#many amazing memories were made while we were writing it and collaborating with another author was an amazing experience and fun | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

crazy-ache · 12 days ago

Text

2024 Fic Writer End of Year Roundup

Thank you @littedidyouknow for tagging me! Answer and then tag three or more creators to keep the game going!

(If you're in my answers consider yourself tagged if you'd like to play!!)

1. How many words did you publish on AO3 in 2024? 311,253

2. How many fics did you complete this year?

15 completed!

3. How many in progress or ongoing fics did you start this year?

I have 3 in progress/ongoing fics from this year! I started Divine Punishments (lol oops), have my ongoing drabble fic Choke on Desire, and am currently working on Treacherous Waters.

4. What was your favorite thing you wrote?

This is such a hard question to answer. But while it was a long time ago now, I am going to go with Separate My Body From My Soul. This was the first piece where I really felt like I found my stamina and voice as a fic writer. It feels very quintessential crazy-ache writing.

5. What piece was your most experimental or different from your usual style?

The most experimental was writing Dear Lucien, Dear Elain with @zenkindoflove. Epistolary writing isn't all that common in fanfiction, and then to write each one as a series of letters with another author (our own chapters serving as true, authentic reactions to what we read) made the writing experience feel so alive and rich. It was incredibly fun and creatively fulfilling. I cherish those memories so much!

6. Did any fics surprise you - either while writing or their reception?

I did not expect Animal Instincts to cause a little riot. I made new friends, got the funniest anons, and had people really invested with each update. The chapters flew out of me because they were a blast. Both the writing process and the reception shocked me.

7. Do you have a fic you wrote and loved that went under the radar? (This is your sign to reblog/repost it!)

I personally loved my oneshot for Lucien Week this year, The Fox Hunt. I was quite proud of the quality of my writing and take on a small historical AU. It had rakish, Fae Lucien and scandalized human Elain which is one of my favorite combos.

8. Who is an artist that inspired you?

@jadedbug @works-of-heart @bonecarversbestie @fierling @olenvasynyt Are all artists that greatly inspire me - from their kindness, to their talent, to the way they feed fandom with their amazing content!

9. Who is an author that inspired you?

@zenkindoflove inspires me daily! I couldn't have done all that I did this year without her encouragement, her accountability, her brain to pick...she's been my writing rock since we started chatting at the beginning of this year.

10. Who is a new author you discovered?

@sapphiresandgold @jsmelodies @clarafae @fortheloveofbanksy @the-darkestminds @starsreminisce @olenvasynyt You are all so talented and I've loved reading your works!

11. Did you do any collaborations? How did it start?

@zenkindoflove It all started because we talk too much and share a brain. Just as simple as a..."hey what if we...." And then we just jumped into a Google Doc. We hope to do another collab next year!

12. What accomplishments are you proudest of?

Finishing ACOWAR (Elucien's Version). It's my longest fic and first completed long fic. I basically rewrote the entire ACOWAR fic which was no easy task, but one I enjoyed immensely.

13. What did you learn about writing or creating this year?

The more you write the better you get. It seems intuitive enough, but when I first started writing fanfic again more consistently, I was frustrated how slow I felt. But the more I wrote, the faster I got. You start to get your groove and know your skills. Now cranking out 10k isn't so much an insurmountable task to do in a week. Ideas, plots, characters, world building...all of that got easier too. Practice really does make you better. So don't get frustrated if you're starting out and not seeing or feeling like you're at your best.

14. Any advice you’d like to share with new or aspiring writers?

This is a community. Fanfiction got a lot more fun to write the more friends I had to share it with - comment, share, kudo, reach out to people via DMs...it really is worth the experience.

15. What are your creative goals for 2025?

I'm going to finish up Treacherous Waters and then shift my focus to my Body Swap AU. I also want to explore some original writing in my free time.

Tagging (no pressure): @zenkindoflove @clarafae @sapphiresandgold @jsmelodies @shadowqueenjude @starsreminisce @bonecarversbestie @the-darkestminds @olenvasynyt

#writer ask game #2024 round up

18 notes · View notes

spicy-dunkaroo · 3 years ago

Text

Stuck by Your Side (Part 1)

♫Now Playing: “Stuck by Your Side (Part 1)” by Spicy Dunkaroo…♪

❀Word Count: 2.5k

❀Rating: PG 13, 18+, Minors Do Not Interact (please)

❀Genre: Mythology AU!, Kelpie! Tamaki Amajiki, a pinch of Angst, very Fluffy, Maybe Smut (Still not sure yet)

❀Summary: Due to your job, you’re forced to visit a beautiful city in Scotland in order to get some reconnaissance on the locals. While on this trip, you grab a drink with a coworker and return home where you begin to notice strange things happen.

❀Warning(s): Cursing, Mentions of Alcohol use (Characters are aged up), and Mentions of Depression

❀Author's Note: Hello everyone!! This will be my first collaboration with the BNHarem server (Of hopefully many more). I hope that if you enjoy this story that you also go ahead and check out the other talented artists/writers that participated in this server collab here. I am beyond grateful to be working with so many amazing writers and artists that have helped me and inspired me to start writing!! I would also like to ask that if there are any warnings I might have missed, please do let me know. The last thing I want to do is have anyone read my story and get triggered because I didn’t properly put the warnings here.

Without further adieu, I hope you enjoy :)

☟❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀☟

Birds singing, leaves crunching, and the wind singing in your ears was all you could hear as the tour guide went on with their one-sided conversation of tour around Inverness, Scotland. If it weren’t for your worrisome supervisor, you’d be in the cute little cottage that you rented for the next few weeks, probably playing on your switch or watching Tigtog videos for hours on end. But noooo, they mandated that everyone had to go on this hour-long tour of the city to “get a nice perspective of the city” or whatever the hell they were rambling on about.

Each person was assigned a partner for the tours so they didn’t have to worry about anyone getting abducted or ‘lost’. Knowing better, you visibly rolled your eyes as your partner looked around like a kid in a candy store. Apparently the woman was from the marketing department as well, her name seeming to leave your memory as you squinted in her direction.

“You forgot my name again, didn’t you?”

“Pfft- no- no way!”

“Yea? Then what is it?”

“Uh, erm...It- it starts with a H, I know that!!”

“It’s Hoshi, or if you’d like to continue with formalities, Ms. Tenmei.”

Hanging your head in shame you look away. Getting lost in your thoughts once more, Hoshi taps on your shoulder.

“Hey, no worries! I’m pretty bad with names myself. How’s camera duty going?”

Saying this, the woman grabs the camera from your grasp, turning it back on to see the pictures you had taken thus far. Whistling, Hoshi looks back at you, noticing the lack of enthusiasm that was painted across your face.

“I know this tour is the last thing either of us want to do, but the quicker you get all those pictures for the portfolio, the quicker we can get out of here and grab a drink. It’ll be my treat if you can get all of them before the end of the tour.”

Nodding your head, you grab the camera back from her, beginning to focus it on a nice view of the lake from the bridge the two of you were standing on. Before you can snap the shot, the tour-guide’s voice snaps you out of your thoughts as he begins to speak about a more interesting topic.

“It’s said that this lake has a kelpie spirit living within its waters. Although, that can be said about any lake that’s big enough to swim in.”

As most tourists begin to talk amongst themselves, you grip onto the expensive camera once more, hoping to find that perfect shot you had before the man’s shrilling voice had interrupted your train of thought.

“Mommy, what’s a kelpie?”

As the little boy spoke, you took the chance to snap the shot as a bird flew on the lake's surface, leaving a black blur on the perfect shot!

‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’

The tour guide you grew to despise butted into the pair’s conversation to answer the boys question.

“That’s a good question kiddo! It’s said that the origins of the Kelpie were originally told as warnings to women and children alike to be alert at all times when not around their loved ones. Despite this, you can ask any local in the area and most could tell you their story of encountering the supposed myth. I suppose we’ll never know till we see one for ourselves. Though, if you’re unlucky enough to encounter such a myth, there’s the chance that you won’t live to tell the tale...”

The boy trembled as he gripped his mother’s dress tighter in his clutch. Your partner begins to scoot closer to you as she whispers into your ear.

“Psst! Hey, what do you think about those ‘kelpie’ hm?”

“It sounds like some sort of folk-lore they tell all the tourists here.”

“Oh c’mon now, you’re no fun! I’d like to think they might not be as brutal as this guy says.”

Scoffing, you shake your partner’s hand from your shoulder as you look into the camera’s lens once more to take another picture.

‘I’m sure it’s all bullshit. There’s no such thing as a shape-shifting kel-‘

Thinking this, you suddenly feel your body begin to fall forward as the bridge railing suddenly let out from beneath you. Before you realize it, you open your eyes to see the water's surface only a mere foot or two from your own face, the camera hanging by your neck and grazing the lake, your body beginning to be pulled back to its upright position.

Turning around to thank whoever it was that just saved you from having to pay for the company camera, you look to see nobody behind you. Nobody seemed to even be around you as you see Hoshi following behind the group of tourists, leaving you in the dust. You begin to chase after the group as you shake off the entire encounter.

Shuffling your bag off of your shoulder you threw it into the nearby chair, slumping into the couch that was adjacent to the chair. You began to hum to yourself as you felt the effects of the beer contest you had with Hoshi who you now knew was your supervisor. Thinking to yourself you remember losing that contest the two of you set up.

‘It was nice of her to pay for us and to bring me back home even though I lost. I should thank her tomorrow and try to pay her back if I can.’

Suddenly feeling the effects of the liquid courage, you stood up a bit too quickly, reaching your hand out to the couch you were just laying on. Not sure what to do, you reached for your phone to scroll through Tigtog, that was until you began to hear something strange. From what you could tell, it sounded like a voice, though you weren’t sure if it was male or female. Curiosity began to take the lead as you stood upright once more. Looking around, you began to walk around the cottage, seeing if there was anything on that could be making that noise. Eventually you found yourself outside in what looked to be the backyard of your little cottage, swaying side to side as you tried to listen for the voice once more.

“Y/N? Are- are you there?”

Under normal circumstances, after hearing an unknown males voice you’d already be locking the backdoor behind you after racing to that door. Tonight, however, was not the case as you yelled back the best you could of a response.

