#let me just go conjure something up rq

[herslvtspeaks]

i’m a writer and i write ffs a lot on my main but idk how i feel abt writing for wbb 🤔 i mean i write for idols on my main so writing for them wouldn’t be much different, but it just feels different yk? i probably sound insane 🤦🏾‍♀️ speaking of writing I WANNA WRITE FOR ICE BRADY 😭

[osleeplessflowero]

// y'all have had too much fluff. let me ruin it rq ❤️Reader's pronouns are They/Them, and their Soul type is up to you. 🧡 Angst Warning 💛 This is connected to my Multiverse Traveler!Reader x Nightmare oneshot, "Chasing". 💚 NOT associated with Flowerfell!! I like to think of this particular flower disease as a bit different than that since it's my own take and I don't ship Frans which is what the original AU was 💙 enjoy the pain :)

A portal abruptly opens and shuts, then it happens again. And again. And again. Nightmare shifts through them with relative ease, travelling alone through universe after universe.

He's alone again, looking for something- no, someone in particular. Those beneath him couldn't help but wonder why he kept going out alone these days, but they weren't complaining too much. Just means less work for them in the end, right?

What Nightmare hadn't told them, is that he is indeed looking for his Soulmate, a human who managed to sneak their way into his heart. Sliding past all of the negative sludge and managing to get through to him, leaving him breathless. The two of you had come up with a game of sorts, Nightmare travelling between universes in order to find the true you, the one who'd found him before. But considering everyone here has separate variations depending on the timeline..that's easier said than done.

While rushing through, he comes to a stop when he reaches an almost completely destroyed realm. All that remains of it is a simple cliff and a sunset view, flowers covering the ground and swaying gently in the breeze. A figure sits, dangling their legs off of the edge. He approaches..mainly out of mere curiosity, wondering who it could possibly be. Who knows? Maybe he could use their pain for a quick boost.

He walks over slowly, stopping immediately when the figure turns their head to him with a small smile. It's..it's you? No. It's not the true you. This is another variation. Flowers cover parts of your body, your arms, legs, torso..and even your eyes, blocking your view and blinding your vision. They're your favorite kind..he remembers you telling him that. It's some kind of magic disease, what was it called?.. Right- Bloom's Disease, that's what it was. A virus that would slowly wear the victim down until they were reduced to petals..

..This is distracting him from his goal. But yet, he can't bring himself to leave "your" side.

"Hello." You greet, completely unaware as to who this stranger is. "..Greetings." Was all he said before sitting down beside you, his tendrils relaxing and lying down behind him. He looks over your state, you seem to be pretty happy despite not being able to see anything..he doesn't really understand that.

"I briefly remember how it looked." He raises a browbone. "The sun." Oh. "Is it still pretty?"

He looks up at the view before you, taking in a deep breath of the faintly remaining air.

"..It's beautiful." "I'm glad. I always loved looking at the sunset. It makes the sky all pretty.." "..Like one big watercolor painting?" "How did you know I'd say that?" "..A hunch, I suppose."

There's a short pause. ..He really should be getting back, but..he doesn't want to leave you here either. Just a little longer, he thinks. Then he'll go.

"Who are you?" "..Someone you know very well in another time." "I see. I'd have liked to meet you in this time. You seem nice." "I'm far from the word, dear." He smiles a little, looking over you.

"..Thanks for taking the time to sit with me. It gets lonely out here." "..Of course."

You lean your head on his shoulder, something he normally would protest against, but..he'll allow it this time.

"..There was a big explosion..something happened, and then I couldn't hear anyone anymore. ..I suppose now it's only me. ..I can't see anything, nor can I even hardly move..so I suppose I'll just stay here, watching the sunset I can conjure up in my mind."

He..decides not to tell you a majority of this universe had been completely destroyed, likely by Error while he was going on a rampage.

"..You have a very sad air to you." "That's something that tends to be attached to me. Does that bother you?" "Not really. I have that sort of feeling around me, too." "We have something in common." "Yeah.."

He hesitates, before putting his arm around you. You smile a little, nuzzling your cheek against his coat.

"..I know I..probably don't have a lot of time left. I couldn't even get up if I wanted to." "..Are you afraid?" "..A little bit. Anyone would be if they knew they were going to die, wouldn't they?"

Nightmare averts his eyelight for a moment, before looking back to you.

"I suppose they would."

"..What's your name?" "..Nightmare." "An unusual name, I'd admit."

He smiles a little, remembering how you'd said the same thing when you met the first time.

"I suppose it is, isn't it?" "I like it though. It has a nice ring to it-" You cut yourself off, coughing out flower petals and letting them fall into the abyss before you. He holds you close, making sure you don't fall off as well. A look of pity crosses his face.

