#maybe write some scenes with everybody to see how the names work out in prose

[fictionadventurer]

As I'm trying to envision character interactions in Lily Between Worlds, I keep stumbling into the idea that the explorer and the scholar would be friends. Maybe childhood friends, maybe later on in life, but they at least knew of each other before Lily came around, and I think their friendship would develop once they both start spending time around Lily. They're both curious about the wider world, open to new ideas and experiences--it's just that the scholar reads about things while the explorer goes out and does things. And maybe part of the effect is that the explorer encourages the scholar to go out and do some exploring of his own--get some practical experiences to go along with his theorizing? It's all very vague, but there could be something there.

[astrovian]

Richard Armitage interviews Harlan Coben for the Win audiobook (released 18/03/21)

Full transcript under cut

RA: Hi, I’m Richard Armitage. I played Adam Price in the Netflix series The Stranger, which was adapted from Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name. With me is the man himself, Harlan Coben, number one New York Times bestseller, the author of over thirty novels, including the one you’ve just listened to. I’m delighted to be talking to Harlan about his book, Win.

Okay Harlan, thanks for taking the time to chat about your audiobook and thanks for sending me a copy of the book. Um, it was so nice I ended up wrapping it up and giving it to my brother for Christmas.

HC: *laugh* You’re supposed to read it first, but okay, thanks Richard.

RA: No, I got the electronic version so uh, so I’ve had a good read. Congratulations, a great story. Brilliant, brilliant central character. I mean the first question I’m gonna ask is – because people listening to this have just been listening to the audiobook – are you, um, a big audiobook listener yourself?

HC: I – I go through stages, um, because my mind wanders, I sometimes have trouble focusing. But when I’m in a car, um, that’s most of the time that I’m- that I really love to use the audiobooks because it does make the ride just fly by. However, I’ve set up my life that I don’t have to commute to work every day, so I don’t have it steadily – it’s usually when I’m doing a nice long ride, I get a really good audiobook and time just flies by.

RA: And have you- have you got any favourite audiobooks that you’ve listened to recently, or any podcasts or what is it that floats your boat?

HC: You know, it’s funny. I still remember when I was a working man, way back when, when audiobooks were really first starting out and we had them on cassette tapes, I listened to the entire Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, um, it was about thirty hours long, going back and forth to work for almost a month. And I still have memories of that experience, and it’s probably, well god, it’s probably 1990 I did that, 1989, something like that.

RA: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean I’ve got a- I’ve got a few journeys up and back from Manchester this year, we’re about to start working on Stay Close, so I’ll happily – I’m happy to take any recommendations of any good books, so maybe I’ll listen to Bonfire of the Vanitites.

HC: Well I tell ya, a lot of people – first of all, it’s a brilliant book, it’s maybe a bit dated, but I doubt that, um. I think Richard, I get more people telling me to listen to any book that you read.

RA: *laugh*

HC: I said, “Hey, I spend a lot of time with this guy, I’m about to do my second television show that stars Richard Armitage. No one I think has starred in two shows that I’ve done ever, so I get a lot of him anyway.” *laugh*

RA: You don’t need my voice in your head when you’re driving, that’s – that’s torture.

HC: That’s right, I’ll be hearing notes on, on scripts in my head if I hear you going. For those who don’t know who are listening, y’know, Richard starred in The Stranger, um, and now is going to be starring in Stay Close, uh, based off two of my novels which I’m sure you can get on audiobook.

RA: And on that note, what um, you’ve had so many adaptations now that have moved from page to screen – what is it like when you go through that process? When you’re – ‘cause you’re very hands on in the way that you kind of collaborate with not just the actors, but with the producers and y’know, the writers. I mean, you’re – you’re writing it yourself. Um, what is it like through, through that whole process, from starting to developing to seeing it kind of realised on screen?

HC: I think the key for me is not to be slavishly devoted to the novel. I think that’s a mistake that a lot of people who are trying to make an adaptation make. So, I go into it, ‘what is the best TV series we can make?’, if it’s true to the book, great. If it’s not true to the book, also great. Um, so I move my stories to various countries, we’ve changed characters around, we’ve changed motivations. Because they’re two very different mediums – a book is a book, and a TV series is a TV series. They should not be the same. One is a visual medium, one is not. Even, even um, audiobooks are slightly different um, than what you read. And they should be. Um, y’know, there’s a performance involved. 

Also, because I’ve spent most of my life alone in a room coming up with writing a book, um, where I am just everything – I’m writer, director, actor, key grip. I don’t even know what a key grip is, but I’m that. Um, it’s really nice to collaborate. So um, you’ve worked with me, I hope you agree – I like to collaborate, I like to hear the opinions of other people and um, I really enjoy that aspect of it. I look at it like I’m – like I get to be captain of a World Cup football team, rather than being a tennis player where I’m standing there on my own, which is what happens with a novel.

RA: Yeah, and actually it’s the same when I get to narrate an audiobook, like you say – you get to be director, you get to be the cinematographer to an extent ‘cause you’re setting the scene, but one thing that I’ve – I really appreciated about working with you was having read your, your books and sometimes you’ll pass by a character that is useful to the, to the narrative that you’re telling, but when that comes to developed for TV or film you’ll take a bit more time to investigate that character, and you’re very open to treading those paths, which makes for a very kind of dense narrative with the screenwriter.

HC: Well that’s what I think we’re trying to do. If you think about The Stranger, um, y’know in the book the Stranger is a sort of nerdy teenage male.

RA: Mm-hmm.

HC: And that just – we even tried out some people, and that just didn’t work. And it was really my idea – and I don’t say it in a bragging way, I say it as a way to show how open we all are – to change the character from being male to being female. And once I saw Hannah John-Kamen do it, then I pictured her in a room with you in that first great scene in the bar, um, or at the club when she tells you the big secret, it just worked. Um, you have to be willing to, to sort of stretch your imagination all over again and re-think your story. Which is also fun.

RA: Yeah, and also I suppose because y’know, as much as we love a faithful adaptation of a novel, um what you don’t wanna do is just deliver the novel in screenplay. You want to, for everyone that has read it it’s a new and exciting surprise, and for everyone that hasn’t it’s, y’know, it’s gonna be the same. So, um, it’s nice to kind of have a, to have your audience ready for people who have read a lot of your work, and there were, y’know, a guaranteed audience of people that had, had looked at The Stranger but what you gave them was something really surprising.

HC: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. And Stay Close, there’s a change in the ending to that which will hopefully shock everybody but especially the people who have already read the book, who will smugly think they know exactly what’s going on.

RA: *laugh* And me, probably. I haven’t read it yet. Um, so when you’re writing – I’m gonna double up on this question now, so when you’re writing, do you write in silence? Do you have any music playing in the background or are you – do you have like a, a kind of sacred writing space?

HC: Um, my routine is not to have a routine. Uh I, I do whatever works until it stops working and then I change up. It’s like I’m riding a horse really fast, and then the horse dies so I gotta find a new horse. So most writers will tell you ‘yes, I use this space, I do it at this time’. Um in the days before Covid, I would go to different coffee shops all the time, I would try out different… any place. Y’know, my favourite example is the end of – when I was writing The Stranger, um with about three weeks left to finish it, I had to take an Uber for the first time. This was a number of years ago. I had to take an Uber in New York City, and I felt really guilty about spending the money on an Uber and trying to justify it, so I was sitting in the back of the Uber and I was writing down notes, and I start writing really well. So for three weeks, I took Ubers wherever I went just so I could finish the book *laugh*

RA: ‘Cause that was the magic formula.

HC: Yeah, that worked! Then that stops working and then I have to find the new, a new place. So my routine is not to have a routine. If you’re trying to write out there, the key to anything is ‘does it make me write more?’ – if the answer is yes, it’s good. If the answer is no, it’s bad. It really is that simple.

RA: I’m gonna make a note of that for when I start writing myself. Um, do you – do you speak any of your characters out loud, your dialogue or your prose passages, do you say it out loud?

HC: The very last stage um, of editing. Okay first of all, no writer gets it right the first time. I know a million writers, I don’t know any writer who doesn’t re-write and re-write a lot. Well, I know one but he’s the guy none of us wanna hang out with, you know what I mean?

RA: *laugh*

HC: So um, the last stage that I do, and it’s usually after I’ve done all the editing with my editor and everything like that, we’re ready to go. I will sit in a room and I read the entire novel out loud to myself. Um, because what happens is, it’s a little bit like a musical score. Where you can – if you read it out loud, I can detect false notes that I may have missed along the way. Um, I can hear them. So the last step is that. I rarely y’know, I’m not – I’m not crazy, I’m not sitting there maybe talking out loud to myself, I’m maybe testing out lines by doing that, and I do that a lot when I’m helping with the screenplays on our shows. But um, for the most part that’s how I do it.

RA: So, in that case, would you ever narrate one of your own audiobooks?

HC: I did narrate one, uh, many years ago called Promise Me. What had happened is we had -  my Myron Bolitar series we did seven with the same reader and he retired. I hadn’t written um, I didn’t write Myron for about five or six years it was. And so they said, ‘hey, why don’t you do it?’ which was a huge mistake in many ways. One, I’m not a professional. But two, the people who were fans of Myron Bolitar liked the first guy, and it felt to them liked they had tuned into their favourite TV show and every actor had changed.

RA: *laugh*

HC: It’s really difficult to re-do or start a series, uh, when people know the- the old reader. So um, I also figure- it was also, Richard you know this of course, so for people who don’t know, it’s a lot of work. I’m a guy from New Jersey. I speak very quickly, which does not go over well in audio. I don’t do voices. I would have to sit with a pillow on my stomach because uh, my stomach would sometimes grumble and that would be picked up- *laugh*

RA: Oh, yeah!

HC: By the microphone. And it took me um, a week to record it because – and I don’t know if this is still the case – but back then, the abridged version wasn’t just a cut up version of the unabridged, I had to do a whole different reading for it. So um, it was – it was a lot of work. Um, and it’s a skill that I’m not sure I’m best to do.

RA: Yeah, it does take a lot of stamina. I mean what’s interesting is, having gotten to know you, and when I, when I now read your work, I can hear your delivery, I can hear your voice. And there’s humour in the dialogue, and there’s humour in the as well, and I – it’s an instant ‘in’ for me, so I – ‘cause, ‘cause often I read and I speak aloud when I’m reading alone in the dark, I say things out loud but I think people approach it differently. But I definitely hear your voice in, in these characters. And I think particularly in Windsor Horne Lockwood.

HC: That’s so interesting because Win, I think of my heroes that I’ve had, Win is probably the least like me. I mean um, when you think about Adam-

RA: *laughing* You have to say that! You have to say that because he’s such a badly behaved person, isn’t he?

HC: *laughing* Yeah! ‘Cause I usually like to think of myself as more of like Adam in The Stranger, who you played, or some of the other characters that – the ‘I’m a father or four’ or those kind of guys. What I love about getting into Win of course is that Win is something of an anti-hero. Um, he sort of says and does things that are not necessarily prudent or appropriate, and he can get away with that. Um, so I really loved – I loved getting in his head, it was really an interesting experience. But on the surface anyway, he’s probably the least like me of any uh, main character that I’ve ever written.

RA: Yeah, I mean I- I relate to that totally. It’s a little bit like- it’s probably a side of you, you daren’t investigate, but- but when you get the chance to do it in a fiction um, you can tap into those things that we’re not allowed to do or say in your, in your regular day. But um, where did that character spring from? What was the seed that germinated into his story do you think?

HC: Rarely is this the case, but um, Win is actually – y’know, he’s the sidekick in my Myron Bolitar series but um, when I first created him I based him off my best friend in college roommate, who has a name equally obnoxious as Windsor Horne Lockwood the Third-

RA: *laugh*

HC: Very good looking, blonde guy who used to say before he would go out to parties when we were in college, he would look in the mirror and say, “It must suck to be ugly”. And so I took him and I tweaked him and made him more dangerous, uh and that’s how I, I kind of came up with Win.

RA: And does this person know that you’ve based this character on him?

HC: Oh yes! In fact, some people know who he is, he uses it. He’s still a-

RA: Oh, really?

HC: Owner of all these fancy golf clubs, he’s president of one of the most famous golf clubs, um, in the world right now. He looks the part. In fact, he one time came to one of my books signings years ago and um, he’s sitting in the back, and I tell people the story of how I created Win, and I say, “I’m not gonna tell you who, but Win is actually in this room right now”. It took the crowd about four seconds to figure out who he was, and he had a longer line to sign books that I did *laugh*

RA: Amazing. I mean I have to say, it’s- you, you start reading the story and thinking, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna like this guy’ but he really grows on you, warts and all. I wonder how many people are gonna go into Saks on Fifth Avenue and go looking for the vault.

HC: *laugh* Yeah, no, I made that up. But there is place in Saks-

RA: I know, so brilliant!

HC: -but the rest of it is completely made up, this involves an app that you’ll read about when you- hopefully when you, when you read book. But yeah, it was fun to do an anti-hero where he makes decisions and does things that you don’t like, and yet you still wanna hang around with him. I always think the key to a fascinating character is not um, that he’s likeable necessarily, but that you wanna spend time with him. Not that he’s a nice guy, but if you were at a bar and you could sit with somebody and have a conversation with them and learn about their life, would this be a person you’d wanna do that with? And that’s sort of the test whenever I do a character. And Win, I think, passes that with flying colours. There are people who love Win and wanna be just like him and there are people who loathe him! But everybody, or I hope many people, are fascinated by him and his life.

RA: Well, also you’ve given him such an incredible kind of tool kit, like a skill set. I mean, I think everybody would look at that character and wish they could do the things he does, maybe not in the way that he does them, but I mean he’s- he’s exactly the kind of character that you’d hone in on, certainly from an acting point of view. I look at that and if I was, y’know, like fifteen years younger, I’d be leaping on that character to play. Which is, it means – it means he’s sort of relatable or aspirational in a kind of anti-hero way.

HC: I’ve heard this a lot, and I think it’s one of the most flattering things that I hear from my actor friends – I think everybody would want to play Win. I mean, I think the- it’s an interesting challenge, um, for a lot of actors. More so than even Myron Bolitar who is my lead series character. Um, everybody kind of wants to play win and kind of wonders who would play Win. Uh, and I take that as a – as a compliment.

RA: Are we gonna see more of him? Is he ge- are you writing more stories for him?

HC: My guess is the answer’s yes. I plan each book as it comes, so I never know until I’ve started. Is it gonna be a stand alone? Is it going to be a Myron Bolitar? Is it gonna be a young adult? Mickey Bolitar is now going to be a Win, and I don’t know until I – each book, y’know when I finish a book, I’m like a boxer who’s just gone fifteen rounds and can’t even lift my, my arms anymore, I gave it everything I had, I can’t even imagine fighting again or writing another novel. So I don’t know is the answer. Probably? I do wanna see Win again, separately or at least back with Myron, so I do think we will see Win again. But the book I’m writing right now is a sequel to The Boy From the Woods, which is the book that came out in 2020, so that’s what I’m writing now. Will I return to Win? Maybe. Maybe. We’ll see how- we’ll also see how people react. Not that I would work necessarily off of commercial interest, but it people really love this book, y’know, we don’t live in vacuum, that would probably somewhat influence what I do.

RA: Right. I mean, because so many of your- your books are being developed and being snapped up to be turned into film or television – I mean, Myron Bolitar is, is a recurring series waiting to happen, and then you’ve got your spin off of Win – I, I- I wonder if, y’know when your first ever, uh novel, did you write with kind of cinema television in your head? Is that something that as modern storytellers we can even avoid? Um, did you ever dream that these would ever turn into sort of film and TV?

HC: Well, everybody dreams, but there’s sort of two answers to it. The first answer is when I’m writing a book, I never ever, ever, not for one second do I think ‘Ooh, this would make a really good movie’ or ‘Ooh, this would make a really good TV series’ because that’s the kiss of death for a book. It really is. It’s, it’s- it’s just a disastrous thought, and if you’re out there writing really don’t try it, because it’s, it’s a big mistake. At the same time, to be realistic and honest, I grew up watching TV. Who didn’t? That’s my – I mean this is what we grew up with. To pretend you’re only influences – y’know you ask a writer ‘What’s your influences?’ “Oh, Shakespeare and Proust and Yeats” – come on. You watched TV growing up. And so that’s an influence on how you tell a story. To deny that is silly. So writers today do think in terms of cinema more just because they grew up with it. Where writers of a different generation did not, so they wouldn’t have that influence.

RA: Yeah, I mean I- I think this all the time – it’s impossible to even de-program your brain not to imagine scenarios in terms of cinema. I mean I- I often think about sort of Victorian novelists that didn’t have y’know TV, and their trying to describe something that they’ve never seen or experienced. And we have references for so many things – I mean it’s almost impossible not to, we’re- we are and will always be influenced by one or the other, especially in the written word. But I- I find that it means that you can kind of uh, put aside the investigation and just get on with the storytelling. And maybe go even a little bit further. It’s like instant access. Y’know, I know exactly the world that you’re talking about when you’re y’know at the beginning of Win, but- but y’know at the same time I felt there was something very Agatha Christie like about the um, the backstory of uh, of this book, I really liked the fact that there was a historic event that was really informing what was happening right now.

HC: Well, y’know when I start a book, there’s- I’m always- I have a bunch of ideas and I’m trying to think which ones are going to go in the story, and it ends up being several. So for example, in this book, I wanted – I’ve always wanted to do an art heist. Y’know, like the Gardner Museum Heist, where they still haven’t found the paintings that were stolen, the Vermeers and the Picassos that were stolen in that particular – I can’t remember if it’s Picasso now, I know it was a Vermeer – um, stolen in that- that, heist in Boston years ago, I wanted to write a book about 60’s radicals – the Weather Underground and what would happen to people who were involved in that so many years later. I also wanted to write something about a kind of Patty Hearst-type character who was a famous kidnapping here in the 70s. So those were like three of the things that I wanted to like – to delve into. And I ended up delving into all three *laugh* which sometimes happens. 

Oh, and the last one I wanted to do – I always wanted to do um, a hoarder that was actually someone famous. There was actually um, something of a case of this in New York City where somebody died who was living in a top floor of an Upper West Side building, and it ended up being the missing son – not really missing, but had just kind of gone off the rails – of a very famous American war hero. And so, I took all of these aspects, which would seem to make three or four different novels, and I make it into one novel if I can. It’s not that different from – again, I’m referencing um, um – The Stranger y’know, because you’re here and provably a number of the people listening to us have seen The Stranger on Netflix, but it’s the same thing with The Stranger a little bit, where I had a lot of ideas for secrets that could be revealed by the Stranger, and each one could have been a separate novel. And instead, the challenge is put them all in one story and find a way to hook them together.

RA: Yeah. I mean, it’s rich in a way that when I- I’m reading it and the producer head in me is saying ‘gosh, this is gonna be a great TV show’ ‘cause you know, you’ve got the present day, you’ve got the near-past and the um, the heist story, which uh, is kind of crying out for – you just want more of it, which is brilliant in a book. When you’re – you’re leaving the reader wanting to know more and wanting to, to know more about that family and what happens to them. It’s – it’s the perfect recipe, really.

HC: And so much of it does come from your life in ways that you don’t expect – right now, maybe a lot of people are watching this uh, the Aaron Sorkin movie about the Chicago Trials from the 70s, Abbie Hoffman, who is played by uh, I think Sacha Baron Cohen played him in, in the movie. When I was in college at Amherst, Abbie Hoffman was on the run, um, but he still showed up one day at our college and gave a speech, then disappeared again. And boy, that stuck in my head always. Man, I’d love to write a character that’s kind of like Abbie Hoffman. ‘Cause he had that charisma even then, y’know on stage he was funny as heck, I must have been eighteen or nineteen um, when I – when I heard him speak. And so that – I never consciously back then, I didn’t think that, but every once in a while those experiences come to head and you wanna write about it.

RA: Mm-hmm. You’ve been writing for quite a few years now-

HC: *Laugh*

RA: -you’re – I don’t know if you can even remember what it was like when you first stated your very first book. Um, and some people have said that books are like children in a way, you sort of rear them and then the more you do, the more familiar you are with that process. But would you – I mean, it’s difficult for you to answer this, but would you say you have a favourite book that you’ve written?

HC: I don’t have a favourite book that I’ve written. Um, this – this sounds self-serving, but it’s usually the book, the most recent book, that I like the best. Um, it’s a little bit like – and the way I try to explain this is – maybe you wrote a paper, an essay when you were in college which you thought was brilliant. You remember that moment in school and you wrote a paper and you thought it was brilliant and you find it now and you re-read it and you go, ‘wow, this wasn’t good after all’. It’s not that it’s not very good, it’s just that you have sort of moved on and you’re not that sort of person and so you see all the flaws. So in the older books, which I don’t re-read, I see all of the flaws. I always think, y’know even if you think of yourself, what you thought ten or fifteen years ago – you sort of go ‘ugh, what did I know back then, I’m so much smarter now’. So the same thing a little bit with books, where I think I’m learning more and the current book is better. One of the interesting experiences of working on these adaptation is having to go back and read a book – in some cases we’re doing one, the next one I think uh comes out in France for example, is Gone for Good, which I think was released in 2002! Or 2003. So I wrote it twenty years ago. And to have to go back and read it now, I’m always kind of cringing at some of the stuff-

RA: Mm-hmm.

HC: -some of the stuff I’m kind of thrilled with, like ‘wow, that’s an interesting twist. You don’t have that kind of ending anymore’ and some of it I’m like, ‘wow, why’d you go there?’ so it’s an interesting experience.

RA: Yeah, I feel the same. I very – I, uh, very early on in my career I would watch my work back in quite a lot of detail, thinking ‘I’m gonna learn something’ and then as I got older it was – it was almost unbearable to just do that. And I actually haven’t been able to do that, but it’s because when you’re – when you’re first starting out you throw everything you’ve got into that first breakout role that you do, and then your realise that you’re always in danger of repeating yourself and you think – ‘gosh, people are gonna suss me out that I’m only capable of doing one or two things’, but you live in hope that you can, y’know, find that one thing that you can completely reinvent. Y’know I still hope for that.

HC: I still think that everyone who I’ve ever met who is successful at what they do has imposter syndrome. If you don’t um, you’re prob- you have a false bravado and you’re in trouble. I always say, “only bad writers think they’re good”. The rest of us really suffer with that, and really questioning and always think we’re gonna be sussed out. And I can tell you, um, Stephen King sent me a book not that long ago because he’d nicely put my name in it and wanted my reaction. But even Steve, after all his success and whatever else, he still worries about the reaction, that he’s as good as he used to be, that people will still like it, he’s – I know him. He still worries about it. And when you stop, that’s when you’re in trouble I think as an artist, when you’re starting to doubt what it- when you don’t have the doubts, you start having an overconfidence that you sort of got this. It’s a little bit like my golf game, frankly.

RA: *laugh*

HC: There’s moment’s when I’m about to swing, y’know, I’m gonna be okay and then you get out there and you stink all over again. So-

RA: Yep

HC: -you’re constantly trying to get better and so I imagine it must be difficult to look at your old roles and you – you’re kinda cringing, right? You see all the mistakes you’re making. You see through you so to speak, right?

RA: Yep. Absolutely.

HC: And then someone will come up to you, right, and they’ll say, “Oh, my favourite thing you ever did was-“ and then they’ll list something you did twenty years ago, and you want them to pay attention to what you’re doing now *laugh*

RA: Yep. Yep. Seeing through you is, is one of the things that is quite haunting because I do, I see through me. I can’t shake myself off, if you know what I mean.

HC: Well, you are very cool, you don’t watch any of it until it’s all over. Uh, that’s correct right? You never watched any of our rushes or I remember trying to tell you that you’re doing great and all that-

RA: No, I watched, I watched the first shot-

HC: -and you had not seen any of it and I watch you every day when you’re on set working on our shows and I’ll comment if I see something or whatever, to either you directly or the director, uh, and most of the time I’m – I’m complimenting you, but you don’t – you don’t know either, because you’re not watching, you’re not getting lost in that.

RA: Yeah, I don’t like to watch or be somebody that studies myself to much, I don’t think that’s my job. I think my job is to be inside the character looking out, rather than the other way around. I leave that to the experts like you and the director.

HC: Also, I think it’s- I think if you start worrying about what – you’re right – and also you don’t have the distance. This is always an issue when I – I first start watching the cuts of the first episodes, and I read the book while I’m editing it, while I try to take time between my writing it and then seeing it, I have to sort of put myself in the position of being somebody who knows nothing about this, and doesn’t come in knowing the story already that I’ve already read or seen a thousand time. How do I keep it fresh in my head when I’m trying to be objective and watching it so we can make edits. Uh, both on the screen or on the page.

RA: Mm-hmm. What draws you to crime/thriller? What – I mean is that – I, I can’t often imagine you writing a romantic novel, but what is it that draws you to this particular genre?

HC: Well, y’know to me it’s uh, not really a genre. It’s more like – it’s a form. It’s more like saying it’s a haiku or a sonata.

RA: Mm-hmm.

HC: And within that form I can, and hopefully have, done everything. Um, I think The Stranger for example is more a story about family, uh, and the secrets we try to hide, rather than it is about who killed who – y’know, the mystery angle of it.

RA: Yeah.

HC: One of my most, uh well-known books, my first bestseller, was a book called Tell No One which was made into a French film starring François Cluze, and that’s really a love story, it’s about a man who’s madly in love with his wife and eight years earlier, she was murdered. And then eight years passed, he gets an email, he clicks the hyperlink, he sees a webcam and his dead wife walks by, still alive., And the pursuit, the wanting to get back, the hope for full redemption is really what drives the story more than ‘who killed who’.

RA: Mmm-hmm.

HC: So different stories do different things. But the great thing about the form of crime fiction is that it compels me to tell a story. I’m not getting lost in the beauty of my own genius, my own kind of navel-gazing. I have to continue to tell a story and entertain you. So any of the themes that I wanna tell, any of the things I wanna discuss, has to be slave to that story. And I think that’s probably a rich tradition. If you think about Dumas really, wasn’t that all crime fiction? Even Shakespeare is mostly crime fiction.

RA: Yeah.

HC: Most great stories, if I ask you to name a favourite novel that’s over a hundred years old, Dostoevsky, whoever, you will find that there’s almost always a crime in it. There’s almost always a crime story.

RA: I mean it’s one of the things that I get very excited about, um, I mean obviously I haven’t read your entire canon but I – there’s a signature, or a theme that you love to play on which is this idea that – that um, the people you know aren’t telling you everything about themselves, or that there’s something to hide and that in our modern world, with technology, we have this sort of ability to – to sort of lead multiple lives of truths or lies. And it’s something which I think we immediately recognise. ‘Cause I think we – we’re living that, that reality, and it’s a theme that I really enjoy about your writing.

HC: Well, first of all, thanks. Second, um, there’s a lot of things we’ve heard about the human condition. One of my favourites about the human condition that I used to write, is that we all believe that we are uniquely complex and no one knows the inside of us. And yet we think we read everybody else pretty well. We all think we are uniquely complex and the person across from us, we can kind of figure out. They’re not quite like us. Um, and that’s something I love to play with when I write. Because you’ve gotta remember that everybody is uniquely complex and on a humanity level, and on an empathy level, I raise my kids and I’m always teaching them that every person you see, the richest, the poorest, the happiest, the saddest – everybody has hopes and dreams. Just think that, when you see a stranger on the street, when you’re going to interact with somebody, when you’re getting angry at somebody, whatever it is – just remember, they have hope and dreams. Um, small little thought, but it helps me create a character as well.

