#it's so much harder than prose? which is not easy to start with

[rainhalydia]

I decided to write poetry, and then immediately remembered that I actually hate writing poetry.

[some-triangles]

I found a video essay which is about Neil Gaiman but is also a critique of fandom culture from the left. It's fun! My guy dresses up as Death from the Seventh Seal and talks about Roland Barthes in rhyming couplets. It's too long and overly pleased with itself but hey, leftists.

I took a break while watching it to go on a milk run to the bourgeois grocery store (might as well not abbreviate it under the circumstances) and saw this:

Given that the video was just talking about Gaiman being more a brand than an author I took this as a sign to share my two cents.

The cents are these: beyond considerations of fandom, parasocial attachment, Death of the Author and capitalism, which the video covers admirably*, can we posit that the art you find yourself the most attracted to as a teenager might not be stuff you should be buying as an adult?

*(they do quote an Alan Moore article from The Fucking Guardian in which he says he hates the growing trend of treating authors as "part of the costumed entertainment" without pointing out that the man wears a costume at all times, which is part of his branding, just like Gaiman. Also maybe given the company he keeps we should start asking more questions about Lost Girls. But I digress.)

Do you want to live in the moral universe of C.S. Lewis? J.D. Salinger? J.K. Rowling? J.R.R. Tolkien? (Maybe going by one's initials is the problem here, actually.) A grown person who thinks for a living shouldn't be going around saying that Neil Gaiman is one of their heroes. Even if you like his books, you've got to admit that the dude's mostly style and reference, that his actual insights don't go beyond those of a bright teenager. It's commodified rebellion for rebellion fans, sitting on the shelf next to Rowling's commodified conformity for conformity fans. We can still have fun with pop but we have to understand that the people who make it are in the sales business. (Yes, even Kendrick.)

The reason this stuff is constantly sold back to you is that it's really easy to sell things to children. The less like a child you become, the harder it is to market to you, so it's in the interests of money to draw you back to your childhood in a million different ways. So: grow up and get some esoteric, contradictory tastes, just to fuck with them. Cut out the hero worship - don't respect people for their "talent" any more than you would respect them for being rich. This will make you less likely to be starstruck enough to follow around a third-rate tumblr daddy dom who thinks he's a wizard.

(no, not me)

Finally, because I'm also a leftist, here's the overlong and self-satisfied part. I read a lot of Gaiman in high school but I also read a lot of one of Gaiman's heroes, Harlan Ellison. He was my favorite! I liked him because he was stylish, aggressive, arrogant and brutal. Teenagers like power and he had it. The fact that none of his stories had real people in them and that he seemed to have a problem with women in particular was nothing to me in the face of his Muscular Prose. Then I went to college and met some people who were smarter than me.

I ended up dumping Ellison for what was in his work, long before I knew much about all the other stuff. Same thing with Gaiman. So if you're worried about being let down by one of your heroes, I suggest looking at all of them carefully. Particularly at their feet. (Not for horny reasons.) And then maybe stop looking at them at all and go do something else.

[ravs6709]

Even If I Dream, Even If I Cry, Even If I Get Hurt (Reality Approaches Frantically) - Mizisua

word count: 1.0k words

or read on ao3 here! (will be locked to only ao3 users after about a week)

woah. mizisua. i actually had a diff fic id been working on for them, however the mizi comics + karma vastly proved that my characterization would not work. i will attempt a rewrite for that eventually, but this idea came to mind, so here's a quick mizisua angst. hehe posting angst on my birthday <333

that brief moment where we see that mizi clearly tried to kill herself... oughhh. and the similarities to rgu too??? i clocked that so quickly i surprised myself (hence, title, which is from rgu's op loosely using official + eng cover lyrics). so yeah basically this is my vision of the suicide attempt, no dialogue --- i wanted to practice my prose cause i typically rely tm on dialogue

warnings: canon suicide attempt

~•~•~•~•~•

The golden sunset's light is warm on her face as Mizi peers down the cliff. Her hand clings to the nearest tree branch, and it makes her want to laugh. Why seek out balance when her goal was to fall anyway? Isn't it funny, human nature?

Pink and orange and red paint the sky now—a complete opposite to the colours that have been painting her heart. Sua would love the sight. They've sat on this very cliff edge and watched it a few times already.

I'm going to ruin this place for her, she thinks, and her fingers grip the branch tighter.

It would have been better if she could do this somewhere else, somewhere harder to find. But this was the only way. If she is going to do this, she has to do it right. Quick. Simple.

Sua would be busy doing her homework. Mizi wonders what kind of face she would make when she found out. Maybe they'd be blank as always, like when they laid out under the night sky and she would talk about Guardian Nigeh.

Her heart pounds in her chest. Too much. Too much. She's afraid to let go. She's even more afraid to not. She's afraid of everything, and laughter spills out of her, like juice pouring out from crushed fruit. Maybe her organs would do the same when her body hits the ground. The smile she wears isn't forced this time—it's wild and ugly and nothing like the pretty mask she wears.

Hurry up and do it already, she thinks to herself. There's nothing to be scared of anymore.

And there really isn't. A few seconds were all it would take to be free. Her laughter dies down, but she doesn't stop smiling.

She consciously wills her fingers to let go, feet sliding down the edge immediately. It's too fast, the world is spinning as she starts to fall, and there's no going back now—

In an instant, everything goes still. There are noises in the atmosphere such as the wind, or her feet hitting the vertical surface of the cliff, but a small noise overpowers it all. A voice, but not her own. A hand holds hers, painfully tight, but so gentle and soft and warm.

She fixes her gaze on the sight before her, and her heart stops.

Another small noise escapes Sua, weak and pitiful. Or maybe adorable. Guardian Shine would have thought that.

Sua's mouth opens, but no words come out. Her hand squeezes Mizi's one tighter, trying to pull her up. 

Why are you here? She wants to ask, but no words can come out of her mouth either.

Her feet which had been kicking at the cliff still, keeping their position steadier.

You're not supposed to be here. Not supposed to see this.

Mizi is stronger than Sua. That's just a fact. She's carried Sua and even Till on her back in the past. Sua is more like a small doll, easy to crush. Sua's not strong enough to pull her back up if she were to struggle.

She's crying. Her hand is trembling as she tries to let go without dragging Sua down with her.

Let me go.

She's crying. Sua is crying. Her hand is trembling as she keeps trying to pull Mizi back up onto stable ground.

Don't cry over this, out of all things, she thinks to herself. Sua doesn't cry often—that's something that Mizi does more. Sua usually stays quieter than she already is, usually just stares forward with distant eyes. 

There are better things to cry over. A million other things. She's heard plenty of what Sua has gone through, and every single one is more worth crying for.

But she's crying over Mizi. She's crying, and her eyes are haunted in a way she's never seen before. Mizi stares into those desperate eyes, and one thought sticks in her mind.

I could crush her. I could crush her right now.

For a brief moment, she really does consider it. The ultimate way to crush Sua with the weight of her love. How far would her blood splatters reach? Would it be enough to stain her?

She wonders and wonders and wonders, knowing that she won't actually do it. At least, not in this way. Mizi could crush her now, but instead, Sua will simply be crushed in the future. Mizi will crush Sua.

She digs her feet into the cliff, seeking out balance. She lets her fingers grab at Sua’s with equal intensity, and allows herself to be pulled up. Sua looks up at her, tears still streaming down her face, teeth gnawing at her lip. It looks like she’s going to say something, but instead she walks away, dragging Mizi with her by the hand. They don’t walk far, just enough that the cliff is out of view. They’re both trembling, legs giving out as they fall down onto the grass and into each other’s arms. They’ve cuddled and kissed, but it’s different now, and Mizi isn’t sure if she’s ever held anything this close to her before. A thousand sentences ring in her head, but none of them are able to be spoken. It’s unfair, it’s so unfair how things are going to go in the future. That even now, before Alien Stage even starts, she knows the outcome.

She should have just done what she intended to do. End it all quickly. There’s no hope for Sua. There’s no use in basking in her love for too long, because it’ll be gone anyway.

But Mizi is selfish. She’s selfish, a part of her wants to live and she craves that love anyway, so she whispers apologies into Sua’s ear and promises to never do it again.

Isn’t it funny, human nature?

~•~•~•~•~•

if anyone wants to join a taglist for future alnst fics, let me know!

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia! I was curious, as I understand, this story was written long time ago? Did you edit it with almost 10 years of practice on writing since 2014 now? And more in general, do you feel like writing is easier or not withos much practice (I read about smut, that it is harder now, but in general - worldbuilding, character creation and so on) ?

Hi hi anon!

Yeah the story was first drafted in 2014, and has gone through big edits since then (the latest being 2017, though I did some cursory stuff this year as well to just double check that it's not terrible).

Tbh, prior to 2014 I was writing like... very serious award winning short stories with tragic endings and winning awards for them, so I'm moderately confident the story is readable. I've been writing novels (for fun mostly) since 1995. And I have a university education in writing that started in 1999.

My fanfiction/serial style is very different to my 'I'm writing a book / I'm writing a short story' style.

I think it will feel different to my serials because I wrote it like a book, there's less sprawling character exploration, and the pacing is much, much tighter. There's a lot more focus on plot, and folks used to my serials might feel like the story ends really quickly! Because it's like much shorter (100k) than my serials.

If anything, I think these are the things to watch out for in Tradewinds:

100k novel means much tighter pacing and prose, and often very little time for too much character reflection.

Possibly not as much character exploration as people are used to from me (though there's still some!)

More plotting

Less smut, and the smut is also more 'vanilla' than what I normally write, because at the time I was a lot more wary about putting BDSM into the market. There are power dynamics though (i.e. a vibe where one character 'feels' more submissive to the other)

Robust scene-setting (i.e. description, place, anchoring)

Lively dialogue

I actually think I was probably a better literary writer back in the 00s but it wasn't much fun for me. I quit writing for a while and then picked it back up again to write fanfiction, which was easier and more relaxed for me. (And still is! The Ice Plague is an exception to that because it had more robust plotting and was structure more...formally.)