“yYeaa! Wwwhooo- whoo arre yOU?”

After saying this, you suddenly began to burp, probably due to the alcohol. Despite everything you had experienced thus far, for some reason your fit of burps could not be funner to you at that very moment as the voice spoke once more.

“T-That’s not important r-right now. I just wanted to make sure you made it back home safe.”

The liquid courage that coursed through your veins decided that you wanted to find out more about this stranger and began to walk into the forest. You began to sway as you attempted to find them, calling out to them in hopes of convincing them to stay and hang out.

“OoooOh c’mON now!! Don’t be liiiike that! Wh-wherrrreeee are ya? Le-le-let’s hanggg ouT for a bit! I-I *hic* think there’s cards in the liv-livingg roooom~! We- we can play a gggame of poKER and- and see what’s in the fridge. Man, now I’m hungryyy!”

Despite your lack of sobriety at the moment, you began to hear a few leaves crunch nearby. It appeared that for some reason or another, what you lacked in logic you seemed to gain in your basic senses. This theory proved true as you sniffed the air, you noticed that there was a lake nearby.

‘Since when the hell did I know what a river smelled like?’

Before you can continue on with your train of thought, the stranger responds once more. They seemed a bit panicked as you heard a twig snap, followed by more leaves crunching beneath their feet you suspected.

“D-D-Don’t come any closer! Y-You should go back h-home, you’re not t-thinking rationally.”

Not wanting to take no for an answer, you continue to walk to the source of the sound, hearing what sounded like a cascading river growing louder. Looking through the trees, you noticed a few yards away the river you had just heard. You speak up once more as you begin to walk toward the river.

“I-I don’t want to be alone r-right now… It-it’s stupid I know, I just...I’d just like to talk, just for a little bit. Would that be okay?”

Your vision began to blur as you rushed to the river's edge. It didn’t matter now if the stranger responded or not, your world began to crash down around you as you looked at the reflection on the water's edge. Sitting on your knees, small whimpers escaped your lips out as you covered your face with your hands. Despite the literal lack of sight, your emotions consumed you as it felt that everything around you was losing the light that once shone in your hopeful eyes.

At this point, you couldn’t hear any signs of life as you gripped harder at your face, only the sound of your quiet cries for help being all that echoed through that hollow forest. Assuming the worst, you began to move your hands from your face, dropping them by your side once more as you looked at your reflection once again.

“Y-You said you wanted to talk? T-That’d be fine, just- just promise you won’t cry anymore?”

There's a beat of silence, it seemed that not even the wind could speak as your body froze. Sure, you could convince yourself that you were just hearing things, that you were just acting aloof because you were feeling lonely. If you could get yourself on the couch, you could wake up and even tell yourself that the whole experience was just a really surreal dream you had. What you couldn’t convince yourself was the half naked man that appeared to be standing a few feet behind you, his voice matching his lips as you watched them move.

‘Maybe- maybe I’m just seeing things? That-that has to be right, right?! But alcohol doesn’t cause hallucinations and I’m positive that none of my drinks were spiked. So- so...Who the hell is this!?!’

“Are- are you okay Y/N?”

Your body grew stiff as you heard your name roll off of his tongue. If you weren’t getting clearheaded before, you definitely were cold sober now. Those shy indigo eyes that seemed to stare back at your own off of the river's surface as they brought you back to your senses.

‘There is a strange, half-naked man, who somehow knows you by your name, staring at you- talking to you! He doesn’t seem very intimidating, but then again he is a stranger!! In the best case scenario, he could just be a nice guy who found someone in need. Worst case, he’s a psycho that found their next victim! I can’t keep my back turned like this, I have to do something and get the hell out of this!’

Taking a shallow breath in, you swiftly turn your entire body around, facing the stranger that now made your body shiver in fear as you looked up at him. Despite the appearance of the situation, the man seemed to be intimidated by you as he looked away.

‘He doesn’t really seem like he wants to hurt me. If anything, he’s scared of me? Maybe I can intimidate him to leave me alone? Though, I don’t think I could pull it off seeing as I’m still a bit drunk…’

“Y-Y/N?”

Looking back at the man, you notice he begins to reach his hand out toward you, slowly beginning to walk toward your crouched form. Worried for the worst, you scoot away as you respond.

“H-HEY!! D-Don’t come any c-closer! If-If you don’t I-I’ll- ACK!”

Speaking this, you only now notice that there didn’t seem to be any more ground beneath you as you felt your body begin to fall into the river.

“Y/N!”

Before you can process everything that’s happening, you close your eyes in anticipation for the cold water that was bound to drown you. The stranger grabs your wrist, holding your body up above the river, your body mere inches from being submerged in the cold water. Noticing the lack of impact, you flutter your eyes open as you look back at the man before you. Shocked, the man looks down at where he grabbed your wrists. Only now do you notice a purple hue that surrounded both your arms.

“What- what is this?!”

At a loss for words, the man can only look back between your face and where he held your wrist. Confused and scared, you rip your arm from his grip as you stand yourself back up. As you stare at the man, you look around, befuddled by whatever the hell had just happened.

While a part of you would love to ask what just happened, the more logical side of you knew that none of this was worth hanging around to find out. Dusting yourself off, the man speaks up once more as he looks away in what seemed to be guilt.

“Y-Y/N, I-I’m so so-sorry!! I-I didn’t mean to t-touch you- What have I done?!”

Not wanting to wait any longer, you began to shuffle around the man, holding your hands up in surrender as you attempted to empathize with the man. Although, you weren’t sure why he was so worried since he didn’t seem to do anything besides whatever that purple glow was moments before.

“Hey, hey! We don’t have to speak about any of this. I’ll go back and after that we won’t have to ever see each other ever again, okay?”

“Y/N, i-it’s not that simpl- h-Hey, WAIT!!”

Before he had a chance to explain, you sprinted back to your cute rental cottage that you were now wishing you never left. Looking back, you notice the man just stood there as you were almost home.

Suddenly, your body stopped moving. What was even stranger, your body seemed to freeze mid-sprint. Looking around, you noticed that somehow your head was able to move but your arms were stiff as you attempted to force your body to run once more. Just as you were about to give up, your legs moved once more, wobbling as they felt gravity work once more. Not taking any chances, you began to dash once more. Not a second later, your body rolled forward from some sort of large and heavy impact. After your body finished rolling forward, you noticed that you were sitting in the backyard of the cottage, the man sitting on his head as his body laid against the door.

“W-Who or-or What are you?”

The man sighs as he flutters his eyes open, rubbing his head as he looks up at you.

“M-My name’s T-Tamaki Amajiki, and- and I’m a kelpie…”

~End of Part 1~

63 notes · View notes

lilydalexf · 4 years ago

Photo

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with aka "Jake"

aka "Jake" has 83 stories at Gossamer, but don't miss her website for fics because a number of them come with cover images and/or illustrations you can't see at Gossamer. She's written some of the most epic and well-known stories in the fandom, including Abaddon's Reign and The Mastodon Diaries. Big thanks to aka "Jake" for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

It does surprise me! It just goes to show the series has amazing staying power and there are many excellent writers in the fandom who were able to capture the essence of Mulder and Scully and expand on XF canon every bit as successfully as the writers of the TV show. Some even more so.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

Like any online community, there were upsides and downsides. But what impressed me most were the lasting friendships that spilled into real life. Overall, the folks I encountered in the fandom were kind, helpful, talented, and inspiring. I’m still in contact with many of them and even meet up regularly with a couple of people who I consider my closest friends now, though we live far apart. Readers could be especially encouraging, poking authors with virtual sticks to get them to write more and faster. An amazing group called the Mastoholics formed to spur me on while I was posting The Mastodon Diaries as a work in progress. Several of them traveled to my house for a mini-con after the story was finished. Other folks called betas provided invaluable editing advice to authors. I was lucky to have several very good ones, but especially appreciated mimic117 and xdksfan. They went beyond proofreading; they pointed out confusing passages, missing plot points, and anything that seemed OOC (out of character). This polishing was a vital step before posting. To think they did it for nothing but the love of fanfic. It was a considerable time commitment.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

There were several key sites for posting and discussing fic when I started writing in 1997. These included Ephemeral, Gossamer, and Haven. Several sites issued writing challenges, like Haven, The Project, and The Church of X. Others gave out awards, like P1013 [Lilydale note: short for Prometheus1013] and the Spookys. I Made This! Productions invited authors, including me, to write episodes for virtual seasons of the show. I recall joining a couple of listservs early on, too.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

Overall, it was an uplifting experience. My writing improved tremendously thanks to honest feedback and several key collaborations, particularly with co-authors Brandon D. Ray and the Secret Squirrels. I’d never written anything longer than an office memo when I started my first fic. I had nowhere to go but up. These gifted and generous authors helped me grow as a writer. Collaborating with them made the experience of writing even more creative, exciting, and special.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

The first episode I watched was The Field Where I Died. It hooked me immediately. Back then, there was no way to go back and watch the earlier episodes. It wasn’t until several years later I was finally able to watch the first 3 seasons on DVDs.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I stumbled upon Ephemeral where I read a fic called Acadia by RivkaT, which was set in Acadia National Park in Maine. If I recall correctly, it was a casefile with an emphasis on Mulder and Scully’s relationship. It felt like an episode of the show. I was thrilled to find a seemingly endless supply of XF stories that allowed me to extend my enjoyment of the TV series. It wasn’t long before I considered writing a story myself, a case file, although as mentioned above, I had no previous writing experience, just the desire to write down and share my ideas about Mulder and Scully.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I haven’t been active in the fandom for quite some time. I have no idea where writers post or readers go to find fic. That said, to keep my mind off the pandemic and other disheartening news this year, I began writing a new fic, which I plan to add to my site in September.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

No, I never joined any other fandoms.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

Sadly, no fictional characters have captured my heart and attention the way Mulder and Scully did.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

Yes, I do still watch XF. Before Seasons 10-11 aired, I rewatched the entire series and both movies. I enjoy the stories as much now as I did back in the day.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

No, not for ages. I’ve never read any stories from other fandoms.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