RA: There’s also a- a kind of very strong level of self-deception involved, which I think can be quite surprising. Because you always read a character and go, ‘I’m not like that’ or ‘I would never do that’ and then if you really think about it, we – there’s a truth we tell ourselves about ourselves which isn’t always honest.

HC: Well, exactly. It’s really come to fruition in the world the last few years, where I kind of joked that I’ve been working too hard on making my villains sympathetic, the villains in today’s world don’t seem to be very – very complex at all.

RA: *laugh*

HC: But for the most part, people don’t think they’re bad guys. Even the bad guys don’t think they’re bad guys.

RA: Yeah.

HC: They have some way of, of justifying. It’s one of the great things about human beings, or one of the most prevailing thing about a human being, is we all have the ability to self-rationalise, to self-justify. Um, and so I’ve always tried with my villains, and I hope that I did it in everything that we’ve done together, to try to make even the villain – you may not like the villain, but you get them. I don’t really write books – I don’t write books where the serial killer is hacking up people for no reason, that doesn’t really interest me. I prefer the crimes where you can say, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t have done it maybe, but I can see why that happened. I can see if I was put in that position, um, where I may have done something similar’. That to me is a much more interesting villain than somebody who’s just cruel and evil.

RA: Yeah. Um, final question actually, is – I mean, as a listener/reader yourself – are there any other authors whose books you love and just go back – I mean, you’ve mentioned Stephen King, um I’m with you on that one – but are there any other authors who really kind of inspire you and, and y’know, like a little guilty pleasure reading for yourself and not for work?

HC: Yeah, well the problem always is that I start listing authors, and then someone will say, ‘well, what about so-and-so who’s a friend of mine’, and then I say ‘oh shoot, I forgot – I forgot that one’.

RA: *laugh*

HC: Y’know I saw recently that it’s the eleventh anniversary of the death of Robert B. Parker, who wrote the Spencer novels, if by any chance you haven’t found the Spencer novels, and I don’t know how popular they are overseas – they’re fantastic, wonderful detective series. Um, so that’s one guy I would go back in time and try to find for audio. But I actually like Philip Roth a lot on audio, even though he doesn’t do crime fiction. I’m a big Michael Connelly fan and I like Lee Child, um and Laura Lippman. Y’know, I could sit here just naming um, people all day. I’m always curious also – who is reading – who does it because of the reader and who does it because of the writer. I know there’s a number of people who will listen to anything you read, Richard, because it’s you. Um, which is really quite nice, but it’s interesting the combination of the audio reader. I have Steven Weber, he’s been reading most of my novels, though I’ve had a female lead – a woman named January LaVoy who’s fantastic – and I think Weber captures my voice. He sounds a little bit like me, we both have a similar background, similar sense of humour, so part of it with the audio is also the match you end up making.

RA: Yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I certainly find I don’t often get to read something which is purely my choice, I have a stack of things that are work-related, or that I’m about to record. So I don’t think I’ve – I’ve chosen a book recently which is just been- I don’t know how I would pick something, it’s usually a recommendation, so I’ll certainly have a look at the Spencer novels, they sound – they sound brilliant.

HC: Yeah, and they’re fun – there was a TV series in America for a while called ‘Spencer for Hire’ – this is s or going back to the, I guess the 70s or 80s I think. Um, those were not great, but the novels themselves were sort of – Raymond Chandler to Robert B. Parker to the guys who are working now. So he’s a huge – he was a tremendous influence on most of your favourite crime writers. I said in his obituary eleven years ago, I said, “90% of writers admit that Robert B. Parker was an influence and 10% lie about it”. So um, if you can find Robert B. Parker Spencer novels that would be a good clue for everybody out there.

RA: Brilliant. Well, that just about wraps it up. And uh, thanks for talking to me. I really enjoyed the book and no doubt it will be another best-seller and fingers crossed it ends up as a TV series.

HC: Well, thanks Richard, and I look forward to seeing you work on uh, Stay Close. I know that uh, Armitage Army out there *laugh* that – your, your loud uh supporters and fans who just adore you are going to go gaga cause you get to play somebody quite different from Adam in The Stranger. Um, it’s-

RA: Yeah. Looking forward to it.

HC: Yeah, it’ll be a lot of fun. Thanks very much.

[avasghost]

Crane Anatomy Update #2

(slightly outdated WIP intro here)

DISCLAIMER: this is my original work. please do not plagiarize in any way.

Hello!! I’m finally back with the second crane anatomy update!

first of all, this is probably going to be a very long post, so brace yourself for a lot of mindless rambling.

LOTS of things have changed since the last update, and its going much better now thankfully! what has happened:

i restarted the book

i changed the form

i got very burnt out

i stopped being burnt out (mostly) after making a verb list (fun verbs always help)

i figured out some stuff about my writing process

so there’s a lot to cover.

first!! I restarted the book!! This is obviously the biggest change that took place. I made a post about it here, when i wasn’t sure if i was going to restart yet, and then decided to go for it and now i’m about 4000 words into the new version. It’s going a lot better in most ways, the prose is better (somewhat), and so far nothing boring or unnecessary has happened so that’s nice! but also some things are worse: this version is burning me out a lot more, probably because i’m trying harder to make it good. there was a long period when i was hardly writing it at all, but i’m getting into it a bit more now so that’s good.

secondly, with the restart, i made a few form changes that i love and really benefit the story. first of all, it’s not in vignettes anymore (sigh of relief) because i realized that wasn’t working and the book didn’t need it. vignettes are kinda light and jumpy and fast paced, and at first i thought that was perfect for this book because of its lightness, but as i figured out more things about the characters and plot, i realized that even though the settings and aesthetic are quite sunny and bright, it’s actually a very inherently heavy story and the longer chapters will help that quite a lot with the lightness and yet also heaviness if that makes sense?? and also, the exciting part: every second chapter is a vignette flashback to Isobel’s old life.

for context, at the beginning of the first chapter, they arrive at their new house, and it’s them entering a new life, which is much darker than their old life. but the vignette chapters are flashbacks to their childhood growing up in their old house. the prose in these vignettes is very hazy and bright and dreamy and saturated, because Isobel’s memories of her childhood portray it as brighter and better than it probably really was.

and finally, in all these major changes, i figured out something about my writing process: i’m a pantser, but i like to have the first few chapters outlined, as sort of a springboard into the rest of the book, something solid to base everything else off of. i guess that technically makes me a plantser, even though everything else is pantsed.

now, onto the chapters and excerpts! i’m finished the first chapter and the first vignette, and currently working on chapter 2.

you may notice that some scenes are very similar to the first attempt, because i did keep a lot of scenes and also a lot of the same prose.

excerpts under the cut.

chapter 1: this new life

it felt soooooo good to write a full length chapter again. after trying to write vignettes for a while, writing a full length chapter was so much more enjoyable. i used to be a very serious underwriter, but (luckily) have mostly gotten over that and can write actual full chapters now, and have a hard time writing short ones!

i named the chapter “this new life” because my plan is to mirror it later in the book, when there’s a vignette flashback to right before they left their old house and its called “this old life” (if i decide to title the vignettes). i love mirroring chapter titles and lines and stuff so i’m excited for this.

ALSO i said in the first writing update (which i won’t link because it’s embarrassing) that there’s a redwood tree in the backyard, but i changed it to an oak tree lol because i realized it would be v weird for someone to have a random redwood tree growing in their backyard.

excerpts

first of all, the new first line:

(idk if this is actually an oak tree but i don’t care about tree accuracy as long as there’s aesthetic accuracy ✨)

The first time Isobel steps onto the lawn outside the new house is the first time she feels her life change in person. It’s instantaneous, like a death or a rebirth. Clouds thread across a sun-smothered sky like gossamer strands, swallows trill out of the limbs of oak trees that arrow down the sidewalk. The car only halfway to a stop, and Isobel has already clambered out. A squirrel bullets along an oak branch. A wind chime tremolos in the breeze. It’s the first day of summer. Life has never felt so dead.

a bit about them unpacking and living sad times (also i changed their mom’s name from beth to pamela because beth was too stereotypical)

Nobody speaks except to toss instructions back and forth, or ask for something to be passed to them as they unpack the few things they need to last the night. Their mother, Pamela, is quick-tempered. It’s clear she never wanted to come here, even though she always smiled when they talked about it, encouraged everybody, told them it was for the best, which it was. It was for the best, but that didn’t make it a good thing. That didn’t brighten the prospect, make it feel better. That just made it less avoidable.

Cyrus, their father, keeps up his usual attitude of encouragement, just like Pamela, pointing out every good thing: the sunlight that spangles everything in citrine, the pizza he’s about to order, the bluebird that spits music in the open window, though he says all these things half-heartedly. His faltering smiles give him away. The strands of grey hair pasted to his forehead. The woolly cable-knit sweater he only wears when he’s unhappy and has been wearing almost every day for the last two months.

and of course, margaret is having the time of her life because she’s margaret:

Margaret is the only one who shows no sign of remorse. She unpacks quickly, then spends the rest of the day ruffling through boxes and coolers for crinkly chip bags and frozen strawberries that melt on your tongue and dribble down your throat. A pocket mirror spined with cracks sits beside her on the table, in case she needs to tweak her reflection. Gold chain jewelry chimes around her throat when she moves, glints in the sunlight that pools around her.

after they eat dinner and isobel leaves (yes i’ve shared most of this excerpt before but it’s one of my favorite parts so here it is again!)

After dinner, Isobel’s throat is still throbbing and she decides to leave the house, leave her family, so if she cries no one has to see her. She doesn’t know where she’ll go, where there is to go, but at seven o’clock she lies about where she’s going, shoves out of her chair and clatters out the door without saying goodbye.

From the doorstep, this new life is just a neighborhood. A car parked in half the driveways, the others at work or school or nowhere. Hedges only trimmed on one side. Flower beds, half withering and half thriving. Marigolds are the most radiant as Isobel stalks down the road. Their fluorescent buds like blood-rimmed suns.

She walks down the middle of the road because the town is quiet at this time, no cars whisk on the pavement, swish corners because they don’t think anyone will be walking there. It’s a risk she finds thrilling because she knows Pamela would make her stop if she was here.

Isobel told them she would go explore the neighborhood, the town, maybe the empty spaces outside it. Wave hello to the skinny chiffon woman bent double over the trunk of her red Chevrolet, the man in the houndstooth jacket in his gaping garage, smoke snaking up the throat of his cigarette. Smile when they wave back.

and of course she runs into a forest because everything i write features too many forest scenes!

She runs until her breath clumps in her chest and she stops, one hand splayed over the itchy bark of an elm tree to keep her balance. It’s dark here, but she’s not afraid of the dark. It’s lonely here, but she’s immune to loneliness. Trees spoke the thin canopy, a veil of gauzy leaves. The sky is clotted with sagging clouds.

this chapter is also where we meet felix, who i love so much. i want to make a character intro for him and also his brother, miles, soon, but i’ve been planning to do that for weeks and haven’t yet so i don’t know when/if i will.

felix shows up in the forest and he and isobel talk a bit: felix is very nice and isobel is my lil psychopath wannabe <3. isobel ends up leaving abruptly because it’s about to rain, and then she gets home and talks with piper a bit and then goes to bed. i don’t like ending chapters with characters going to bed, because i do it so much! a character going to bed has a sense of closure since its the end of the day, and obviously there’s nothing wrong with ending a chapter like this, but i do it do often that it’s starting to irritate me.

first vignette

i still haven’t decided how i’m going to title the vignettes. they’re not chapters, so this isn’t going to be called ‘chapter 2′, but they’re still sort of chapters?? right now i just have them titled as roman numerals, but i’m not happy with this and am going to change it as soon as i think of something better.

this vignette is a short flashback to that morning, right before they leave to go to their new house. it features isobel and piper going into the forest and then they leave and its v sad.

this is the first flashback in the book, and then in future flashbacks it jumps back a few years and follows their childhood right up to this flashback again. the last flashback is going to end with the same line as the first line of the actual book, so it comes full circle.

excerpts

There were different types of trees. It was a different town, in a different province. Isobel and Piper had evaded Pamela’s searching fingers, hopped the fence, blotted under the trees like redwing blackbirds.

Piper slowed first, sunlight quivering over her sawn black curls, pinching out a cramp after outrunning Isobel the whole time.

same excerpt as in the first update but with an extra sentence at the end and the beginning! why share new prose when you can just recycle old excerpts galaxy brain

here’s when pamela calls them out of the forest and they leave:

Pamela’s raspy shouts wound Piper and Isobel out of reverie. They trundled to their feet, flitted through the trees back to the house. Then they left.

Isobel stared at the house through the rear window as the car clicked into motion, wheels whirring on the pavement. She watched it shrink: first it was her home, then just a house, then a dollhouse, a triangle of roof on the horizon, and then nothing. From that point on, it was just an image in her head, a lingering wish. A life lost. A life she would never get back again.

this is v sad i’m sorry characters but i had to cause you this misery for the sake of the plot (also you probably deserve it)

anyway that’s all i have for this update! bye!

- Ava

Crane Anatomy taglist (ask to be added/removed!):

@gracestowewriting​​ @flip-phones @shaelinwrites​​​

[thanksjro]

“Bullets”, a Last Stand of the Wreckers prose story- Ironfist Solves a Murder Mystery

Now that Overlord and Rewind have been exploded horribly in the vacuum of space, multiple people have died, and Chromedome’s horrifically single, let’s take a look at all those Last Stand of the Wreckers extras, yeah?

We more or less start with a Furmanism, as is tradition.

One day Furmanisms won’t be nearly as prevalent within the comic publications, and that is a day that I cannot wait to see. Forget politics, forget misogyny, forget basically NEEDING Death of the Author in effect to enjoy anything the man’s done- Furmanisms are a crutch that everybody in this franchise uses, but nobody needs. They never feel natural, in my opinion. It’s like a literary obligation at this point, and you can tell, because it never quite meshes with any writer’s style.

Anyway, this is the setup for what would happen on Pova- the Wreckers have been watching Squadron X fix up their ship, and now that the thing’s airborne again they’ve gotten itchy trigger fingers. Well, some of them, anyway. Rack n Ruin aren’t so sure about this whole thing, seeing as there are eight of them and an entire battalion up there. Impactor’s working the crowd though, as a leader of such a high turnover rate group is required to do, and that’s the point where First Aid stops reading.

Yep, this is one of Fisitron’s datalog entries, of which First Aid is a fan.

This isn’t First Aid’s first appearance within the IDW continuity- he played a role in Spotlight: Jazz, where he lived up to his name, and in Transformers: Ironhide #1, where he was in the background. This IS his premiere as a major player in a story, however, and it’s here that he’s revealed to be a bit of a slacker- he should be making the rounds at Delphi right now, but instead he’s reading entry logs about the wartime equivalent of a boyband.

He hits a key to quicktab to something at least somewhat medically-related as he feels someone approaching from behind. It’s the CMO, and he is in no way fooled by First Aid’s attempt to hide his shame. He gets back to work, but that particular entry- 113, because of course it is- is still on his mind. Hope he never finds out it’s a load of bunk.

I REALLY hope he never finds out this is all bunk. We all need something, you know?

Of course, First Aid- y’know, not to brag or anything- personally met one of the Wreckers. Roughly five years ago, Springer had approached him at a medical conference on Kimia. Why a medical conference was being held on Kimia of all places isn’t addressed, but it was probably because half the folks stationed there are doctors. First Aid, being a classy guy, fucking ogles Springer the entire time they’re talking.

You’ve heard of “Men Writing Women”, now it’s time for “Roberts Writing Robots”. Yes, this is THAT scene, and it’s on the first goddamn page.

First Aid, wanting to be of use to his idol, offers his medical expertise, completely willing to fix Springer’s nose, give him a breast reduction, and even update the circuit dampeners he doesn’t have. Springer, while flattered, isn’t looking for that sort of help. He’s looking for folks who have a lot to give.

The phrasing he uses makes First Aid think that he’s about to be recruited to the Wreckers- in other words, about to be put in line for a slow and awful death- but Springer clarifies that he’s looking more for eyes and ears to help him, not so much bodies. He hands First Aid a card with his number, and says to give him a call sometime.

Cutting back to the present, First Aid is walking through the rows of patient slabs, where we see an honestly horrifying practice in play- every patient in Delphi has their non-essential functions turned off to conserve power. This includes things like the ability to move, and speak.

Because that couldn’t possibly have any negative repercussions.

He checks in on the Fader he’s been assigned, confirms that, yes, his head IS still missing from his neck, then makes to walk out of the room, only to be startled by the sudden entry of a stretcher and Ambulon. Here, Ambulon is identified as a chief paramedic, as opposed to being a ward manager. Whether this is early installment weirdness or a simple mistake isn’t clear.

Ambulon is quickly followed by Dogfight, Dodger, and Backstreet(’s back, alright!) First Aid gets to work, by checking the three of them for injuries, paying special attention to their Autobot badges.

This is the reason Rung had to call in at the beginning of MTMTE #4, though it might be more because First Aid can’t act like a professional of five friggin’ minutes.

Oh, Delphi’s HR department is getting a call for sure.

First Aid, while a known fondler of badges, has never had this exact reaction. He runs off to make a phone call, leaving the injured Dodger to wait for the surgery he’s going to undergo the moment First Aid gets back.

Meanwhile, somewhere else- I’m guessing Kimia- Rung has an appointment underway with a dude named Flattop.

Flattop’s TFWiki article is one of the most depressing on the entire site, and it’s completely “Bullets”’s fault.

You see, Flattop’s attempting to talk through his trauma, but it’s difficult.

This level of insight is why they pay Rung the big bucks.

The war, while terrible for everyone’s mental health, has given Rung a slew of patients to handle.

Gee, wonder who that medic was.

Anyway, so Flattop’s deal- he was at Babu Yar, which was an event that was apparently so terrible, everyone involved was offered brand new bodies as compensation. He’s currently hiding underneath a table, which Rung identifies as “playing to type”. Flattop isn’t even here to talk about Babu Yar, but it’s good to know that war is still hell.

The reason Flattop’s actually here is this: he was serving under Silverstreak- another one of Rung’s patients, and someone who I’m convinced might actually be a Warrior cat given the name- and was going to check something out when he saw something utterly terrifying.

Rung gets Flattop out from under the table, and they talk about what the Shimmer means. Flattop is convinced that since he’s seen the thing, he’s going to die. You see, folklore in space is very similar to its counterpart on Earth, in that it’s a warning swathed in story to make it easily digestible.

Rung, who tries to keep things rational, offers to give Flattop a few possible explanations for what he saw. Because Flattop had only recently gotten his hot new bod a short while before he saw the Shimmer, it’s completely possible he had had a hallucination due to the adjustment period. Another theory is that Flattop has PTSD. Which, I mean, yeah.

While Rung was busy trying to explain what had happened, Flattop friggin’ died.

Awkward.

Over with Ironfist- because “Bullets” is a prequel- we’re in the middle of a meeting with the Ethics Committee. Xaaron, Animus, and Trailbreaker of all people, have come together to pass judgement on Ironfist’s cerebro-sensitive bullets. There’s a lot of hemming and hawing, and Ironfist reflects on how they got to this moment, while fiddling with a data slug to burn off the nerves.

This is just after the Surge happened, an event kicked off by the betrayal of the Autobot cause allowed Megatron to seize a majority of the Autobot outposts. It was a huge deal, a lot of shit was stolen, including the Weak Anthropic Principle, and it left everyone a little twitchy towards one another. Trust is not in vogue at present.

Kimia’s in a mess of trouble anyway, however, due to the events of Babu Yar, where Gideon’s Glue had rained down on the Autobot troops under Flame’s command, eaten to Swiss cheese by something eerily similar to something being developed on the station.

So an investigation was established. Brainstorm, who’s apparently big man on campus here at Kimia, is questioned, as is everyone else. Of course, no one cops to having invented Gideon’s Glue, because that’s a big ol’ war crime, so the questioning goes nowhere, but now there’s a precedent for mistrust on this science station.

Anyway, back to the bullet thing.

Ironfist’s cerebro-sensitive bullets are designed to hit the head, every single time, ignoring trajectory, ballistic physics, what you think is possible, and the Geneva Convention. It’s fired, it hits the first brain it identifies. Brutal stuff. Effective, but brutal.

Trailbreaker’s not a fan.

I mean, maybe? I guess it depends how gray your morality is. I bet Prowl would like them.

After telling Trailbreaker to keep it professional, Xaaron tells Ironfist that using these bullets would be a literal war crime, and he’s got a little over a day to hand them over to the Committee for destruction. Meeting adjourned!

Ironfist is left standing there until his good buddy Skyfall checks in on him. Ironfist is kind of bummed out, but Skyfall knows how to cheer him up- by comparing him to Impactor, former leader of the Wreckers, and one of Ironfist’s fan-crushes.

Man, this makes the Pova reveal a little harsher in hindsight, huh?

Skyfall invites Ironfist to the Exit Rooms, a place where the Kimia employees can drink and no one will give a shit, and as they make their way over they run into Brainstorm.

Brainstorm gets some interesting development in this story.

That’s right, not only are his weapons completely insane, and in some cases literally abstract, they’re apparently often so incredibly dangerous that the Ethics Committee loses sleep over the fact that they exist.

And Brainstorm loves it.

No wonder Trailbreaker was so annoyed in his Spotlight.

Skyfall asks about what’s in Brainstorm’s briefcase, gets an answer that’s likely a lie, then the boys head over to the Exit Rooms.

Over on Hydrus 5, it’s raining cats and dogs, and this is somehow the Transformers fault. I guess the universe bends to the will of what would be the most dramatic, as everyone takes a break from warmongering to soul-search.

Or ego-stroking. That works too.

Here is our dear Pyro, reveling in the aftermath of a battle that destroyed the natural ecosystem of the land, but at least they kicked those ‘Cons’ asses!

Pyro, who’s revealed to be maybe perhaps not the best at coming up with one-liners, is left alone for a bit as Afterburner goes to check on the rest of their men. As he tries to piece together a speech to deliver, he sees a green something- they’re always green, aren’t they?- and that something is the Shimmer.

Well, heck.

Over on the dilapidated space station of Debris (wow, that’s even less subtle than usual for this franchise) Springer’s holding a bullet. I mean, it’s not really a bullet, and the Decepticon who fired it wasn’t really a Decepticon.

I want you to know that I keep track of how many times 113 comes up in these stories, and for “Bullets" it’s a LOT.

Today’s letter from Agent 113 foreshadows/hindshadows the events of Last Stand, claiming that the DJD hasn’t heard anything from Garrus-9 since the Surge happened. Prowl’s concerned that Fortress Maximus is still alive in there and fighting off the Decepticons while waiting for backup, so he recently called Springer and invited the Wreckers on a mission.

All Springer has to do is pick some sorry sons of guns to die.

Over with Guzzle, who is romanticizing a weapon, comparing his gun to a religious artifact, our dear little bastard man has realized that he does, in fact, have emotions, and is in mourning over his lost comrades, who died rescuing Kup from Tsiehshi. Guzzle doesn’t much appreciate this whole “feeling” thing, and would rather it didn’t get in the way of him shooting statues for no other reason than him wanting to. Then he sees the Shimmer, and feels fear. He doesn’t much care for that, either.

Even Nick Roche is powerless to stop this madness.

We reconfirm the fact that Ironfist is a massive nerd, then are shown that the bullet accident that will have killed him by the end of Last Stand #5 has already happened. Ever so slowly, the bullet is heading for Ironfist’s brain. Every time it hits a new layer of his noggin, he blacks out.

Ironfist is going to leave on his super-fun, not-at-all-traumatizing Wrecker adventure soon, and he’s promised Skyfall his workshop. Skyfall was at Grindcore for a while, and that kind of gave him PTSD, so when Ironfist had gotten accepted to Kimia, he’d brought him along for the ride.

I like to call Grindcore Eugenesis-lite.

Because Skyfall is a reckless son of a gun with access to Ironfist’s workshop, he inadvertently caused a major incident with something called Black Phosphex, which resulted in the deaths of several Autobots because it wasn’t properly tested. This landed him in Garrus-9 for a bit, in a temporary career-path deviation, until it was time to come home to Kimia, just in time for the Inquiry.

Are stans always this intense? Because good lord, Ironfist.

Over at Karashi Delta, in the aftermath of a fierce battle, Rotorstorm is hyping himself the fuck up.

But does he buy it himself?

Hmm, survey says no.

Of course, verbal abuse isn’t the only thing we’ll be getting here. No, things begin to escalate pretty rapidly with Jetstream, who moves from shoving to almost beating Rotorstorm to death in a matter of months, before disappearing from the station forever.

Dang, this Jetstream fella kinda sucks. What’s his friggin’ problem?

Ah.

Again, I can’t stress this enough, Whirl’s awful flipper claws from back during his time as a cop do not make a nice fist. He was basically stabbing Rotorstorm. Who let this man be a teacher?

Rotorstorm is snapped out of his self-deprecating flashbacks by the sight of something on the canyon lip up ahead. It’s the gotdang Shimmer. Rotorstorm books it, not wanting to be caught by a harbinger of death. It doesn’t work, but points for trying.

Back on Debris, Springer’s picked his new recruits. Now all he has to do is call them up. Hey, isn’t Springer green? Green like the Shimmer? How about that.

Back on Kimia, Skyfall’s wandered into Ironfist’s workshop to share the gossip on Fisitron’s latest Wreckers: Declassified. Folks are a bit critical of his writing style, it would seem.

Of course Swerve knows what fan-fiction is. He seems like exactly the type to make fun of it, then read a 43,000 word fic in a single sitting, under cover of darkness, burning with shame all the while.

After making a note on his current Wreckers: Declassified document to ease up on the adverbs, Ironfist switches gears and gets busy on his other project: an Unofficial Wreckers’ Training Guide. I wonder when the switch from Primal Vanguard to Wreckers as a hyperfixation happened for him.

Ironfist asks Skyfall what entry he’s currently on, and the answer is a ways away from the latest one. Skyfall’s a slow reader, but he doesn’t want to just beam it all into his brain because it feels like cheating. He asks Ironfist when he’s going to cover the Wreckers’ mission to Garrus-9, the one that happened while he was there being not-imprisoned. Ironfist gives a non-answer, then asks if Skyfall wants to help with packing up the war-crime guns. Skyfall most certainly does not.

Ironfist starts breaking everything down when he gets a call from Prowl, as happened in Last Stand #4.

Back with Springer, we’re giving our dad a hug, as he greets Kup. It’s here we find out who Ironfist replaced on the Wrecker team for Operation: Retrieval- it was Skyfall. Skyfall had impressed Springer during their last Garrus-9 excursion, and thought that he’d be a good fit for the team, despite the Black Phosphex incident.

Kup goes full old man story time mode about how insanely boring Prowl is, while Springer gets the door. On the other side is Twin Twist, Top Spin, and Perceptor. They hold the vote, Ironfist given immunity due to unmentioned Prowl reasons, and Springer gets ready to call all their new pals.

Back at Ironfist’s workshop, Ironfist reflects on just how his life got to this point. He’s going to join the Wreckers! Never mind the fact that he’ll be going to die, and that’s if the bullet crawling around in his skull doesn’t get him first. Never mind the very likely possibility that he’s being exploited by Prowl. Nah, he’s gonna go on an adventure! It’s gonna be awesome! Yaaaaay!

