#me as a writer: if i do not get the precise distance you could ride a horse in one day i shall PERISH

[youvebeenlivingfictional]

The Logical Epilogue

Epilogue to The Logical Progression

Pairing: Nathan Bateman x Reader Rating: Mature Warnings: Cursing; sexual innuendo; Nathan being Nathan Notes: Honestly was kinda stunned that so many people asked for an epilogue 🥺 Sorry it took so long!  Just as a note, the painter mentioned in this piece is entirely fictional Summary: At first, it was exciting.

Berlin worked.

Berlin worked for a while.

You settled into your new position, your new office. Your new boss, Mark’s replacement, was out in California, and the time difference was a little bit of a bitch, but you made it work.

You made it work for a while.

You saw Nathan most weekends, at first. Most, because he got consumed with his work so often, and so did you, sometimes. Truth be told, you couldn’t always take the time out of your schedule to take the two hour flight from Berlin to Oslo, and then the hour long helicopter ride from the airport to the drop zone near the estate, and then the forty five minute hike from the drop zone to Nathan’s house.

At first, you did.

At first, it was exciting. At first you were optimistic, and in love, and brimming with hope because this was a compromise—and sure, it wasn’t something that the two of you had come up with together; it had been your idea, but he had said yes. Yes to your idea, yes to Berlin, yes to your new title – in his company. You had carved out your own place in his company, gotten to where you were by your own merits. You were happy. He was happy.

It worked at first.

After the first few months, though, the bloom was off the rose.

It started with the travel. 

Four hours was a lot one way – and that was four hours if everything was running on time and the weather permitted. It was eight hours all told, round trip. Eight hours every weekend, back and forth, was a bit much. So after a few months, every weekend became every other weekend – and it was still a lot. Of course, any time you mentioned that to Nathan, he was unapologetic at best.

“If you’d just moved in with me like I’d planned, you wouldn’t be tired.”

The first couple of times, you’d laughed. The fifteenth time, it wasn’t so funny anymore. You finally stopped mentioning it to him.

Then, it was the work.

It took you four hours to get to his house. Four. Three flying and an hour of a hike – sometimes through the snow. Silly you, you’d thought the man might stop for more than a kiss and a, “Hey, honey,” when you got there.

At first, the two of you were fucking like rabbits. And then your visits became more infrequent, and even when you were there, Nathan was sometimes too locked in to whatever it was that he was doing to give you the time of day, so much so that you felt like his damn Jackson Pollack: you were around to be looked at occasionally, contemplated, and then left to your own devices.

You’d made the mistake of mentioning that to him, too.

“I’d have more time for you if you were here, honey.”

That had started as a tease, too, but you knew Nathan. Every little joke and jab had a thin layer of saccharine shielding the spike he really wanted to stick you with.

And it stuck.

It didn’t help that your work had felt stagnant since you’d moved. Blue Book was still flourishing; your performance reviews were all positive; the Berlin office was thriving, but… But ever since you moved, you just felt so disconnected.

-- 

“You’re not coming this weekend?”

Nathan’s voice didn’t manage to lose any of its petulance despite how tinny it sounded through your headphones.

“I can’t, we’re going through tissue sessions for the pitch on Monday,” You told him.

“I haven’t seen you in, like, a month.”

“Oh, you noticed that?” There was a pause on Nathan’s end before he dryly asked, “You driving at something, sweetheart?” “Look Nate, I’ve got work to do,” You retorted, “I’ll call you later and try to make it out next weekend, alright?” Nathan let out a scoffed laugh and hung up. No ‘goodbye’, no ‘sure’, no ‘noon will be fine’. Looking back, that should’ve been a warning. With Nathan, there wouldn’t be a goodbye. There would be a drift. The time between your trips to see him became longer and longer, and your countenance in one another’s company became more and more icy, more static. The trips stopped, the calls stopped, and then a box with the things that you left at Nathan’s place showed up at your door. No note, no letter from him, nothing. His Maya console was right at the bottom. He’d finally ripped it out of the fuckin’ wall. Mommy and Daddy had broken up and you got full custody. -- 

The decision to leave Blue Book wasn’t a result of the break up. You’d had other job offers before - Nathan knew that-- No. No, you told yourself to take Nathan out of the equation as you handwrote your resignation letter. Handwrote, because you were still under NDA, and you didn’t want the drafts of this to be caught in one of the regular data audits that Blue Book did. 

You weren’t leaving to join Google, Apple, or IBM, or any of the other companies that had offered you positions with them over the years.  One of the reasons that you had moved up in Blue Book as quickly as you had was your ability to look at a product release and translate the jargon-heavy language into something the average person could understand. You’d done it for a few friends in the tech industry on the side now and again, when they were getting started with their own companies. And as much as you liked Blue Book, you liked the idea of being your own boss more. -- Your last night at Blue Book was no less than a fiasco - you’d been there a long time, so they made an effort, a fuss. They threw a party at a swanky art gallery in Berlin. People had come up to you all evening, asked you what your plans were, if you were excited, what you would miss. You’d told them - you were going to become a freelance writer, focus on technical writing. You already had a number of jobs lined up. You were incredibly excited, but a little nervous. Blue Book had been one big cyber safety net. You’d be alone.

“You hear Bateman was here?” It was a whisper behind you - from one member of the sales team to another, but loud enough for you to hear, loud enough to distract you from the conversation that you’d been in the middle of. There was no way. You hadn’t heard from the man in months - four of them, if you were going to be precise. There was no way he would turn up at your going away party - to do what? Make a fucking splash? All eyes on him? You wondered exactly how much shit you’d get for leaving your own party. You heard the ping of Blue Book’s messaging system on your phone and you pulled it out of your pocket, going cold when you saw the message. N. Bateman: Ferrar room.

