't have an acount there yet so.

[sweetboybucky]

In October

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Word Count: 1300

Warnings: Total pointless sap, because literally nothing has changed. Brought to you by Rae, that one girl who can’t stop giving a 100 year old former assassin fluffy animals to mother to death. 

Summary: This is what Bucky dreamed of, in those years of ice, and even before. 

A/N:  This is my piece for my beautiful love @barnesrogersvstheworld​‘s Are You Afraid of the Dark Halloween Challenge, and my prompt was black cat. Attie - I adore you. I know this challenge was meant for scary stuff, but I hope you like this one anyway.  

I’ve missed you, my loves. Thank you for your kindness this year. I have appreciated it more than you could ever know. Some more notes at the end, to keep this author’s note from getting offensively long. I’m pretty rusty with this writing thing, but I hope you guys enjoy this one. 

*** October settles softly in Brooklyn, with leaves of crimson and ochre and wind whistling through the trees. The smell of maple syrup lingering in the kitchen. Morning sunlight filtering through sheer curtains. 

Eyes of winter gray hide themselves from the sun. Body curled tightly under the blanket he knitted for himself, fingers closing around the soft fabric, drawing it up higher to cover the little smile on his lips as he listens to you - humming something under your breath, making Bucky’s apartment feel like home. 

A sigh slips into the air, and you chuckle a little on the exhale. Bucky’s grin grows wider. 

There is quiet, measured amusement in your voice when you ask, “You going to help me with this, honey?” 

He groans. “Too early.” 

“Not that early, Buck.”

“Still too early.” 

“You said you would help me decorate.” 

He lets his eyes open when the couch shifts with your weight, when he feels you press into his side, warm and solid and real. Looks up at you through a bleary gaze, your beautiful face, your kind eyes. Hums when you stroke your fingers through his hair, lips pressing to his temple. 

“How did I ever manage to wind up with such a lump?” you tease. “Don’t you want to decorate for Halloween?”

“Too tired,” he argues. Startles when a slight weight lands on his legs, little paws digging into his thighs, moving up to his belly. An all too familiar chirp sounds through the air. 

“Look who’s awake,” you say, and Bucky turns his face down, finds those gorgeous green eyes, that expanse of shiny, smooth black fur. 

“Good morning, Princess Cricket,” Flesh fingers stroke behind her ears, down her back.  Affection bubbles in him when she goes pliant, flopping down to lay on top of him on her side, chirping and extending her face up for more attention. 

You echo him, smiling as you pet at Cricket’s side. “Good morning, Cricket,” turning to him, you add, “Wait here a second,” then you stand, taking your heat with you. Bucky misses it in an instant.

He whines, reaches a hand out to you as you walk over to the bin of decorations you abandoned on the floor, digging through it, “What are you doing? Come back.” 

“I bought a present for the baby, I’ll be back in a second.”

Bucky grins, mock innocence in his voice as he calls back, “Am I the baby getting the present?” 

“Well,” you say, turning back once you’ve found whatever it is you were looking for, a small object hidden between your hands, “you’re certainly a baby.” He tickles your side when you take your seat next to him again, tender warmth curling in his heart as you laugh and swat at his hand. “But this present isn’t for you.” 

A frown pulls at his lips, but it’s teasing. “No fair.” 

“Because Halloween is practically your holiday, Miss Cricket,” ignoring his words, tapping Cricket’s nose with your finger, “I got something to help you look the part. 

Winter eyes track your hands as the move, settling the gift on Cricket’s head, pulling back once it’s in place, pressing sweet into his side. 

And he can see Cricket now, as she stares up at him with a tiny, jet black witch’s hat on her head. 

Laughter comes deep from his chest, rumbling through the room. He tweaks the point of the hat with one hand, goes back to stroking Cricket’s face as he wraps his metal arm around you. Drawing you closer, feeling something too soft for him to name beneath his skin as he looks from you to the cat. 

“Do you like it?” 

“I love it,” he tells you, moving his fingers to take yours in his grip. Kissing your knuckles once, twice before continuing, “I think Cricket does, too.” She chirps at him, holding very still. “You’re so scary, sweetpea, my little demon witch.” 

“She’s cute, not scary.” 

“You do know that she’s a demon in a million trashy horror movies, right?” He taps the hat again, looks at Cricket as he continues, “She was a total demon when she was a kitten.” 

“Cricket is too cute to be a demon.” 

“You didn’t find her eating a brand new loaf of bread after she tore through the plastic with her tiny daggers for teeth.” 

“Guess I didn’t.” You scratch at Cricket’s belly, just to get her to stretch out across Bucky’s chest. “But I bet she had you whipped, anyway.” 

And he remembers, with a surge of something fierce and overwhelming, when he had first brought her home, between after everything and before you, when she was tiny and warm and so curious. How he had worried over her, but how grateful he was to have her. 

“She did,” he concedes. But he lets his smile turn teasing again. “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t a demon.” 

“Does this,” you gesture to the cat, nuzzling her face into Bucky’s belly and purring, “look like a demon to you?” 

“Yes,” he answers. “Look at her. I can’t believe I’m still alive. She’s drawing it out, the anticipation is killing me.” He curls his flesh arm around her little body, hauling her up so she can nestle her wet nose against the skin of his neck, grinning up at you, “Put me out of my misery already, Demon Cricket.” 

“She’s about as scary as you, Buck.” 

Breath hitches in his throat. He looks up at you, watching your face and that careful measure of fondness in your expression for a long moment, turning those words over in his head. Admiring the way the sun makes your skin glow gold. Slowly lifting fingers of cool metal, tracing the line of your cheek, staring as you grip them in your own, press a few lingering kisses to the knuckles, the palm of his hand. 

“I love you.” 

It is a quiet, tentative and breathless statement. A feeling that has been stirring in his mind since he first met you, since your warmth first touched his heart. A fierce kind of emotion he has felt for you for so long without naming, without breathing it into the air. 

Your eyes are wide, and there’s something he can’t name in your expression now. But it gives way to a smile too tender for words. A small, private thing meant for the two of you alone. 

“I love you, too, Buck.” 

And this is what he dreamed of - what he longed for in the years of cold, and even before then. 

His next exhale is shaky, but a grin comes with it anyway. Because he loves you, more than those words alone could ever explain, can feel it in his bones, and you love him, too. 

Shifting on the couch, he keeps a hand on Cricket to keep her in place, hearing her chirp as he makes room for you. Tugs on your hand, pulls you down next to him. 

“I guess decorating can wait for a little while,” you murmur, indulgent and so sweet as you curl into his side. Hook your arm over his belly, your cheek pressed to his shoulder. 

Eyes trace over your face for long, peaceful minutes, his lips making a path from your hairline to your cheek to your nose to your mouth, kissing you slowly, sighing into your mouth when your hands thread through his hair. Keeping him close, drawing him in. 

He pulls away to tuck you against his side, one last lingering press of his mouth to your hair before resting his nose in the strands. Breathing against you, letting every loose part of him settle. 

Cricket’s fur is soft beneath his fingers, and you are so warm against his side, and there’s so much sunshine spilling into the room. Such an easy, mundane morning, made beautiful by the simplest of things. 

“Baby?” 

“Yeah, Buck?”

“Can we get hats to match with Cricket for Halloween?” 

You chuckle into his neck, pull back to look at him. “Sure, honey.” Fingers trace the line of his jaw, and your lips follow soon after, affectionate kisses pressed into his skin, filling him with light and love. 

Notes: 

Title and inspiration for this one from girl in red’s gorgeous song, “we fell in love in october” because it made my gay little heart feel something. 

A special thanks to @panicfob for posting about the handwriting method and how helpful it is during a writing slump, it was how I got the first draft of this one done. You’re lovely, darling, and thank you for sharing your tips with us. 

Cricket the Demon Cat is mildly based on my own cat, Maddie, because she is very chirpy, lovey and cuddly, and she also once tore through the plastic on a brand new loaf of bread and ate half of it when she was a kitten. I love her. 

More love to all of you, and my amazing friends, for all the support. This year has been hard. Just trying to hope for better in these last few months, and the upcoming decade. I hope your days are filled with so much light, darlings. 

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[averycanadianfilm]