It doesn’t pay to be blue and naive when Roberts is handling the story. Just ask Pipes.

Or don’t. You won’t get an answer.

Called it.

Ironfist, starstruck, bumbles his way through the conversation we saw in the Mosaic, and so it was that he became a Wrecker. All he has to do is pop on over to Rung’s office, get his head examined, then get his butt on over to Babu Yar.

Telecon work completed, Springer reflects on the fact that Guzzle turned him down. It’s not often someone turns down the chance to be a Wrecker.

Oh, well, never mind then.

Ironfist immediately tells Skyfall about what’s happened, because he’s just so jazzed to be a Wrecker. Skyfall isn’t quite as thrilled, but does his best to be supportive.

And by that I mean he’s not listening in the slightest as he’s already planning out the interior design for the workshop once Ironfist is gone. I bet he’ll get Atomizer to help him, the tacky bastard.

Skyfall runs off to go look at paint swatches or whatever, and Ironfist finalizes the stuff for the Ethics Committee pickup.

Oh, so that appointment wasn’t on Kimia after all. Can we please get some sort of fast-track program for the mental health specific degrees? We can’t keep using Rung for everybody, he’s only one person.

Oh heavens, Ironfist, be careful.

Ironfist gets another call, and we jump scenes before we can figure out just who rang or why.

Brief timeskip, and we find ourselves at Babu Yar, as Ironfist introduces himself to Guzzle and his gun.

Ironfist is about as smooth as coarse-grit sandpaper.

While Ironfist is busy revealing his nerd shame to Guzzle, someone’s decided to be a cocky little asshole.

Oh, dramatic irony. Always a delightful sort of pain.

Rotorstorm cranks up the “I’m hot shit” act to 11.5, doing completely unnecessary flips and talking himself up like he will literally die if he doesn’t.

Off in the distance, something disingenuously impressive comes up over the hill.

Of course, it’s not Optimus Prime, but it is someone who would very much like to be him. Such is the nature of primus apotheosis. Gang’s all here!

This is going to turn out fan-fucking-tastic.

Rotorstorm and Guzzle want to play with the big gun Ironfist brought along, and since Ironfist is going to die anyway, he lets them go for it. This would be why everything was on fire at the start of the miniseries.

Yep. Just gotta make it hurt just a little more, doncha Roberts? Just gotta twist the knife.

Nine months after the events of the Garrus-9 mission, Skyfall is upset. He’s gone and played himself by not attending the Ethics Committee hearings, and they’ve taken all his toys away as a result. He tries to mask his lack of concern for safety precautions behind a facade of missing Ironfist, but it doesn’t get him the weapons back.

Feeling cross, he decides it’s about time he made a visit to the Exit Rooms to blow off a little steam.

Later, he gets a call. Worried that his lack of ethics and/or his drunken squabbling has gotten him in trouble yet again, he’s loathe to answer, but does anyway.

Ghost call!

No, it’s actually a prerecorded message, one that claims that Skyfall killed Ironfist. Ironfist had asked Brainstorm to take a gander at the gun after he got shot, and found that it had been tampered with, set to go off on its own when held a certain way. That’s who was calling before he left for his Wrecker mission. 

Skyfall starts to panic, expecting the security detail for Kimia to bust into the workshop at any second. 

Ironfist knows that only Skyfall could have done this to him, but he doesn’t know the exact motive. Was it because he was jealous of how good a weapons expert he was? A chip on his shoulder about Grindcore? Whatever the reason, Ironfist isn’t terribly concerned at the time of the recording. What he is concerned about is Gideon’s Glue.

Ironfist had, in fact, invented Gideon’s Glue, but he’d been so horrified by what the shit actually did, he flushed it into space and destroyed all research before the Ethics Committee even knew about it. It still got to the Decepticons, though, didn’t it? How could such a thing happen?

Probably not, considering what happens next.

Ironfist is a smart guy, but more importantly, he knows how to reach his audience. Literally, in this case, as Skyfall finds out, when the Enforcement Squad starts trying to break down the door. Ironfist had the message that Skyfall is currently listening to primed for beaming into all of Fisitron’s reader’s brains. Everyone knows what happened. Swerve. Atomizer. Ratchet, who’s over on Earth right now. First Aid, who has enough bullshit to worry about on Delphi without this nonsense. You. Me. Everyone.

Skyfall, in a mad attempt to save himself, throws some of Ironfist’s Wrecker memorabilia at the door, and out pops that last tube of Gideon’s Glue.

There’s only one way out of this one.

This got really intense at the end, didn’t it?

[letterboxd]

Life in Film: Kris Rey.

As her new comedy I Used to Go Here opens, Chicago-based writer and director Kris Rey talks to Letterboxd editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood about turning 40, divorce, female friendships, why nobody but Jemaine Clement could pull off a scene making tea, and what we can all learn from Generation Z.

If Kris Rey’s new comedy I Used to Go Here were a typical Hollywood rom-com, it would finish just before Rey’s film starts: with Kate Conklin (Gillian Jacobs) as a newly published author, engaged to be married to a handsome guy. Instead, we meet Kate in a Bushwick apartment she can no longer afford, as her publishing company breaks the news that her debut novel (Seasons Passed; terrible cover art, purple prose) is a failure and the publicity tour is off. That’s on top of the insult that her fiancé has recently ended their engagement.

Kate is given a faint ray of optimism when her creative writing professor (Jemaine Clement) invites her back to the liberal arts college she graduated from a decade earlier, to give a talk to his Gen Z students. Leaving Brooklyn and her pregnant bestie behind, Kate dives into the nostalgia of her old Illinois stomping ground, and I Used to Go Here turns into a low-key, pot-fuelled, intergenerational romp through ideas of success, friendship, creativity, authenticity and idolization.

The film’s fans on Letterboxd include Matt Neglia, who writes: “Gillian Jacobs brings charismatic charm and restraint to her role as a writer longing for a time when we were filled with endless potential without the fear of failure.” Matt DeTurck identifies with this theme: “Relatable for anyone wrestling with fitting the pieces of their life together in ways that feel truthful.”

On the contemporary representation of university life, Alex Billington remarks that “it’s got all the college movie tropes… but it repackages all of these in a smart adult-looking-back indie film package”. Max notes that “the college kids are an invaluable addition and feel like people rather than college or Gen Z stereotypes”.

Kate (Gillian Jacobs) and David (Jemaine Clement) in a scene from ‘I Used to Go Here’.

Your film starts just after the point at which a mainstream comedy about a single white woman in her thirties would end: with Kate’s book being published to no acclaim, her engagement being broken off, everybody else pregnant except her. It runs in opposition to the happy endings Hollywood has made us expect. Kris Rey: Oh god, [that’s] so astute. No-one has said that before and I have never thought of it before, but that’s so true! I think what’s so interesting about the whole journey that she goes on, and all of our own personal journeys, is that you’re used to, like, at the end of the movie, they get married! She gets her book published! And then everything is perfect! And then you realize: ‘Oh. Oh god, okay. How do I move on from this?’ So, you’re right, that is what’s so different about this.

The other thing—and I’m sure this can be said about most films this year—is how the set-up feels weirdly right for these times, which is to say: the widespread derailment of plans that the pandemic has wrought. It’s like we’re in a strange global coming-of-age. Several Letterboxd reviews observe how, for women in their late twenties to early thirties, there’s a second coming-of-age where everything suddenly feels extremely nostalgic. The film dives into that longing feeling by literally returning Kate to her old college. It’s funny, you know, a lot of people have pointed out how this doesn’t quite fit into a category. It’s not a rom-com, it’s not a true coming-of-age film in a sense of what we know that to be. I think that part of it is exactly what you’ve just pointed out, which is that it’s about a unique period of time for women, where you do reach this precipice. Mostly, it comes out of this big ever-pressing question which is “Am I going to have a family or not?”. Not every woman, but most women, have that question in their head until they either have a baby or they reach the age where they can’t have a baby anymore. “Am I going to have this? Am I going to follow this path of domesticity? Am I going to find a relationship that works long enough to have a family with them? Am I going to have to make sacrifices in my career to make room to have a family? Am I going to find them all at once?” Men just don’t have that point, to no fault of their own, but the fault of the patriarchy in general, which is that it has to be a conscious decision for women in a way that everything revolves around that, as we go about our lives at that age.

And you’ve explored that idea in more than just this film. I loved the awkward-yet-sincere moment at the baby shower, when the friends make her hold her book alongside their third-trimester bumps for a group photo. A book is a baby, and its publication should also be celebrated! Scenes like that emphasize how well Gillian Jacobs embraced the role of Kate. What did she bring to it that wasn’t on the page? There’s such a special thing that happens when you cast anyone for anything. It certainly happened with Gillian, but also with everyone. Definitely Jemaine was a big one, which is that I don’t typically write for specific actors. I write a character, I write the dialog, and then when I cast them I think ‘oh, Jemaine Clement is going to be in this role’, so then I go back through and read the whole thing in his voice and think ‘maybe he’d say it like this instead’ and maybe after [a scene we don’t wish to spoil], he would make tea for everyone. Very few, if any, American actors would be able to pull that moment off. That is kind of what I’m looking for: who are they? Are they able to feel like real people? Because so often they feel performative.

Like versions of a person. Right. Like they’re acting like a person! Gillian is very authentic. If you were to talk to her, she would just seem like her real self, and that was what was so appealing about her for me. Gillian just really brought herself, and I learned about her as a person.

As well as great comics like Kate Micucci and Jorma Taccone, there’s a lovely assortment of inclusive young characters who live in Kate’s old student house. Where did you find them? I just flushed them out and gathered them and held them close! There’s a couple of them that I didn’t know but I had seen in other stuff. Josh Wiggins, who plays Hugo, I’d seen him act in a movie called Hellion. Forrest Goodluck I saw in The Miseducation of Cameron Post. He’s incredible in that and I knew I wanted him to play Animal. Hannah Marks was someone that was sent to me, and we talked on the phone and I just knew she would be perfect. She’s such a brilliant go-getter and filmmaker and so ambitious in her own life. Khloe Janel, who plays Emma, auditioned for me here in Chicago and she’s so good. I adore her. I was taking a walk yesterday through the neighborhood and I saw her name on a little sign—she was making these poetry zines! I bought one.

Hugo (Josh Wiggins), Animal (Forrest Goodluck) and Tall Brandon (Brandon Daley) in ‘I Used to Go Here’.

The person we need to know about is whoever the guy is who plays Tall Brandon! Brandon Daley, who plays tall Brandon, is a person that I just knew. He is on the periphery of my social circle and he had come to a few parties at my house. His buddies called him ‘Tall Brandon’, in this very demeaning way! They were of course all good friends. I thought he was such a funny character that I wrote the character based on him. But I didn’t know him. Then he heard that I had written a part called Tall Brandon and he asked if he could play the part. I was like, “I don’t think so, Brandon!”

Was he an actor? Kind of. He’s a filmmaker but he’s much younger than me and he hadn’t done anything besides his own work. But I made him audition for the role based on him! [Laughs] I don’t know, I was just like, it’s a huge role, you know? The last thing you want is someone who can’t act like themselves, which everyone struggles to do. Anyway, he was so good in the audition, so funny, and he just nailed it. He steals the whole movie! He’s just so good.

I Used to Go Here is a long way from problematic college fare like Revenge of the Nerds or the angst of St Elmo’s Fire. It feels thoroughly 21st-century, especially in how the Gen Z housemates take an inclusive, ‘sure, why not’ approach to having Kate tag along with them. What inspired the way you wrote the intergenerational aspects of the film? There weren’t necessarily college films that I was using for inspiration. I wanted the place to feel the same that she left, but I wanted the people to feel different. This is what I’m finding in my life. I’m gonna turn 40 this year, and when I interact with people in their twenties, I’m blown away by the way that they view the world and the way that they view themselves and each other. I’m so impressed by it. And I am on board with a lot of these cultural changes that we’re seeing happen before our eyes, like, the idea of gender identity has changed so much, and so quickly. I’ve never seen anything change like that in my life. The idea of consent. When I first heard it I was like, “What? You have to ask if you wanna touch someone or kiss someone? It seems so lame!” Now, I can’t believe that we ever did that! I’m learning so much. They seem so clear-headed about it all. I just think that we have a lot to learn from that generation.

The movie’s not about that, necessarily, but it’s infused into it and I wanted that to influence Kate, in her life. Some of it is specific to this generation, but some of it is also just specific to being in your twenties. The character April, the way that she thinks about the [publishing] industry and her art, and the way that Kate, who is jaded, is like, “Okay, whatever, you’re naïve, make your little magazine, but you’ll have to follow the rules.” We’ve all been faced with that before.

Kris Rey with her son Jude Swanberg on the set of ‘I Used to Go Here’. / Photo by Blair Todd

So it’s a watershed year for you, turning 40. What would you define success and happiness as now, compared to when you were in your twenties and the ideas you had about the industry then? Oh, god. Okay so I’ve also had a lot of personal growth because I got divorced this last year, which was crazy. I’ve got two kids, a four year old and a nine year old. So I’ve been through so much; it’s been such a huge change for me. I have learned a lot, but one of the things that I have learned so much is that the relationships that matter the most in my life are my female friendships. I’ve always known that, but I’ve never seen it so much as I have in the last two years, both personally throughout my divorce, and professionally through making a film without a romantic partner to lean on. Of course I have male friends that are wonderful and supportive, but my female friends, those relationships are where I’m realizing I wanna put my effort into more than any other part of my life.

Okay, it’s time for a few questions about movies that are important to you. Thinking back, what is the film that made you want to be a filmmaker? Boogie Nights was the first film that I watched when I was in high school that I thought ‘oh, this is a job, and I’m seeing someone make stylistic choices that are interesting and unique’. You can see the behind the scenes in that movie a little bit. I remember watching it and thinking ‘that would be a cool job’. I also really loved the movie Bottle Rocket in high school. I began my filmmaking career thinking that I wanted to make documentaries, and so there’s also a lot of docs that I loved. But those were the early films that made me realize that it was even a job. Unfortunately not any female filmmakers, because I think that was just so rare [then].

What is your all-time comfort favorite film? Sleepless in Seattle, no question.

There’s your female filmmaker! Yes, but with a movie like Sleepless in Seattle, it’s such a mainstream movie that I never thought of it as ‘a job’. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I saw more independent and auteurish works. But Nora Ephron is a genius. That movie is perfect in my opinion.

What’s a film that, as a teenager, felt like a mirror into your soul? That movie with Chris O’Donnell, an Irish film, Circle of Friends. With Minnie Driver! Who is also in Good Will Hunting, another film I saw in high school. I haven’t seen Circle of Friends since it came out, but it felt very real to me, that movie. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that movie to anyone!

Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes in ‘Shakespeare in Love’ (1998).

What is the sexiest film you’ve ever seen? Shakespeare in Love! [Laughs.] There’s two movies. One was Legends of the Fall. It was literally the sexiest movie I’d ever seen up till that point. I was very young when it came out and there was this lovemaking scene by candlelight and I was like, ‘oh, that’s what sex is!’. And then Shakespeare in Love. That scene where he’s unwrapping her? So hot.

Who is another director you’d die for? I’m such a huge fan of Nicole Holofcener. I love her films so much. I have never met her. I do know some people that know her and I am honestly so scared to meet her because I like her work so much. She’s probably my favorite filmmaker. I just vibe with everything she makes. I love the tone. I just love all of her movies.

What’s a film that we should watch after we watch yours? You should watch She Dies Tomorrow. It’s so good, and Amy Seimetz is my very, very close and dear friend. We started making movies at the same time. Our movies were supposed to premiere at SXSW on the same day, and now they are being released on the same day, and we’re just in love with each other. Amy and I are— the movies are so wildly different from each other, but her movie is so good. It is really funny, it’s really weird and it’s really appropriate for the times right now.

I feel like some reviews are missing the comedy in it. I laughed so much throughout that film. I agree: people don’t get it! Can I shout out another movie that I watched recently? Crossing Delancey. I had never seen it before and my sister-in-law texted me and she was like, “you should watch this film like right now—this seems like something you would love”. I couldn’t believe how good it was. It’s so great. It feels like it could be shot right now in Brooklyn. All the cool kids in Brooklyn are dressing exactly the same way that all the cool kids in Brooklyn dressed in 1988, or whenever it came out. She’s having a dialog with a friend and the friend is like openly breastfeeding. And the way that they’re talking about romance and all this stuff is so on point. That movie’s great.

And another female director! Joan Micklin Silver. Yeah!

Related content

Dana Danger’s chronological list of films directed by women

Appropriate Behavior: the Letterboxd Showdown of indie, slacker and mumblecore films

Quarter Life Crisis: a list by Mary, and another by Michelle

Follow Gemma on Letterboxd

‘I Used to Go Here’ is now in select theaters and on demand. All press images are courtesy of Gravitas Ventures.

[plantfeed]

        ok turns out i am 100% that dumbass bitch who still aint posted my intro on main....... so for reference.....  hello! im nora ( she / her ). im a 24 year old creative writing graduate currently residing in sheffield, south yorkshire. when i’m not hunched over a keyboard writing, i enjoy independent cinema, chinese food, and big nights out that i’ll remember only in fleeting snapshots. i currently work as a barmaid and a tutor for a filmmaking project.  

without further ado, here is my interpretation on the skeleton ‘ophelia’, a development of a character who’s been brewing at the back of my mind for absolutely AGES now so thank u for giving me the push to actually flesh her out. 

ive included a full biography, but please feel free 2 skip to bullet points if TLDR because it is LOOONG..... and im so happy 2 be here.... new home.... chefs kiss.... yes lov u all

IN CHARACTER.

skeleton: ophelia name: theresa rigby. (goes by diminutives tess, tessa, tea or thea. the only time she’s theresa is when she’s in trouble.) age: 21, born july 10 (cancer) faceclaim: diana silvers. gender: cis-female. pronouns: she/her degree: comparative literature & ancient history (joint honours)

INTRO.

trigger warnings.

loss of a parent. missing person / disappearance. drugs and alcohol reliance. death.

BIOGRAPHY.

i. narragansett, rhode island.

              1999, an Austrian sunrise, it is the year of the Water Monkey.  A water baby, first screams under the surface, the catch of it gargled in your throat. A birth mark the size and shape of a door handle pressed into your pelvis like a lover’s badge. Born like a clenched fist. Annie always wished you’d be more like an open palm. You still carry that tension with you, an unreadable kind of silence when you slink around the edge of a room or perch on an arm rest like a bird about to startle and fly off. Nobody knows a thing about you and you like it that way. Conceived in the winter, some of that coldness still lingers in you. 

              The only perfect girl is a dead girl. That’s what you learned, last-born runt of the litter growing up in the bedroom of a girl who would be forever cold, young and pretty. In the beginning, they thought you were a blessing — Bet’s soul reincarnate, the same pale face they’d seen as they’d signed her into the pick ‘n’ mix family. You were given her clothes, her room, even her middle name, stripped and rebranded like a toy doll bought after the last one’s head was chewed off by the dog. Four boys, a dead sister, and you who — with your birdlike features and unrelenting eyes — was merely a walking ghost. Tennis skirts, nail varnish, a shag rug, a rotten corsage; these were the staple reminders that you were living in a shrine, the room never quite your own lest you disturb the lingering presence of Bet. Soon, you began to see it as not a room but rather a prison cell caging you in the imprint of a sister you never met.

              Your mothers met at an undergraduate socialist meeting when the fall semester fell into winter, Kath in a mustard coloured beret, Annie in a blood-orange duffle coat, a philosophy major and an art historian respectively. Your childhood was a montage of potato printing eels onto the walls of a Rhode Island boarding house next to the sea. Five children — some adopted, some surrogate — a permanent rotation of rooms and always a handful of lodgers to foot the bill. Travelling salesmen, students on gap years and tinkers in search of odd-jobs became a flipbook of faces etched into your memories like fleeting figures in the wings of a theatre; you sketch them into the body of your work. They become the characters to haunt the pages of your notebooks, stashed beneath floorboards lest they fall into too-hungry flour-caked fingers, scones baking in the oven two floors below. A house that seemed to physically inhale every time a new body entered it, tall and thin, too small to house all that weight. The gaps beneath the floorboards are the only spaces that feel like your own, untouched by a girl who’s shadow you were born in. In your diary, you scribble her name until it tears through the pages thinking that if you wish hard enough, you’ll make yourself her. It’s never enough.

              At twelve, you lose Annie to a boating accident. You lose a piece of yourself with her and stop wearing yellow. Grief makes a better writer out of you though it sounds selfish to admit it. Kath remarries the following spring, a man named Peter. He is ordinary in all the ways Annie was magical and when he sits in your mother’s chair you feel yourself slip out of your skin and into the body of a raven cawing in the woods, scratching at the dustmites. You try to teach yourself how to be a girl, though you’ve always felt more like a wild thing crouched in the attic window of the lighthouse, screaming at the crash of the waves. You wanted to love the sea as closely as it owned you. In the sea you were rewritten into a tide, into a shell, into the swell of a rockpool around the body of a crab. You wanted to be like the ocean —a tangible, changeling thing —making paper boats and setting them out to sea, wishing you could shrink yourself into one, sail away. For a while, you toy with the idea of starving yourself into something the size and shape of an eel; of growing gills in the night and darting into the ebbing current. They’d think you crazy if you told them.

ii. concord, massachusetts. 

              You butt heads with Kath on a daily basis. She tells you you resent her for moving on with her life when you seem unable to move on with yours. That maybe a clean break would be best for all the family. A fresh start. A change of scene. You lock yourself in the bathroom and cry for an hour until your mouth feels raw, like running a cheesegrater down the inside of your throat. The following September, they send you to boarding school, two suitcases and an armful of Annie’s jumpers. Kath has decided they don’t compliment her skin tone, and she’s not twenty-five or studying philosophy any more. New England becomes the best decision for you that your family have ever made. You thrive on the independence of living in a dormitory on a corridor of Alison’s and Margaret’s and Ruth’s. From the names on their doors, you paint them into people in your head, red-haired Ruth who collects birth stones and can count to twenty in Mandarin. They turn out to be nothing like the versions of them you’ve spun. You love them anyway, their rough-softness, the scuffed knee thrill of growing up half-wild. There’s a brightness in their girlhood that you try to capture in your words. 

              Though you never quite find yourself settling into a group, Dr. Franklin becomes the anchor to which you tether yourself to, a little girl leeching onto her Literature professor for a sense of stability in a tempestuous world. The others might think it sad, but she sees something in you — an inner restlessness, a need to analyse and observe and contain everything within poetry and prose — that reminds her of herself at your age. You begin one-to-one sessions after the school day has closed, whisper about Proust and O’Hara over frothed lattes in a campus-run coffee shop, ink blots on the pages of dog-eared copies she’s gifted to you on an indefinite loan. Sometimes, you think you love her. You run your fingers over the buttons of her typewriter, close your eyes, and imagine yourself pulling on her skin like a new coat.

              The woods become your saviour. In Narragansett you never knew woods, only harboursides, seafood restaurants, the smell of the ocean breeze and a lighthouse calling you home. You learn to love the smell of the earth after rain. The feeling of soil between your toes. The sense of belonging you feel trailing through the woods in stark white nightgown, twigs catching on the mud-stained hem. Massachusetts becomes a place of revision. You remake yourself as a fawn, elegance in your limbs and hunger in your heart. You learn how to write yourself into being. There’s a violence in your grace — simultaneously glass and the hammer that shatters it — and despite the ethereal way you move it’s the leonine stature of a tigress, claws bared, teeth sharpened into fangs, but a smile like butter wouldn’t melt. Lady Macbeth was always your favourite of Shakespeare’s heroines. There’s something dark in her that resonates with you, the way when a pimple appears you have to squeeze it until it bleeds. You tell yourself that everybody has a morbid fascination. 

              Each night you take a torch, a book and a bottle of Merlot, and you wile away the hours reading in the woods. At home, sleep never came easy to you. You’d pace the floorboards counting sheep and wake having barely slept a blink. This, on the other hand, seems useful, though when you’re never asleep, you’re never quite awake, floating through the school day like a ghost, part removed, the dark circles pulling your eyes to a close. It’s a tiredness you carry in every aspect of your life, limbs heavier than usual, pen slower when it grazes the page. Soon you start taking tablets each night. Two white ones, no bigger than a baby’s fingernail. For the first time, you begin to dream.

              When February rolls around you take your exams. Pass with the grace of a swan in everything except AP Calculus. You say you’ll try again next semester, but you don’t. You apply for Yale, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia, Ashcroft. You wait. And wait. And wait until it feels like your skin has shed itself since the letters left your hands, before an envelope comes marked Theresa. No one ever calls you that name. Right from the start it’s been Tea, Tess, Thea, common names in your house as fickle as the tide that swallows it. Billy’s never been a William, and Sebastian sounds all wrong. You can scarcely remember what Brodie’s short for. Rejection after rejection until Ashcroft answers the call, a cawing in the dark of a wasteland you’ve not yet walked. You’ll read literature, follow in the footsteps of Ginsberg who you clumsily try to quote as you bid the girls goodbye, a bonfire and the smell of cinnamon whiskey. 

iii. ashcroft university, edinburgh. 

              You’d read of a boy who went missing there. It happened in the woods. Seventy years and all they’d found was an emptied bottle of wine and one shoe. Newspapers claimed involvement in an elite society, perhaps a hazing gone wrong, and you imagine them burrowed in underground tunnels wearing wellington boots and tweed. This is what draws you to Ashcroft ; to Imperium. It’s not so much the mystery of it —you’ve never seen yourself as a Nancy Drew — but more the idea of living in a place where people can disappear. That’s always been an idle fantasy of yours. One day, you wonder if you’ll write yourself out of the world and into the pages of a book, nestled between a title and contents page.  

              From Concord to Boston, then a ten-hour flight ; for the first time in months, you sleep through the night. A line break cancels your train and you have to take a replacement bus service instead. By the time you reach the school, the open day is almost over. You feel it at the gates, like a tingle on the back of your neck, something crawling down your spine. It only grows as you close in on it. It feels like it knows your own heartbeat. You’ve never known a building to have so much soul. You imagine yourself walking the cobblestones on the quad each day, climbing the steps to a dormitory, sprawled on a library table, scribbling frantically, willing the clock hands backwards. It’s a life you want to lead.

              In a matter of months, Ashcroft has become not only your home but your life. You are utterly consumed by it. You meet Lysander at a poetry reading. You recite Shelley. He recites Keats. He compliments you on the steadiness of your voice, clear as a bell. A voice for the stage. You tell him your father had a powerful voice. It’s a lie. You’ve never had a father, but it’s fun to imagine one slouched on the couch, wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose. He invites you to dinner the following week. Grilled sea bass and risotto. You don’t have the heart to tell him you’ve become a vegetarian, swallow each mouthful with your pride. You try out for the orchestra, though your hands shake a little too much and you hear more from the inside of your own head than the keys. You leave without waiting on an answer. It’s too contained for you, anyway. You need something more chaotic, like jazz. You wish for chaos, so Imperium opens it jaws and swallows you whole. They like you because of your voice, a voice that speaks scarcely more than a low whisper in life, but when written wins you a Bysshe-Shelley Prize. In poetry, you give that voice to the voiceless ; bring dead girls buried in the woods out of the ground and into being, like soil in your hands. A voice like that is a powerful thing to have in your ranks. It becomes every page in your diary, every catch of your skirt on a tree branch, every rap of your fingertips against the desktop, imperium, imperium, imperium.