"Sorry. I've always been a mood killer, haha." You laugh tiredly. "..Don't worry about it. I am myself." "Another thing we've got in common, huh?"

You move to lean on his shoulder again and he places his hand over yours, gently holding it beneath his own bigger one.

"Hey.." "Yes?" He looks over at you with a soft eyelight. "You said you know me in another time..what am I like?" "Well.. there are a lot of ways I could describe you..I still don't have the perfect one, just yet. Such a colorful person..someone I still have to get to know, once I find them." "Surely there's some word you could think of.."

He lets out a hum of acknowledgement, taking a second to think.

"..Nightmare?" "I'm here. I'm only thinking." He reassures you, squeezing your hand lightly.

"I suppose the word I'd use is.." His face shifts into a fond smile. "Wonderful."

You smile at that, some tears making their way out from beneath the flowers, making them bloom a little more and causing you to wince.

"What's wrong?" He asks, his tone and expression worried. "S-Sorry, it's.. it's just nice to think about. A timeline where I'm not doomed by these. One where someone likes me. Someone cares about me."

A tear pricks at the corner of his eyesocket, gently falling down his face. ..He hasn't cried in a while. It feels..strange.

He leans down, moving your hair slightly and pressing his teeth to your forehead, a small kiss to comfort you. You smile a little more, before you feel a few of his tears hit your face.

"Nightmare? Why are you crying?" "I'm sorry." "Whatever for?" You speak softly, sitting up and facing the direction you can hear his voice from. "That no one could be there. That you've..had to suffer, alone. I know that feeling better than anyone else. You don't..deserve that. Not you. Never you."

You reach up your hand until you're sure you're touching his face, resting it on his cheek. He leans his head into your touch, turning his face so he can gently kiss your palm. You wipe away his tears with your thumb, smiling weakly up at him.

"Don't cry for my sake. I'll be alright. ..At least..I got to meet you, right?"

You lean back a little, holding out your arms. He realizes what you're doing, hesitating slightly due to your fragile state before giving you a hug.

"There you are.. doesn't that feel a little better?" "..Yes." "Good. I wouldn't want you crying on my behalf."

It's quiet for a little bit.

"Hey, Nightmare?" "Yes?" "When you see me again..the other me, I mean. Can you do something for me?" "What is it?" "Give me a big smile. One I haven't seen before." "..I don't know if I can." "You could try, couldn't you?" "..I suppose I could."

He stares at the flowers that had surrounded where you were sitting, frowning at them.

"I'm..feeling a little sleepy. Can I sleep here for a little bit?" "Of course you can, dearest. However long you need to.." His voice breaks a little as he speaks, shaky. "Thank you.." You bury your face in his shoulder as he listens to your soft breathing.

A few minutes pass..with nothing but you, him, and the permanent sunset before you.

"Dearest?.." He whispers to you.

..There's no response.

He backs up to look at your face, seeing a smile still placed there.. your body going limp. His eyelight shrinks almost immediately as he realizes.. you're gone. ..Tears begin overflowing again as he hugs you tightly to his body, his shaky breaths now the only sound there.

The flowers on your body emit a faint glow before they surround you, shifting your form. He backs up a little, watching as the flowers begin to float into the air..your figure no longer present. He reaches out to grab one before all of them have left mere petals behind, staring at it fondly.

He doesn't know how much time passes as he looks at the sunset once more, before finally forcing himself to leave as the remaining parts of the realm begin to break and disappear.

..He really needs to find you.

Putting the flower in one of his pockets, he opens another portal..and continues his chase.

[edithcuth]

PhD Diary Day... 180ish

This one has more bad stuff than good stuff, sorry.

The Good (sort of)

I’m generally upset and angry these days. I won’t bother you with the details of how little work I’ve managed to do, but I will say that since the first post on this topic I’ve had what they call here an interim review mid-December. I had to massively rewrite (=beef up) my research proposal for that, which had some very nice consequences:

In having to write it I was able to come up with a better defined topic (perception and discursive performance of interpreter invisibility in police interviews) and better research questions. In fact it’s better to say that I discovered these through the process of writing which I was dreading so  much. 

And I discovered that I enjoyed the writing process once I got going. This is big, you guys. I don’t think I enjoyed writing... ever. It was always a fucken chore, what with the procrastination, and the unhelpful perfectionism, and the fixed mindset and all. But, this time, I was excited about where it would lead me. I was curious about what I was going to say next. (I wonder if this is in part due to me allowing myself to just say stuff that felt right instead of censoring myself a priori - “no that won’t work”, “hmm you can’t prove that though”, “someone else has said this better” etc. Me - 1, Inner critic - 0; take that, you scumbag).

The Baaaad news - of course there is bad news, I warned you - is that I just... can’t get any data. My focus is on authentic police interviews, and while of course I don’t know what I’ll say yet, I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to make the same argument with, say, role-play data. 