SEARCHING FOR SAMUEL – A QUADRA ISLAND MYSTERY

Felt the need to re-blog this post: The script for the first film of "A Very Canadian Film" is written by Hubert H. Burke and is partially based on this short story. This is a story about Samuel H. Lawson, aka Tshi Nebre. Written by Peter B. Smith of Quadra Island. SEARCHING FOR SAMUEL – A QUADRA ISLAND MYSTERY By Peter B. Smith Every word you are about to read is true. It all began on a damp morning in mid-October, 2005, when my wife Amanda was walking our golden retriever Misty on Rebecca Spit, not far from where we live on Quadra Island overlooking Desolation Sound off the west coast of B.C. Just inside the turn off to Rebecca Spit Road, Misty chose to go sniffing near the door of the green-painted building housing the washrooms. Amanda checked, and there, neatly packed in the entrance to the building, under the roof overhang out of the rain, was a huge back-pack. It was one of those you strap on your back, really heavy, crammed full and with an additional tent and blanket strapped to its outside. It was so heavy, Amanda couldn’t lift it. A black briefcase, also bulging full and heavy, had been neatly placed on top of the back-pack. Amanda and Misty walked for a good hour, and on returning, Amanda saw the back-pack and briefcase were still there. No one was around, and Amanda had met no one walking who appeared to belong to the back-pack. When she arrived home, she told me about her mysterious discovery, and my curiosity was aroused. I was a newspaper crime reporter for 37 years, and now live on Quadra where as an author, I write true-life crime books. Mysteries on my doorstep pique my interest. I drove back to the Spit in the afternoon, and the possessions were all still there as Amanda had described them. I wandered around looking for an owner, and called out, but the Spit was deserted. I noticed three wood-bugs crawling over the pack. Only three would mean it couldn’t have been there very long, certainly no more than one night. Any longer and it would have been alive with creepy-crawlies. So I heaved the back-back into my van, without doubt the heaviest back-pack I’d ever lifted. Pity the poor hiker who had to travel any distance with this lot on his back. I picked up the briefcase, and took the whole lot to the RCMP detachment on the island, where I handed it in as “found property.” The corporal there had a glance at some files and papers inside the briefcase which seemed to have a name “Lawson” on them, and “Barnard College.” I gave him my name and telephone number, and he explained if the property wasn’t claimed in 90 days it would revert back to me as the finder. At home that evening Amanda and I discussed this strange find. Why would anyone leave all those possessions including all their personal files in the woods on Quadra Island? I came up with the immediate obvious answer, that whoever it was must have committed suicide. It was my first reaction, one borne out of 37 years of dealing with deaths, and murders and suicides on the crime beat. But if this person had walked out into the sea, they would have found a body by now. None had been reported. Of course, his body could be lying hidden somewhere in the woods on Quadra. That was a possibility. Our second thought was that perhaps the owner had been robbed of the property. That didn’t really make sense, because if he’d been robbed, he’d have reported the attack – well, unless he’d been robbed and murdered. It was the crime reporter coming out in my thoughts again. But anyway, if some thief had stolen all that gear, he would have sold it on by now, and turned it into cash. Where would be the sense in stealing it, and stashing it in the woods? Perhaps he was going to return to it later? We discounted that, because someone else could have stolen it again in the meantime. Anyway, we finally dismissed the whole thing in the knowledge if there were less drastic answers, and the owner was still around, he or she would claim the property back from the police very soon. Midway through November, I telephoned the RCMP and asked whether anyone had claimed the property I’d found. No one had. That made it all a lot stranger. Amanda and I were just a little more convinced now that my original take on it all, was right. No one would leave such a large quantity of personal possessions for more than two weeks without claiming it - especially if they had come to Quadra intending to go camping. What would they be using for a tent, and equipment and clothes, now all their possessions were sitting in the RCMP evidence room? One other explanation might be that the back-pack contained something criminal, a stash of heroin or crack cocaine maybe, and the owner knew the police would have discovered it, and daren’t call in for it. I called the corporal again in December, and was surprised to find the property was all still there, and the police hadn’t located the owner. I thought they would have looked through the personal papers, discovered the owner and contacted him or her - but no. The mystery still remained. January passed, and when I bumped into the RCMP corporal at the local store one morning in early February, I mentioned my found property. We agreed that 90 days had long since passed. If I wanted to drop into the detachment the next day, I could pick up “my” new-found property. This I did. The corporal heaved the items out of some back room and asked whether I thought there was a computer inside. “No, only paper files,” I said, remembering what we had seen the day I brought it in more than three months earlier. “That’s strange,” said the corporal, opening one of the files. “Oh, an American,” he said, from what he saw, and gave me the form to fill out. So it was that at 10:43 a.m. on February 7, 2006 I signed the form and staggered out of the detachment under the weight of my new back-pack and briefcase. Every crime reporter worth his salt reckons he’s as good as any detective in solving mysteries, and I was determined to solve this one. My first step when I got home was to make an exact list of everything in the briefcase and in the pack. To be honest, Amanda and I were struggling with a cash flow problem at this time, and we were greatly tempted to place a cash value on all we could find in our new property, have a grand garage sale, and immediately alleviate our financial burdens. But very quickly the instinct to discover what was behind the mystery overcame these mundane considerations. The very first folder inside the very first zip section I opened in the briefcase gave me the name “Samuel H. Lawson,” with a telephone number in Toronto, dating from the year 2000 – six years earlier. In the next few hours I became immersed in another man’s life. Amazingly, all his personal papers were here. His credit cards, banking documents, details of his bank accounts, and seemingly, all the important papers governing all the twists and turns of his life. He was a man with a quirk for saving receipts of all kinds. In these initial hours, I also discovered he was a man who had taken to conversing with himself about life, in a strange dialogue written on hundreds of small scraps of paper. Everything was printed in large letters, making it perfectly legible. But he was also a man very heavily into astrology and for every scrap of paper I could read, there were two scraps covered in unintelligible astral symbols and strings of numbers which were beyond my comprehension. The briefcase contained really heavy manila files which showed he was a physics and math professor, who had been the math instructor during the summer of 2005 at Barnard College, Columbia University, which appeared to be in New York. All this happily provided me with the answer to who the mystery owner was, but sadly, further strengthened my sure knowledge now that he had either committed suicide or had died in some way on Quadra Island. No one, certainly not a working university professor, would voluntarily abandon all his teaching files, his student records, photographs of everyone studying on his course, and his own text books and files in some remote woods on a tiny island off the west coast of B.C. in Canada. All these things were in the briefcase. There was a photograph of a heavily bearded guy with a toddler, and another of a blonde woman seemingly walking along a street in America, judging by the advertisements on the buildings behind her. Was this man in the photograph Samuel H. Lawson? When I unzipped one of the main sections of the briefcase, I discovered more evidence convincing me this man was now dead. In a pouch inside the case were three expensive watches, including a really top class Timex under-water time-piece, together with its warranty. I knew no one would leave such valuables as these lying around in the woods. The three watches were neatly aligned with parallel straps in the pouch. One was engraved “Samuel H. Lawson– 27-12-78” on the reverse. I had a mental picture of this man carefully placing these few valuables in the pouch before going away to end his life. Maybe he intended these would be found and passed on to his next of kin, whoever and wherever they were. Unconsciously, and without evidence, I felt that he was dead. It was like this all through my newspaper career. Other reporters would write stories about missing persons still thought to be alive, and yet whenever I came to write about the same case, the body would be found. Other reporters would write stories about extensive searches in mountains or in rivers where adventurers were lost, and when I came to write about them, their bodies would be discovered. It was a touch I didn’t want, but I had it. We hadn’t lived on Quadra long when a young man, Joe, was dropped off by taxi cab right outside the fence of our yard, not many yards from our kitchen window. He walked away and was never seen alive again. Everyone knew he must be dead. His family has even promised a reward for anyone with information which led to his body. Eventually they found his remains where he had taken his own life. But the last time he was seen alive was right outside my house. And now, I was handling Samuel H. Lawson’s possessions. I just knew I was the kiss of death. The more I found, the more I knew I was right. This man was carrying with him a huge manila folder containing a 180-page report on “The long-term effects of energetic healing on symptoms of psychological depression and self-perceived stress.” It had been sent to him from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in California in 2002. Was this connected with his professional life, or was he a man suffering “psychological depression and self-perceived stress.” Such a man would be the classic type to commit suicide. I calculated that if he’d carried this report around for three years, was he now just going to abandon it in the woods if he was still alive? I don’t think so. And alongside it was another huge dissertation, this time a 137-page report on “touch healing” from the same institute, which had been sent to him in 2003. And large numbers of weird astral charts covered in hieroglyphics filled another folder. His personal papers included all the kind of papers you would usually keep at home in a drawer of important documents, not the kind you’d take camping in a back-pack. His pension papers told how much he might expect to receive when he retired. His spouse had signed papers waiving her rights to his pension if he were to die. Was this important now that this could be the case? There was a large money transfer of thousands of dollars to a woman, apparently in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He had seemingly worked at Colorado College, and at Rutgers State University, New Jersey, before tutoring at Barnard College. Legal documents from his lawyers were addressed to him at some time care of the “International Development Research Centre” in New Delhi, India. One explanation of why this man would carry all these papers on a camping trip was that perhaps he didn’t have a home. Perhaps he was homeless. Perhaps he had been a successful academic, now badly down on his fortunes. So far down that he had ended it all. Travel documents in the briefcase included airline tickets, Via Rail receipts, and bus tickets so it seemed clear he didn’t have a vehicle. This left a strange mixture of someone seemingly homeless, with no car, but with the resources to occasionally use trains and planes. I put all this to one side, and turned to the back-pack. Just at that moment, my wife returned home and joined me in this odyssey through another man’s life. I know she had found the property originally, but I simply couldn’t wait to start exploring it, hence I had completed the briefcase before she arrived. On the top of the back-pack all the camping gear appeared to be new, recently purchased and unused, including a new tent, tent pegs, a sleeping-bag and tent repair equipment. He had a heavy Afghan rug and sandals, and inside, everything was bagged into plastic bags. We experienced an excited expectation with every new revelation. What would be in the next bag? In which direction would each new find send us? It was like a treasure hunt. Many of the clues being revealed minute by minute brought more questions than answers. In one plastic bag were toiletries and a 14-carat gold chain inscribed “Italy.” What was the Italian link? And a leather wallet contained Indian and Ethiopian currency. What a strange mixture. Not a single Canadian coin or bill, but a folded wad of money from the other side of the world. What did that mean? With each new find, my heart sank. This man must be dead. He wouldn’t leave valuable gold jewelry behind, together with watches, and all these new possessions. My interest in the mystery began to be tinged with sadness over what I knew I would ultimately find. One plastic bag seemed to contain some horrible mush. My criminal mind immediately thought of magic mushrooms, or that heroin or crack cocaine, but we quickly realized it was only food – really rotten food that had aged badly while sitting for four months in a hot police station. More plastic bags, all tied shut, contained clothes, mostly sweaters and T-shirts, a pair of jeans, mostly all clean and folded as if they hadn’t yet been worn. We had found all this in October, 2005, and here I was looking at it all in February, 2006. What had this man been wearing for the past five months if all his clothing was here? Obviously he hadn’t needed it because he was no longer alive. And then, I made the strangest finds. Several white plastic bags, handed out in supermarkets, were stuffed full of years of receipts, and numerous pieces of paper covered in his printed writing. These were very depressing. Day after day he wrote of having no money, no food, of realizing his health was suffering, and sadly appealing to himself to provide the answer to extract him from this dreadful plight. It was becoming easier for me to understand how this man had come to take his own life. I filled pages of my notebook with details off every piece of paper. Amanda was fascinated and excited to rush forward to the next bag. She couldn’t believe I was taking this all so methodically and recording every item before moving on to the next. He seemed to be a collector of people’s business cards. One of them inside an envelope inside a plastic bag was from the “Heriot Bay Inn” here on Quadra. Perhaps someone there might remember him. I put it high on my list of calls to make in an effort to find him. I knew it was hopeless. I knew he was dead, but I resolved to trace every clue on all these thousands of pieces of paper, trying to find him. Only when I’d exhausted every avenue, would I decide what I ought to do next. Some documents had him living in New Jersey, others in various cities in Ontario, including Belleville, Pickering and Toronto. Others hinted at Vancouver, or Victoria, and there were definite links with Salt Spring Island, B.C. I hit on a plan. I took every detail I had and re-arranged them in a strictly chronological time-plan. This would give me an exact picture of how he came to be on Quadra Island, and hopefully, an explanation for why he had taken his own life. Only when it was finished, did I realize what a complete picture I had of his life. Samuel H. Lawson was born in Jamaica. His family took him to Ottawa, where he grew up and became a Canadian citizen. He worked in Manhattan, U.S.A. at some time, and earned a physics major at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana in 1985. Various references indicated he had lived in Bombay, India, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Hong Kong, and he’d worked as a professor and instructor at these various universities in the States. Let me share with you the exact detailed time-line of Samuel H. Lawson’s life, as I reconstructed it from the scraps of paper in his back-pack, since November 16, 2004. On that day he booked into the Day’s Inn hotel in Victoria where he lived permanently until January 7, 2005. On the day he left, his stay had cost him more than $3,500 in hotel bills and taxes. It was pretty clear the hotel stay had taken all his immediate resources, because within a month he was writing the most despairing, depressed and distressing notes to himself in his journal on scraps of paper. Throughout February the notes speak of fasting, being undernourished, having no money for food, and asking plaintive questions of himself. “OK. How much longer am I to exist like this? OK. This body is becoming ill, so food is my first priority. ”Receipts showed he was vegetarian, buying only fruit and juice at a grocery store, and a regular customer at Starbuck coffee houses, but it seems this life-style was hardly keeping him alive. On March 18 he wrote of “fasting and hopelessness.” Next day it was “despair and loneliness and still having no money for food.” The journal references went on day after day for almost three months through February, March and April. It wasn’t difficult to see how a man with such burdens could end it all. But I couldn’t understand how such an educated and intelligent man seemed to have no sense of reality. He could have acquired a position almost anywhere with his academic qualities but he didn’t. Instead, he wrote long painful questions to himself asking himself why he couldn’t get his first book – a thesis on applied physics – published. Why waste time writing a dialogue to himself? Why not pursue publishers or find employment? On April 21, 2005 he takes a ferry from Swartz Bay, Victoria to Tsawassen, Vancouver, and next day he’s at the Vancouver International Airport, where he has a veggie burger in the lounge and coffee at the Starbucks outlet in the domestic flights lounge. Next day he’s traveling by Trans Link in Vancouver, according to the ticket he saved. But on April 24, he’s back on the BC Ferries, traveling from Victoria up to Fulford Harbour on Salt Spring Island, a journey he makes several times back and forth in the next few days. I try to imagine what he’s doing there. Remember, this is all only six months before he chooses to end it all in a lonely wood on Quadra Island. His bank records show that his account is draining away at this time. At the end of April he’s down to less than $70, and by May 5, he only has $3.04 in his account. But it’s obvious from the files I found that he had to be back at Barnard College in New York State where he was scheduled to be the math instructor for his class of all-women students on the HEOP (Higher Education Opportunity Program) summer session, beginning in a few weeks. I find the answer. At 11:06 p.m. on the evening of June 14, 2005 he receives a money transfer of $240 from the director of the college, which appears to me to be his air fare back to New York. It looks as if it doesn’t arrive a moment too soon. Next morning (according to his air-line ticket) he catches the 8:30 a.m. American Airlines flight AA 360 from Vancouver International to Chicago O’Hare, and later that day, he takes the 3:30 p.m. American Airlines flight from Chicago to New York. The college schedule shows the staff orientation lunch was on June 17, two days after his flight gets in, and on July 4 he’s at work teaching math to his students. I wonder to myself what enormous character it must take to transform oneself from a despairing, starving, seemingly almost homeless stray to a fully functioning university professor – an amazing leap in my mind. On July 31, 2005, his fortunes improve when he receives his salary from the college of more than $3,400. Remember, by this time, he has only three months left to live. The words “Fly to Vancouver” written in his distinctive hand, which, by now, I had come to recognize, appeared on the college schedule for August 12, in his back-pack, presumably after the end of the summer session. Matching this reference, in another plastic bag, I found the corresponding air-line tickets. On August 12, he took the 4 p.m. American Airlines flight AA341 from New York to Chicago O’Hare, and after a short stay, took the 6:44 p.m. American Airlines flight from Chicago to Vancouver International. By August 30, Samuel was staying at the Seabreeze Inne on Salt Spring Island. Could there be a more incredible contrast anywhere in the western world. One minute he is embroiled in the frantic, noisy, stress-laden life of a New York college, surrounded by thousands of people, all rushing to get somewhere. The next, he is almost alone in an idyllic serene tranquility on a beautiful island, with forests growing to its shorelines, where there are more loons, cormorants and sea-birds than there are people. Next day he receives another money transfer, apparently from a family member. I worry about this entry. I feel responsible for all this property of his which I have. When one day I can confirm officially he is dead, should I return it all to his family members? I decide all that will take care of itself when the time comes. And then I came across documents which brought this wanderer right into my little corner of the world, right at the time when I think he chose to take his life. On September 2, he signed a tenancy agreement to take on tenancy of a single-dwelling unit at Hollyhock, a retreat on Cortes Island, a tiny island reached only by car-ferry from Quadra Island. What’s more, we had found his property no more than a 20 minute straight-line walk from the ferry terminal he would have to leave from to reach Cortes Island. He had paid the $600 security deposit, and was to have taken up his residency there on December 1, 2005, staying until February 28, 2006. For me, this was the final nail in the coffin, quite literally. No man who was struggling financially, would pay in advance, a $600 deposit for living accommodation, and then fail to turn up there. Something catastrophic had befallen him on Quadra Island in October. After paying his Cortes Island deposit at the beginning of September, he was then busy criss-crossing Canada before finally heading out west, presumably on his final run to Cortes. On September 17 he traveled from Campbell River on Vancouver Island to Nanaimo by Greyhound bus, then from Nanaimo to Vancouver. Receipts show he was staying at the Day’s Inn in Toronto on September 21 and 23 but five days later he had returned to B.C. and began a five day stay at the Day’s Inn, Victoria. By my reckoning, this was less than two weeks before I think he took his life. The last receipt I found was the last hotel bill when he moved out of the Day’s Inn in Victoria, presumably to head north to Quadra to catch the car ferry to Cortes. This would bring him here several weeks ahead of the December 1 date when he was to take possession of his retreat dwelling at Hollyhock. I guessed he planned to camp for a few weeks, hence the camping gear, prior to moving in at Hollyhock. Now I was satisfied I knew all I could learn from the bags of receipts and scraps of paper. I could place him on Quadra, as he’d obviously left his back-pack here, and knew the reason he was here, making preparations to moving across to Cortes Island. The only possession we hadn’t found was his wallet. No doubt when he’d walked into the sea, or took himself into some deeply wooded secret spot to die, he was wearing the final clothes he had chosen to die in, and his wallet was in his pocket. Now, I had to check every conceivable place where he may still be alive- Salt Spring Island, Victoria, Cortes, Quadra, Toronto, and the States. I knew this stage of my quest would be hopeless, as I knew he was dead. But I had to check. I wrote a new headline in my notebook. It read, “February 7, 2006 –Searching,” and I started working the phone. I decided to start with the most recent clues and work backwards. Obviously the first stop was to contact the Hollyhock retreat on Cortes Island. That was where I thought he had been headed. That was where he should be right now on February 7 - after all, he was scheduled to stay there until February 28. It all started with great frustration. I just hit answering machines, and no one was available, but repeated calls finally brought a result. No, they said, Samuel was not there at Hollyhock, he never had been. “He was going to stay here, but then he decided not to come. He has never been here,” said one of the staff members. I took this as another confirmation of what I already knew. He had ended his life in mid-October. I knew he wouldn’t have turned up at Hollyhock in December. I wondered if, when he changed his mind about going there, he’d ever had his $600 refunded. If he had done, the paperwork wasn’t in his back-pack. Then I tried to track down the people who must have known him best, the staff at Barnard College in New York. I faced another round of frustrations as every number in the college directory in the back-pack led to an answering machine. When I hit the switchboard, a receptionist searched the permanent staff directory and told me no “Samuel H. Lawson,” was listed. His personal residency number listed at the college rang “no longer available.” I was drawing blanks everywhere. It seemed from the several references to Salt Spring Island, that someone there must know him. On all documents, he gave an address on Salt Spring Island as his home address. We have a friend who lives on the island, and we called him, explained our quest, but he didn’t know him. My first day of working the phones had taken me no further forward. Next day, I resumed the hunt. Another call to Barnard College led me to the provost’s office, where I was told there was no “Samuel H. Lawson” on the registry, not even as a math instructor. I tried calling every instructor at the college, working methodically through the directory. No one was available. In one of his plastic bags was the business card of the manager at the Heriot Bay Inn, just a stone’s throw from the ferry terminal where Samuel would have caught the ferry to get to Cortes, if he had got that far. I rang the manager at his home and asked if he remembered meeting Samuel. He didn’t – and explained his business cards sit on the front desk at the hotel, and anyone could just pick one up, without having to meet him - another blank. I tried the most recent telephone number listed for Samuel in Toronto in the year 2000. It was another answering machine, with the voice of a younger woman. I was sure if he’d been apparently near homeless in the past two or three years, a telephone number from six years ago was a waste of my time. As it seemed to me Samuel liked to stay in Day’s Inns in various cities, I called the Day’s Inn in Victoria and asked for him. He wasn’t there. I knew he wouldn’t be, but the more negatives I could confirm, the more certain I could be that he was dead. It was a sad day for me making these calls. I didn’t want them all to be negative because I wanted him to be alive. But with each blank response, I felt a reassurance that my understanding of what had happened was correct. During his last stay at the Day’s Inn hotel in Victoria early in October, which I reckoned was only two weeks before he died, his receipt showed he had called a number on Cortes Island several times. Hopefully, I rang it, and a woman answered, saying she didn’t know who I was talking about. But she said another woman had been staying there in October, and she now lived in Victoria, and perhaps Samuel had been calling her. I rang the new number in Victoria.The woman there had no idea who I was talking about. But she remembered, a guy had been living at the same place who was now living in Ontario. I rang the Ontario number, and spoke to the man. Yes, he knew a Samuel on Cortes Island, but a few more questions quickly showed me this was the wrong Samuel. My hopeful “Cortes” lead had drawn another blank. Next day, I started again. I ran through the numbers at Barnard College again, and this time I had success. One of the directors of the course, knew Samuel, knew he was traveling in Canada, and thought he would be contacting her periodically. If he contacted her, she would pass on my telephone number to him and get him to call me. I thanked her, and made a mental note not to hold my breath. I knew that in the course of time the director would eventually realize he wasn’t contacting her, and her alarm bells would start ringing too. I started reading Samuel’s desperate journal again looking for new contacts I could reach. I found confirmation he was a black man. I knew he was born in Jamaica, and among his scribbled pages, I discovered he had strong views on racism, having obviously encountered some racist problems. Someone in Canada had once wound down a window in their car to shout the “n****” word at him. He had philosophized on how racism in Canada was not as violent as racism in America. To know he was black assisted me, as I knew it would help me describe him when trying to find anyone who had met him. It also meant I now knew the photograph in his briefcase of a heavily-bearded white man with a toddler, wasn’t him. In his desperate journal I found a reference to him “nearly fasting to death on Salt Spring Island in 2004.” I decided to track down all the Salt Spring Island references I could find. In his back-pack I found a Salt Spring Island telephone directory. First I rang the Seabreeze Inne hotel and asked if he was there at the moment. He wasn’t. I know he wouldn’t be, but I had to ask. A receptionist said he had stayed there in 2004 and 2005. I knew that. After all I had seen all his hotel receipts. But here I made progress. The receptionist gave me his telephone number on Salt Spring Island, the number he had given during his stay in August last year. This was his current telephone number. Before ringing it, I looked it up in the reverse telephone directory. It was the “Oh Goddess Herbal Products and Massage Therapy” shop! I rang the number and left a message on the answering machine. Several of the telephone calls Sam had made from the Day’s Inn at Victoria were to Salt Spring Island numbers. Seeking them out in the reverse directory I found more than one was to a chiropractor’s clinic. I rang it, and hit another answering machine. Another landed me on a woman’s cell-phone, and she’d never heard of him. And then I had my best break-through. One of the calls he made from the hotel in Victoria had cost him $12, so he’d obviously had quite a conversation with someone. Checking the telephone directory, I discovered the area code for this call was Allentown, Pennsylvania. I called the number. For the first time on any call, I reached someone who knew Samuel, a woman who actually knew Samuel H. Lawson. I explained what I was doing, that I’d found all his property and was trying to reach him to return it. She told me, “Yes, I know he is traveling in Canada. I am one of his friends from college days. He’d be thrilled if he knew you were taking all this trouble to find him. I can try to reach him for you.” She was a professor at St. Joseph’s University, and I gave her my number. I did confide in her my worst expectations that I feared he may have taken his own life, but that was only my personal thought and I could be wrong. I explained he’d left all his possessions in a wood and hadn’t attempted to retrieve them for at least four months, and he hadn’t turned up at a retreat where he had been expected. She told me she understood. “I have been worried about his well-being for a long time,” she said. I was saddened to know that someone who knew Samuel could understand that what I feared was possible. I was hoping she might say that such a thing was out of the question with him, that he wasn’t likely to do that, but she didn’t. She thought he had some family in Toronto. She thought his mother was living in Ethiopia. That could explain him transferring money to an account in Ethiopia. Perhaps he’d been sending money home to his mother. I had reached the stage where I needed to think about what to do next. I was sure he wasn’t staying at any of his usual haunts. No one had heard from him for months. He’d abandoned all his personal possessions. I considered my options. I could contact the RCMP again and see whether I could report him as a “missing person” but I doubted if they would take a report from me. After all, I wasn’t anything to do with him. My wife suggested we could place a notice in the Discovery Islander, the newspaper which circulates throughout the islands here, including Quadra and Cortes. Perhaps someone would remember meeting him and have a clue about what happened to him. I decided against making any attempt to reach his family. I knew if I found anyone, I couldn’t ask questions without causing them anxiety, and that wouldn’t help. If, one day, I could somehow get a “missing person” inquiry launched with the RCMP, then they, with all their resources, could discover what happened to him, and maybe even find his body. And they, as the professionals, could locate and contact his next of kin. I’d reached the stage where I’d almost exhausted the calls I could make. I had left plenty of messages on several machines. I would just have to wait until I received some calls back. Hopefully, anyone who called back would provide me with some new avenues to follow. Almost on cue, the phone rang. “Hello, Pete Smith,” I sang out. “This is Samuel,” said a voice with a Jamaican twang. “Samuel H. Lawson. Were you trying to get hold of me?”

THE END 

copyrighted by Peter B. Smith

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b, Book, and Me by Kim Sagwa; translated by Sunhee Jeong Two Lines Press

Best friends b and Rang are all each other have. Their parents are absent, their teachers avert their eyes when they walk by. Everyone else in town acts like they live in Seoul even though it’s painfully obvious they don’t. When Rang begins to be bullied horribly by the boys in baseball hats, b fends them off. But one day Rang unintentionally tells the whole class about b’s dying sister and how her family is poor, and each of them finds herself desperately alone. The only place they can reclaim themselves, and perhaps each other, is beyond the part of town where lunatics live―the End.

In a piercing, heartbreaking, and astonishingly honest voice, Kim Sagwa’s b, Book, and Me walks the precipice between youth and adulthood, reminding us how perilous the edge can be.

Today we welcome the author Kim Sagwa to the blog to share about her book b, Book, and Me.

Before getting into the actual content, can we talk about the cover images? On Goodreads, I found the original title of the book, 나b책. I noticed that when read aloud with the letter ‘b’ there, it sounds like the Korean word for butterfly. When the original cover showed up in my search, it had a beautiful butterfly as the illustration. The cover image for the English version is lovely, but quite different. It made me think about translations and how some things simply don’t make the jump from one language to another. Reading the original and the translation will always be a slightly different experience. Do you have thoughts to share about the translation of this book or the art of translation in general?

As you mentioned, the original title 나b책 translates as “Butterfly Book” in Korean. The story is about three people: 나(me), b, and 책(book). So the title has a double meaning and that’s how I like it because I’m addicted to puns. When I sent the script to the publisher I was worried that they wouldn’t like the title. But luckily for me the publisher bought into the whole concept and even let me choose the cover image. I sent them a picture of a butterfly I found on gettyimage.com.

The English cover has a different approach. What I love about the English one is that it is an impression based on the story I’m telling in the book. It shows a pair of big scissors about to cut a tiny flower which gives a hint that something horrible is going to happen in the book, and so it does. The Korean cover is, in its way, sly, because the beautiful butterfly on it has not much to do with the nasty kind of things that happen in the book.

My theory is that someone’s first encounter with a text written in a strange language produces a more direct, objective, even realistic point of view. Sometimes this peculiar viewpoint is hard to imagine by people of the native language, because they notice too many cultural layers beneath a story. As a translator, if someone tries to deliver on all the layers she/he found as a reader of the original, it would be hard not to fail. That’s why I believe the simplest, word-for-word translation is best in practice.

When you are asked about this book, how do you generally describe the story and your characters?

It’s the story of two young girls who live in a small seaside town, which is a town that I’ve made up. Rang is well-to-do; B is smart, but full resentment because her family is dirty poor. After B’s sister dies of illness, she decides to leave the town with Rang. They reach the edge of town where they meet Book. Book is a childish young man who lives by himself in a hut that’s right next to the coastal cliff. B and Rang follow Book and crash a strange party thrown by a bunch of lunatics. It’s the best time B and Rang ever will have, but the reason this is so is because it’s the last and only time they get to celebrate the joy of youth.

I haven’t seen many teen books in this particular format. How or why did you make the choice to write in numbered sections rather than chapters or using another format?

Because I wanted the book to have the feel of a serious document or journal, or anyways something official.

I found b, Book, and Me surreal and dreamlike at times although it also felt quite realistic and contemporary. This contrast is partially because we get an intimate look at the mindscapes of b and Rang. What led to your focus and interest in the thought processes and even the mental health of teens?

Honestly, I didn’t think much about what teenagers are like in general, because my real goal for writing b, Book, and me was to make money. I had just graduated from college and I needed money. But I certainly had a hidden ambition to write a unique story about young people. I was weary about teen books, because I found many of them fake and boring. Writers of teen books usually have a fixed image about teens. Happy and energetic. Positive and curious. I thought it would be a good idea to introduce some realistic teenagers who were unhappy and slow, pessimistic and dull, but still cute.

