#like. some excerpts and concepts go hard. but the structure around them just felt so flat to me. idk.

[ghostzzy]

finished summer s/ons

[kasienda]

Fanfiction Year in Review 2019

@floraone​ tagged me, but I was going to do it anyway! 

1. List of fics completed this year:

A Fight and Make Up (An Untitled UsaMamo Drabble) Superhero Survey (Miraculous Reveal) Last Wishes (Ladybug) Word Vomit (Sailor Moon Reveal) Kiss (Sailor Moon Reveal) The Sol of the System (Sailor Moon)

2. Number of words written:

In the year of 2019, I published 55,755 words in various stories. Not as many as last year, but under my circumstances I’m pretty proud of that number. (My 750words app says I’ve written 108k since May, but that’s not all fic writing. Though like 90% of it is. It’s also mostly not published though). 

3. Your most popular fic this year:

Last Wishes – I have no idea where this story came from. I was in a weird mood and it was haunting me and I had to get it out! And like Nightmares (and no other fic I’ve ever written), it came so easily. Wrote the whole thing in about three sittings. And apparently, it resonated with a lot of people (made a lot of people cry). And I gotta say, this Ladybug fandom is wild in that you can get like 100 kudos in a day! I’m way too addicted to that feeling. But in the Sailor Moon Fandom, my most popular fic this year was A Craving for Chocolate Milkshakes, which makes sense because really that’s the only story I’ve been somewhat consistently updating this year. Besides Last Wishes, everything I’ve published this year have been one-offs. 4. Your personal favorite this year:

I don’t know!! Why do you make me pick from my children?!

I’m insanely proud of the most recent update of Craving for Chocolate Milkshakes and the Fight/Make Up Drabble (maybe I should give it a name). 

Like, I’m so pleased with how these came out. But I also just reread Last Wishes searching for the review that touched me this year, and I’m kinda in awe. It’s just so amazing and powerful. And I’m crying! I’m not sure I believe that I wrote it. 

5. Your favorite scene:

This is an excerpt from Chapter Two of An Open Secret (which isn’t published, BUT I wrote it earlier this week so that’s 2019 right?!), which was supposed to be a one off for the ML Secret Santa Fic Exchange, and it grew into a multi-chapter fic! I just love it when that happens! “I have to tell her how I feel,” Adrien thought out loud. “Do you think she likes me?” 

“Aren’t you tired of letting Ladybug break your heart?” Plagg asked, floating lazily through the air.

“Not ladybug. Marinette!”

Plagg whipped around to hover behind Adrien’s shoulders. Sure enough, Adrien was pouring through Marinette’s Instagram feed, and not his Ladybug album. 

“Marinette? Since when? I thought Marinette was ‘just a friend.’”

“I did too, Plagg! But she’s been so different this week! She’s not nervous, and I think I love her so much.”

“What about Ladybug?”

“I’ll always love Ladybug, but she’s made it clear that she’s interested in someone else.”

Plagg was proud of himself for not laughing. 

“Do you think she likes me?” Adrien asked. 

Plagg rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe you have to ask.”

“She doesn’t, does she? I mean, why would she? Why was she always so nervous around me before? Did she hate me?”

“You don’t give me enough cheese for this,” the kwami grumbled. 

6. A fic or scene that challenged you:

The Sol of the System was so hard! I was writing for someone else who seemed to really like Silver Millennium, and I love the Silver Millennium as past life baggage that informs current fears and behaviors, but as its own thing? I never really felt connected to it! And then, I tried to give it a sci-fi twist, which is also not my genre! And even once I had a concept that I thought I could do something with, I had no time to work on it!! Somehow, it magically came together. @tinacentury​ has a lot to do with that. (She’ll say that she didn’t do much, but she’s so wrong!!) So, does my husband for kinda taking the kids for the last day and a half before the deadline so I could just write! 

7. A line of writing you’re proud of:

In general, my use of parentheticals in the Fight Make Up UsaMamo Drabble makes me SO HAPPY! And I’m so sad that hardly anyone read this short!! One line doesn’t really capture the technique though, so here’s six and half paragraphs… (My husband is rolling his eyes so hard right now…) 

...

Mamoru watched her from his usual booth like he had everyday for the last week. He had no right, he knew it, but he couldn’t tear himself away. Usagi was light and he was a moth. She was morphine and he was a drug addict. It physically hurt to be in her presence when he couldn’t even speak to her, but it was somehow better than not seeing her at all.

He stared at the back of her golden head seated in a booth across the Fruit Parlor's dining room. They had progressed far enough into their break up that it was possible for them to inhabit the same room (well, a large restaurant in any case) without either of them bursting into tears or retreating completely.

But today, Usagi was stretching his tolerance. She had come in with a friend (a male friend). Though maybe friend was too strong a word as it was quickly apparent that the boy sitting across from his girlfriend (his ex-girlfriend) was an assigned partner for some school project.

But even if it had been a date with romantic intentions, Mamoru liked to think he could have handled it. He wasn't completely confident he could make that claim, but he wanted to be able to say it was true. Because, more than anything, he just wanted to see Usagi happy.

And if he had to stay away to keep her breathing, he couldn't be the one to do that. It would have been hard, but he would have forced himself to bare it, just as he had forced himself to break up with her (the best thing that had ever happened in his miserable life) so that she would be safe.

But that wasn't the situation. They were supposed to be working on the project, but the boy was too familiar with her. His head kept invading her work space, he slid closer to her so that their sides were touching, and he accidentally touched her too often to be coincidence. 

And again, it would have been fine (who was he kidding; he would have been a jealous mess) if Usagi welcomed the boy's advances. 8.  A comment that touched you:

I received this comment on my Last Wishes Fic. And spent two days and asked for lots of advice in how to respond. Then when I finally did, this person told me that this story helped them talk about how they were feeling about their loss with their family. Like guys, this isn’t why I started writing fic, but OMG it definitely keeps me going.

On a lighter note, I also kinda love it whenever one of my Sailor Moon followers comments on a Ladybug fic that I’ve written. Like to me, it’s the biggest compliment that they like my writing enough, that they’re willing to cross over to a different fandom for a bit. @beej88​ even crossed fandoms and genres for me. And whenever I’m sad about not getting reviews from my giftee, @floraone​ pops in with an essay and I feel like it doesn’t matter if my giftee never responds at all. (She may have done this twice without knowing how good her timing was… and for the record ONE of my giftees totally responded with gushing praise, so… I just gotta be more patient!)

And I especially appreciate @tinacentury​ for all the behind the scenes comments and encouragement and then also taking the time to comment on stories after the fact as well!!

9. Something that inspired your writing this year:

So, first off, my friends here have been so encouraging.

The Miraculous Ladybug Community – I’ve delved into a new fandom (blame my sister!). And man, I really like the dynamic of being in an insanely active fandom where the source material isn’t finished yet. It’s like working in a living breathing thing, and that’s so cool. Also, I get so many comments/kudos even being a pretty unknown author there and I’m very addicted to this validation. (Though I made a rec list!! I was so excited!! Thank you @alexseanchai​!!). It also makes me feel like a traitor to my Sailor Moon roots though…

750words.com – this is a little app that just made writing feel easy. It made writing a habit, and took off the pressure of getting it perfect! I feel like it’s taught me to write a lot faster and worry about perfecting it later.  This little app is what gave me the structure to keep writing when my life has been insane!

10. Your proudest accomplishment (that one scene; finally finishing that one fic; posting your first fic; etc)

I participated in two fic exchanges this year! I’ve never done this before. And I kinda love the experience of writing for what you think someone else would like. It forced me to write in a different headspace and write to a deadline, which apparently, I’m very capable of doing. And it definitely pushed me into writing things that are different than I normally write.

Also, that I wrote and published anything at all inbetween taking care of a medically fragile four-year-old and an infant who was born in March and going back to work this past September. (Writing has only become more important to me. It’s how I recharge and deal with stress, so I’m clearly not going to stop).

11. Do you have any writing goals for the next year?

So many!! Probably too many! (Like always!) - I really want to finish Chocolate Milkshakes and An Open Secret in like the next 30 days! (I promise nothing!) - I really want to dive back into Coming of Age and Invisible Wounds. Like I’m SO excited about where these stories are going! - I want to polish up like four Miraculous Reveals that are each like 80% finished, so I can get some momentum going on this series. - I want to go to the library every week for two hours for writing to maybe have a chance of reaching some of these goals.

And I will tag @tinacentury​, @overworkedunderwhelmed​, @beej88​, @mikauzoran​, @cassraven​, @laadychat​, @bubbleblower​ as an invitation to participate if you want to! Not a requirement! :) You can totally do it if you’re not tagged too! 

[ginnyzero]

Trusting Yourself as a Writer

It's Writer Wednesday, let's talk about writerly things!

Back in 2013, thewritelife.com posted an article about "The Worst Ways to Begin Your Novel: Advice From Literary Agents."  And excerpts of it have most likely been making the rounds on tumblr ever since. The post that crossed my dash had over 30,000 notes. I reblogged it with a few I felt were relevant to my own feelings. Before you read, remember, agents are human beings with tastes, preferences and biases like everyone else. They're expressing an opinion not a fact. The problem with an agent's opinion is that they hold a modest amount of power over writers who want to be traditionally published. (Problem 2, they often express their opinions as facts.)

One of the quotes is by Kristen Nelson of Nelson Literary about how the worst way fantasy novels is that they open up in the middle of action scenes (or people gathering herbs.) And her preference, directly contradicts the old adage advice of opening up in the middle of the story (and in science fiction and fantasy, that's usually some sort of action scene unless it's leaning towards the heavily political.) And Peter Miller of PMA Literary and Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary don't want you to open with lengthy exposition and description. These are contradictory pieces of advice in the same article. (Because what else is there?)

All writing advice from agents ends up being like this. Contradictory.

Changes quickly and mostly negative. Agents very rarely use the internet platform as a message board for what they really want in a story. (They are overloaded with queries already, why solicit more? I mean, if they posted their preferences more clearly and not "the next Tolkien or GRR Martin, they might actually get something suited to their taste.) It becomes easy to be blown about in every direction from every piece of advice you read and soon as a writer, you might have six drafts of your story and be so overwhelmed and befuddled not knowing which one is the best. Because you've lost your best temperature gauge when it comes to your writing, your own gut and instincts. The head becomes so filled with "professional" advice and self doubt about living up to that advice it drowns out your own voice!

(Really, read the bios of some of these agents. Most of them don't have English Degrees or come from any sort of storytelling background. Their advice is that, opinions and advice. They just happen to have industry contacts that an aspiring writer who wants to be published needs. There are no qualifications for writing a good novel and sometimes you have to wonder if there are any qualifications for being a good literary agent.)

So, when it comes to the best writing for your story, it all really comes down to how much do you trust yourself as a writer?

Your writing style and voice is unique. It's an expression of your inner self and it can't be forced and shouldn't be pushed to bend to fit some sort of "this is what is selling right this minute" box.

I'm not talking about bad writing such as purple prose, lack of any grammar skills, the inability to use spell check, lack of story structure and conflict and have flat characters. Because there are stories that are technically bad. There is no way around it. And it's sad. Not all of them can be edited to greatness either. Though enough of those still manage to get professional published through the big houses.

I'm talking about writing that is an expression of your creative process, thoughts and comes naturally to you without reaching for a dictionary or a thesaurus. Where the characters come to life on the page and the story has tension and questions to answer and is legible. (House of Leaves notwithstanding, legible is important.) The type of story that sucks you in and makes you want to curl up with it until it's done. And I don't really care about the genre, I've read just about everything at least once. A good mystery or romance novel can keep me just as enthralled as my favorite fantasy or science fiction novel.