No. No, you wouldn’t let him do this. This motherfucker wouldn’t get the chance to just swan back in and sweep you back off of your fucking feet after he was such a shit. -- “So you haven’t plugged Maya in yet.” “...Well between my phone, laptop and the NDA, I’ve kinda already got enough of your spyware in my apartment.”

Nathan chuckled, still wandering around the little back room of the gallery. You’d had to ask an attendant where the Ferrar room even was - but it was full of some of the most vibrant work you’d ever seen. So maybe, for that reason, you’d briefly forgiven Nathan for not even turning to look at you since you’d walked in. And yeah, it had stung, but considering everything that had happened and-- and not happened -- considering the things that the two of you had never said and the fights that you’d never had, and the compromises that he’d never made and every single compromise that you had made, it was no wonder that the man didn’t bother to turn and look at you when there was canvas after canvas after canvas of life in vivid color all around him. “Armel Ferrar,” Nathan said, “French painter, born in Peillon in 1868. Moved to Paris in 1885. Heavily influenced by Seurat and Cézanne -- more Cézanne than Seurat. You can see it in the color use, but… the way he plays with light, that’s all Seurat.” You weren’t looking at the painting that Nathan was looking at. Hell, you weren’t even looking at the paintings. You were just looking at him - at the back of his fucking head. At the back of his fucking head, and the slight tapering that you could see of his beard; at the way his shoulders sloped, and where his hands were tucked into his pockets. Your eyes drifted up his back again, over his neck, his head. The painting he was looking at, whatever painting it was, had bursts of yellow - wheat, maybe, or stars, or the sun, it was difficult for you to tell at that distance. From where you stood, it was as though the man was haloed and framed. Bright and shining and on display, this man that liked to keep to himself and spent his days underground in his office. “Stayed in Paris, too--” He was still talking, of course he was still talking, “Most of his life, or what was left of it. Never married, had one kid outta wedlock… Died in 1891, same year as Seurat. His daughter, Marie-Thérèse, married a military man that moved her to Berlin after the second World War. She brought his paintings with her, that’s how they wound up here.” 

Nathan went quiet for a few moments before, “What do you think?” “...I’m wondering why you had me come back here when you very well could’ve given that TED talk to an empty room. Or better yet to any one of the people out there that are utterly fascinated with you. Either would suit, considering how much you love your own voice.” You had already turned yourself to look at a painting, made yourself distracted by the time you answered, because you’d known that that would get a look from him. You were right, too; you saw him turn to look at you out of your periphery. “Can we skip this part?” That bored tone was back. You dug your nails into the palms of your hands, letting your eyes hone in on the vivid splashes of red on the painting in front of you - petunias. “Which part would that be?” You asked. “The part where you tell me what I did wrong and I pretend that you’re right so that I can say sorry and we can get back to what we were doing.”

You laughed. You actually laughed. Not a fake one, not a haughty one, but a real peal of laughter left you in shock. “Wow,” You sighed once it had passed, “I forgot what a dick you are, you know that? I actually kinda managed to forget.” “Look--” “No,” You turned to face him, holding a hand up to stop whatever he was about to say, “If you came to fake some sincere bullshit, or to tell me that everything would’ve worked if we had done things your way--” “They would’ve--” “Shut the fuck up, Bateman,” You snapped, “You don’t know that, alright? You don’t. I don’t care if you have it in your head that it would’ve all been perfect because you said so.” 

“You really think my way would’ve been worse?” “Well, we’ll never know,” You shrugged, folding your arms over your chest. Nathan was quiet for a single, blessed moment. Then-- “Why are you leaving Blue Book?” “I don’t wanna sound egotistical here, but I kinda refuse to believe that you didn’t read my resignation letter.” “I did.” “Then you know the answer.” “Were those the only reasons?” You looked over his face for a few moments. “... It wasn’t you,” You shook your head, “I don’t know if you wanted it to be, or didn’t, but it wasn’t you.” “Why the fuck would I want it to be?” “Because you think the universe revolves around your beard.” 

He seemed to fight a smile for a moment, and your stomach twisted. You’d seen that look - the way he had to work to pull down the corners of his mouth - in the first video he’d ever sent you, yelling at Maya to remove you as an admin. Maya, which was still sitting in a box in your apartment, because you couldn’t bring yourself to get rid of the damn console. You didn’t want to plug it in, but you couldn’t just fucking throw it out. “...So, this new job,” He approached you slowly, and you were careful to hold your ground - not just because backing or turning away felt like weakness, but because stepping backward would mean knocking into the work of a French artist whose life sounded pretty fucking tragic. “Yes?” “You staying in Berlin?” You were quiet for a few moments before you shook your head. “I don’t know. I can do it from anywhere, so I haven’t really decided what my next move is going to be.” “Anywhere?” Nathan repeated. “Whatever you’re thinking, un-think it.” “Can’t unscramble an egg, honey.” “Don’t.” “Don’t what?” “Bateman, I’m serious. You think I’m just gonna crawl back to you?” “Who the fuck is doing the crawling? I’m here!” He snapped. “Oh, look. Nathan did one thing,” You cooed mockingly, “Nathan put on something other than sweatpants and left his estate--” “It’s a four hour trip--” “Oh, you cannot fucking tell me about the travel, Bateman, don’t you dare. I did that for months and you acted like it was nothing, you acted like I was nothing!” 