Was there research or other preparation necessary before or even during the writing of this book?

From the first stage of writing, I carefully thought out the form the story was going to take. I numbered the section headings (as you mentioned) and tried to make the language as simple as possible, because I wanted to evoke something audible, like a real-time confession. But the story itself is, on the contrary, far from realistic. This is partly because I wrote the book in Porto, which is, like the one in the book, a beautiful small seaside town. I was visiting for the first time, and all the exotic things I found about the place made it into the book. For example, there were all those little boys diving into the sea. I hoped that the town itself, apart from the narration, would seem dreamy and artificial. I even drew a big map for the story. I put everything on the map, the beach, the seaside supermarket, Rang’s house, B’s poor  neighborhood, the cliff for Book, and the abandoned hospital for lunatics.

You now have two teen books translated for the U.S. market. What are your plans and goals for future writing? Will your writing journey likely include more books for young adults?

Recently, I’m working on a nonfiction book about the three years I spent in New York City. After that I think I’m going to write a novel about white-collar workers. I don’t think I’ll write another book for young adults anytime soon. I’m more and more curious about what’s expected from ordinary adult life— maybe because I know next to nothing about it in the first place? Or is it a simple sign of aging? For whatever reasons, the white-collar world looks such a gold mine because my superficial observation as an outsider tells me that urban white-collar culture embraces a crazy amount of insanity. The madness in civilization is always a fascinating subject for contemporary writers.

Thanks so much for joining us!

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Books Read in 2019: The Why

In a tradition I accidentally started for myself and now quite enjoy, at the end of the year I look back at my reading list and answer the question, why did you read this particular book? 

Below, the books are split into groups by target readership age, plus nonfiction at the end. This year I have added the category “how I heard of it” as well, because I just think that info is neat.

FICTION

The Visitor - K.L. Slater. 2018. Read because: Ten episodes of The Good Cop weren't enough, so I tried to find something w/ similar characters, and this looked kinda like "TJ as a slightly more withdrawn weirdo." By the time I realized it wouldn't work due to being British, I was too excited by the prospect of a thriller to stop.

How I heard of it: Googling keywords

Like the Red Panda - Andrea Seigel. 2004. The back cover and first few pages reminded me of a friend I had once.

How I heard of it: Library

The Lost Vintage - Ann Mah. 2018. What's that? You've got some secret family history/a mystery from the past to be solved using old personal papers, including a diary? My jams.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls (4th ed.) - Emilie Autumn. 2017. I googled for books that promised unique formatting/art design, and Emilie Autumn has always been an intriguing enigma to me.

I Heard the Owl Call My Name - Margaret Craven. 1967. I know this title, but not why -- when I tripped over it in the teen* section and saw how tiny it was, I decided to find out what it was about. (*it's there because it's often taught in schools. It's here because its intended audience is adult.)

Escape - Barbara Delinsky. 2011. Went looking for an audiobook -- the cover with a woman standing on a small bridge amidst the woods drew me in (I can't find that cover on the internet though), and the idea of abandoning responsibility and driving off to a small town sounded like my dream.

How I heard of it: Library

Saul and Patsy - Charles Baxter. 2003. Another search result from my attempt to cast Josh Groban in a novel -- Midwestern-set and a man very much in love with his wife, no worries about the relationship being wrecked? Sweet! (though ultimately, I had to mentally recast)

How I heard of it: Googling

California - Edan Lepucki. 2014. Needed an audiobook. The title and green forest cover caught my eye, and the off-the-grid life + promise of a mysterious and possibly suspicious settler community described in the plot appealed to me.

How I heard of it: Library

The Lost Queen of Crocker County - Elizabeth Leiknes. 2018. Woman moves back home to rural Iowa in a book described as a "love letter to the Midwest"? Look at all these good choices.

How I heard of it: Library

All The Things You Are - Declan Hughs. 2014. Was looking for a different book w/ this title, but saw Spooky Dark House cover + wild summary and wanted to know how that could possibly happen / what the explanation was.

How I heard of it: Library catalog

Tumbledown Manor - Helen Brown. 2016. Cover love. A book about restoring a historic family manor?? BRING ME THERE.

How I heard of it: Library

The War Bride's Scrapbook - Caroline Preston. 2017. IT'S LITERALLY A SCRAPBOOK. I loved her other one like this.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day - Winifred Watson. 1938. Rewatched the movie and needed to relive an alternate take immediately (especially for more Michael).

How I heard of it: special features on the DVD

April & Oliver - Tess Callahan. 2009. This just screamed "(slightly less storybook) Ned/Chuck AU!!" [Pushing Daisies] at me. There was semi-platonic comfort-spooning in the second chapter, COME ON.

How I heard of it: Half Price Books

A Short Walk to the Bookshop - Aleksandra Drake. 2019. This looked like an even more solid Ned/Chuck AU, missing only the childhood connection/age similarity, with bonus fave keywords anxiety, widower, bookshop and dog.

How I heard of it: Googling

Girl Last Seen - Nina Laurin. 2017. Recently watched "Captive" and wanted a story of the aftermath from the captive's perspective.

How I heard of it: Goodreads (specifically, I looked up an older book by this title intending to check out related recs, but this came up first)

The Road to Enchantment - Kaya McLaren. 2017. Gorgeous cover/title + "single [pregnant] woman inherits late mother's ranch" = an alternate life I want to try on.

How I heard of it: Library

From Sand and Ash - Amy Harmon. 2016. Love between childhood best friends who can’t (well, aren’t supposed to) touch? Sounds like a Ned/Chuck AU to me!

How I heard of it: a book blog post

My Oxford Year - Julia Whelan. 2018. Always here for age-appropriate student/teacher romances -- I had this one saved for a while -- but read now specifically to cast David Tennant.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

The Reckoning at Gossamer Pond - Jaime Jo Wright. 2018. There's a mystery from the past being solved in the present. Also, "inherited hoarder's trailer" made me v. curious about what was inside.

How I heard of it: a book blog post

My Husband the Stranger - Rebecca Done. 2017. It's Find Books That Remind Me Of David Tennant's Roles Month, and this was my crack at "Recovery."

How I heard of it: Googling

The House on Foster Hill - Jaime Jo Wright. 2017. Fixing up a spooky abandoned historic house + solving a mystery from the past in the present!

How I heard of it: a book blog post

Broadchurch - Erin Kelly. 2014. Fell in love with the show, had to immediately relive it in text form.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

The Vanishing - Wendy Webb. 2014. Spooky historic mansion from a reliable author for the spookening season.

How I heard of it: looking up the author’s back catalog

The Scholar - Dervla McTiernan. 2019. The Ruin - Dervla McTiernan. 2018. "Hmmm looks kind of like (Irish) Broadchurch but where the detective character has a girlfriend to fuss over and worry about. Nice." Read out of order because the second one had more girlfriend content, and enjoyed it enough to go back for book 1.

How I heard of it: Googling

The Day She Died - Catriona McPherson. 2014. The cover looked perfect for the Spook Season/gloomy weather. Sign me up for insta-families and murder mysteries w/ MCs in possible danger any day.

How I heard of it: library (literally because it was right next to McTiernan)

Still Missing - Chevy Stevens. 2010. Collecting base material for when I play this scenario (abduction/prolonged captivity and its aftermath) out w/ TV characters I like.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

This Is How You Lose The Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone. 2019. It sounded EXACTLY like a (genderbent) Doctor/Master or Crowley/Aziraphale relationship.

How I heard of it: a book blog post

The Tale of Halcyon Crane - Wendy Webb. 2010. Wanted an audiobook and I like this author (esp. for spook season).

How I heard of it: author’s back catalog

The Child Garden - Catriona McPherson. 2015. I liked her previous book and this setting looked even spookier and more atmospheric.

How I heard of it: author’s back catalog

Quiet Neighbors - Catriona McPherson. 2016. One last dip into this author...because what part of "woman gets a job organizing the books in 'the oldest bookshop in a town full of bookshops' + an old cottage to stay in" does not sound like my dream life?

How I heard of it: author’s back catalog

Doctor Who: The Nightmare of Black Island - Mike Tucker. 2006. After 2.5 months in a Ten/Rose spiral, the time was nigh to pluck one of their novels I didn’t get around to reading back in my original fandom heyday.

How I heard of it: can't remember

Misery - Stephen King. 1987. I just woke up one day and decided I was in the mood to try this infamous mother of all literary whumps.

How I heard of it: can’t remember

The Whisper Man - Alex North. 2019. Went looking for books that would remind me of the father/son dynamic in "The Escape Artist."

How I heard of it: Googling

Open Your Eyes - Paula Daly. 2018. Second crack at a "Recovery"-shaped novel (it failed instantly because I didn’t take the possibility of diversity into account, but suspense is still a good genre regardless).

How I heard of it: Googling

The Last - Hanna Jameson. 2019. "Dystopian psychological thriller" + the gorgeous hotel on the cover.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

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YOUNG ADULT

Blood Wounds - Susan Beth Pfeffer. 2011. Established quality author + (what I thought was a) thriller premise.

How I heard of it: author’s back catalog

Beware That Girl - Teresa Totten. 2016. I wanted an audiobook, and contemporary YA options are limited at the library. The mystery/thriller aspect sounded good enough to spend 8+ hours with.

How I heard of it: library

Trafficked - Kim Purcell. 2012. I am mystified/intrigued by domestic/non-sexual slavery, and have not seen the topic covered in YA.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Wild Bird - Wendelin Van Draanen. 2017. I have long been fascinated by teen reform camps for girls in the wilderness.

How I heard of it: library

The Year of Luminous Love - Lurlene McDaniel. 2013. The Year of Chasing Dreams - Lurlene McDaniel. 2014.

The library didn't have Girl With the Broken Heart, but it did have a fat duology featuring similar elements of horses + tragic illness, and a trio of friends that called to mind Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

The Pull of Gravity - Gae Polisner. 2011. I was looking for quality male friendships, but the male/female friendship + road trip in this search result sounded like I could cast them as teen versions of Survivor contestants. I forget which ones.

How I heard of it: Googling

The Summer of Jordi Perez (and the Best Burger in Los Angeles) - Amy Spalding. 2018. Established quality author + bright cover, cool title, burger quest, MC's love of fashion and job in a clothing store, and summer in L.A. setting

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Tiger Eyes - Judy Blume. 1981. Found out Amy Jo Johnson was the mom in the movie version, decided to read the book as prep since once again, I knew the title, but not why I knew it.

Darius the Great Is Not Okay - Adib Khorram. 2018. I turned the internet upside down in search of books with quality male friendships, and was pointed here.

How I heard of it: Googling

Big Doc's Girl - Mary Medearis. 1941. Went looking for vintage stories of simple country girls who reminded me of Katharine McPhee's character in The House Bunny. (spoiler alert: this was not it even a little bit, why did I think it was)

How I heard of it: Googling

With Malice - Eileen Cook. 2016. Always here for random teen thrillers, including a fictionalized version of Amanda Knox.

How I heard of it: library

The Girls of No Return - Erin Saldin. 2012. Like I said, I'm big on girls reform camps in the wilderness.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Hope Was Here - Joan Bauer. 2000. Needed an audiobook. This one was short and by a proven quality author.

How I heard of it: library

Rules of the Road - Joan Bauer. 1998. Best Foot Forward - Joan Bauer. 2006. Bought the first super-cheap a while ago because of the cover/road trip aspect/fascinating first few pages; read NOW to keep the Bauer train rolling, followed immediately by its sequel.

How I heard of it: Goodwill/Goodreads

Now Is Everything - Amy Giles. 2017. Interesting format, sympathetic-sounding main character (edit: What Makes You Beautiful - Ha Ha Ha version.mp3), potential for a sweet and protective romance.

How I heard of it: library

Radical - E.M. Kokie. 2016. Survivalist/prepper teen?  Intriguing and underrepresented concept in YA.

How I heard of it: library

Hit the Road - Caroline B. Cooney. 2006. “It's spring, which means it's time to think about road trips.” Plus I just read a fun teen + old lady on the road book (Rules of the Road). It's thematic.

How I heard of it: library

I Am Still Alive - Kate Alice Marshall. 2018. I dig survival stories, especially in the wilderness, and this one was well recced.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

The Caged Graves - Dianne K. Salerni. 2013. Spook cover!! I MUST KNOW WHY THERE ARE CAGES OVER THESE GRAVES.

How I heard of it: library

Fancy Free - Betty Cavanna. 1961. Found cheap and will read this author always.

How I heard of it: antique store

Once And For All - Sarah Dessen. 2017. Stubborn determination to complete this author's canon and literally no other reasons.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Wired Man and Other Freaks of Nature - Sashi Kaufman. 2016. People in the Goodreads reviews were mad that the guys were so close yet not gay for each other. That's the very specific male friendship wheelhouse I've been looking for! Plus I know this author can write teen boys in a way I can tolerate.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Field Notes on Love - Jennifer E. Smith. 2019. Needed an audiobook and this was on display at the library; it looked cute and fluffy and I was ready for an antidote to the Dessen book.

How I heard of it: library

Midnight Sun - Trish Cook. 2017. Needed an audiobook and sick!lit seemed the most reliable of my options, given that previews for the movie had looked okay and it was real short.

How I heard of it: library

9 Days and 9 Nights - Katie Cotugno. 2018. Sequel to a book that drove me insane, but where I loved the writing style and was frustratingly fond of the characters so I Had 2 Know what happened next.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Your Destination Is On The Left - Lauren Spieller. 2018. Attractive cover + keywords like "nomadic RV lifestyle," Santa Fe, post-high-school YA, and internship

How I heard of it: library

Weird Girl and What's His Name - Meagan Brothers. 2015. X-Philes?? In MY modern-day YA fiction?? (with a side of inappropriate age-mismatched relationship?)  My interest is more likely than you'd think!

How I heard of it: library

All Out of Pretty - Ingrid Palmer. 2018. Attractive design + arresting first page piqued my curiosity

How I heard of it: library

Hitchhike - Isabelle Holland. 1977. Vintage book w/ a puppy on the cover, by an author I like.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Send No Blessings - Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. 1990. Reread from high school after it came up on the What's The Name of That Book? discussion group; felt a strong pull of positive feelings but couldn't remember much.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

The Year of the Gopher - Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. 1987 Wanted better understanding of the source material before reading an essay about this book and the above in Lost Masterworks of Young Adult Literature.

How I heard of it: another book

Up In Seth's Room - Norma Fox Mazer. 1979 There was an essay about this in Lost Masterworks too. I had read it a long time ago and remembered NOT liking it, but figured I might as well revisit it to review on Goodreads.

How I heard of it: library

Blizzard's Wake - Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. 2002. Happened to be on the shelf when I checked to see what non-Alice books of hers the library had in stock, and figured as long I'm on a Naylor kick, this might as well happen. Mainly ‘cause I saw "deadly blizzard" on the back and was like "WOW this seems useful for my hurt/comfort scenario stockpile."

How I heard of it: library

A Whole New World - Liz Braswell. 2015. Seeing the new Aladdin trailer blew up my heart with FEELINGS for the original, so I went looking for a YA retelling. Can't believe I found an actual Disney-based retelling.

How I heard of it: Library catalog

After the Dancing Days - Margaret I. Rostkowski. 1986. The connection between Roy and the little girl in The Fall reminded me of this book, so I reread it specifically to visualize Andrew as Lee Pace.

How I heard of it: Library

There's Someone Inside Your House - Stephanie Perkins. 2017. I'll read most any teen thriller you throw at me. The more murders the better.

How I heard of it: Library

All the Forever Things - Jolene Perry. 2017. Loved the author's writing style on a previous book, but couldn't stomach the love triangle. Wanted to give her another chance.

How I heard of it: Library

Aristotle and Dante Discover The Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Saenz. 2012. Been on my TBR for a while because quality male friendship; read it now to see if I should keep or get rid of the dollar store copy I bought. (answer: get rid of. it's good but not amazing to me personally)

How I heard of it: Goodreads

The Hollow Girl - Hillary Monahan. 2017. Violent revenge fantasy against rapists? Especially to save the life of a guy you like who was brutally beaten during your assault? Heck yeah.

How I heard of it: Library

The Opposite of Love - Sarah Lynn Scheerger. 2014. The hurt/comfort potential was off the charts and it vaguely reminded me of Ryan/Marissa (the O.C.).

How I heard of it: Library

Sophomore Year is Greek to Me - Meredith Zeitlin. 2015. It just looked light and cute, like summer.

How I heard of it: Library

Girl Online On Tour - Zoe Sugg. 2015. Girl Online Going Solo - Zoe Sugg. 2016. Two sequels to a book I enjoyed.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Plague Land - Alex Scarrow. 2017. Plague Land Reborn - Alex Scarrow. 2018. Always here for illness-based apocalypse/dystopia. Would have finished the trilogy but library doesn’t have book 3 yet.

How I heard of it: Library

Pretty Fierce - Kieran Scott. 2017. Spy daughter of spies running for her life along w/ doting boyfriend (named Oliver, a name that has never let me down in fiction)? The ship radar is sounding OFF.

How I heard of it: Library

The Leaving - Lynn Hall. 1980. Will read any LH book, but this one was small and easy to take on an overnight trip plus everything about the summary and first couple of pages drew me in.

How I heard of it: author’s back catalog

Speed of Life - J.M. Kelly. 2016. Beautiful cover, blue collar family, unusual premise (twin sisters co-parenting the baby one of them had, no dad in sight), and I love stories where teens are (essentially) head of household.

How I heard of it: Thrift Books

Freshman Year and Other Unnatural Disasters - Meredith Zeitlin. 2012. Looked light and cute, because it's back-to-school time and lately I've been enjoying study blogs from people just starting high school.

How I heard of it: Library

The Land of 10,000 Madonnas - Kate Hattemer. 2016. Unsupervised teens a-wanderin' through Europe? Sign me up for that vicarious wanderlust.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

A Thousand Boy Kisses - Tillie Cole. 2016. A romance w/ astronomical hurt/comfort potential. (spoiler alert it’s too sickly saccharine even for me)

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Hooked - Catherine Greenman. 2011. Random reread of a book I had come to believe should have been 4 stars rather than 3, but couldn’t remember well enough to feel confident in changing the rating without checking first.

How I heard of it: Library

Appaloosa Summer - Tudor Robins. 2014. Horsey YA + after years of it being on my TBR, the author saw me post about this fact and offered to send me a free paperback copy for review.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

I Stop Somewhere - T.E. Carter. 2018. I too identified as a girl my classmates would never notice was missing (moreso in college, but still). Plus it's getting close to Halloween, so time for spooky/true-crime-esque reads.

How I heard of it: library

What Waits in the Woods - Kieran Scott. 2015. An ideal spook setting for the spook season!

How I heard of it: Library

Illuminae - Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff. 2015. The formatting/art design just sounded cool and unique.

How I heard of it: a book blog post

Boot Camp - Todd Strasser. 2006. I went to the library to check out a different book of his, but this caught my eye because WHUMPITY WHUMP (with a side of pining for the teacher he had previously been in a relationship with).

The Last Trip of the Magi - Michael Lorinser. 2012. Picked up cheap at a book sale for the struggling-to-survive-a-winter-night-outside aspect.