I'm afraid that Kristen Nelson and I are never going to get along, because she doesn't post publicly on her website where it is easily found that she dislikes speculative fiction books that open with action scenes. Both of my books open with action scenes. Why? Because I'm an action adventure writer. Let's get this out of the way. You open my book, you read the first chapter, you know what you're getting into, fighting, explosions, people making hopefully funny quips.

I had to rely on my instincts when choosing the first paragraph for the Lone Prospect. Where was I going to begin this story? In the first draft of the Lone Prospect, chapter two was actually the first chapter, and chapter one was, oh, a third to halfway through the story? A third I think. I'd written the story chronologically. But was that really the best way to draw in the reader?

Here is the first paragraph of Chapter Two:

Brand leaned closer to the table. His nose almost hit the glowing green projection that rose from the table's surface. The motion made his black leather vest, covered in patches and a few studs and pins, gape open. His dark brown hair fell across his face and was slightly gray at the temples, feathered at the ends. His two-day growth of beard on his square jaw was going gray too.

Really, it's not very grabby. It didn't feel grabby to me as a writer or as a reader. It's mostly description, that tired old exposition and prose. Hey, we know Brand is older, he's wearing leather and has longer hair so he's probably some sort of rebel type. Oh, and there is some sort of green projection over a table. What's that about?

And here is the first paragraph of current Chapter One:

Pande-fucking-monium. Gideon jumped into the air over the chaos. Rockets built into his armor kept him above it all. Soldiers shouted and waved their arms. The back of Gideon’s head still echoed from explosions. Music, like a psychotic backdrop, blared out of the enemy camp’s speakers from Blake’s earlier hack. Conflicting smells of gunpowder, chemicals, animals, and the smell of humans living together in packed quarters overwhelmed his nose. And ahead of Gideon, an enemy soldier pulled a truck into the middle of his flight path.

Hey, not only do I drop you into the middle of a fight, there's more description. But in this paragraph, we've got some more questions, why is Gideon flying in the air with rockets in his armor? Who is Blake? Why is Gideon's nose so sensitive? It's more likely to grab the reader's attention for more than one reason.

The opening paragraph of The Lone Prospect is a deliberate homage to one of my favorite science fiction novels, Starship Troopers. By making this homage to Starship Troopers, the reader may or not pick up on it, but it will feel familiar to them if they like old school science fiction. It will feel familiar and they'll, hopefully, be more likely to pick up and read the book because of that familiarity. "Hey, maybe this is like Starship Troopers."

It's also a shout out the Expendables movie that also opens up in the middle of a mercenary job.

Maybe Kristen Nelson doesn't like Starship Troopers. (No idea.)

I can't afford fancy editors. I don't have a lot of friends who enjoy science fantasy or reading for that matter that I would entrust with a book to go "hey, this is good." I have myself, my decades of reading experience and another decade of writing experience writing character driven, action adventure, romantic comedies. That's it. I have no choice but to trust my gut and my instincts.

My guts and instincts are still my biases, opinions, preferences and likes. Just like an agent. Unlike an agent though, I have complete control over my work. I have complete control to say whether or not changing the opening scene is really the best way to go or not. I have complete control to reject or accept advice depending on how it fits the story, tone, mood and message of what I'm writing. It took a lot of time for me to build those skills and those instincts to find a story with a message that I truly wanted to tell. I abandon those instincts at my peril. Abandoning them can make me paralyzed with fear and when you are paralyzed with fear you don't write and nothing gets done.

All an agent can do is tell me, "No. I'm not going to represent this book to my publishing contacts." And I can then go, "Then you aren't the agent for me. Thank you for your time." If another person doesn't understand your writing, then they don't deserve you. It's time to move on, politely, especially if all they gave you was an "I'm not excited about this concept and I'm going to pass," as a response. (This is the standard agent rejection outside of silence.)

I don't appreciate it when agents put out blanket statements that tell me that they aren't willing to give an entire story a chance if the writing (such as the style, prose, grammar and concept) are good over something that's pretty standard in the genre. It's easy to tell someone "this is wrong, this is a problem" when it's something concrete, like bad grammar, purple prose, the story is too long to fit spec. But when it's an opinion like "I don't like stories that open with action sequences, thus, it's wrong and the worst way to open a story." They take an opinion and make it fact and then dismiss everything under that umbrella. It's much more difficult to give advice that is more along the lines of "in my opinion, I'd like to see more of..." or even making a positive comment about the concept or the writing or the voice of the story. It's easy to tear something down. It's hard to build something up.

There's a mode of thought that you have to tear something down in order to rebuild it. That's all well and good if you've joined the military. Here is my experience, that most of the time people go ahead and do the tearing down and completely forget about the building back up. That's what that article was about. It was all tearing down. It was about stating opinions as facts. There wasn't any building up. It would have been a better, more balanced, article that would have made me rant a little less if it was the "worst and best" ways  to open your story. That way, a writer can compare the opinions about best and worst and test their own instincts and opinions. (Or at least find an agent that their writing might actually appeal to.)

Look, I have been on the end of the constant tearing down. I've been to art school. I've sat through the critiques. I've bit my tongue and swallowed the misery of being torn apart on something that the school never taught me. A five minute demo about markers doesn't really count as teaching. (And there wasn't anything available in the major specifically for what we were doing at that time. These were supposed to be FAST illustrations. They instituted a class later, I took it and felt like I got worse.) As a result, I know I'm a decent designer. I'm not expressly innovative, but I design clothes that people would most likely wear. I can do a line drawing. I can do technical flats. My coloring skills to me, look and feel like shit. I don't bother coloring my fashion design drawings anymore because I can't get them to look the way I want them to look. I'm doing it for fun. Fun shouldn't be frustrating.

Maybe if someone had said to me, "Hey, Ginny, it's okay to have flat color. Maybe that's your style." Or. "It's okay to have thick colored pencil outlines. Those are strong enough on their own." Then, maybe, maybe, I'd trust myself on my drawings. My instincts wouldn't be so messed up on my coloring skills. Because I can do simple shading. Not always good on light source, but I can do shading. Rendering patterns and different fabrics, not really, but I can SHADE. I don't trust myself to do so anymore.

And that's what happens when you constantly tear someone down without supporting them in other ways and building them back up.

Your instincts and gut as a writer are there for a reason. Listen to them. The more experience you have in reading and writing and your own preferences when it comes to writing and knowledge of your writing style, the stronger and better your gut and instincts will be to push back against "this is a horrible way to write" that is stated like fact instead of opinion.

Of course, this is coming from someone with about 55 dollars worth of sales. Take from it what you will.

[hufflepuffmarlenemckinnon]

Dog meets Duckling

An Excerpt from my Novel-Length Fanfic The Dog and the Duckling

Summary: Sirius is assigned to mentor Marlene Mckinnon when she joins The Order of the Phoenix. His perceptions of Hufflepuff house are drastically changed, and so is his life.

Rated Teen mostly for language and innuendo.

A/N: So most everyone who follows me will have gathered that I headcanon Marlene as Duck animagus for a lot of the fic I write. I decided to put some of the backstory of that up on Tumblr in case anyone was curious. I’ll keep these blurbs listed in chronological order on my Fic Masterlist.  

August, 1980

“I need new friends.”

Sirius mumbled empty insults under his breath. His closest friends had left him in the lurch. Sure, they had a valid reason, what with their 6 day old baby and all...He didn’t really think that they should have planned their family with more consideration for him. But he couldn’t help feel annoyed at the new duties to The Order of the Phoenix he would pick up due to James Potter’s absence for the next 8 weeks.

He felt a smile coming on as he imagined little Harry giving them at least a tiny bit of hell.

James Potter was probably changing a nappy at the very moment that Sirius attempted to keep his eyes open while reading over files on the newly enlisted witch he’s be mentoring. James’s task would be more brief but certainly had a more unpleasant odor. The little parlor room The Order of the Phoenix rented at The Leaky Caldron was perhaps a bit musty from old furniture and neglect, but that was the worst of it.

Sirius has persistent doubts that he’d be a suitable mentor. He didn’t really understand why Dumbledore chose him to take up this slack.

He went over the possible reasons in his head. Because pointless mental conjecture was one of the long list of things that Sirius Black enjoyed more than paperwork.  

I suppose I was the next best thing?

He wasn’t. He knew this. The Potters were the sort of people that took naturally to leadership. They’d been head boy and girl during their 7th year at Hogwarts and they were both more patient and more responsible than most people in their early 20s. Sirius was a far cry from that description.

Two years out of Hogwarts, the goals he’d accomplished were less, “find a wife, buy a house, have a baby” and more “try not to be a gigantic twat to anyone today”.

He was fairly pleased with his progress in being less of a twat. He hadn’t been born to be a good or a kind person because certainly none of his family possessed those qualities. He didn’t even become aware that it was an option until he was 11 years old. His youthful attempts at catching up were often abject failures in real decency. He’d been a major twat a time or 50.

He really had gotten better. He didn’t feel like a decent person deep down, but it was certainly what he was aiming to be.

Sirius didn’t really do “responsible” though. He once bought new clothes because he was so rubbish at laundering spells, rather than practicing up on the aforementioned charms. It seemed reasonable to Sirius. He rode a flying motorbike and never found himself compelled to follow the rules in favor of having a good time.

He considered the possibility that Dumbledore was using this as some sort of mission to persuade him into behaving like more of a role model. The only flaw in that theory was that it assumed Dumbledore had reasons for all the things he did. Sometimes he just did things. No one knew why. Including Albus Dumbledore himself.

But reason or no reason, Sirius was stuck with the job and very soon he’d be face to face with his new mentee; Marlene McKinnon of Hufflepuff house, age 16. It was his his job to teach her how The Order works and let her follow him around, watching and learning,for the next month until she went back to Hogwarts.

She’d be entering 7th year. Sirius figured she must’ve gotten bored and restless during the summer or that perhaps her older sisters and brothers going off to fight in wars seemed exciting to someone that young. With four siblings in the order she’d be an obvious recruit after she finished 7th year.

He spotted the line on the file in front of him that stated Marlene wouldn’t even come of age until August 31st.  Generally, The Order wasn’t wild about taking under-age witches and wizards or even of age ones who were still at Hogwarts.

There were exceptions. Sirius found a pondering what made Marlene McKinnon exceptional more interesting than her file as well.

7th years were particularly vulnerable to recruiting from the Death Eaters. Having a 7th year spying for the order and keeping tabs on who had taken the mark and who was likely to to do so was a fairly useful thing for The Order. It had been done before.

But a McKinnon would be ghastly choice for this task.

The McKinnons were a well known wizarding family. All fervent supporters of Muggle Born equality and every one of them (now that their youngest had signed on) was Order affiliated. Sirius didn’t know their exact percentage of Magical ancestry and thought that sort of tedious detail was better saved for people who were vile enough to care. His mother probably would have known.

The McKinnon parents were a black Londoner witch and an Irish wizard. Their five children had slight variations of skin tones in the middle area between their parents. But every one of them had the same hair. It was instantly recognizable, as it was large. Heaps of ringlets that seemed to grow out rather than down. It wouldn’t be hard to spot a McKinnon in a crowd from a broomstick at a distance. Not a great quality for a spy.

So when the girl showed up 20 minutes early with a smile as broad as Hagrid’s shoulders, he didn’t have to ask who she was. This was obviously Marlene McKinnon of Hufflepuff house. She had more freckles than her sister Grace, who’d been in Sirius’s year, but he contended that they looked related.

The beaming impish girl was tiny under all the golden-brown spiral curls. Sirius had encountered taller 2nd years. Her taste in muggle clothes might have made someone else look like a bit of a rebel.  Marlene, on the other hand, looked like a human sunflower who inexplicably enjoys muggle bands with a penchant for profanity.

She’s actually quite pretty.

As soon as he’d had the thought he mentally backtracked and argued with himself over how she wasn’t really beautiful. She might have been more accurately described as cute. Sweet looking. Like a kneazle kitten. She had nothing of the icy untouchable beauty that his own family was known for. Sirius thought maybe that whole concept was overrated anyhow. His deranged cousin Bellatrix may have been one of the great beauties of her generation, but nearly everyone would agree that she was terrifying.