              You’ve never been able to do things by halves — you always let them consume you. One glass becomes a bottle. One paragraph becomes scrawling until sunrise. Obsession takes its form in Hamlet, strong in all the ways you appear weak. You like the smell of his breath when he tells you to stub out your cigarette. That’ll kill you one day, he says. I know, you reply, and your pretty lips curl upwards. One drunken night, you fall into his bed and imagine stitching yourself into his sheets so you can sleep with him every night. Tongues on your thighs like a voice in your throat. Touch me, touch me, touch me. Never been held like this before. Like you’re not glass, but something material and robust. You like the way his hands feel under your skin. Perhaps you’ll keep him there like a splinter. Tall for your age but thin as a rail, he makes you feel like more than an eel of a girl. You like the way he catches on your spindly elbows where others have snagged leaving trails of cotton. At first, it’s only physical, but you get greedy and want more. You’re not sure when a love of beauty became something more than skin deep. You’re not sure if you even loved him until he’d stopped loving you. In October, you find the body. The day all the clocks stop ticking. The day something inside of you snaps like the branch of an elm.

              You become a cocoon, velvet ribbons in your hair and rope around your throat. Or maybe it’s lace, and you’re only imagining it that way. You drink wine, stumble blind-drunk through the woods, lose textbooks to nature and curse when you can’t find them the following morning. Most nights, you appear like a ghost in the wood, a linen nightdress with mud clinging to it’s hem and feet laden in soil. You’re not sure if it’s conscious at this point, or mindless sleepwalking. Everything you do feels like sleepwalking these days. Shadows move in the corners of your eyes at night and you turn to the tarot cards for answers. They tell you only of that which you already know. Death. The Hanged Man. High Priestess. You think of Octavia, of Lysander, and of you pulled like a ragdoll between them, with the intuition that comes from living by the sea but without the evidence to execute it. The pills have stopped working. You wake in sweats, guilt swelling in the pit of your stomach. In a therapist’s waiting room, you watch as a girl scratches the skin off her own arm.

              Soon news of your occultist proclivities becomes gossip on everyone’s tongue. Witch becomes a synonym for your name, and one you’ll happily wear like a noose until you’ve stolen Lysander from the drop. Finding the truth becomes the only thing keeping you sane, runes scrawled on the walls of a dormitory where pages of novels are tacked up like wallpaper. And still, you can’t shake the fact that she hasn’t come to you when the others who scarcely believe in such phantomed are rattled by her ghost on a nightly basis. Competing and girlhood go hand in hand, but the longer it gets, the more it feels like she knows your desperation to absolve Lysander isn’t entirely selfless. Perhaps she saw you lingering in doorways, waiting in the wings for him to change his mind and tell you it was you all along. Or maybe the sight of her corpse is making you search for answers in places they don’t exist. You’re hanging on my a single thread, one glimpse away from fleeing to the woods to plant yourself into the earth.

              The snow is crisp on the November ground when you learn to love melancholy like a dance you were taught as a child. You think it adds depth to being a writer. How can a person write about pain if they live in a state of blissful oblivion? You tell yourself that all of the best writers were depressed; Plath, Fitzgerald, Dickinson, Rice. If you say their names each morning, followed by your own, perhaps you’ll become one of them. 

BULLET POINT SUMMARY.

here is a bullet point summary of theresa, as i understand my writing can get a little dense.

Mother always said that people who grow up near water are different to other people. That there’s something more primal in their bones. A kind of knowing.

In Theresa, the knowing is a kind of silence. She’s always struggled with verbal communication, and it’s rare that she can ever let herself go in a conversation. She’s the one on the outskirts of the group, only speaking up to deliver a poignant metaphor, before fading off again. On a good day she’ll ramble, perhaps, on morbid longings and fascinations, but it’s like she’s always skipping around words she can’t quite pinpoint. 

Writing’s different. When she’s writing, she feels like all the dead souls of Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are all rising up from their graves to possess her. It is, perhaps, a rather egotistical thought -- but it makes her feel less alone. Like writing isn’t so much a solitary pursuit as it is a reigniting of what’s been lost, a way of listening to the dead. She’s militant in the way she writes, has been for as long as she can remember -- every night when the clock strikes twelve. Even if she’s rolling on mandy in an abandoned warehouse or dropping acid in a shipyard with her toes in the sand, she’ll start scribbling at twilight, for as long as she can. Back home, there weren’t too many bars that allowed underage kids, and the ones that did would nail your phone to the wall like you’re living in the eighties, so they made their own fun getting high in places long since infested with rats on baggies bought cheap in the back of the dry-cleaners shop.

Theresa’s always felt more able to relate to dead people than to living ones. That might sound depressing, but she doesn’t think so. Death has never been far from her. She grew up in the room of a foster sister who had died the previous winter. She lost her mother to a boating accident at twelve years old. She lost Octavia last year, found her body in the woods, and was thankful that she -- and not someone else -- had seen her crumpled like a fawn. Because even though it clings to her and burrows under her skin, she knows how to drown it out now. In words. In wine. In pills crushed against the veneer of a sink and snorted through a twenty-dollar bill. She’s getting good at losing herself completely. Theresa herself feels like a girl half-dead, like something ghostly, trapped between two planes. Which is why it hurts so much that she still hasn’t seen Octavia’s ghost. She’s supposed to be the special one. The one who’s vision isn’t clouded by idle dogmatism. The one who believes in all that fate, juju, third eye stuff that the others seem to scoff at. It feels like a personal attack. Like somehow, in keeping hidden, she’s blaming Theresa for her death.

Theresa is the month of November. There’s something mysterious about it, something cold. It’s on the cusp of the end of the year, but it doesn’t quite reach it. I feel like that’s what Theresa’s like. Always reaching for the apples that are just out of her grasp, or perhaps, reaching for apples which aren’t even there. 

She knows grief like an old friend, but somehow, she still doesn’t trust it. When she was twelve years old she lost one of her mothers. Annie was always the brighter of her parents, and Tessa never really believed that someone so full of life could just disappear. Her soul had to be somewhere. When Kath remarried, Theresa never forgave her. Between grief and anger, their relationship became fractious, and Kath decided to send her to boarding school. She went to a New England college where she learned art, history, literature, english, athletics, the sciences and the classics. Boarding school was probably the best decision for Theresa that Kath had ever made. She became fascinated with the girls around her, so feral and wild in their girlhood. She fell in love with another girl more than once. She fell in love with the freedom of New England, of being in the woods, of a gaggle of girls with bottles of wine sat around a campfire, scared half to death that the matron would find them.

But death’s never far from her. She’s been searching for Annie in the linebreaks between poems, in the chaos of clutter under her bed, under lace and linen in her underwear drawer, but somehow she can never quite find her and never give up.  Finding Annie was perhaps the reason she came to Ashcroft at all. She intended to go to Columbia, read Literature, and clumsily follow in the footsteps of Ginsberg. But Annie had spoken of Edinburgh with such a childlike awe.

Lysander was the first of the society she met, at a poetry reading in the autumn of her first semester. He brought her into the club because he saw something in her, an otherworldliness, a still but powerful voice. Her eyes saw more than they let on, always glinting at something more. She thinks her closeness with Lysander is the reason she still hasn’t seen Octavia’s ghost, and now Hamlet’s out of the picture she’s starting to think she might love Lysander. Or maybe she just needs to be loved by someone, and absolving him of blame is the key.

She was never really sure how she felt about Octavia. One moment they were friends, the next they were rivals. It was something like love and hate combined, but perhaps that’s just the curse of being a woman. A fierce sense of competition in everything you do, even if it’s just competing for air.

She likes old French music, European cinema, art that doesn’t come in her mother tongue. She’s always thought English pointless. The French say things so much better.

Her favourite TV show is Twin Peaks. She likes the absurdist truth in it, the style, the colour, the oddness. She likes the mystery of it all. She loved the woods in New England and it reminds her of that. A kind of home away from home. Tea brings a pocked dictaphone out with her, for she’s so often absent-minded that she misses half the day. That way, she can replay conversations, the sound of a bird in flight, the particular inflection in the voice of someone she loves. She’s obsessive when it comes to lovers. She doesn’t want to be loved -- she wants to be respected, understood, devoured. She thinks love is a kind of mutual lying.

She finds truth in the unusual. In tarot cards and horoscopes, in the position of the planets through a thrifted telescope. She’s a night owl, never in bed before 3 or 4 in the morning. She visits the woods each night to write until her fingers ache. Sometimes with wine, sometimes with mushrooms, sometimes with a tab against the flat of her tongue, imagining herself to be Alice in Wonderland. She feels like she’s getting close to the truth, but maybe she’s just closer to losing her mind.

LETTER TO OCTAVIA.

My dearest O,

I wish I could find an adequate way to write you an epitaph. You saw a poet where everyone else saw a foolish dreamer and yet you’re the only one I can’t put into words. But in truth, there is no word large enough to contain you. You were the ellipsis I was always looking to conclude, and it’s so like you to steal even that from me. Some days, I think I could love you.  

Please know that death cannot touch girls like us. That you’re more than just skin, teeth and bone. Death itself has you only on a short-term loan. As Thomas puts so eloquently, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thank you for filling me with life. I’ll see you in the next one.

Tea.

anything else?

mock blog.

 pinterest 

wanted plots.

someone who theresa knows purely from seeing them at the library. recently, she hasn’t been visiting as often. she’s less in the world and more in her head. her schoolwork is suffering. someone who feels this absence like a missing tooth.

unlikely bc ashcroft is in scotland but if they’re from rhode island maybe distant relatives.... ophelia / theresa is adopted so could work regardless of heritage. her family lived in narragansett, but she went to boarding school in vermont. could have met if ur character is new england based??? maybe

give me fellow wanky pretentious art-lovers and poets and historians who will go to museums and galleries with her and listen to the velvet underground on vinyl

people she gets mortally fucked off her tits with at parties bcos this baby is not alright. she drinks at least one glass of wine every night. sometimes a bottle. she’s always a little bit high or a little bit weary with a comedown. she can’t seem to keep her feet on the ground.

theresa was pretty numb after finding the body, as you would be. she stayed in her room listening to enya for three days straight and just eating cereal straight out the box. then thalia broke up with her and that fuckin shook her too, and now she just thinks she’s unlovable. she’s always been pretty bad at sleeping but now she just wanders about in her white nightdress looking for a door with light spilling beneath it so that maybe she can find someone who’ll hold her for the night and make her feel like she’s still alive

she’s currently hooking up with a lot of people. a lot of very detached sex, so if she has any sort of close connection with your character this might not work. could be good for angst or awkwardness though, or she cld get like.... super attached after a one night stand and complicate the shit out of everything. theresa’s kind of obsessive when it comes to her affections, she loves with her whole heart or not at all

people she used to date or unrequitedly likes, but to them it’s just a physical thing, give me all the thirsty angst plots, and maybe some softness too, i need some religion in this girls life jesus 

honestly everything just give me all the plots

[stuckwith-harry]

hey you, i only followed you recently and I really like your hinny fanfics and your poetry. Would you mind telling me about your process when you write? I really wanna learn how to write properly and you seem to take your craft so seriously. How do you built a story, how often do you edit, how much time do you spent on your work, what do you try to go for,...? Thanks xxx

Anon, this is the coolest ask I’ve EVER received, and I’m hanging it on my wall next to all the colour-coded flashcards with poems on them. This is going to be LONG, and by no means exhaustive - I’m gonna jump around and ramble a bit and if there’s anything specific you wanna hear more about, please ask! I fucking love talking about writing!

I’m gonna put most of this under a cut, but before we dive in: yes, I tAkE mY wRiTiNg sErIoUsLy in the sense that I’d like to publish some original bodies of work in my life and to have physical copies of them exist on a bookshelf that’s not my own. I don’t need it to pay the bills, but if you googled my full name I’d like for, like, a poetry collection to show up and not, I don’t know, the two poems I got published in a regional newspaper when I was eight.

(And please let the record show that they’re fine poems for a primary schooler. The cringe years came way after that, kids.)

So, even having some ambitions in the industry, the reality is that I’m a 19-year-old kid with a keyboard and a dodgy internet connection who discovered fanfiction when she was twelve and got hooked for life. We’re going to retire the idea of “writing properly” for now, because writing is supposed to be fun and I haven’t actually gotten accepted into that Creative Writing Bachelor’s degree I so desperately want to do. YET. Don’t let the fancy writing blog (@jessicagluch) fool you into thinking I know what the heck I’m doing. But, okay, with that out of the way, let’s get into what I’m personally doing right now, yeah?

Fanfiction

You asked about process, and the truth is, I don’t … really have one. For the Muggle/FWB AU called “Let Me love” I just published, I actually wrote a pretty detailed outline that I then filled in, which was fun, but it’s not a habit exactly. I’d written a lot of assorted scenes and pieces of dialogue for that one, too, so I had a lot of material and just had to put all the scraps and pieces in order and stitch it all together. After the brainstorming, word-vomity part of writing Let Me love, my #1 task was figuring out where everything went, and making sure it’s all there.

As soon as I’d written a full first draft, no gaps, and the anatomy of the whole thing had somewhat clicked into place, I moved away from it for a while. Wrote something else. Came back maybe a week or two later, polished up the prose a bit very late at night.

Figure out when your creative hours are, if you can pinpoint it at all. Mine are precisely “I was supposed to be asleep two hours ago and I’ve got an important thing tomorrow” o’ clock. Sigh.

Just - leave it alone for a bit, come back with fresh eyes. I love writing Let Me love - I’m working on part 2 right now - but after you’ve fucked around with the same sentence fifty times, you get sick of it. And I did. At some point you have to decide to put down the pen and let it be.

Especially because fanfiction isn’t something you’re writing for a publisher - hopefully, you’re writing it mostly for you - no one is holding a gun to your head to get rid of every last adverb or stuff like that. I can do what I want, MOM. I am allowed to make the thing I’m writing as tropey and campy as I want and hold up a big old middle finger to the rules, if that’s what I want to do.

Fanfiction, to me, is this grand, batshit writing playground. That’s why I fell for it in the first place - it’s inherently self-indulgent and hedonistic and that you can write everything EXACTLY as you please is the primary purpose it serves as a genre. So go wild.

(Process-wise, the one thing I do very consistently is making moodboards and playlists. I like having some inspiration material to swim around in, which helps me figure out what the story looks and feels and sounds like in my head. 

Every fic has a soundtrack. SOUNDTRACKS ARE IMPORTANT, PEOPLE.

Like, Let Me love is all coloured lights and night-time London and texts left on read. It’s neon signs and wearing somebody else’s t-shirt, messy bedsheets and hangover breakfasts and quarter-life crises.

This is the Pinterest board.)

What I pay most attention to is the stuff that gives the text depth beyond the surface. I look for metaphors - and I personally prefer the ones that carry through the whole thing, ideas we explore throughout the story and revisit at the end. I look for themes that hold a story together beyond the plot. I look for subtext and imagery and I want symbolism, goddamnit. 

(That’s the poet kicking in.)

And of course, I’m a product of my generation, so I love referencing other bodies of work and subverting tropes and stuff like that. Hey kids, intertextuality is fun!

(Like, do you see what I did there? See how the phrase “hey kids x is fun” in itself is a reference to something? See??? I’m a fucking genius.)

I think we need some examples. Allow me to toot my own horn for a minute.

In the Halloween 2018 oneshot I wrote, which is about Harry grappling with the anniversary of his parents’ death when he’s a little older, he visits the graveyard with Ginny and Lily Luna. Ginny comments that “it’s freezing”, to which Harry responds with the titular, “you’re warm”. And yes, it’s October, it’s probably cold. They’re keeping each other warm. And yes, it’s maybe about comfort in harsh situations in general, a more metaphorical warmth, if you will. I get it. 

But when you remember this exchange is taking place on a graveyard, you might start to wonder about warm, living bodies as opposed to cold, deceased ones. And then you think about how this whole story is about the living remembering - in a sense, living with - the dead. And how it’s about death as a part of Harry’s life. And you can probably guess by now that all my literature teachers fucking adored me.

(But he’s also choosing a side here, maybe. But I’m merely the author, you don’t have to listen to me at all. My words beyond the words don’t mean shit unless you decide they do and even then you’re going to find yourself knees-deep in a debate around authorial intent in record-time. In the age of “Nagini was a cursed human woman all along”, I’m not sure I want that.)

I also reference other pieces of work a lot. Often poems, and even more frequently, songs. The songs in Let Me love are VERY IMPORTANT and I can’t show you the full playlist right now because SPOILERS. But the chapters are split into sub-sections via song lyrics. Those are part of the playlist. There’s also a lot of referencing songs in general because Harry is a big music fan in this one, but that’s just indulgence on my part. If I want to make a 21st century Harry a Mitski stan, then I will. And I did!

(AND Let Me love has a Friends reference. For funsies, but also, for much more than funsies.)

“I love you / please do not use it” was inspired by a poem by Savannah Brown called “organs”. (It’s linked in the author’s notes at the beginning.)

“It’s two sugars, right?” borrows and/or references a ton of lines and phrases from T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. Most noticeably:

Sublety isn’t my middle name, exactly. (The forget-me-not-blue sky in The Bride On The Train, anyone?)

In short: I like when my fanfictions are worth rereading. I like when you can come out the second read having found a little more than you did the first. I like when you can wander around a little, and, like a treasure hunter, make some strange new discoveries.

Lastly: of course, writing from your own experience helps. Spy on your own life. Collect all the ways in makes you feel, like a thief, write it down, memorise it, put it in the story. Reuse! Recycle! ✊🏻

I fortunately don’t relate to Harry’s childhood trauma, but the feeling at the beginning of “We’ll figure it out” - which is a story set shortly after him and Ginny find out she’s pregnant and he’s struggling to connect with everybody else’s simple bliss, because he’s terrified, and he’s terrified of admitting he’s terrified - that was real. That “wait a minute, this moment is amazing. I’m supposed to be the happiest person on the planet right now. Why am I not feeling it? What is this emptiness? Am I not happy right now? Why am I having doubts? I’m not supposed to have any doubts! What the fuck is wrong with me?”, that was lifted from a specific experience.

Side note, I’m really proud of that one.

Okay, poetry! 

Where there is even less rules and more fucking around ensues!

I read and promptly lost a quote recently about how explaining a song sort of defeats the purpose. (I’ll link it here if I ever find it again.) In some ways, poems and songs work really similarly, and I think it applies here as well: if you could really explain the whole poem in one sentence, or a few sentences, if you could accurately and concisely summarise exactly how it feels, then you wouldn’t really need the poem. My favourite poems (or songs) tend to be the ones that outline a really specific emotion via a few powerful images, but I couldn’t precisely tell you what the emotion is. Like, I know exactly what this thing is saying, I know this exact feeling, I GET-GET it, but don’t ask me to explain the thing, just READ the THING, and you’ll KNOW.

Mitski does this really well. Like, I couldn’t explain to you what Last Words Of A Shooting Star makes me feel, but it does. I can tell you that “I am relieved that I left my room tidy, they’ll think of me kindly when they come for my things” cuts through me like a hot blade but I can’t pinpoint exactly why and I don’t want to. All I know is she Gets It, and that I want her writing chops, goddamnit.

Or, like, look at Laura Gilpin’s Two-Headed Calf. Yeah, I’ve read that poem a hundred times and thought a lot about all the themes it’s presenting me with. But I have zero desire to explain those themes to you, because I’d kind of be robbing it of its magic. I don’t want to tell you what it’s about. I want you to read it and I want to simply sit with the knowledge that we know, we Get It, that “twice as many stars as usual” kicked you in the shins, emotionally speaking, as much as it did me.

Few words, max impact, is key.

In Mary Oliver’s words, we want something inexplicable made plain, not unlike a suddenly harmonic passage in an otherwise difficult and sometimes dissonantsymphony - even if it is only for the moment of hearing it.

I’m realising right now that leading with these shining examples and then following them up with my own thing is nerve-wracking. But I like to think that I accomplished something like that with a little poem I wrote called Basements.

It’s is based on the prompt “back to nature” and follows that, uhm, somewhat loosely, a little subverted. I think it’s about impermanence and nostalgia and the fact that the places we lived in continue to exist even when our lives in them don’t anymore. It’s about that and a lot of other things. Maybe. The truth is, I don’t want to explain it to you: I just want you to read it, and then I hope that it made you feel something, and I’m going to trust that you Get It. Maybe you don’t get the same things I did, but that’s great. I’d love nothing more.

Before it was all those things, it was a poem about my life. The neighbourhood with the yellow house across the graveyard that I spent nine mostly happy years in. (The house, not the graveyard.) Every single thing in there is true: my sister really bust her lip and we both cried; wild lilac really grew there; we did spend most of our summers catching tadpoles, and yes, that neighbourhood was a construction site from the first day we lived there to the very last.

And I really sat in the driver’s seat of the family car about a year ago and watched it from afar. I didn’t come up with that - it’s my life. I only went on a scavenger hunt through my own memories, through the places and records and mementos of my life, and arranged a few specific anecdotes in a way that would give them meaning.

It’s kind of what I’m proudest of when it comes to my poetry - that I get to just live my life and see the metaphor and the meaning and symbolism as I’m experiencing it. I sat in the car and I thought, huh, that’s definitely making me Feel A Thing right now, that I’m sitting in the driver’s seat looking at this place I haven’t really been to in years, my childhood home, where I don’t live anymore. That I drove here myself.

I think that, when done right, specific makes universal. If you arrange a kaleidoscope of memories in just the right way, what it’s making you feel will speak for itself, and you won’t have to explain it. Most people who’ve read “basements” probably didn’t spend countless summers playing in literal holes, originally dug out for basements that were never built because no one wanted to move there. Holes that then grew full of weeds and wild lilac and felt like miniature jungles right outside our parents’ houses. It was perfect, it was specifically mine, but the feeling behind it is universal, I think.

Like, that’s how half of Taylor Swift’s RED works. That’s how most good Taylor Swift songs work. That’s why the bridge in Out of the Woods is so good and why I love New Year’s Day so much and it’s EXACTLY why All Too Well is considered her best song by so many people. Because she zoomed in on the details of her life and let the world take a look. Because “we dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light” is a line in that song. THAT’s why it MAKES YOU FEEL THE THING.

Back to poems? This:

So we tell them all about the dayWe planned revolutions on my bedroom floor, or how we onceSpent an entire Monday lunch break making life plans over ice creamAnd most of our parties talking politics over beerWe both paid for ourselves.About the days you drive me to school. In your carI am the girl, front-seat passenger of our lives,Who does not need reach for the steering wheel –The road is alright. 

isn’t fiction. These are my memories, carefully selected and re-arranged for Politics at Parties Boy.

I didn’t make up these film stills of a non-romantic relationship that never became anything other than non-romantic because neither party ever made a move. What I did is look at my own life like it’s a piece of fiction. If these memories were a movie, you could pluck them apart and say, see, the screenwriters put this scene here to communicate that.

The truth is, I am the screenwriter and the protagonist and the actress and the director and the camerawoman. I looked at a teenage girl who refused to let her friend buy her a beer at a school party and decided “huh, I guess that tells us everything we need to know” because I was that girl. 

And I did pay for the beer, so we’d never move into “let me buy you a drink” territory. He was already driving me to school.

That’s my best lesson on poetry, really. I look at my life like it’s a piece of fiction and then I make it one. I put personal memories in poems meant to be read by other people, I overinterpret everything that happens to me, am literally constantly thinking about how to work every knock-back and struggle into my narrative arc and look for symbolism in anything from the date, the weather, and the colour of my front door. I watch myself in third person all the time and thus become my own muse. I’m the painter and the painting.

It’s a somewhat narcissistic and masturbatory approach to poetry, but as far as writing about your own life goes, it’s what works for me.

As far as writing about not yourself goes - well, I’m a narcissist and I’m bad at that, but I wrote a poem about the Mars rover Opportunity that shut down this February called Spirit shuts down and Opportunity feels no tremble, no ache. For stuff like that, if you don’t happen to be Struck TM by a lightning bolt of inspiration (which is the exception, not the rule), a good old-fashioned mind-map helps. I just let my robot grief go wild on the page for a bit and what I ended up writing about was death and the human condition and being a teenage girl, maybe.

I really enjoy taking two concepts/ideas and juxtaposing them, watching a theme unfold in the overlap. Like, it’s a poem about a robot AND about being a teenage girl and in between those two lies a poem about the futile attempts to teach a robot human emotion. Maybe.

It’s a poem about how my mum always cries at the airport and about me making my own happiness my priority and it kind of ends up being about my intense guilt of making my parents watch me change and grow and leave.

It’s about the night I wandered through a quiet street in Central London at 1 a.m. and realised that the city of my dreams sleeps like any other place, that people wake up early and make coffee and go to work and have bad days here. That it’s not all dream. It’s some people’s lives. But it’s also about watching another person sleep - the way someone’s face changes when they do.

In the middle lay a poem about finding a friend in a lover. Not the daydream, but my life.

Lastly, I can’t talk about my own poetry without talking about my darling poem 5 disasters. It’s my pride and joy. Like, you could kill me write now and I’d be like, it’s okay, I’ve written the poem I want to be remembered for and it’s this one. I wrote it in less than a day and every time I think about the fact that I wrote

I cravedsomething more violent than death, somethingviolent enough to bea beginningand for my life to be thousands of themI wantednothingto remainexcept the girl that sentthe disastersand survived -may this wasteland bewhere I find her.

… I lose my shit a little bit.

(5 disasters was a rarity in how quickly I wrote it. It often takes me weeks. Sometimes months. There’s poems I’ve been meaning to write for years now and I still haven’t found the words. Take your time.)

5 disasters is a lot of things, but within the context of the poetry collection it’s hopefully going to exist in one day, it serves as almost an instruction manual for metaphors: here, the floods and rainfalls are always change and the forest fires are always my highschool demons and my friends and how they look the same. The colour yellow is always referencing the same love. Basically, I like pinpointing my symbolisms and then crafting a poem around them. You end up creating something like an in-poem universe that you get to navigate like a fantasy novel. Like you’re telling a story about a natural disaster, but it’s all a metaphor, Hazel Grace.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As I do.

I hope this serves as a starting point of sorts, anon. Most importantly, have fun, don’t concern yourself with all the rules too much. Experiment, be bold, read lots.

Again, if you’ve got any questions, I’d be thrilled to help. Thanks for the opportunity to toot my own horn to this outrageous degree, it’s been a blast.

[professional-anti]

Chapter Nine: The Circle and the Brotherhood

Okay, we start out a little stressful bc Jace says they’re gonna take the subway back to the Institute and Simon jokes around like “you guys take the subway but you’re demon hunters haha” and this happens:

Jace was scary-calm. His face was expressionless, but something burned at the backs of his eyes.

Um, are we not supposed to be worried about this? Jace should be working on this problem!! Why is he so mad at Simon? Oh, that’s right, he thinks that Simon is competition for Clary. And that’s enough for him to get this angry at Simon. I’m sure everyone can tell why this is unhealthy.

Simon proves to be an actual idiot when they get to the Institute. The Institute is housed in an old church, and for some reason Simon can’t comprehend that old buildings can be used for something else.

“It’s the Institute,” Clary said . . . “I thought it ws a church.” “It’s inside a church.” “Because that’s not confusing.”

This is New York City!! The home of remodeling!!! My aunt’s apartment used to be a house! My brother’s camp used to be an apartment! Things can be other things!! Oh my god!!!