This links to another one of my big, big worries, which is that I can’t make a case for why my research questions are relevant in practice to the people concerned; like, it might be an interesting theoretical argument for academics, but I can’t say anything like ‘you’ll want to hear about this b/c it suggests better interviewing strategies’ (I’m not researching interview techniques effectiveness) or ‘answering these RQs is important b/c human rights’ or whatever (I mean... it could be about human rights?? but I can’t find the connection). I expect what I’ll find is something like “sometimes interpreters are allowed to ‘perform’ invisibility, sometimes they are not” and the first thought I immediately have is SO WHAT. So what, if I can’t say why (or even WHETHER) this has material consequences for suspects or witnesses. So what, if I can’t show why/whether it matters from a fairness in the justice system standpoint. 

Of course I might be lucky and discover that it is indeed the case, maybe I’ll even point out some of those consequences, maybe I’ll be able to link them to a bigger social justice issue or something - but I can’t do anything like that UNTIL I LOOK AT THE DATA. And I seemingly can’t do that until I convince someone to let me do it. How do I convince them to let me do it? Well, by pointing out that my research can help solve X, Y or Z hot button issue. But how do I know whether that’s the case until I do my analysis? How can I do my analysis without the data? Etc., etc. This, my friends, is what we in the business call a catch-22. And it drives me fucking mad. 

The Fucking Ethics

The sticking point is that I have to somehow find (conjure up??) and articulate these benefits, to convince the police - who have enough work of their own - to provide me the data, with all the logistical and legal fuss that entails. I need to show them that I can answer pressing concerns or whatever the fuck. But, WORST OF ALL, I need to convince my own goddamn ethics committee. When you do research with human, you must have their consent. Their meaningful, informed consent. The kind that people interviewed by the police a bunch of years ago can’t give (because you can’t find them. Thankfully.). The kind that people being interviewed by the police right there and then can’t give you (because of power dynamics). You can tell people they can refuse to take part in research without it affecting the outcome of the interview/legal case until you’re blue in the face, but you can’t control for the fact that some people will just say yes out of fear. You just can’t. The ethics cttee won’t take that risk. I won’t take that risk. So, with the taped interviews that already exist in police archives & the inaccessibility of consent, what do you do? According to the British Society of Criminology, we should make sure that participants 

(...) be able to give freely informed consent in all but exceptional circumstances (exceptional in this context relates to exceptional importance of the topic rather than difficulty of gaining access).

“exceptional importance of the topic” Well, fuck. 

[sammyj-me-blog]

My computer notes for my class presentation

Summary of the reading:

·         Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the ghost gum (https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/snugglepot-and-cuddlepie-in-the-ghost-gum-evelyn-araluen/ )has multiple narratives over the 10 pages. Overall, it feels like it is a personal account of the author about her Indigenous culture, land, memory, and Australia’s cruel treatment of the Indigenous through history.

·         The first part, the ghost gum sequence, has the character travelling the land via roads to Sydney. It goes into detail the characters connection and consideration to the land. It very quickly takes a turn into the government’s control of the land, where they ‘close off every path to leave without paying’ (p. 2), and then into the Stolen Generation, where ‘Governor Macquarie gathered up the precious children … to teach them God and Civilisation’ (p. 2).

·         There’s a very succinct passage that demonstrates how the Indigenous and white Australians see the land very differently. ‘Why don’t they build something there, a sunset profile picture asks on the community Facebook where we gather to buy and sell and complain. There’s nothing in that field but a tree’ (p. 2).

·         Afterwards, she touches on memory and childhood, through the characters from the childhood book Snugglepot and cuddlepie. She then considers, ‘they want me to write about them—or maybe they don’t, and they just want to be left where they are’ (p. 2). This line almost speaks to me to say that she wasn’t sure if she should write about this content.

·         The last paragraphs touches on the history of Australia. “The Cumberland Plains of Blacktown and the Hawkesbury are drenched in a history of settler violence and forgetting that goes unspoken when we squabble over heritage”. But despite this, without having to be taught, they know the land. “In the way I know all times are capable of being, Tench’s gaze is still there – but so is ours, staring back”

A nest of auspoes:

·         She appears to be telling a metaphorical story from the point of view of animals. The Auspoes are white Australians who are ‘an invasive species’ that ‘suffocate the native species’ (2019, p. 2). The entire paragraph points to this conclusion, but it is through reading the previous paragraph where the themes were introduced, that allows us to think this way. As Walker states about the braided essay: it ‘lets [her] pop in and out of different realties—not so much manipulating the facts but instead to pace them out, allowing [her] to digest reality in drops’ (2017, p. 3). And I think that’s what the rest of the other piece is doing by separating them into sections. It’s like everything is too much to deal with all at once, so separating them helps.