A List of Cages - Robin Roe. 2017. Male friendship loaded with hurt/comfort.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

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MIDDLE GRADE

Sparrow Road - Sheila O'Connor. 2011. The setting -- an artist's retreat at an old mansion on sprawling estate grounds formerly used as an orphanage -- captivated me.

How I heard of it: a Little Free Library (outside of a mansion repurposed as an art council's center, actually)

Annie's Life in Lists - Kristin Mahoney. 2018. I LOVE LISTS.

How I heard of it: library

Hope is a Ferris Wheel - Robin Herrera. 2014. Still grinding my teeth over Dessen's Once and For All, I was desperate for a sweet middle grade story to refresh my palate. Gimme that bright cover. Ooh, and a trailer park kid?

How I heard of it: Library

The Education of Ivy Blake - Ellen Airgood. 2015. Prairie Evers - Ellen Airgood. 2012. Also intended as a Dessen antidote, I picked up the sequel first due to the incredibly charming excerpt on the back, and then fell so in love with the character and writing style I needed more of her world.

How I heard of it: Library

When You Reach Me - Rebecca Stead. 2009. Rave reviews from friends; mystery aspect sounded intriguing.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Counting By 7s - Holly Goldberg Sloan. 2013. Picked up cheap at a fundraiser garage sale I wanted to support; seemed easily readable.

Summerlost - Ally Condie. 2016. Young!Ned/Chuck AU?? (spoiler alert: maybe if it wasn't so boring)

How I heard of it: Googling

Where The Heart Is - Jo Knowles. 2019. "Country girl taking care of the animals at a hobby farm across the road" = the childhood dream and also I wanted to ignore the summary and hope I could still get a Young!Ned/Chuck AU. How I heard of it: Library

The Wizards of Once - Cressida Cowell. 2017. Twice Magic - Cressida Cowell. 2018. First one: David Tennant reads the audiobook, and literally no other reasons.

Second one: Ah heck turns out I kind of loved how David Tennant read that audiobook and want more.

How I heard of it: Library catalog

My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece - Annabel Pitcher. 2011. David Tennant reads the audiobook, and literally no other reasons.

How I heard of it: Library catalog

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NONFICTION

Seinology: The Sociology of Seinfeld - Tim Delaney. 2006. It's sociology, it's Seinfeld, what's not to love?

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Survivor: The Ultimate Game - Mark Burnett. 2000. At the beginning of the year I was obsessed w/ this show like never before, so a detailed recap of one of its seasons seemed like the ticket to complement that.

How I heard of it: Googling

Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival - Yossi Ghinsberg. 1985. Loved the movie, wanted to relive it in text form.

How I heard of it: special features on the DVD

Lost Masterworks of Young Adult Literature - ed. Connie Zitlow. 2002. There was an essay about Send No Blessings in here. If that's the kind of book this book is about, I wanna hear all about it.

How I heard of it: Library catalog

Animals in Young Adult Fiction - Walter Hogan. 2009. From the same publishing line as the above, which I loved, I figured this was even MORE my specialized reading niche.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Phantoms of the Hudson Valley - Monica Randall. 1996. When I have I ever NOT wanted to read about grand mansions of yesteryear -- especially if some are abandoned ruins?

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Seven Cats and the Art of Living - Jo Coudert. 1996. Picked up cheap at a library sale because cats (and the cute author-illustrated cover painting).

Psychic Pets and Spirit Animals: True Stories From The Files of Fate Magazine. 1996. Random reread of a childhood favorite.

How I heard of it: B. Dalton's (THAT’S how long I’ve had this book, y’all).

Extreme Couponing - Joni Meyer-Crothers with Beth Adelman. 2013. Who doesn't love saving money? But I am not very coupon-savvy and wanted to learn.

How I heard of it: Library

Cabin Lessons: A Tale of 2x4s, Blisters and Love - Spike Carlsen. 2015. Having the money/skill to build my own cabin on MN's north shore is a fun daydream.

How I heard of it: Library

The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book  - Wendy Welch. 2012. Opening a used bookstore is my impractical dream too.

How I heard of it: Library

Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home - Nora Krug.  2018. Illustrated memoirs are always awesome.

How I heard of it: Library

The Astor Orphan: A Memoir - Alexandra Aldrich. 2013.

Rokeby was one of the estates that fascinated me in Phantoms of the Hudson Valley, and the content of this one took place around the same era that book was written.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

I'll Be There For You: The One About Friends - Kelsey Miller. 2018. Am I going to turn down "a retrospective" about one of my favorite shows?? I am not.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB & UPN. 2007. Recommended after the above because I love hearing how network TV stations are built in terms of programming decisions.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of 80s and 90s Teen Fiction - Gabrielle Moss. 2018. Take how I reacted to Lost Masterworks of Young Adult Literature, and multiply it by "fully illustrated with brightly colored pages." These are the kind of books I’m familiar with and always down to talk/hear about, but hardly anyone else is.

How I heard of it: Goodreads

[howtodrawyourdragon]

Blizzard

Summary: Modern AU. Hiccup had left to help an acquaintance of theirs and Astrid is left home alone. When he doesn't return, she grows worried.

Author’s Notes: Saw this prompt from @whumpprompts pass by my blog and I just had to write a Hiccstrid fic based around it. So enjoy! Constructive criticism is appreciated!

When Astrid looked at the clock once again that evening and noticed that it was already well past midnight, her worry instantly grew tenfold.

Hiccup should have come home hours ago. He was just supposed to check some wiring at the place of an acquaintance of theirs. He had told her himself that this should be a relatively quick fix, one he'd done many times before.

And though such claims should sometimes be taken like a grain of salt with him, he had promised to call or send a text in case this were to take longer than anticipated. Astrid tended to believe his promises, which he didn't break so easily.

Well, there were no texts and there had been no missed calls whatsoever so far. It was why Astrid stayed with the fact that her husband should have been long home by now and on the couch to cuddle with her as they watched a Snoggletog movie.

Checking her cellphone, which she had done numerous times by now, and still noticing no new messages of any kind, she got up with a heavy sigh and an equally heavy heart to look out of the window and placed her already cold mug of coffee down on the small table in front of her. It remained untouched.

One glance out the window told her that it was still snowing too. A thick layer of it covered the street outside, still pristine due to the late hour. That made it all the more difficult for him to drive himself home. He already had a hard time walking around in the Winter with his leg, let alone drive.

It's not that he was a bad driver, it was just that he and Winter did not mix well. Oh, she hoped nothing bad had happened to him.

She would've gone and searched for him herself already, but...

A look was given to the still silent babyphone on that same coffee table next to her mug. She couldn't possibly leave their baby girl behind to go search for her father. Not unless she had no other choice and Hiccup was staying away for much too long.

Well, Astrid couldn't take it anymore. She had to go find him. Her idiot might have gotten hurt somehow. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.

He was once reckless, but since becoming a father had become more careful in favour of watching his little girl grow up, of being able to play with her and teach her all he knew, of watching her graduate and cry at her wedding. He had made a sudden turn in life little over a year ago when the love of his life told him she was pregnant and visits to the doctor and even the hospital had lessened significantly.

It had been months since the last time, which was when he tried to help Snotlout Jorgenson after he had gotten himself in trouble with some guys in a bar. He had gotten called out of bed in the middle of the night by some worried Thorston twins, who sometimes had a little bit more sense than the Snot, and what had begun as him trying to keep the peace had turned into the very fist fight Hiccup had been trying to avoid.

Having been the one to have dragged him into it, Astrid had blamed Snotlout for weeks before Hiccup managed to get her in the same room as him to talk it out. But Mr. Haddock had once been a reckless, not-actively-seeking-out-trouble troublemaker. So to have him not come home now... While there was such a heavy snowfall outside...

Astrid couldn't take the waiting.

Without a second thought did she pick up her phone and looked through her list of contacts to find her most trusted of friends.

Calling her despite the late hour, Astrid hoped she would pick up.

"Yeah?" Heather's groggy voice came through.

One arduously long half an hour passed before Astrid could hear the doorbell ring all the way from the bedroom she shared with Hiccup, which was where their four month old baby slept in her crib.

Helga she was named. Old Norse for 'holy' or 'blessed', much like how Astrid meant 'divine strength'. It seemed fitting with both of their families descending from a long and old Viking bloodline and it was the name Hiccup had suggested they call her before she was even born.

Little Helga Haddock-Hofferson. HHH, like her father.

Helga was still vast asleep as she suckled on her pacifier and clutched her stuffed dragon to her chest. So her mother quietly left the room to travel down the stairs, skipping the last four steps. She was desperate to find her husband, who still had not shown his freckled face.

Opening the front door, Heather invited herself in. And like she had hoped, Fishlegs, Heather's longtime boyfriend, had come with.

"Oh my Thor, Astrid, we came as soon as we could, but the streets were so slippery!" Heather didn't miss a single heartbeat before she started talking, hushing herself when Astrid made it clear that the baby was sleeping upstairs.

"Still haven't heard anything from Hiccup?" Fishlegs asked in a soft tone. Both of them shared her concern, knowing that their mutual friend liked nothing more than to spend time with his family after a long day of work.

"No, I haven't and I'm scared something happened to him. I need to get out there!" Her friends had only just arrived and already Astrid had pulled on her coat and scarf. She was pulling on her gloves and beanie hat next.

"Don't worry, Astrid. Fishlegs can stay here with the baby while you and I go out there and look for Hiccup." Heather reassured her as her boyfriend dressed out of his own thick winterwear. Astrid looked to him next.

"Fishlegs-"

"I know, I know, Astrid. I've looked after Helga before, I know how to take care of her. I'd protect her with my life. We'll be fine, you know we love her too." The only man larger than life besides Stoick the Vast, the currently missing person's father, spoke to ease her troubled heart.

That last part was true.

The day Helga was born wasn't just memorable because their first child had come into the world after nine months of waiting, but also because all of their friends had been right there in the waiting room.

Only the Gods knew how they ended up being as close as they did.

Helga was the daughter of Hiccup and Astrid, but Snotlout, Ruffnut, Tuffnut, Fishlegs and Heather were her aunts and uncles. Some crazy, others somewhat considered normal.

Yes, her baby would be safe with Fishlegs. Astrid knew that to be true.

The engine of Heather's car roaring to life outside, the front door was still wide open, snapped the tired mother back to reality. She shot one last glance to the upper steps of the stairs and left.

The two women barely spoke a word and the radio didn't play. Silence was their only companion as they drove through the streets of their town. They were nearly completely abandoned at this late hour. Besides a few stores that were open all night, all the other establishments were closed.

Astrid found her mind wandering to her significant other and Heather wasn't quite sure what to tell her.

So she decided to ask her a question instead.

"Still nothing?" She only glanced at the other occupant of the car from the corners of her eyes, keeping her attention on the treacherous road.

"No." A sigh as Astrid's phone blinked to life.

Love didn't hurt. That was something people liked to say, but it wasn't true. What was true was that you sure as Hel could be driven mad when you love someone and said loved one's whereabouts or well-being remained unknown.

"So Hiccup went to this guy's house to check... what?" Heather had to keep a conversation going. Astrid looked ready to either fall asleep, cry or both.

She was a strong young woman, the strongest she knew, but there was only so much worry a person could take. Especially when exhausted after taking care of an infant for the last four months after already carrying her for nine. Helga had taken after her father in that she was a very active child already.

Hiccup always did his best to help his young family, but there was only so much he could do with his full-time job, which he worked hard at to provide aswell. And Astrid, for now, stayed at home. At least until their daughter was a little older.

Had she not been in between jobs anyway, Hiccup would have gladly become a stay-at-home father.

"He had some trouble with his lights and hoped Hiccup could figure out why. That's all I got before Hiccup left. That and that this should've been a quick fix. He told me he'd be back by eight." She replied, appreciating her friend's attempt at keeping her up and talking.

This acquaintance did live in a different town, but it was relatively close to the one they were living in now, North Berk. The snow would make traveling there a little longer, but Hiccup had thought about that as he told his wife when exactly he'd be back. He may be an idiot, but he was of the intelligent kind. He must have taken that into account.

"Next time let them call an electrician. You know Hiccup's reputation." Heather spoke, though sternly so. The reputation she mentioned was that Hiccup had a hard time turning people down. It wouldn't be the first time others had taken advantage of that fact.

Her husband was too good in a world that was often too harsh. It was one of the reasons Astrid married him, she had to admit.

They were driving out of town soon enough, taking the only road Hiccup could have taken to his destination. The shortest he could have taken. If he had been on his way, they would have crossed him by now. Not too many cars still driving around either.

Heather decided to keep this particular thought to herself. But she figured that, if they did not meet Hiccup anytime soon, they would need to have a 'talk' with this guy Hiccup was supposed to meet. She wouldn't take "it's late, come back tomorrow" for an answer.

They were far out in the middle of nowhere. They're only companions besides the silence was the darkness and the trees. The streetlights seemed to have failed to turn on at this section, which really didn't help.

If Astrid wasn't already worried for her lover, she sure was now.

On the opposite side of the road did the headlights of another car doom up in the distance. Though it was standing still next to asphalt, Heather and Astrid didn't pay it any mind at first.

Not until they passed and Astrid recognized that dark red colour.

"That's our car!"

Heather hit the breaks a little harder and abrupter than she intended.

The vehicle had stopped for barely a second before the passenger door was flung open and Astrid was out. She ran as fast as she could through the falling snow to get to the other car, slipping on some hidden spots of ice along the way.

"Hiccup. Hiccup!"

"Astrid..." Heather had not immediately followed her best friend. Not just to grab a flashlight she kept in the dashboard, but also to stare when she realized that the other car wasn't just parked at the side of the road.

It had crashed into a tree.

"Oh no..." Finally moving, she hurried to catch up.

"Hiccup?" Astrid called her husband's name as she dove down and looked into the driver's seat through the open driver's seat door to find absolutely no one there.

Well, the door was open. Did Hiccup get out?

"He's not here." She told Heather as she caught up and she decided to take a look in the backseat, discovering that to be empty aswell.

Hiccup wasn't here, yet the car engine was still running. He wouldn't just leave it behind like this, so where did he go? Find better cellphone reception to call his concerned partner?

"Astrid... Look at this." Heather's voice drew her attention again when she had been looking out into the dark forests on either side of them and back in the way from whence they came, hoping to see a tall, lanky silhouette that they could have somehow driven past.

She hated that they still hadn't found him.

"What did you-" Astrid wanted to ask what she might have found when she noticed what Heather's flashlight was illuminating.

The direction from which Hiccup came from, it had obvious tire tracks of him swerving out of the way of something, which was most likely how he ended up crashed against a tree.

But there was also blood. And a lot of it.

Astrid felt herself becoming still and growing colder than even the crisp freezing air around them as she approached. She didn't even know she was doing so. Her body moved of its own accord.

How did they miss that? It looked like she even almost slipped in the dark red soaking up the snow. Her bootprints were in them.

The falling flakes were gradually covering it up, but there were definitely streaks of blood they had passed.

They made it look like Hiccup had been bleeding profusely. Like he had been thrown away from his car and skidded painfully across the asphalt.

Astrid felt her heart stop at the sight. Tears welled up in her eyes and fell silently down her cheeks.

Hiccup, despite getting hurt so much in his life, was a big, sturdy guy. Not physically big since he was scrawny no matter how many fastfood meals they could down, but he was stronger than he looked.

Those drunken imbecils that had insisted on fighting with him when he had insisted on having a civil chat that night at the bar ended up worse off than the guy they thought would prove to be an easy victory.

Hiccup was a sturdy young man, sometimes abnormally so, but this much blood?

"There's no body." Heather swallowed her own fears for her best friend's sake. They couldn't simply jump to conclusions like that.

Trying to get herself back together, Astrid wiped her cheeks dry and nodded. Gods, she was tired.

But Heather was right, there was no body. They didn't even know if it was Hiccup's blood to begin with. For all they knew-

"He could've hit a deer or something and tried to help it. You know what he's like." Yes, Astrid knew exactly what he was like.

The reason he lost his leg little over ten years ago was because he jumped in front of a car to save his jet black kitten, Toothless, who still lived with them. He also once climbed a pretty high tree just to get Stormfly down when the bird had escaped her cage and outright refused to come back.

The lengths he had gone to for animals through the years... Astrid wouldn't be surprised if Hiccup had hit something and then tried to follow it through the trees to see if it was okay.

Except there was one problem.

There were no spots of blood leading into the forest. Therefore nothing had been hit and then limped off into the woods.

"No blood on the car..." She could hear Heather tell her absentmindedly when she suddenly found the other woman back at their red car again. Red, like the colour Astrid had once mentioned suited Hiccup well back when they were eighteen and traveling.

Either way, apparently Heather had been checking the front for any sign that something of flesh and fur had collided with the metal weapon on wheels they called a vehicle and used for daily transport.

When their eyes met, it seemed they had come to the same conclusion.

It wasn't animal blood that coated the street.

They didn't want to return to their first option, but did they have a choice?

"I'm calling the cops." Heather made the decision for her.

It seemed like there was reception after all, decimating the possibility that Hiccup could've tried walking to the nearest town until he could call for an ambulance when he could have just stayed seated instead.

Alone with her thoughts, Astrid found her gaze moving back down to the skid marks of blood.

Hiccup swerved for something, got out and then got hurt himself? Is that what happened here? There was no other explanation. None she could think of.

And then she wondered, did someone run him right over? Was someone pissed off at Hiccup when he was the one who crashed? And did they decide to hit the gas pedal to mow him down when he exited his car to check if the other party involved was okay? Did they take him and was that the reason why he wasn't here?!

Astrid didn't want to think about it. She hated the very thought of someone hurting her loving husband, who was by nature a forgiving, compassionate, patience soul. The notion that anybody would want to harm a person so good made her sick to her stomach. Made worse by the fact that this particular person was her lover and the father of her baby.

And yet, though she tried to stop them, that horrible scenario was followed by many more and Astrid felt like shouting at the dark sky just to make them all stop.

Just then her eye caught something else in the snow. There were strange markings that were too big to belong to any known animal. Honestly, she felt like calling herself crazy for even considering to call them animal prints.

Honestly, this crime scene... What else could you call this?... It looked like something ripped right out of a horror movie or a thriller.

If her partner hadn't been missing, she might have even felt the need to investigate.

Instead Astrid, numb and chilled to the bone, sat back down in the passenger seat of Heather's car and watched said driver call the police. Her animated gestures as she called in a panic, vividly describing what they had found, reminded Astrid of Hiccup. And she realized, with an unbearable pain in her heart, that the love of her life was missing.

Missing, hurt or possibly even dead.

[almostarchaeology]

Archaeotrolling the Wall

By Adrián Maldonado

There’s been a lot of commentary over the weekend on the effect of two years of the Trump presidency. One overlooked aspect of this is the surprising amount of archaeology-related activism that has arisen over the same period. From peer-reviewed takedowns of populism to fact-checking Trump’s theory of ‘wheels and walls’, archaeology has become one of the most consistent methods used to troll Trump.

The most interesting part about this is that it is not only archaeologists who are archaeotrolling Trump. The best example of this is the way journalists have begun reading up on the famous border walls of history. They have not done so of their own volition, of course, but because of Trump’s repeated misuse of ancient monuments to lend justification to one of his signature campaign promises. It is one of the most obvious ways in which archaeology is being dragged into current events, and thus deserves comment as ‘pop culture’ archaeology.