I honestly think writing gets easier or harder depending on the project and writing style involved.

Some writing gets easier with time, some doesn't. Sometimes that will flip or switch. Sometimes one thing is easy for years and then becomes harder with certain stories.

It was Gene Wolfe who said:

"You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing."

And yeah, I tend to believe for the most part that's true with how hard or easy something is. How ambitious a project is, its genre, its length, its complexity can all play into that.

I pick easier projects as my main projects right now, but I have hard projects coming up too!

I would say overall writing does become "easier" in the sense that foundational skills become second nature (I know how to build a character and their dialogue now without thinking about it, and while there's always more to learn, I can now start in a place of just knowing how to do that instead of knowing I need to learn how to do that), but that the stories themselves will still pose unique challenges to a writer.

Er so TL;DR yes writing for me is easier but I'm choosing easier things to write, and sometimes it's still very hard!!!

[ilikereadingactually]

Craft: Stories I Wrote For the Devil

Craft: Stories I Wrote For the Devil by Ananda Lima

i don't have the physical book in front of me so i don't know who it was, but i have to start by just kissing the person who designed this cover so noisily on the cheek like an overly familiar auntie. i fucking love this cover so much, and it makes me have just the tiniest sliver of regret that i never got into book design like i thought i wanted to in grad school.

whew, glad i got that out of the way. now i can just scream like a tea kettle about how incredible this book is. i'm not even sure where to start. the prose is so easy, as in Lima makes it look easy, it's the reading equivalent of sinking into a hot tub. and even better, it's not actually a light read—Craft presents stories within stories, each with elements of magical realism, each connected by Brazilian immigrant experiences: those of "the writer," a recurring character of the frame narrative, and those of the characters she writes. the outermost layers of this onion of stories also feature frequent encounters with the Devil—flirtatious, world-weary, magical, tender. exactly the best kind of Devil, imo, and his mild interventions delighted me every time.

also, the section that was just feedback the writer received from peers in a writing workshop, about a story we only get to know through that feedback, made me laugh harder than i have in ages. i'm SUPER EXCITED about my upcoming workshop experience and don't anticipate the feedback being comically oblivious, but that section of Craft did bring me right back to every creative writing class i took in college. just so, so keenly observed. fantastic!

the deets

how i read it: an e-galley from NetGalley, which i'm only a little bit behind on this time! i'm definitely buying this book asap, i'd love to actually mark it up with some tabs to really study how the structure is working.

try this if you: love magical realism, dig a nuanced perspective on immigrant experiences, have ever been in a writing group, or think Lucifer actually did nothing wrong.

some bits i really liked: i'm just a big fan of his

The Devil looked around the living room with a face that said, "Not bad." The Devil, who had been forever banished from home with nothing but a condemned soul, for reasons she couldn't quite make sense of, after trying Saint Augustine, Wikipedia, and even the Bible.

___

The writer narrowed her eyes at him but smiled. The Devil sat down where the man had been. The AC was suddenly working again, and the Devil's warmth was pleasant. The air smelled faintly of someone freshly showered, a little like Peter, a subtle soapy sweetness. The Devil's legs were nicely contained within the boundaries of his own seat. She wanted to hug him but couldn't. She said he looked good.

___

Now at the DMV, he looked at her book sitting on her lap and raised his eyebrow with a suspicious expression. He asked if she had to be into that stuff, might he suggest Nyssa or, more recently, Kotsko, the romantics, or so many others instead of that guy—he pointed to Saint Augustine on the cover with a bitter expression.

pub date: June 18, 2024! seriously go get this book it's a stunner!

[gwaeddblaidd]

First time answering a @writing-wednesday question:

Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

It's a longer excerpt, hence the cut, but due to the way I write it's hard to share a short dialogue excerpt. This fic, especially, is very prose-heavy; written in the first-person present tense, a lot of sensory description is used. As a result, dialogue scenes tend to be a lot longer than usual.

I chose this scene because it was the first scene in which I wrote extended dialogue for Wednesday herself. I find that one of the biggest challenges I face when writing fanfiction is getting characters' speech styles right, especially when it comes to characters who have especially distinctive ways of talking.

Wednesday is well-spoken but blunt, and it can be easy to overexaggerate these features. I'm happy with how everything sounds when it comes to the dialogue in this scene; I can imagine the characters actually saying the words, without it sounding like a fanfic, if that makes sense.

With all that said, I'm looking forward to answering more questions in the future! I might have to go through the backlog, actually...

Excerpt follows:

---

I awaken with a start, jolting upright with such speed that it feels like I give myself whiplash. My head pounds and my sides ache, but more than anything I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling that I’m forgetting something. I grumble and groan and raise my hand to rub my sore neck, but find myself pausing. My claws are at least half extended and threads of colourful fabric hang from my fingers. I bury my face in my hands; I don’t want to see the damage I’ve done to the bed.

“You whimper in your sleep,” a voice from across the room says, “like a kicked puppy.”

The voice makes me jump and my body tenses up. I slowly turn to my left, my hands sheepishly falling from my face and revealing my shame. My eyes open tentatively and settle on those of Wednesday Addams, standing next to her desk with arms crossed in front of her. Her cold gaze forces me to break eye contact after but a moment, my groggy mind lacking the conviction to challenge her. I realise I have yet to respond. “Wednesday… Hi.”

I avoid looking her directly in the eyes, but her gaze is unflinching. She says nothing, verbally or otherwise. I pick threads of cotton and fleece from my claws, assessing the damage to the lightly shredded blankets around me. My shoulders drop, signalling my embarrassment.

“Oh please, I’ve seen worse,” Wednesday says, breaking her silence but not her stare. “Your claws must be rather dull compared to Enid’s.”

I read no humour in her voice, but the comment brings a smirk to my face. “Got lucky with at least something, I guess.”

She cocks an eyebrow at that - she doesn’t seem to agree. “Lucky? Your natural weapons are fundamentally flawed and you consider yourself lucky?”

“Yeah, well anything that makes it that little bit harder for me to kill someone…” I trail off; that was perhaps a bit much. If Wednesday notices my oversharing, she doesn’t make it known. “Sorry, what time is it?” I ask, swinging my legs over the side of the bed to sit up properly.

“It’s a little past three. You slept for some fifteen hours by my count, but I didn’t have the heart to wake you.” The slightest hint of a smirk emerges on her face. “You appeared to be having such awful dreams. I would’ve hated to interrupt.”

“Oh, you could tell?” I ask jokingly as I tend to my still-aching neck. I’ve been told enough times by my roommate that I’m quite the emotive sleeper. “So, where’s Enid?”

“At one of her many clubs, I’m sure.” A disdainful look flashes on her face. “Forgive me if I don’t know which.”

I crane forwards and with some light pressure on my neck I hear a crack, followed by some of the tension being relieved. When I look up again I notice that something about Wednesday’s stare has changed. Her eyes are a little narrower, her lips are slightly pursed and she’s standing more rigidly than before, if that’s even possible. She has something she wants to say but is holding back. My perceptive prowess can’t compare to hers, however, and in the time it takes me to read her body language she notices the change in my own. Her face relaxes.

“This question may seem… invasive,” she says, taking a small step towards me, “but know that it comes from a place of genuine interest.”

It’s my turn to cock an eyebrow. “Shoot.”

“Your nightmares. What are they about?” She pauses, her eyes not quite focused on me, as if she’s visualising something. “Enid’s been getting nightmares ever since she wolfed out; is it just a werewolf thing? Are all of you destined to be such tortured souls?”

I consider the question for a moment. “I’m no expert, but we do tend to be pretty vivid dreamers. Add a serving of trauma to that and I guess it’s no wonder you’d end up with nightmares.”

“The trauma of wolfing out for the first time, for example?”

“For some, sure. It can be hard for some wolves, especially if they end up hurting someone. The guilt, the loss of control…” Am I getting too personal? “It’s a bit of a rude awakening, learning what it truly means to be a wolf.”

“Speaking from experience?” she asks, her head tilting a little to the side.

“Nah, I was a bit of an early bloomer. I barely remember my first time,” I admit, a half-truth at best and a lie by omission at worst. My first time was easy. My parents were well prepared; they made sure I was safe and couldn’t get anyone hurt. The revelation of what wolfhood entails though? That came later. I was sheltered for so many years. Hell, I didn’t even really know what I was until I met wolves from other packs and realised just how different I was. The end of my childhood wasn’t marked by something as simple as wolfing out for the first time. No, the day I learned exactly how much violence I was capable of, what sort of cruelty I could enact on others… that was my wakeup call.

“You didn’t answer my first question,” Wednesday says, forcing me out of my reminiscence. “Your nightmares. If they don’t stem from your wolfing out, where do they come from?”

I guess it’s time to make my boundaries known. I notice myself shuffling uncomfortably as I speak. “Sorry, that’s a bit personal, even for me.”

She doesn’t try to hide her disappointment. “A pity,” she says, turning away. She sits down and moves her typewriter to the middle of her desk, apparently finished with the conversation. I do feel a little bad. I’m under no obligation to share my insecurities, but at the same time I do feel as if I owe her something . Considering her reputation, she’s been surprisingly welcoming to my intruding on her personal space. What harm could it do to let down my walls a little?

“They’re about my parents,” I relent. She doesn’t turn around but her hands stop moving; that got her attention. “They were good people. Or, my mom was, at least. They… they didn’t deserve what happened to them.”

She spins around in her chair. “What did happen to them?”

“They’re gone.”

“I gathered. There’s more to the story than that though, surely?”

I chuckle. “Well, yes, of course. But the details aren’t exactly pleasant.”

Her arms cross once again. “I didn’t ask for ‘pleasant’.”

“My benefit, not yours. I relive it enough in my sleep; if I started spending my time awake thinking about it I’d never get anything done.” In truth, it’s less the memories themselves that bother me so, but rather the implications. If I shared the whole story with her… it wouldn’t take her long to figure it out. Being unable to share too much lest other people piece together the truth… It’s tiring, and serves only to isolate me from my peers. An unfortunate measure, but a necessary one. “Why so interested in my nightmares, anyway?”