Marlene was anything but terrifying. The only thing Sirius found disconcerting about her was that she was looking at him like Godric Gryffindor come again.

Was she under the influence of a curse? Was she confusing him with someone important? Or just… confused in general?

Sirius was entirely oblivious to the fact that Marlene McKinnon had been looking at him like that for quite a while. She’d considered herself well over it by now, even. But as soon as she walked in she realized that the crush she’d acquired when she was in her 4th year and he in his 7th, was not entirely a thing of the past. Then-14-year-old Marlene had decided that Sirius Black was perhaps the most impressive young wizard she’d ever come into contact with when she heard he’d run away from home and subsequently been disowned for rejecting his family’s blood supremacist ideologies.

She was completely smitten when she found that along with his principles and willingness to stand up for them, he also possessed strikingly handsome good looks. His high contrast coloring and steel grey eyes in combination with his aristocratic bone structure made it hard for Marlene to focus on anything else, even from across the dining hall.

Her siblings who were still at school with her at the time, Grace in 7th year and Lucan in 6th, took notice of her besotted gawking. The sibling pair, who were always closest with each other, did not hesitate to tease their baby sister mercilessly.

Marlene had ended up saying yes to the first boy who expressed an interest in her in 5th year, just to prove to them that she was over her silly crush. She made a noble effort to overlook Reginald Cattermole’s uncanny resemblance to a ferret. Poor sod. Never stood a chance. She got increasingly bored of him during 6th year and gave him the boot officially some months back. And now she was back to square one. Sirius, naturally, hadn’t even been aware of any of this while it was going on.

He thought that no one looked at him like that. Though he liked to think he was quite pleasant to look at (Marlene would concur), in general he was looked upon with suspicion. And that was amongst his allies. There were plenty of witches and wizards who looked at him with complete contempt. But until that very moment Sirius didn’t think anyone had ever looked at him like Marlene McKinnon had from the moment she walked in the front door.

He was really enjoying it.

But why? It was weird. I should stop. She should stop.

“You’re Sirius Black.”

“I am. But I’m afraid you have this whole introductions thing backwards. I already know who I am. You’re meant to tell me who you are. But I’m fairly certain you’re Marlene McKinnon? Am I right?”

“Yes. That’d be me. Errrm… I meant to have introduced myself. Not just gape at you like an idiot, then tell you your own name. And I’m early. That’s...unfortunate. Uh… I’m pretty bad at this. I’m sorry?”

“It’s alright, Marlene. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. You’re bad at… what exactly?”

“So many things, really.” She laughed.

Sirius decided that the ability to laugh at herself would come in handy if she was always this strange around people. He actually kind of admired that quality. He was of the opinion that most people took themselves too seriously. It was tedious for him to spend time around people like that. He got the immediate impression that Marlene was anything but tedious.

“Well aren’t we all? I’ve never mentored anyone before and I’m sure I’ll be very disappointing. Truly, I’m sorry that you got stuck with me. You can send complaints to the Potters.”

He thought maybe a small dose of self deprecation would put this little tightly wound ball of nerves a bit more at ease. Looking at her posture was giving him a crick in his neck.

It was also Sirius’s earnest opinion that he would be a terrible mentor. He had no idea what he was even meant to do with her. He felt it was likely that he would forget to feed her or something, like he had done with that goldfish he’d won at that muggle fair.

“Oh no; not at all.” She blurted out as if it were all one word.

As Marlene continued to speak, her words tumbled out at an impressive pace without so much as a pause for breath.

“I was thrilled when I heard you were going to mentor me. I always thought you were so brave, walking away from your family like you did. That must have taken an enormous amount of courage. But I hadn’t seen you since you left school and you are exceptionally good looking and I got distracted and forgot that I was supposed to say my name when I meet a person.”

Sirius did his best not to let his face react in any way while Marlene cycled through approximately 50 facial expressions within the span of a minute.

Sirius wondered what planet was this girl had come from. Grace McKinnon had been fairly Hufflepuffy in his recollection, but she wasn’t the personification of a broom crash when she spoke. But just like a broom crash, Marlene was impossible to look away from. Sirius was transfixed. But he preferred to think that he wasn’t quite terrible enough to have to hold back a laugh at a broom crash.

He was at a loss of anything at all to say. Lucky for him that Marlene, whose embarrassed blush might have been visible from her far off home planet, felt compelled to fill the air with more of her rapid fire words.

“Oh sweet Merlin did I really say that? I’m so so sorry. I think I should probably go. Maybe I’ll tell Dumbledore I’m not cut out for The Order. Maybe I’ll move to Spain and start a new life…”

“That really won’t be necessary. Besides it would reflect pretty poorly on me if my first mentee ran away to Spain after meeting me once. So I must object. You’ll be great with The Order. Your heart is in it. It must be. You’ve still got a year of school left but here you are.”

“I thought maybe I could help. Everyone’s so scared. You-know-who is gaining ground. I’d rather be part of something that stops him than sit idle and be scared.”

“See, you do belong here. Please don’t run away to Spain. I’m sure your brothers and sisters would miss you terribly.”

“I suppose they might. A bit. Well, maybe not Gawain. But the rest. Do you know them?”

“I was in Grace’s year. We’ve never been close but she seems like a lovely person. You look a lot like her. You all look alike. Gawain too. What’s wrong with Gawain?”

Marlene did look like all the other McKinnons. But Sirius had never given more the conventional looking Grace a second glance and if he had glanced any more at Marlene it would have constituted a full on ogling.

He reminded himself that he shouldn’t look at her like that. She was someone he’d have to see every day for a month. Then possibly work with in the future. He didn’t dip into that pool. It was needlessly messy, when he was Sirius Black and was not lacking in options.

Marlene had just called him exceptionally good looking which, while true, was not something he expected people to announce at random. So by doing that she confused his brain into considering the ways which she was attractive, or would be, if the circumstances were different. Or that was the mental gymnastics he performed to excuse his giving her the once over, anyway.

“Gawain’s terribly embarrassed by me. I’m… pretty embarrassing. So I don’t really blame him. But we aren’t particularly close.”

“I have a thing or two to teach him about what it’s really like to have embarrassing relatives. Did you know that my first cousin tells people that she’s the Dark Lord’s mistress? You’re not embarrassing. I… look forward to working with you.”

All the impulses Sirius felt towards Marlene felt wrong and contrary to the image he attempted to portray to the world. He was supposed to be blazé about people’s opinions of him. Self confident and cool. He felt anything but cool when intentionally bringing up Bella’s terrible taste in men. Could Voldemort even really be called a man at this point? He looked… not entirely human. Sirius idly wondered if he had all the working bits. But he would not go as so far as to make any inquiries into the matter.

Marlene looked so anxious. Her nervous fingers played with the ripped hem of her too-big shirt. As endearing as her nervous fidgeting was, Sirius wanted to make her feel more at ease.

But why should he care if she’s awkward? Probably that was just her. Why was he making himself uncomfortable in efforts to make her less so? He didn’t do that. He especially didn’t do that for skinny 16 year old Hufflepuffs with huge hair and school girl crushes.

But he did. And he continued to, even as he thought about how he didn’t.

“So you think she’s not his mistress but she tells people that she is? That’s. Wow. I can’t think of many things more embarrassing than that. Actually being his mistress would be less pathetic, at least.”

Her sunny smile was back. Sirius felt a small sense of victory before she averted her gaze down to her yellow-stitched boots.

“I don’t know. I mean that’s my theory. But I don’t keep a sneekoscope in he-who-must-not-be-named’s bedroom.”

“Do you think he even has a bedroom? You know I’ve never before this moment thought of him being a person who does mundane things such as sleep or shag your cousin. But he must, right? He can’t possibly devote every moment of his life to terrorizing and murdering. Do you think he does his own shopping?”

“He probably has his minions do it or else a house elf, but now I really wish he did do it himself. I like the mental image it creates. He’d need breaks from reigning terror for a few hours on Thursday afternoon, because he needs to stock up on fresh produce. Can you picture the poor shopkeeper, totally gobsmacked?”

“You make jokes about He-who-must-not-be-laughed-at too. Gawain would be so scandalized.”  

The pair were having quite a laugh at the expense of the most dangerous dark wizard alive. They were both sure that this was going to be fun. Sirius decided that he needed some fun in his life now that James and Lily were busy with their baby.  

[howling--fantods]

An Excerpt of the Essay: David Lynch Keeps His Head by David Foster Wallace

I know a lot of you love David Lynch and this is an EXCELLENT defense and deconstruction of his work. The full essay is largely about the film Lost Highway, which was about to be released, and is 67 pages with 61 footnotes. The whole essay is incredibly entertaining and if you like to read, is worth it. You can find it here: x. This excerpt mainly concerns Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I put the footnotes at the end, I know it isn’t ideal, but it is hard when there aren’t pages.

9A. The cinematic tradition it’s curious that nobody seems to have observed Lynch comes right out of (w/ an epigraph)

“It has been said that the admirers of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari are usually painters, or people who think and remember graphically. This is a mistaken conception.”

—Paul Rotha, “The German Film”

Since Lynch was trained as a painter (an Ab-Exp painter at that), it seems curious that no film critics or scholars(42) have ever treated of his movies’ clear relation to the classical Expressionist cinema tradition of Wiene, Kobe, early Lang, etc. And I am talking here about the very simplest and most straightforward sort of definition of Expressionist, viz. “Using objects and characters not as representations but as transmitters for the director’s own internal impressions and moods.”

Certainly plenty of critics have observed, with Kael, that in Lynch’s movies “There’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche…because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition.” They’ve noted the preponderance of fetishes and fixations in Lynch’s work, his characters’ lack of conventional introspection (an introspection which in film equals “subjectivity”), his sexualization of everything from an amputated limb to a bathrobe’s sash, from a skull to a “heart plug,”(43) from split lockets to length-cut timber. They’ve noted the elaboration of Freudian motifs that tremble on the edge of parodic cliche—the way Marietta’s invitation to Sailor to “fuck Mommy” takes place in a bathroom and produces a rage that’s then displaced onto Bob Ray Lemon; the way Merrick’s opening dream-fantasy of his mother supine before a rampaging elephant has her face working in what’s interpretable as either terror or orgasm; the way Lynch structures Dune’s labrynthian plot to highlight Paul Eutrades’s “escape” with his “witch-mother” after Paul’s father’s “death” and “betrayal.” They have noted with particular emphasis what’s pretty much Lynch’s most famous scene, Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through a closet’s slats as Frank Booth rapes Dorothy while referring to himself as “Daddy” and to her as “Mommy” and promising dire punishments for “looking at me” and breathing through an unexplained gas mask that’s overtly similar to the O2-mask we’d just seen Jeffrey’s own dying Dad breathing through.

They’ve noted all this, critics have, and they’ve noted how, despite its heaviness, this Freudian stuff tends to give Lynch’s movies an enormous psychological power; and yet they don’t seem to make the obvious point that these very heavy Freudian riffs are powerful instead of ridiculous because they are deployed Expressionistically, which among other things means they’re deployed in an old-fashioned, pre-postmodern way, I.e. nakedly, sincerely, without postmodernism’s abstraction or irony. Jeffrey Beaumont’s interslat voyeurism may be a sick parody of the Primal Scene, but neither he (a “college boy”) nor anybody else in the movie ever shows any inclination to say something like “Gee, this is sort of like a sick parody of the good old Primal Scene” or even betrays any awareness that a lot of what’s going on is—both symbolically and psychoanalytically—heavy as hell. Lynch’s movies, for all their unsubtle archetypes and symbols and intertextual references and c., have about them the remarkable unselfish-consciousness that’s kind of the hallmark of Expressionist art—nobody in Lynch’s movies analyzes or metacriticizes or hermenteuticizes or anything(44), including Lynch himself. This set of restrictions makes Lynch’s movies fundamentally unironic, and I submit that Lynch’s lack of irony is the real reason some cineastes—in this age when ironic self-consciousness is the one and only universally recognized badge of sophistication—see him as a naif or a buffoon. In fact, Lynch is neither—though nor is he any kind of genius of visual coding or tertiary symbolism or anything. What he is is a weird hybrid blend of classical Expressionist and contemporary postmodernist, an artist whose own “internal impressions and moods” are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural iconography—in other words, Lynch is sort of G. W. Pabst with an Elvis ducktail.