Trump’s argument for the wall has increasingly relied on citing historical walls, both specific (the Great Wall of China) and nonspecific (“medieval”), as precedent. It is the kind of ‘common sense’ argument that sounds legit as long as you don’t think about it. In response, several news sources have found themselves rushing to slap together short pieces on famous historical walls (usually just the ‘big three’: Great Wall, Hadrian’s, and Berlin), in which some light Wikipedia research is dressed up as fact-checking. But even a cursory reading of past border walls quickly allows journalists to troll Trump’s intentions. Archaeology is powerful this way.

Famous walls of history

Notably, several scholars of archaeology, anthropology and history have also taken part in this trend, whether by being cited in these pieces, or having original pieces published in news outlets. Denigrating Trump’s Wall using facts and a long-term perspective is now a whole subgenre of political commentary and is allowing archaeology to take centre-stage in matters of global import.

However, it should also be clear by now that the combined heft of these pieces have not remotely dissuaded Trump or his base from believing that the Wall is a good idea. So this subgenre of journalism is due a bit of source criticism. Here follows a preliminary, non-scientific survey of online news and commentary on ‘famous walls of history’ in light of the Trump Wall.

I am choosing here to divide the genre into two groups – those led by journalists (including some with academic credentials, but whose main output is through an online periodical) and those led by academics (whether in a blog or periodical). This is to roughly distinguish between public archaeology (in which experts share knowledge for public benefit), and the reception of archaeology by the public (in this case, journalists).

Journalist-led

History via Google search (source)

Much of this work consists of little more than going through the ‘big three’ in turn, conflating three very different times and places in the assumption that a wall is a wall.

Why Trump’s comparison of his wall to the Great Wall of China makes no sense 

8 March 2016 – early in 2016, when Trump was by no means the frontrunner in the Republican primaries, he began making outlandish comparisons between his wall and the Great Wall of China. In response, Michelle Ye Hee Lee put together a fact-checking piece for the Washington Post highlighting some unsavoury aspects of the famous world wonder. “Labor conditions were so appalling that some 400,000 people are estimated to have died building the wall…through most of Chinese history, the wall was a negative symbol of oppression, cruelty and death…the wall as a symbol of strength and resourcefulness is a part of the myth and misconception of its true history.”

The walls before Trump’s Wall

11 December 2016 – long read by Thomas de Monchaux (design and architecture critic) for the New Yorker. Shows he’s accessed good scholarship on Hadrian’s Wall, pointing out all the ways its design shows it was not meant as a hard border. Concludes with some incisive archaeotrolling: “some distant Anglo-American memory of [Hadrian’s Wall] may help to explain the political power behind the idea of a wall—even as theories suggest that this wall’s purpose may have been very different, perhaps directly opposite, from that of the wall evoked by our President-elect.”

How Trump’s Wall compares to other famous walls

25 January 2017 – Cheap rundown of the ‘big three’ for BBC Newsbeat, featuring embarrassing graphics about which is the longest and the tallest with barely hidden phallic undertones, which I’m sure Trump would actually retweet.

Trump’s Wall vs the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall and the Berlin Wall

29 January 2017 – off-the-shelf roundup of the ‘big three’ again for a history news blog, including howlers like “Hadrian’s Wall was built as a defensive measure to keep out nomadic tribes, in this instance the Picts of Scotland”. (Fact-check: Scotland did not have ‘nomadic tribes’, nor was the wall built as a defensive measure against nomadism, nor did the Picts exist in the second century.)

The history of walls is long. Here’s where Donald Trump fits in

30 January 2017 – Time correspondent Olivia B. Waxman provides a very hazy history of no specific ancient walls, but does better in modern times. Notes that walls attract and bind communities of their own, as seen in the afterlife of the Berlin Wall. Sadly ends on the facile lesson that walls are some kind of inevitable social logic: “one thing is certain: walls are not going anywhere…it’s an impulse that’s only human.”

What can Scotland teach Donald Trump about walls?

2 Feb 2017 – featuring yours truly. I was approached by a reporter during this wave of wall histories for a lighthearted feature on BBC Scotland. The focus was on the lesser-known Antonine Wall, and marks its only appearance in this list. Abandoned by the Romans after little more than a generation, “The Antonine Wall is the epitome of a symbolic victory.”

The (anthropological) truth about walls

7 February 2017 – In a post for the Anthropology in Practice blog on Scientific American, Krystal D’Acosta uses a few ancient walls, but mostly Hadrian’s Wall, to troll Trump’s vision of a wall as a hard border. “As a concept, the idea of a wall suggests permanence, security and identity. Physical boundaries help define people by establishing a shared experience of place and time. But this is a very simplistic view of national barricades. It overlooks the ways in which these monuments function as sites of exchange, and the ways in which they generate their own experience of identity and place.” Negative points for, again, mistakenly making the Picts into Hadrian’s antagonists.

The fears that fueled an ancient border wall

26 April 2017 – decent history of Hadrian’s Wall by Carly Silver for the Smithsonian, with Trump slotted in as the lede. Featuring guest appearance by wallchaeologist Rob Collins, but despite expert advice still manages to make the mistake that Hadrian was fighting the Picts, who, again, did not exist yet. Valuable observation that it was fear, not strength, which fueled Hadrian.

What walls mean from Hadrian to Trump

2 May 2017 – another flying survey of walls through time from the BBC, but does well to cover the modern wall-mania sweeping the world beyond Trump. “Of course, walls remain practically rather useless barriers, rendered increasingly obsolete by new technologies like drones. Yet they clearly retain their psychological value as demarcations of a dream of purity, keeping out all those threats to self-identity.”

Building walls may have allowed civilization to flourish

5 October 2018 – National Geographic featured this interview with David Frye, author of Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick. Judging solely from this summary, it is clear the author equates wall-building with ‘civilization’, splitting peoples into ‘wallers’ and everyone else, denigrating those who didn’t build empires as the uncultured losers of history. In doing so, he ends up parroting the propaganda of emperors and autocrats through time.

via GIPHY

Academic-led

Undergirding all the above commentary were the archaeologists and anthropologists who have weighed in, producing new pieces rather than waiting to be approached by journalists. Notable here is how early these voices began to weigh in, many well before Trump was elected president. Here in the ‘expert’ column I am including early career and student voices which have joined the fray.

How Trump’s Wall would trample hundreds of archaeological sites

21 March 2016 – One of the first to enter the field was public archaeologist Kristina Killgrove in her widely-read Forbes column. Here she drew attention to the violence the Wall would perpetrate upon indigenous heritage, a symbol of the ethnocentric agenda that embodied the Trump campaign.

The Wall: a monument to the nation-state

17 April 2016 – Maximilian Forte, Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, for his Zero Anthropology blog – the densest academic tone of the pieces reviewed here, a rebuke against those that rail against Trump's 'fascism' while ignoring the forces of globalisation and neoliberalism that brought us to Trump. Some alarming rhetoric about 'globalists' and George Soros, though, and the 'Let’s watch and see' conclusion certainly did not age well.

Hole(s) in the wall: Trump’s implausible solution to the problem of immigration

22 July 2016 - Rosemary Mitchell, Professor of Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University, punctures the myth that Hadrian’s Wall separated civilisation from barbaricum, but in fact acted as an “economic magnet for people and goods”, similar to the way the actual southern border in America currently acts. Negative points, and I can’t believe I have to say this again, because the wall is said to border onto the Picts, which, how many times can I say this, did not exist for the first two centuries in the life of Hadrian’s Wall.

For five millennia, politicians have proposed walls like Trump’s. They don’t work

29 July 2016 – Adam T. Smith, Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, takes us straight back to Mesopotamia for some top-notch fact-based archaeotrolling, where “walls were spectacular failures…Barrier walls are not simply clumsy, imprecise solutions to problems of population movement, past and present; they also represent a catastrophic failure of political imagination endemic to totalitarian thinking.”

Archaeology in Trump’s America: borders, immigration, and revolutionary remembering

10 November 2016 – a fiery call to action from PhD candidate Patricia Markert, published on Binghamton University’s public archaeology blog, just days after the election in 2016. “Contemporary archaeology of the border opens spaces to critically engage those who fear undocumented migration in new conversations that include real people rather than abstract villains, foster empathy rather than hate, and lead to constructive conversations about immigration policy in our country…Trump’s discourse is one of forgetting, and a dangerous one at that. Archaeology is a discipline of remembering, and that may be one of the most revolutionary tools we have for the fight ahead.”

Trump, Brexit and the archaeology of exclusion

10 November 2016 – across the Atlantic, PhD candidate Cait Scott also submitted her take on the catastrophic politics of 2016 for her blog Archaeology Stories right after Trump’s election. Linking Trump’s unsubtle wall with Brexit’s conceptual walling off of Britain from Europe, she notes their symbolism is directed inward. “Imagined safety, though, is a seductive idea; the election of Trump and the Brexit referendum results demonstrate its power. The manipulation and misuse of immigration narratives by politicians legitimises and reinforces the desire in everyday people for this imagined safety.”

The Trump Wall in archaeological perspective

14 November 2016 – An archaeological volley written soon after the election in November 2016. Howard Williams, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Chester, argues that we can use history to understand Trump’s Wall, but we can also use Trump to help us understand archaeology. Extra credit for introducing the early medieval Offa’s Dyke, which rarely makes it into the discussion but may be one of the closest archaeological parallels to Trump’s Wall. “Was Offa’s hegemonic project incomplete or subverted once it was realised just how unsustainable it was as an enduring frontier work?” One of the few blogs cited here that has crossed over into academic literature, cited by Gardner in his archaeological reflections on Brexit.

Clovis anthropologist challenges Trump’s Wall

7 April 2017 - Manuel Peña, in an editorial for the Fresno Bee, argues that we forget the past when we wall it off. "I happen to be a descendant of the colonists who first settled the Texas side of the river. We did not immigrate to this country: it migrated to us… the promotion of the wall is at base a symptom of the historical amnesia that defines a surging neo-nativist ideology. Besides denying the diverse origins of our nation, this nativism is of a piece with the ethnocentric/racial intolerance that rages through several European countries at this moment."

How walls like Trump’s destroy the past and threaten the future

24 October 2017 - Andrew Roddick, Associate Professor of Anthropology, McMaster University submitted a post on The Conversation on the problems that come with walls throughout history. Archaeological perspective advises us “to carefully think about the material impact of fear and xenophobia…anthropologists and archaeologists working with contemporary migration issues demonstrate that the costs of such walls can have long-term unintended consequences, including an increase in violence and insecurity.”

Crossing between the Great Wall of China and the ‘Great’ Trump Wall

14 November 2017 – the only journal publication I’ll mention here as it is open access. Mimi Yang, Professor of Modern Languages and Asian Studies at Carthage College goes far beyond the usual explainer about the Great Wall of China, producing a meditation on the fundamental difference between the Great Wall as the violent establishment of a new empire, and Trump’s Wall as the dying cough of an imperial era. “The Trump Wall has its foundation cemented on fear, bigotry, and above all, fundamental intolerance for difference.”

How do the walls around the world function differently?

2 December 2018 – This is a student blog submitted as part of coursework for ANTH 100 at Vassar College, but credit for being one of the few to discuss the anthropology of modern walls. “Hungary and Slovenia are two countries with the region’s largest expanse of fences. …It is revealed that people living near these barriers often find that they serve little purpose and can be psychologically damaging.”

Hadrian’s Wall, education and the heritage presenced in US ‘security’ and immigration policy

5 December 2018 - A short case study by Chiara Bonacchi, Lecturer in Heritage at Stirling University. This snippet text-mines 1000 tweets mentioning Trump and Hadrian’s Wall, showing that the public forges links between them, even if only as defensive barriers and not as “places of encounter” as wallchaeologists might prefer. Notably, these tweets often refer to Brexit as well. “It is a wall that divides, but also connects regions and peoples who are experiencing populist nationalism today… it remains a powerful but contested image and heritage site, of great resonance in today’s world.”

Trump says medieval walls worked. They didn’t

10 January 2019 - In late 2018, Trump began mentioning nonspecific ‘medieval’ walls as proof that walls always work, prompting medievalists to enter the fray. Matthew Gabriele, Professor of Medieval Studies at Virginia Tech went straight to one of America’s leading newspapers. “[C]alling the proposed 700 to 1,200 mile border wall ‘medieval’ is deeply misleading because walls in the actual European Middle Ages simply did not work the way Trump apparently thinks they did. If anything, their true function may speak to Trump’s intentions: Poor tools of defense, medieval walls had more to do with reassuring those who lived inside them than with dividing self from other.”

The Wall isn’t medieval

11 January 2019 – Gabriele was soon joined by David Perry for CNN, reinforcing the point that Trump’s use of the term medieval is not just lazy, but shows how wall-logic appeals to those with the least historical awareness, and along the way, gets in some exquisite fact-based burns. “[T]he wall won’t work – not because it’s a throwback to imagined medieval barbarism, but because it’s a con.”

What works, and what doesn’t

It is clear from the above charts that the academic-led responses largely preceded the journalists’ interests, and have carried on continuously, responding dynamically as Trump shifts his narrative. It shows that archaeologists and anthropologists are actively fulfilling their responsibility for public education. In comparison, journalists really began to take interest when it was too late, in response to one of Trump’s first acts as president, the Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements executive order which formally directed the government to seek funding and design proposals for a physical barrier along the southern border.

And while this survey begins in 2016, archaeologists and anthropologists have been trolling the impulse to build border walls for years. For instance, on this very blog, I wrote an exasperated piece bemoaning the abuses of Hadrian’s Wall in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014, as did Britain’s eminent wallchaeologist, Richard Hingley, for The Conversation. Long before 2014, the work of Laura McAtackney and many others around the Belfast ‘Peace Walls’ has shown the value of recording the human effects of walling people from one another in real time.

On the other side of the Atlantic, archaeotrolling the Border Wall takes us much further back to its first major fortification (fencification?) during the xenophobic Cheney presidency. No discussion of archaeotrolling is complete without mention of Jason de León’s Undocumented Migration Project, with its devastating revelations of the violence perpetrated by fortifying borders. Similarly, the Migrant Quilt Project materialises the human costs of a fortified border, promoting cooperation and understanding. David Taylor’s photography has documented the border’s transformation from imaginary line to irrational severing of living communities since 2007.

All these projects put the focus squarely on the people and communities terrorised by the Wall, but also their continued resistance to it. As activist archaeologist Randall McGuire put it in 2013, the wall unintentionally “enables agency that the builders did not imagine or desire, and crossers continually create new ways to transgress the barrier.”

‘Walled In’ by John Cuneo (source)

So what hasn’t worked? It is clear that despite decades of archaeotrolling border walls, dating back to the days when Trump was known only as a walking reminder of failed 80s economic policies, the urge to build them has not abated, and has in fact increased. Despite demonstrating “A Wall Is an Impractical, Expensive, and Ineffective Border Plan” way back in November 2016, here we are, still debating it two years into the Trump era.

The problem lies with walls’ own brutal physicality. We can academically deconstruct these ancient walls all we want, but we are at the same time always told that they are wonders to be marvelled at. The way they remain standing after millennia gives them an obviousness that is blinding. Their recurring role in history makes them seem inevitable, as several of the pieces listed here concluded. And even those with the best intentions, even a fair few of the experts listed above, are hoodwinked by the mythical quality of the stories that grow up around these walls – like the notion that Hadrian’s Wall was ever seen as the end of the Roman Empire, and that it was put up against Pictish aggression, when it would be more accurate to say that Roman frontier policies created the Picts.

In his Myth of Nations, Geary called ethnic nationalism the 'poison' of modern history, but these famous walls seem to exude the same venom. Border walls are the toxic waste of empire, spread around the globe by short-sighted regimes with no regard for the future, which continue to poison us and cloud our view of the foibles of the human past by their stubborn monumentality. If Trump gets his wall, it will not only be his legacy, but all of ours. Don’t pollute the future with another one.

***

Follow us on @AlmostArch 

The title image is not my creation, but an unwitting self-parody by the president himself; I’d rather not link to his Twitter account, so read this instead.

[noticelifewriting]

A Reflection on Creating a Commonplace Book

A commonplace book is a way for a reader to catalog the interesting, perplexing, moving, and useful words, phrases, passages, and thoughts they come across while reading. Commonplace books act as memory holders as well as memory aids. The purpose of a commonplace book is to retain useful information that a writer could possibly incorporate into his own work. For our class, we were not concerned with collecting items for later use. Instead, our goal was to read the assigned texts for the course and curate a commonplace book filled with what resonated with us. We wanted to interact with the text and the authors and use what we found to explore our own thoughts and ruminations. At the beginning of the semester, our class goal for the commonplace book was not as clear to me as it is now. However, the process of constructing my own commonplace book allowed me to negotiate with the complex ideas, themes, and histories we were reading while also furthering my education of what memoirs are as I discussed them, and, in a way, created my own form of life writing.

The first challenge I had while making my commonplace book started at the very beginning of the process and the problem was how should I create the actual “book.” There were so many different avenues I could take that the options became overwhelming. I have kept many journals and composition books before that I filled with ruminations, quotes, poems, and drawings, so, I thought that I could organize my entries in a notebook. As soon as I tried to make the first entry in the notebook, I knew immediately that it wouldn’t work. I felt uninspired and I could not envision how the notebook would turn out in a way that I would be proud of. I abandoned that I idea and began looking for new ways to curate my project.

Last semester, I took the digital portfolio course in which I learned how to build a website and I spent a lot of time learning how to use Wordpress. All students at Agnes Scott College are required to make a digital portfolio in the form of a self-designed website. While working on the portfolio, I learned that I could make a subdomain, which is basically a website within a website. After the notebook idea failed, I thought that I could create a subdomain for my commonplace book. I visited the library guide on how to create a subdomain. With that knowledge, I created the subdomain, which I named Noticing Life Writing based on the course and Professor Stamant’s famous quote “notice what you notice.” However, not too long into the process I began to feel discouraged. It had taken me months of work last semester (and over my four years at Agnes) to build my website. Having to start over from scratch was so daunting that I did not know how to proceed. Consequently, I again searched for a way to house my entries. This led me to create a Tumblr. With Tumblr, you do not have to build an entire website. All I had to do was write a post and pick an image.  After creating a few posts, Tumblr seemed like the best fit and I was finally happy with the format of my commonplace book. Nevertheless, the journey did not end there.

After I had made around twelve posts on my Tumblr, I started thinking about the website again. I never deleted the subdomain I had created and I now had something that I could actually put on the website. I revisited the subdomain, and as a test, I copied and pasted a few of the posts I had made on Tumblr. When I saw the posts on the website I felt reinvigorated. I began looking at themes, and, when I found one that I liked, I felt inspired to keep going. I played around with the theme some more and I started working on the pages. The first page I had was the posts page, which did not require actual building. I moved on to creating an About the Blog page where I explained who I am and what the blog was for. The hardest page to create was the page where I listed the books I had read. I wanted to find a layout that allowed me to display the covers of the book while also linking the viewer to the posts that were made about a certain book. It took me days of sifting through add ons and widgets before I finally found one that worked. After I got the books page finished, the only thing left to do was finish the posts and simply make a page for the reflection.

The posts were both extremely difficult and incredibly enlightening to make. When I first started the posts, they were only analytically focused. However, after the third post, I was like a crash test dummy in the way I slammed into a wall. I couldn’t come up with anything else to say. I made a meeting with the professor to talk about the problem I was having. When I was told that the assignment was not supposed to be difficult and that I should be writing my thoughts, I was able to find new inspiration. Instead of trying to write a thesis-driven essay for each post, I wrote from a more introspective place. I began constructing my posts around personal connections I had to the text, and I realized that I could still be analytical while allowing myself to write what I wanted to write. When I freed myself from the restraints I placed on myself, I was able to write posts more easily.