They meet Isabelle in the kitchen, where she’s stress cooking. Oh, I remember this! She sucks at cooking but does it when she’s stressed. It’s actually really cute. I stress cook too! Once I made soup from scratch at 3 AM. (My psychiatrist said, verbatin, “That’s worrisome.”)

But then of course we get the typical annoying thing, where Simon stares at Isabelle “rapt and openmouthed”. I think I speak for most people when I say that someone staring at you with their mouth open is creepy. And weird. When was the last time you looked at someone like that? Hopefully never! Blergh, it’s like the way creepy men stare at you on the street. And then Clary gets jealous of Isabelle. So, that’s fun. Love that girl-on-girl hate. I’ve never felt the urge in my life to hurt a girl bc she was prettier than I am. I can’t imagine feeling that way. Sometimes I’ll say jokingly “she’s so pretty, I’m mad”, but I’ve been trying to cut back on that bc I don’t mean it, it’s something that’s been programmed into me to say. But Clary literally wants to throw the soup over Isabelle’s head. Okay.

There’s a tiny bit of worldbuilding that’s also kind of cute, which is that Isabelle “got the recipe from a water sprite at the Chelsea Market.” Well, most people would just say “Chelsea Market” without that article in front of it, but I still like it. Idk, maybe I’m just a sucker for magical New York. Vampires on the Upper East Side? Give me. Werewolves taking advantage of Central Park? Hell yes! Magicians in Greenwich Village? Duh, sign me up. So, little mentions like this make me happy. The worldbuilding is still shit, but this is some nice stuff.

Jace snarks at Clary for eating all the sandwiches at Dorothea’s, and it’s maddening. Those sandwhiches were the first thing she ate for a whole day! Let women eat their fill without judging them!! Arggghhhh!!!!

For some reason, Jace isn’t sure if they should tell Hodge that the men with Luke were the ones that killed his father. I guess bc he thinks that Hodge won’t let them go out and investigate? Idk. Like, we all know that Hodge is Evil Giles, but Jace doesn’t know that. He tells Isabelle that they’re going to Hodge, but they might not tell him about the men being his father’s killers, and this exchange happens:

[Isabelle] shrugged. “All right. Are you going to come back? Do you want any soup?” “No,” said Jace. “Do you think Hodge will want any soup?” “No one wants any soup.” “I want some soup,” Simon said. “No, you don’t,” said Jace. “You just want to sleep with Isabelle.” Simon was appalled. “That is not true.” “How flattering,” Isabelle murmured into the soup, but she was smirking. “Oh, yes it is,” said Jace. “Go ahead and ask her—then she can turn you down and the rest of us can get on with our lives while you fester in miserable humiliation.” He snapped his fingers. “Hurry up, mundie boy, we’ve got work to do.”

So much. So much. I’m short-circuiting. First of all, it’s so incredibly disrespectful to Isabelle for Jace to talk this way. If I were her, I’d be so uncomfortable. And I know that Jace knows her and her comfort limits, but it’s still disrespectful. Secondly, Jace is so mean. And Clary does call him out for it, but who even knows what she sees in him. He’s so fucking mean. And mean characters are fine. They’re great. But I’m just confused why everybody is falling the fuck in love with Jace. It makes zero sense to me. Jace is set up as this paradigm of a romantic partner and it’s like,,, what??? This Jace???

Clary calls Jace an asshat. An asshat. In our year of the Lord (checks copyright date) 2007. Actually, makes sense. Fandom was Like That. Everyone being vaguely British. I wasn’t technically on the fandom scene for anything back then, but in my fanfiction phase, I did some serious digging into the past. And all this fandom dialect makes sense when you remember that CoB is repurposed HP fanfiction.

Jace claims that he was trying to save Simon from heartbreak bc “Isabelle will cut out his heart and walk all over ti in high-heeled boots. That’s what she does to boys like that.”

Clary APOLOGIZES to Jace for snapping at him. Like, the Jace who was so brutally mean to Simon just now? The Jace who is constantly rude to her? The Jace who talks down to her and is so freaking patronizing? Is she apologizing to that Jace? Mmmmmkay.

Ugh, apparently Maryse, Isabelle’s mom, is usually the cook. So it’s the women who like cooking in this book. Got it. Usually 7 people live here, right? Isabelle, Alec, their brother, their parents, Hodge, and Jace. Two women. Five men. And the only people who cook? The women. Cool, cool, cool. Okay. Got it. Thanks.

Wait, this is weird. Apparently Maryse never taught Isabelle how to cook because, according to Jace:

“Isabelle never wanted to learn. She’s always been first and foremost interested in being a fighter. She comes from a long line of women warriors,” he said, and there was a tinge of pride in his voice. “She’s one of the best Shadowhunters I’ve ever known.”

So, huh. A lot to unpack. Isabelle likes to cook, right? So why wouldn’t she want to learn? And why are cooking and fighting mutually exclusive? There’s so much weird stuff going on here. Clare writes the women as the only ones who cook. I don’t like that because she’s basically saying, “Cooking is something that women do, not men.” And now, because it’s a traditionally feminine thing (which it doesn’t have to be anymore now that most men aren’t out hunting all day), Isabelle doesn’t want to do it. And the narrative accepts that as normal, that women should want to divorce themselves from traditionally feminine things, which in my opinion is still sexism. Except that Isabelle likes to cook. So why wouldn’t she let her mom teach her? Does any of this make sense, you guys?

I AM CONFUSION

For some reason, Clary desperately wants to know if Alec is a better Shadowhunter than Isabelle. Not sure why. Jace replies that Alec has never killed a demon. Interesting. Not sure how that’s possible, but okay. They meet Hodge in the greenhouse, and the prose is truly awful:

Clary exhaled. “It smells like . . .” Springtime, she thought, before the heat comes and crushes the leaves into pulp and withers the petals off the flowers.

Slow down there, Emily Dickinson. Anyhow, Jace tells Hodge about their adventures, except for the fact that the warlocks were the ones who killed his dad. Still not sure why, still don’t really care.

“And [the warlock’s] names were . . .” “Pangborn,” said Jace. “And Blackwell.” Hodge had gone very pale. Against his gray skin the scar along his cheek stood out like a twist of red wire. “It is as I feared,” he said, half to himself. “The Circle is rising again.”

There are so many other quotes like that from HP, but I’m not about to reread all 7 books to find them.

Neither Jace nor Clary knows what the circle is, and Hodge ominously leads them to the library. There’s some annoying, edgy description about the libary. Then Hodge pulls out the Death Eaters’, I mean the Circle’s, manifesto. He reads some creepy stuff from it about swearing his life to the Circle “in order to preserve the purity of the bloodlines of [Elba]”. So, you know, creepy. He explains that he used to be part of a group of Shadowhunters that followed Valentine. They wanted to kill all muggles, ahem, Downworlders when the Downworlders arrived in Elba to sign the Accords. For some worldbuilding reason, they have to be signed every fifteen years.

I’m going to cry. I just can’t. A group of magical supremacists who follow a leader whose name starts with the letter V. Please, someone set me free from this hell. Jace recognizes this story; apparently, this was the Uprising. Somehow the Clave managed to wipe out every mention of the Circle, though. Not sure how. Sounds a little bit like a scary place to live, if the government can just wipe out information like that. A healthy government would say, “This was something terrible that our country did. Nobody forget. We must do better.” But apparently Elba is some sort of fascist hothouse. Also, I’m confused what the point of erasing the Circle was if everyone still remembers the Uprising. Whatever.

Hodge finally admits that he used to be part of the Death Eaters, and even helped write the manifesto. Double bombshell, Clary’s mom used to be in it to.

“My mother would never have belonged to something like that. Some kind of—some kind of hate group.” “It wasn’t—,” Jace began, but Hodge cut him off.”

Okay, tell me what it wasn’t, Jace? It wasn’t a hate group? They wanted to kill all the Downworlders bc they were just so full of love? No, tell me. I’m interested.

Anyway, Hodge triple-bombshells Clary by telling her that Jocie wouldn’t have much choice in the matter bc she was Valentine’s wife. Let’s just ignore the fact that Jocie still is on the hook for being part of a suprmacist organization and end part one. That’s right, guys! Part one is finished, finito, finis. See you on the flip side.

[julesdelorme]

Genius by Harold Bloom Jules F. Delorme Literary criticism, true literary criticism, that deconstructs and doesn’t just attack, that isn’t just a collection of soundbites, criticism that is whole and aims at our higher selves, seems to have gone the way of the dodo. We get most of our information in soundbites and memes today. And longer, more thoughtful, in depth criticism seems to be very much a lost art.

Harold Bloom might well have been the last truly great literary critic. He made you want to read. He broke down why Shakespeare or Milton were great, what made their work so special. He could be provocative and opinionated, but most often these were tools in his hands to get your attention. Once he had it he kept your attention with thoughtful deconstruction, breaking down passages to show you what made them work, what made them so powerful.

Harold Bloom was rarely boring.

I have to admit, when I saw his book Genius, a Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, on the shelf at my local bookstore, I grabbed it up without much inspection, based almost entirely on Bloom’s name, and assuming that it would be a work on genius in general. I expected passages on Einstein, Freud, Jung and Thomas Aquinas. It didn’t even occur to me that, this being Harold Bloom, this book would be exclusively on literary genius. Even as a writer myself, I’m not sure that I would have chosen to spend good money on a book about one hundred literary geniuses. I doubt very much I could have named anything close to a hundred literary geniuses and many of the names in this book I’d never even heard of before. Some of the names I may never read.

I don’t agree with all of his choices, both in who he chose to include and who he didn’t. Some of the passages seem far too short and some seem too long. 

But that is part and parcel of great criticism. It requires the critic to take a point of view. One of the greatest film critics of all time, Pauline Kael took the point of view that small verite films are good and big ones are bad. She turned on Stanley Kubrick for making 2001, saying he had sold out to Hollywood. She once wrote an article claiming that Star Wars and Jaws had murdered cinema. I don’t agree with any of those things, but her ability to break down a single scene in a film and explain why it worked or didn’t work was nothing short of art. She was also, as is Bloom, a very good writer. 

I’ve often found myself disagreeing with Harold Bloom too. But I have never, not once, found his writing to not provoke me into thinking more deeply about why I disagreed with him or why I agreed with him.

That, to me, is the sign of a truly great critic.

Great critics, quite literally, teach us how to think.And they definitely are a dying breed.Don’t get me wrong. I love that IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes and Goodreads exist. They democratize opinion about movies and books and give all of us access to feedback about any book or movie with a few clicks of the keyboard. But in democratization we also become subject to denomination, to census more than individual opinion. You’re probably scanning this piece or not reading it at all because it’s too long. But that is the point. Art, great art, is textured and complex and difficult. You have to sit with it and struggle with it, to pause and really take serious art in. And writing about it should, I would even go so far as to say has, to reflect that.

That’s not to say that every single thing has to be deep and mysterious or it isn’t worthwhile.

A fun read, a fun film is a pleasure of its own kind.

But have we become a culture of the glib, of the soundbite and the meme?

People like Harold Bloom remind us of the beauty of depth, of complexity, of Genius.

And Genius, as a book, can be said to be Bloom’s sequel to How To Read and Why in that it presents us with a list of what Bloom considers to be one hundred of the greatest writers in history. In doing so he invites us to explore some of these writers, discover some we never knew about or only vaguely knew about and maybe go back and rediscover some writers we read but did not fully appreciate. He presents poets like Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson and prose writers such as Cervantes, Beckett and my beloved Faulkner. He gives each writer a chapter in which he deconstructs one work or one piece, giving you some idea why this writer is special.

Since he is presenting one hundred writers it is of course a long book.

And it’s not always easy.

Some of the writers are obscure and difficult and he doesn’t present them as anything but.

But he gives you a glimpse of greatness, one hundred glimpses of greatness. 

Some you will appreciate this immediately and some may take some time to sink fully in. And some you will just not see the point of this book or of Harold Bloom.

But they are there for you.

 what Harold Bloom does, what he hopes to do, is to give you glimpses of these genius writers’ daemon, their spark of inspiration, while maybe, just maybe sparking your own daemon along the way.

Genius is not an easy book.

It wasn’t meant to be easy.

But I don’t think Bloom is asking you to abandon your Stephen King, your Harry Potter, your romances or your fun reads at all. Of course those books have their place and they are deserving to be read.

I think that he’s just trying to show you that the deep end of the writing pool may be a little intimidating but some of it is well worth the venture away from the shallow end, however briefly.

As I said, Harold Bloom might well be our last great literary critic.

That may not attract you. That may not speak to you.

You may have abandoned this piece about his book a long time ago.

But, if you haven’t, if you’ve read all of this piece despite its length and challenges, then maybe you should pick up Harold Bloom’s Genius, A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative minds.

I did.

And I can honestly say that I have a long list of writers that I now want to explore. And that my thoughts on writing have been greatly expanded.It’s not a book for everybody. Nothing Harold Bloom ever wrote was for everybody.

Most of what he wrote challenged us to think more deeply about what we are reading and why.

If you sincerely don’t care about that at all, don’t read this book.

If you do, read Genius, or any other of Bloom’s many books.

They’re more fun than you might expect.

And you will definitely be smarter for having read them.

I, for one, think that you couldn’t ask for more than that from a truly great critic. https://www.facebook.com/delormewriting #writing #writer #writers #poetry #poem #poems #poet #JulesDelorme #JulesFDelorme #delormewriting #ScarboroughWritersFightClub #book #booksbooksbooks #bookshelf #author #authors #goodreads #GoodreadsChoice #critic #critics #criticism #greatwriters

[paintmyreality]

Dear Writers: The Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Feedback

"But I'm more than a little uncomfortable with writers who don't just ask for feedback, but who more or less demand it, even making threats that they'll stop writing altogether unless they get more positive comments. I don't react well to emotional blackmail from people I actually know, and it really bothers me when someone I only know as a screen name tries to manipulate me into saying something nice."

—Tell me again how much you love me by The Divine Adoratrice 

 "I tend not to send helpful feedback to people because I don't particularly want to be accused of flaming. It's a damn shame, because so many people out there do want honest, helpful, critical feedback, so that they know if they're walking around with broccoli stuck in their teeth or not. I think it really sucks that people who can't stand the heat are not only staying in the kitchen, they're insisting that everyone else turn off the ovens for them." 

 —This was good, but I thought it could ise some work... by Arduinna 

"I guess it all boils down to why you write. Do you write for enjoyment, or do you write to be read? There's nothing wrong with writing to be read, but you can't force people to read it, and you definitely can't force people to send you nice comments. The harder you try, the more of an annoyance you become."

"So to everyone who begs for feedback, please stop making a scene. And please stop threatening to abandon the story if you don't receive feedback. The next time I read a message from someone saying "If I don't get feedback, I won't continue this story," I'm going to reply "Then don't." Something you can abandon that easily isn't something I'm willing to spend my time reading anyway.”

“We are not here to feed your ego."

—Begging for feedback by Jane

“Just like writer’s aren’t there solely for the readers’ entertainment, readers aren’t there solely for giving you words of encouragement

It’s okay to ask for feedback or remind readers to leave you feedback 

But don’t try to make them feel guilty about it if they don’t.

I know that feedback is incredibly important to us and helping us become better writers, but leaving feedback is the reader’s choice”

—Reply by villagecrazypeggy

"Your story sucks and they hated it. For some reason, you didn't reach the reader. Too obscure, too lyrical, too sparse, bad plot, crappy characterization, poor grammar, pedantic prose. Whatever. Well, it's possible, isn't it?"

"Because they don't like you. You personally. They think you suck. Not as a writer, but as a human being. They are incapable of separating personalities from the fiction those personalities produce. Just as many writers don't choose or have any desire to separate themselves from their work."

"They hate those stupid blackmail schemes: "If you want more fic, send me feedback!" or "If I don't hear from people, I guess I won't bother going on." If folks wouldn't take that crap from a writer like Stephen King, what in the world makes any fan fiction writer think people will cave in to this manipulation? Oh, wait. Must be because so many readers do."

"They're annoyed by those "Only send me positive feedback!" demands. Dictating what kind of feedback you're willing to accept decreases your chances of actually getting any at all."

"They're afraid to tell you what they really think of your story, in case you're one of those morons who thinks feedback is only about ego stroking and can't tell a flame from constructive crit. In other words: they'd like to write you some feedback or constructive criticism, but after debating it with themselves, they'll probably decide it's so not worth it."

"They wrote you once before, and you either didn't bother to respond or you were a bitch to them when you did. Either way, now they're done with you."

"Because they don't see your story as a gift to them, and they bristle at the notion they are somehow obligated to thank you in return. In fact? They probably think their feedback to you is the gift. And who's to say they are wrong? Not me."

—24 Reasons Readers Don't Send Feedback by Destina

It is incumbent on you, as an author, to grin and bear it gracefully. Don’t respond to your bad reviews. Don’t justify yourself. Find a close friend and vent if you need to, but in public, thank everybody and move on to your next story. You took the good stuff that came from publishing your story; cope with the bad stuff. Maybe fix your spelling by finding a line editor? Some critique is helpful! But if the commentator didn’t like your ships and complained about the things your story set out to do, ignore them and keep on shipping.

—Reply by antennapedia

“It seemed like some of the same entitled rhetoric I’ve seen from “writers” here on Tumblr. You know the ones. They’re the ones that feel that writers don’t owe their readers anything, they’re doing us a favor. Even going so far as to dictate how readers are to leave only positive comments, and essentially bow down to their charity and reassure them that they each have flowers blooming out of their asses simply because they’re writing fanfiction.”

If readers have to tip toe around your emotional state as a writer, I hope to God you never experience what an actual publishing house will do to you. Because if you’re going to eat up the praise with a spoon, you’re going to also have to learn to buck up and take the criticism as well. Otherwise, you’ll never be as good as you potentially could be.”

“Like it or not, these are the people that will either cultivate your art, and you as an artist, or rip you to shreds and make you question if you’re cut out for this.“

—Let’s Talk Fanfiction: Writers vs Readers by stilettoroyalty

Look, I know it’s frustrating to work hard on a piece and get one or two comments when you were hoping for more. It’s frustrating to think that no one is enjoying your work because they’re not telling you. But here’s the thing: odd as it may sound, your readers are not your bitches (to paraphrase Neil Gaiman). They are not obligated to give you ANYTHING. By demanding that they do, you’re coming across as a narcissistic writer whose fragile ego needs to be constantly boosted at any cost.

How to Make People Not Want to Read Your Fics by forficwritersbyficwriters

“You asked why people don’t post, even if it’s to say, “this isn’t my cup of tea but thanks.” As a reader, I personally don’t like to post the equivalent of “I don’t like this and won’t be reading it anymore, but good luck” because I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen writers eviscerate readers on tumblr for doing just that. I hear a constant refrain of: 

“Don’t like it, don’t read it.”

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t anything at all.”

“You don’t like it? Leave. I’m not writing for you.”

You’re upset in this post because you feel that readers are withholding support/reviews because they don’t like something you’ve written…. at the same time writers all over tumblr are all saying that they don’t want to hear anything that could even be remotely construed as negative to the writer and that it’s better to not say anything at all if you don’t like what you’ve read.“

— Reply by ellesjourney

 "Fandom is NOT a group therapy session, okay? We don't all love each other; hell, many of us don't even like each other. I'm not going to pat you on your little head and stick a gold star on your forehead for being such a brave girl and posting a story. I expect people to be aware that it takes more than just showing up to get applauded." 

 "I can understand why people want praise -- it's a very glowy-making thing, praise is, and I like it just as much as anyone else, and I've saved every compliment anyone's ever sent me on my writing -- but why on earth do people think they deserve it just for finding their keyboards?" 

 —What does "LOC" mean anyway? by Arduinna 

 ""Oh, nobody ever comments on my work! Pity me! You don't like me! Boohoo!" I personally have no idea why anyone would want a "nice story" which was extorted from the poster by this sort of emotional blackmail, but it's apparently just what floats some people's boats. There's always someone nice enough, or tolerant enough, or just new enough to fanfiction mailing lists to respond to this with a "nice story." It's really just a waste of time. The person giving you the guilt trip doesn't care what you say in your comment, or how much of your life you wasted typing it just so you could make them feel better. It's not enough to satisfy them, and it won't ever be enough, because they know deep down they extorted it out of you." 

 —Hey sailor, got some comments? by Martha Wilson 

"You can't take criticism. I once pointed out a missing word to an author, very nicely, under my regular slash writing identity. She said it was her story and she could do what she wanted with it, and basically that I was interrupting her creative process, and who did I think I was. I was just a fresh set of eyes that spotted a typo, not someone who was interrupting Rembrandt. Anne Rice insists on her books being published unedited, when almost every other successful author makes no such demand. What makes her so special? The same thing that makes you so special. A big fat ego."

"You have an FAQ on your web site. What are you, Microsoft? Please, please tell me what I need to know that's so important that it requires a list of frequently asked questions."

—Check your head by Jane 

 "A writer's words are no more sanctified because they're in story format than anyone else's words are. You don't have to have some kind of training and be paid, in order to say something critical about a story, all you have to is read the thing and have a opinion. Because the reader's words matter, too."

"I also do not believe in coddling the poor ickle writers and enabling "OMG my feelings are hurt, I'm never writing again!" behavior. Rather than cocooning people in cotton wool, how about we teach them healthy reactions to criticism and mockery?"

—oh goody. round 3.45 billion of "the writer is god and every word is sacred by Mary the Fan 

“The ‘if you don’t like it don’t look’ mentality can be harmful, even dangerous, because it’s giving writers leeway to normalize things that should be treated with care. We have a right to speak about whatever we want, to post whatever we like, but that does not give us the right to be rude or to mistreat someone with a different opinion.

We cannot normalize the fact that we should never get criticized, or that readers should never express their opinions if they’re not the same as ours. It’s not healthy and it’s only perpetuating a distorted image of the writing community. “

—Reply by inktae

"You are not guaranteed success, in fandom or in profic writing. You can do literally everything “right.” You can write the popular fandoms and pairings and tropes. You can type until your fingers hurt. You can put up fic after fic on AO3 and become a damn good writer and still never achieve even modest success."

"You’ll pour your heart and soul into a story only to watch it sink like a stone. You’ll write the best damn fic you can write and then watch someone else’s fic, that does ALL THE SAME THINGS, get recced everywhere while people ignore yours. You’ll read a fic that is absolutely perfect, that makes your heart sing, and the only comment on it will be yours. There is no “if” about this, only “when.” This is not your readers’ fault. This is not your fault. And blaming your readers for being inadequately appreciative will not make you more successful."

 —Let's Hear It For The Lurkers by laylainalaska

"You've given it (your story) to someone else. What that story means to you cannot possibly mean the same thing to the person you've given it to. That person has their own history, opinions, and viewpoints, and interprets literature their own way, and no two people do it exactly the same. You don't get to hand it to them and say, "Wanna read this -- but you can't have an opinion on it." That's nuts. It's a story. People think about stories. Stories affect people. THAT IS WHY MOST OF US WRITE THEM -- TO AFFECT OTHERS. You don't get to say -- This story can only have THIS KIND of an affect on you. The reader can't control the effect it will have on them, how can you assume to? To likewise say, "You can read this but I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT WHAT YOU THINK UNLESS IT'S POSITIVE," denies the reader the right of expression, something the writer hasn't been denied in producing the story!"

"I recently had a person subbing into VP who expressed great concerns about how she had "learned" what was "appropriate to say" and what wasn't. And she hadn't spent a minute on VP where we say pretty much anything we want! The net is about free expression and writing is all about free expression. Story writers don't get an exclusive on this. "

—Convoluted Writing Thoughts by Flamingo

[jimgim-blog]

Striving

As always, I begin with an apology. It doesn’t matter who or when. “Sorry, but--” is how I always begin any dialogue, whether it’s with my best friends who I haven’t called in over 2 months or with me, because everybody has to figure out which version of himself he wants to side with.

First, prose. Paul Kalanithi in “When Breath Becomes Air” sparked again, my love for literature. Perhaps unfounded, based on the fact that I’ve tried to read “Crime and Punishment” over five times, but still, a love that remains. His prose can only be described as leaping off the pages. It’s music. Especially towards the later chapters, when the “urgency of racing against time” is evident. He really poured his life out in the face of certain death. Although the vocabulary, syntax, structure and fluidity of his sentences elude my Reddit-level capacity to really appreciate them, I can tell its potential, similar to a tone-deaf drunkard happily sounding out half-flat drum beats because he can attest to the feeling the music produces.

There’s a list of quotes that I bookmarked but two that carry importance.

You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving - pg. 115

Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering...Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving - pg. 143

During COVID-19, one prominent lesson I’ve learned is that life hangs in a precarious balance between suffering and pleasure and that our job is to find out where that tipping point is for us. If you’re good at reading people, you can see where their limit is and can carefully guide them there (that’s what a good manager does). It came at a point when I was watching an episode of The Top Gear with a glass of beer. I thought it well-deserved since I had just finished a coding project that took way too long of a time. But by the time I had finished it, it was 2 AM. And I just felt this tremendous wave of sadness. It’s as if I had crossed the point a tad too much and the yin-and-yang of my personal universe was whipping me back into shape.

But, I argued back. Didn’t I deserve it? Isn’t the whole point of crunching numbers to relax afterwards? I mean, who actually likes writing out reports to projects that have no real value? (The premise that engineering at the Master-level study program has no real value, I probably should confront at some point, preferably before I delve into a career). Isn’t life all about the reward?

Besides the rush of dopamine which evolution has carefully produced to enable the continuation of the human species, I’m starting to realize the answer to the question lies in my upbringing. The Christian life to any person with a basic knowledge of the Bible is a life of delayed gratification. Confess now and you can go to heaven. Resist the temptation and you shall receive reward in heaven. Well, that’s incorrect. The Bible reveals the Christian life as one lived with Christ, in Christ and out of Christ. It’s a life of loving Christ, having Christ love you more than you can possibly imagine, and simply telling that to anybody else you know. But, to realize that--and even the more, live that out--requires maturity. 

It helps that I went to a Bible seminary, but there are stages to a Christian life. In the initial stages, you find out what it means to deal with outward things like sins, the world, unrighteousness--things that most people can easily identify as those evil in the eyes of a Christian. But, at some point, you read Romans carefully and discover that God never expected you to perfect your resolve to never sin again. In fact, that was never His intention at all. His intention is that you would get to know Him more. To love Him more. To care about Him. The end game is when you realize that there’s really nothing more that pleases Him than Him giving Himself to you, and you allowing that.

There’s many obstacles like, your thoughts about what God is doing, who God is, or why God made things the way they are, but the point of the Christian life is to let those things go so that you would know Him.

That’s why the Bible doesn’t have any explicit answers to the problems of world poverty, hunger, unfair suffering and general illogical and incomprehensible ways that each individual life turns out; that’s not His focus. Neither does He actually owe it to you to solve all those things.

And here comes the point. Suffering is a part of human life because Adam fell. Christians suffer (arguably more than the unbeliever because of the fact that now he’s aware of not just one person, but several persons who lives within him--Satan, God and himself) and it’s just a part of life. Whoever came up with the idea that the good Christian goes to heaven has probably given Christianity a lot of thought. Philosophically, it's a satisfactory explanation for the impossible lives certain Christian biographies attest to. Politically, it’s a great tool for crowd control (Caesar Augustus). But it fails to hide the meaninglessness of it all that cloaks its happy ending. And look at the consequences! It’s become categorically almost taboo for a Catholic priest to be convicted of child molestation or some other gross sin for which he would be by the Catholic addendum to the Bible, responsible for help purging at the confession altar. The walls of Sardis and Thyatira echo with words of twisted teachings. How frustrated God must be that we’re just not getting it!