Wednesday glares for a few seconds, but then her demeanour softens. As I suspected, she can appreciate a transactional interaction. I offered her some information, with the potential prospect of more, and so it’s in her best interest to respond in kind. She speaks slowly now, clearly choosing her words carefully and betraying her vulnerability. 

“Like I said, Enid’s been having nightmares most nights since wolfing out. It’s starting to impact her day-to-day life. Nightmares have never really been an issue for me, so I thought that perhaps consulting another werewolf might give me some insight on how I might help her.”

I was expecting a far more morbid reason for her curiosity. “That’s actually kind of sweet.”

“Yes, well…” She stiffens again. “Breathe a word of that sentiment to anyone and you’ll have bigger problems than mere nightmares.”

“My lips are sealed.”

[agallimaufryofoddments]

hey, i really wanna help out with the baccano wiki, what do you suggest i start with?

Hallo, hello, hullo!

I appreciate you reaching out!

I think many major characters' chronological sections leave much to be desired. Of course, this is partly my fault, for neglecting them, but still. You take a loot at, say, Huey's or Nile's or Dekurō's pages, and wham bam, there is much missing. Frankly, really, if anyone takes a cursory glance at many of the character articles on Baccano! Wiki, one will see the chronology sections are either lacking (as is in the case of the many neglected articles) or sometimes overmuch (as in the cases where I wrote far too much bloat and wasn't reprimanded).

So! Perhaps if you could add content to the pages with obvious missing content (which are many), that would be swell! With references, I should ideally hope, based on the precedence of other pages that already exist, but I can add references after the fact, of course.

Some people start out with minor things like typos and obviously inaccurate statements. If wikitext is intimidating, I can easily advise on that front! I can do anything.

If you've never edited on a wiki before, I'd say editing easy existing content is an easy way to ease yourself into it. By going into source mode and fixing typos or the like, that way you can familiarize yourself with the editor interface.

I would recommend creating a FANDOM account if you're serious about contributing to the wiki. There's the supposed promise of less ads (I sometimes wonder how firm that expectation holds, these days), but there are other benefits, too.

Perhaps, if you mouse over the menus in the top menu, you'd see the Special:Community menu, or you'd see the Community Portal menu, or the Policy menu (the subpages of which I do need to update, very embarrassing). Perhaps I need to update all of it, so perhaps it is all embarrassing.

----

At any rate, to speak the point, I do think many major characters do lack adequate chronology sections. Character articles tend to be the most visited. I understand that chronology sections can be a bit overwhelming or intimidating, since they require referencing many novels and compiling a character's actions over the course of many novels into a cohesive summary, but on the other hand, perhaps chronologies can be a bit more straightforward than, say, summaries.

In any case, know this. Many of the character articles, including the major articles, are woefully incomplete, surely in part due to my neglect.

I also know my Manual of Style hasn't been updated in a while, and I surely haven't enforced it for scaring off editors (scarce as they are).

In any case, if there is anything you think you'd be good at or would prefer to do, I can happily advise you here or on the wiki itself.

I do expect that I can trust your judgment for the most part, for if, say, you use the wiki casually and find xyz elements lacking (like, say, a character article that woefully lacks much of a chronology), you could easily contribute. There is much that is woefully lacking.

When it comes to prose, I know that mine own prose can be unfortunately blathering and...well....I ramble a lot. I know the chronology sections I wrote can be too wordisome, too detailed. I don't mine people paring them down. I hope also that others don't mind if I edit their edits, if it comes to it.

Summary: A lot of character articles still lack filled chronology sections. Some also lack Personality sections, but I totally recognize that those can be much harder due to the need to balance subjectivity with objectivity. Look at what is lacking, what you wish was there but wasn't. I guarantee you will find many things.

[squarebracket-trickster]

I wouldn't say my second draft was easy, but it was easier than my first and third.

What helps me is, first of all, acknowledging that it is not realistic to expect a finished product by the end of this draft (I am not an experienced enough writer to get away with so little editing); and since this novel is not going to be "done" by the end of this draft, it is okay if I deliberately leave problems for later. It will happen anyway. I might as well be intentional about it.

Then I pick a few areas to improve on, set some goals, and don't let myself touch anything that isn't going to get me to those goals. (I mean, every now and then I might stray a little but I try not to. Even giving myself permission to stray makes the task that much more overwhelming.)

In choosing what areas to tackle first I ask myself:

Which problems are the biggest? When I think of the biggest critiques a reader might have of this story where does my mind immediately go?

Which problems are bothering me the most? Are there any specific problems that are making me want to avoid this WIP or dread rereading it?

Which problems should addressed before I fix others? There is no point fixing stuff I am just going to rewrite or cut later.

Which problems will prevent me from making progress later if they are not addressed now? Are there changes I need to make in one place before I can know what changes to make to another?

I am allowed to change a goal if it isn't working for me but if it is working I have to do my best to stick to it.

In draft 2 if WIPVII I had about five goals:

cut the draft down to around 80K

fix the ending

fix the plot holes and add in any foreshadowing I didn’t put in first draft

any other major structural changes including cutting things that turned to be not needed

cut/fix anything that makes me cringe

Things I left for later drafts included (but not limited to): properly naming the characters, filling in [square brackets], fixing timeline issues, adding description, making the prose sound nice, making the dialogue sound interesting, scene-level conflict and tension, line editing (sentence flow, word choice, filler words etc), grammar and spelling, narrative voice, research, and scene-level pacing (though I did start these edits in draft 2 by cutting things to hit my word goal).

Anytime I came across an issue that wasn't one of my five goals I just wrote it down, often in the comments directly on my word doc, so I could come back to it in a later draft.

idk if any of this will help you. You may already do this or you may have a completely different process/definition of second draft than me. But, for me at least, it has the added benefits of, not only taming some of the overwhelm, but also keeping me from getting stuck on any one section for too long and getting frustrated by the lack of progress, and keeping my perfectionism in check.

This method has also been working beautifully for my third draft. The only reason I feel like my third draft is harder than my second is because I found the cuts and scene rewrites I did easier than the prose-level stuff I have been fighting with in draft three. I am just not naturally a strong prose writer and I am very out of practice too. (I got stuck on the first paragraph of draft 3 for like 3 months... fml. I'm well past it now though!).

why are second drafts so much harder than first and third drafts?? there must be a scientific explanation for this

[maggiecheungs]

Hi I came across your tale of genji posts in the tag and I'm not sure if you've answered this before but what translation would you recommend for someone who's thinking of reading it for the first time?

MY TIME HAS COME!!!!

(first, as someone who has read all the english translations in full, a word of reassurance: it doesn’t really matter which translation you read. All the translations are excellent; they all have their own advantages. There is no definitive 'best' translation, and honestly, until you’ve experienced them for yourself, there is no way of knowing which is best for you.)

the unhelpful answer: honestly, it depends on what you want to get out of the experience.

for a first-time reader, i would generally recommend the Seidensticker, simply because it’s probably the most readable and is widely recommended as a good place to start; or the Tyler, which is probably the closest we have to a ‘definitive’ english translation atm (and my personal favourite)

however, everyone has their own preferences, so under the cut i’ve put together some of the pros and cons of each version (and obviously, this is very much a matter of perspective--for example, i prefer translations which have lots of footnotes, but some people dislike that etc.)

Waley (1933)

Pros: rich poetic language, first complete translation, gives a sense of the gradeur of the original, stands alone as a novel well, naming fairly consistent

Cons: poetry is run into the text, a (fairly unimportant) chapter is inexplicably missing, more liberal with his prose style, dense style if you're not used to 19th/early 20th century literature, very few footnotes

Seidensticker (1976)

Pros: most readable, easy to source, consistent naming

Cons: fewer footnotes, less academically rigorous than the Tyler translation, slightly less beautiful prose than the Waley and Tyler

Tyler (2001)

Pros: very true to original, lots of footnotes (integrated, so on ebook you can easily reference them), available easily (in print and ebook), accurate, excellent academic resource, direct and minamilist prose style that's still beautiful, good introduction

Cons: mostly the same as pros, just depends on perspective, i.e. lots of footnotes, inconsistent naming (use of shifting titles, true to original), very little is explicitly stated in-text (there were lots of things I only fully picked up on when reading different translations later). the Tyler is definitely the least domesticating, so if that isn’t your style, then maybe don’t start here

Washburn (2015)

Pros: academically rigorous, but less full-on than the Tyler; integrates contextualising information into the translation itself rather than in footnotes; excellent introduction

Cons: can be accused of lacking concision, a bit stodgy, sacrifices some of the ambiguity of the original text in favour of greater clarity

so in conclusion, i would say:

if you don’t have any experience with classical japanese literature and would prefer to read a version that is slightly more domesticated, and more readable, choose Seidensticker

if you don’t mind reading a version that is a little harder, but is ‘truest’ to the original, choose Tyler

if you have a burning passion for the Victorian novel and its style, choose Waley

if you want a version that spells out some of the more subtle elements of the story in the text itself, choose Washburn

but like i said, it’s very subjective, so here are some links to other people’s opinions:

this is a great summary of some of the key differences between the versions: https://maiji.tumblr.com/post/172828724619/saiyuri-dahlia-thank-you-so-much-for-the-reblog

and this is somebody else’s ranking of the translations (again, obviously subjective, but it mostly agrees with my own ranking): https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2021/08/15/the-tale-of-genji-ranking-the-translations/

and here’s a roundup of the various translations of the genji, with soem pros and cons listed and samples from the first chapter so you can see which writing style you like best: https://welovetranslations.com/2021/03/20/whats-the-best-translation-of-the-tale-of-genji/

[nanowrimo]

3 Most Common Worldbuilding Mistakes for Writers and How to Fix Them

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. World Anvil, a 2021 NaNoWriMo sponsor, helps you develop and organize your characters, plot, and world setting. Today, World Anvil founder Janet Forbes is here to share some pro tips for worldbuilding. Don’t forget to check out the offer to NaNoWriMo writers for 30% off a World Anvil membership!