And then Nathan stopped. Nathan stopped and lowered his chin to his chest for a moment. “You’re not,” He spoke softly - so softly you almost didn’t hear, “You’re not-- You know that. That's your insecurities talking--” “Knowing and feeling are two different things. I’m not a console, I don’t run an OS, I can’t just go in and fix the buggy code that tells me differently,” You had to work to keep your voice steady and get the words out, “What you just did once to get here? I did that for months, Bateman. And that’s after I pulled my whole life up and moved to a new country. That trip, two days a week, every week, and half the time I was there, you acted like I wasn’t. I may as well have not been, so I stopped going.”  “You could’ve talked to me.” “...You know what, I’m not even going near that one, because I really don’t want to yell in here,” You managed through gritted teeth, eyes diverted to another painting. Nathan lifted his head then, looking you over before he stepped forward, muttering, “Stop that.” “What?” “That.” He reached out, taking hold of your hands from where they were crossed under your arms. He ‘tsk’ed softly as he uncrossed your arms and unfolded your hands, running his thumbs over the small half-moon dents that your nails had left in your palms. “... Alright, maybe gatecrashing wasn’t my best idea,” He glanced toward the door to the room before his eyes scanned your face. “I don’t think it even breaks your top five.” “Would you care to list that top five now?” “I would not, at the risk of puffing up your beard.” You heard him chuckle, felt his thumbs continue to smooth over your palms. “...You remember that first Rise of AI, when I told you why I’d pulled you up on stage to give that presentation?” He asked. You frowned, turning to look at him again. He was watching you closely over the top of his glasses, eyes knowing and dark. “You wanted to see what I'd do if you threw me in the deep end.” He nodded. “That was Blue Book, something we both knew. This…” He wrapped his hands around your, gave them a gentle squeeze, “This is new for the both of us. We jumped into the deep end and uh…Starting in the kiddy pool might’ve been better.”  “Did Nathan Bateman just admit defeat?” “No. No,” His gaze went stern, then, “Because kiddy pool or not, you’re still in the fuckin’ water.” You looked down at where his hands were holding yours still. “I want to try again,” Nathan crowded closer to you, “And I know-- I know that I am an asshole and that I fucked up, and you know what, I’m probably going to fuck up again,” He raised one hand to cup your chin, raising your head to meet his eyes, “But I wanna give it another shot. I just… I just need to know if that’s even an option here.” When the box of your things had arrived at your place, you’d told yourself that it wasn’t. You’d told yourself that Nathan was an asshole, and a shitstain, and a dickwad, and a douchecanoe, and a host of other derogatory names that you’d dreamt up in your most frustrated moments. Because, yeah, he could be those things. But that didn’t change the fact that you still had feelings for him. It didn’t change the fact that you’d made mistakes in that relationship, too. “So?” He prompted you as you looked at one another, “How do you think we’d do in the kiddy pool?” You gave him a small smile and murmured, “Swimmingly.” The force of Nathan’s kiss nearly knocked you off of your feet - your head would’ve hit a Ferrar if his hand hadn’t come up to cup the back and cushion it. (The gallery owner saw the two of you and was horrified.) (But Nathan bought that painting and like five others, so they got over it.)

Tag list: @spider-starry​ ; @mylittlelonelyappreciation​ ; @grogu-pascal​ ; @blueeyesatnight​ ; @kid-from-new-zealand​ ; @revolution-starter​ ; @kindablackenedsuperhero

[firesidoni]

I mean, if we hazard a guess that she’s, what, somewhere in the range of maybe fifteen to twenty-one, with maybe one year, maaaaybe two as outer margins of error? Let’s guess her at the older end of that, and say she turns twenty-one in 1891, which gives us 1870 as a neat birth year to work with. That would make her only forty-four when WWI breaks out in 1914, and forty-eight when it ends.

... *surfaces gasping from a minor research binge* so, uh, a mildly embarrassing amount of time later for an offhand comment, I can find appropriate mortality rates and life expectancies for the US for the appropriate time period, but not for France, at least not without paying for a hundred-odd-page paper, so Imma use the corresponding US statistics.

A white woman age twenty in 1890 could expect to live on average another forty-two years, for a total life expectancy of about sixty-two years. (This matches almost perfectly with data I found for England and Wales in the same time period, which is promising.)

I’m not touching maternal mortality rates except to note that, if we’re going off contemporary stats from the UK, the maternal mortality rate was around one in two hundred births - about 0.5% per child.

This means that, barring catastrophe, Belle could quite reasonably expect to live through World War I and into the 1930s. In fact, if we say she lives through WWI, and she makes it to age 50 in 1920, her life expectancy rises to age 73 or so.

This means that not only will Belle probably see World War I, she has decent odds of at least seeing, if not necessarily living through, World War II!

(Okay, I’m stopping there before I lose another hour or two. Eheheh.)

Dating Disney: Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast features my favorite love story and my favorite Disney Princess, so it holds a very special spot in my heart. So, it’s worth looking into the film to decide when the Movie is supposed to be set.

During the opening musical number “Belle”, Belle is telling the Baker about the book she’s been reading. She’s clearly describing Jack and the Beanstalk, the earliest version being the tale of “Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean” in 1734. But she also deliberately mentions an ogre, not a giant. Near as I could find, the only version with an ogre was written by Joseph Jacobs in 1890, making Belle nearly contemporary to modernity. Belle’s excitement over the book is likely a sign that this is a new story.