There are so many great authors and I’m hesitant to name them for fear of leaving someone out and hurting their feelings. Like a lot of fic writers, I was inspired by Prufrock’s Love beautiful way with words. Mountainphile wrote taut, realistic case files that I admired. David Hearne took on unique perspectives. To name just three.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I think my best writing may be in my long, post-col story Abaddon’s Reign. The story I most enjoyed writing was The Case of the Exuberant G-Man. It was a fun story that seemed to write itself.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

As mentioned above, I’m finishing up a new fic now and plan to post it on my site on or near the anniversary of the airdate of Season 1’s episode Squeeze. My story takes place in 2023, 30 years after Eugene Tooms was mangled to death in an elevator. I wanted to explore the idea of Tooms returning. How would that be possible? And what would Mulder’s and Scully’s lives be like five years after losing their son at the hands of CGB Spender and learning Scully was pregnant once again? I honestly thought I’d never write another fic but here we are.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

Often from the unanswered questions left by the show, the off-screen scenes we didn’t get to see.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

The majority, no. Years ago, I told my sister I was writing XF fanfic and she looked at me like I’d grown two heads. We didn’t speak of it again. More recently, my sister-in-law discovered my work. She’s a big XF fan and still reads fanfic, so her reaction was very accepting. Back in the early days, fanfic wasn’t considered serious writing and had a pretty bad reputation, which honestly didn’t jibe with the truly fine quality of some of the writing in the fandom. Sure, it wasn’t all good but there were some real gems.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

All of my stories are on my site at akajake.net.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Just that I’m pleased there are folks like you who are helping to continue the tradition and fun! Thank you for interviewing me and giving me the opportunity to stroll down memory lane.

(Posted by Lilydale on September 1, 2020)

#new post #old school x #newsflash: new aka jake story coming soon #xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #xf fanfic author interviews #aka jake

91 notes · View notes

nutty1005 · 4 years ago

Text

(Excerpt) Exclusive Interview – The Story Behind “Cao Yu’s Special 110 Year Old Commemoration Event”

Original Article: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/TVxr2OkA_NRlCsvsEzRsVQ This article is published by Blogger World 博客天下 Weixin on 31 Aug 2020. I only extracted the portions that spoke about Xiao Zhan and how they made contact.

01 Youth

Tens of thousands of fans flood into the live broadcast, not only to see their idol, who had not been seen for a while, but also to enjoy a feast of plays strung together by Cao Yu and Wan Fang. Exclamations such as “I didn’t know plays were this amazing” and “I want to watch at least once in the theaters” were seen in the scrolling comments.

This was the first time the theater attempted live broadcast. Wang Keran was not sure whether this attempt could aptly showcase the difference between plays and television dramas – how it is done “live” and how it can interact with the audience, “but what I know is, in this day and age, most audience choose to watch online, hence I will use this method to showcase the charm of theaters.”

Wang Keran’s thought was – how do we commemorate Cao Yu? “Can it be considered a commemoration by simply acting his works on stage?” He felt that something was simply missing.

He wanted a youth, to raise questions on Cao Yu’s works – and via these questions, highlight the vitality that links up the stories and the lives of our youth.

Wang Keran feels that, as classics, there should be a certain core vitality to it that crosses time, and touches the hearts of people regardless of the era. If they did not create the chance for the youth to understand the classics, it might instead create estrangements and misunderstandings.

The Chinese Central Drama Group used “Cao Yu’s Special 110 Year Commemoration Event” as the starting point to begin the conversation, in hopes of resonating with the audience.

Wang Keran said “The core of the conversation is, can Cao Yu’s works still stir up people’s emotions?”

The commemorative segment on Wan Fang and Xiao Zhan’s “Conversation of Two Eras” was birthed under such a thought.

As the daughter of renowned author Cao Yu, as well as a famous playwright in her own right, Wan Fang has an open attitude. She felt that this should be a question to be left to actors “On one hand, classics that has the hallmark of its era, but on the other hand, its influence also goes beyond its era. How do you portray that? How do you face new audiences?”

The emphasis on “current”, is a special feature of the Chinese Central Drama Group.

According to statistics for the audiences of Chinese Central Drama Group, 60% are aged 18 to 40, 70% are below 45, 90% are below 55. This is related to Wang Keran’s view on theater, to him, the audiences are able to project their mental rhythm onto the stories portrayed in theaters, “Plays are always reflecting the spiritual unrest of the people now, under the current circumstances.”

For many late nights, Wang Keran spent him time with pop culture. He saw all kinds of popular works, fantasy literature, and also books recommended by the interns in the theater. He is 50 this year, and hence it was difficult for him to be interested in some of the works, but he still persisted, “I feel that as someone who is in performing arts, if I can’t communicate with teeagers, that I’ll be really old. My age is like this, but my expressions cannot cause the youth to feel that there is a gap between us.”

Before this live broadcast attempt, he already started using TV celebrities on stage. Starting from “Watching TV with You” (TN: A play), he has invited stars from all age groups to leave their mark on the Chinese Central Drama Group.

This was not a mere commercial consideration. Wang Keran felt, plays are an art of “actor”. In the history of Chinese Opera and theater history, it is common to be headlined by the actor, and fans attending for the sake of the actor is almost traditional.

“Which of the Chinese plays were not acted by the biggest star of that era? If the star is suitable, we would invite him/her. I need the star, I just need him/her to stand there, so that more people would believe and understand the charm of the theater.”

In stirring up the interests of young audiences, he always had this optimistic faith – “Many youth, while exploring why that pudding is delicious, is also exploring why pain and suffering descends upon them, why happiness is like a bright light, momentary but yet gives so much deeply enjoyable emotions to themselves.”

When Cao Yu wrote “Thunder Rain”, he was also a youth. When “Thunder Rain” premiered in China on 1935, it was organized by Gusong Drama Group from Tianjin City Normal School, and the 25 year old Cao Yu went to direct the rehearsals. All the actors were students, the set came from the school shed, they rehearsed during the summer break and acted in the school hall.

No matter it was via a popular celebrity, or via live broadcast, Wang Keran wanted to share and introduce theater to more youths.

02 Questions

Before this, Wang Keran never heard of Xiao Zhan. There was once a friend who brought up that this young man might be interested in plays, but he did not think much of it.

However, after a string of events, he felt that this young man is quite interesting, “The most mysterious thing about a person’s life is how impermanent it is, and this is also where the soul of theater lies.”

“This person Xiao Zhan, is a question, isn’t it?”

When organizing “Cao Yu’s Special 110 Year Commemoration Event”, he asked his friend to bring Xiao Zhan a message, with a mission – raise some questions to Wan Fang’s “Journey of Winter” and “You and I”.

“I’m just seeing if we’re fated, if he could ask the questions.” Wang Keran hoped that the questions could highlight the deep thought and analysis of the current youth.

A few days later, Xiao Zhan replied a long list of 20 to 30 questions, to his amazement, and hence sealed the collaboration. After the broadcast, many speculations left Wang Keran laughing at how ridiculous they were.

“Some came to my Weibo to attack me, said that the questions were prepared by us for him. Excuse me, I’m 50 already, I really can’t ask questions like a 20 year old.”

“Aren’t you worried that Xiao Zhan would bring about some negative doubts?”

When “Blogger World” raised the same question, Wang Keran said “Let them question. Wan Fang and I, both of us just have one statement, if we are always moving forward with ‘truth’, then we will do what we should do.”

In this special event, the conversation between Wan Fang and Xiao Zhan, they started with writing and they quietly touched on life experiences, Wan Fang brought up “sincerity”, “choice”, “confusion”, which were exactly the things that Xiao Zhan was facing, and it showcased the strength of two eras resonating with each other. This was exactly the effect Wang Keran was looking for.

He used Xiao Zhan, but rejected using this as a major publicity point, because “we do not want so much traffic, we want strength.”

Wan Fang explained the meaning of “pain” for an actor to Xiao Zhan – “All that you have experienced, including pain, I feel that there will be a chance to portray its positive side. When you are portraying a certain character, you will be able to have a deeper understanding.”

She also used the same feeling to describe the creativity rush that “pain” bestowed upon her – “If your life is especially happy, especially joyful, then you might not have thought of creating anything, because you just need to enjoy what you have, no one would ask – why am I so happy? Only when you are in adversity, then you would have many questions, what is this for? What should I do? This is the source of creativity.”

This type of questioning can be seen throughout Wan Fang’s “You and I”, as she remembers her parents. She once said to her younger sister, the main pursuit of writing this book was truth. Her sister rebutted, “What you know isn’t really the truth, only fragments.”

Although Wan Fang agreed with this opinion, she also felt, “I must find it between these fragments. Truth exists from seeking it, isn’t the act of seeking a form of truth?”

She admitted that she is a “limited” “truthful” author. In this book, she never conclusively tells you how the experiences of Cao Yu was like. She even inserted blurred memories from different people. Readers would not be able to see the truth directly, but they could feel the realism of the memories.

Wan Fang split her creative works into two parts – one belonging to TV dramas, “There will be stray thoughts, the audience would be considered, the ratings would be considered”; and another belonging to literature and theater. There she wrote from her heart, realistically using her emotions then and her questions then. She always believed that “things with stray thoughts, won’t be really good things.”

How do you move the audience with works written so personally by the author?

“I cannot represent everything, but I can represent many. As long as you have an understanding of the truth behind human nature, you can try your best to understand, to explore, the expression of truth can represent many people.”

Wang Keran rejected using “lead” to describe the meaning of theater in culture – because leading is a form of education, but theater is not. It never wanted to conclude anything, it only wanted to be the path to truth, to soothe the bewilderment of humans, to express the depth of souls.

Just like that day, Wan Fang answered Xiao Zhan, “What is the core of a piece of work? It is questions. The process of creating a piece of work is a process of questioning, just a journey of nearing the answer, of finding the answer.”

And in questions, there are infinitely vast and rich nutrients, enriching the souls of humans.

#xiao zhan #sean xiao #xiaozhan #肖战

35 notes · View notes

bookofwillplay · 6 years ago

Text

Amazing Dramaturgy for THE BOOK OF WILL (Part 1)

INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF WILL

Theatrical Outfit, Atlanta, 21 July, 2018

Michael Evenden, Production Dramaturg

Personal introduction.