I talk to hundreds of writers every week, in our World Anvil Q&A live streams, our World Anvil writing challenges, and meetings with our professional authors. And mostly, they’re encountering the same few worldbuilding problems! Here are the 3 most common worldbuilding mistakes, and how you can fix them:

1. Mary-Sue Worldbuilding

You’re probably familiar with the Mary-Sue—a flawless, artificial-feeling main character. Mary Sue Worldbuilding follows in the same vein. If everything in your setting is directly related to your main character, it feels like the world revolves around them. It’s too convenient and artificial. That’s Mary-Sue worldbuilding.

Mary-Sue worldbuilding is usually caused by worldbuilding exclusively around your plot. Introducing larger-scale conflict in the backdrop of your setting, current affairs like civil or religious movements, war, disasters, or technological breakthroughs, can help expand the world beyond just your main character. 

Your main character might interact with these elements, or more usually, with problems caused by them. For example, they might help some refugees from “that war over there”. But your character should not be at the core of everything—they’re not the cause of the war. Other things are happening outside of your story, in the background. (Pro-tip: this is a great way to reinforce your genre and themes, and make your world feel alive and expansive, too!). 

Fixing Mary-Sue Worldbuilding Of course you’ll need a series bible like World Anvil to help you keep these current affairs organized, connect them together, and make sure you don’t lose your notes! Use World Anvil’s worldbuilding templates to get inspired for your big conflicts, and remember - you only need to write a few bullet points to start with! You can always expand more later (we’ll talk more about that in a moment).

World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Templates are custom-made by experts to help inspire and guide your creativity—and you can customize your own templates too!

2. Mosaic Worldbuilding

You know those computer game worlds where each area feels like a self-contained zone? Where the “desert” region and the “forest” region have no trade, communication, or overlap between them? That, in a nutshell, is Mosaic worldbuilding. It ruins suspension of disbelief, makes your novel setting feel false, and can pull your readers out of your story! 

Fixing Mosaic Worldbuilding

The best way to avoid Mosaic Worldbuilding is to make sure that you have a clear overview of your world early on, with each major region and concept penned out in just a sentence or two. That way, each region will feel like a connected aspect of your seamless setting, not a tile shoved on the side. 

On World Anvil, each world setting has a “Worldbuilding Meta” section to help you detail the 10,000 foot overview—the big stuff. And not just your physical world and its people, but your genre, your motivations, and your themes. This invaluable reference tool helps you expand your setting and add more detail, and will also help you sense-check what you’re adding!

Once you have a clear picture of your meta, and know the overview of your world, it’ll be easy to make use of cultural aspects like imports and travellers, cultural diasporas and geographical transition zones to make your world seem more connected and less artificially divided! And you’ll be able to do it without spending too much extra time worldbuilding. Which brings me to my final common worldbuilding mistake…

World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Meta tool helps you focus, streamline and sense-check your world setting! It’s full of guides to create an excellent overview for your worldbuilding project. This is the view mode of Manifold Sky by B.C.G. Wurth.

3. Worldbuilder’s Disease

Sounds nasty, right? Well, Worldbuilder’s Disease is a very common problem—a compulsion to continue worldbuilding things which aren’t actually useful. Here’s my favorite example—the “elven shoes”:

In your world you have elves. They wear shoes. So far, so good. Maybe there’s a plot-point where an imposter’s revealed because they’re wearing the wrong shoes. So you fill in a few details on your series bible. But if you find yourself writing a 5,000 word treatise on elven shoes through the ages… honey, you have worldbuilder’s disease.

I use shoes as an example, but it could be anything. It might be detailing three centuries of monarchy, or expanding unvisited areas in excruciating detail. Sure, it can be fun, but all that time spent on unnecessary parts of your setting isn’t helping you polish the core parts—or get your novel written! It’s distracting you from your primary goal. 

Curing Worldbuilder’s Disease

There are three major causes of worldbuilders disease: 

Lack of perspective

Lovers of prose

Fear of losing your ideas

1. Lack of perspective

Lack of perspective can often lead down a worldbuilding rabbit hole. Keep clarity on what’s important in your setting with tools like World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Meta. This helps you define your active worldbuilding area - not just geographical but thematic areas—which helps  streamline your world and your project, so you can be sure you’re spending your time where it counts!

Also, be clear with yourself WHY you’re worldbuilding the element you’re working on. Keep clear notes in your series bible about how this new element fits into your novel. If it’s little more than set dressing, you only need a few words. For a core concept, you might need more.

2. Lovers of Prose

As writers, we love to write (duh)! But for most of us, writing in prose in our series bible can cause serious problems. Not only does it mean that you write MORE than we should (your get in flow, words happen!), it’s also harder to reference your ideas quickly later on. Stick to short, organized articles in note form. Make sure the salient information is there, and link in anything relevant. You can always expand to prose later if you need to.

Keep your series bible in brief notes with clear headers! This character article took 5 minutes using World Anvil’s character template which automatically adds the headers. The linked articles help me easily reference related people and places as I’m writing.

3. Fear of losing our ideas

Fear of losing our ideas is actually one of the most common reasons for worldbuilder’s disease—that we’ll forget or lose our notes if we don’t write them out in vast detail. To combat this, make sure you have somewhere to keep your world details safe, organized, tagged and searchable. Then you can reassure yourself that you can go back and develop more later if you need it. 

Obviously, World Anvil is custom made for this, backing up everything in one place and linking everything together, so you can easily search, reference and update your series bible whilst writing your manuscript and not have to worry about losing things!

Anything here ring true for you? Or maybe you’re struggling with another worldbuilding mistake or problem? You can always hop into our live streamed Q&A sessions on our Twitch channel and ask us directly! We go live three times a week to answer questions about writing and worldbuilding, as well as helping our community with World Anvil queries too! Maybe we’ll see you there. And happy worldbuilding :)

Janet Forbes is a published fantasy author and RPG writer, whose recent credits include the Dark Crystal RPG with the Henson Company (coming 2021). In 2017, she and her husband created World Anvil, the ultimate worldbuilding and novel writing platform. World Anvil helps you organize, store and develop your worldbuilding and series bible privately, and market your books to the world too! The inbuilt novel writing software, accessible from anywhere, integrates seamlessly with your worldbuilding. And when it’s time to publish, you can export, or publish directly on the World Anvil platform and monetize YOUR way! Check it out at World Anvil.

[nexility-sims]

What is the hardest part of writing for you? o.O

actually writing, obviously ! that's the easy answer. i think it's a bit more complex than that, tho.

having motivation to write at all is the biggest struggle, but i wouldn't frame it as a matter of ~inspiration~ so much as a matter of ?? idk, discipline ?? i write for work and for fun, yet it's much easier to write for work because it's something i have to make myself do regularly. i haven't written for fun in a HOT MINUTE, neither long form stuff nor my simblr content. i do feel really mournful about having abandoned my lifelong love of Working On Novel Ideas, but 1) it's a choice i can always unmake and 2) i could theoretically get the same joy and satisfaction from my simblr story. for a while, i made time every evening to work on story things, including the stuff i'd classify as really "writing": plotting, revising plot things, drafting dialogue. sticking to a regular practice of writing is hard. especially when seemingly more important things are demanding my time and energy ! i am getting major fomo from seeing everyone's posts the last several weeks ... oh, to mount my own comeback ...

the more interesting answer, to me and in the context of simblr, is that i sometimes find it hard to convey the investment i feel within the writing itself. being limited to dialogue is part of it, i guess. it's not that i'm eager to hit everyone over the head with exposition so much as the facts that 1) i like to lavish in metaphors and build out the inner world of the characters and 2) the worldbuilding i adore is much more behind-the-scenes than super obvious or at the forefront. as a writer, i rarely spend time on the physical settings unless it's immediately relevant to what's happening; in the story, i build sets but they're not really the point most of the time. historically, the stories i write take place in the minds and hearts of the characters (although i rarely write in first person; i don't really like that kind of, uhm, perspective, as a writer or reader). adding prose paragraphs helps me get at what i want to include with the sims story, but it's not quite the same ! there's also the problem of the nature of the format, which i just haven't mastered. maybe it's my impatience, but i read y'all's stories that make me FEEL things and RELATE to what's happening and CARE deeply ... i'm not sure how to get that effect, in a way that feels real and successful to me personally. step one is probably Posting Regularly Instead of Being On Hiatus For 12843950 Months, huh?

so, maybe it's not that complex, lmao. starting is hard. continuing is harder.

[shihalyfie]

Kizuna itself vs. the two versions of the novel

Written on request from a friend who wanted to remain anonymous. This is more of an editorial than a meta, and while I usually have a policy of “this is an analysis blog, not a review blog” it goes into more of my personal impressions and opinions than usual, but it’s something I write hoping to be helpful.

There are basically three “official” full versions of Kizuna: one being, of course, the movie itself, one being the Dash X Bunko version of the novel, and one being the Shueisha Mirai Bunko version of it. While it’s certainly not to say that any of the three is an “incomplete” version of the narrative, if you really want as full of a picture of the story as possible, somehow, each of all three versions of the story happens to have really important information that the other two do not. If I had to pick only one of these three versions to recommend to people, I would of course pick the movie itself; it’s obviously the base story everything else is based off of and was the one the production centered around as a priority, but the novelizations have a surprising amount of info that provide a lot of insight into the movie’s story and themes.

I get the impression that the creation of Kizuna involved making a lot more story and background details than could fit in a 95-minute movie, so these novelizations, which were based directly off the original movie script, ended up being an outlet for a lot of these details (and as much as I could be harsh on the movie itself for being a bit “reliant” on extra material, I have to admit that Adventure and 02 were both like this too -- a lot of our current understanding of the series comes from the Adventure novels and drama CDs -- so frankly I’m thankful we at least got this with a 95-minute movie instead of a yearlong series). On the flip side, while I'm not going to say that the novels are completely and utterly inaccurate representations of the movie, in a perhaps too-close approximation of Adventure and 02's writing style, this is a movie where even the nuances in a single line or split-second moment carry heavy implications, which become much blurrier or harder to identify when they’re presented differently (or not even presented at all) in the novel’s context, especially when they emphasize very different things from what the movie itself was emphasizing.