During the same musical number, we see a sign depicting a tobacco pipe, but unlike with the Calabash pipe from the Little Mermaid movie. I could place it to possibly be a Billiard type, but the exact era of creation escapes me. However, tobacco pipes have been around as long as Tobacco has been introduced to European trade, starting in the 16th century.

The history of colored printing goes as far back as the 16th century, and there are illustrations from the early 1700s with an impressive variety of color that help establish a stronger time period. The book also shows the words Le Prince Charmant or Prince Charming. Prince Charming started being used in 1697 in Charles Perrault’s version of Sleeping Beauty, although there, Prince Charming was not a name. Rather, Perrault stated that the Prince was charmed by her words. The first story to use Prince Charming as a name is the Tale of Pretty Goldilocks. It was written at some point in the 17th Century by Madame d’Aulnoy, but in her version the hero was named Avenant. It wasn’t until 1889 when Andrew Lang retold the story that Avenant was dubbed as Charming. One year later in 1890, Oscar Wilde used the term “Prince Charming” sarcastically in his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, meaning that the term had gotten its more modern meaning by this point in time.

Gaston’s musket is a Blunderbuss, which was invented in the early 1600′s and remained popular through the 18th century before falling out of fashion in the middle of the 19th century. However, considering Belle states that this is a backwards town and Gaston is an old-fashioned, Primeval man, it’s possible he’s using a largely outdated weapon.

While there are no street lamps in the city, we can see in the background lanterns on the sides of buildings, which might allude to the movie taking place before the invention of gas lamps. However, gas lamps were invented in 1809, and if the version of Jack and the Beanstalk is from 1890, then by all accounts the town should have gas lamps. What this amounting evidence is leading me to believe is that the film is directly following the plot of the original fairy tale.

In the story, Beauty’s father is a merchant who loses his fortune due to a storm destroying his cargo. They’re forced to live on a farm until the merchant stumbles upon the Beast’s castle and kick starts the plot. In the opening song, Belle says “every morning’s just the same, since the morning that we came, to this poor, provincial town.” This could mean that she grew up in a much more modern, urban, and progressive town. Possibly even Paris. But that after Maurice suffered severe financial trouble, he was forced to move them to the small, backwards town that was practically living an entire century behind the rest of France, which is why she’s so bored and unimpressed by the little town. It helps explain why she’s so eager to want to get out of this town and see the world. She wants to be part of the modern world again.

Interestingly, I can support this theory with background information. According to some of my research, Belle’s village was based on the little town of Riquewihr, France, which still looks like it did in the 16th century to this day. So the idea that Belle’s little village lacks so many modern elements could be a nod to the architecture of this sleepy French village that has remained largely untouched by the march of time. Hence why it looks more like something out of the 1700s despite the many elements from the 1800s being present.

During the song “Be Our Guest”, Lumiere dances with a match stick. Match sticks were invented in 1805. Assuming the film still takes place in the 1890s, this would be concurrent with the other evidence we’ve seen thus far. Later in the same song, the silverware makes an Eiffel tower, which was constructed in 1889. Since Jack and the Beanstalk was written after that, it still fits within the suspected time frame.

During the climax of the battle, Cogsworth is wearing military garments reflective of Napoleonic styles. Napoleon was coronated in 1804 until 1814, had a brief return to power in 1815, and eventually died in 1821. So this is also congruent to the established time period.

In the Youtube Video “Fashion Expert Fact Checks Belle from Beauty and the Beast’s Costumes” by Glamour, April Calahan, a Fashion Historian from the Fashion Institute of Technology directly noted that Belle’s yellow gown lacks the shape of a proper 18th century dress, and more closely resembles the shape of 19th century dresses, fitting into the evidence that’s been mounting in support of a late 19th century setting.

As a part of his primary costume, Lefou wears a waistcoat and tailcoats, which came into vogue in the 1800s, namely from the 1840s through the 1850s.

But if the film is set in the 1800s, how can the Beast still be a prince after the French Revolution? Well something worth noting is that when he finds out that Belle isn’t coming to dinner, the Beast storms through the halls to her room as Cogsworth calls after him as “Your Eminence” and “Your Grace”. The address of “Your Eminence” is reserved for Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, and is an ecclesiastical style of address. “Your Grace” is noticeably an English style of address, but it’s being used by Cogsworth who is British, so I can chalk that up to just part of his culture. Although it was used for British monarchs, it fell out of use during the reign of King Henry VIII (1509-1547) and after that, the use of “Your Grace” became used to address archbishops and non-royal Dukes and Duchesses. Now clearly the Beast is not a cardinal or a bishop, especially if he is looking for the love of a woman to make him human, since it’s forbidden for Catholic priests to marry. So clearly that is not what is meant here. But the other answer actually does hold a bit of weight. Beast’s father was in fact, a Duke. So how is the Beast a prince? He’s not. Not entirely. See, there’s more than one kind of Prince in French nobility. There’s a Prince du Sang, or a Prince by Blood. Effectively, the Crown Prince, the sons of ruling monarchs. But the title is also given to lords in charge of a Principality, one of the smallest territorial sizes. The Beast’s principality probably only extends to having power over the little unnamed village. And with it being after the revolution, Beast might not even have the proper use of his title anymore. He’s effectively a rich kid in a fancy house with no real authority or power. He’s just old money from a by-gone era of human history. But if Beast’s address of “Your Grace” is accurate, that would mean that he’s a non-royal Duke, meaning he would not likely have been executed during the Revolution, as his family would have essentially been governors or senators than actual monarchs. They just had jurisdiction over a small piece of the Kingdom of France and reported back to and obeyed the orders of their King. Thus, he would not have been important enough to be killed or chased out of power by the townsfolk.