I think I’ve arrived at the cusp of understanding it. Not the point of it all, but why it’s meaningful to live in the faith. And what part suffering has in all of it. Because it’s not dissimilar to what I consider a life worth living outside of the bounds of Christian law. It’s exactly what Dr. Kalanithi wrote. Striving. That’s the whole point. Or, in layman terms, the pursuit of happiness.

When I watched Will Smith explain it to his kid (oh please, that scene was basically made for him and his actual kid) that nobody should strip his dreams away, I could resonate as an immigrant because that’s what my parents embodied in their ever-sacrificing life for me. They never said it, but I could tell. And striving was simply a part of it. They never questioned why they should strive because it was ingrained into their bones as they did everything they could to survive in the teenage stages of the miracle on the Han. But me, I have the pleasure of enjoying the fruits of their labor, never having to worry about having enough to eat. Instead, I have to re-discover why I should strive at all to find a meaning in life that they never had to question (presumably. I never asked them). But, it’s finally start to click: the pursuit is the happiness.

Like donkeys, we need the carrot at the end of the stick. I generally agree with the capitalist notion that humans need incentive to progress (or to work, for that matter). North Korean defectors have the hardest time integrating into South Korea because working is purely a status from 9 to 5, not a gateway into a better life. And look where North Korea is today; isolated, whining and throwing a tantrum every couple of months so people would notice them. So, we desperately need the idea of perfection. We admire those who have seemingly achieved it. We cling to the ideals and lift them up because it incentivizes us. “A perfect life exists and I’m going to get after it.” And, that’s really what the economy thrives on. Without grandeur ideals of a large house by the lakeside with a collection of supercars in the garage, Wall Street would collapse. Sure, some are more driven by the fact that their childhood was deprived of any sense of normalcy. I can’t say anything to that. But, the point is that normalcy is the ideal of “perfection”.

But if you see any interview of the person who’s “done it all”--I recommend for all the Asians, Johnny Kim (it hurts because my name is so similar)-- you never get the sense that they are exuberant beyond measure. Least of all, there is rarely a sense of absolute pride that they’re done it the way they wanted to and that was the end of it. The common thread is sacrifice and a bit of luck. The more they gave for their goals, the less they had time to think about if they’re happy at the moment. It’s in that precise moment of the present, when no thought of anxiety over the status of their happy-barometer is looming, that they’re actually, happy.

Perfection doesn’t exist. But if you don’t strive for it, there’s hardly any meaning at all. A perfect Christian life isn’t a life without suffering. It’s a life with, in and through Christ. But it’s unattainable, impossible. And maybe that’s the whole point. 

p.s. There’s another dimension to the concept of “striving” in the Bible. It’s usually in a negative light because the entire medium through which we can live the normal Christian life is through faith and striving, on the contrary, implies work of our own merit. Here, striving is meant in a positive way, in the sense of pressing forward, of devoting serious energy into a matter that is near to the heart. Instead of a perfectionist foolishly striving for a goal that to him is naively reachable, I think of Luganksy playing Rachmaninoff Concert No. 2 in a recording that undoubtedly is one of the greatest performances of his life but riddled with miss-hits and asynchronous crescendo into the cadenza. It captures the beauty of irony; that only imperfection can bring solace to the troubled soul, keeping it afloat amidst the chaos of life. There is no perfect anything, but striving for it, whatever it may be or to whom the conceived idea belongs, is undoubtedly the greatest blessing to life.

[rodrigohyde]

Best Instagrams for Men's Style Inspiration

Gone are the days you waited for your monthly GQ to arrive in your mailbox to source your style inspiration. How many pages did you have taped to your walls to inspire your next big clothing buy at the Gap? Ok, maybe I am dating myself. Regardless, thanks to the internet, there are now literally millions of places to find style advice and it is overwhelming.

While the big name magazines are still around , there are blogs, Reddit and subReddit chat rooms, as well as YouTube videos and daily email blasts that tell us what’s hot, what’s not and where to buy it. Of course the Grand Poobah of style arbitration is Instagram. There are now thousands of “influencers” who snap their way to millions of followers by showing us how they dress on a daily basis. While many of these guys seems like they don’t have a clue what real style is, we applaud the attempt. Because of them, men and women are trying harder than ever to look their best 24/7 just in case their OOTD is captured on social media for all of the globe to see.

That said, there are some incredibly dapper gents to follow on Instagram. They know their style and share with us their favorite finds from around the world. Then there are those dudes who are just effortlessly stylish. We enjoy following them too. They may wear some serious suits, but their lifestyle can be just as enviable. Highest respect goes to the guys who give back. They post about helping others, raise awareness for a cause, and encourage their followers to do the same. Below you will find our favorite 13 guys to follow for style inspiration.

Broderick Hunter

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#blackmensmile

A post shared by Broderick Hunter on Feb 2, 2018 at 12:54pm PST

This model/actor from California has worked with Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger and was included in Harper’s Bazaar’s “sexiest men on Instagram.” He also happens to have great, approachable style and posts some pretty funny Insta stories.

Instagram: @BroderickHunter

Eric Rutherford

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Life imitating Art..or ‘Where’s the bar?’??? #KeithHaringxAO @aliceandolivia ? @dxprutting @bfa Fun night celebrating art, fashion and creativity. ??????❤️ Big congrats to my gal pal @ladystarknyc ? #artisforeverybody

A post shared by eric rutherford on Nov 14, 2018 at 11:07am PST

It’s refreshing to see a gent in his 50s getting so much attention for his personal style. While Rutherford began as a model in the 90s, much of his career was spent on the production side of things. But thanks to social media, his mug is the main attraction once again. Besides collaborating with menswear brands like ISAIA and Todd Snyder, he also dedicates his time to helping LGBT youth through GLSEN.

Instagram: @mr.rutherford

Tristan Cameron Harper

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Hope everyone has had an amazing time during this festive holiday ????? Blessed to have the opportunity of spending these precious moments with family and being invited to parties sharing lots of delicious food, love, laughs and good vibes. ✨✨✨ Keep spreading those good vibes and remember there are many people out there who are not as privileged as some of us, any chance you get do something that makes a difference even if its a smile or a hello ?❄️???? #spreadthosegoodvibes #christmas #festiveperiod #kilts

A post shared by Scotland ??????? Tristan ? on Dec 27, 2017 at 3:16am PST

Scotland is much more than haggis and bagpipes and thanks to the handsome Tristan, the world is getting a fresh take on the incredible country. Harper is a retired professional ice hockey player and now travels around the world writing about his adventures. His style is definitely more outdoor heavy but he has been known to rock a really good kilt at times.

Instagram: @TristanCameronHarper

Josh Peskowitz

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@jimmygorecki @standardissuetees ✌?

A post shared by Josh Peskowitz on Jul 29, 2018 at 10:46am PDT

Peskowitz is truly an OG in the menswear realm. A former editor, he was being photographed way before social media was spawned. Today he is the co-owner of the Los Angeles-based menswear store Magasin, as well as Fashion Director of Moda Operandi Man.

Instagram: @jpesko

Nick Wooster

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Thank you @paspaleypearls @hamiltonisland @qualiaresort #hirw ? @kararosenlund

A post shared by Nickelson Wooster on Aug 19, 2018 at 7:32pm PDT

Anyone who follows #Menswear knows Mr. Wooster. He has legendary status in Japan and he is well-loved for his very unique style that always seems to be pushing the envelope. A former buyer for Barneys and current Fashion Director at Neiman Marcus, he has consulted for a plethora of brands and is currently collaborating with the shoe brand Greats.

Instagram: @NickWooster

Joekenneth

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Keep your vision in focus.

A post shared by Joekenneth on Nov 17, 2018 at 5:23am PST

A Brooklyn-based artist, Joekenneth is making a name for himself with his books of poetry and prose. While he isn’t in the fashion world, that makes it all the better to appreciate his take on menswear.

Instagram: @JoeKenneth

Eugene Tong

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For their September issue, I showed GQ Taiwan some of my favorite spots in NYC, including the Rose Bar at the @gramercyparkhotel ?: @gqtaiwan

A post shared by Eugene Tong on Sep 16, 2016 at 7:11am PDT

Well known as the style director of Details , he continues to blaze a trail in the menswear world with his collaborations with everyone from Nike, The Kooples and Kith. While he doesn’t post many pictures of himself, follow him for the insiders guide of what’s happening behind the scenes.

Instagram: @ettong1979

Alex Badia

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Thanks @esquirehk for the love #streetstyle #mensfashion #menswear #mensstyle thanks @stevenconnorlau

A post shared by Alex Badia on Oct 18, 2018 at 7:25pm PDT

Roaming the world as the Men’s and Women’s Fashion Director at WWD, Badia certainly has his pulse on the fashion world. His posts capture the inner workings of runway shows and photo shoots as well as his own personal style.

Instagram: @thealexbadia

Waris Ahluwalia

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The most pressing matter with the environment is our relationship with it. We seem to always forget the inter-connectivity. It is not us vs. nature. We are part of nature. #GQ10 #GQAward #onstandsnow #lovenotfear

A post shared by Waris Ahluwalia on Oct 14, 2018 at 8:14am PDT

A Sikh American who grew up in Brooklyn, Waris is a fixture on the social and fashion circuit, known as much for his style as for his positive vibes. He is an accomplished actor and his company, House of Waris, has collaborated with a plethora of artists and designers.

Instagram: @houseofwaris

David Coggins

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Hey now “Men and Style” going into reprint! So get a first edition now or wait for the next one where we fixed the typos. Everybody wins!

A post shared by David Coggins on Nov 7, 2018 at 1:44pm PST

Author of the best selling Men and Style, Coggins is a pretty snazzy dresser himself. He is equally at ease on a fishing boat in Maine as he is at a tailor’s shop in Florence. His apartment also wins major style points.

Instagram: @davidrcoggins

Luka Sabbat

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Bad breaker upper

A post shared by Mr. Fallback on Nov 4, 2018 at 2:26pm PST

Growing up in the fashion world , Luka has been buzzed about for years for his fashion-forward looks. An early friend of Virgil Abloh, he also walked in the first Yeezy show. It doesn't hurt that he just started dating a Kardashian.

Instagram: @lukasabbat

Oliver Cheshire

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A cheeky Pret

A post shared by Oliver Cheshire on Jan 9, 2018 at 10:50am PST

At 15 years old, Oliver became a model and soon after was the new face of Calvin Klein. With his handsome features and well thought-out looks, he has become a street style icon. His six pack will definitely make you want to hire a trainer.

Instagram: @oliver_cheshire

Mark Cho

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I made a DB sport coat for myself in some fuzzy overcoat fabric with metal buttons as a little accent. Not terribly practical, but nice over a thick sweater. Also, loving the @drakesdiary Paraboots. First time owning a pair, really loving them, check them out if you're at the Drake's store! I also wore my first CAID piece I ordered back in 2013 for the Ametora event last night: a grey herringbone tweed, repro of 50s Brooks Brothers.

A post shared by Mark Cho on Nov 8, 2018 at 12:46pm PST

As the co-founder of one of the world’s best menswear stores, The Armoury, Mark is one of the best gents to follow to truly understand and appreciate suiting and tailoring. Follow along to read up on his thoughts on everything from overcoat fabric to trends in watches.

Instagram: @markchodotcom

from Style channel http://www.askmen.com/style/fashion_trends/best-instagrams-for-men-s-style-inspiration.html

[sarahemorin]

One of the joys of getting back into writing circles in the past four years has been getting to know so many other talented writers. In 2015, right after Waking Beauty was published, I ran an interview with W.B. Cornwell and A.N. Williams, who were also releasing their first book. Although Ben and Millie are still in their twenties, they have racked up the publication credits in the past three years. Already their publications include A Chill in the Air and The Shadows are Alive (under pen name Storm Sandlin), and A Day at Aunt Carrie’s. They compiled and edited Heart of Hoosierland: A Collection of Elwood Poetry. They were also contributors to Poets of Madison County and Paw Prints in Verse.

  Their newest release, Awaiting Dawn: The Story of Avalene, came out earlier this summer. I sat down with the pair at Logan Street Sanctuary in Noblesville to ask them about their latest endeavor. Ben is an outgoing and consistently upbeat young man. He’s full of energy and grateful to swap ideas with other writers. Millie is quieter at first, but focused, observant, and unafraid to interject insightful comments. Together the pair are ambitious, optimistic, and incredibly productive. Seeing the pair interact smoothly at the interview gave me an inkling of how they function as cowriters. At times they were so in sync they finished each other’s sentences.

Sarah E.: I love talking to local authors. What is your connection to Central Indiana?

Ben: Our great-great-great-grandmother was born here a month before Indiana became a state in December 1816. Our family were pioneers of the state, county, and Elwood, the city where we now reside.

Sarah E.: So you two share not only a literary relationship, but another type of relationship.

Millie: Yes, we’re first cousins and best friends.

Sarah E.: And that’s after surviving several books, a real test of friendship! What kind of literary works do you write?

Millie: All kinds. Under the pen name Storm Sandlin we write horror. Awaiting Dawn: The Story of Avalene is our first YA novel. We also write historical fiction and fantasy, poetry and prose.

Ben: We have separate projects as well. But yeah, we’re pretty eclectic. Imagine two collections of Edgar-Allen-Poe-inspired stories beside our children’s book.

Sarah E.: Tell me about the plot of Awaiting Dawn.

Ben: The story is set in a medieval time frame. A young princess’s family is murdered and she’s taken captive by the new king. He takes up residency in her home and gives her to his son. The whole book is about her trying to survive at her former house. It’s her palace, but it’s no longer her family. She’s no longer safe there. She’s in an abusive marriage and has a horrible father-in-law. It’s very much a story of survival.

Sarah E.: It’s like a crossover piece, fantasy and thriller.

Ben: It’s hard for people to understand how someone could be a princess and a slave at the same time.

Sarah E.: So politics are what bind her?

Ben: Yeah, if she left it would mean her life.

Sarah E.: That’s intriguing. Millie, who is your favorite character?

Millie: Starla. She is a servant in the place and becomes the only friend and companion that Avalene has. She’s a light in her life.

Sarah E.: Was her development your idea?

Millie: We created Starla together, but—

Ben: She was yours.

Millie: (Laughs.) She was my character. We planned out all the relationships between characters and plot points. And then we each took ones that were important to us and wrote the scenes.

Ben: We divide it as homework basically. You have five chapters this week. You have Avalene and her best friend. I have her and the love interest. And then we write and compare and edit together.

Sarah E.: Do you think an outside reader is able to tell who wrote what?

Ben: I don’t think so because sometimes it’s hard for us.

Millie: Yeah. I don’t remember which part we wrote.

Ben: It’s pretty fluid.

Sarah E.: That’s remarkable. But then your imaginative brains have been functioning side by side for a while.

Millie: Since we were little, we created games to play together and worlds and stories.

Ben: One thing that is bizarre is for first cousins—you really only hear about it with twins—we share nightmares.

Sarah E.: WOAH! That’s kind of cool. Not that I really wish nightmares on you.

Ben: Well, that’s the Storm Sandlin stuff.

Sarah E.: Right right. I can see the influence of the Storm Sandlin genre on this fantasy novel now that you’ve described it. It’s not as far away from your original genre as I thought.

Ben: Yeah, it’s not slasher. There’s nothing supernatural. But there is mental abuse, like you might see in a realistic horror story. It’s scary in a different way. Avalene is battered.

Sarah E.: Why do you choose to write those two genres?

Ben: (Laughs.) I guess we’re sick people!

Sarah E.: I don’t believe that.

Mille: I would say with Awaiting Dawn it’s a lot easier to answer that question. It’s because of the continued hope in the darkness, trying to fight back to the light.

Sarah E.: See, that was a good answer! When you are a reader, what genre are you pulled most to?

Ben: Historical fiction. My favorite author is Gene Stratton Porter. The first book I ever read of hers was A Girl of the Limberlost, published in 1909. That’s the birth year of three of my great-grandparents.

Sarah E.: That was my grandmother’s favorite author. She had collections of moths and butterflies pinned in boxes. And Millie, what about you?

Millie: I am typically drawn to very whimsical fantasy, anything that has that magical element. It started with Narnia.

Sarah E.: Fascinating that you, Ben, write historical fiction, and you, Millie, like whimsical fantasy, but that’s not what you write.

Ben: Well, I am a genealogist. I love anything that puts you into that time frame.

Sarah E.: It is true that the study of history ties in well to the world-building you do in fantasy. You have to invent a kingdom and which rules you’re following and which rules you’re changing. That’s sort of like being a historian. I say that because I’m a Conner Prairie girl.

Ben: Right. I think that’s cool you that.

Sarah E.: It’s pretty fun! So when I interviewed you two in 2015, you mentioned your inspiration was Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton, classical music, and nursery rhymes. Has that changed?

Ben: Actually L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables influenced Avalene.

Sarah E.: What’s the connection?

Ben: Anne’s not abused, but she’s alone in the world until the Cuthberts take her in. Her time with the family before is not good. It’s a story of survival. It’s incredible to see how Lucy Montgomery develops her characters. It helped me become a better writer. It’s really funny to think the process of how Anne of Green Gables came to be is similar to how Avalene came to be, which I didn’t find out til after it was published.

Sarah E.: Tell me more about that.

Ben: Anne of Green Gables started as a short story. Lucy was going to send it in to get published in a magazine and something told her, no, save it. Years later she took it out and turned it into a huge series. Well, Avalene started off as a three-part short story. When we first wrote it, it was vastly different.

Millie: That was five years ago.

Ben: We posted it on Facebook.

Millie: And on our blog.

Ben: I was reading it and said, “Millie, we need to bring new life to this.” So we removed it from cyberspace and edited what was maybe 4000-5000 words into a novel. It took—how many months?

Millie: We started last November.

Sarah E.: It just came out on Amazon June 5th. That’s fast!

Ben: We had a really great editor who is also an Indiana author named Samantha Boothroyd.

Sarah E.: I hear she’s nice!

(Note: At this point we all glanced at Samantha Boothroyd, who just so happened to be in the room and just so happens to be Ben’s girlfriend.)

Ben: She is! I’m fond of her.

Samantha: I can hear you, and for the record when I read it I didn’t know who wrote what.

Sarah E.: That’s amazing you were that smooth in your transitions.

Ben: A lot of people ask us, “How do you work with someone?” I couldn’t do it with everybody.  Millie and I can even cowrite a poem, where every single word matters, and be happy with it. That’s a really rare thing.

Sarah E.: You two are a really fascinating case study. Speaking about Anne of Green Gables, you have seen Anne with an E?

Ben: I have not.

Sarah E.: You might be interested because it deals much more with her past and that she was essentially a neglected child. It’s a much more psychological treatment than she’s traditionally given.

Ben: I feel like I would betraying Megan Follows, who did the original version. But I do want to see it.

Sarah E.: Here’s a quote from you two a few years ago: “With a writing partner, there’s no such thing as writer’s block.” Do you still find that to be true?

Mille: Yes.

Sarah E.: Do you ever have an artistic disagreement?

Millie: (Laughs.) That’s also a yes.

Ben: At first, if we didn’t like something—

Millie: —we’d just get really quiet. We wouldn’t provide feedback for each other. We were afraid of offending each other. But we sat down one day and had a conversation: if we’re not both completely happy with this, we shouldn’t publish it. And if there’s a different way you see this scene happen or saw this character, explain it. That’s how you know who your characters really need to be.

Ben: A lot of people will at some point work with a cowriter. It’s important when you’re doing that to have a shared mapped-out outline. You know what’s going to happen. If you write 12 chapters, and I’m writing 12 chapters that take place after that, and I discover you killed off a major character…you can’t do that.

Millie: You have to be communicating constantly to write together.

Ben: We get together twice a week for 2-3 hours for writing sessions. At the end of the session we have homework. You work on this scene, I work on that scene, then we get together and edit.

Sarah E.: How did you learn your craft?

Ben: I didn’t start taking writing seriously until high school. Then it was private. I threw a lot of it away. I didn’t see a point in keeping it.  Big mistake. Then when we started working together. I had a story I couldn’t finish, she had a story she couldn’t finish. I said, “You know what would be cool? If your character and my character were friends.” That’s what started our first collaboration. I do believe writing groups are important. We both belong to The Write Idea. I belong to the Last Stanza Poetry Association. Jenny Kalahar, who I know you know, is my literary godmother.

Sarah E.:  That’s a good description of Jenny!

Ben: She’s been more of a blessing than she will ever know. I recently sent her something to proof and she wrote back, “You’re getting better and better.” The joy that came from an adopted mentor telling you that is hard to explain.

Sarah E.: So Millie, how did you learn your craft?

Millie: I don’t remember a time I didn’t write. In elementary school I would start a story and get stuck, and throw it away, and start another story. I did that through middle school. I took two writing classes in high school. One was on poetry, and it almost made me not write poetry.

Sarah E.: Oh no!

Millie: I started to think it was all rules and meter. But then I rediscovered poetry and enjoy having more freedom. I also took a creative writing course and that helped me develop my thoughts into complete stories.

Sarah E.: Upcoming projects?

Ben: We are sending out a submission call soon for an anthology called Under the Cherry Tree: Thirty Great Poets Under Thirty. It’s a nationwide search for poets between the ages of 18 and 29. It’s kind of a hard age. There’s a lot of things for kids, and that’s great, and then you’re twenty and can’t do those anymore. But in your 20s, older poets don’t take you seriously sometimes. To the teenagers we’re old, it the older poets we’re children, and so we’re trying to give a publication for that awkward age group in the literary world. We’ll feature the 30 best poets we can collect.

Millie: We’d like to publish this in April 2019 for National Poetry Month.

Ben: After that we’ll do an anthology for Indiana poets. We’d like to constantly produce works that don’t feature just us. It’s an odd concept to not be working on 3-5 publications.

Sarah E.: Anything else we should know?

Ben: Elwood’s Poetry Month is coming up in October. In 2016 Mayor Todd Jones signed a proclamation we presented him. Elwood has a Poetry month now in remembrance of a poetry day Elwood use to have in 1976, which was started by my grandmother.

Sarah E.: What can folks look forward to this year?

Ben: We are still raising money from Heart of Hoosierland. Every dime raised til November 1 all the money goes to the city—to the library and the food pantry.

Sarah E.: Thank you, this was a fun time. You all fascinate me. Last thing, how can folks get copies of your books?

Ben: All our books are on Amazon. We publish through Create.Space. We also encourage folks to visit our Facebook page or read our pieces on http://goodkin.org/.

          WEBSITE

              Author Interview: W.B. Cornwell and A.N. Williams One of the joys of getting back into writing circles in the past four years has been getting to know so many other talented writers.

[libramoon2]