The short version of this is that I believe the Dash X version contains the greater amount of “plot and story” information but significantly misses out on the emotional themes and presentation, whereas the Shueisha Mirai version abridges and cuts chunks of content but is much better at conveying the intended message. More on this below the cut. (Note that the following post spoils Kizuna’s plot events.)

The movie itself

Since the following parts are more “in comparison to the movie”, I’m not going to go too much into this in this section, but one thing I will say is that the official English subtitle translation for the movie is really not great. Even if you take out nitpickiness about the fact it misses several significant nuances (the difference between “unchangeable fate” and “changeable destiny”, or the fact that Gennai refers to partnership dissolution as a “case” and not like it’s something that happens overall) at really plot-important moments, some lines (thankfully, usually not plot-important ones) are just straight-up incorrect. And worse, there’s evidence the official English dub was based on that translation! (I’m not faulting the people in charge of the dub for this, but whoever handed them that translation to work with.)

The dialogue in the Dash X Bunko version is transcribed effectively word-for-word from the dialogue in the movie (or perhaps vice versa, given that the novel is based on the original script), so I highly recommend checking that version as a reference for dialogue or if you want to do any intimate analysis on it. I don't want to go as far as to suggest not supporting the official version of the movie because of this, but at least please be aware that the translation used there is not entirely reliable.

Dash X Bunko

If you talk about “the Kizuna novel”, this is the one that people usually tend to be referring to, for two reasons. Firstly, it was translated shortly after the movie’s release, and due to the unfortunate circumstances of Kizuna being delayed in accessibility outside Japan for several months, this basically served as the only comprehensive source of info about the movie outside Japan for a very long time. Secondly, in Japan, this one was marketed as “the one for adults” in contrast to the Shueisha Mirai one being “for kids”, which meant that a lot of people assumed that the latter one was just an incredibly stripped down version that was otherwise disposable or replaceable. (This is very, very much not the case, and is extremely ironic when it comes to a movie that partially centers around the dangers of looking down too much on things associated with childhood.)

When it comes to “plot and story info”, this is the one that probably serves as the best reference (especially for fanfic writers or those who need a refresher on certain plot events or to look up something quickly), and probably has the most “comprehensive” listing of plot events surrounding the movie. The dialogue in it is a word-for-word recreation of the movie’s script, and actually includes more scenes than the movie itself does, including two that I suspect to be deleted scenes (a detailing of the specifics behind the initial plan to pursue Eosmon, and a conversation between Koushirou and Tentomon) and adaptations of the first and second memorial shorts within their context in the movie. It also contains some interesting background details and extra context for some things in the movie that you might think would normally be animation flair or something, but take a very interesting implication of story importance if they’re going out of their way to write this in the script. (There’s a scene where Agumon and Gabumon appear in front of their partners when they’d been behind them a minute before, and it’s easy to think this might be an animation error, but not only does the surrounding context make this unlikely, the novel itself actually directly states that their positions had changed.) Given that, I think it was very fortunate that this novel was available to us for those outside Japan waiting for the actual movie to come out, because this level of detail was very important to have on hand rather than fragmented spoilers on social media.

However, the part where I think the novel is significantly deficient in compared to the actual movie (and also to the other version of the novel) is that it describes the plot events in too blunt of a manner and doesn’t bring out its themes very well. (It’s kind of like having a long and very detailed Wikipedia article plot summary; it definitely got all the hard facts down, but the emotion is gone, which is still a pretty significant issue when media’s all about the feelings and message in the end.) While “considering the movie to be more cynical than it’s probably meant to be” happens regardless of which version someone’s working from, I’ve talked to perhaps an unnervingly high number of people who started with the novel and were absolutely convinced that the movie’s message was about adulthood sucking and needing to just accept it, until they saw how the actual movie pulled it off and the surrounding atmosphere and realized it definitely was not. (I think one really big factor here is that a lot of the visual imagery makes it extremely, extremely hard to miss that Menoa’s mentality is completely screwed up and her way of seeing things was dubious to begin with; prose descriptions really just don’t capture the way they slam this in your face with visual and musical cues during the climax of the movie.)

You can figure this out from the novel itself, but you have to really be looking closely at the way they word things, and on top of that it’s hard to figure out which parts you should be focusing on and which parts aren’t actually that important -- in other words, the “choice of priorities” gets a bit lost in there. Even the little things lose a lot of value; it’s theoretically possible to use the novel to put together that Daisuke is wearing his sunglasses indoors during his first scene, but you have to put together the context clues from completely different paragraphs to figure this out, none of which compares to the actual hilarity of visually seeing him wearing the thing in a very obviously dimly lit restaurant because he’s our beloved idiot. (For more details, please see my post with more elaboration on this and more examples of this kind of thing.)

I wouldn’t say that the movie itself isn’t guilty of (perhaps accidentally) having some degree of mixed messaging, but I would say this problem is rather exacerbated by the novel’s way of presenting it due to its dedication to dropping every single plot detail and event without much in the way of choosing what to contextualize and what to put emphasis on (as it turns out, treating practically everything in the movie as if it has equal weight might not be a great idea). So, again, for that reason I think the novel serves as a good reference in terms of remembering what happened in it and knowing the movie’s contents, but I also feel that it’s really not the greatest deliverer of the movie’s message or themes at all.

Shueisha Mirai Bunko

The second version of the novel was not translated until several months after the movie first released, and shortly before the Blu-ray and streaming versions of the movie itself came out anyway, so my impression is that on this end a lot of people don’t even know it was a thing. On top of that, even those who know about it often dismiss it as the “kid version” -- and to be fair, it did baffle quite a few people as to why this version even exists (Kizuna is technically not unacceptable for kid viewing and its plot is still understandable regardless of age, but since the movie is so heavily about the millennial existential crisis, it’s not something kids would really relate to). So a lot of people tended to just skip over it...which is really a shame, because it contains some interesting things that actually aren’t in the other two versions at all. For instance, did you know that, as of this writing, this is the only thing that plainly states the specific explanation for why Yamato decided to become an astronaut, for the first time in 20 real-life years?

While there are still some things that weren’t in the movie proper (mainly the Eosmon initial plan and the adaptation of the second memorial short), for the most part, the actual events are somewhat abridged compared to the movie and the Dash X version, and other than a few stray lines, there’s not a lot of extra information that would be as helpful for referencing the events of the plot. The version of the novel here is rather broadly interpretive of the scenes in the movie, so several things are condensed or taken out (and, amusingly, because it’s assuming that the kids reading this don’t actually know the original Adventure or 02, it has to describe what each character is like in a quick one-liner).

However, interestingly enough, it’s because it’s so heavily interpretive that it illuminates a lot of things that weren’t really easy to glean out of the Dash X version. For instance:

Some scenes are described with “other perspectives” that give you info on someone else’s point of view. (For instance, we see more of Yamato’s perspective and thoughts when he has his first phone call with Daisuke, or a bit more detail in the process of how Eosmon kidnappings work.)

We get a lot more information on what’s going through everyone’s heads during each scene, and what emotions they’re feeling at a given time. (This is something that you could at least get to some degree in the movie itself from facial expressions and framing, but would often be a lot blurrier in the Dash X version; here, it’s spelled out in words.)

When things are abridged, you get a clearer idea of what the intended point and theme of the scene was because it’s stripped down to include only that part. In one really interesting case, the scene with Agumon finding Taichi’s AVs has a “censored” equivalent where Taichi’s pushed to a corner because he can’t find anything non-alcoholic in his fridge -- so when you look at the two versions of the scene and what they have in common, you can figure out that the point isn’t that it was a lewd joke for the sake of it, but rather that Taichi’s forcing himself into boxes of “adulthood” that are actually meaningless and impractical.

Some of the descriptions of the characters, scenes, and background information make it a lot more obvious as to their purpose in the narrative (it outright confirms that Miyako being in Spain means that her personality is getting overly enabled there).

The scene where the circumstances behind Morphomon’s disappearance are revealed makes it significantly less subtle what the point is. In the actual movie, a lot of this involved visual framing with Menoa seeming to become more and more distant, but in this version of the novel they basically whack you over the head with the final confirmation that Menoa is guilty of neglecting her own partner, which contradicts her own assertions that “they were always together” (maybe not emotionally, it seems!) and helps clarify the commonality between her, Taichi, Yamato, and Sora in what exactly led to their partners disappearing.

Bonus: this version of the novel really wants you to know that the ending of the movie is about Taichi and Yamato fully having the determination to turn things around and lead up to the 02 epilogue. (The movie’s version of this involves the extended version of Taichi’s thesis and the credits photo with Yamato obviously next to a rocket, while this novel’s version involves more detailed fleshing out of how Taichi and Yamato decided to use their experiences to move onto their eventual career paths and what kind of hope they still have at the end. The Dash X version...didn’t really have a very strong equivalent here.)

In other words, while this version of the novel isn’t the greatest reference for plot or worldbuilding, it does a much more effective job being straightforward about the intended themes and message of the movie, and even if the scenes in it are much more loosely adapted, it’s much better at adapting the emotional nuances of the things that would normally be conveyed via visuals, expressions, and voice acting. (Although I would still say that the movie itself is the best reference for that kind of thing, of course.) If you just want lore or plot ideas, I don’t think it’ll help you very much, but since this series is so much about characters that had their ways of thinking fleshed out in such incredible detail, and about strong theme messaging, this is all still very valuable information in its own way.