·         And another link to do with this paragraph, is that she talks about the children’s book snugglpot and cuddelpie. And maybe, for some reason, she is taking the approach as if writing a story for kids.

Playing in the pastorals:

·         This paragraph talks about peoples view of the Australian bush from what seems is a bit more academic approach.

·         “The environmental conditions of the land being incompatible with European modes of agricultural practice, nineteenth-century poets such as Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall necessarily emphasised Gothic-Romantic themes of hostility and hardship in early Australian pastoral poetics, while Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton staged forbidding prose tales of estrangement and annihilation against the backdrop of a land fundamentally opposed to humanity and civilisation”

·         “Hodge and Mishra have explored this double premise as the ‘Aboriginal archipelago’ of simultaneously refusing to acknowledge Aboriginal presence in social space while conjuring up emblematic tropes of Aboriginal spiritual presence in disembodied forms”

·         She also touches on how the eucalyptus was misused in settler text; how settlers wrote about it however they saw fit. These all highlight how settlers had no connection to the land and used and abused it along with the Indigenous people.

·         About children’s literature. “Affrica Taylor extends this notion in her argument that for the white children of this literature, native animals functioned as guides or mentors through their ‘journey towards indigenisation’, naturalising their claim to the land as both entitlement and inheritance”

·         She talks about a native/settler binary towards children is that they are only ever safe at the homestead. And that the books cast out Aboriginal people through negative representation.

To the poets

·         This section is different yet again. It seems more emotional and passionate. Summing up, the narrator talks to the white settlers; about the differences between them and the Indigenous. How they are “puppeting your hands through ancestors, through relations”

·         “But I want to know what it means to lose the world you’re still standing in.”

To the parents

·         Is more of a straight talk about settler views and control of the land. As well as the influence of children’s literature depicting Australian lands.

·         It changes back to the first narrative where it seems like it’s present day narrator. They talk about land and animals and we can feel their connection. They ‘write poetry here, and about here’

·         “I can name the colonial complexes and impulses which structure these texts but it doesn’t change the fact that I was raised on these books too. They tell me they never chose them to hurt us, and I never thought they did. They both grew up surrounded by the bush in country New South Wales towns”. They can’t change the fact that they’re part of the ‘new’ world as well.

·         Shen then talks about her parents and how hard they worked to just afford books to read.

·         Her dad however read to them with “salt grains and disputations”. To say to scrutinise everything, don’t just believe off the bat. He told his own stories, but let them join in too.

·         She then describes that it was too easy to see Indigenous Australians as victims, but this disregards all their hard work and effort.

·         To finish that paragraph, she arrives home, where everything belongs.

The dropbears poetic

This appears to be a narrative that combines all of the settler myths that were mentioned throughout the story.

Why did you choose it?

·         Besides it being one of the last ones to choose from. But because the structure of the piece was different, and after having read it, I just found it very interesting. It’s hard though.

Discuss what practical applications this reading had--what did you gain from reading it that will inform your writing practice going forward? What do you disagree with, and why?

·         I’m looking at this piece in a braided essay lens. By switching between different narratives that detail the same story, it lets you look at it from different angles. The writer uses a few different narratives. Like through the personal, through the influence of children’s literature, in a metaphorical sense, through a parent generation. However by including so many different perspectives, I lose the sense of the specific thing she is talking about. I feel that there are so many elements that I get a little lost. Although I feel I got the bigger picture, I lost the nuances she was telling.

Question: Do you think that the use of subheadings and separate sections added additional meaning? Or perhaps do you think it is too much? They lose the sense of what’s happening? Has anyone does something like this before?

 Discuss the reading in relation to the piece/s of writing you have chosen from the ‘Community of Practice’ folder--why did you choose to discuss these pieces together? Do these pieces demonstrate lessons that the piece of theory has to offer?

https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2019/2/28/blossom-by-leah-jing?rq=leah%20jing

·         I’m looking at Blossom from a braided essay lens, as well. I found Blossom was easier to understand because it just uses two narratives and it’s clear what she is talking about. They both write about personal narratives overarched with a wider concern.

·         jing switches between concern for writers of colour and how their bodies are perceived, then abruptly to a personal love story between her and H. She flips between these two narratives, yet it is still about bodies. Her body and how her lover treats it, and as a wider concern, bodies of coloured people, particularly how people view hers, and how she views it herself. By having two different narratives of the body, adds a deeper meaning when the reader is engaged in the text.

·         Although they both look very different in structure they both have an interweaved narrative that lets us see multiple sides of the writer.

Last question:

·         I’ve been looking at this from a braided essay point of view. Is this a limiting view? Or perhaps not a quite right way to look at it? How did other’s read it?