Manifesting Destiny excerpt

Moon in Libra I may not have a lot, talking about material things, and more concretely, the symbol behind all that stuff, money, and the fantasy of all that stuff money can be exchanged for. When I say I don't have a lot, that is only in comparison to some American dream, or even many people I know and interact with. But, I could as easily compare my store of possessions to the truly poor, and see myself quite wealthy. That's the point. I am. Quite wealthy on my own terms -- with everything I value. I know I complain horribly because I can't afford some terribly important toy. But, hey, they say Danes love to complain, yet keep testing out as the happiest people on Earth. And why are the Danes so happy? Because they like what they get. They don't need wealth in terms of breakable toys and up to date impressing accoutrements of ostentation. They are happy to have fulfilling jobs and lots of time to play and enjoy with loved ones. Me too. I could be Danish! Well, a Dane of Irish/Italian extraction born in the USA. But my point is that I don't even have time to be buying the latest gadget and fashion or keeping up with high consumption rates (and wasn't consumption some romantic disease a couple of centuries back?). I'm way too busy having fun, expressing my lovely creativity, and lovelier sexuality (hee hee). If sex sells second-degree products, I'm obviously ahead of the game, going directly to the first degree real experience. Is that what the "make love, not war" people were about? Walking my hero's journey to the music of my soul Dancing, in tune with my Universe Millions of sparkling diamonds light my cotillion Moon in Aquarius With Celia it was mostly "Persephone" with the occasional "Seph" when truly informal. Danny and Marie tended to go with "Peri" softly sweet. I was 5 when he left. Marie carried forward the tradition. I was 12 when she left, more permanently. He still called me Peri when we talked by phone, on his very occasional letters, when he came back for that short time to bury his sister, though I was less innocently sweet by then. I was turning bitter. Why not? My world seemed to be in a steady state of crumbling. But I loved for him to call me Peri, when I was his little girl. All I wanted was to be his Peri whom he loved enough to take back with him to his real family in California. I was even willing to be big sister to precious Maya and baby Osiris (Sy). Gwen was eclectic in her deities, in her lifestyle, in all her ways, but staunchly firm against Danny's previous life intertwining with the life they shared. She was adamant that he cut his ties with Celia, apparently some big loyalty test he had to continually pass. His trip back East for Marie's funeral must not renew ties to us. He was not cruel. Far from it, he was completely loving, even apologetic. How could I feel anything but love, and misery in knowing that he would soon be gone again? And contempt for Celia, how could I feel anything but? What is it about kids? We would do anything for a loving glance from the rejecting parent, while spitting in the face of the parent who is always there. Such contrary creatures. I love it when Tom calls me "Purr" "Purrsephone" though I am way too clumsy to be catlike. With him, I do purr with contentment. I won't abide "Percy." Friends will generally put up with the whole mouthful, but will often fall into the easier "Seph" as Celia did, or even “Peri.” I am not exclusive about these names. They are only attention-getting sounds. I was (secretly) bothered back in school when the popular kids and hangers-on dubbed me "Phoney." I think they thought they were clever. Names. Symbols that attach to us, as if some kind of definition. Mostly we are so accustomed to this designation of sound and letters by the time we have any coherent awareness, we simply accept that this is who we are. At least I didn't have the cognitive dissonance of responding to my name in the midst of other children designated by the same vowels and consonants. At least as a child, I got to feel that my unique name might be tied to a marvelous destiny. I had only a vague idea of the myth, then, that I had been named for. I didn't think about my ancient namesake, torn between two worlds. All I knew was that I was named for a goddess. I wonder what her friends called her. Did her husband, God of the Underworld, call her "Purr"? Did she feel content in his realm? This is what we writers do. We wonder about things that never were, and spin out tales from our wondering. I mean, why should what is called "reality" be seen as more truthful than fiction? So much of our reality is made up, stories we tell ourselves or everybody knows. Names that are imposed when we are too young to understand that it is only a name, a word, a metaphor for who we really are. Still, our names are certainly more colorful and meaningful than some random alphanumeric designation. Moon in Gemini I've been thinking about that theory of human life being some kind of ultimate point of the Universe. Divine Design, I guess. God’s will with the "scientific" twist about all these highly improbable coincidences that had to be just right or life wouldn't have made it. But then, self-evidently, we are here, as well as a plethora of other things and beings. I mean, there's no logical reason for it to have been other than accidental, the vagaries of eternity and random chance. Not that I believe it all accidental. I have a multi-layered view of reality. On some level an event could well be an accidental meeting of forces. On some level it could be eternally meaningful, part of a work of art or grand legend. On some level it could be imagination, maya, a random thought soon forgotten, a dream, a metaphor. On some level it could be a cosmic joke or a cosmic unraveling of all that is which includes all that could be, all existing at once, but seen spread out, like taking in a panorama. Sometimes I think I awaken into a subtly changed Universe, maybe a very close parallel dimension, where all those little differences appear like memory glitches or strange miscommunications. Reality is definitely not what it's made out to be in school and mass media. No, it's not the drugs. I really don't do that hardly anymore. When I did, I was way too involved in self-pity to have any conceptualizations of this nature. It is difficult, though, to speak of these concepts in prose. The word/referent link is slippery. Maybe that's why scientists use math. Is math a kind of poetry, symbolic language to describe concepts not easily manipulated into common parlance? I never thought about math like that before. The way it was pigeon-holed in school didn't make sense. Of course numbers are often combined with words as adjectives and functions, often act as metaphors. I think I'm digressing. Okay, music is based on math, intervals, rhythms, resonances. But is the music I hear in my head mathematical, or pure experience based on intuitive emotive reaction to sound? The language is the map, the human-made interpretation and communicative symbology. The experience is the territory, the reality. I think art is meant to bridge the gap, to be a language of more direct experiencing. Who else could I talk to like this without sounding so totally out there? Good to have you to converse with, Persephone's journal. No, that's not fair. I do have friends who get these conversations about, well I guess metaphysics. Tom and I definitely connect on that level. There is something very basic, a pull, a cord (chord?) between us. Something meant to be? I can say we get each other on a fundamental level, but that is map, not territory. On many levels we complete each other. We can experience other lovers without jealousy or even concern, because what we share, even sexually, is about essence and mutual need for that deep expression, again poetry, music, knowing beyond words. Maybe it's just me, too hung up on words, my writer's world. But then, I do directly experience all the time. Experience, that's the element of writing, of any art, you can't fake. You can learn all the tricks, but experience is what provides something meaningful to say. Without that, all you've got is language. What use is a map without territory to refer to? Moon in Libra I was an adored child. The grown-ups in my life may have been totally screwed up, but they always loved me unconditionally. Somewhere I always knew that. I mean, I was a total pariah in my neighborhood, but the people who counted knew I was amazing. Imagine my guilt when I kept screwing up, big time. Yes, out of my large-scale self-expressive hubris, I, an inexperienced young woman with big chips on my shoulders, managed to keep showing myself to be a fool. Probably no one was even watching but me. My mom still tells me I'm great whenever we speak. In a real way, all that bratty messed up behavior is behind me now. I have become someone I created out of the ashes. I have become a woman I can be proud to present to the people who believed in me. They never expected wealth or fame, just that I would do them proud as a strong-minded, independent force upon the Earth. I'm getting there, bit by bit, in my own idiom. I feel the late Spring wind, with hints of Summer's heat. I keep getting flashes of scenes from my childhood, like trailers from a movie. Maybe I'm working toward some revelation that will put my whole life in perspective. Maybe my stupid, childish belief in my special mission is true, and there is a great piece of art incubating inside me. Maybe I'm psychotic, having delusions of grandeur, incubated in my psyche by too being given too much adulation in my formative years. I think Celia was sexually abused by her dad. She's never said anything. All the stories I hear, though, the women I know who have gone through that hellish childhood, the way she is so reserved, secretive, brash in that forced way, gives me that idea. Marie told me about some of the tortures her dad and his older sons laid out for Danny, to toughen him up. The suffering of little children that no one seems to see in this world of Disneyland and video cartoons, it breaks my heart. Yeah, what happened to my parents was, obviously, a generation ago. It's still happening today, right now. Parents raise powerless kids unable to connect with the blessings all around us, insisting they put on a happy or appropriately miserable face to fit in and keep the family secrets. I do hear the stories all the time in the women's groups I attend. Pagan artists are far from immune. Even if I myself wasn't molested by my nearest and dearest, there were always those pathetic men, young and old, looking at me in that sadly dangerous way wherever I went. These days I discount their presence as a matter of course. There's a lot to be said for a Darwinian theory of a predator society. There's a lot more to be said for a magick theory of alternative realities within which we can craft a world in which we can best live. It is important to craft the spell carefully, mindful of the power of the words of incantation. Not too limiting; not too open to evil; not too micro-managed at the expense of spontaneity; it has to be carefully thought through and made just right. In this cosmic sense, I am not working on a deadline. You might say it's more of a lifeline. I was a damn mystical little kid, and I've still got it -- that magical world where I am quite at home. Moon in Scorpio It's like I'm consolidating. I feel myself moving into a deeper version of me. I'm drawn to examine where I've come from, who I've been, roles I've tried out, tried on for fit -- consolidating data to make the leap into a more fully informed identity. I have this body I inherited not from one person or another, but an amalgamation of DNA. Thick, long, abundant red-gold hair that I sensuously enjoy flinging against my skin, a gift from my father and, as Marie told me, gifted to him from sainted mama Louella. She died before my mom and dad ever got together. Had she lived longer and I still been born, no doubt I would have known and loved her as did those of her children I did know and love. Thank you, Grandma Louella, for your luscious red hair and your vivid, creative imagination, your manic energy, your loving gentleness, your brilliant spirit. Then there's my clear sun-kissed skin from Celia's Southern Italian ancestors of whom she never speaks. My moss green eyes must be nature's synthesis of Celia's green-flecked brown and Danny's turquoise blue -- his compromise of Louella's green and Robert's blue. I have the womanly version of Danny's strong-boned soldier's build, though not his height. Still, I am taller, generally larger, than small-boned, petite Celia, who undermines the expectations of her small size with her fierce determination. So, I've got this hodge-podge of inherited traits to work from. ("From which to work"? Who comes up with these stilted forms, or lesser forms, and their distinction? I am wandering ...) I've always been so independently self-defined. But then, I've often been doubting my own definitions as against those who disrespect me. There's a thing about being an artist, or so it seems to me, of constantly being confronted with oneself, doubting and refining values and interpretations. Maybe it is an unhealthy self-obsession. But those stories, songs, poetry, have to come from somewhere. Or not. There does seem to be a glut on the artistic market. Everybody has their creative spark to play with. I certainly don't want to court the wages of hubris. Yet, to even bother to bring to market my scribblings, my strangely main marketable skill, I have to spend a lot of time in that place in which I know I am brilliant and well worth listening to. Okay, it's the muse, the Goddess of Artistic Visions. She tells me what to say. I am but a vessel. I am a vessel of my ancestors and my muse. I am also a fully functioning human, being and becoming. I’ve got to be expressing my love of adventure, growth, assimilation of experiences, experiences that become me. Looking through the experiences I have come out of, feeling this new to me drive to consolidation. It feels good to touch my core and know I am someone I can count on. The days are so long now. There's so much to celebrate. Solstice next weekend. Thank Goddess, I have turned in my songs and stories. My time is my own for Solstice dreaming. Very soon Tom and I will be dancing and sending out wishes beneath the end of Spring Full Moon. Moon in Aquarius Summer Solstice. The Sun reaching its peak performance. We certainly gave a peak performance at the Goddess Center tonight. Despite all the nervous energy attacking our community lately, or maybe because of it, finally finding an outlet to feel good in release. I, of course, was brilliant, dazzling in my presentation, recitation, expressive movement to elegant improvisational music, as well as my bit parts in ritual incantations. It was a living dream, despite or because of all the sidebar drama. I love this motley bunch we think of as our pagan artistic community. Creative types, lovable but totally crazy, loudly proclaiming our mutual lovefest when not loudly proclaiming our independent outrages. Everyone needs a special place to come first, to be more noticed, to be catered to and expect nothing but applause for whiny venting or sympathy for yet another crisis. Not to mention, though everyone does, loudly, personal traumas, romantic disconnections, family issues, how can I get my work done when they turned off my electricity or who can afford simple errands with gas going up practically every minute, and on and on. Personally, I haven't had a car in years and would happily laugh at fuel prices if they didn't drive up my groceries as well (and then there's the winter heating costs on par with burning large denomination currency). Don't let my pecuniary disdain fool you: my prima donna streak is as wide as any. But I am so cool. I've learned the fine art of taking advantage of confusion to subtly get my way. And, of course, my way is the best, isn't it? Never mind. The point being the result was marvelous and an excellent time was enjoyed by all. Nervous energy transformed to kinetic dancing, electric performing, what we humans call "fun." Ritual wine and cannabis-laced cakes may have helped in taking the edge off, I'm sure. Ritual, to keep the community whole, healthy, in tune. Ultimately, everyday can be a celebration of being alive. We just seem to find some strange and nasty ways of celebrating a lot of those days. Is war a celebration, homage to the war gods? When we are totally horrid to each other, and ourselves, is that a celebration of the horrors within us? Do the wealthy celebrate their position with human sacrifice? Do people farther down the food-chain celebrate our pretentions to superiority in casting down and condemning those with any differences we can elevate to shame? Yeah, we arty types, we're selectively insane. Dancing on my inner stage, limbs and neck moving right along, to remembered music, I am in tune with my human contradictions. Dear Goddess, let me dance out all these questions for my dreams to ponder. I mean, without that annoying irritation, no pearl forms. I am a gypsy dancer, casting pearls before the swinish crowd. Dancing in firelight reflecting my visions, days of early dawns, late sunsets, sweaty heat and sudden storms bursting with lightning. My lover returns from temporary slumber. Soon his hand will remove my pen from mine, taking my hand into his. We will dance together in Summer's early light. Moon in Taurus These preachy Christians give me a pain. All this warning about the homosexual scourge, I guess a subset of the general sexual scourge plaguing mankind. You'd think we somehow invented biology in defiance of the Lord. Yeah, Lord, the metaphor that says we are a race of serfs, making our living at the pleasure of the owner of the land. So it's okay if you are a sorry excuse for a friend or lover or whatever so long as you make the right sacrifices to the protector to whom you owe allegiance. Doesn't sound like what I've heard of Jesus. To my understanding of the story he was a righteous, kewl dude. I don't remember him ever saying anything about the evil of gayness. He probably was pretty much gay himself, hanging with all those worshipping dudes he picked up along the way and told to forsake their families to come with him, sleeping rough, giving solace to the lonely and sore of heart. Think of the parties with him turning water into wine and blessing the whole occasion. Jesus wasn't about repression or exclusion. He was about life and love and peaceful coexistence. You know, it makes sense that those admonitions against gay sex in the Old Testament were in a section about dietary laws. Apart from the obvious joke, those laws were really about health risks. God's people were being warned against eating creatures seen as unclean. What could be more unclean than sticking a part of your body into the part of another from which excrement flows? Seriously. God was warning his people to have safer sexual practices. So where do his people come off making such a big deal about condoms? I mean they are one of those clever human inventions, a way of compromising so we get to have fun and health. I guess some people are wound so tight that they have to have old, ancient, strictures to hold onto. Sounds like insanity to me. Which is fine. I mean, there's plenty of insanity of all flavors out there. Mostly we manage. I just prefer not to be ruled by the blatantly insane. I prefer to have the common moral code based in sanity. Even if I give credence to the worship of their God, he didn't write the Bible. It was guys of the day who I guess could be compared to our journalists, telling the stories as interpreted by their own culture and precepts. Yeah, God would want his people, his hands, his workers upon the Earth, to avoid blatantly unhealthy practices. He would want them to be fruitful and multiply in a time when there was such a high rate of early death, all those battles for the glory of God, and disease. But in those Ten Commandments, the holy law, there is nothing specifically about sex at all. Adultery? That about honoring your sacred bond, your oath of faithfulness taken in marriage. No sex. No drugs. No rock and roll. These are not proscribed in the Commandments. Maybe Christians wouldn't be so bad if they actually believed in their religion, the part given by their holy spirit, not the clergy politicians. Part of having a minority faith, you have to really think about what you believe in the face of all those followers of the One True Church, culturally supported, even mandated in a lot of ways. Goddess, give me strength to see the truth, as much as I am able, despite the mass-hypnosis I strive to avoid. It helps to have friends, and lovers, who agree in alternative beliefs. I guess that's why we have religions rather than everyone practicing their own private, personal spirituality. Moon in Virgo My refuge, my sanctuary. When Daddy Danny left us, Celia was inconsolable and resolute, the way she can be. In some ways she clung to me as all she had left of love and family. Still, she had, what I now realize, an acute awareness that I had my own issues of abandonment, anger, mixed with fear and loss. She wanted me to have my own space to work it out in, not entangled with her grief. My mother is at heart a woman of the written word. Her safe haven and playland as a child was in books. In college she had concentrated on literature, with an ambition to teach as a college professor, something her public school teacher parents could view with pride. Even without the laudable career, she lived in a world of literature. To focus her mind and cope with emotional outrage she worked, reworked, never satisfied, on a poem she had started in college. I had been named for that obsession, a poem based on the myth of the Goddess Persephone. She is obviously a strong romantic archetype for Celia. Though, of course, her rational mind would never think of Goddess worship. When I asked why she was always writing, sometimes sobbing or angry over the closely worded, scratched out and revised in margins, pages, she set her draft aside to answer. She pulled out of the desk drawer a fat spiral notebook and a plastic case of colored pens. "I know it has become sad and confusing here since your daddy's been gone. Sometimes it's hard to talk about your feelings. It can help to write what you feel, even when there's no one else around you have some place safe to open up and let out what you need to say. Try it." Even at 5 I had been reading and writing for as long as I could think about. These skills came naturally for me as walking and talking. Instinct from DNA? I liked fairytales and diverse myths from different cultures which I found in books laying about the house. I liked to write little doggerel verses, simple song lyrics, my mimicking of Danny's craft. I took the gift, very seriously, and sat among the cushions in a corner of the room, playing at making words with different colors as I saw them in my mind. That notebook and its descendants have been my sanctuary, sounding board, never failing friend and companion. I get to focus the whirling storm of thought and emotion in my mind onto a magical manifestation of words on paper. Look, here, thoughts, feelings, spun out into a metaphoric web into which I safely let go. I soothe, energize, inspire myself with ramblings emerging from subconscious grappling with all the daily influences input into my senses, revelations made visible. Who needs drugs? (I mean other than for socializing or specific biological ends.) I'm not the practical one. It's Celia who has that Virgo critical breaking down of information skill to fall back on. I'm just a mass of Sagittarian fire, caught up in my enthusiasms of the moment. This notebook is my continuity, my exoskeletal structure, giving my bits and pieces a place to come together. Thanks, mom, for this nightlight to watch over my dreams. Moon in Capricorn We stopped at some generic fast food place to get some take-out grease on our way to an afternoon concert in the park. The staff seemed pretty spiffy, alert, working as a well-oiled team, with cute smiles and calm speaking style to deal with the milling clientele. Hobbled old folks, snarling young folks, brawling children, drawn-eyed parents, an imbroglio like some surrealist comedy. Spending so much of my time safely ensconced in my little fringe community, I forget how sad and unempowering daily life in the city usually is. Thank Goddess I've never been mainstream or Main Street. Thank the whole blessed pantheon that I've been able to frame my lifestyle in my chosen direction, somehow getting the little breaks I need to keep my self-creation moving along in my own idiom. Apparently, most people don't get those breaks, or don't recognize them as breaks. They seem so tightly wound and scared, and bristlingly angry. Not everyone, but the general trend. Reading comments on blogs, or hearing bits of conversation on the street, there's so much blaming, sarcastic digs, caustic platitudes, pointing at the designated scapegoat or anyone daring to disagree. Was the voice of the people always so mean, so closely wrapped, so crab-like stealthily pinch/withdraw/pinch again? Yeah, Cancer (the sign of the Crab, not the ubiquitous disease) rules the commoner, the public or publick, those served by the publick house or politician. Families like those of the kids at school, giving them the license to torture me for being different, foster these so-called conservative values. I never knew my grandparents, any of them, apart from stories. I didn't grow up in the wake of those emblematic American homes of the 50s. My dad ditched his military family history to be a ne'er do well songwriter, living pretty much on charisma. My mom rejected her Italian-American working class school teacher family traditions to follow a romantic dream. When she woke up, finding herself a single parent in a different working class neighborhood where she was figuratively spat on for being too much the intellectual elite, she closed off from the people of tradition yet again. The values I assimilated were not those of my grandparents, or even my parents or peers. I kind of made it up as I went along, mostly doing my real living in self-made fantasy. Perhaps that is how writers are formed, the creative sort that tell our visions, not the tell-all gossips or tech texters. Filmmakers, too, and other kinds of creators from the seeds of mental masturbation, are we all creating worlds in which we can feel welcome? What about those who work at those quirky idiosyncratic jobs, finding those precious niche markets in the hidden back alleys of commerce? Meanwhile mainstream commerce stamps out all the perky fast food servers and other barely above bound servant laborers willing to totally be the brand, mold themselves into appropriate hive-worker mentality. All the flag-waving "land of the free" and the patriotic hatred of those who "hate us for our freedom" while those so fervently defended freedoms are carelessly forgotten, even defiled, in the name of everyday practicality, in the name of some commercially designed prescription for survival. Or, in short, selling their souls to The Man for a promised share in the American nightmare. I assure you, me, this is no whine of bitterness from a certified loser. I'm not the loser. I'm the lost child that slipped through the veil into Neverland where life is a never-ending adventure. I never have to grow up into some semblance of tight-wrapped normalcy, however "normal" is being defined and by whom. That was never my role. Maybe we who have slipped through the veil are like the tribal shamans. Maybe we have a sacred duty to live apart from the life of the norm that we may intervene with the deities, bringing back treasures beyond knowing, invisible to those who refuse to see. Or maybe we just get to ride off and enjoy our adventures, regardless of mainstream rules and desires. Maybe I was incarnated for some divine purpose. More likely, I get to define my mission for myself. Everyday I get to create my life, my art, my self and expression. I thought that was the purpose of freedom, the primal scream of the American dream. Full-Moon tonight. Hear me howl! Moon in Taurus It's about the grounding, the safe and sacred place to release the charge. Feeling inadequate, out of focus. Yeah, the deadlines get tiring, their continual obligation, too tiring and I send in work not up to the standard I expect. No, no one is calling me on it. We all seem to have entered some summer space of lazy disregard or hyper-giddiness. Lots of our community energy is dissipated on far-flung festivals, self-finding excursions. We who are left behind far from forming a responsible core seem to be melting in the chain of sudden storms, wilting like the grass inundated in rain. I don't know if it's part of the global warming thing. It's sure not any warmer, just wetter than my mental collection of summer memories. I have to get a new pen. This one keeps leaking at critical moments. How am I going to market my angst if I can't read it? I talked to Celia, Mom, today. She calls from time to time to check in, keep up to date. I call from time to time when I need to blubber or be cruelly sarcastic about childhood memories that erupt disquietingly, or just because once in a blue moon I feel like a daughter. Today she was the one who wanted to talk about memories. I was feeling squeezed by the deadline for my Lammas piece which was refusing to come together. We talked at cross purposes for a few minutes. Aunt Marie died 17 years ago next month, which means my as yet unmet half-brother is about to be 17 years old. Not an especially commemorative year. I guess he would be going into his senior year of high school, except, as I recall, they were being home-schooled so as not to miss any educational opportunities. Gwen liked to pick up and go en famille on a whim without having authorities or institutional calendars to consult. Danny's new family (though not so new by now) was only peripherally on Celia's mind. Mostly she talked about me, asking about what projects I was involved with and intimating that she would like to see me, get together, share some quality time, when it might be convenient. I know, I don't visit her enough. She really has always been there for me, despite our difficulties. I admit I am at least as difficult as she is. It's never been a question of love or loyalty. We have very different styles, ways of being, enthusiasms. I don't blame her anymore for my broken-home upbringing or the glaring differences between our family and those of my neighborhood peers that I suffered for. Yes, I did blame her, unfairly I now see, for a lot of my years. I know better now. I've told her so. Still, I manage to avoid spending much time together. It seems better that way. Perhaps, well more like definitely, there are issues we need to work out. Perhaps in the fullness of time we will. I guess I could start thinking toward arrangements to visit for her birthday in September, Virgo on the cusp of Libra. Well and good, but this decision hasn't done a thing for this twisted feeling, just short of anxiety. My sure cure -- I can go talk to Tom about it and feel safely secured within his protective psychic and physical embrace. That's what this human thing is about -- sharing the little bumps and bruises and irrational moments with someone who gets it and gets me and is happy to be that place of safety and love. Why not be there when we can? Moon in Cancer Those narrow-minded pro-capital idiots. This must be why I rarely watch tv. Then I think I ought to be more aware of the wider political world, to inform my writing and probably my somewhat political opinions. So I have to be made aware yet again of the incredible stupidity that calls itself practicality. I mean, Mr. Smarty-Pants Business Man, you are not the Crown of Creation. Profit is not the be all/end all measure of worth. Some of us only minimally deal, out of necessity beyond our control, with money as a means to an end. The end is to pay our rent, have a space where we are allowed to operate our lives without being thrown out on the street with no place to keep our stuff or even shower off the muck. We deal peripherally with the world that believes so adamantly in the fiction of finance. Our real lives are about art and family, relationships, philosophy, finding deeper meanings, being absorbed in passions, following dreams to unexpected realities, being, believing, enjoying, getting involved, having lives we value, worth living. There is no need or sanity to hoarding greedy profit, gambling called investing, rating wealth in dollars, playing for the ownership of all the toys or golden parachutes or that other jargon. You somehow feel justified, entitled to rape the world of resources that we all might share, not because you have some marvelous plan to increase everybody's share and make us all happier, healthier, more empowered, but for your sacred bottom-line, for your profit-based greater glory. So you pay off politicians and wave your power over the people that the meek and hypnotized may fall into place, serving you and blindly buying what you sell, no matter that it takes more than their paltry pay, keeping them tied to your usury. Needless suffering, horrible tragedies squeezed out of what could have been happy lives. You preen and crow, so sure of your superiority. What twisted you so grotesquely? Obviously you have talents, drives, whatever got you to your reign of power. Why wasn't it enough for you to be happy, content, doing your part, making your mark, without trampling and faking your way to proudly display your place stamping above the heap you designed? I can be arrogant too. I don't need or believe in you. I have, in being me, all I need. What I value is so much greater, more life sustaining, pleasurable, even more powerful than any amount of currency or IOUs or numbers on an accounting sheet. Why am I so incensed? Buttons pushed; response aroused. Equilibrium re-established. Lammas celebration this weekend. In community we are strengthened. And we have a whole lot of fun. Let's see what this Lammas Solar Eclipse brings. Leo rules rulership. Perhaps the emperor will discover he is naked. I am happy to dance under a moonless sky and call forth the light that is the other side of darkness. I like to play that game where there are no toys, only the limitless power of imagination. We all have the power to do what we are. To some extent we have the choice of how far we go, in what direction. Moon in Libra All this talk about "the economy" as if there's a war between capitalist free market and governmental programs, or as if any policy could be one size fits all. People get so caught up in ideologies and competition, putting down viciously any idea defensively seen as contrary to our preset mindset. Well, obviously, not everyone, but enough to be an enormous unnecessary obstacle to real world optimization. What makes more sense to me is a kind of two-tier economy. You've got your basic tier in which everyone gets a piece of the pie covering whatever is deemed to be the basics. This sphere can also include basic infrastructure like public health facilities, public transportation including roads and such, public safety organizations like emergency and law enforcement, or more rationally peace enforcement. Then there's public education, libraries, art and culture centers and events. The second tier would be the free market capitalists to provide the goods and services they do best, consumer goods, luxuries, lifestyle and status markers, specialty niche fillers, fads and fancies and fantasies and innovations. People will want to go beyond the basic and fulfill dreams or create profits because there is more to human satisfaction than basic comforts. We like to shine, be respected, show our stuff. We like to earn credits to win prizes. We like to build our personal empires or be part of exciting or valued projects. We like to work when that work is appreciated and not oppressive. We are not in a position, even in impoverished areas, where we need to live by the creed: If you don't work, you don't eat. We have plenty of potential labor to provide far more than enough for everybody without demanding full participation. There are plenty of people who have no desire to be part of the quest for financial wealth, yet give full value to the social net. Raising children is valuable work. Caring for ill and infirm family and neighbors is valuable work. Organizing and participating in volunteer projects addressing community needs is valuable work. Providing education, art, cultural events is valuable work. Yet it is also legitimate to live, enjoy life as best one can, privately, without fanfare or public obligation. Humankind is so much better served by people pouring energy and intent into their passions than people grudgingly performing jobs out of obligation or desperation. If there is concern about less appetizing but necessary work being done, there are certainly ways to address this: 1) What is unappetizing to some may be interesting or useful in some sense -- psychologically or other -- to others. This is another advantage of a diverse population, when properly celebrated. 2) Ways can be found to reward, show admiration for, or otherwise make more palatable such tasks. 