CONCLUSION

The movie is set between the late autumn and early-to-mid winter of 1890. Although the snow is gone when Belle returns to the village, the trees are still bare, signaling that it may just be unseasonably warm, though it could be the very early spring of 1891 between the receding of the snow and the blossoming of new spring foliage. Between the books, clothing, and references made, my conclusion is that Belle is a very modern girl living in a backwards little town stuck in the past, thus why a village in 1890 looks so completely lacking in modern technology despite the era. The Prince is nothing more than a fancy title as the son of a Duke, and he likely has very little if any actual government authority. Essentially, Belle married into wealth, not power, and will never be a proper queen, and I’m not sure if the wife of a lord ruling a principality is a princess or not, but I suspect the answer is no. Making Belle, like Mulan, a Disney Princess who did not marry royalty, was not born royalty, and thus, cannot be called a Disney Princess. She’s definitely a noblewoman, but she’s not royal by any means.

SETTING: Riquewihr, France

KINGDOM: The French Republic (France)

YEAR: Autumn, 1890 - Spring, 1891

PERIOD: The Third Republic (1870-1940)

LANGUAGE: French

[ju-liberty]

Clint & Natasha

(Or, the deeper approach into their psyche and love)

Turns out that Endgame hit me harder than I could ever have prepared myself, and I don’t like what I have read from other perspectives about their platonic relationship very much, so I’ve decided to write my own. At this point I don’t even need to fight anyone to prove anything, what they are to one another up until now have already far exceeded any ordinary relationship in the entire cinematic history.

There are some fatal plot holes that are hardly dismissed as a writer myself but I’m going to be a good person to ignore all of them and even pretend to forgive the ridiculous five-year period that made no sense to the character development and motivation.

1. Firstly, let’s talk about Natasha’s roller-coaster emotional ride.

Natasha in the last piece of the Avenger series was, as Scarlett has said herself, ‘hardened’ by all she had lost, and simultaneously softened and vulnerable in a way we had never seen her before.

She loved so hard and so deeply that if before we didn’t dare acknowledge it, now it was pouring all over her facial expression as though she didn’t even bother to hide it anymore.

Okay, please give me a specific number of times you have seen Natasha Romanoff with a breakdown. With tears? Except for the time when she thought Nick Fury was dead. There was only one time under Wanda in AoU that she was off her game, then again we all know who was there in half a second later to look after her.

This time, though, this was different. Nobody knew how to handle her the right way, and nobody was there anymore. The perfect timing of Steve’s appearance was so precious and realistic I can’t appreciate it enough. Steve was not Clint, probably hadn’t seen Nat at her worst the way Clint did, but he was there at that precise moment to stay with her through the misery. What could be more fulfilling in a friendship? Your friend was there, burdened with his own misery and could not ease yours but he was there nonetheless. If we take a careful look at the predicament, we could see that Clint, in this case, was the very source of her distress instead of her comfort. And if you have seen the way she grieved, it’s so blindingly obvious that he was more than just a friend to her. He was family. The one that she had lost.

It wasn’t like Natasha would need Rhodey to give her the precise location of Clint Barton—we have seen the way Clint found her in the most unbelievable circumstance in their own classic way in AoU—she had always known where he was, she must have been keeping track on him, and yet she chose to stay away and pretended she didn’t see what he was doing anyway, because she believed she could not give him hope. The way she went straight to him and took his hand bravely felt like she had always known where he was in all her life and all it took was just a sparkle of hope.

And then there’s the arrow necklace, oh yes, that was fucking thrilling. We grown women do not wear jewelries to honor our siblings or close friends, and let’s not ignore the Godly timing that the necklace first made an appearance was actually right after her breakdown for Clint. Listen, if you have spotted 40+ ester eggs all over the movie, you must have known by now that there was no such thing as a coincidence in every scene, for example her ballet shoes in a corner or the sandwich that was cut diagonally. So if she wore the arrow necklace over a black t-shirt instead of a white one in a dozen of close-up shots with one of the most breaking expressions on her face, there was a reason for it. I suspect it had something to do with her breakdown and the necklace was possibly the symbol of her determination to set things right (to find her partner and to bring him back) now that they had found a way out of their failure.

That didn’t happen just once. She wore the same necklace when they went to Bruce. And what’s more terrifying? She wore it in the same room with Clint in the most comfortable atmosphere between them as though she knew that he knew and they both knew what it meant to them and were completely okay to show it. That could mean she didn’t take it off until Vormir, or not ever. Whether it really had something related to Clint or not, do interpret it in your own way, I don’t care, facts will always remain facts.

And then there’s that mind-blowing moment when Clint was back from the time-travel and she was up there in a second like their life depended on it. There was so much love radiating from her when she went all of her way out to articulate the word ‘family’ when there was not a single one of the team had dare mention before, and so much love for Clint that she didn’t bother to conceal it. Either family or friendship, her love had already gone way beyond those with a simple touch of her hand on his face and that look on her.

Just—that look.

2. And Clint Barton, the most underappreciated character in the MCU history.

One of the things Jeremy has shared about what he enjoyed the most about his character was that Clint Barton was just a normal guy. He has no super power or physical enhancement and yet he chooses to fight alongside the heroes with his partner. He is normal, and despite everything that he has been robbed from the insane story line, he as a character still has grown so much through each movie. He is human, he lost, and he grieved.