The entire process of creating a commonplace book allowed me to learn more about myself and write down thoughts I have had for years concerning racism, family dynamics, human mortality, memory, etc.  Each post brought me closer to myself and to the authors as I felt bonded through similar experiences. I felt most connected to bell hooks who comes from a similar background as I do. She discussed her childhood growing up as a black girl and I related to almost everything she wrote. The ability to connect with the authors, as I did with hooks, and my inner self allowed me to create posts that were like my own life writing, giving me an even deeper appreciation for the memoirs we were reading in class. Through this project, I learned how important it is for writers and readers to always be interacting with and challenging the text. It is so easy for a person to forget or to let important words, phrases, passages, perspectives, and messages they read escape their conscious if they are not engaging and negotiating with the text. With my commonplace book, I have stored thoughts and ideas and experiences that have shaped me and will continue to shape me as a person.

[mst3kproject]

Night Fright (1967)

 I found this movie by accident while I was looking for Night of the Bloody Apes.  The goofy cover art got my attention, so I pulled the box out for a better look and there at the bottom was the name of the star: John Agar!  There’s also Bill Thurman from Attack of the The Eye Creatures, a movie I will be referencing a lot in this review. Furthermore, Night Fright was directed by James A. Sullivan, who according to IMDB edited Manos: the Hands of Fate (yeah, apparently Manos was edited… who knew?).  Clearly the Bloody Apes were going to have to wait for another time.

That woman on the cover?  Not in the movie.  I’m not sure she’s in the same decade as this movie.

We open on a couple making out in a car, and then watch as they get killed by a POV shot while a radio news announcer tells us that a mysterious object recently fell from space.  With that union-mandated scene out of the way, Sheriff Clint Crawford gets to work investigating the rash of mysterious murders that have beset Hollis County in Texas.  Weird three-toed tracks make it look like the Paulasaurus from Track of the Moon Beast might be to blame… and that’s actually almost it.  The object that landed in the nearby woods is a NASA rocket, and six months in space has mutated every living thing on board into hideous monsters!

I think ‘James A. Sullivan’ may be a pseudonym for Larry Buchanan, because this movie feels an awful lot like Attack of the The Eye Creatures.  I mean, there’s Bill Thurman, and both John Agar and Carol Gilley were in another Buchanan film, Zontar, the Thing from Venus (a remake of It Conquered the World).  The dingy and washed-out film stock makes the day scenes look exactly like Buchanan’s night scenes, while the actual night scenes are tinged blue, so dark it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going on, and still obviously shot in the daytime!  We see several full-body shots of the monster that are just black, with no features visible.  I’d be tempted to say this was an attempt to create suspense if we ever did get a good look at the thing, but we didn’t, so I guess the lighting was just that bad.

What little we do see of the monster is gloriously cheap.  It’s half-Paulasaurus, half-Bigfoot, a shambling fun-fur joke that moves very slowly because the poor actor in the costume can’t see where he’s going.  I think the reason shit-cheap movie monsters attack teenagers making out in convertibles is mostly because they’re not fast enough to catch anybody else.

A number of online summaries claim that the creature is a mutated alligator, but I’m going to disagree on several grounds. First, although we don’t see the monster very well we can tell it’s a primate… and it’s got fur, for crying out loud.  Second, the same summaries also say that the radiation from the rocket mutated an alligator that was already living in the swamp, which is not at all what the movie says happened.  And third, who sends an alligator into space?  A dog, sure.  A monkey, of course!  An alligator?  What poor bastard had to stuff it into the capsule?

Badness continues.  The characters are blandly-dressed and big-haired.  John Agar looks like he’s about fifty in this movie (he was, in fact, forty-six) while his love interest is implied to be in her twenties (I could’t find out how old Carol Gilley was).  The dialogue is breathtakingly bad – the way to kill the monster comes up in one of those ‘wait, say that again, no, the other part’ conversations.  The character of college student Chris is established as a philosophical type by having him say something like, “I keep thinking about the things we don’t know about, like the earth and the sky and the wind and even this leaf.”  What?  The movie’s scientist, Dr. Clayton, always has a pipe in his mouth and seems to be an expert on everything from rocketry to biology.  And god, I hate having to say this, but John Agar is actually the best actor in the movie.

The music is very strange.  ‘Suspenseful’ scenes are set to what sounds like a very, very sleepy woodpecker who occasionally wakes up and does some proper hammering before drifting off again. There’s a very annoying piece that consists of the same four notes on a flute, over and over – when we’re meant to feel more urgency, it’s reduced to three.  The ‘hip song’ the beach kids dance is a repetitive instrumental, which to judge by what the radio announcer says, is apparently the hottest thing around here.

And again like Attack of the The Eye Creatures, very little actually happens.  For much of its length, Night Fright just kind of lies there, trying to convince us there’s suspense and action when there isn’t any. Everything goes on way too long: there’s an early scene with a couple of young lovers who do far too much dull frolicking before finally finding a corpse, interminable scenes of men in cowboy hats searching the woods, a Manly Beach Dance that would show us lots of wiggling asses if it were only bright enough to see them, and many more.  There’s some kind of subplot among the sorority girls, having to do with who used to date who and who has a crush on who else, but this ultimately doesn’t do much in the plot and I’m not sure why they made such a point of it.

There is one kind of fun thing in the movie, though, and that’s how they defeat the monster.  Sheriff Crawford likens it to duck hunting – they set up a mannequin in the middle of the woods and all sit around watching it, with guns.  The monster doesn’t fall for it, though, perhaps because the thing doesn’t smell like a human.  Instead, it chases after Chris and his girlfriend Judy, who run towards the mannequin, and then it blows up when the creature touches it.  I was definitely not expecting that, and it made me smile, so I guess I can award a couple of points for that.

Really, though, there’s very little entertainment or amusement of any sort to be derived from Night Fright.  There’s just nothing interesting in it, and it completely denies us the two things we want most out of it.  The first of these is a decent look at the monster.  We can see just enough of it to tell that it’s probably hilarious rather than horrifying, but the details that would make the difference remain frustratingly just out of reach.  If you make a monster movie and the monster is not somehow memorable, then you’re screwed.

The second thing we want to see is the massacre of the teens at the lake, which seems to build up but then, as in Nightbeast, somebody tells them to leave and they actually do.  The only ones who hang around to get munched are annoying wannabe-tough-guy Rex and his whiny girlfriend Darlene, but Rex has already had his comeuppance when sensitive nerd Chris beats him up, so… why bother?  At the end of the film, the credits roll leaving us feeling fundamentally unsatisfied.  Why the heck did we watch that movie?  Why did anybody bother to make this movie?

As usual, I’ve managed to tease an answer out of the mess, and I think it may actually be an intentional one.  This movie is about government secrecy doing far more harm than good.

At the beginning, the rocket come to earth and the Area 51 types, with Dr. Clayton in tow, immediately show up to claim it (the movie can’t afford to show us this, of course, or the army of State Troopers brought in to help hunt the creature).  Nobody is allowed in, even local law enforcement, and so it’s only the coincidence that Clayton and Sheriff Crawford are old friends that allows anyone to make the connection between the downed rocket and the bodies.  Later, the Sheriff brings a plaster cast of the creature’s footprint for Clayton to look at, and Clayton recognizes it at once but has to seek permission from his superiors before he can say what it is.  I don’t know if I can say he would have saved lives by speaking up, since this movie has a body count of four, but the possibility exists.

Local law enforcement, in the form of Crawford and his deputy Pat, resent this, but also participate in it.  In the tradition of authorities in monster movies, they decide to keep what’s going on a secret in order to avoid a panic (the plot here really is just a bunch of tropes strung together).  They forbid the newspaper editor to print the story until they have more information, and then ask Chris and Judy not to talk about what they’ve seen at the site of the first murder.  Chris remembers this later when he urges his friends to abandon their beach party, and so Rex and Darlene dismiss his warning.  Everybody in this movie keeps secrets, and nobody gains anything by them.

In running this blog I’ve reviewed a few movies I highly recommend entirely because they suck.  There’s the amazing Lou Ferrigno Hercules, for example, or The Giant Claw, films that are absolutely no good at all and yet are funny or charming enough to be truly so bad, they’re good.  This is not one of those movies. There’s no reason to bother watching it unless you’re some sort of masochistic John Agar completionist, which… uh… well, at least I have a name for my problem now.

Damn it, I could have been watching Night of the Bloody Apes.

[elizadoolittlethings]

My First Fanfiction Attempt

Here goes. It is Molly’s side of the story. AU Sherlock tv series. Not sure of the rating - probably teen up. Definitely Mycroft-centric. Definitely happy ending. Early 18th or 19th century. mix of Pride and Prejudice - not at all (only the misunderstandings), Robin Hood [ :) well sort of] . Inspired by many of AO3 authors, mostly ylc, starrysummernights, ... will add more later. [there was a fairy tale AU where john and sherlock rescue princess molly from a tower. i never pay attention to names!! will search and add - GOT IT!! - The White Tower and the Winding Stair by CherryBlossomTide for what_alchemy] AND . MANY MORE.

It is more of a ... prologue (?). Posting before I chicken out. Also hope to continue and not abandon since I have already posted the beginning.

Had a tough time bringing out the thoughts to words.

I literally practised this - of course mentally! To clear my head. Hope it is worth reading.

Do comment - however discouraging it may seem. Especially since I have never been outside my hometown, and, all my ideas come from movies and my high school history knowledge. {For eg. ‘hackney’ - not sure if it is the right word for my idea of the vehicle in my story - a horse drawn, canvas roofed cart,I’d say. Apologies for all the loop-holes.}

keep reading if you want to. if you don’t, still keep reading ;)

[just the beginning of a long story]

{maybe not that long}

so sorry. i don’t know how to edit without re-blogging. and i don’t want to reblog. so adding the whole thing again!

Princess Molly and The Banker

Chapter 1 - The Beginning of a Journey

Molly woke up to the nudge on her shoulder and the whisper in her ear - recognising the voice - “My Lady! Wake up. Wakeup! We’ve to leave!”

It was Mary, her maid , her guard, her childhood companion. Someone she, and her father trusted with their life.

Something was definitely wrong.

Silently Molly allowed Mary to bundle her into clothes of a man - shirt, trousers, boots, cloak. They took the secret stairs behind her wardrobe. It led to an underground passage and into the woods behind the castle.

A hackney was waiting for them. As Molly climbed into the back she heard Mary whispering to the man beside the horse. Slowly she recognised the silhouette - it was Sir John, second in command to Captain Lestrade, the King’s commanding officer.

She desperately wanted to ask them why he was not with her father, the King, protecting him! But knew she was expected to follow, not ask questions and cause a delay.

Although only 14 yrs old, Lady Molly Hooper was far more intelligent and capable than any of her friends. Not that she had any - friends! They treated her with respect for after all she is the Princess of Astoria, only daughter of King Edward Hooper. Even if most of them felt that she was not normal, with her obsession with taking care of injured animals, reading books on medicine and death! Death! She seemed fascinated by poisons and decomposition of the body. That was definitely not normal!

Molly’s thoughts of her life in the castle were turned to the movement of the hackney. Mary had joined her at the back, and they were off in a hurry. She was jolted from side to side but held on to the beam passing along the canvas roof. Her thoughts strayed to the castle, her father. She shut them down. Concentrated on the twists and turns of the path ahead.

The forest was her only friend, with Mary as her companion, while she explored - memorising plants from the hefty books that Mary carried in a small cart, as Molly searched for specimens to use in the small room her father had ordered set up for her. He loved his daughter, more when her mother passed away from a fever that had taken more lives in his kingdom than any battle. His loss though hidden was obvious to his quiet daughter. Molly was determined to find the cause for this ‘plague’ that had taken so many precious lives. And her father indulged her, much to the discomfort of his councillors - who thought that a Princess’ role was to be presentable in court, and make a good Queen when the time came.

Half-way through the journey Molly started losing the orientation of the path. They were heading deeper into the woods - farther than she had ever been. Slowly the rocking of their vehicle lulled her into a doze that she found hard to resist. She needed to remain alert, study the path, note the relevant pieces that would help her re-trace the way back to the castle. Not that she did not trust John or Mary. It had become a force of habit - memorising everything that fell in her field - of vision.

Not sure for how long she had slept, Molly heard the whispered arguments of her companions and decided to get out and see where they were. It was still dark, they were at the border of the woods, and all she could see ahead was fog. Her movement had alerted her guards and Mary came running to her “My Lady. Please remain inside. It is not yet safe for you to come into the open.”

Frustrated but practical, Molly nodded and sat inside, waiting for John and Mary to finish their discusion and continue with their journey. As she cuddled into the fur blanket that was spread out on the make-shift bed at the floor of the hackney, something hard touched her head. She leapt up, silently, and focussed her gaze on the object hidden under the fur. The outline was definitely familiar. It was her log-book : the one she carried with her wherever she went. All her work was detailed in it. As she slowly placed the bookon her lap the hackney shifted under the weight of Mary who climbed in to join her. They started moving again.

Mary watched her caress the book and smiled. It was the only personal item that she could collect given the circumstances. Yet, she knew Molly would prefer this to all the treasures her father had bestowed upon her over the years.

———~———

The slowing of the hackney woke her up. Molly watched Mary jump out and run ahead. She held the book close to her chest, seeking comfort for her racing heart.

John slowed the horse and got down, leading them closer to what looked like a barn.

He tied the horse to a pole and came to the back to help Molly get down. Seeing her questioning look John held a ffinger to his lips, watching Molly nod in understanding, and led her into the barn. Settling her in a corner with the blankets around, he signaled her to wait while he went out.

She was too tired to even think of the reasons for all this secretiveness. And too anxious to sleep. So all she could do was wait even if not patiently.

The sound of more than a pair of boots on the gravel outside made her crouch into the hay.

“Where is she? AAh. My lady, please allow me to escort you inside,” the voice was deep, touching her heart like a well sung sonata. Yet she did not dare peek at her interlocutor.

A strong hand with thin long fingers grasped her elbow firmly and fluidly pulled her up. As Molly rose up from between the hay she looked up to see a tall man with curly hair, strong chin, high cheek-bones, long neck, dressed in a tight shirt and breeches and boots. Her head reached only his chest. In the dark she couldn’t see his eyes. His breath was steady and he was watching her intently.

Trying to gather all information about the stranger, she did not register the other voices behind the man. Like a fog being displaced my the sun, her clouded mind cleared on hearing the slightly admonishing tone of Mary. She tried to look over the stranger’s shoulder but couldn’t budge.

“Well, you do want me to keep her safe, don’t you John?” he asked.

“Of course we bloody do, Sherlock! But, don’t frighten her into running away! That’s not very good now, is it?” John replied.

“Hmph. She doesn’t look like the running type.” “ Shall we, Princess?” saying so, the stranger Sherlock walked past them out of the barn.

“Don’t worry. He is a Good Man. You’ll be safe here, till John can bring more news from the castle” Mary assured her Lady.

“What happened? Is Father alright? When will I see him again?” Molly started babbling as she was led into a small single storied house by Mary, John following them. Sherlock was nowhere to be seen.

———~———

The front door was open. As they stepped in Molly could hear the faint sound of music- violin, behind the closed door to the left of what looked like the only room in the house - there was a fire-place, next to which stood what looked like a shelf that held kitchen utensils. This was at the far right of the rectangular room, where there was a window with a ledge that had books, writng paper, and some cushions. Right in front of the fire-place was large chair looking cozy with a rug and more books on the floor beside it. There was a large table in the middle of the room that was covered with pans and jars and more books.

Next to the door in the left corner of the room was a make-shify bed that looke more like a wooden board covered with a rug and a few blankets. There was a stand covered with books next to it. A candle was burning on the stand and there was a quill that was resting on a parchment paper.

Molly slowly realised that what was resting on top of the books was actually a skull, and, looked human! She had seen the remains of a baby in the forest, and Mary had mentioned that sometimes when a woman gave birth to a still-born, the father would bury the child in the forest, and not in the graveyard of the church. This was to let the spirit of the child be free to wander in the woods and not be bullied by the other ghosts.

Though Molly never belived her and knew that Mary was hiding something, the fact was she loved fantasies and this only fueled her imaginations.

As she slowly approached the skull the door opened with a bang and Sherlock moved in a flash to the pots and pans on the shelves.

“What would you like to have?Soup?”

John exchanged a glance with Mary. “I’ll worry about the food.”

Sherlock merely looked at him as if he was a disturbance and fell into the chair by the fire.

“Why don’t we get you settled, my Lady?” Mary asked Molly.

Molly looked at her not sure what she meant. She was led by Mary through the door to the stable right behind the house where on the floor was a trap door that she lifted to reveal stairs. A faint glow lit the stairs. Molly followed her companion down the stairs to a small room that had a bed, a shelf for clothes, a basin and a jug full of water, also a table with books and writing equipment.

The room had walls and floor that were covered in wooden beams - probably to keep the chill out. There were pipes running along the ceiling. Molly wondered what they were for.

“You’d best change into something more comfortable, my Lady.” Mary was already taking out a few clothes from a bag that sat on one of the shelves.

Molly walked over to her, held her trembling hand and slowly turned her to look directly into her eyes “Tell me. You know I would rather know the truth than avoid it. Please. In the name of our friendship, if you truly are devoted to the King, please!”

There was unshed tears in her eyes.

Molly was never one to interefere when she knew she was expected to remain silent. But this was about her father! Her Kingdom! She held on to Mary’s hand steadily.

Mary nodded and led her to the bed. She still carried the bag of clothes. “These are John’s. Will fit you, even if a little loose. Why don’t you change first. After I promise to tell you everything.”

Sighing, Molly rose to her feet and started shedding the clothes she had hastily worn earlier in the night. “What time do you think it is?” she asked in a whisper.

“Almost daylight” Mary answered as she helped her remove her petticoat.

Mary moved to a corner where a wooden board was covering what looked like the beginning of the pipe that ran along the roof. Removing the lid she placed the jug of water on the iron plate that was revealed. The water slowly started heating. Mary dipped a piece of cloth in the water and gave it to Molly who wiped herself. After ensuring that she was clean Mary took the jug, closed the iron plate with the wooden lid and washed the rag in the basin. After wiping Molly’s hair with the damp cloth, Mary helped her into the clean clothes.

“I’ll wash your petticoat and dry it. We’ll have to improvise since there is no spare.” Mary refused to maitain eye-contact. That was not a good sign.

Molly sat on the bed waiting for Mary to finally run out of excuses.

“Lord Magnussen was heard threatening the King by John. Not sure about the details. John approached Captain Gregory, who’d said that the King is in his debt and owes the Lord quite a large sum. Since he’s in good terms with King Moriarty, of Snowdonia, John feels  …” Mary paused, not sure if she should complete the thought.

“That Moriarty might attack? Like he captured Snowdonia?” Molly completed the sentence in her head, not realising that she had whispered it aloud. “But, Pembrokeshire is so far away! Unless he has the help of the neighbouring kingdoms …”

“Lord Magnussen has too many nobles in his debt. It’s not safe for you in the castle ‘till we are sure of his motives. Trust John. He’ll be off to the castle by now. W’may have to wait for a day or two. He’s promised to get back to us by then with any new developments. If it’s safe, we can return immediately.” Mary tried, her voice not convincing enough.