3) Ways can be found to give over as much as possible of these tasks to technological aid. 4) We can figure out better ways to take care of the needs now served by such tasks. The best incentive, result and means of moving toward this expanded economic model is the unleashing and uplifting of the great gift of human creativity, along with a generally increased zest for life. It doesn't have to happen all at once. If we consciously make efforts in this direction, eventually the tipping point will be reached, the more rational paradigm will take hold. As the benefits become evident, that which is best in us will continue to move forward. Moon in Sagittarius We are the stuff that dreams are made of. Every little fleeting thought, sensory input, synaptic connection is raw material for literal dreaming and the surreal expressionism of art (writ large or small). Something is impinging on my sense of equilibrium. I'm not sure what. Perhaps it will work its way into my dreams, or my art, unconsciously; perhaps that is its purpose. Maybe it's just the rain and celestial fireworks making me edgy. Maybe it's the impending Lunar Eclipse. The time between eclipses, solar and lunar, in the selected month is theoretically fraught with meaning, changes, revelations. Tom's been out of town these past couple of days, overseeing a festival he's organizing. I've been working on my own projects. Busy lives. Isn't that what lives are for, to create those manifestations on the material plane, playing with all those art materials, making those markings upon the world, enjoying the use of the stage? Why am I here in the city in August while the world seems to be caught up in countrified festivals (the world, that is, not caught up in war, politics, Olympics, or business as usual) Couldn't tell you. It's an intuitive thing. Maybe basing my life on pushes and pulls from some mysterious inner realm is a cop-out or otherwise unsound, but, really, what else is there to go on? It seems to be working well enough to keep me alive so far, despite all the massive insanity I've lived through to tell about. I have no problem believing the craziness happens to give me a wider perspective, object lessons, growth experiences. What doesn't kill you makes you stranger, as I've heard here and there. Part of my job description, strange and road-tested, transfiguring all with my magic pen-shaped wand, inking out this hero's journey through lands of Oz and Wonder and Never and the ancient mysteries. My dreams have been less than clear lately. Lots of movement from one situation to another without segue or apparent connection. When I wake up, it's all a jumble in my inner eye. No clear images. I feel like there's been a scoop taken out of my psyche to make room for new images waiting to be assimilated. I like the late night quiet. It's like another world from the day which belongs to consensual reality. The bread in the fridge has gone stale, ready to turn into the comfort of bread pudding-like french toast. Lemons are too expensive to praise the virtues of lemonade; I prefer iced tea (with lemon) which I have assembled of herbs and water, intermingling and waiting in its refrigerated bottle. All part of this complete pre-dawn, pre-sleep breakfast. This summer's been more cool and wet than I remember as usual. The paradoxical blessings of global warming? Some say we are born in a dream, all the buzzwords and hyped stories imaginative metaphors for our psychological concerns. Apart from being overly influenced by Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone," what might be the meta-analysis of my dreams? The stuff that I am made of? Moon in Aquarius I can hear Patty Smith in her intro to "Gloria" emphasizing "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." People talk about the troops -- and where did that designation come from, simplifying human lives into uniform units -- fighting, sacrificing, dying for my freedom. I am so very sorry for all this horrendously stupid suffering. I never wanted it. I never condoned it. My freedoms get stomped on all the time with or without anybody's sacrifice. It's up to me, every day, to make sure I am free. These folks, dying in some far off post-imperial war sure don't seem free. The folks they're killing for the existential crime of being the designated enemy sure aren't free. Freedom's got nothing to do with it. Or security. More officially sanctioned violence in the world makes nobody safe. Honor on the literal battlefield is neither a surefire way to make a career nor the mark of a real man (male or female) -- not in these days when there is so much real work, made even more imperative after all the wanton destruction, needing doing. Maybe people get so frustrated with discrepancies between what they're taught to want and what they get that blowing stuff up, people, livestock, antiquities, whatever you've got, feels more satisfying, like something decisive has happened. Or maybe that's just my silly girlish romantic idea of warfare. I've never been in armed conflict. Maybe it's all so regimented that no one gets to really feel much of it at all. Occasionally some lives or limbs or other body parts get lost. Occasionally buildings crumble, homes, families, neighborhoods, lost in the rubble. Whose freedom benefits? How do I benefit? Is this meant to be some Malthusian pruning back of population to serve up bigger pieces of pie to we who remain? The pie is ruined by inedible rubble. Careful, you'll break your teeth on that soldier's bones. It we want freedom, and whatever safety is actually possible in this unreliable world, wouldn't strapping manpower be better used to build and grow, teach and heal, explore, improve communication skills, party and create? That thing about power coming from the barrel of a gun only works while you're the fastest or biggest gun. People who feel empowered to be free can get killed. We all die. It's part of the package. People who give their power and freedom to fear never live. They may as well be robotic troops. There seems to be a common idea that if we can get the right toys, enough of them, it's as good as being free. Violence to get those toys and hold them is a wonderful game. Just because I don't get it doesn't make them wrong, if it works for them, I guess. It does make it wrong for me and the others who have our own games to play that are being obnoxiously and sometimes tragically interfered with by the violence and its consequences. Our rights must be at least as legitimate, as important, as theirs. Who is charged with the promotion of peaceful, cooperative, creative, life-affirming initiatives and maintenance? Billions of taxed dollars and huge military organizations get wasted while we are expected to gloriously applaud, then individually muster what energies we can in the service of paying bills and taxes to keep the war machine, the industries and their corporations they serve, marching along. Who made these rules anyway? The sinners that Jesus keeps dying for? It seems like a bad bargain to me, not just because I am on the ripped off end. The Goddesses are so much more sensible, gloriously enjoying as a sacred example, not horribly dying in martyrdom. Isn't that the way it goes: guys hopelessly posturing their foolish macho pride while the women get to not only do the real needful work, but also have to keep cleaning up all that needless mess. Well, not all guys, nor all women, but enough to prop up the metaphoric stereotypes. Men aren't from Mars, nor women from Venus. We're just variations of the biology of Mother Earth. Would it help if we made a point to remember that? Until the colonization of other planets, we're all stuck here together. When we do it right, we can have so much fun. So what's the stupid hang-up? A topic for eclipse meditation ... Moon in Aries I know I'm letting it get to me, but it hurts. In my gut, in my heart, in my mind I really do feel the pain of all the ugliness. People behaving viciously; there's no need. There's no reasonable reason. Yet it happens everyday, all the time, in all manner of horrid manifestations. People beat their small, defenseless children. People plot against supposed friends, stab them figuratively, sometimes literally, in vital places. People use the love others feel for them as tools of torture. We deceive to the point of creating insanity. We embarrass ourselves to mortify those who could have been allies. We deceive ourselves into thinking it's fine to destroy over petty differences. We are pretty damned evil. Not all the time, nor all of us, but way too much for comfort. This is what I get for listening to gossip. All the nasty little demons of everyday lives come tumbling out over glasses of wine. But it's always there, too, in the headlines, even if I resist reading the details, in the broken faces on the street, even if I resist hearing their stories, in the song lyrics and radio news breaks. Yeah, if it bleeds it leads. Sensationalism sells, and what's more sensational than brutality? Of course, I should move my mind toward counting my blessings. My life, these days, is relatively safe and sane. My lover is sweet, not bitter and deranged. My family life may have been imperfect, but never violent. My neighborhood runs to the bohemian, not the territorial warfare of the oppressed. What I suffered in my less enlightened times I survived, minimally scarred. (Just scarred enough to be intriguing, not hideous.) So, let it go. Think lovely thoughts. I shall clap my hands and save a fairy's life, shall I? I shall drink delicious magical potions and swoon into bliss, no harm, no foul. Or maybe I could get by meditating on my umbilical reminder. We are all one -- Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm. Because, what do I think I can do to combat the ugliness short of creating and surrounding myself with beauty? What would be wrong with that? There's always dark beauty, dark humor, the magic of darkness, the yin-yang shadow, the cup of refreshingly sour lemonade, the decadent delight of the bittersweet. That is what we do with the ugliness, I guess. Paint a graffiti mural over it all, clouds and whales and galaxies. Make it just an incidental part of the picture, disease germs and bloody revolution, Malthusian balance, life eating life, the tragedy of survival in all its ugly methods of demise. Why can't we all die peacefully in our sleep? Is there a vital truth to be gained from pain, torment, cold vengeance, scary demands of conformity, inescapable agony because someone profits? Who said any of it has to make sense, be nice, or feel good? It's only tragedy if someone's watching, and labeling. Otherwise, it's just private pain, like could happen to anybody. Isn't that what pain receptors are for? Maybe it's just interpretation. I say pain. You say pressure or discomfort or neural activity. I say torture. You say enhanced interrogation techniques. I say I don't want to see it anymore. You say here are some lovely blinders, part of this complete costume. Enjoy the fantasy ball. Your pumpkin awaits. I say awake me from this nightmare. You say: you are awake. Start dreaming. If the world was mine to create, what would I do differently? How would I reorder the better angels and the spiteful demons? This world seems to be moving into ever more fateful times. Then, all times must be fateful, chock full of ugliness, armored in beauty, blessed, cursed, nurturing within a burning crucible. If we could learn to program not in binary but in multiplicity, what answers could we compute? Would that mean anything to the battered child no longer able to survive? Or the battering parents killing themselves vicariously? Suicide bombers desperate for release from bondage, desperate to create their own context. Is there that possibility of escape with popular, market designated art? Is there a way to reconcile with human complexity writ large on canvas? None of it stems the pain, staunches the endless bleeding. Still, I have deadlines to keep and pages to type before I sleep. If I could just get rid of this queasiness so I could concentrate. I am so sorry, ghosts of the brutally defeated. Blessed be you all. May we all find peace, tranquility, pleasant dreams to erase the pain, reach transcendent beauty. Moon in Gemini "It's not that I don't want to be self-disclosing. I just think no one wants to see me disclosed." Celia told me. The last time I was living with her, after the whole adolescent rebellion thing that kept our conversations minimal, after my whole wrecking my life thing, yet again, stalwart Mama stepping in to take me home and care for me. After I got sufficiently bored with my self-pity, we had some good, deep conversation, now and then. I tried to let her know that what she disclosed I cherished, even while reserving my right to be a brat. I have the typical Sagittarian foot in mouth disease, not reticent like Celia at all. More like Daddy Danny who never knew a party he couldn't be the life of. I'm not that flamboyant, but I do manage to get myself in quite a bit of trouble with my radical ideas outspoken. But then the more gentle-caring side of my nature will kick in. I'll start seeing everybody's point of view and go all soothingly good-humored. Mostly I get along pretty well socially. Yet I do so enjoy that quiet understanding, deep emotional sharing without need for explanation, like I have with Tom. We do talk, so much, about everything, passionately. But there's that other layer where no words are needed for complete attunement. Yes, Goddess, I love him. I thank you fervently for the meeting of our paths. I'd had no idea it could be so easy, so beautiful, safe and magnetic, while exciting, energizing beyond any dream. Amazing how people affect each other, like elemental forces. I can be so very different in one relationship from another. These others, they pull out different aspects of ourselves, aspects even that we were never aware existed until there they are. There I am, in a way I wasn't before this other's influence showed me this way of being me. I do like the me he shows me, the feeling of being we. More and more, too, I like the me I show me. The better I get to know me, through all the relationships, especially the one, or many, with myself, the better my respect, love, appreciation for this marvelous creature grows. That can't be bad. All this stupid talk about selfishness, the great sin. Wherever I go, whoever I'm with, I'm always here. Doesn't it make more sense to spend all my seconds and minutes and lifetime with someone I love and appreciate and enjoy? I haven't got Celia's self-deprecating hang-ups, or Danny's well-deserved guilt over spinelessness. They don't need those hang-ups, though they seem to think they do. I certainly neither need nor accept such self-imposed limitations. There's plenty enough limitations, just being on the material plane in a social network, bumping against everybody's rules, restrictions, expectations of conduct. It is so easy to lose yourself in all the cross-current. Anchoring to a secure inner voice can be essential with all those conflicting voices vying for attention. No wonder the world can seem so crazy, everyone a hair's breadth from total meltdown one way or another. People clinging to whatever voice tells them what they want to hear, or are used to hearing, no matter how miserable it keeps them. Yeah, well, I would have more compassion for these miserable folks if they didn't seem to want to make everyone else miserable too. Yes, Persephone, everyone isn't as magnanimous as I. Named for a doomed goddess, I must be special, eh? Blessed be, each and all. Moon in Libra I want to take notes, record the world going by. Change can come so quickly. How can I know what I am learning, what has meaning? There have been times when I have looked back so clearly; I see the metaphor, the spiritual lesson, the brightly colored thread woven through my life. I didn't see it then. Then I was caught up in the moment's crisis, scared out of any possible wits that I would not find a way out. There's always a way out, if you can be calm enough to find it and resolute enough to take it. At least, I need to believe that. I feel the call of Autumn, change, forward moving energy. Challenges in the air. Will I be ready? I'm barely holding together as it is. When I was a kid I wondered about the future, the new millennium, how special is that! The past would be behind, with this whole bright and shiny new future to do whatever was imaginable. When the millennium came around, of course, I was in no condition to make much of it. Just another day, another year in a pointless series of days and years as far as I was consciously concerned. The calendar doesn't matter. It was, no doubt, devised for political reasons at the time. Some philosopher, I should probably google, I think said we can't step in the same river twice; everything constantly changes. I especially see the change from summer into fall. So why put the New Year in the middle of winter? Whose idea was that? Yeah, we may need a ceremony to convince us that the Sun is returning, but it doesn't mean we have to change the year so abruptly mid-season. Winter doesn't start on December 21, even though that may be the longest night. We all know when it is winter, when it turns cold and snowy necessitating heavy clothing and lots of it. Or is that too regional? And what will Global Climate Change do to that regional experience? At least in my culture, the school year starting after Labor Day has marked the change into another year. I am a grade older now, wiser, more in control. Yet this is when we are still in the servants' sign, the time of harvest, golden fields to be plucked of crops ready to be sent to market. They say new ways must be found to produce more food for a growing world, in these times of climatic change, in these times of economic uncertainty and the decline of vital resources. Still, people have long thrived through times of much less, probably still do in some societies. There seem to be the people who gossip and complain and catastrophize, and people who sit back, think, work it out, find solutions and creative outcomes. Of course there are other people as well. I know there are those who try and try and always get knocked down yet again, just a bit out of step with the main flow of acceptability. There are also those shallow hangers, smiling and flocking to the bright center of the parade, whatever it takes. I prefer to make it (or not) on my own terms, which have nothing to do with fame or fortune as popularly portrayed. I enjoy living simply with occasional treats, especially unexpected treats. I like being true to the principles I have figured out for myself through the life I experience. I like knowing I can count on myself while acknowledging the great goodwill of my fellows which allows my actual dependencies to be easily reconciled with continued independence because it all goes around. What I really like is getting away with being a brat because I'm so cute and clever. Ah, truth. Then, I start to think I am getting too old to get away with being a cute, clever brat. It's probably getting to be time to buckle down and work on more marketable skills. Just how long do I think I can get by on this low-level career mosaic of some art promotion here, selling my clever words to low-circulation publications, working events paid by distribution of door proceeds or tips, the occasional temp gig, whatever comes along and grabs me for a short term recompense? I know Tom could and would support me without a second thought, but I would end up feeling owned. Okay, this is something legitimate to be thinking about as the seasons change. Note that I never considered running to Daddy Danny now that I am no longer a package deal with Celia, obviating Gwen's objection. It did have to be said. The Pisces Full Moon will be available for celebration in a couple of weeks. There is plenty of time to devise a ceremonial spell to supplicate the Goddess to bring me the awareness I will need to find the path She ordains for my next phase. Free will is free. It is what we use to make our own what destiny demands. Or not. It makes more sense than running on chance, in my experience. Then, my experience may be a game of my mind, placing what comes in according to my expectations. It's all so tenuous! What makes sense of it is to go with what works for me, whatever my rationale of personal insanity. Full Moon ritual it is. And dreams, paying attention to what they say in their slippery dream language. Moon in Sagittarius I really enjoy wandering bookstores, sampling the wares, finding hidden treasures to make note of. I don't buy retail, prices in books like prices in general getting ever more emblematic of the cultural rift between the economic classes. There are still libraries and secondhand outlets for we financially challenged. Wandering the store, though, is free and fun. Sometimes I run into those author events where you get the lecture, free coffee, and the Q & A, which can be quite edifying. Today there was this author who apparently had written about the tumultuous 60s, heyday of my father and the social revolutions we are still embroiled in sorting out. It wasn't all sex, drugs, rock n roll and flower children. I've heard the stories, at this point from a wide variety of sources who mostly lived it first-hand. It was about all kinds of people breaking out of their stereotyped roles. There was the Civil Right Movement at first. A hundred years after the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves, you could have fooled large segments of society who didn't seem to get the word that "equal rights" had legitimate meaning. I'm not sure what the eventual catalyst was, maybe all that post-WWII social flux slowly sliding down, shaking out. The mass communication of tv might have helped. There was all that idealism around the JFK presidency; imagine a liberal Irish Catholic able to be elected, exhorting us to ask what we could do for our country. Whatever the background, change was playing around our collective psyche. A whole lot of people started to feel a need to make this rights thing right. And it grew. African-Americans needed rights. Draftees needed rights. Women needed rights. Gays needed rights. All the oppressed groups saw the light, that they were Americans too and entitled to be taken seriously. It's amazing to think about how radically different the world was not all that long ago. My parents may be getting on in years, but this was all within their lives, within a generation. That vast worldwide storm of social upheaval is my direct history, living memory, available on tv archives and affecting our everyday lives in ways we no longer even think about. When my mom was a kid, women were teachers, nurses, secretaries (or, of course, whores, but we don't speak of that), if they worked outside their home at all. Mostly they were housewife/mothers, and happy to be so. Or so the myth goes. Not that they didn't have plenty to keep them busy; and not that today there aren't plenty of women who opt for that lifestyle. During WWII, the one they thought would defeat the fascists and make the world right again, women patriotically did all the work left behind by the men going off to fight the good fight. Then, the guys came home victorious and it's the kitchen and bedroom for you, little lady. Well, no, not if you're too poor to have a kitchen and bedroom if you don't take some shit job not considered manly or worthy of decent pay; but proper women with good providing husbands get to spend their days cooking, cleaning, caring the for kids, and providing a safe hole for hubby's semen. I suppose guys got to feel the pressure to earn their perfect fiefdom. Then, there were all the closeted queers making life miserable for themselves and undesired wifey. This is the world the Christian Conservatives are so hot to restore, when men were real dicks and women were real tits and ass babymakers. Great! Backlash. But how does it make sense to lash out against freedom, rights, equality under the law and in the marketplace? Aren't those the grand old flag founding American values we get to go to war for? And I don't remember where Jesus said" "Oppress thy brothers and sisters as thee would want thyself oppressed." Wasn't Jesus about love and forgiveness? I am so confused. At least I'm not a Christian. How do they reconcile the teachings of their Lord and Savior with the preachings of their angry hellfire pastors? I guess that analogy about flocks of sheep is right on. Pardon me for being a bitter practitioner of an alternative faith. We pagans know about dark and light, and the necessity for giving full reverence to the whole. We are not so easily fooled by exhorters of light who lead into darkness. We like to celebrate life in all its intricacy, rather than insisting on some narrow path from life to a death-dependent reward. So, what's the difference between the supposed Muslim call for martyrdom rewarded by virgins and paradise, and the Christian reward of Heaven after a righteous life of suffering? I guess that the Christian is not required to die in combat, and is not promised a sexual hereafter. After all, you know, sex is bad. Procreating is essential, but the means impure. So sad. Jesus, I am so sorry for what your so-called followers have wrought. I know you tried, gave your life to teach them better. I hope you are enjoying your paradisial reward. I think you would be happy conjugating with "sinners" rather than virgins. I mean, isn't that virgin thing about claiming ownership of the fruit of the womb? What should that matter in the afterlife? "Sinners" are so much more experienced, much more fun. I mean, we are talking reward. Sorry, Islamic martyrs. Though, I suppose, being intent on martyrdom, on dying for your people, you never get much chance to be very experienced yourself. Maybe it would be more fun for you to experience newly together with your afterlife harem. What about the Muslims who don’t die in battle? Do they get a segregated corner of Heaven, or a piece of paradise devoid of virgins? Someday I want to learn Arabic and see for myself what the Koran says. Moon in Capricorn Of course the Goddess Center women are all abuzz in heated political debate, or rather debate about the highly hyped issues and candidates. I'm generally more into meta-politics, the underlying philosophies, paradigms, ways and means in the developing of the structure within which to perform our interdependent social roles -- much more fascinating than the media memes. Happy little packages we can carry through the day to give us our unthinking preferences are useful if we want politics to be a binary system. They don't end up so happy, though, when you do throw in some thought. Of course, thinking just leads to confusion. I am not happy about the sexist/racist political warring. I know, sisters, we want a woman in the Whitehouse (and I don't mean First Ladies and staff) because that would somehow give us, what? More power? A better shot at an executive position or fulfilling political ambition or respect? Because once we acknowledge we have these equalities of expectation, women will naturally elevate ourselves without it being worthy of comment. Until our culture respects its female half, a figurehead of gender is just another target for bad humor and rancor. To me the sensible course is to go with the candidate whose style of leadership is one I can respectfully get behind, if such a candidate presents, even from a so-called third party. Who makes these decisions about what political organizations are more legitimate than others? Is it just based on longevity? Doesn't that keep us stuck with the most entrenched in corruption? Or is it based on the size of the membership? It seems rather self-fulfilling that the groups who get the status will get most of the flocking crowds. These elections become such a big deal -- a national orgy of angry rhetoric and divisiveness. People finally vote, then seem to think we are governing ourselves by proxy, their job is over. Then we get to bitterly complain that the jokers can't get it right because they are not all things to all citizens. Meanwhile, for the local elections, the level at which most of our everyday lives intersect with democracy, small enough for individual activity to really make a difference, no one shows much notice or interest. I guess we pretty much just like to complain, not do the work to fix the problem. So, great, we get to get up on our high horses in mock battle, make our symbolic gesture in the voting booth, and righteously complain that the bastards don't know their ass from the hole we want filled in in front of our house. Ah, America, home of the equal opportunity idiots, selling our birthright for a bit of entertainment and self-satisfaction. Didn't the Roman "bread and circuses" come before the fall? Or is that why it's become so important to throw out the invading hordes of Mexicans and Muslims? We are a nation of immigrants and religious freedom, as long as you all are our kind. See why I don't get into political arguments with my friends and colleagues? I mean, I'm all for political action, but that's a totally other realm of discourse. Time seems to be moving faster lately. I have to get my brain in gear and work out the logistics of my visit to Celia for her birthday, less than a couple of weeks away. Tom had wanted to fly her in, put her up in a swank hotel, wine and dine and entertain her for a few days, including bringing her to the Mabon celebration, which would also allow me to participate. I ran this by her, and she would have none of it. She wants me to herself without distractions, she says. She always has been essentially very private. I can see that she might not be comfortable amongst a large gaggle of witches, mostly strangers to her. It's her birthday. She gets to make the rules. I'll have my work in in plenty of time for the holiday, so I may be missed a bit but not needed. Tom said he would rent me a car since I refuse to deal with airport security, and it's only a few hours' drive. Usually I take the bus. I want to go a couple of days early so it won't be a rush, so I'll have time to acclimate. Celia moved out of our old neighborhood a couple of years ago, once she realized I wouldn't be returning. She found a smaller place, top floor of a two-family double-decker, a condo, closer to her work. I won't have to deal with old neighborhood memories. I haven't made any memories in this new neighborhood. I've only briefly visited, not often, and spent that time with Celia, not the neighbors. I know she has friends at work, but she likes to compartmentalize and doesn't bring them home much. There's just her and Pandora the cat, who replaced the now long dead Mao of my childhood. This will be good. We will be adult women talking about our lives, our relationship, working on that primal mother-daughter bond. Then I will come home, back to my life, renewed, enriched by this familial experience. It's all good. It's golden, like autumn leaves. Moon in Pisces Harvest Moon, too overcast to see your resplendent glory. We've been dancing to, if not exactly under you. The weather should be clearer tomorrow night for the full Full Moon effect. Or will another hurricane come up the coast to drown you? Unsettled weather. Unsettling times. Uranus conjunct the Full Moon at the time of harvest. The Towers were struck by lightning, manmade lightning. Fire and brimstone. I wonder about the Christ and anti-Christ quoting scriptures, using prophecy to further causes of today. If Christians wonder why I mock them, or more likely take offense (turn that other cheek, guys), how would they feel about castigations of being Satan Worshippers, evil heathens, unbelievers in the One True Church (splintered as it may be). They leave no room for me. I, on the other (left?) hand honor them by taking their creed seriously. There's room enough for all of us. Why don't they want to see that? They've only been around for a couple thousand years. In the beginning was way before any of us can remember. At the end we all die, onward to whatever afterlife does or does not await us. The Bokononists, in Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" believed the world ended when they died. Their world did. Of course, their world was a fictional one created by a human author. So like a god, the artist, creator of worlds. Don't worship me! I don't want the responsibility. Why would a god? Why would a President? Why do these politicians want to be President of The World Power? What kind of power does it really give them? Well, if we the people and our other representatives aren't looking, paying attention, expressing our minding, who knows? Maybe it's not some mythical anti-Christ and Beast we need to be concerned about. Maybe the threat is much more mundane and RealPolitik. Beware of politicians on a mission from God. So, dear Goddess, tomorrow night belongs to you, under the Harvest Moon. My intention for supplication to your wisdom will be brought with holy honor. What is the nature of my harvest and my sacrifice? The Vestal Virgins were not physically intact, but free of the domination of any man. Perhaps I am in that sense a virgin as well. Though the bonds of love -- but are bonds of love a domination if it is a love between free equals with no expectations, no demands? What am I willing to sacrifice? It's not like I've got much. Maybe I can sacrifice my ignorance, my unfounded fears, my ill-advised temptations, self-imposed limitations. I sacrifice my weakness in the service of my strength. Sounds lovely. The thing with magick -- be oh so careful when wishing that you are ready for the consequent reality after tweaking to magick's demand. Be careful what you will for; it may become your destiny. I could be such a well-adjusted coward. Well, part of me would be. I am opening myself to destiny, not out of bravery, but necessity. What else have I got? It's far too late in the game to switch over to a "normal" lifestyle. I have the candles, the incense, the herbs, the wine, the spell. Wish me luck. I am a daughter of Jupiter. Luck is my Ace in the hole, my guardian talisman, my banner and armor. Moon in Taurus I don't get what these economy down the tubes explainers are talking about. There is no free market. At least not in the land of the free where everything costs. There are all kinds of regulations, petty and large, but mostly opportunities for people to be paid off. There are licensing fees and inspections and filing papers and setting up appropriate accounts for paying taxes, paperwork constantly prying into the time that you want to be spending on making the business happen. Creating a small business, even before making it work, is made so difficult, as if we didn't really need and want all the local and specialty enterprises keeping our daily lives running with the manufacturing and distributing of goods, services, community glue, backbone of a thriving economy. I took a bunch of courses at community college in small business management. After investigating my job options, doing some kind of art promotion seemed the way to go. I had picked up some idea of how art and making a living might intersect while I adhered to Mark. Not that he was very successful, but, amazingly (to me) he did make a living from selling his paintings. Of course I got to learn about blackmarket sales and distribution close up at Brent's side, though I may have been more focused on sampling the wares. Having had some basic marketing and business accounting classes, though, I'm sure my amalgamating brain cells did their multi-tasking and I did pick up salient lessons. I do seem able to come up with decent strategies and ideas, useful enough for various friends and cohorts to be happy to trade favors, ask my advice, invite my participation in their and mutual projects. My point being that these big deal business as theft types at the top cry so hard about free market liberty, small government, social welfare is none of our concern, blah, blah, blah; but they don't play by those rules. They do all they can, like buying politicians and advertising hypnosis, to get their sweet, sweet deals, laws swerved to their favor, keeping the little guys swamped in paperwork and regulations that they have departments of experts to play for them, merrily screwing the workers and consumers, setting themselves up as too vital to fail so they get bailed out when they go too far, excused from every stupidity and vile act and liability with the best justice money can buy... Where is anything resembling a free market whose invisible hand chooses products, prices, promotes innovation and creative problem-solving (not just financing), gets the best to the most for the least? There is no free market. There probably never has been. Like the people's communism that is meant to form once the state has withered away, instead the state stands firm no matter the dire straits of the common people, those communism was meant to uplift into mutually benefitting community. They're only theories. In the real marketplace corruption and strong-arming rules. The more you've got the more you can get by paying off the refs and cops and rule-makers. Meanwhile, the people with the great ideas who might be truly providing what the people, the customers, the market would so greatly desire have to get nickel and dimed, insulted and threatened and broken one way or several so that if they ever do manage to make a go of it they need to develop talents having nothing to do with their purported product but all about scrabbling and scheming, skimming and hoarding resources. At least admit the game is fixed. Admit that winners and losers are not about moral desert, but immoral leverage. Maybe if we finally let the corporations fail, too big or not, let the market happen, let the millions of little good ideas sprout up in communities everywhere, suited to their individual little markets, we really could have that diversity of ideas and cultures and small solutions that we ideally say we want. Even if profits were not the only motive, even if we were more concerned with people having the products and lives we each really want, it would still be a marketplace of freedom. I know, the script says we are mere vassals in the service of our Lords. Isn’t it better to be vestal virgins in the service of our Goddess, no man's slave? I've got to get my act together to get it on the road tomorrow. On my sacred mission to celebrate her birth with my mother, just at the changing of the seasons. It seems appropriately, what? Generational? I'll be leaving from here, Tom's place. We are spending our last few precious hours of Summer together, since by the time I'm back next week it will already be Fall. We got together shortly before Spring, kind of a half-versary. Bed and breakfast a la casa with Tom, dinner with Celia, a long drive's worth of transition between. Today we have unplanned plans to play like kids, in a totally other world from logic or economics or politics, just Tom and me and the we of our common becoming.