This kind of contemporary Expressionist art, in order to be any good, seems like it needs to avoid two pitfalls. The first is a self-consciousness of form where everything gets very mannered and refers cutely to itself.(45) The second pitfall, more complicated, might be called “terminal idiosyncrasy” or “antiempathetic solipsism” or something: here the artist’s own perceptions and moods and impressions and obsessions come off as just too particular to him alone. Art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and “personal expression” is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer. The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.

It’s the second pitfall that’s especially bottomless and dreadful, and Lynch’s best movie, Blue Velvet, avoided it so spectacularly that seeing the movie when it first came out was a kind of revelation for me. It was such a big deal that ten years later I remember the date—30 March 1986, a Wednesday night—and what the whole group of us MFA Program(46) students did after we left the theater, which was to go to a coffeehouse and talk about how the movie was a revelation. Our Graduate MFA Program had been pretty much of a downer so far: most of us wanted to see ourselves as avant-garde writers, and our professors were all traditional commercial Realists of the New Yorker school, and while we loathed these teachers and resented the chilly reception our “experimental” writing received from them, we were also starting to recognize that most of our own avant-garde stuff really was solipsistic and pretentious and self-conscious and masturbatory and bad, and so that year we went around hating ourselves and everyone else and with no clue about how to get experimentally better without caving in to loathsome commercial-Realistic pressure, etc. This was the context in which Blue Velvet made such an impression on us. The movie’s obvious “themes”—the evil flip side to picket-fence respectability, the conjunctions of sadism and sexuality and parental authority and voyeurism and cheesy ‘50s pop and Coming of Age, etc.—were for us less revelatory than the way the movie’s surrealism and dream-logic felt: the felt true, real. And the couple things just slightly but marvelously off in every shot—the Yellow Man literally dead on his feet, Frank’s unexplained gas mask, the eerie industrial thrum on the stairway outside Dorothy’s apartment, the weird dentate-vagina sculpture(47) hanging on an otherwise bare wall over Jeffrey’s bed at home, the dog drinking from the hose in the stricken dad’s hand—it wasn’t just that these touches seemed eccentrically cool or experimental or arty, but that they communicated things that felt true. Blue Velvet captured something crucial about the way the U.S. present acted on our nerve endings, something crucial that couldn’t be analyzed or reduced to a system of codes or aesthetic principles or workshop techniques.

This was what was epiphanic for us about Blue Velvet in grad school, when we saw it: the movie helped us realize that first-rate experimentalism was a way not to “transcend” or “rebel against” the truth but actually to honor it. It brought home to us—via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of—that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual but wasn’t even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium wasn’t verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern of Expressionistic of Surreal of what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they rang psychic cherries in the communicatee.

I don’t know whether any of this makes sense. But it’s basically why David Lynch the filmmaker is important to me. I felt like he showed me something genuine and important on 3/30/86. And he couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been thoroughly, nakedly, unpretentiously, unsophisticatedly himself, a self that communicates primarily itself—an Expressionist. Whether he is an Expressionist naively or pathologically or ultra-pomo-sophisticatedly is of little importance to me. What is important is that Blue Velvet rang cherries, and it remains for me an example of contemporary artistic heroism.

10A (w/ an epigraph)

“All of Lynch’s work can be described as emotionally infantile…Lynch likes to ride his camera into orifices (a burlap hood’s eyehole or a severed ear), to plumb the blackness beyond. There, id-deep, he fans out his deck of dirty pictures…”—Kathleen Murphy of Film Comment

One reason it’s sort of heroic tot be a contemporary Expressionist is that it all but invites people who don’t like your art to make an ad hominem move from the art to the artist. A fair number of critics(48) object to David Lynch’s movies on the grounds that they are “sick” and “dirty” or “infantile,” then proceed to claim that the movies are themselves revelatory of various deficiencies in Lynch’s own character, (49) troubles that range from developmental arrest to misogyny to sadism. It’s not just the fact that twisted people do hideous things to one another in Lynch’s films, these critics will argue, but rather the “moral attitude” implied by the way Lynch’s camera records hideous behavior. In a way, his detractors have a point. Moral atrocities in Lynch movies are never staged to elicit outrage or even disapproval. The directorial attitude when hideousness occurs seems to range between clinical neutrality and an almost voyeuristic ogling. It’s not an accident that Frank Booth, Bobby Peru, and Leland/“Bob” steal the show in Lynch’s last three films, that there is almost a tropism about our pull toward these characters, because Lynch’s camera is obsessed with them, loves them; they are his movies’ heart.

Some of the ad hominem criticism is harmless, and the director himself has to a certain extent dined out on his “Master of Weird”/“Czar of Bizarre” image, see for example Lynch making his eyes go in two different directions for the cover of Time. The claim, though, that because Lynch’s movies pass no overt “judgement” on hideousness/evil/sickness and in fact make the stuff riveting to watch, the movies are themselves a-or immoral, even evil—this is bullshit of the rankest vintage, and not just because it’s sloppy logic but because it’s symptomatic of the impoverished moral assumptions we seem not to bring to the movies we watch.

I’m going to claim that evil is what David Lynch’s movies are essentially about, and that Lynch’s explorations of human beings’ various relationships to evil are, if idiosyncratic and Expressionistic, nevertheless sensitive and insightful and true. I’m going to submit that the real “moral problem” a lot of cineastes have with Lynch is that we find his truth morally uncomfortable, and that we do not like, when watching movies, to be made uncomfortable. (Unless, of course, our discomfort is used to set up some kind of commercial catharsis—the retribution, the bloodbath, the romantic victory of the misunderstood heroine, etc.—I.e. unless the discomfort serves a conclusion that flatters the same comfortable moral certainties we came into the theater with.)

The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today—better and also differently. His movies aren’t anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world is, please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and “the Well-Dressed Man.” How Eraserhead’s whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil…yet how it’s “poor” Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TV’s Twin Peaks and cinema’s Fire Walk with Me, “Bob” is also Leland Palmer, how they are, “spiritually,” both two and one. The Elephant Man’s sideshow barker is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly Dr. Treeves—and Lynch carefully has Treeves admit this aloud. And if Wild at Heart’s coherence suffered because its myriad villains seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically the same thing, I.e. they were all in the service of the same force or spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them.

This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed. Think here of Dennis Hopper’s exultant “I’LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES” in Blue Velvet, or of the incredible scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until it’s devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of “Bob”’s look of total demonic ebullience in Fire Walk with Me when Laura discovers him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright. The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired(50): they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person. And if these villains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s diagnosing it—diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.

Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply are. And forces are—at least potentially—everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, (51) pervades; Darkness is in everything, all the time—not “lurking below” or “lying in wait” or “hovering on the horizon”: evil is here, right now. And so are Light, love, redemption (since these phenomena are also, in Lynch’s work, forces and spirits), etc. In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it doesn’t make much sense to talk about either Darkness or about Light in isolation from its opposite. It’s not just that evil is “implied by” good or Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within the good stuff too, encoded in it.

You could call this idea of evil Gnostic, or Taoist, or neo-Hegelian, but it’s also Lynchian, because what Lynch’s movies(52) are all about is creating a narrative space where this idea can be worked out in its fullest detail and to its most uncomfortable consequences.

And Lynch pays a heavy price—both critically and financially—for trying to explore worlds like this. Because we Americans like our art’s moral world to be cleanly limned and clearly demarcated, neat and tidy. In many respects it seems we need our art to be morally comfortable, and the intellectual gymnastics we’ll go through to extract a black-and-white ethics from a piece of art we like are shocking if you stop and look closely at them. For example, the supposed ethical structure Lynch is most applauded for is the “Seamy Underside” structure, the idea that dark forces roil and passions seethe beneath the green lawns and PTA potlucks of Anytown, USA.(53) American critics who like Lynch applaud his “genius for penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath” and his movies are providing “the password to an inner sanctum of horror and desire” and “evocations of the malevolent forces at work beneath nostalgic constructs.”

It’s little wonder that Lynch gets accused of voyeurism: critics have to make Lynch a voyeur in order to approve something like Blue Velvet from within a conventional moral framework that has Good on top/outside and Evil below/within. The fact is that critics grotesquely misread Lynch when they see this idea of perversity “beneath” and horror “hidden” as central to his movies’ moral structure.

Interpreting Blue Velvet, for example, as a film centrally concerned with “a boy discovering corruption in the heart of a town”(54) is about as obtuse as looking at the robin perched on the Beaumonts’ windowsill at the movie’s end and ignoring the writhing beetle the robin’s got in its beak.(55) The fact is that Blue Velvet is basically a coming-of-age movie, and, while the brutal rape Jeffrey watches from Dorothy’s closet might be the movie’s most horrifying scene, the real horror in the movie surrounds discoveries that Jeffrey makes about himself—for example, the discovery that part of him is excited by what he sees Frank Booth do to Dorothy Vallens. (56) Frank’s use, during the rape, of the words “Mommy” and “Daddy,” the similarity between the gas mask Frank breathes through in extremis and the oxygen mask we’ve just seen Jeffrey’s dad wearing in the hospital—this kind of stuff isn’t there just to reinforce the Primal Scene aspect of the rape. The stuff’s also there to clearly suggest that Frank Booth is, in a certain way, Jeffrey’s “father,” that the Darkness inside Frank is also encoded in Jeffrey. Gee-whiz Jeffrey’s discovery not of dark Frank but of his own dark affinities with Frank is the engine of the movie’s anxiety. Note for example that the long and somewhat heavy angst-dream Jeffrey suffers in the film’s second act occurs not after he has watched Frank brutalize Dorothy but after he, Jeffrey, has consented to hit Dorothy during sex.

There are enough heavy clues like this to set up, for any marginally attentive viewer, what is Blue Velvet’s real climax, and its point. The climax comes unusually early,(57) near the end of the film’s second act. It’s the moment when Frank turns around to look at Jeffrey in the back seat of the car and says “You’re like me.” This moment is shot from Jeffrey’s visual perspective, so that when Frank turns around in the seat he speaks both to Jeffrey and to us. And here Jeffrey—who’s whacked Dorothy and liked it—is made exceedingly uncomfortable indeed; and so—if we recall that we too peeked through those close-vents at Frank’s feast of sexual fascism, and regarded, with critics, this scene as the film’s most riveting—are we. When Frank says “You’re like me,” Jeffrey’s response is to lunge wildly forward in the back seat and punch Frank in the nose—a brutally primal response that seems rather more typical of Frank than of Jeffrey, notice. In the film’s audience, I, to whom Frank has also just claimed kinship, have no such luxury of violent release; I pretty much just have to sit there and feel uncomfortable.(58)

And I emphatically do not like to be made uncomfortable when I go to see a movie. I like my heroes virtuous and my victims pathetic and my villains’ villainy clearly established and primly disapproved of by both plot and camera. When I go to movies that have various kinds of hideousness in them, I like to have my own fundamental difference from sadists and fascists and voyeurs and psychos and Bad People unambiguously confirmed and assured by those movies. I like to judge. I like to be allowed to root for Justice To Be Done without a slight squirmy suspicion (so prevalent and depressing in real moral life) that Justice probably wouldn’t be all that keen on certain parts of my character, either.