[yurimother]

LGBTQ Manga Review – If I Could Reach You Vol. 4 & 5

If I Could Reach You remains an incredibly emotional and powerful story

I vaguely remember once staying home from school as a child for a somewhat extended period with an illness, and upon my recovery, I was loath to return. However, my father said that the longer I wait, the harder and more awkward it will be to return. It is with that spirit that I drag myself back towards review for the first time in over a month after the ever-grueling modern reality of isolation, paranoia, and working remotely sapped my strength and excess energy for the ninth time. However, if I have to force myself to write a review, groaning and whining all the way, I may as well make it something good, and fortunately, that part was easy to find. Indeed, the end of 2020 and opening of 2021 is stuffed with more Yuri than my lesbian vision board. I chose to go back to the most recent entry in one of my favorite series, If I Could Reach You. Perhaps this shattering and emotionally draining series is not the best medicine to cure the quarantine-blues. Still, it is nice to have a reminder that there are people in the world, or at least in manga, that are as miserable as us.

The fourth volume of If I Could Reach You kicks off when Uta’s mother reenters her life after apparently staying overseas for several years. She intends to start her relationship with Uta over. She insists that the high schooler come live with her, throwing the delicate balance she, her brother Reiichi, and sister-in-law Kaoru have. On top of this, Uta is struggling after her confession to Kaoru failed to reach the older girl, who seemingly interpreted it as a statement of familial friendliness.

During much of this volume, characters avoid the seemingly inevitable, which builds a sense of foreboding or even dread for what may come. Uta devotes more time to her friends, leading to a narrative focus on Chloe and Miyabi’s relationship and the Konatsu telling her story of a relationship with a young teacher. These side stories are compelling enough, but they at least feel like a joined part of the narrative, rather than a distraction as they occasionally drifted towards in previous volumes. Uta learns and grows from seeing her friends’ struggles and appears affected by them, incorporating their experiences into her journey.

Uta’s experiences are mirrored perfectly by Kaoru, who is apparently more suspicious of Uta’s feelings than she let the younger girl believe. Ultimately, this leads to their big confrontation at the start of volume five and, while I will not spoil anything, the results of it are stunning. The author is uniquely able to convey the complex emotions of the characters. Utas feelings after the encounter are ones of guilt, joy, and overwhelming relief. The story is rapidly barreling towards its conclusion as she prepares to leave behind her brother, the woman she loves, and, she hopes, her feelings.

If I Could Reach You’s story is as devastating and shocking as ever. The characters are complicated, and their motivations and feelings are not always clear, but not for lack of clues. Upon repeat reading and analysis of the images, their true feelings become more apparent, showing more detail the more time you spend with it. It is brilliantly paced and rewarding to invested readers who spent the time with the last few volumes and stayed invested and critical during the build-up.

However, the real reason I adore If I Could Reach You is the artwork. Few of the illustrations appear breathtaking at first, or epic in their achievement, but the more so their subtleties. Every shot’s framing, the arrangement of panels, and the characters’ expressive faces and bodies all serve to prop up the story and communicate it and its intricacies perfectly. Indeed, tMnR is the master of visual storytelling and has enough confidence in their art to relieve dialogue and let the art do the work’s brunt. On more than one occasion, back before the series concluded serialization, I would browse the latest chapters in Comic Yuri Hime and just observe the art, without looking up any of the Japanese, and was consistently impressed.

A lot of the time, I feel art, especially dramas, exists only to serve as secondary visuals for the dialogue and stories, a sales banner clamoring for attention and then serving only as talking heads for text which could easily be rewritten in prose or else rearranged into a large group text chat. If I Could Reach You is one of a few works that only really works in visual mediums. Much of this I have said before, but I want just to highlight how astounding and tight tMnR’s focus and artwork is.

If I Could Reach You remains an incredibly emotional and powerful story. The tension continues to rise in volumes 4 and 5, as both our heroines press forward and finally reveal the truth and hurt. The series is subtle yet exceptionally direct, pulling no punches in this complex and devastating whirlwind. It is all accompanied by precise and wonderfully crafted artwork that instills a profound relationship and understanding of its subjects unique to other works. It is one of a select few series that holds my attention and investment, and for an excellent reason.

Ratings: Story – 8 Characters – 7 Art – 10 LGBTQ – 5 Sexual Content – 3 Final – 8

Check out If I Could Reach You volume 4 and 5 digitally and in paperback today: https://amzn.to/3rAHAHi

Reading official releases supports creators and publishers. YuriMother makes a small commission from sales to help fund future content.

Review copies provided by Kodansha Comics

[gaussianray]

Some tips for studying in STEM

So, I'm a TA for an engineering class and I often see a number of similar problems popping up again and again and I thought I'd write down some of those tips to see if they'd help anybody else.

I guess they'd work well enough for most STEM classes too.

In no particular order: 1. Units matter and they can help you a lot When doing anything that you're not quite sure if it's right or not, work out the units and see if they make sense. Some basic rules you should probably be aware: - Derivates (df/dx) have units [function]/[variable] - Integrals have units [function][variable] - You can only add or subtract things with the same units This can help you catch some mistakes regarding unit changes or when you have two similar concepts that have different units (e.g.: capacitance and capacitance per area, both of which are written out as C) 2. Always do a Common Sense Test Does it make sense for a load bearing beam to have a 1 km length (about 0.62 mi)? You have a circuit with a 1 V battery as the sole power source, does it make sense if the current you calculated would dissipate more energy than the UK generates in a year? Sometimes you can get some weird and funky results because you made a mistake somewhere and just stopping to check if the answer makes sense can save you some grief later on. Some common checks you could do: - Is the answer in the expected order of magnitude? - Would this answer waste more energy that's being given to whatever system you're working with? - Does the answer make physical sense in some easy to check special cases? E.g.: If the input is 0, or if the input is infinity or things like that. Some of those checks only really become easy to do after you get some experience but getting used to doing these kind of checks is a useful habit to get into. 3. It's OK to not know something, but know you don't know it in advance As a TA, I try to help people as much as I can and sometimes that includes giving a refresher (or in some cases even teaching) on some things from other subjects. But if you show up the day before the exam or the worksheet deadline and want me to explain the entire subject to you, it's not easy to help you.

Which brings me to another tip ...

4. When asking for help, have actionable questions. If you show up and say "I have no idea how to do this", trying to help you becomes a lot harder because I don't know what I need to say to get you to understand and I won't just tell you the answer or the exact algorithm.

But if you show up saying "I don't understand X" or "Why do we do Y instead of X?" there's a foot in the door to start explaining things and trying to figure out where the foundation is wonky.

Sometimes you can't help it, and that's fine, but try to avoid this if possible. 5. Read carefully and to the end. Sometimes you'll see a problem statement, think "Oh, it's an X question, I know what to do" except it was asking something slightly different. Or was asking you to do X and Y, or was giving you some information that would have made your life a lot easier (or just possible). And even when just studying, most books, tutors or whatnots begin with the "textbook answer" or procedures and will only give the tips and special cases after. If you stop reading as soon as you find something that works you might end up doing more work than necessary. 6. Prose makes all your assignments that much more readable. If you explain your thought process when you're doing something instead of just writing down things you get a few benefits: - You'll have an easier time assimilating the content - Whoever's grading might see you know what you're doing and give you half marks if you messed up the math - If you do make a mistake somewhere and you're trying to figure out where it went wrong, having your thought process written out helps 7. You do the thinking and the computer does the math Using a programming language to do the math avoids a lot of common math problems, mechanical errors (the calculator button was stuck and didn't register) and is easier to debug if anything went wrong. That's all I can think of right now, maybe I'll do a follow up if I remember more stuff and of course, your mileage may vary, these are just things that were useful to me and would help with some of the mistakes I see happening a lot.

[boredout305]

Kid Congo Powers Interview

Kid Congo Powers was a founding member of the Gun Club. He also played with The Cramps and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Powers currently fronts Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds and recently completed a memoir, Some New Kind of Kick.

           The following interview focuses on Some New Kind of Kick. In the book Powers recounts growing up in La Puente—a working-class, largely Latino city in Los Angeles County—in the 1960s, as well as his familial, professional and personal relationships. He describes the LA glam-rock scene (Powers was a frequenter of Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco), the interim period between glam and punk embodied by the Capitol Records swap meet, as well as LA’s first-wave, late-1970s punk scene.

           Well written, edited and awash with amazing photos, Some New Kind of Kick will appeal to fans of underground music as well as those interested in 1960-1980s Los Angeles (think Claude Bessy and Mike Davis). The book will be available from In the Red Records, their first venture into book publishing, soon.

Interview by Ryan Leach   

Kid Congo with the Pink Monkey Birds.

Ryan: Some New Kind of Kick reminded me of the New York Night Train oral histories you had compiled about 15 years ago. Was that the genesis of your book?

Kid: That was the genesis. You pinpointed it. Those pieces were done with Jonathan Toubin. It was a very early podcast. Jonathan wanted to do an audio version of my story for his website, New York Night Train. We did that back in the early 2000s. After we had completed those I left New York and moved to Washington D.C. I thought, “I have the outline for a book here.” Jonathan had created a discography and a timeline. I figured, “It’ll be great and really easy. We’ll just fill in some of the blanks and it’ll be done.” Here we are 15 years later.

Ryan: It was well worth it. It reads well. And I love the photographs. The photo of you as a kid with Frankenstein is amazing.

Kid: I’m glad you liked it. You’re the first person not involved in it that I’ve spoken with.  

Ryan: As someone from Los Angeles I enjoyed reading about your father’s life and work as a union welder in the 1960s. My grandfather was a union truck driver and my father is a cabinetmaker. My dad’s cousins worked at the General Motors Van Nuys Assembly plant. In a way you captured an old industrial blue-collar working class that’s nowhere near as robust as it once was in Los Angeles. It reminded of Mike Davis’ writings on the subject.

Kid: I haven’t lived in LA for so long that I didn’t realize it doesn’t exist anymore. I felt the times. It was a reflection on my experiences and my family’s experiences. It was very working class. My dad was proud to be a union member. It served him very well. He and my mother were set up for the rest of their lives. I grew up with a sense that he earned an honest living. My parents always told me not to be embarrassed by what you did for work. People would ask me, “What’s your book about? What’s the thrust of it?” As I was writing it, I was like, “I don’t know. I’ll find out when it’s done.” What you mentioned was an aspect of that.