But Molly was a practical girl. She never was carried away by fanciful thoughts. “Let us go eat” saying so, she rose from the bed, determined not to give more trouble than she already had - which was inevitable, considering the fact that the fate of her Kingdom rested on her head. Mary may be doing her duty, but she knew that Mary was more like an elder sister to her. She was cared for deeply, and knew that Mary would give her life to protect her Lady.

———~———

definitely mollcroft. for a moment thought sherlolly/mollock. but, mycroft is always my favourite, so....

hope it is worth the effort to continue!

A Map of Wales

[rpgsandbox]

INTRODUCTION

HighFell, an ancient keep long abandoned and in decay, now drifts slowly across the landscape.

A millenia ago, black wizards founded the keep as a school of eldritch wizardry atop a remote mountain called the Dwimmerhorn. Only the most gifted students received instruction within its walls.

In time, HighFell was deserted and fell into ruin. Its towers, battlements, citadels, and catacombs became home to all manner of wandering monsters. Adventurers and dungeon explorers began making the dangerous trek up the mountain in search of arcane lore and magical treasures.

In recent months a strange green light was seen emanating from the ruins at midnight. The light slowly intensified until a great explosion rocked the Dwimmerhorn. HighFell pulled away from the mountain and now slowly drifts - and occasionally phases in and out of place - over the Great Steppe of The Northern Reaches.

Are you brave (or foolish) enough to explore the ruins of HighFell - The Drifting Dungeon?

WHAT IS HIGHFELL?

This Kickstarter campaign is designed to support the creation of a new megadungeon adventure called HighFell: The Drifting Dungeon.

HighFell is designed for Labyrinth Lord but can be played with any Old School Role-Playing Game (or their clones) from the 70s and 80s such as B/X, First or Second edition, OSRIC, or Swords and Wizardry. This scenario can also be played with the DCC RPG with conversions.

This new megadungeon adventure is designed to support a medieval fantasy campaign lasting months and years. HighFell will support low-level to high-level play.

I estimate the final draft to be between 180-250 pages and approximately 500-600 encounter areas. If you are familiar with Barrowmaze Complete, that project was 259 pages in a two-column format (cover to cover). Forbidden Caverns, my follow-up project, was 293 pages, PDF poster maps will be done in both black and Old School blue.

HighFell opens with a gazetteer that outlines the region in which the adventure takes place. This includes a cultural history as well as the detailing of several small villages that can provide a base of operations for an extended campaign. Like the mounds in Barrowmaze, or the caves in Forbidden Caverns, HighFell also provides some low hanging fruit above-ground to get (wise) players started. The dungeon proper will be leveled in a traditional style, albeit in a floating dungeon context with twists and surprizes. This approach merges my own particular vision with inspiration drawn from modules like The Village of Hommlet, Dragons of Desolation, and The Ghost Tower of Inverness.

Remember prices are in Canadian Dollars so there's AWESOME SAVINGS for all my peeps in the United States and abroad. If you are unfamiliar, the 2017 average conversion for the year was $1.00 USD = 71 cents CAD. (citation: bankofcanada.ca).

Here are some past layout samples from Barrowmaze Complete with the cover by ex-TSR artist Erol Otus. The cover and page samples represent the style you can expect with HighFell: The Drifting Dungeon

                                 Cover and Layout Samples

WHO AM I?

My name is Dr. Greg Gillespie. I am an Associate Professor of Popular Culture at a university in Ontario, Canada. I regularly teach a senior undergraduate course entitled The History and Culture of Role-Playing Games (for realz). I am also the author/designer of two very popular Old School megadungeons called Barrowmaze Complete and The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia. You can read widely about Barrowmaze on the internet or on rpgnow.com. Through my professional expertise, I know how to create, manage, and deliver outstanding game projects on time.

ART AND THE OLD SCHOOL

In my opinion, crafting an OSR dungeon is about much more than creating an adventure. It is about celebrating the origins of the hobby, the classic fantasy gaming experience, and understanding that dungeon crawling isn't supposed to be about long exhausting combats but rather an equal mix of exploration, combat, and role-play. These values are very important to me and find expression in my design and aesthetics. Just like Barrowmaze and Forbidden Caverns, HighFell will place a premium on amazing art. I will get the band back together including the talents of Cory Hamel, Stefan Poag, Peter Pagano, Trevor Hammond, Stephen Thompson, and others.

Similar to past projects for Labyringth Lord Rules, every monster in the monster section will have its own illustration. In the past I have worked with former TSR artists Erol Otus, Jim Holloway, and Tim Truman. I hope to work with these and other TSR illustrators again on this project for a colour cover and also interior art. Erol has already agreed to illustrate the cover for HighFell. We will ensure the colors and aesthetic chosen compliment Barrrowmaze and The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia (so they will all look super swank on your shelf).

In terms of mapping, those of you will a close eye will notice my published dungeons are slowly filling in a certain old school wilderness board game map that serves as the basis of my Northern Reaches homegame (we affectionately call it...Greghawk lol). HighFell will continue this tradition as a tip of the cap to Gygax's original homegame.

Cory Hamel and Peter Pagano have created some fantastic preliminary illustrations to give you an idea of the aesthetic we have in mind for a few of the monsters. There's more to come!

Kickstarter campaign ends: Thu, May 24 2018 12:40 AM BST

Website: [academic] [blog]

[techyblogger]

SEO for Startups in 2021 and beyond https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/mh4ed1/seo_for_startups_in_2021_and_beyond/

We actually wrote a guide on this very topic I think could be very useful for any start ups looking to invest in SEO.

Technical SEO covers the technical health of your site, site architecture, indexation, site speed, mobile friendliness, structured data markup, robot files and sitemaps, canonical tag reviews, and internal link structure.

That’s a lot.

Additionally, because sites change and grow over time, technical SEO is also an ongoing process and an integral part of upkeep.

When we run a technical check on a client’s site, we check hundreds of individual factors.

Unless you’ve got a dedicated SEO team, that may not always be feasible. So, for the sake of space and practicality, let’s just quickly cover the very most essential and basic best practices — things you should implement when you launch a site and should keep up on as you build out a library of content:

- Indexation

- Site architecture

- Site speed

- Titles and H1 tags

- Content quality (duplicate and thin content)

Indexation. Indexation has two parts: (1) making sure content that should be indexed is indexed and (2) making sure content you don’t want indexed is not indexed. You can request indexation with Google Search Console, and you can block indexation with either a noindex tag or through the robots.txt file. Here’s Google’s documentation on the Index Status Report found in Search Console, which looks something like this:

Site architecture. Site architecture refers to the structure of your site, which is determined by both your internal linking scheme and the structure of your folders (usually determined by your categories if you’re using WordPress). A clear and logical structure that promotes relevance can help boost overall rankings.

A few basic rules of thumb include:

- Minimize page depth (number of clicks a page is from the homepage)

- Group relevant content together

- Link from content to other relevant content within the same category

If you really want to dig into site architecture, this is one of the most definitive articles ever written on it (although it’s a bit outdated). To visualize your own site architecture, we recommend Screaming Frog, which generates stuff like this:

Site speed. Google rolled out a site speed update this year. While it really only directly affected the slowest sites on the internet, it’s still a good practice to make your site as fast as possible. Why? Because fast sites typically yield good user engagement metrics, which do affect how you rank. There are lots of things you can do to speed up your site, but the basics are:

- Deliver your site through a content delivery network (CDN)

- Set up and enable caching

- Aggregate and minify CSS, HTML and Javascript

- Reduce image sizes

- Reduce plugin bloat

- Splurge on good hosting

To check and optimize your site speed, you use tools like GT Metrix or Pingdom. Google also has one of their own. Reports usually look like this:

Titles and H1s. Optimizing title tags and H1 tags are — and have always been — the most important on-page ranking factors. Luckily, they’re fairly straightforward. All you have to do is plop your main keyword in there somewhere, make sure the length is good (so it shows up correctly in Google), and you’re good to go; however, as sites grow, it becomes easier and easier to lose track of even basic tactical SEO like this. Screaming Frog gives you lots of good insight into this stuff as well:

Content quality. In this context “content quality” doesn’t mean how subjectively “good” a piece of content is; we’re mostly just trying to avoid too much duplicate or “thin” content. In general, every piece of indexed content on a site should be unique, substantial and meaningful. There are lots of ways to really dig into content quality, but one of the easiest ways to do it is to use a free tool called Siteliner. Plug in your site, and you’ll get a simple report like this one:

So those are the basics. And they’re really not rocket science. We recommend getting at least one full and comprehensive technical audit toward the beginning of your business’s life; it’ll save you a lot of time and headache in the long run.

Now, onto the other two more subjective, more nebulous, and more wily pillars of SEO…

​The Engine: Content Strategy & Keyword Research for Startups

An SEO-driven content strategy has two basic parts:

- Traffic-generating content

- Linkable assets

Traffic-generating content is designed to rank well in Google and (surprise) attract traffic; linkable assets are marketing tools that help build links, which are still a core part of Google’s algorithm and are necessary for a site to rank on their platform.

You generally need both. The one exception would be if you already have a site with very high authority (i.e. lots of links from other sites already pointing to it), which sometimes happens with startups that generate lots of press. But most of the time, especially for newer startups, a steady stream of links is required to maximize other SEO efforts (more on link building below).

Traffic-generating content should comprise the bulk of the content on a site and typically targets lower-competition keywords (keywords that are easier to compete for in Google).

The trick to creating high-yield traffic-generating content is to find topics that have the best combination of traffic potential and low competition (when talking about keyword competitiveness, we in the industry typically refer to it as “keyword difficulty”).

So, in other words, you want a good traffic potential : difficulty ratio.

Let’s unpack each of those separately.

Traffic potential is a measure of the upper limit of the traffic we might expect if we rank well for most of the available keywords for a given topic.

We use this to supplement — and sometimes in place of — search volume (how many times a given keyword is searched per month) because often, traffic is much higher than the search volume of a specific keyword since successful content usually ranks for many hundreds of keywords.

To see traffic potential, we have to use a third party tool, and currently, the one and only tool that adequately does the job is Ahrefs.

Ahrefs is so good for this particular task because it allows us to see a decent (albeit not perfect) estimate of traffic for a given set of search results. Let me show you what I mean:

Here’s the Ahrefs data for the keyword “furniture design software.”

In the SERPs (search engine results page) we can see all the pages’ rankings along with Ahrefs’ estimate of each page’s monthly organic traffic.

These are the numbers we’re interested in when looking at traffic potential.

The most successful pages generate over 1,000 visits per month (quick note: Ahrefs tends to underestimate traffic, so the real traffic could likely be higher). Other ranking pages seem to attract several hundred visitors per month.

For one piece of content, this is fairly good, especially if you sell furniture design software. It’s also just one keyword in one topic. By and large, this is a higher traffic potential than the average for most content.

If we wrote a blog post on this article and it ranked in the top 10 results in Google, we might expect to attract somewhere between 500 and 2,000 visits per month.

Let’s plug this into a quick hypothetical scenario: if you’re publishing weekly, and about 3/4ths of your content (perhaps 40 posts per year) is traffic-generating content optimized to rank for topics similar this one, you might expect to increase your monthly traffic by 20,000-100,000 visits over the course of a year.

Compare that to a keyword like this one: “best cart abandonment software.”

Here, the SERPs look quite a bit different. There are a few pages with decent traffic, but quite a few pages here attract less than 100 visits per month.

It’s not nothing, but it’s also not ideal.

A second hypothetical scenario: If we added 40 pages optimized for topics that had traffic profiles like this one, over the course of a year, we might hit a few home runs, but it’s more likely we’d bat the average and add somewhere between 50-100 visits per month, or 2,000 – 4,000 monthly visits.

That’s a lot less than the numbers we were just talking about with our first keyword. In fact, it’s about 10x less.

We didn’t change much here. We published 40 traffic-generating articles in each of our hypothetical scenarios. The only real difference was that in the first, we tried to pick a topic with a health traffic potential.

In my view, traffic potential is possibly the most important part of a good SEO-driven content strategy. Understanding this metric alone — even if you’re just using the best estimates of a third party tool — can easily 10x your content ROI.

It’s not the only part though.

A good content strategy also requires you to understand keyword difficulty.

Keyword difficulty is the measure of how easy it would be to rank for a given keyword.

If a keyword is too difficult, you could end up spending time and money on content that will never rank, and if it never ranks, both your traffic and your ROI will be zero.

Keyword difficulty is measured in lots of different ways (e.g. content quality, domain authority of the sites in the SERPs), but the best way to measure it is by measuring the number and power of the backlinks pointing to the pages that already rank for the keyword.

Almost all keyword research tools on the market include some way to measure keyword difficulty. Because I’m a bit of a nerdball who wants the best possible SEO tools, I did an extensive analysis on which tool had the most accurate keyword difficulty scores (measured against my own expertise, so take it with a grain of salt).

In my opinion, Ahrefs (yep, the same tool; notice a trend?) has the most consistently accurate keyword difficulty scores, so it’s what we usually use when we’re trying to find that Goldilocks traffic potential : keyword difficulty ratio.

Let’s return to one of the keywords we were looking at just a moment ago: “furniture design software.”

This is Ahrefs’ KD score:

Ahrefs gives this keyword a KD score of 3.

That’s very low.

Ahrefs has a logarithmic keyword difficulty scale, which means as the numbers get higher each point represents more and more real-world difficulty.

At the lower end of the scale, though, each KD point represents roughly one backlink needed to realistically compete with the pages that already rank.

However, I’ve found that we can realistically compete for keywords with KD scores less than 5 with no link building directly to those pages whatsoever.

So, unless we’re building out a blog on a website that already has lots of authority, we like to target keywords with KD scores below 10 (and below 5 if we can find them) almost exclusively, making exceptions for keywords that are necessary for some other non-SEO reason.

Compare this keyword to our second keyword: “cart abandonment software.”

Here, the KD is 29.

In my experience, the only way we’d rank for a keyword with this kind of KD score is if we paired it with a targeted, sustained outreach campaign that could eventually build 20-30 links to our page.

In other words, we haven’t got a prayer of ranking unless we devote loads of additional resources.

When building out a content strategy, we want to vigorously hunt for keywords that have:

- A traffic potential of at least a few hundred monthly visitors, and

- A keyword difficulty of less than 10

Of course, it’s not that easy. There’s one more component.

The last and (arguably) most crucial part of a good content strategy is understanding and properly targeting search intent.

We touched on this a bit earlier: SEO allows us to target people at specific points in the buying cycle.

We do this by understanding search intent.

In other words, we need to ask and be able to answer, “What did the searcher want when they typed in [keyboard]?” — and we need to understand where that intent falls in the buying cycle.

Unfortunately, understanding search intent is sometimes more of an art than a science, but (at risk of oversimplifying), here’s a quick breakdown.

Keywords that represent non-buying intent (i.e. things being searched for by people who will never buy, and are thus keywords we want to avoid) include modifiers like:

- “free…”

- “DIY…”

- “…torrent…”

- “streaming…”

- “cheap…”

- “…discount”

…And anything else the signifies “I don’t like spending money.”

Keywords that indicate people who are potentially at front end of the buying cycle — people who might buy if we can sufficiently help them — commonly include problem-solution-type modifiers like:

- “how to…”

- “…tips”

- “faster…”

- “get rid of…”

- “ways to…”

- “…strategies”

- “…solutions”

- “…service”

And finally, the juiciest keywords, buying-intent keywords — the ones that almost always make the most money — usually include modifiers that indicate a user is looking at products and making comparisons:

- “…reviews’

- “best…”

- “…vs…”

- “top…”

So, we obviously want to avoid non-buying-intent keywords. And buying-intent keywords almost always produce the highest direct ROI. However, that does not mean we should only target buying-intent keywords. If we neglect other types of keywords — those problem-solution keywords in the middle — we’re needlessly taking on massive opportunity cost since they’re often the easiest to find.

Instead, we need a mix; we just have to be extra sure we understand what people are looking for and that we produce content that meets their needs in a way likely to convert them into a user or customer down the line.

The goal of a great SEO-driven content strategy is to combine these things and find keywords that:

- Have high traffic potential,

- Are easy to rank for, and

- Appropriately match the most valuable kinds of search intent for our market

Good content strategy and keyword research is not easy, especially for startups who are often establishing new web presences. But the dividends can be huge.

We just need the last piece of the puzzle…

The Gasoline: Tactical Outreach for Startups

Outreach is perhaps the most difficult part of SEO because it has by far the most variables.

It’s analogous to (and possibly even the same as) a sales process: you’re reaching out to real human beings and pitching them. These sorts of processes are by nature less data-driven and more about sweat equity and relationship building.

There are hundreds of outreach tactics out there. Some of them work; some of them don’t. Over the years, we’ve filtered out the ineffective stuff and have zeroed in on tactics that work consistently (for the most part) across niches. A few of our tried-and-true favorites include:

- Guest posting

- Links and resources pages

- Skyscraper

- Infographic promotion

It’d take a novel to write about all of them (or even to cover an handful of them in detail).

So, I’m just going to cover one that we like to use here: it’s called mention link building.

The basic steps behind mention link building are:

- Build the best possible guide on one of the biggest topics in your industry — something people are talking about daily

- Track those conversations and pitch your guide to people who have actively blogged about that topic in the last couple days

It’s a super powerful tactic and can get you really good links. Even more importantly, because you’re reaching out to people who have published articles on this topic in the last couple of days, the links you earn can be timely, which is relatively rare in most types of outreach.

Here’s how we do it.

First, we need to find topics for which blog posts are published on a daily basis. To do this, we use a third party tool called Ahrefs. Ahrefs has lots of functionalities, and we use it for a lot of stuff. Here, we’ll be using their Content Explorer tool, which tracks content, social signals and links. It also allows us to sort by date, which is crucial to these kinds of outreach campaigns.

In Ahrefs, we’d navigate to the content explorer. In the dropdown box, we want to make sure we have “In title” selected, which will give us much more relevant results (it’ll only search for articles with search terms in the title).

Now, we need to search for a few topics. We want to go big. These are not articles we want to rank for; we’re using them expressly to supplement our outreach campaigns. So generally, we can just start with the biggest topics in our industry, and more often than not, if you’ve got a startup, you know exactly what those are.

As a demo, let’s imagine we’re a fintech company selling billing and coding software to hospitals.

If we just type “billing and coding” into Ahrefs, we’ll get some results…

… over 1,000 results, in fact. Looks good right? Almost, but if we narrow this down to blog posts and articles published in the last 24 hours, we get bupkis.

The topic isn’t big enough.

We need something bigger. Even if it’s not explicitly related to our products, we need something huge that people are writing about everyday.

Let’s see what comes up if we type in “medicare.”

That’s a ton of posts, but are people writing about it on a daily basis? Will there be people to pitch everyday? Let’s see what’s been published in the last 24 hours.

Bingo.

Yes, this number (90 articles) is a lot smaller than the previous number, but if even half of those people turn out to be good prospects (and if this is the average conversational output for this topic), we could feasibly send out 40-50 good, timely emails every day.

Of course, we’d need to build a killer piece of content — something big or fresh or interesting or, ideally, all three — we’d have a solid number of people to pitch it to everyday.