I’m not going to pretend the family didn’t exist because they did (and it was a pleasure seeing they got dusted) and their disappearance did pull a string or two on this new side of Clint and his newly introduced skill sets that I super enjoyed. There is absolutely nothing wrong with him going vigilante given his background of a master assassin and the darkness of his personality and PTSD, and the five year time skip that had been done poorly in the movie did nothing to ruin his perfect characterization. 

Since a lot of articles have been talking about Thor’s stages of depression that should not be taken lightly as humor device, remember that Thor wasn’t the only one who suffered from mental disorder and please also don’t compare the kind of loss they all had to confront alright? Each person had to go through different kind of manifestation of mental illness, and for a former agent like Clint to go into hiding and killing as coping mechanism was completely acceptable. Don’t give me the morality bullshit, we are talking about fictional characters here, thank you.

Even though the five year excuse was unfair, why should we pay too much attention about it when we could have all we should have and Natasha was still the only one who could come for Clint? You can’t possibly forget the way she held out her hand and he immediately took it without hesitation like five years of distance between them never existed. That display of vulnerability and utter trust that he only showed in the presence of Natasha was pure gold. He knew she would find him as much as he knew once she did, he would be willing to come back with her.

Did he still grieve, though? Intensely. Did he want to die? More than anything else. Did he also have to live? Yes, yes, and yes.

Ever since the beginning to the end, he never stopped grieving. Have you noticed the way he wore his eyes in almost every scene? It’s a tortured look. Clint Barton had come such a long way from the first time he was introduced as a sassy, witty archer to this broken, quiet man with a constantly tortured look. And every step of this journey, Natasha was there with him.

Did he let himself heal? Also yes. In those little moments like when they sat next to one another discussing the plan to get the stones, or when the whole team were getting ready for the mission and he sneaked a glance at Natasha at the other side of the room, or in the spaceship when he initially brought up Budapest with a laughter in contrast to the first time it was mentioned by Natasha in the first Avenger movie. He was allowing himself to heal only because Natasha was there.

Clint and Natasha didn’t act that comfortably around anyone else but each other, and only with one another, they were able to heal themselves gradually.

3. Then Vormir happened. Their journey to the end.

From now on, I am talking about their love and how it was manifested through Endgame.

The parallel cinematic wasn’t just about Natasha finding and bringing Clint home in contrast to how he had made a different call in the past, it was their entire journey with little things, like the hand holding: if Natasha first took Clint’s hand to take him home at the beginning, Clint was the one who took her hand at the end of their conversation.

It was the extended bargain that had started from the first conversation between Natasha and Loki until Red Skull: the world was still on the balance and their bargain was still (forever will be) ultimately for one another.

I see hundreds, hell, thousands of wishful thinking for the Vormir scene to be more than just a forehead touch. Like, you wanted more? Was it even possible to be more? God no. Please look up infinite intensity. Romance didn’t even fit here. It was deep-rooted emotional intimacy, I would call. Like, you want to scale them down to an ordinary couple in a romantic movie who confess their undying love for each other and then kiss and make up and walk towards the horizon holding hands? Look, Disney fairy tales are always available all over the world except here - we are not sugarcoating a single fraction of a second they had here - not that way, never, okay?

What can you ask for more really? The man was fucking married and lost his family, and yet he literally spent almost every second of his scenes putting Natasha ahead of every single other people of his life including himself in all movies (and interview but we are not even talking about that, damn), exactly the way she had done for him. They were each other’s priority without a single discussion. What more could you actually imagine them to be? They didn’t just fight alongside one another. They literally fought against each other while calling each other idiot and a pain in the ass, just to die for one another.

That, was blatantly, blindingly, obviously fucking love.

Since Clint had been grieving and this was not a fairy tale, admittedly, he wanted to die. The way he recklessly threw himself into relentless massacre, as shitty and underdeveloped as it is, the way he volunteered as an object for a possible one way trip (again, shitty choice with the farm as if it was the fucking symbol for a life of a master assassin), it was clear that he had been suicidal. Natasha could be his anchor, but at the first chance he got, he immediately relapsed into his suicidal intention. He chose to die because he wanted to, and he believed it was as best as life could get.

And then something changed. The moment he realized what they would do in this circumstance was manifested in the way they looked at each other, it was heartbreaking and beautiful.

But they knew each other without a word and fought on an equal ground. They knew they were each other’s dearest person, this they knew without a single banter or discussion. That was when the self-loathing was replaced by love - whatever the fuck kind you want to interpret - it was love and not guilt or responsibility or debt anymore. Because guilt could not earn them the soul stone. He wanted to keep her alive even more than he wanted to die. Everything that remained in that moment as the world did cease to exist, was love.

Do you remember how many times Clint had called her Natasha? Each time was different, and yet none was like this one, because he knew this was it, this was the last time, so he said it with a smile so understanding and agonizing and most of all, so damn loving.

With the mere look he gave her when he called her Natasha, let me tell you, even if they gave him 10 more families all over the world with a hundred of children, Clint Barton sure as hell would still put Natasha Romanoff before every single one of them without a second thought and love her enough to die for her as many times as it took.

This. look.

And the look Natasha gave Clint when he ran over the edge and when he held onto her hand, as much as gratitude and fear, the only thing that had been constantly staying there, was love.