           When I started the book and all throughout the writing I had gone to different writers’ workshops. We’d review each other’s work. It was a bunch of people who didn’t know me, didn’t know about music—at least the music I make. I just wanted to see if there was a story there. People were relating to what I was writing, which gave me the confidence to keep going.

Ryan: Some New Kind of Kick is different from Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s autobiography, Go Tell the Mountain. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think of Pierce’s work as I read yours. Was Go Tell the Mountain on your mind as you were writing?

Kid: When I was writing about Jeffrey—it was my version of the story. It was about my relationship with him. I wasn’t thinking about his autobiography much at all. His autobiography is very different than mine. Nevertheless, there are some similarities. But his book flew off into flights of prose and fantasy. I tried to stay away from the stories that were already out there. The thing that’s interesting about Jeffrey is that everyone has a completely different story to tell about him. Everyone’s relationship with him was different.

Ryan: It’s a spectrum that’s completely filled in.

Kid: Exactly. One of the most significant relationships I’ve had in my life was with Jeffrey. Meeting him changed my life. It was an enduring relationship. It was important for me to tell my story of Jeffrey.

Ryan: The early part of your book covers growing up in La Puente and having older sisters who caught the El Monte Legion Stadium scene—groups like Thee Midniters. You told me years ago that you and Jeffrey were thinking about those days during the writing and recording of Mother Juno (1987).

Kid: That’s definitely true. Growing up in that area is another thing Jeffrey and I bonded over. We were music hounds at a young age. We talked a lot about La Puente, El Monte and San Gabriel Valley’s culture. We were able to pinpoint sounds we heard growing up there—music playing out of cars and oldies mixed in with Jimi Hendrix and Santana. That was the sound of San Gabriel Valley. It wasn’t all lowrider music. We were drawn to that mix of things. I remember “Yellow Eyes” off Mother Juno was our tribute to the San Gabriel Valley sound.

Ryan: You describe the Capitol Records Swap Meet in Some New Kind of Kick. In the pre-punk/Back Door Man days that was an important meet-up spot whose significance remains underappreciated.

Kid: The Capitol Records Swap Meet was a once-a-month event and hangout. It was a congregation of record collectors and music fans. You’d see the same people there over and over again. It was a community. Somehow everyone who was a diehard music fan knew about it. You could find bootlegs there. It went from glam to more of a Back Door Man-influenced vibe which was the harder-edged Detroit stuff—The Stooges and the MC5. You went there looking for oddities and rare records. I was barely a record collector back then. It’s where I discovered a lot of music. You had to be a pretty dedicated music fan to get up at 6 AM to go there, especially if you were a teenager.

Ryan: I enjoyed reading about your experiences as a young gay man in the 1970s. You’d frequent Rodney’s English Disco; I didn’t know you were so close to The Screamers. While not downplaying the prejudices gay men faced in the 1970s, it seemed fortuitous that these places and people existed for you in that post-Stonewall period.

Kid: Yeah. I was obviously drawn to The Screamers for a variety of reasons. It was a funny time. People didn’t really discuss being gay. People knew we were gay. I knew you were gay; you knew I was gay. But the fact that we never openly discussed it was very strange. Part of that was protection. It also had to do with the punk ethos of labels being taboo. I don’t think that The Screamers were very politicized back then and neither was I. We were just going wild. I was super young and still discovering things. I had that glam-rock door to go through. It was much more of a fantasy world than anything based in reality. But it allowed queerness. It struck a chord with me and it was a tribe. However, I did discover later on that glam rock was more of a pose than a sexual revolution.

           With some people in the punk scene like The Screamers and Gorilla Rose—they came from a background in drag and cabaret. I didn’t even know that when I met them. I found it out later on. They were already very experienced. They had an amazing camp aesthetic. I learned a lot about films and music through them. They were so advanced. It was all very serendipitous. I think my whole life has been serendipitous, floating from one thing to another.  

Ryan: You were in West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was breached in November 1989. “Here’s another historical event. I’m sure Kid Congo is on the scene.”

Kid: I know! The FBI must have a dossier on me. I was in New York on 9/11 too.

Ryan: A person who appears frequently in your book is your cousin Theresa who was tragically murdered. I take it her death remains a cold case.

Kid: Cold case. Her death changed my entire life. It was all very innocent before she died. That stopped everything. It was a real source of trauma. All progress up until that point went on hold until I got jolted out of it. I eventually decided to experience everything I could because life is short. That trauma fueled a lot of bad things, a lot of self-destructive impulses. It was my main demon that chased me throughout my early adult life. It was good to write about it. It’s still there and that’s probably because her murder remains unsolved. I have no resolution with it. I was hoping the book would give me some closure. We’ll see if it does.

Ryan: Theresa was an important person in your life that you wanted people to know about. You champion her.

Kid: I wanted to pay tribute to her. She changed my life. I had her confidence. I was at a crossroads at that point in my life, dealing with my sexuality. I wanted people to know about Theresa beyond my family. My editor Chris Campion really pulled that one out of me. It was a story that I told, but he said, “There’s so much more to this.” I replied, “No! Don’t make me do it.” I had a lot of stories, but it was great having Chris there to pull them together to create one big story. My original concept for the book was a coming-of-age story. Although it still is, I was originally going to stop before I even joined the Gun Club (in 1979). It was probably because I didn’t want to look at some of the things that happened afterwards. It was very good for my music. Every time I got uncomfortable, I’d go, “Oh, I’ve got to make a record and go on tour for a year and not think about this.” A lot of it was too scary to even think about. But the more I did it, the less scary it became and the more a story emerged. I had a very different book in mind than the one I completed. I’m glad I was pushed in that direction and that I was willing to be pushed. I wanted to tell these stories, but it was difficult.

Ryan: Of course, there are lighter parts in your book. There are wonderful, infamous characters like Bradly Field who make appearances.

Kid: Bradly Field was also a queer punker. He was the partner of Kristian Hoffman of The Mumps. I met Kristian in Los Angeles. We all knew Lance Loud of The Mumps because he had starred in An American Life (1973) which was the first reality TV show. It aired on PBS. I was a fan of The Mumps. Bradly came out to LA with Kristian for an elongated stay during a Mumps recording session. Of course, Bradly and I hit it off when we met. Bradly was a drummer—he played a single drum and a cracked symbol—in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Bradly was a real character. He was kind of a Peter Lorre, misanthropic miscreant. Bradly was charming while abrasively horrible at the same time. We were friends and I always remained on Bradly’s good side so there was never a problem.

           Bradly had invited me and some punkers to New York. He said that if we ever made it out there that we could stay with him. He probably had no idea we’d show up a month later. Bradly Field was an important person for me to know—an unashamedly gay, crazy person. He was a madman. I had very little interest in living a typical life. That includes a typical gay life. Bradly was just a great gay artist I met in New York when I was super young. He was also the tour manager of The Cramps at one point. You can imagine what that was like. Out of Lux and Ivy’s perverse nature they unleashed him on people.

Ryan: He was the right guy to have in your corner if the club didn’t pay you.  

Kid: Exactly. Who was going to say “no” to Bradly?

Ryan: You mention an early Gun Club track called “Body and Soul” that I’m unfamiliar with. I know you have a rehearsal tape of the original Creeping Ritual/Gun Club lineup (Kid Congo Powers, Don Snowden, Brad Dunning and Jeffrey Lee Pierce). Are any of these unreleased tracks on that tape?

Kid: No. Although I do have tapes, there’s no Creeping Ritual material on them. I spoke with Brad (Dunning) and he has tapes too. We both agreed that they’re unlistenable. They’re so terrible. Nevertheless, I’m going to have them digitized and I’ll take another listen to them. “Body and Soul” is an early Creeping Ritual song. At the time we thought, “Oh, this sounds like a Mink DeVille song.” At least in our minds it did. To the best of my ability I did record an approximation of “Body and Soul” on the Congo Norvell record Abnormals Anonymous (1997). I sort of reimagined it. That song was the beginning of things for me with Jeffrey. It wasn’t a clear path when we started The Gun Club. We didn’t say, “Oh, we’re going to be a blues-mixed-with-punk band.” It was a lot of toying around. It had to do with finding a style. Jeffrey had a lot of ideas. We also had musical limitations to consider. We were trying to turn it into something cohesive. There was a lot of reggae influence at the beginning. Jeffrey was a visionary who wanted to make the Gun Club work. Of course, to us he was a really advanced musician. We thought (bassist) Don Snowden was the greatest too. What’s funny is that I saw Don in Valencia, Spain, where he lives now. He came to one of our (Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds) shows a few years ago. He said, “Oh, I didn’t know how to play!”

Ryan: “I knew scales.”

Kid: Exactly. It was all perception. But we were ambitious and tenacious. We were certain we could make something really good out of what we had. That was it. We knew we had good taste in music. That was enough for us to continue on.

Ryan: I knew about The Cramps’ struggles with IRS Records and Miles Copeland. However, it took on a new meaning reading your book. Joining The Cramps started with a real high for you, recording Psychedelic Jungle (1981), and then stagnation occurred due to contractual conflicts.

Kid: There was excitement, success and activity for about a year or two. And then absolutely nothing. As I discuss in my book—and you can ask anyone who was in The Cramps—communication was not a big priority for Lux and Ivy. I was left to my own devices for a while. We were building, building, building and then it stopped. I wasn’t privy to what was going on. I knew they were depressed about it. The mood shifted. It was great recording Psychedelic Jungle and touring the world. The crowds were great everywhere we went. It was at that point that I started getting heavy into drugs. The time off left me with a lot of time to get into trouble. It was my first taste of any kind of success or notoriety. I’m not embarrassed to say that I fell into that trip: “Oh, you know who I am and I have all these musician friends now.” It was the gilded ‘80s. Things were quite decadent then. There was a lot of hard drug use. It wasn’t highly frowned upon to abuse those types of drugs in our circle. What was the reputation of The Gun Club? The drunkest, drug-addled band around. So there was a lot of support to go in that direction. Who knew it was going to go so downhill? We weren’t paying attention to consequences. Consequences be damned. So the drugs sapped a lot of energy out of it too.