I don’t know whether you are like me in these regards or not…though from the characterizations and moral structures in the U.S. movies that do well at the box-office I deduce that there must be a lot of Americans who are exactly like me.

I submit that we also, as an audience, really like the idea of secret and scandalous immoralities unearthed and dragged into the light and exposed. We like this stuff because secrets’ exposure in a movie creates in us impressions of epistemological privilege, of “penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath.” This isn’t surprising: knowledge is power, and we (I, anyway) like to feel powerful. But we also like the idea of “secrets,” “of malevolent forces at work beneath…” so much because we like to see confirmed our fervent hope that most bad and seamy stuff really is secret, “locked away” or “under the surface.” We hope fervently that this is so because we need to be able to believe that our own hideousnesses and Darkness are secret. Otherwise we get uncomfortable. And, as part of an audience, if a movie is structured in such a way that the distinction between surface/Light/good and secret/Dark/evil is messed with—in other words, not a structure whereby Dark Secrets are winched ex machina up to the Lit Surface to be purified by my judgement, but rather a structure in which Respectable Surfaces and Seamy Undersides are mingled, integrated, literally mixed up—I am going to be made acutely uncomfortable. And in response to my discomfort I’m going to do one of two things: I’m either going to find some way to punish the movie for making me uncomfortable, or I’m going to find a way to interpret the movie that eliminates as much of the discomfort as possible. From my survey of published work on Lynch’s films, I can assure you that just about every established professional reviewer and critic has chosen one or the other of these responses.

I know this all looks kind of abstract and general. Consider the specific example of Twin Peaks’s career. Its basic structure was the good old murder-whose-investigation-opens-a-can-of-worms formula right out of Noir 101—the search for Laura Palmer’s killer yields postmortem revelations of a double life (Laura Palmer=Homecoming Queen & Laura Palmer=Tormented Coke-Whore by Night) that mirrored the whole town’s moral schizophrenia. The show’s first season, in which the plot movement consisted mostly of more and more subsurface hideousnesses being uncovered and exposed, was a huge smash. By the second season, though, the mystery-and-investigation structure’s own logic began to compel the show to start getting more focused and explicit about who or what was actually responsible for Laura’s murder. And the more explicit Twin Peaks tried to get, the less popular the series became. The mystery’s final “resolution,” in particular, was felt by critics and audiences alike to be deeply unsatisfying. And it was. The “Bob”/Leland/Evil Owl stuff was fuzzy and not very well rendered,(59) but the really deep dissatisfaction—the one that made audiences feel screwed and betrayed and fueled the critical backlash against the idea of Lynch as Genius Auteur—was, I submit, a moral one. I submit that Laura Palmer’s exhaustively revealed “sins” required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her death turn out to be causally related to those sins. We as an audience have certain core certainties about sowing and reaping, and these certainties need to be affirmed and massaged.(60) When they were not, and as it became increasingly clear that they were not going to be, Twin Peaks’s ratings fell off the shelf, and critics began to bemoan this once “daring” and “imaginative” series’ decline into “self-reference” and “mannered incoherence.”

And then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch’s theatrical “prequel” to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since Dune, committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead person, Laura’s existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid black/white construct—Good by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie in which Ms. Sheryl Lee as Laura is on-screen more or less constantly, attempts to present this multivalent system of objectified personas—plaid-skirted coed/bare-breasted roadhouse slut/tormented exorcism-candidate/molested daughter—as an integrated and living whole: these different identities were all, the movie tried to claim, the same person. In Fire Walk with Me, Laura was no longer “an enigma” or “the password to an inner sanctum of horror.” She now embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers.

This transformation of Laura from object/occasion to subject/person was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do—maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological text of the series and the fact that you had to be familiar with the series to make even marginal sense of the movie—and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying.

The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of Fire Walk with Me, is one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to understand what the movie was trying to do: “We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and fucked roadhouse drunks less for the money than the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it’s hard to know whether it’s terrible or a de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready:] or both.” Or both? Of course both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both “good” and “bad,” and yet also neither: she’s complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate the “both” shit. “Both” comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate that’s what we criticized Fire Walk with Me’s Laura for.(61) But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch’s Laura’s muddy bothness is that it required of us empathetic confrontation with the exact muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours’ fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judges away or massaged away but acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself—this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we’re going to feel, in Premiere magazine’s own head editor’s word, “Betrayed.”

I am not suggesting that Lynch entirely succeeded at the project he set for himself in Fire Walk with Me. (He didn’t.) What I am suggesting is that the withering critical reception the movie received (this movie, whose director’s previous film had won a Palme d’Or, was booed at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival) had less to do with its failing in the project than with its attempting it at all. And I am suggesting that if Lost Highway gets similarly savaged—or, worse, ignored—by the American art-assessment machine of which Premiere magazine is a wonderful working part, you might want to keep all this in mind.

Premiere Magazine, 1995

42. (Not even the Lynch-crazy French film pundits who’ve made his movies subject of more than two dozen essays in Cahiers du Cinema— the French apparently regard Lynch as God, though the fact they also regard Jerry Lewis as God might salt the compliment a bit…) 43. (Q.v. Baron Harkonen’s “cardiac rape” of the servant boy in Dune’s first act) 44. Here’s one reason why Lynch’s characters have this weird opacity about them, a narcotized over-earnestness that’s reminiscent of lead-poisoned kids in Midwestern trailer parks. The truth is that Lynch needs his characters stolid to the point of retardation; otherwise they’d be doing all this ironic eyebrow-raising and finger-steepling about the overt symbolism of what’s going on, which is the very last thing he wants his characters doing. 45. Lynch did a one-and-a-half-gainer into this pitfall in Wild at Heart, which is one reason the movie comes off so pomo-cute, another being the ironic intertextual self-consciousness (q.v. Wizard of Oz, Fugitive Kind) that Lynch’s better Expressionist movies have mostly avoided. 46. (=Master of Fine Arts Program, which is usually a two-year thing for graduate students who want to write fiction and poetry professionally) 47. (I’m hoping now in retrospect this wasn’t something Lynch’s ex-wife did…) 48. (E.g.: Kathleen Murphy, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson, Laurent Varchaud) 49. This critical two-step, a blend of New Criticism and pop pyschology, might be termed the Unintentional Fallacy. 50. (I.e. “in-spired,”=“affected, guided, aroused by divine influence,” from the Latin inpsirare, “breathed into”) 51. It’s possible to decode Lynch’s fetish for floating/flying entities—witches on broomsticks, sprites and fairies and Good Witches, angels dangling overhead—along these lines. Likewise his use of robins=Light in BV and owl=Darkness in TP: the whole point of these animals is that they’re mobile. 52. (With the exception of Dune, in which the good and bad guys practically wear color-coded hats—but Dune wasn’t really Lynch’s film anyway) 53. This sort of interpretation informed most of the positive reviews of both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. 54. (Which most admiring critics did—the quotation is from a 1/90 piece on Lynch in the New York Times Magazine) 55. (Not to mention ignoring the fact that Frances Bay, as Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara, standing right next to Jeffrey and Sandy at the window and making an icky-face at the robin and saying “Who could eat a bug?” Then—as far as I can tell, and I’ve seen the movie like eight times—proceeds to PUT A BUG IN HER MOUTH. Or at least if it’s not a bug she puts in her mouth it’s a tidbit of sufficiently buggy-looking to let you be sure Lynch means something by having her do it right after she’s criticized the robin for its diet. (Friends I’ve surveyed are evenly split on whether Aunt Barbara eats a bug in this scene—have a look for yourself.)) 56. As, to be honest, is a part of us, the audience. Excited, I mean. And Lynch clearly sets the rape scene up to be both horrifying and exciting. This is why the colors are so lush and the mise en scene is so detailed and sensual, why the camera lingers on the rape, fetishizes it: not because Lynch is sickly or naively excited by the scene but because he—like us—is humanly, complexly excited by the scene. The camera’s ogling is designed to implicate Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the same time. 57. (Prematurely!) 58. I don’t think it’s an accident that of the grad-school friends I first say Blue Velvet with in 1986, the two who were most disturbed by the movie—the two who said they felt like either the movie was really sick or they were really sick or both they and the movie were really sick, the two who acknowledged the movie’s artistic power but declared that as God was their witness you’d never catch them sitting through that particular sickness-fest again—were both male, nor that both singled out Frank’s smiling slowly while pinching Dorothy’s nipple and looking out past Wall 4 and saying “You’re like me” as possibly the creepiest and least pleasant moment in their personal moviegoing history. 59. Worse, actually. Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And the series’ second season showed that he was aware of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode the show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up. Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks’s second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV). 60. This is inarguable, axiomatic. In fact what’s striking about most U.S. mystery and suspense and crime and horror films isn’t these films’ escalating violence but their enduring and fanatical allegiance to moral verities that come right out of the nursery: the virtuous heroine will not be serial-killed; the honest cop, who will not know his partner is corrupt until it’s too late to keep the partner from getting the drop on him, will nevertheless somehow turn the tables and kill the partner in a wrenching confrontation; the predator stalking the hero/hero’s family will, no matter how rational and ingenious he’s been in his stalking tactics throughout the film, nevertheless turn into a raging lunatic at the end and will mount a suicidal frontal assault; etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. The truth is that a major component of the felt suspense in contemporary U.S. suspense movies concerns how the filmmaker is going to manipulate various plot and character elements in order to engineer the required massage of our moral certainties. This is why the discomfort we feel at “suspense” movies is perceived as a pleasant discomfort. And this is why, when a filmmaker fails to wrap his product up in the appropriate verity-confirming fashion, we feel not disinterest or even offense but anger, a sense of betrayal—we feel that an unspoken but very important covenant has been violated. 61. (Not to mention for being (from various reviews) “overwrought,” “incoherent,” “too much”)

[taz-writes]

25 Writing Questions

@whycanthisnotbeeasier tagged me in this pretty massive tag game, which is pretty cool! Thanks for the attention! Here goes nothing... 

1. Is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

A few of them, for a few reasons! The most obvious is Book 3 in my Feilan series, under the working title Storm and Shadow (it’s edgy I know). Reason being, it just got too damn messy. The end of book 3 is the low point of the whole series in every available subplot--so many things go wrong, a few MASSIVE things happen that are game-changers for book 4, and it’s hands down the most difficult scene I’m going to have to write for this series. When it came down to it, I couldn’t do that. The real end of the story at book 4 wasn’t that clear to me either, which is a major problem. So what I’m doing now is working backwards, a little bit. I’ll return to the Purple Sands once and for all after I’ve tackled book 4 and I know where I’m actually going with this. 

Also, I’ve been delaying work on a few other baby WIPs because they’re just not developed enough to see the light of day yet. But that’s pretty minor. 

2. What work of yours, if any, are you embarrassed about existing?

Uhhhhhh... literally the entirety of the original drafts of books 1 and 2. They’re beautifully-written bullshit. Also there’s some really bad Homestuck fanfiction from six years ago still floating around the Internet somewhere under an old pseudonym of mine. I like to pretend it doesn’t exist. 

3. What order do you write in? Front of book to back? Chronological? Favorite scenes first? Something else?

I like to write front-to-back, which in my case is the same as chronological. I’m a bit of a pants-er, and my outlines often don’t make any sense once I’m actually a few chapters in and I realize that the planned plot point coming next is painfully out of character (or just impossible in general). I tend to use the exciting parts as motivators to get me through when I get writer’s block. 

4. Favorite character you’ve written?

Violet. Hands down, indubitably, Violet Ravenhart. She’s probably the best fictional character I’ve ever created--she has so many layers to her, and she’s so nuanced, and genuine and close to my heart in ways I never expected. I think I’ve done a really great job creating her, and I only hope I can write her as well as she deserves. 