I wanted to start by acknowledging the long relationships I have with many artists in this room, because I think one of the sources, the primary energies of this play, is gratitude—active gratitude. These characters are fighting to express that kind of gratitude, and to pit that active gratitude and honoring of what’s irreplaceable, against loss, refusing to let loss have the final word. It’s a noble quest.

What are these characters trying to preserve?

At an obvious level, they’re fighting to protect Shakespeare’s plays. But what does that mean? What are Shakespeare’s plays—to them? And honestly, I think that, for every character in the play, the idea of what Shakespeare’s plays are might have a slightly different meaning, because of different exposure to them, because . . . nobody read them. Practically speaking, nobody in this play is likely to have read a Shakespeare play. Possible exceptions? Jaggard, and possibly his son--because they are the only ones of these characters who printed them. But that’s a different relationship to the text than reading it for pleasure or comprehension. Ralph Crane, because he made copies—same thing. Possibly Emilia Bassano because she’s been away from the stage and may have read something in quarto nostalgically. Maybe.

For those most involved in the theater, the play wasn’t experienced as a coherent written text at any point; and the text of the play, if they ever even thought about it, was a prodigiously unstable, slippery thing. And I want you to understand all the ways that was true.

Shakespeare never made any effort to publish his plays. His poetry, yes—for the long narrative poems and the sonnets, he oversaw publication with great care. No effort to publish a play. We don’t even have any hard evidence that he actually kept a copy of them. Why? We don’t know—but we need to clear out a number of our own preconceptions to get something of an idea:

First, the profession of playwright itself was not exactly a thing in early modern England: it was mostly a sideline that educated men would do to earn a buck while trying to rise in society; most playwrights gave it up, many later actively renounced the theater. Although there are exceptions, by and large people didn’t think of a playwriting career. Even Shakespeare, who wrote plays longer and more centrally in his career than almost anybody, was a co-owner of his company, so in part a manager, plus a published poet, and a landlord. A lot of these men, like Henry Condell, diversified to make a living (actor, theater manager, merchant). So the idea of separate, defining calling as a playwright or a theater artist of any kind—no. They did without that idea.

And, second, plays themselves were not regarded as particularly publishable literary work. England was late to arrive at that idea: there were plenty of published plays in Italy and Spain, but in England it was like writing a disposable paperback romance or an early television script or a video game: nowadays fans might follow a particular writer in these fields (as they get more arty), but most of the time we let the author’s name slip past unnoticed and we would never read those things in book form: so, truly, nobody thought of publishing a playscript any more than we would proudly publish the text of a comic book without the illustrations. A published play from the popular theater— published in some official way—didn’t seem to make sense. It wasn’t a thing they imagined.

Third, a related point: Very often plays were casually co-written, as modern scholarship suggests several of Shakespeare’s plays may have been. And, as Bart van Es points out in his new book Shakespeare and Company, Shakespeare, who had the unique distinction of writing over a rather long career with a single company of players, not only had occasional co-writers, but he also seemed to write his plays in collaboration with his actors—not necessarily verbal collaboration, but incorporating what he knew of them and their talents, so that spiritually the plays were not just his but were co-created.

So Shakespeare had his poems that he edited and published and put his name on and cared for in a particular way. The plays were something different, and, honestly, his refusal to publish them may be in a way a tribute to their nature as performance texts made in the maelstrom of a decades-long collaboration—he did not think of extracting the text from those performances. And if Shakespeare didn’t think to extract the play from the performance, why would anyone else?

The Raw Materials of the Folio.

So if those plays weren’t the way we think of them, as texts to be read and possibly performed, but rather performances maybe never to be read, then what was their afterlife—what forms did the texts of the plays actually survive in?

We can say a play, unpublished, might survive in ten imperfect forms:

· The playwright’s initial, handwritten rough version, what were called the foul papers.

· The fair copy—a final draft in good handwriting prepared by the playwright or a professional scribe—the initial final draft.

· The fair copy was sent to be recorded in the Stationer’s Register, which listed all manner of texts made public, and technically controlled who had the rights to each, and from there to the Master of Revels for censorship; this fair copy, possibly with emendations for censorship, might then return to the company to be annotated and edited as the prompt script. This is the text the prompter offstage would prompt the actors with if they got lost in performance—the prompter or company scribe adding in notes of entrances exits business, etc. Is that the authentic item? The real play? Or do you want the fair copy, the version before the censor got to it, or before the play was cut and revised in rehearsal for god knows what reason—lack of actors? adjustment to a different performance space or a different audience?—cutting politically sensitive scenes before the play tours to court? In any case, which is more authentic (the play before rehearsal or as performed?)—and authentic to what?

· There were other reasons a prompt script would change in use: particularly if a play was revived, it was common practice for it to be rewritten by a new author for the new staging: when Shakespeare’s company revived Marston’s The Malcontent, they wrote in a whole new character for their new clown, Robert Armin, very much consistent with Armin’s comic persona—he was the fool in Lear, for example—but he wasn’t in Marston’s original text. Yet he was there in the second version that was performed—so which version do we care about? The revision prompt script is another version of the play—which reflects performances and therefore has that level of authenticity. An interesting example for us is King Lear, which Shakespeare seems have completely rewritten himself—the Oxford edition publishes two separate versions of King Lear. Which, then, do you authorize?

· But we're getting ahead of ourselves: Once the fair copy came back from the Master of Revels, the company scribe would divide the prompt script, or, later, the revision prompt script, into sides or parts. Each actor would get his lines and his cue lines and that was it. Again: none of them read the play.So the actors’ sides.

· They would post an outline of the scenes in order backstage to help people figure out where they were in the play they only read in parts—this was theplatte. (This doesn’t sound like a textual source of a play, but if we found a platte for Hamletand found out they didn’t include this scene or that in the performance, that would be informative to preserving the text—yes? So it’s another kind of document.)

· There was probably a one-time sit-down reading of the playat the start of rehearsal,but the actors never saw the whole script---they heard it. This was a listening culture—lots of keen aural memory.

· And at last we get to consider: the performance. Most of these characters, when they refer to a play, mean a memory of performing or watching a performance,with no ghost of a whole script backing it up in their minds. It’s the performance that’s in their minds, its sounds, words, bodies moving, doors opening, swords pulled, a comic dog, a jig at the end, audiences gasping, props hitting the floor—all entirely separate from any comprehensive written text. (So think of a play you were in. What are your strongest memories of it? Are they looking on a page and reading the words? Could you sit down and write out the play? Why would you want to? That’s not what you primarily experienced.) So we have to give credence to the idea that when they say Shakespeare’s plays—they mean words, not written, but flying between actors and striking the ear. Nothing more permanent than that.

And how precisely authentic were those words when performed? We know that these performers kept a number of plays in their head at a time, rarely performing the same play two afternoons in a row. The fact is, the performances must, really must, have diverged from the text. At least some. So once again, which is the text that is meaningful? The one printed or the words in the air, performed that are much stronger in the memory?

· Then, once the play was performed there might be quartos. These were, especially in Shakespeare’s case, pirated texts. Illegitimate. And thank God for them. People who could read—and the English had what was for the time a high literacy rate—liked reading plays, and some minor printers were willing to be careless of the author’s rights and to cobble something together. How? Decide on a play that people seem to be liking. Bribe the prompter for a look at the prompt script. Bribe an actor for his sides. Send a scribe into the performance to have him write down the play as if taking dictation, so he misses a few words, who’s to object? Print them cheaply, and send them out. They were culturally ignored—called “riffe-raffe books,” part of a printing trade that struggled with monopolies, that grabbed at any quick source of a little money. A tossed-off thing.

So you get these quartos, cheap printings, cheap paper, doublefolded and stitched together, of varying quality—traditionally, we call them bad quartos or good quartos. (What’s the standard? Whether they are like the Folio.)

But what if the quarto has an important truth to tell us, reflecting the play in performance? There’s a scene in Romeo and Julietthat cannot be staged on an Elizabethan stage as written (in the Folio)—Juliet has to get from the balcony down to the stage floor and she has no time to do it. In the “bad” quarto, however, there’s a one extra speech for the Nurse during which Juliet can cross downstairs—it solves the problem. If the Folio reflects, let’s say, how the scene was originally planned, and the quarto reflects how it was performed when tried out in the theater—which is the real scene? We think of “Shakespeare” as something written, but in his day? Maybe not. So we actually might need to add these despised quartos to our list as legitimately reflecting Shakespeare—whatever “Shakespeare” means.

· And there were larger pirated publications, as Jaggard did with a handful of Shakespeare’s plays without his permission—Shakespeare was apparently quite angry.

That’s ten forms of evidence: foul papers, fair copy, prompt book, revision prompt book, in-house reading, sides, plot, performance, quartos, larger pirated publication. Incomplete and contradictory records every one of them. And that’s the best anybody ever had.

#thebookofwill #BookOfWill

2 notes · View notes

skittelsen · 8 years ago

Text

My Secret Origin as a Super-Fan

*This post is my personal story. It does not represent the opinions or views of NetherRealm Studios, WB Games, or DC Entertainment.

What a week!

My first game as Narrative Lead, INJUSTICE 2, launched worldwide, and the response from fans and critics has been overwhelmingly positive—as in I feel overwhelmed by all the positivity. This week also marked the tenth anniversary of my NYU graduation. Finally, there’s the MOST important milestone of all, my son’s third birthday. For me, all these events are connected.

Of all the reactions to Injustice 2 out there, I love most when someone remarks that the people who made this game must really love DC Comics lore. Trust me, they do. Everyone on the I2 team has a favorite DC character, from the iconic to the obscure. My favorite is Superman.

It might come as a surprise that the Narrative Lead on a game in which Superman is portrayed as a lethal tyrant would profess to be a Superman fan, but I am.

Here’s why. When I was about 4 years old, my parents told me that I was and would always be their son, but that I didn’t come out of Mommy’s tummy like my sister. I was adopted. My birth parents, whoever they were, couldn’t raise me, so they sent me away to find a family who could provide a better life for me.