What’s that content look like?

The frustratingly simple answer is: to earn links, content has to be really good. Of course, that’s vague, but it’s vague by nature. Content can be as “good” as your resources and imagination allow.

In general, though, “good” = (1) highly useful, (2) extremely timely, (3) totally original, or (4) exhaustive/comprehensive.

A few examples.

Check out this page built by Nerdwallet.

It doesn’t have many words (in fact, it has under 1,000 words). However, it has a a custom, well-designed retirement calculator. It’s both totally original and extremely useful.

How many links did it earn? Try 472.

Here’s another. It’s an article on creatine, of all things, published by Examine.com (don’t read it, or you’ll be MIA for several hours).

Just in case you missed that line at the bottom, it says “Our evidence-based analysis features 735 unique references to scientific papers.”

And it’s true. Here’s the very bottom of their citations.

This article is also (and this is a nice way of putting it) fairly long. It clocks in at over 46,000 words, and it was written, researched and edited by people who have master’s degrees and Ph.D.s in scientific fields.

In other words, it’s probably as exhaustive and comprehensive as a piece of content could possibly be.

How many links did it earn? As of the time of writing: 585.

Obviously, it’s not feasible for most of us to put together content like Nerdwallet or Examine.com. The good news is we don’t have to. This content is on the extreme end of “good.”

A typical article written for a solid, ongoing mention-driven outreach campaign might be 2,000 – 3,000 words. It would need to be exceptionally written, of course, and it would likely need some other special X factor: a fresh angle, an infographic, original data, compiled data, the advice of an expert… just… something.

After writing and publishing our amazing content, whatever it is, we can start tapping into the ongoing conversation we already know exists.

Returning to our hypothetical fintech startup, after we’ve written our piece on Medicare, we’d simply log into Ahrefs every day, look at articles published in the last 24 hour hours (these):

We’d go down the list, and if we saw an article that could benefit from including a link to our asset, we’d give them a shout.

The email might look like this:

Nothing fancy.

Short, sweet, simple, and communicates a very explicit proposition: we’ve got amazing content that your article could benefit from.

If anyone is interested I'd be happy to share the full article.

Best of luck!

submitted by /u/Thesocialsavage6661 [link] [comments] March 31, 2021 at 05:20PM

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Blog tour- SCHEME by @JennSommersby With An Excerpt & #Giveaway! @skyponypress @RockstarBkTours

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the SCHEME by Jennifer Sommersby Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

About The Book:

Title: SCHEME (AVRA-K #2)

Author: Jennifer Sommersby

Pub. Date: April 21, 2020

Publisher: Sky Pony Press 

Formats: Hardcover, eBook

Pages: 456

Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, TBD, Bookshop.org 

The key to good is found in truth.

Genevieve may have left the circus behind in Oregon, but there is plenty of show still to come.

When she and Henry land in France, they are whisked away to Croix-Mare, the home of Henry’s grandfather, Nutesh, where they will prepare for a journey they never could’ve imagined. Now that they have all three AVRAKEDAVRA texts—Life, Death, and Memory—the books must be destroyed in the Undoing.

However, it’s not as simple as taking the books to their birthplace in Babylon and setting them alight. Genevieve and Henry must rely on unexpected allies as they embark on a harrowing global search to acquire pieces necessary to complete the Undoing. They’re offered cover and protection by La Vérité, the secret network of followers devoted to the message of the AVRAKEDAVRA, who, not surprisingly, are found under the big top—because no one does underground quite like the circus.

But loyalties among the magical community are fragile. Genevieve, still grieving the loss of her mother, now struggles to control the new AVRAKEDAVRA-bestowed gifts, and with mounting threats to her psyche and body, she clings mightily to the promise of a brighter future once this is over—if they can survive it. And Henry, broken by his father’s treachery but entranced by the heartwarming connection his family’s text has granted him, grapples with the fact that once they succeed in destroying the books, he’ll lose the only family he has left.

Together, our two young heirs will learn that when hope has abandoned us, the overwhelming love of friendship and family is all the magic we need.

About Book 1:

Title: SLEIGHT (AVRA-K #1)

Author: Jennifer Sommersby

Pub. Date: April 24, 2018

Publisher: Sky Pony Press 

Formats: Hardcover, eBook

Pages: 424

Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, TBD,  Bookshop.org 

Delia smiles at the shadow only she sees—

Something slams into her. The lyra whirls like a half-dollar spinning on its edge.

My mother is thrown backward.

And she falls.

Growing up in the Cinzio Traveling Players Company, Genevieve Flannery is accustomed to a life most teenagers could never imagine: daily workouts of extravagant acrobatics; an extended family of clowns; wild animals for pets; and her mother, Delia, whose mind has always been tortured by visions—but whose love Geni never questions. In a world of performers who astonish and amaze on a daily basis, Delia’s ghostly hallucinations never seemed all that strange . . . until the evening Geni and her mother are performing an aerial routine they’ve done hundreds of times, and Delia falls to her death.

That night, a dark curtain in Geni’s life opens. Everything has changed.

Still reeling from the tragedy, the Cinzio Traveling Players are also adjusting to the circus’s new owner: a generous, mysterious man whose connection to the circus—Geni suspects—has a dark and dangerous history. And suddenly Geni is stumbling into a new reality of her own, her life interrupted daily by the terrors only Delia used to be able to see.

As the visions around her grow stronger, Geni isn’t sure who she can trust. Even worse, she’s starting to question whether she can trust her own mind.

Praise for Sleight “Jennifer Sommersby’s Sleight makes magic from an enthralling premise, wonderfully-drawn characters, and beautiful words. It’s hard to avoid descriptors like entrancing, spell-binding and mystical.” —Michael Grant, New York Times bestselling author of the Gone series “Fantasy readers will fall in love with Sleight. Like a circus, it’s an intoxicating mix of beauty, humor, magic, and danger that means the reader can’t bear to look away until the final page.” —Eileen Cook, author of With Malice “Startlingly imaginative and vividly realized.” —Ira Bloom, author of Hearts & Other Body Parts

Excerpt:

1

Calling Andronicus a mean lion would be like Calling a tsunami a big wave.

He tore off our wrangler Montague’s face. He didn’t mean to. Lions are wild animals, even if they live with a circus—especially  if they live with a circus—and the show Andronicus came from used bullwhips and cattle prods to train him. That cat had some stuff.

But I saved Montague. I was young—six? Seven, maybe? I heard the screams coming from the menagerie, and if you spend any time at a circus, you get to know the good sounds from the bad ones. Montague’s hollers for help, the yowl and roar of an enraged big cat—definitely not good sounds. Naturally, all the important players went running: Ted Cinzio, my “adopted” uncle and owner of the Cinzio Traveling Players Company and the man who rescued Andronicus and his girl Hera (and Gertrude and countless other beasts) from their terrible situations; Baby, the show’s tentmaster and Ted’s right-hand man in all things, and the other half of my mother’s heart; crew leads and roustabouts and Aunt Cece, Ted’s wife; Aleks Jónás of the Jónás Family Flyers, Ash and Violet’s dad; my mother, Delia.

And me.

She didn’t want me to see it, but out of all of them, I was really the only one who could do anything for Montague. Baby and my mother warned me, but I loved Montague, just as I loved all of my circus family. I couldn’t just let him die there in the lion’s pen, hay and dirt matting to his hair and neck from the incredible blood loss.

I saved a bird once. It flew into the side of our Airstream trailer. I picked it up and my head exploded in a firework of pain and light. I squeezed that little bird gently and mended its wing and it went from almost dead to alive and flying away in less than a minute. Then I threw up and my mom told me that we have secrets. It was the first time I really listened to the story—the one she told over and over again—about the little girl whose mother told her of a secret family treasure. I knew from then on that we were different.

Which is how I knew I was the only one who could save Montague.

While Ted and the wranglers tranquilized the lion, I sneaked in under their legs and laid my hands on Montague’s face. I pushed the skin back where it should be. I stopped the bleeding and saved his eye.

I was just a kid, so I wasn’t strong enough to restore him completely. I might have been able to if Baby hadn’t scooped me up and run out of the menagerie tent. Too many people were watching. But this was before everyone recorded everything on their phones. No one thought to record the little girl with the magic hands.

No matter. It has all caught up to me now.

And as I watch Montague in his predawn jog across the massive lawns of the Delacroixs’ French estate, his heavily scarred face a reminder of that day at the circus, I think about how I’d give anything to go back to that life, to those people, to that day, when I saved someone I loved.

When I believed I still could.

About Jennifer:

Really, though, who am I? How about a list? We Virgos tend to like lists:

Writer, copy/line editor (www.plumfieldediting.com)

I reside in the Great White North, though the webbed feet prove that I originate from Portland, Oregon. Last U.S. address was Los Angeles. No, I do not miss the traffic. (Although Vancouver is #2 in North America for Worst Traffic Ever.) I do miss California's awesome beaches.

I write under the pen name Eliza Gordon for non-YA titles -- romantic comedies and Happily Ever Afters. (These books are NOT for kids. Mature themes, adult language, super-inappropriate jokes that will make you giggle. Well, I hope.)

Member of SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators)

Member of the eight-person fiction cohort of the 2007 Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University

Studied copy and substantive editing (2005-06) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. As a writer, I have worked with and studied the practices of some of the best editors in the publishing industry. #luckyJenn 

Studied English, political science, and criminology via Washington State University

 I'm called Mom by three brilliant babies.

I will never join the PTA or PAC, so please, don't ask. I also don't do candle, jewelry, or clothing parties. Thanks, though. I'm sure the finger sandwiches are delicious.

I used to do all of my first-draft writing in the car, at night, in the parking lot of my favorite coffee shop. These days I write where it's quietest -- home, or my local coffee shop.

I buy a lot of books. A LOT. No, seriously. I have a problem.

I am a soundtrack/movie score JUNKIE. Hans Zimmer and Alexandre Desplat and Sonya Belousova and the Greyson-William brothers and Ramin Djawadi … and HARRY ESCOTT. *swoon* He followed me back on Twitter and I almost died. Almost. If you ever need movie score recommendations, I AM YOUR PERSON.

I am obsessed with elephants and otters. I'd like to smooch one of each someday. 

Cat person. The household is ruled by an overweight tuxedo cat named Nuit and her very energetic little sister, Rosie Cotton (named after Samwise Gamgee’s wife from Lord of the Rings). 

I love coffee, Shakespeare (!!!), Joan of Arc, most things pastry, MOVIES (oh man I love movies so much), the Golden Rule, and bloody good writing. 

I am Team Superman all the way. I wear the same outfit every day: a Superman T-shirt and jeans, and I have a very cool Superman tattoo inspired by the artwork of comic book artist Jim Lee.

I adore Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit -- and I ship Kili + Tauriel forever, and I don't care if Tauriel wasn't in original Hobbit story. 3>

I now have five tattoos, including the Dwarvish script from Kili's rune stone (from Desolation of Smaug). I waited until my 30s to get my first tattoo, just to be sure I wouldn't regret it.

Muses help me write -- I have many. I love movie stars!

I hate thunderstorms, paperwork, people lacking humility, lazy writers with a sense of entitlement, and going to the dentist. Oh, and bad drivers. THE BAD DRIVERS TURN ME INTO A RAGE STORM OF CALAMITOUS DOOM.

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Goodreads

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BookHounds YA

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momfluenster

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Sweet Things

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MORE STRANGE CASES OF SPONTANEOUS HUMAN TELEPORTATION

Posted by M M | Dec 26, 2017 | 2017, Daily Blog, Paranormal 

MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE

One of the more fascinating mysteries I have come across is that of people who, for whatever reasons, have seemingly spontaneously teleported over great distances with no explanation. I have covered this phenomenon here at Mysterious Universe before, on more than one occasion, and it is a mystery that is endlessly intriguing. Although teleportation in recent times has been shown to be a very real possibility, what are we to make of such cases, when a person suddenly and inexplicably transports from one place to another? I do not intend to get into the specifics of how such a process would work, but what I will do is bring you some truly weird cases of when this has supposedly happened.

A very early and strange case of what appears to have been some form of teleportation supposedly happened in 1687 in North Cornwall, England and concerns a young servant named Jacob Mutton, who was in the employ of a William Hicks, the Rector of Cardinham. On May 8, 1687, Jacob was reportedly getting ready for bed when he heard a strange voice calling out, which sounded as if it were saying “So Hoe, So Hoe, So Hoe” over and over again. Upon looking around for the source of the mysterious voice, which he said had sounded “hollow,” Jacob tracked it to the window, but when he looked out there was no one out there in the night, and it would have been odd if there had been, as his window was a full 17 feet off of the ground. This would be the last thing he really clearly remembered before he mysteriously vanished.

The next morning when Jacob was nowhere to be found the premises were searched, but all that could be located was an iron bar from outside his window lying on the ground. However, it soon came to light that Jacob had been found some 30 miles away near the town of Stratton, lying unconscious on a narrow road still tightly grasping a window bar from his bedroom. Jacob proved to be rather dazed and unable to clearly recall what had happened to him at first, and he expressed bewilderment that he should be so far from home in an area that he had never been to before. Upon being brought back home it was noticed that the young man’s demeanor had changed, and that he was rather dour and contemplative rather than his jovial and cheerful usual self. When asked what had happened to him the only thing he was able to vaguely remember was that a “tall man” had taken him out over the land, as if flying. It is unclear just what exactly happened to Jacob Mutton, but it is an intriguing tale to say the least.

In 1926 there was the strange case of French swimmer Simone LaVille, who was in the midst of trying to swim the English Channel. According to reports from the rescue boat that followed her, during her swim Simone suddenly purportedly began to fade away, as if being erased from reality, before disappearing completely. A panicked search began, but the woman could not be located anywhere in the area and no one could figure out how she could have possibly just vanished under the watchful eye of the 18 crew members aboard the rescue vessel. She would allegedly be found 3 hours later in a farmer’s pond 17 miles south of London, with no rational reason, nor any memory as to how she could have possibly ended up there.

Another strange case comes from 1959, when a man in Bahia Blanca, Argentina was driving home after a business trip. According to his account, he checked out of a hotel and got into his car to continue on his way, but when he started the engine he claims that the vehicle was suddenly tightly wrapped within a thick, soupy white fog that seemed to come from nowhere. He peered out of the window but could not make anything out through the oppressive white of the haze, and at some point he believes he passed out, only to awaken to find himself standing alone in a field, with no sign of where his car had gone nor the hotel he had been at. It seemed that he was in an unfamiliar rural area in the middle of nowhere, and he could not figure out just what had happened.

The baffled and disoriented man then made his way to a nearby dirt road and managed to wave down a passing truck. When he asked the driver of the truck if he would take him to Bahia Blanca things would get strange indeed, as according to him they were now in Salta and that Bahia Blanca was over 600 miles away from where they were. The dumfounded man reportedly looked at his watch and saw that only a few minutes had passed since he had been enveloped by the bizarre mist.

The truck driver then apparently dropped the dazed man off at a nearby police station, where he told his story to some very skeptical officers, yet when they checked out his story by calling the hotel he claimed to have stayed at, the receptionist confirmed that the man had indeed just checked out not long before. The mystery man’s car would be found soon after abandoned and with its engine still running. Just what in the world happened to this man and did he really get transported hundreds of miles within minutes? Who knows?

Also from the same country, is a case written of in Our Haunted Planet, by John A. Keel. It comes from 1968, and revolves around 11-year-old Graciela del Lourdes Cimenez, who in the summer of that year was out playing with friends in Cordoba, Argentina. Similar to the previous account, the girl claimed that she had suddenly been surrounded by an impenetrable and oppressive white mist. Startled and frightened, Graciela then tried to run through the thick fog in the direction she thought her house lay, but as she did so she suddenly ran out of the murk into a busy town square, odd considering they had been nowhere near such a place. Gabriella allegedly went to the first house she could find, and when she asked the residents where she was she was shocked to find that she was over 100 miles away from where she had been.

More recently, in November of 2000, a man named Ralph Morily claimed that as he and his wife were relaxing at their Miami home when an unidentified stranger suddenly appeared in their hot tub. When the man was questioned he was found to be rather flustered and confused, and he claimed that he had just dove into the pool of a hotel 8 miles away and surfaced there in the hot tub. This would be confirmed when the stranger’s wife and two teenaged children said that they had watched him dive into the pool but that he had never surfaced, prompting a police search. The next thing they knew, the police informed them of having found the missing man in the hot tub miles away. In it a weird case, and considering it was first reported in the Weekly World News should probably be taken with a grain or two of salt, but for what it’s worth I figured it was worth at least putting out there.

Even more recently brought forward is an account shared by a commenter calling himself Pavel on the Russian Boris Zolotovforum on June 12, 2008. The user claimed that he had been an army officer serving in Kazakhstan in 1967 when he experienced some bizarre events as he was attempting to get back home to Moscow, some miles 3,800 kilometers away. A rough translation of his account reads:

The train from there (to Moscow) is 3.5 days. At 5 p.m., I get from headquarters, with all the documents on my dismissal. Travel documents have not yet been issued to me. Lieutenant Tihonchik on Java motorcycle, stopped near me and proposed a ride. I take the seat behind him and … fall into the darkness. My condition is stunned curiosity. Still with the darkness around, I suddenly hear female voice: – “Don’t make noise with your boots! It’s not Vietnam here! (I was wearing a panama hat).

My vision comes back to me and I find myself in Moscow walking near a metro station close to the building my family lived in. The time is about 8 p.m. hours (time difference between Moscow and Kazakhstan is 3 hours). With joy, I run home… And the most interesting thing I can’t find any travel documents on me.

Finally we have an odd report originating in South Africa in October of 2017. According to the strange story, an infirm 61-year-old man was admitted to a hospital for emergency abdominal surgery, after which he was transferred to the larger Stellenbosch Hospital, in Cape Town, South Africa to recover and for rehabilitation. During the man’s stay, a nurse was caring for him and allegedly went to go fetch some fresh linen, but when she returned to the room a mere minute later the man was nowhere to be seen. It was incredibly strange, as he had been completely bed-ridden and in an immobilized, postoperative condition at the time and barely able to move, let alone get out of bed and walk off in such a short amount of time without anyone noticing. It was as if the patient had just disappeared into thin air.

Over the next few hours a search was launched at the hospital, searching every inch of the facilities and the surrounding area, but there was absolutely no trace of the vanished man. It would not be until 13 days later when the vanished gentleman would finally be found dead, but what is truly strange is just where he was ultimately found. The body was allegedly discovered stuffed up in a confined and typically inaccessible niche within the ceiling slabs of an isolated hospital unit, and neither authorities nor hospital staff have any idea whatsoever as to how this immobile old man could have possibly gotten there, leading to whispers of teleportation. As crazy as it all sounds, the story has supposedly been confirmed by the Ministry of Health of the Western Cape province, Mark van der Heever, and is apparently still under investigation. Did this man spontaneously teleport? Just what is going on here? No one seems to know.

Is there any truth to such tales and how can this possibly happen? While we pursue the technology to teleport objects and pore over the theory behind it all, if these reports are anything to go by it seems as if this has been perhaps happening naturally for years. Are these people tapping into some force we cannot yet comprehend? Are they venturing through vortices or miniature black holes that have sucked them in and spit them out in disparate locations or even miles from home? Is there any truth to these accounts at all or is this all attributable to some rational explanation? It is a mystery that provokes discussion and debate, and one which we may never fully understand.