4. What’s left

We grieve that she wasn’t among those in the final battle, that was such a sick joke I agree, however come to think of it, Clint wasn’t, either. That went back to the beginning when they were spies, not soldiers. They were the best with their skill sets when sent on specific missions. Taking out all other characters, if you squint, you probably could see that this really was their own journey to go back to the way they used to be in the old days with just the two of them, either fighting alongside one another, or just fighting for the other. Tragically, Natasha did not come back, then again you did not see Clint as a whole person ever again. She wasn’t in the final battle and neither was Clint (except doing his side job for a few minutes), because they were meant to fight together or not fighting at all.

Natasha deserved to live. Of course she did. Do you know who understood it the most and fought for her life harder than anyone else? Clint Barton.

But living isn’t that simple as black and white, and if you turned the ending upside down in which Natasha lived and Clint didn’t, imagine the life she was going to live without her partner, best friend, soulmate. It wasn’t because she had no family that she deserved less to live, no, it was exactly because death was the easier way out than enduring the trauma, which by now Clint was shouldering for her.

Think of it this way: It wasn’t the family reunion we were seeing, it was Clint looking at those loved ones he was supposed to save and only seeing his other half spilling blood and losing life for them to live. Like the way it was supposed to be him. Like the way he kicked off the gauntlet after the reversing snap and treated the stones like ‘a goddamn thing’ instead of feeling thankful for them for bringing his family back. Clint was never going to get over it, to be honest he was never going to truly live anymore.

A life where you constantly grieve and loathe yourself, do you think Natasha would have deserved it? What Clint was shouldering in her place wasn’t a second chance at life nor another debt on his ledger, it was a downright bloody punishment.

So again, hello to Disney fans. If this was one of the fairy tales, if AoU did not happen and the only one they had was each other, there is no doubt that they both would die together. Screw the world, end of story. However, what made their love so intense and so much more painful than that ideal scenario was when Clint realized as much as he wanted to jump after her (oh trust me he longed for it), he wasn’t allowed to let Natasha’s sacrifice go wasted. See, this is the difference between a romance and a bond so deep it overruns everything else - he had to make it worth first, and then he would punish himself later - which already happened immediately, all of his emotional catastrophe and enormous anger. Clint was punishing himself badly and he would not stop. Ever. If losing his family already hit him that much, imagine how quickly he was going to abandon his life without Natasha. Remember how easily he let go of the gauntlet and the stones - the family and the world might be let go in the same way without remorse.

While we are saying a proper funeral was a better display of gratitude that Natasha should have deserved, can we take a look again at how most of Clint and Natasha’s battles were like? Against their inner demons. Behind the scenes. That was how they operated through the years. That was just what they were. And remember, Clint chose to share his lasting grief with Wanda who had lost her other half, not with his family.

As lacking as the ending was, simultaneous it was a given that the two of them were manifested in the right way. Clint and Natasha were spies not soldiers. It was not fair, it was terrible, but when we learn to live with what we got and twist it around to make it work, life becomes acceptable.

5. Last but not least

Clint and Natasha. What these two had for each other was the love so intense and profound it went beyond boundaries of common relationship and left them devastated for the rest of their lives. And that, I tell you, is fucking magnificent.

To wrap it up, do I hate Endgame? Not at all. Simultaneously do I want to rewrite it? No, not in 14,000 possible ways except one in which the farm family somehow would get erased infinitely, accidentally, magically, whatever, and Natasha would live.

Wishful thinking, but why not?

[sansanficrec]

Q&A  with ladytp

Grab a glass of wine and get to know @ladytp!

How long have you been writing fanfiction?

I actually went back to the folder of my first posted fanfic, and it was almost 6.5 years ago, September 2012… That was my first ever creative work I wrote as well, as I started quite late – being already adult, established professional and all that. So never too late to start, one doesn’t have to have grown up writing!

Did you write before that?

No I didn't - unless scientific publications are counted as 'creative' writing (well, to be honest, sometimes there was an element of creativity when trying to make one's data make sense, LOL!)

How long ago did you join Tumblr?

To be precise (as I like to be!) I joined March 1st 2013 – so almost six years ago… But it took me four months to make my first post (an awesome music video about ASOIAF and GoT), being initially a ‘lurker’ to observe and learn. I migrated there from Livejournal when things started to quiet down there – like a moth I was drawn to bright lights, moving images, and more of my fandom content!

What is the meaning behind your username?

My username is from the Livejournal times as well, as when I joined it, I didn’t grasp the significance of one’s url or username and just picked the first one that came to mind when filling in the details: “lady” and my initials. D’oh! Luckily I have been able to successfully have the same name in other platforms as well, which is great – it is easier than have many different names. I am also glad that it is not fandom specific, as my interests are many and varied…

What was your first fandom? First pairing?

Definitively ASOIAF – that was my introduction to the whole cultural phenomenon of ‘fandom’, devouring fics and joining communities (yeah, I am so far behind of everyone else – I used to have a life, LOL!). Sansan was my first ship, but I also had a brief period when I was very interested in Daenerys and Jorah (this was before I saw the show). Even though the show had a big negative impact on Sansan experience for me (not due to Rory, I hasten to add – but the storylines), it has still stayed my OTP in a sense that I feel most comfortable about writing them and their dynamic still fascinates me above anything else.

How/when did you first notice (or start to ship) Sansan?

My story is very typical; first reading their interactions after the Hand’s Tourney, then the scene of the Battle of the Blackwater – and I was hooked. Googling and finding fics, Livejournal communities and all the metas…no getting back from there! I mean; it is so blatantly obvious that I wonder who can read the books and NOT get the vibes??

Is there a SanSan fic you’re particularly proud of?  Chapter? Paragraph?  Plot?