This kind of news can really mess with a kid’s head. I was an indoorsy, deep-thinky emo boy, and I would dramatically stare into the bathroom mirror and wonder whose eyes were looking back at me. Fortunately, my Mom and Dad were a real life Ma and Pa Kent, equipped with big hearts to manage my drama. They loved my sister and I as much as any kids could be loved, and they never treated me any differently on account of my secret heritage.

Superman: The Movie was on TV a lot in the 1980s. I don’t remember when, but at some point not long after my parents told me I was adopted, I made the connection that Superman was adopted. Superman was just like me!

From then on, my personal identity as an adopted kid was still fraught with complications and insecurities, but it wasn’t always a source of trauma. In my mind, I had a secret origin, a source of strength. And how cool would it be if I found a spaceship buried in the basement?

My parents reinforced this imaginative coping mechanism by indulging my every superhero fantasy. They took me to every comics and collectibles shop in upstate New York looking for special issues and rare action figures. Mom sewed more than one Superman cape (and a few Batman capes, too), and she and I binge-watched George Reeves in Adventures of Superman. For my 18th birthday, my Dad bought me the S-shield tattoo that’s still on my shoulder. A year later, he got the same S-shield tattoo on the same shoulder as me. He sat in the inker’s chair wincing from the needle, quoting Marlon Brando as Jor-El, “The son becomes the father, and the father becomes the son!”

Without my parents’ support, I may never have gone to Metropolis for college at NYU. They were so proud at my graduation, but I wasn’t proud yet. I wanted to be a writer, but instead, I found myself working as the Corporate Files Administrator at the HBO Legal Department and taking an LSAT prep course by night. I was lost.

Then, two things happened that set me back on course. First, I was hired by an indie producer to write a screenplay, enabling me to quit my job at HBO. Second, at my wife’s urging, I sent a fan letter to one of my favorite writers, author and educator Douglas Rushkoff, asking if he needed any help.

They say don’t meet your heroes, but in Rushkoff, I found a mentor and a lifelong friend. Working as his editorial assistant was a dream come true. I learned more in one year working Rushkoff than I had in four years studying at NYU.

Then my screenplay deal fell apart, the global economy tanked, and like a lot of recent college graduates, I faced the real possibility of going broke and moving back in with my parents. Rushkoff couldn’t pay me a full time salary, but he offered to help me get an inside track at DC.

Applying for a job at DC Comics without a personal recommendation is like throwing rocks at the moon. For years, from sophomore year of college on, I had applied for every DC internship and entry-level position available. Never got a response. Rushkoff recommended me and I got a call from WB HR within a few hours. It certainly helped that I now had a few more bullets on the CV. It also may have helped that the person Rushkoff recommended me to was Paul Levitz, then President and Publisher of DC Comics.

An extensive interview process later, I was hired as Assistant Editor - Interactive at DC Comics. My family was with me when I got the phone call. We all went out for dinner and celebrated, and I got so drunk, I ate a bowl of unpeeled shrimp with the shells intact. That hurt in the morning, but it’s still one of my favorite memories.

Little did we know how much that job would change things. Less than a year after I started at DC, Paul Levitz stepped down and Diane Nelson arrived as President. DC Comics became DC Entertainment, and the office was split between New York and California.

It was a great deal of change in a relatively short period of time for a company invested with decades of tradition. That made for a controversial and upsetting time for many of the employees who had been at DC for years. I had the benefit of being the newbie, and my wife grew up in California, so were were excited to relocate to Los Angeles, even though it meant leaving our beloved city and so many wonderful friends behind. I accepted my offer to join the new team in Burbank, and off we went.

Working at DC was a dream job. I considered my colleagues like family members, and I got to work with more talented creators than I can list here. One of my favorite collaborators, though, was NetherRealm Studios.

Working with NRS on Injustice: Gods Among Us felt like a big deal. Mortal Kombat was a formative games franchise for me growing up, and the team was just coming off an amazing 2011 reboot of the MK franchise with an incredibly ambitious cinematic Story Mode.

Plus, this would be the AAA game in which my favorite hero, Superman, could finally take center stage. He would be the villain of the story, but a villain motivated by good intentions in response to a horrific tragedy.

The results were nothing short of awesome. From that first game through five years of comics and a blockbuster mobile adaptation, the Injustice universe took off like a bullet train.

I left DC before Injustice launched. It was a dream job, to be sure, but I still had that other dream of being a writer, and for HR reasons, that wasn’t possible while I was a DC employee. So when a Burbank creative agency offered me a leadership role, a better salary, and the freedom to write for anyone I wanted, I knew it was time to go.

Leaving DC felt like a big risk. It doesn’t get bigger than Superman. What would I find in the great beyond? But after getting comfortable in my position at DC, disrupting my routine and transitioning to games marketing was a challenge I needed. My partners and I built a crack team of creatives and account managers. That team pitched and executed campaigns for clients all over the world, and went on to win award after award after award.

My risky marketing venture was now a successful career. It was possible to envision a future where I never wrote again, living comfortably off all those marketing dollars. I had co-written a screenplay since leaving DC, but apart from that, I no longer made the time to write. My wife was pregnant, we’d just a bought a house, and I was traveling on a weekly basis. There were only so many hours in the day, and I needed to make those hours profitable.

But all the money in the world couldn’t fulfill my goal to be a writer. It was at this time that some close friends challenged me to write. Well, not just to write, but to finish something. One comics editor friend put it to me, “If you can’t write a 12-page backup, what can you write?” That put the fire in me. So I wrote a short story that editor, then a short story for another. Then I sold an original comic series (still upcoming!). And then I got a call from an old colleague.

At DC, I worked with an incredible woman named Victoria Setian, or as we call her, Tory. She had been part of Team Interactive with me, and since I’d left DC, she’d also moved, across the street to WB Games, where she was a budding producer on Mortal Kombat X, which of course was being made by some of our favorite developers, NetherRealm Studios.

Tory asked if I wanted to throw in a pitch for an MKX comic series. I knew the lore, I knew the team, what did I have to lose? So, in between agency work and preparing for a new baby, I wrote my pitch.

Then my son was born. A big deal for anyone, an extra big deal for an adopted person who’s never laid eyes on a blood relative before. My son opened his eyes, and for the first time, I saw myself in another human being. The experience was psychedelic. Becoming a father profoundly changed me in ways I’m still figuring out.

Everyone who knew me knew that I wanted to name a son “Clark” someday. Didn’t want to force that on my wife, though, so we came up with an alternative name, and she picked from both names once she saw the baby and got a sense of his personality. He was quiet for a newborn, a little gentleman, she said. She named him Clark Eric, taking his middle name from my father, which was an added surprise. Suffice it to say there wasn’t a dry eye among the Kittelsen men that morning.

The call from my editor at DC came that week while I was still home with the family. I got the gig. How soon could I turn around a new outline?

Thus began the most difficult summer of my life. New house, new baby, new writing gig, and I still had to pitch, travel, and manage the creative team for the agency. There was pressure coming at me from every direction. I became depressed. Something had to give.

Alan Moore gave an interview once where he talked about taking the leap to freelance. He came home to tell his wife he was quitting his industrial job, but when he got there, she told him she was pregnant, so he went back to work. But in time it occurred to him that no matter how poor his writing career might make the family, the baby would survive. They’d find a way. The only question was, would the baby grow up with new shoes and a miserable father who resents his lot in life, or with secondhand shoes and a father who can honestly tell that child she can be anything she wants to be.

This was the choice I faced. Fortunately, I didn’t have to make it alone. I had my wife, my partner, to work it out with me. She drafted a household budget, figured out how lean we could live, how long we might survive, and together we put together Humble Wordsmith, LLC, my freelance business.

I quit the agency job, reduced my monthly expenses to bare minimums, and started working from home. Beyond the comics, I had freelance gigs as a copywriter, a marketing consultant, whatever I could get paid to do. I busted my hump, but no matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to build momentum. That first year, our household income went down by over 75%.

Things picked up a bit when I got hired by WB Games to write story and in-game content for the DC Legends mobile game. With that under my belt, I looked for more games writing gigs, but they were hard to come by. I focused more of my time on Feral Audio, a start-up podcast network was growing steadily.

That’s when I got another call from another old colleague, Senior Producer Adam Urbano. NetherRealm Studios was looking for a writer to join their team and work on the story for Injustice 2. Would I be interested and available? After years of working with NRS on various projects in various capacities, this was the ultimate compliment.

The rest, as they say, is history. Writing for the game is the best dream job I’ve ever had the privilege of working. There was so much work to be done, I handed off my Feral Audio duties to my partners at the network. For the first time since I graduated from college, I could focus on one job title: Writer.

Becoming a father was wonderful but disruptive. Writers are selfish people, we like having lots of time to ourselves to “think” and “be creative” and sometimes even to write. But I can’t be selfish anymore. So with each year since I started freelancing, I’ve worked harder at balancing my family life with my work. The more quality time I spend as a Dad, the more fulfilled I become. I’ve been around for all Clark’s achievements, from walking to talking to his first tantrum. At the agency, I feared I would miss all those priceless memories. Now I have a treasure trove.

As if all this weren’t enough, there was one more surprise waiting for me in the lead-up to launching Injustice 2.

**MINOR I2 SPOILER WARNING** In the game, Superman meets his cousin, Supergirl, for the first time. It’s the first time he’s ever laid eyes on a blood relative. The first time he sees himself in someone else. Just like the first time I saw Clark.

Writing that scene was obviously somewhat personal and emotional for me. Now, a couple years later, I get to live that scene out for myself.

See, ever since my wife became pregnant, I’ve been taking DNA tests, trying to decode my secret origin. They never yielded any close results, but the ethnographic results they provided me were interesting, and I never knew what they could yield, so I kept taking them. Then, just this March, I got a match to a distant cousin. On a lark, I sent her my adoption info, and within hours, she sent me the name of my maternal grandfather. Then we found my grandmother.

We did not find my birth mother. In a soap opera twist, my birth mother was given up for adoption, just like me, so her identity is still a mystery. But I can’t complain. I’ve found new uncles, aunts, and cousins, they’ve welcomed me to the family with open arms, and they want to help find my birth mother.