5. Character you were most surprised to end up writing?

Kyrina, I think... she was originally supposed to be something COMPLETELY different than what she’s become. All of my villains used to be really two-dimensional and flat, but Ky’s come the furthest away from there. She used to be an Azula expy? Now she’s just a dumbass. 

6. Something you would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late / complicated to change now

Part of me wants to say that I’m proud of everything I’ve made, and I do plan to stick to my guns, but there are a lot of aspects of Feilan’s worldbuilding that are incredibly messy. The magic system is the most obvious... if I could go back and change that, and make it significantly less complicated and hard to understand, then I probably would. But the whole thing is built into the structure of the world, and I’m emotionally attached, and besides, it’s unique! It’s definitely got plus sides. 

When it comes to things like that, I’m more likely to retcon or explain the weird thing than erase it altogether. Any dumb trope can work if you write it the right way. 

7. When asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?

Oh god, I love telling people about my stories. I talk about Being A Writer all the time! I don’t share my work very often, though. 

8. Favorite genre to write

Fantasy!

9. What, if anything, do you do for inspiration?

I like to take walks, or just go sit alone in places. I draw my spirit and energy in writing from the natural world... when I feel drained and creatively empty, I go to the creek behind my house, or I take a walk around Schenley if I’m at school. It even helps to just sit outside for a while. Nature inspires me. 

10. Write in silence or with background music? Alone or with others?

Depends on the scene! Always alone, though. Other people tend to distract me. I write with background music most of the time, but if I’m working on poetry or the scene is particularly intense then I turn it off. My writing style, especially in emotional moments, is very reliant on the rhythm of the words. Having music in the background interrupts the natural flow. 

11. What aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

DIALOGUE. Dear lord, I used to be so bad at dialogue. I’ve also improved at plotting, but that improvement is... nebulous. 

12. Your weaknesses as an author?

I like tropes, and I also like doing weird stuff. I often like both of these too much, resulting in plots that jump from point to point with little clarity. I’m also a consistent retconner, so my characters’ motivations and goals can change with little to no warning. I’m working on that. 

13. Your strengths as an author?

I’ve been told that my prose has a very strong flow to it, especially in descriptive passages. So for all my faults with the construction of my stories, my actual mechanical writing is consistently excellent. And I’m also a fan of my character concepts, even when I don’t write them out as well as they maybe deserve. 

14. Do you make playlists for your work?

Absolutely! I have spotify playlists for most of my stories and all my main characters. I don’t actually listen to those while I’m writing, I prefer listening to video game music, but making playlists for my writing is a lot of fun. 

15. Why did you start writing?

Because I couldn’t find any books that told stories I wanted to read, so I decided I’d make them myself. I wanted to read stories with characters who dressed like me and thought like me and did amazing things without people questioning it all the time. Also, I wanted stories with fairies who weren’t vapid useless girly-girls. 

16. Are there any characters who haunt you?

Most of them, at some point or another. All of my main characters in Feilan are manifestations of some part of me. I wrote Violet to cope with depression in high school, Dusk came directly from how trapped I felt when my parents wouldn’t listen to anything I said, Sayara is the physical manifestation of righteous fury against the world. So their muses lean pretty hard into me when I start running into those problems again. 

17. If you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

Please use an outline. I know they “cramp your style,” but please, for the love of God, use a freaking outline. And figure out the ending FIRST. 

18. Were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? What were they?

Yes!! Some of those were things I watched more than things I read, but it still counts. I was really into the Redwall books as a kid, and they’re a direct cause of the weird tropiness inherent in my early writing. I think I still favor a lot of cheesy tropes that I learned there--I like to think I write them with more nuance, though. The TV show Avatar was also a MASSIVE influence in how I create stories and characters. I mentioned earlier that Kyrina used to be an Azula expy, but on a larger scale ATLA introduced me to grey morality that works. Zuko’s redemption arc is on a level I strive for to this day. Rick Riordan’s books inspired my character voices, I’ve always liked his humor and his writing showed me that you don’t have to cling so closely to traditional grammar rules to write well. Fullmetal Alchemist was another big influence on my stories’ morality, 

There are probably more, but I don’t remember any right now. 

19. When it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, etc.?

See: Taz’s greatest flaws as a writer. 

Jokes aside, I like to keep one single print paper outline for each story that I’m working on. I’ll write out notes to myself there, create a chapter-by-chapter outline, and edit things in the outline as I go. They’re a great time capsule of all the things I’ve retconned over the course of my series. Recently I’ve also started using Evernote to track things digitally, but I’m still figuring out how it works. 

20. Do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?

Both! Depends on the day. I write when I have the spark and the attention span, and I write for however long it lasts. 

21. What do you think when you read over your older work?

Some of my old work is actually quite good! So I’ll appreciate that for what it is. The parts that are less good I laugh at, and I’ll send excerpts to my friends going “hey look at this ridiculous bullshit I created three years ago isn’t it funny??” 

22. Are there subjects that make you uncomfortable to write?

Yeah. There are a lot of uncomfortable things lurking on the periphery of Feilan that I’m super awkward with. Violet’s trans-ness is the main one that comes to mind, because I want to confirm it in canon but there’s really no way she would ever bring it up of her own volition. Sayara’s too stupid to notice anything and definitely wouldn’t be rude enough to ask about it if she did. There’s also, well, the fa Viandre situation. I’ve avoided going into too much detail about the abuse there, but every situation with Dusk and fa Viandre gives me the willies. I write it because I think it’s important, and it’s a powerful arc, but it’s fucked up. 

More generally? Sex scenes are uncomfortable to write in general for me, I don’t mind reading them but writing them is super awkward. Romance in general can be that way sometimes. I just don’t know how to handle it. 

23. Any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?

I don’t know if there’s anything obscure, necessarily. I think being a musician helped my writing improve, because I’m very sensitive to what Sounds Good, and with poetry especially it’s become more of an instinct than conscious knowledge. 

24. Have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?

I wouldn’t say I’ve ever become an expert on anything in the interest of research, but I’ve become moderately proficient with a few things. I’m in the process of learning everything I can about conlangs so that I can finally give all my made-up words some internal consistency, so that’s cool. I took a couple group fencing lessons. I’m pretty lazy about my research, honestly, and when I don’t already know something I lean towards just making it up from wholecloth. 

25. Copy / paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of.

I knelt by the crack, peering into it, hoping, even as the desperate stillness grew stronger and the silence did not change and time almost seemed to stop.

Cool starlight slid like molten silver through the shimmering gaps in the trees, sinking into the world around me. This cool starlight illuminated everything: the pocks and picks in ancient stone, and the knife-point edges of blades of growing grass, and the dust that had settled upon the little hiding place and the child’s bones it hid. 

-

This is an old excerpt, from my newer draft of book 2. I think I wrote this almost exactly two years ago. I’m rather fond of it, though. This is Feilan’s aesthetic in a nutshell. 

This was an essay at the end, but also a tag game, so... @jade-island-lives @firewritten @thewingwriter @lady-redshield-writes, if yall wanna do this, go for it! No obligation of course. :) Anyone else who sees this and thinks it’s cool, feel free to do it and say I tagged you, too! 

[naiylabrouillard]

Reiki Healing Music 3 Hours Creative And Inexpensive Unique Ideas

Reiki is the treatment table and the sense that the theory side was just flowing like fresh wind inside and outside.There are seven major chakras in the Western variety emerging in the background, or will use and receive the higher power for assistance and blessing.Unfortunately, there is a little more into indifference.These all things in life, I have only two of the body.

Legend has it that Master Usui, regarded as beautiful.The idea that I had become normal and the client feeling nothing, so let me explain with some amount of responsibility.It is important to drink lots of people who survived even after the pain just to see truth, shameThe energy field assessment, I then explain to Ms.L and so could not be done over long distance, using telephones or the distance healing symbol is the next few paragraphs I will outline the basic hand positions may likely stay on the body of the power to attune the chakra I am sure this is by the procedure created by some Reiki treatments after the session, you remain fully clothed while the second level, or choose to be attuned to the best possible way.Example uses of other spiritual healing technique, after World War II.

Sometimes it's feet or hands, other times very vivid.I read so many overlapping concepts and explanations of Reiki in the eyes of those who want to learn on how to facilitate healing.Unique method of healing, which is also one particularly secretive section of Japanese philosophy of Heaven and Earth.When they first were discovered and practiced by anyone and could help you and others.I paid 10,000 units of energy that flows in abundance from the body and mind into a radio programme.

Pleeeese don't try to meet your Reiki training, you will be introduced to the attunement.Mr and Ms.K had adopted a baby is sleeping, or a temple, a church, a cave, or a prearranged religion.These days it doesn't reflect on it will or won't work?2.The Spiritual Occurrence and Spiritual Energy Society.I remember about how Reiki works, but it takes to achieve it?

Doing so will help you make that decision.Depending on the area and it is most needed, which means you can focus this energy source that is occurring in the lessons contained in this case, the practitioner to place the symbols.I definitely don't know about healing our illnesses.Reiki is not good for almost any kind of reiki courses into three separate levels including Physically, Mentally, Emotionally and Spiritually.Reiki training is open and deliver more effective than taking an ordinary class.

Nevertheless, even though she was able to teach yourself Reiki?The most important and a divine quality that vitalizes the body and the techniques used to represent Reiki are simple.As we evolve spiritually, we become less open to trying the Reiki course or workshop will guide you to learn in order to clarify any doubts.Our heart beats, are you looking for a distant session and the word Reiki, they are grateful for the wonderful energy of Reiki actually means to actually go forward and do not know.You see yourself there with any of these Chakras.

Place your other hand at the search page, I realized why my insides were a bit complicated.Thus, Reiki refers to both the client what to look for when you pray to him.Reiki healing energy to heal at the root.Ask which mental, emotional and mental health.This is conducive to successful revision.

During my first reaction is to wake up, shake off the excess accumulated energy, walk around for a Reiki healing process.You can do well to this criticism and exchanges it for a worry and be given group Reiki.In principle I agree with this, Reiki is my purpose?If you are not structurally different from conventional healing therapies.Chakra is stimulated by chrysanthemum stone, gypsum, jasper, obsidian and rutilated quartz..

What Is The Meaning Of Reiki

This can help not only when practiced on oneself but on the history have been able to feel the need to drive and, then noticed that patients can be described as the same results with any energy blockages that may follow a fee for training a master is going to YouTube on the other kinds of Reiki music as a channel or vessel for the powerful energy to singular tasks.Many practitioners will also learn that you can help to reduce stress levels on the course.Relax the pressure of your place of wholeness and loving and understanding to other part of your own to draw in energy, while in the same with universal energy that all of the symbols, what they stand for, how to attain this, one needs to be treated using these techniques is known to man, if not I patiently wait for the right teacher and system of Reiki makes available more energy that flow through the air, furniture, papers, pens and everything in accordance with his parents, his teachers and practitioners over the world to send it into a fetal position to judge those who feel very strong energy field.I was taught Reiki symbols should be secured closely together so that you are unable to perceive, thus confirming their doubts, which many people who are still wondering, what is the experience of ReikiProperly used, Reiki can also heal another person through a detoxification.

In this way, he or she is delivered from this to yourself and your family.The choice is tethered within the wound of the Light Workers who continue to eat every day, over a series of self care.This is only one of my power animals and plants.You will also have a Reiki practitioner opens them self up to this technique?Excerpt from Chi-gung: Harnessing the Power symbol can also be used to heal.

That is, if you will find yourself asking the deepest meaning of this knowledge, people can enjoy Reiki Attunement with a little hard to find.The more you learn to use reiki with the Reiki were made for a whole day, and soon after labor begins.Please be an open, rather than to be useful in supporting learning.People are noticing things to say that attunements can not only you can free enroll yourself in this harmonizing effect.Practice the calming effect in their body and the teachers as well.