           I recorded the one studio album (Psychedelic Jungle) with The Cramps and a live album (Smell of Female). The live record was good and fun, but it was a means to an end. It was recorded to get out of a contract. The Cramps were always going to do it their way. Lux and Ivy weren’t going to follow anyone’s rules. I don’t know why people expected them to. To this day, I wonder why people want more. I mean, they gave you everything. People ask me, “When is Ivy going to play again?” I tell them, “She’s done enough. She paid her dues. The music was great.”

Ryan: I think after 30-something years of touring, she’s earned her union card.

Kid: Exactly. She’s done her union work.

Ryan: In your book you discuss West Berlin in the late 1980s. That was a strange period of extreme highs and lows. During that time you were playing with the Bad Seeds, working with people like Wim Wenders (in Wings of Desire) and witnessed the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the GDR. Nevertheless, it was a very dark period marred by substance abuse. Luckily, you came out of it unscathed. As you recount, some people didn’t.

Kid: It was a period of extremes. In my mind, for years, I rewrote that scene. I would say, “Berlin was great”—and it was, that part was true—and then I’d read interviews with Nick Cave and Mick Harvey and they’d say, “Oh, the Tender Prey (1988) period was just the worst. It’s hard to even talk about it.” And I was like, “It was great! What are you talking about?” Then when I started writing about it, I was like, “Oh, fuck! It really wasn’t the best time.” I had been so focused on the good things and not the bad things. Prior to writing my book, I really hadn’t thought about how incredibly dark it was. That was a good thing for me to work out. Some very bad things happened to people around me. But while that was happening, it was a real peak for me as a musician. Some of the greatest work I was involved with was being done then. And yet I still chose to self-destruct. It was a case of right place, right time. But it was not necessarily what I thought it was.  

Ryan: Digressing back a bit, when we would chat years back I would ask you where you were at with this project. You seemed to be warming up to it as time went on. And I finally found a copy of the group’s album in Sydney, Australia, a year ago. I’m talking about Fur Bible (1985).

Kid: Oh, you got it?

Ryan: I did.

Kid: In Australia?

Ryan: Yes. It was part of my carry-on luggage.

Kid: I’m sure I can pinpoint the person who sold it to you.

Ryan: Are you coming around to that material now? I like the record.

Kid: Oh, yeah. I hated it for so long. People would say to me, “Oh, the Fur Bible record is great.” I’d respond, “No. It can’t possibly be great. I’m not going to listen to it again, so don’t even try me.” Eventually, I did listen to it and I thought, “Oh, this is pretty good.” I came around to it. I like it.

Ryan: You’ve made the transition!

Kid: I feel warmly about it. I like all of the people involved with it. That was kind of a bad time too. It was that post-Gun Club period. I felt like I had tried something unsuccessful with Fur Bible. I had a little bit of shame about that. Everything else I had been involved with had been successful, in my eyes. People liked everything else and people didn’t really like Fur Bible. It was a sleeper.

Ryan: It is.  

Kid: There’s nothing wrong with it. It was the first time I had put my voice on a record and it just irritated the hell out of me. It was a first step for me.

Ryan: You close your book with a heartfelt tribute to Jeffrey Lee Pierce. You wonder how your life would’ve turned out had you not met Jeffrey outside of that Pere Ubu show in 1979. Excluding family, I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who’s had that sort of impact on my life.

Kid: As I was getting near the end of the book I was trying to figure out what it was about. A lot of it was about Jeffrey. Everything that moved me into becoming a musician and the life I lived after that was because of him. It was all because he said, “Here’s a guitar. You’re going to learn how to play it.” He had that confidence that I could do it. It was a mentorship. He would say, “You’re going to do this and you’re going to be great at it.” I was like, “Okay.” Jeffrey was the closest thing I had to a brother. We could have our arguments and disagreements, but in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was our bond. Writing it down made it all clearer to me. His death sent me into a tailspin. I was entering the unknown. Jeffrey was like a cord that I had been hanging onto for so long and it was gone. I was more interested in writing about my relationship with him than about the music of the Gun Club. A lot of people loved Jeffrey. But there were others who said they loved him with disclaimers. I wanted to write something about Jeffrey without the disclaimers. That seemed like an important task—to honor him in a truthful manner.

Ryan: I’m glad that you did that. Jeffrey has his detractors, but they all seem to say something along the lines of “the guy still had the most indefatigable spirit and drive of any person I’ve ever known.”

Kid: That’s what drove everyone crazy!

Ryan: This book took you 15 years to finish. Completing it has to feel cathartic.  

Kid: I don’t know. Maybe it will when I see the printed book. When I was living in New York there was no time for reflection. I started it after I left New York, but it was at such a slow pace. It was done piecemeal. I wanted to give up at times. I had a lot of self-doubt. And like I said, I’d just go on tour for a year and take a long break. The pandemic made me finally put it to bed. I couldn’t jump up and go away on tour anymore. It feels great to have it done. When I read it through after the final edit I was actually shocked. I was moved by it. It was a feeling of accomplishment. It’s a different feeling than what you get with music. Looking at it as one story has been an eye-opener for me. I thought to myself, “How did I do all of that?”

           I see the book as the story of a music fan. I think most musicians start out as fans. Why would you do it otherwise? I never stopped being a fan. All of the opportunities that came my way were because I was a fan.

[yourstrulyrita]

character name: Rita Skeeter age & birthday: 33, june 5th. Geminis sun, geminis moon, Taurus rising. pronouns: she/her blood status: half blood occupation:  journalist for the Daily Prophet faceclaim: Margot Robbie

PERSONALITY TRAITS:

positive traits: resourceful, creative, skilled, ambitious negative traits: manipulative, liar, selfish, untrustworthy

I. childhood and hogwarts years: 

Rita Skeeter had been a very much wanted child. Her mother had fertility issues and she and her father tried so hard until she came. With her bright blue eyes, cute dimples and blonde hair, Rita charmed every single person that she crossed path with. She was a cute girl, always spoiled by everyone and the apple of her parents’ eyes.

Her family was a typical middle class family, they had all that they needed but not more than that, which was something that made Rita slightly suspicious. In her eyes, her father’s job as a muggle prosecutor (as a muggleborn, he decided to work in the muggle community rather than in the wizarding world) should pay more than he brought home. Her mother was a seamstress in Madam Malkin’s shop, and everyone knew that didn’t pay well.

That stopped mattering the second she set foot in the Hogwarts’ express. Rita was excited, her parents told her everything about Hogwarts and she couldn’t wait to walk those halls.  She was marveled by the castle and the floating candles, all the uniforms looked so beautiful and she couldn’t wait to wear hers.

Rita Skeeter was a hatstall. The sorting hat took almost fifteen minutes to decide. There was plenty of ambition and a hunger to prove herself, so Slytherin would’ve been a great house for her. But there was something about how her mind worked and her thirst for knowledge that got her into the Ravenclaw house. She was excited, the blue went lovely with her skin and it matched her eyes.

Life in Hogwarts was… not exactly what she thought it would be. Most classes were boring as hell. With the exception of charms and Transfiguration, Rita made absolutely no effort, just the bare minimum to pass. She would rather spend her time flirting with boys and becoming a social butterfly.

One could often see her hanging out with the popular guys, just sitting on their laps and laughing as they all spilled their secrets to her. She was charming – and some might even call her nosy, but they were just jealous, or so she says – always batting her eyelashes and pouting to get what she wanted.

II. during the first wizarding war: 

Tw: death

Rita was not interested in becoming a healer nor working as an auror. Those conventional jobs didn’t suit her right. Instead, she decided to become a journalist. She was good at writing and she knew how to obtain information.

She didn’t join the Order nor the Death Eaters, but she did cover the war. She didn’t agree with Voldemort, but Albus Dumbledore seemed just as shady. Besides, she had good sources on both sides, it was better to remain neutral. Both Death Eaters and Order members were pissed with her, which was a sign that she was doing a good job.

Surprisingly, Rita took her job seriously and she liked the idea of speaking the truth (or more like her truth). Not only that, but she also enjoyed being influential. It was challenging at first, in a male dominated field, Rita had to work three times harder than any mediocre man for her work to be taken seriously. In spite of her rocky and slow start, she began to gain popularity. With her unique point of views, good information and elegant prose; she quickly gained more readers.

But things couldn’t possibly be that easy, right? One night, after meeting one of her sources, Rita was heading back home when she saw a man that looked just like a father come out of a town house. There was a woman (that was not her mother) and two teenagers who were hugging him and calling him ‘dad’.  That was the first time in her life that Rita felt properly humiliated. Did her mother know that? After a week of investigation, Rita discovered that her father had a double life. All those nights he said he was working late, he was actually with his other family.

Some might call her callous and cruel, but she sent all her evidence to a muggle newspaper and let the press take him down. She never felt any remorse, not even when her mother died a year later, unable to recover from it.

III. where are they now?: 

When Voldemort was defeated, Rita hit a wall. She had specialized in covering the war and now there was no more war to cover. Sure, it was the aftermath, but that wouldn’t last forever. So Rita realized that she would have to branch out her content.

She started easy, with profiles and interviews, but they weren’t as successful as her coverage of the war. In a desperate attempt to make things more interesting, she began to add some “colorful details” to her articles.  The more “details” she added, the more readers she gained.

The end justifies the means, right? Rita Skeeter is now back and she writes about everyone and everything. She’s not afraid to tackle any topic. Currently, she’s one of the most popular authors in the Prophet, plus, she also published her first book, which was an immediate best seller: “Armando Dippet: Master or Moron?”

ANYTHING ELSE

Rita Skeeter is an unregistered animagus, a beetle.