By finding the birth family my mother never knew, I’ve found another missing piece of myself. Now I can look in the mirror and see the pieces I gave to Clark, as well as the pieces my grandparents gave to me. Sometime soon I’m going to meet my cousins in person for the first time, four Supergirls who share my blood. The game becomes the writer, and the writer becomes the game.

So there it is. My life story as a Superman fan, a writer, and a father. This week I got to celebrate as all three. Remember when I said I graduated from college and my parents were proud of me, but I wasn’t proud of me? I’m proud of me now. I just checked off my bucket list by the dozen.

How am I possibly going to top this experience? I’ll have to figure that out. For now, I’m going to savor this moment with gratitude and satisfaction. After 10 years of professional ups and downs and always searching for the next opportunity, I’m happy where I am, and on the whole, I think it’s just swell. ;)

2 notes · View notes

markolsonsongs · 5 years ago

Text

BIO

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MARK OLSON & INGUNN RINGVOLD INVITE LISTENERS TO JOIN THEM FOR A FASCINATING MUSICAL JOURNEY ON

MAGDALEN ACCEPTS THE INVITATION

OUT JUNE 5 ON FIESTA RED RECORDS

The husband-and-wife duo’s third collaboration mines a “Death Valley isolation chamber folk/pop sound” that is awash with darkness and light

March 12, 2020 —A roller coaster in a long-closed Lake Minnetonka amusement park, walks through historic orthodox churches, a fossil-collecting canoe trip along the Niobrara River, and an isolated pizza place in South Africa. Old memories swirling in the warm Joshua Tree breezes provided Jayhawks founder Mark Olson and his wife, Norwegian singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Ingunn Ringvold, with the inspiration for the set of intriguing, imagistic songs that lovingly fill their latest outing, Magdalen Accepts the Invitation, coming June 5 from Fiesta Red Records.

The album’s ten tracks draw upon the couple’s recent adventures together and their earlier adventures apart as well as tapping into, and stretching out, their own individual musical influences. While continuing along the Americana-cobbled roads they took on their first two albums, Olson and Ringvold explore lesser traveled musical territories on this release. Without exactly knowing where they were going, the two were emboldened by each other’s company and unafraid to push forward. As Olson describes it:

The recording sessions occurred during the heat of summer at Thermometer Shelter Studios, located not too far from Death Valley National Park. Olson admits that the experience was not so nice all the time. “You really begin to miss family and friends, community with one another, and college bookstores. The music begins to ask you something at this point: Am I strong? Can I do this all alone? Where am I going?”

“We wanted to go another way. We felt like we were being called to be a husband-and-wife songwriting team driving together at night, holding hands in the dark. Finding new ways of floating above the Armenian mountain streams of our memories when we played music. A language we only understood when nature spoke to us. We decidedly put melody first in a modal sense of the distance between notes and harmony … The writing, melodies, lyrics — then the recording and the takes — are very focused and clean. In the past I would get a start and go for the finish line as fast as possible. This time I doubled and tripled back including on the artwork to make sure everything was absolutely right.”

The Armenian Qanon, the Mellotron, the dulcimer, and djembe drums are among the world of instruments that the multi-talented Ringvold contributed to Magdalen’s sound. The variety of arrangements on the album act, she explains, “like a different color in an impressionistic painting.” Ringvold also is thrilled about being able to weave elements of her family’s musical heritage into her own songs and the interesting ways that her work blended in with Olson’s original material.

All of Magdalen’s original track recordings were done on a Nagra field recorder, which further enhanced the album’s unvarnished sonic textures. Additionally, Olson and Ringvold were perfectly in sync when it came to the recording process. He did all the analog engineering while she did the digital. Handling the mixing and mastering, as he had on Spokeswoman of the Bright Sun, was the award-winning producer John Schreiner, and Olson sings high praise for the warmth and spaciousness that Schreiner delivers in his work.

Olson’s track-by-track notes: Pipestone I Won’t Be Back – Pipestone Minnesota is a town made of Sioux Quartzite buildings from the Catlinite Pipestone quarry location nearby. We visited the Pipestone National Monument on our way home from a tour one year, and continued on a two-lane highway along the Niobrara River through north Nebraska where we canoed and collected fossils. Then You’ll Find the Morning – I wrote this on the porch we have in Joshua Tree that faces directly east. Starting in June the evenings here are super warm and livable because of the shadow. I like to play guitar out here. I keep reading about bee problems and imagined that bee poison reaching a person’s well water is pretty much the end. Excelsior Park – The old amusement park on Lake Minnetonka. It represents danger in some ways because of the scary high rollercoaster and the house of mirrors. My Dad was from a farm and this was not a place he was ever going to take us. If we wanted to go on rides it would be after a daylong excursion to the animal barns at the State Fair. Christina Hi! – We wrote this song in the summer after going to the art classes and specifically working on writing a Qanon song. I was thinking about how easy it is to get involved with the wrong friends that are into derelict ideas and how that can affect a person’s life. April in Your Cloud Garden – I think overwhelming stuff can put a person in a cloud garden, where you escape the reality and start to live in your imagination, and watering and tending a place that seems better. This is important and it can work, but then someday you have to come down from the cloud I guess. 31 Patience Games – I wrote this in South Africa where Ingunn and I were married. We were there two separate times for six months total. We ended up in the mountains in the only hop-growing region of the country. It was foggy with lots of wild animals and streams and amazing people. It was really nice and sometimes we went to the beach. I saw the biggest crane in Africa flying over our cabin way up high in the air. So many memories. If there is a time of a person’s life that is the best — this was it for me. Black Locust – I mail-ordered for a package of Black Locust tree seeds and planted them in the desert yard. Some of the trees have grown tall and they have nice white flowers. You need to place yourself in a place where your soul can grow and not be limited by gossip mongers and barbarian event manipulators. Starting your life over by planting trees by seed, with many of nature’s and technology’s ways against you and your babe, is where this song is coming from. Elmira’s Fountain – Here is a song Ingunn and I started in Vanadzor, Armenia about a real fountain where we would meet our host, Elmira. She would take us to Orthodox churches and cool parks. This song made the album because of the positive hopeful energy I feel about the lyrics and also the idea of drinking out of wild rivers. We would stop and drink from springs in the mountains, but drinking from rivers would require another step on our part. We swam in Lake Sevon, which is very deep, cold and somewhat dangerous, but sinking in the sand by the water’s edge worked for us. Silent Mary –This song started after listening to the classical music that made its way into early horror movies. I found some soundtracks where I pretty much scared myself into not watching the movies. I like the drama and lighting atmosphere though, so that worked well for the outline of my writing start. Children of the Street Car – We would stop at the most old-fashioned, well-stocked small town utility store on earth in Lucerne Valley, and wander around the aisles to escape the heat. I started working on many of these lyrical lines in that store like the “fog minus time,” which I meant to mean current day San Francisco minus time equals the heyday of experimental folk rock — which in a way, along with Death Valley isolation chamber folk/pop, is a good way to describe our musical stating points.

Mark Olson was born and raised in Minnesota by a family of mostly farmers and schoolteachers. Predominately a self-taught musician, Olson is well known for his use of alternate tunings and two-part unison singing that then breaks into harmony. He founded the Jayhawks in 1985 in Minneapolis. Olson was a principal songwriter, singer and guitarist for the band’s self-titled debut album, as well as later releases Blue Earth, Hollywood Town Hall, Tomorrow the Green Grass, and Mockingbird Time. Upon leaving the Jayhawks, he formed the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers in 1997. That band, later called the Creekdippers, made seven albums.

Ingunn Ringvold comes from Larvik, Norway (also the home of Thor Heyerdahl, the famed explorer and Kon Tiki author). Blessed with a naturally beautiful voice, she began singing in public at a very young age. Ringvold hears music in her heart and writes emotionally moving string arrangements. She studied the Armenian Qanon with Arax, a master musician in Vanadzor, Armenia, where she learned how to harness great strength in her performance style. She has released four solo albums in addition to her collaborations with Olson.

Olson and Ringvold live now in the California desert, and they tour off and on internationally almost every year.

FIESTA RED RECORDS

fiestaredrecords.com

0 notes

cryptswahili · 6 years ago

Text

Interview with the Creator of DeOldify, fast.ai fellow: Jason Antic

Part 21 of The series where I interview my heroes.

Index to “Interviews with ML Heroes”

Today, we’re talking to a very special “Software Guy, currently digging deep into GANs” — The author of DeOldify: Jason Antic.

Jason is a CS Major and has been working as a Software Engineer for over 12 years. You might be surprised to know that he is still very new to DL, having taken it up seriously about nine months ago.

We’ll be talking about Jason’s experience and the coolest GAN project that’s live on a website: colorize.cc

About the Series:

I have very recently started making some progress with my Self-Taught Machine Learning Journey. But to be honest, it wouldn’t be possible at all without the amazing community online and the great people that have helped me.

In this Series of Blog Posts, I talk with people that have really inspired me and whom I look up to as my role-models.

The motivation behind doing this is that you might see some patterns and hopefully you’d be able to learn from the amazing people that I have had the chance to learn from.

Sanyam Bhutani: Hello Jason, Thank you for taking the time to do this.

Jason Antic: My pleasure!

Sanyam Bhutani: You have created one of the most amazing “Deep Learning” Projects, you’ve been working as a Software Engineer for over a decade now.

Can you tell us how did you get interested in Deep Learning at first?

Jason Antic: Well really I’ve been interested in neural networks long before they were cool. They just seemed intuitively to have a lot more potential than other methods. But yeah, they were seriously uncool when you go back 7+ years ago. In fact, I took two artificial intelligence courses in college and neither of them covered neural networks. Years later, AlexNet swept the competition in the 2012 ImageNet challenge. That caught my attention because I knew computer vision basically just didn’t work before then. Comparatively speaking, Deep Learning was magic. I started devouring information on the subject afterwards but it wasn’t until years later that I actually started developing my own models.

Sanyam Bhutani: You’ve had a few failed starts to get started with DL at first, and finally took up fast.ai through till the end-what appealed to you the most about fast.ai?