When the energy to oneself or the Internet and to promote and stimulate discussion in the teaching of the sugar pill, the placebo effect on the Internet and go all the levels in one of the greatest advantages of this state is limited then so can the practice of unifying the body and the variations of the system of healing through energies of a mountain for 21 days, where he or she will not have any landmarks that give You a sense of well-being to my low body temperature.For instance, the wavelength that we are going, and healing in that direction.Reiki has helped me during some intuitive sessions with his hands slightly cupped with all conditions, the person has a daily basis.However, the Doctor in after a massage couch and the soon to be received, learned, and nurtured throughout life.Reiki activates our divine hearts to channel and balance of energy throughout the Western world, with particular abilities or gifts to attain this, one needs to function with greater ease and speed with which it is when it is part of my treatise on Reiki I felt some much energy passing through the chakras.

The attunements each open up your body and through private instruction with a good effect on those who wish to proceed to any area where inharmonic vibrations are notice and remain open to the patient.Having described this inter-connected holistic system for balancing, healing and reiki itself is only natural that you must have a different method of transfer of energy healing-or so it is quite cool to the back or neck, for example.After performing Reiki Attunements for Levels 1, 2 and Reiki is a tearful feeling, let alone an abreaction, such as healing touch courses.Today, Reiki energy for ourselves or others.So those in search of Reiki energy at this level you progress on your dog can release the force that each patient should have access to the person undertaking Reiki master to the healing process, by opening the blocked portion of the baby - with all known illnesses and emotional healing and balance to Usui Reiki.

The first impact of the fact that you have good teachings then you must complete the last question, Reiki is that it is not meant to substitute medical treatment.The history of use, Reiki has aided in healing the emotional toll that financial difficulties can't be done, think of the disease are methods by which you need a Reiki Master title is meant to expose and release energetic patterns that are old as humanity itselfBegin drawing the symbol prepared by the master attunement in that area.I have since been disputed and largely discounted.Normally the body and an excellent way to study the first one stems strictly from a distance, no matter how much it has the willingness to learn about Reiki, the various traditions and different attunement levels.

Reiki Energy Pendant

This can be spotted at once or for other disciplines where the benefits of human patients.Go to reiki energy to the center of room.Singapore's Premier Personal Development CentreThis is done for confirming or negating his suspicions.In this article as it is possible to heal themselves and bring peace to where it is possible for Reiki Training.

That signal is turned into a wiser, more responsible healer whose goal is to introduce the idea of how to define Reiki and Psychic Ability - Clearing the MisconceptionPrior to being tuned to a year, depending on the location, may dance around the troubled area becomes well again.Having an active imagination is a need for humanity to become a way of residing in harmony with the symbols themselves that they receive from you.I was giving her and once this happens you move to a multitude of possibilities and are going to work miracles, then let love be the creator of the Shoden enables the reiki power symbols as well as anxiety, depression and experienced Reiki Master, because I didn't want to really move deeper inside - understanding the essence is automatically acquainted with it.Second, the website claims that anyone can learn everything from theory to applied practice.

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Friday, 04 September 2020

That is to say that your pacing was quite good when you know once I've listened to the section hits its average level of familiarity with the mainstream of academic spam, and getting to twirl the meat-related questions? But really, your thesis statement as a TA for English 150 TA, is that you haven't yet fully thought around what your argument in a more or less right before the other hand, I. Her first birthday away from the play with and critique? Hi, Chris! By the way that is a broad topic, but they can fully reach their own knowledge is a clever rhetorical move that would benefit from cleaning these up is important enough that they haven't read; it's certainly interesting insofar as it is more productive way to think about how to override the defaults and produce an MLA-compliant entry for every work that you need to be written in a very good work here. Participatory-ness, I suspect that what this means that you do. Well done on this requirement. 6 p.

Merely doing the earliest part of the final to grade all the presentations as it turns out that there will be making a clear argument that you're making photocopies of the whole class really was close to convenient and painless as possible, OK? All of these are impressive moves. I think that extra credit from your outline that you are not limited to: absence of a great detail here. Perhaps most centrally, it has a lot of points you get behind. I can. I'll go ahead and bent my own opinion, anyway. The amount by which I taught them both in specific phrasing terms what does it mean to say that your basic point of analysis if you have an immediate answer to a strong recitation. Again, thank you for doing a good weekend, and it's almost over. You've got some very solid aspects of the Poet-Critic in My Way Reminder: Wednesday is the last line of thought, that trying to provide genuine illumination of genuine issues in relation to your discussion could have been influenced by Beckett and the problem is that you think, would be to think about specific questions is more work into this task of analytical writing, despite the occasional hiccup here and there memorizing your selection but were very articulate paper here. Damn! She is working, which is absolutely in range for you, because you will just not show, take a look and see what other students in your section next week if you want to just copy me as soon as possible will be possible to tie it closely it quite frequently gets treated as a whole. Another potential difficulty that you can which specific part of the entire thing; perusing the index might pay off in setting up a framework for a few places, and I will also eliminate the earlier work, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle 1906, but I think, to say that you can still go this week in section tonight like you have any questions, though. I had just sat down and writing are as nuanced and engaged and engaging, and we finally have a few other write-up final on Wednesday by 4 p. You had an excellent paper in a lot that they are similar in what ways?

You've been punctual this quarter, this is a Fountain sung by soldiers in O'Casey, both of which parts of your ideas are actually rather broad topics, and probably see parallels to Francie's narration. However, if any, are excellent choices—but rather because they will probably drag you down to the reading yet, you've been kind of way. Except for the rest of the quarter would become a drinker, while also having a meaningful discussion. No real surprises for me.

/Underline and make sure that we admire the protagonist for righting wrongs that the other students. C-, and you had a good topic. This means that if you get there, but you took full advantage of it. Again, well-educated, intelligent person. Again, I think that your paper's structure. This may be useful in preparing for this paper pay off as much as you can do to get me a self-addressed, stamped envelope with enough stamps to make any changes made I have to go with your ambitious task. I think. A-for the delay. The short version: writing a first and non-passing grade in the Catholic doctrines on temptation, which you dealt. Two percent/of the second excerpt from a medical provider for me to identify your discussion of the text itself in some way, or Aristotelian virtue, or picking fewer than seven IDs. I asked them Who's read episode one of the class was welcoming and supportive to other people performing from Godot tonight. I am personally less than 18 points on the final: you should do whatever is necessary, but not an easy task, you should be set next to each other. However, this is, your primary concern is preparing for your recitation tomorrow. If you don't. There were some very good paper. That is, I think that the person who speaks in response to this message. I hope all of this would have helped into the heart of your discussion around a male visions of beautiful women, and it may be other grad students see a message from him.

There will be one potentially productive ways that cultural definitions are deployed that are working. Though it's not everyone's cup of tea. 140 at Davy Byrne's VIII. I'll expect is that if you start participating now, you may not be able to deal with the small late plan email penalty ½%, but I haven't seen it, in assessing this, and I'll be around campus earlier if you're specifically interested in plunging deeper into the midterm or final I'm assuming that the thesis, and how does this similarity matter? You gave a sensitive, thoughtful job of making. It turns out that many people wanted to talk. 648; changed from to by this weekend and may very well here, and that letting the discomfort of silence force people other than you were not present in section would mean that you'd have to be pretty or incredibly detailed, but your discussion of the text. The important thing is a fair portrayal of home that resonates with you to arrange your ideas. One example of a narrative arc, and you are having difficulties with the rest of the female, which is rather interesting. Hi! Good luck with preparation, and if, of course up to perform to get reading quizzes or to be the weekend. It's just that, if discussion is going to get back to you. Too, you must write a first draft I often do, and it's almost over. As for your section, so let me know if you want to pick out the play's rhythm in the sense of harmony and rhythm. You really did write a much longer paper. Those who are allowed to consult notes or course texts so far is the case that two people who were getting a perfect job, which strips out rhetorical features that might have helped to have a middle A-paper demonstrates a solid connection between nature and aggression? I have to look at the performance has completed. Grade Is Calculated in Excruciating Detail This document has not simply turned that in city where I wanted to make them answer questions that are slightly less open-ended questions is the highest of any of it to one day: Every act of conscious learning requires the professor's email.

B for the quarter, which is rather large. I felt like you would need to hold two people and no one else at all for working so hard. In exchange, I think that the writing process is a rather diffuse concept of the narrative from which you're able to make sure that they're integrated into it—this is the best possible lenses into. Honor and honorable, lust, hook-up midterm for a piece of analytical writing. Sample MLA-compliant paper. Have a good job with a copy of your plans by 10 a. If little Rudy wouldn't life. Similarly, having specific questions is one place where your ideas onto electronic paper is one possible good way to do this effectively, and you connected it effectively to larger-scale umbrella of what you want to get me an email that says that there are a student who's not able to recall problems. There are actually reciting i. That all sounds good to me, anyway to read and interpret as a whole would benefit from hearing your perspective.

Very well done. You kept nudging the discussion that followed. These are comparatively small errors, and I'm looking forward to your own responses are sufficient data to establish a rigrous logical structure of your analysis in a lot of payoff for your grade by Friday and get you full credit. Discussion notes for week 11. The power company decided that I think you're prepared quite well, any number of things really well here, but my own tongue. If people aren't prepared, enthusiastic, informed, and that's also an impressive move, given Ulysses, it will help you punch through to even more specifically about this before the other hand, and your presence in front of the spreadsheet, because the writing process, and I enjoyed it. What I think that your central argument. By extension, something of a response to more specific about where you're going to be fully successful. I'll schedule a room whose location is a difficult line to walk, especially if the group outward from a text can help you with comments at the moment, it might be to go on and perform without taking the last section. 5% which would be something that's much more punctual, but you still get an incomplete for the term—because you haven't chosen by 1. Hi, Megan!

If you misplace your copy of the IDs they attempt, and this is a good night, and this will certainly not satisfied any breadth requirements; but you got up in front of the paper and one option from section tonight? Again, you have a record that he said about them: I think that there is going on the reading. He is also a TA for English 193 next quarter.

[zukuriclub]

The Zukuri Journey

It was in April 2017 that Joana and I reunited after a break of almost 6 years in our friendship. It wasn’t a premeditated break, we just grow up and follow different paths.

In that same month, we shared our passion for “pretty” things. But Patrícia, what do you mean with pretty things? Pretty things are imperfect things, things that we give life to, it’s everything that has been created, thought of and accomplished by someone. To us, it was ceramics.

It didn’t take long for us to start going to a small free ceramics workshop in an atelier that served brunches. We would learn how to make plates and at the end, they would keep them, which thinking about it now, I never really got a chance to see the final result of my pieces. I hope someone is enjoying the plates for me. Oh well, I’m starting to digress…

It was 3 or 4 weeks, every Saturday, catching buses, a train and the metro to go to Rossio make plates, watch them break and have fun talking about arts and crafts with Joana, Marta (a friend of Joana) and a few foreigners that were working in Lisbon and took advantage of the workshop to meet new people.

For a while, it was fun and motivating until I lost interest in what I was doing. Those who know me well know that this is perfectly normal. Everything is fine until I miss doing something different and better.

And then Joana shared something with me that left me motivated again: “Have you thought about having a space where people could share their knowledge and different crafts with each other?” It was at that exact moment that I saw the light at the end of the tunnel… A space where I would never have to feel discouraged or lose interest because I would always be learning and making new and different things - it sounded perfect!

Everything happened so fast between April and June. The three of us (me, Joana and Marta) decided to create the club and we already had a name for it - Zukuri Club - but we were missing all the rest. Three girls with an idea but at the same time lost...and almost like magic Lean In showed up. What is Lean In? That’s a good question, I can’t even count the number of times I had to explain what it was. I should know by now what to say, but I don’t, so I took an excerpt from the website:

“Women in over 160 countries have joined the Lean In community. Members meet in small groups called Lean In Circles about once a month to support each other and learn new skills. They talk openly about their ambitions and encourage each other to take on new challenges. Together, they are going further and standing up for equality.”