Jason Antic: They simply have a much better method of teaching than other courses (I rage-quit quite a few popular MOOCs!). They start you with a huge amount of momentum right away — you’re creating an awesome dogs/cats classifier on the first day. THEN you drill down into the details. This is so motivating and more effective in terms of being able to connect the dots of what you’re learning. This is a method of teaching spelled out in a great book called “Making Learning Whole Again.”

Also, what’s being taught literally is cutting edge. Uniquely so. In fact, in V3 part 1, I got to collaborate with Jeremy and Sylvain on lesson 7, and I committed the final notebook used for the GAN super-resolution bit a mere few hours before the course started. It was literally something we invented over the previous two weeks — GAN pretraining. I asked Jeremy if this was normal for him in preparing courses and he confirmed. It’s mind-boggling that it actually works out but the end result is amazing!

Sanyam Bhutani: For the readers with a bit of less-tech background, could you share an ELI5 about what your project is and how it works?

Jason Antic: Sure! I basically created a deep learning model to colorize old black and white photos. While this isn’t the first deep learning model to colorize photos, it does a few new things that make it significantly better than previous efforts. Namely, the output is much more colorful and convincing, and this comes from setting up training of the colorizing model to involve a second model — the “critic” — that basically is there to “criticize” the colorizations and teach the “generator” to produce better images. This design is called a GAN — Generative Adversarial Network.

Because the “critic” model is also a neural network, it can pick up on a lot of the nuances of what makes something look “realistic” that simpler methods just can’t. The key here also is that I as a programmer simply cannot comprehend how to explicitly code something to evaluate “realism” — I just don’t know what all that entails. So that’s what a neural network is here to learn for me!

Sanyam Bhutani: I think you’re the Thomas Edison of GAN(s) (or at least photo colorization using DL)-the idea didn’t work for quite a few weeks and you had quite a bit of unsuccessful experiments (over a 1000).

What made you stick to the project and not give up? How do you think can a software engineer stay motivated and not give in to the “imposter syndrome”?

Jason Antic: Well that comparison to Edison is rather flattering! So, what made me stick to the project and not give up is this somewhat unreasonably optimistic view of mine that there’s a solution to any reasonable problem and that it’s just a matter of effectively navigating the search space to find the answer. Effectively to me, that means doing a lot of experiments and being methodical, and to constantly question your assumptions and memory because that’s typically where problem-solving goes wrong.

That being said, despite my undeniable successes I still to this day fall into that dark mental state of self-doubt, wanting to give up, and “imposter syndrome”. Even earlier this week it started creeping up on me again when I was running into difficulties, and the intrusive thoughts started pouring in again. “You’re deluded, and you were just lucky with DeOldify.” Believe it or not that still happens.

Then I pushed through it and figured it out, and I am very excited about what will be released in the next month as of this writing :)

How do I push through it? The belief that a solution is there and that I’m capable of finding it simply because I’m a normally functioning human being that can problem solve is a big one. That’s the key point here — it’s not so much a matter of intelligence as it is of the method (and that’s learnable!). Another motivating factor is the realization that there is in my mind no better way to spend my time then to try to solve big/cool problems, and that it’s worth the blood, sweat, and tears. Purpose and autonomy are huge motivators.

Sanyam Bhutani: There is a flipside to it as well, how does someone know when to quit a project that might just be too ambitious for the given technology?

Jason Antic: Yes, you definitely have to know when to quit, and that’s quite the art. I say “No” to, and/or quit, a lot of things actually. Why? Because for everything you say “Yes” to, you’re saying “No” to many other things. Time (and sanity) is precious. As a result, especially lately, I’ve said “No” to quite a few opportunities that others find crazy to say “No” to.

So quitting for me is decided first on whether or not the path falls squarely in my realm of values, interests, and maintaining sanity. If you’re talking about an ambitious technological project, then you have to go one step further and evaluate whether or not it’s actually feasible. Often you simply can’t answer that right away, especially if you’re doing an ambitious project! So that’s why you experiment. If you discover a sound reason (and not just a rage-quit rationalization) as to why something won’t work, then quit, learn from it, and move on! But be careful on this point — a lot of problems are solved handily simply by shifting perspective a bit. For this reason, I’ll stick with a problem a bit longer than seems reasonable, because often my perspective is simply wrong. Often the solution comes when I walk away (shower thoughts, basically).

Sanyam Bhutani: It’s very interesting to note that Jason doesn’t have “experience” with photo colorization. Yet he’s done a great job at it, even pushed a “Chromatic optimization” update to the repository allowing DeOldify to run on GPU(s) with smaller memory.

What are your thoughts about “Non-Domain” experts using DL to make progress in general?

Jason Antic: It’s great that you brought up the “Chromatic optimization” because that actually didn’t come from me. That was from somebody on Hacker News the day that DeOldify went viral that had at least some domain knowledge and suggested it as a way to get much better results much more efficiently. So I think this is an important point — domain expertise still counts. And good old-fashioned engineering and design still count. Not everything is going to be solved by your deep learning model — at least as of now.

That being said, I’ve been able to get really far on DeOldify with zero domain expertise, and that idea generally excites me! I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of the implications of this — that we can have a model discover things that not even experts know about yet. The challenge, of course, is figuring out what the models are figuring out and not just treat it as a black box. But I really think that we’re going to see some big breakthroughs in science in the next 10–20 years because of this (and it’s already starting to happen to an extent). Additionally, not requiring domain expertise to be effective means many more minds can be put to the task of solving many of our world’s problems. This is very cool.

Sanyam Bhutani: Your project is built on top of the fast.ai library (v 0.7), can you tell us how it has helped in the development of this project?

Jason Antic: The Fast.ai library is brilliant! It encodes a lot of best practices (such as learning rate finder) which make your life much easier as a deep learning developer. It’s painful and silly to constantly have to operate at a low level and reinvent things (poorly) with things like Tensorflow or PyTorch. Fast.ai’s library does a lot of this for you, which means you can spend more time doing productive things. This is how progress in software generally happens, and I feel Fast.ai is leading the way. Do note too: I’m about to push a Fast.ai V1 upgrade, and the benefits of doing this were huge — speed, memory usage, code simplification, and model quality all benefited from this largely out of the box.

Sanyam Bhutani: I’ve tried running DeOldify and it really really blew me away. Were there any images or scenarios that even made you go WOW?

Jason Antic: It might sound silly but the cup in the image below was my first wow moment. This was one of the first images I rendered after I finally experimented with a self-attention GAN based implementation, after failing to get this stuff to work with a Wasserstein GAN. Up to this point, I didn’t get anywhere close to this kind of detail, or interesting and seemingly appropriate colorfulness in my renders. I do acknowledge the flaws in this image (the zombie arm, for example). But I knew I was on to something after seeing this.

Sanyam Bhutani: DeOldify works and works really well, what’s next for the project?

You’ve mentioned in your repository and twitter that you want to make a lot of under the hood improvements. Why do you think those are a priority over building something that will be potentially even cooler than this?

Jason Antic: I have no doubt that there’s going to be a model in the next year or two that’s going to blow my model away in terms of sophistication. That’s just the nature of progress! But what I’m really interested in is making this stuff practically useful.

When I first released DeOldify, I was able to create some truly impressive images, but at a cost — I had to search for quite a while just to find an image that didn’t have some sort of awful glitch or discoloration. GAN training is a double-edged sword currently in this sense — you get really great results, but stability is really difficult to achieve. This is the sort of thing I’m wrapping up on addressing now. This will make the difference between having a cool tech demo and actually being able to use the tech in the real world in a truly automated way. It’ll also enable something else that’s way cool, but I can’t talk about that yet. ;)

The issue that DeOldify is currently a supreme memory hog is another thing I’m attacking. Quite successfully I’d add! That also will enable practical usability.

Once the items above are addressed and announced (very soon!), I’ll be looking to finally try making some money on this stuff. As you can imagine, countless friends and relatives have been asking “are you monetizing this?” I’ll be able to finally allay their concerns about giving everything away for free LOL. And who knows what all that will involve. Just no VC money. Definitely not that.

Sanyam Bhutani: For the readers wondering about Jason’s experience in Deep Learning, he had picked this project right after completing fast.ai Part 1 and 2. What pointers do you have for the enthusiasts that would like to build something as cool as DeOldify?

Jason Antic: Well, to be honest, DeOldify’s origin story was that I had a bit of a shower thought while taking a long walk (a walk thought, I guess), where I was like “Ohhh…GANs learn the loss function for you!” That’s not actually an original thought but you don’t hear it much and I certainly hadn’t heard it at that point. Then I just paired this up with a list of projects I had compiled over time (again “walk thoughts”) and figured: “Let’s try this with colorization because I have no clue what the loss function should actually be. So perhaps the GAN can learn it for me!”

That was the intuition and I was unreasonably sure it was right. That gave me the stupid energy to spend the next six weeks doing probably upwards of 1000+ experiments (failure after failure) until I eventually stumbled upon self-attention GANs and it finally worked. And I have to emphasize that point — it was a lot of failures, and a lot of unknowns, and a lot of not giving up even though I was taking a bit of a psychological beating after a while. You know — self-doubt and all that jazz.

Hence my advice is this: Find something you’re interested in enough to pursue it in a manic way and guide your efforts by at least somewhat rigorous experimentation. And stay the course until you have the actual reason (evidence) to believe that what you’re pursuing is impossible as opposed to just unknown. I think this is where most people shoot themselves in the foot — they give up way too easily!

Sanyam Bhutani: Are there any upcoming updates in DeOldify that we should be really excited about?

Jason Antic: There’s a fast.ai v1 update coming very soon, and along with that comes the many benefits of the said upgrade! The model is going to be much faster, much smaller, higher quality, zero artifacts, and nearly zero “artistic selection” needed, and a large part of this comes simply from taking advantage of what is available in the new fast.ai code.

There’s other stuff you guys should be excited about that I just can’t talk about yet. You’ll hear about it soon or soonish. I’m such a tease :P

Sanyam Bhutani: How can someone best contribute to DeOldify?

Are there any long-term goals that you’d like to work on with the project?

Jason Antic: I’ve been getting awesome key contributions from people in so many forms. For example, there are those who simply want something that I haven’t had time to produce yet. The Colab notebook is a great example of this. I loved that one because it made DeOldify way more accessible to a lot of people.

Another interesting key contribution was somebody on Hacker News telling me about the “Chromatic optimization” idea they had which turned out to be the enabling factor in doing unlimited resolution image colorization. It wasn’t code, but it was so important and made DeOldify way better.

Then there are people doing awesome renders with them, sharing them, and even giving me feedback on the problems they have and the wishlist of updates they’d like. That’s a great contribution too!

Contributions can come in many forms. I welcome them wholeheartedly. They make this “job” of mine so enjoyable and meaningful.

Sanyam Bhutani: Given the explosive growth rate of ML, How do you stay updated with the recent developments?

Jason Antic: Generally speaking, reading everything and knowing everything is simply not an option today. There’s no such thing as the “person who knows everything” in the world anymore. Thomas Young apparently was the last person who had this title, and he lived two hundred years ago.

Even within just the field of machine learning, there are so many papers coming out and new information that you can’t possibly keep up. So what do you do? You filter intelligently. You choose good resources that do the hard work of distilling what’s actually important and presenting it in a much more useful manner.

Fast.ai is an excellent example of this, and in fact, Jeremy told me that they like to think of their work as “refactoring Deep Learning”. We need that desperately, as there is a lot of noise to be separated from the actual signal at this point.

It’s also much more efficient to let others in the community figure out for you what’s great and then taking a look yourself. So follow some of your ML heroes on Twitter and see what they say! They’re tweeting about great papers and new developments all the time.

Sanyam Bhutani: What are your thoughts about Machine Learning as a field, do you think its overhyped?

Jason Antic: Speaking specifically to deep learning, I think Jeremy Howard said it best: “Deep Learning is Overhyped…is Overhyped.” Simply put, I’m strongly of the opinion that even if you just look at the capabilities of what’s already available today, that we’ve far underutilized the potential uses and problems solved with deep learning. And I think that’s chiefly because there’s probably not enough engineers and domain experts running with the tech yet to make this stuff work in the real world. I think people who say it’s overhyped either just like to be contrarian or lack imagination.

That being said, there are some seriously awful startups popping up here and there that make outrageous claims yet get still convinced somebody to fork over money. It’s reminiscent of the dotcom boom in a way. But that’s to be expected — there’s always going to be swindlers and they’re always looking for new ways to take your money. AI and blockchain just happen to be the latest sexy things to achieve that. Keep in mind — though there was a dotcom bust, the internet still really revolutionized the world. The same will happen with deep learning — that much I’m convinced of.

Sanyam Bhutani: Before we conclude, any tips for the beginners who aspire to go out and build amazing projects using DL but feel completely overwhelmed to even start?

Jason Antic: Go directly to fast.ai, and do the work! Great results take time and effort, and there’s no good substitute for that.

Sanyam Bhutani: Thank you so much for doing this interview.

If you found this interesting and would like to be a part of My Learning Path, you can find me on Twitter here.

If you’re interested in reading about Deep Learning and Computer Vision news, you can checkout my newsletter here.

Interview with the Creator of DeOldify, fast.ai fellow: Jason Antic was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

#cryptocurrency

0 notes

tanmath3-blog · 8 years ago

Text

It is no secret that I think Matt Hickman is an amazing writer. His book Amnesia was my number one book last year and for good reasons. If you haven’t read it you are really missing an awesome story. From his stories in anthologies to his writing with other authors one thing is certain he has wicked talent. I’m telling you he is one to watch. Not only is he a writer but he is a great friend and an incredible dad. His pictures with his kids always make me smile and bring back fond childhood memories. If you haven’t met him you need to do so right now. Please welcome Matt Hickman back again to Roadie Notes……

1. It’s been awhile since we talked what new books do you have out now? Latest release? Since we last spoke I’ve released a collaboration with Stuart Keane called Gemini – a serial killer story that we wrote from the viewpoint of two opposing female characters. It was a really interesting book to write and Stuart was a pleasure to bounce ideas off. I’ve released Amnesia through Matt Shaw Publications which has been my most successful book so far, I was honoured to have a certain someone name it as their number one read of 2016, especially as I was concerned about people thinking the content was a little extreme. I’ve featured in a few anthologies, one named VS which was an interesting charity project where a load of British authors were teamed against a load of American authors to face off. I was drawn against talented authors, Melissa Lason and Michelle Garza – The Sisters of Slaughter. I can’t tell you which way the judges voted, but I couldn’t have been happier with who I got to face. They are a great talent and good friends of mine. In addition, I have also featured in another couple of charity anthologies – Bah Humbug, released by Matt Shaw Publications was a fun anti – Christmas project featuring some of the best names in horror, and a project called Dark Places, Evil Faces which has been compiled by Mark Lumby, which features some top authors such as Graham Masterton, Jack Ketchum and Ramsey Campbell. My last release was a collaboration with Matt Shaw called State of Decay, a really dark, gritty urban horror story about a man pushed over the edge by a society that’s falling apart around him. Matt is one of my contemporary writing heroes and I was stoked to share the covers with him.

2. If you could pick any author alive or dead to have lunch with who would it be? Why? Hhhhmmmmmmmm, I’ve shared lunch with a few authors over the past few years actually. I would probably say Richard Laymon. I would just love to get a glimpse inside that depraved mind to see how he conjured up his ideas and whether it was all as natural and seamless as it appears on the pages, or whether there were times that he struggled.

3. What is the strangest thing a fan has ever done? I hate the term fan. I don’t have them, I’m nowhere near big enough to consider using that word and even if I was, I still wouldn’t. The strangest thing was probably some guy who just kept on dropping me really strange, passive-aggressive comments on everything I put on social media. I had enough and confronted him, explaining that I had better things to do than mess about with him. I told him to pipe down or f**k off. He chose the latter. Strange boy.

4. What is the one thing you dread to do when writing? I used to dread the initial release of a book and receiving the first feedback. I’ve learned now to relax with the whole process and understand that one person’s point of view is exactly that. In some cases, negative feedback can be a whole spin on positive. I appreciate that I can’t please them all, so chill. I don’t dread anything else, I’m a pretty laid back little monkey. I love the whole thing.

5. Did you have imaginary friends growing up? Tell me about them No, I never did, however my daughter had one that she called Lucy Poo. My wife went to see a spiritual medium once who claimed that my daughter may have ‘the gift.’ I may consider this my retirement fund.

6. Do you go to conventions? If not why? I do go to conventions. I love them. I love going as a trader and meeting readers face to face. I’m still fairly new to them but I’m a fairly personable bloke and love having a good chin wag with anyone. I also love attending conventions from the other side of the table, its great meeting up with like-minded people from within this community. I have a few lined up this year.

7. How many times did you have to submit your first story before it was accepted? Once. It was a story called Anna which I submitted to Dark Chapter Press for an anthology called Kids. I haven’t really looked back since that acceptance.

8. Ever consider not writing? If so what made you continue? The only time that I’ve stopped was over the last month or so, while I’ve been getting a new job off the ground, where travelling and long days just didn’t leave me any chance. I’m back at it now, every night. I ignore people who claim they don’t have time for this and that. Nobody is ever going to do anything for you.

9. Ever thought about writing in a different category? A lot of the short stories I write lean towards humour, usually in a very, very dark way. In addition, I wrote a crime thriller, a collaboration with Andy Lennon called Bound where we threw in some very horrific elements. It worked well. I think I’d be fairly comfortable having a go at anything, I thrive on challenge.

10. Any new additions to the family? No. Two kids are more than enough for me. I did buy a new iron last week. I have to water it, does an iron count?

11. What is coming up next for you? Next up, I’m releasing my first collection of shorts called Sinister Scribblings. It’s all of my short stories so far that have been published elsewhere in one book, along with some bonus new material that I’ve thrown in. Next up, I’m finishing the sequel to Jeremy. I have a queue of people who are asking to collaborate with me, but I need to concentrate on my own stuff for the next few months.

12. Do you do release parties? Do you think they work? I do them because if nothing else they’re a great laugh. They can be stressful from this side of the screen but I believe they’re great for promotion. They can be an acquired taste, but I enjoy them. I love the fact that many of the readers who attend actually make new friends with other people that they’d never have bumped into.

13. Do you have crazy stalker fans? Have you ever had one you wish would go away? See above. If anyone needs to be forcibly removed, I’ll do so myself. I don’t suffer idiots too well and I’m too long in the tooth for childish antics. There can be the odd upstart within this community that decides they want to try to rock the boat, but they usually show themselves up fairly quickly and move themselves on. Most people in this community are to notch people.

14. Do you still have a “day job” ? If so what do you do? I’m a sales manager for a construction company. It’s a bit of an anorak job, but it pays the bills. It involves a lot of travelling, so at least I get to see our green and pleasant land, even if it is from standing traffic on the motorway.

15. What is your process for writing? Do you have a voice in your head? Not really, as soon as I have an embryo of an idea, I get down and start writing it. I make it up as I go. I don’t plan anything, even novels. I am the dictionary definition of winging it. In fact, if you look up winging it in a dictionary, there’s probably a picture of me looking gormless and picking my nose.

16. Is there a book you want to make a sequel to you haven’t yet? I’ve started work on a book called Becky which is a sequel to Jeremy, I have a good idea of how it’s going to pan out, and Jeremy will be back with an almighty bang. He’s the character that most people have said they would like to see return. I considered bringing a few of the characters from Amnesia back into stand-alone novellas of their own but doubt I’ll ever get round to it.

Thanks again to anyone that takes time to pick up my work and give it a go, you rock! It’s the best feeling in the world that people are enjoying something that you’ve created. Long may it continue. If you’re on Facebook, come and say hello, I don’t bite. Thanks to my wonderful friends and peers for their continued support and encouragement. Too many to mention individually, but you know who you are.

You can connect with Matt Hickman here:

https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Hickman/e/B015RQBG1I/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_5?qid=1493363179&sr=1-5

Twitter: @Mathewhickma13

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matthickmanauthor/

Some of Matt Hickman’s books:

Getting even more personal with Matt Hickman It is no secret that I think Matt Hickman is an amazing writer. His book Amnesia was my number one book last year and for good reasons.

0 notes