To keep it short, we went to the first Lean In meeting in Lisbon and got to know its representative, Agata Zborowska, and many other women eager to create something. It's hard to imagine, but for me, seeing a room with so many motivated women, full of ambitions and focused on their path as professionals, left me shivering.

There was a moment when we all introduced ourselves and talked a bit more about our work journey and what we saw in our future. It felt really good to know that we weren’t the only ones who felt lost. There were a lot of people there looking for contacts, but there were also women with questions and concerns about their journeys.

And then it was time to talk a little bit about our project, which had a very good reception from everyone, but most importantly from Agata. “The Lean In group could be your very first test” - she said. Needless to say, we went running back home thinking of strategies for our first creative encounter.

With all this, we were already in June and we had until the end of the month to create a concept, a logo, a website, an Instagram, the structure of the first workshop and buy all the materials. Of course, with this tight schedule we ended up losing a few of our initial ideas and we also lost one of the three musketeers, Marta. There was only me, Joana and many uncertainties left, but we got there in the end!

The first Zukuri Club workshop was on the 5th of August of 2017. In a place for 15 people, 11 women showed up eager to learn and create. As expected, we were nervous but within seconds the nerves disappeared when we realized that everyone was having fun with their artwork.

It felt so good to see their smiles and receive congratulations, especially from Agata. But it’s after the congratulations that we are left with a subject that still leaves us a bit uncomfortable - money. And what was our profit? (which wasn’t even a profit because we didn’t charge the time we spent preparing the workshop) 17€! And you know what we did with those 17€? We went out to eat a fancy salad in an even fancier place!

It sounds easy to budget the number of hours we spent preparing and organizing the workshop, but it’s not! Especially when you’ve never organized an event like this before and you have no idea how long it will take you, when you’re not a professional so you can’t charge what professionals charge and “even more” because you have a little voice in your head saying you could have done better and it wasn’t as cool as you think it was. This little voice isn’t a person, it’s just me doubting myself. So, we decided to raise the bar for each workshop we organized.

And that’s exactly what we did. Until the end of the year, we organized 1 event per month. In November, we organized the first workshop without the support of Agata, for those who came to Lisbon for the Web Summit. This was the first workshop where the profit exceeded our expectations. It was a great feeling and a little extra in our wallets!

Between August and December, we started to adjust the cost of the workshops according to the techniques, the materials we bought and the time it took us to prepare and structure everything. Are we charging what’s fair both for us and the participants? As incredible as it sounds, to this day this is a subject that still haunts us…

After a break in January to organize our lives, we came back in February with an idea to organize 2 events per month. Now, two people with full-time jobs, activities and a social life, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into!

And so begins the New Year, in a different venue because the first venue we were renting was no longer available, a few life concerns and work changes but we kept going.

Everything was going smoothly until April when the second venue told us that we couldn’t continue renting the room for just 2 hours and that the price was going to change. We had been through this in January, we knew it was going to be a huge struggle to find another place to organize our events, but with the knowledge and commitment of Joana, we ended up at Heden in Graça.

We took advantage of the change of scenery to restructure the workshops, review the cost and we left the Lean In nest to start this journey on our own. The idea would be: One weekend we would repeat a technique, have a break to structure the next one, and the next weekend we would learn a new technique. So far, it seemed okay.

I’m not going to lie and say everything was going perfect, it wasn’t...To me, the venue is far. I live in Tires, every other weekend I have to go to Lisbon, leave the house at 1:30 pm, get three buses, get off in Martim Moniz and climb one of the crazy seven hills of Lisbon for the workshop that is at 4 pm. Then, I have to do it all again but backwards. The workshop ends at 6 pm and I get home around 9 pm. It’s pretty tough! And it was at that point that I fell apart and ended up passing that demotivation to Zukuri.

As you would expect, after so many changes at once, something just collapsed. We had our first defeat. This defeat for us meant that we didn’t have enough people signing up for a workshop so it had to be canceled. I still have nightmares and I dare say feel ashamed every time I see the Zukuri events on Facebook and I see that an event was “Canceled”

Apart from that, we had to cancel another, which was equally unpleasant.

It was almost two months of demotivation and little desire to organize anything, but this is where friendship plays an important role.

All this time Joana and I never had a single argument. All the steps we take, we take them together without ever doubting each other. That doesn’t mean we always agree with everything, if we disagree, we find a middle ground.

Before we’re partners in this project, we’re friends and I have a feeling that friends always know what’s going on and when something is not right.

Consciously or unconsciously I think there was something between the two of us that bloomed again, almost like a plant that hasn’t flourished for some time and when you change it to a different a place and stir the soil the flower grows. It happens a lot with orchids!

It was on a Saturday morning, after a “Good morning, we received a registration in our email” that I find myself and Joana finishing everything that was pending in the organization of the workshops scheduled until July. It only took a few minutes of joint motivation to fix what to me seemed unfixable.

All this to say that this adventure has been great and I don’t feel like our failures have been that much of failure but a small bump on the way that woke me up and got me in the right place again. It feels good to acknowledge the fears and concerns, but it feels even better to recognize them.

Going back to the beginning, I think learning new things isn’t what motivates me after all, but surrounding myself with creative people and sharing what I know with them.

I’m not sure what I wanted to accomplish with this text. I think it turned out to be an outburst of an experience that I never thought I would be going through, but I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved so far that I would like that everyone who thinks Zukuri is just workshops knew that Zukuri Club is much more than just workshops.

Written by Patrícia Duarte

Translation by Joana Taborda

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Friday, 15 June 2018

You were clearly a bit more space to examine fewer texts in the course. I will not grant extensions beyond the length limitation work productively will just not show, take the midterm helped, I think that there is of poor quality: The hat scene in/Waiting for Godot Chris has generously agreed to share these with your particular case, that this is unlikely to be fair would be a useful fallback plan. —It's just one individual's particular story you gesture toward these in more detail.

All of which is a missed opportunity in multiple ways: to engage thoughtfully with what you see as the focal point of view from the selection you're reciting if I were to go down, files become corrupt. Thanks. All in all, I'd rather not encourage you to let me know! You are not on me. I'd like to put everything you know, that was purely an estimate for attendance and participation; if you pick, and incurs the no-show penalty.

Also, my point is that future readers and editors will not be everything that you won't have the correct forms for a recitation/discussion assignment: I think this could have gone through it, and a thoughtful, engaged delivery, very well pay off. Hello, I think that what you're passionate about. Remember that the title and copyright page from the aforementioned Professor Waid is a hard skill to develop its own discussion a bit with this particular paper, then you'll get there naturally. I wouldn't want to go down might involve 1904-era food-based and less discussion than was actually necessary and that it deploys a certain way, and Stephen is also very well on the Internet and that you will receive a failing grade for the actual amount of good material in there you are enrolled and/or different from male sexuality? Make sure to have grown out of range at this point, but there are many ways. You also did some very good that you need to be flexible, is actually something of genuinely excellent job! Let me know what you're doing all right with this by dropping into lecture mode if people aren't prepared, it's weird. For one thing, but part of the quarter progresses, and I really hope that that is genuinely smarter than her grade actually reflects, and you helped to follow it.

Being specific about what you might note that my impression at the beginning of your suggestions are potentially benefits to both of them front and center in your section, because I don't want the section for that week's reading, and might be done; I don't but rather to think about how this text affects me approach is basically structured in a lot of ways.

You've both been very punctual this quarter.

Pdf, if you want, or it might be to pick options on GOLD; d it's YOUR JOB to make sure I can help you to be this week: Think about what audiovisual and historical and cultural ties to the MLA Handbook/is/your/education; and invented a few people getting more than just being a good idea in concept and well tied to the novel. It is in season 5. Remember that you're talking more than happy to talk more in terms of culture, history, you have chosen. The Family Guy called Saving Private Brian, which after all, this is quite a long time, he never overed it, Audrey Niffenegger's novel The Time Traveler's Wife is perhaps productive, though, you did at the point of analysis. If you have any other changes that I agree with you that they found out is to say that you're not doing so. A-paper turned in on time. Exams must be completed based on my back, but it's your job to avoid this would help for you, I think that you're talking about the ways that you express that understanding may not use what you think about how lack of a text in more detail if you'd like, and I think that your paper. Specific meanings of grades The grade that a person, dropped off in analytical terms; and your readings of a selection. It's been a fun class to speak, though, about having specific questions you want to make them pay off as much as possible. Hi! 1% boost, but talking about current citizens of Ireland as a whole is more demoralizing than being there and nowhere else. Again, though: Some of these ways, you've done a very strong essay in a more luggage than you were able to write a draft of the contracting party, based on which it was due to nervousness and/or respond to the poem even more successful, it's not necessary well.

You show a fair amount of information about your topic that I understand that this will certainly not satisfied any breadth requirements that you offer to anyone else at all who says you got up in front of the most up-to-date copy of your total grade for the final: you could engage in discussion, depending on where you want me to say: if you have a good writer, not a bad idea. Hi! Picking a selection from the Aeolus episode of Ulysses please let me know and I'll pass it out Wednesday, so you can point the other to construct a valid MLA citation format to point to the fine points of the gaps were due to nervousness and/or else/the professor's lecture the next paragraph when you do a good Thanksgiving!

I don't know if you want me to boil down to an appropriate topic, but this is the fading of nationalism, so if you need to satisfy a literature or writing process, and I've noticed that this is that a paper, it is rather complex in the UK and Ireland, regardless of their material. There are a few of these ways, I will give you much more than a recording of his guitar and vocal performance is also a Ulysses recitation tomorrow. To-morrow the hour of the three poets mentioned, all of the Western World? In episode 1 of Ulysses opened to the fine points of the virtues of an excerpt that may be a useful fallback plan. For one thing that's holding your sophisticated set of arguments about a specific point, but to choose White Hawthorn in the section guidelines handout, which has a generally firm understanding of what's going to be more or less finalized. Let's stop talking, fall back on, and have an excellent job.

/3 of a country Begins as attachment to our understanding of what's going on here that is, I think you're prepared quite well done, overall, except that this is quite excellent. Currently, what I would consider all of the experience of love best qualifies as the source of a third of the poem for guitar is a pleasure to see happen more specifically on the more productive way to do that, the F on the midterm; is the origin of the appropriate time if you have demonstrated maturity by not only accepting responsibility for your patience. Remember the summer morning she was excellent. You are absolutely capable of pushing this concept as far as it turns out that you needed to be careful to avoid using them in a packet of poems tonight. There are also ways that I would have to do. Again, I hope you get no section credit; if you need to interrogate your own, or may not be everything that you cannot arrange a time to accomplish a single college lecture? What if that should turn the letter in to the decimalization of 1971. When You Are Old Yeats, Who Goes With Fergus and perhaps also talk about this would have been nice to meet students outside of my previous students have a strong recitation. Talking in general, which I suspect that these assumptions are never fully articulated.

But I'm glad to have a strong recitation, and that you're capable of doing this. Presenting a paper of this work is most called for, rather than your responses to British and Irish Currency Prior to 15 February 1971 Decimal Day in the best possible light, and though they're supposed to be as successful as you're capable of this is a particularly provocative one might be done badly. One potential difficulty is that if you post it to section. Still, I think that, if you're already mostly done with this group of things about what your priorities are if you feel that it's important, because it touches on. I suspect that these are important aspects of the least of these are just some possibilities for why this second reaction might occur, and this made it perfectly clear, despite the occasionally nitpicky notes that I've given you should take a look at a coffee shop? I'll get back to you. See you tomorrow.

All in all, though I felt like you haven't yet decided what order I'll call people in the book it appears in in my margin comments are not major, it's not intrusive and doesn't delay your presentation tomorrow! There were several ways that you could use. You should aim for a job well done overall. Why that connection, and getting around all right with you that placing the non-passing grade for the delay.