Hmmm…’Which one of your children you love the best?’, in other words – always a difficult question! I guess I am still the proudest of “The Triangle”  It was one of my early fics, it was a long-fic, and it was about the subject I had been fascinated with for years and years; the complicated Arthurian relationship between 3 people who loved each other for different reasons (Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot in the original, Sandor, Sansa and Jaime in the fic). Chapter-wise I am very happy with the last chapter of the “Kiss of the Blade”, as hard as it may be for some due to the character death implied. It has melancholy but also beauty, I thought when I wrote it. Plot-wise I am excited and happy about my current WIP “This Time, We’ll Do Better”, as although it has some common trope elements, I think they have somewhat cool applications and it is nice to write something more plot-orientated for a change!

Any comments you’ve received that stick out, even now?

I have to admit that again, “The Triangle” inspired some absolutely wonderful comments, probably because of its unusual premise. Towards the end, and especially with people who had read it in one go long after it had been completed, there were some wonderful convos going back and forth. I especially enjoyed the ones where people either told that they had had some reservations starting it, but then ended up really enjoying the fic, or the ones where they might have had some queries and doubts and questions, leading to a mutually fruitful and eye-opening discussions on both sides. Those conversations really blew my mind!

Do you use a beta?

I have had the privilege of working with two wonderful betas, of which I am eternally grateful. The first one was wildskysheri / wildsky, whom I “met” via Livejournal, and who betaed for me for “The Triangle”, “A Chance Encounter” and “A Premediated Reunion”.  She taught me – a non-native English speaker/writer – so much about writing and what to pay attention to and what to look out for. I owe her so much! After our ways parted amicably as she moved on to other things, I was without beta for a long time, not really actively looking for one, but when my path crossed with the lovely @hardlyfatal, I have once again had the pleasure of getting my words scrutinised by someone knowledgeable, making them better on “This Time, We’ll Do Better”. I honestly can’t speak highly enough for a beta who can make any writer and fic so much better!

Are there tropes/styles/genres you struggle with?  Any that are almost too easy?

I do struggle a bit writing babies and children, and hence haven’t written much about them… I don’t generally care for modern AUs either and would struggle to write a full story in a modern times – although who knows, maybe in a right setting, replicating the high stakes situation of the canon, it could work. Haven’t tried so can’t say for sure! Very fluffy genre is also something I don’t feel particularly comfortable with, nor anything where the characters are very young. And porn without plot is neither a genre I relish. The most comfortable genres for me are the slow-burns, where mature people interact with each other in a mature way (whatever that means…). First realisations of feelings, hesitancy, and all that. I also do like plot-driven stories that have a start, middle and ending. I am all open for fake marriage, bed-sharing, ‘there was only one room at the inn’ kind of genres – any kind of ‘forced’ situations where the characters are obliged to spend time together!

When you start a fic, do you know where it will end?  Or do you figure it out along the way?

There have been fics along both scenarios – some were started at the spur of the moment, with only vague ideas of where and how far they would go (”The Prophecy” comes to mind, which I started as a random holiday scribbling – and repeatedly apologised and updated my chapter number as it grew and grew and grew…). And there were the ones where even at the end I couldn’t decide what the ending should be, so I wrote two (for example “Past Was Such A Long Time Ago“). But for most I would have some idea about the ending at the start, and for some I would gain it somewhere early along the way. So yeah, it varies!

Do you have any rituals/conditions for ‘getting in the mood’ to write?

I mostly write over the weekends when I have more time, after getting up and having breakfast, reading my emails and checking on Tumblr and doing all the routine stuff one does – and then I open my doc and start writing… With my internet radio blasting on the background on some jazz or lounge or classic channel. I find it hard to write during the weeks after getting back from work and being distracted by mundane home things and TV and such.

Have you ever had writer’s block?  Any tips for overcoming it?

I did have a period well over a year ago when I felt I had ‘lost my mojo’. It was largely to do with the way the Game of Thrones show had progressed and changed the characters so much that I couldn’t recognise them anymore, and my initial inspiration of writing about them consequently suffered. Especially as the show canon started to take over the original book canon so strongly in many platforms, including fics. The way I got over it was to distance myself from the show and partly, unfortunately, also from the fandom (so largely focused on show). I had a nice break, didn’t read many fics, focused on books and generally took a step back. Then I challenged myself to write a new type of story, a plot-focused ‘action & adventure’ story instead of romance focused only. That inspired me to write again, and I have been riding on that inspirational wave ever since with my latest long-fic WIP!

Aspirations of publishing one day?

No, not really. It is a tough world out there, especially as writing has become more reachable to many people who previously might not have even considered it (yay, fanfic and other forms of creative writing and platforms encouraging it!), and publishing world is awash with submissions and self-published stories alike. Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect that wanting to become published would take much more effort and determination and will than what I have for now, as for me this is a lovely hobby, nothing more.

What are your other hobbies?

My absolutely biggest hobbies are food and wine. I have loved cooking, eating and learning about food and wine for most of my life and it’s really important for me. Cooking meals ‘from the scratch’ from their base ingredient is what I love, as well as learning to master new techniques, new cuisines and difficult recipes. When I travel, food is one of the main drivers for that too, and holidays are largely built around restaurants, regions, cuisines and wineries. Holidaying in wine regions and wine tasting is the favourite kind of holiday! Yet I also love everyday cooking – the beauty of this as a hobby is that I get to do it every day and can challenge myself, be inspired by it and practice it all the time!

As for other hobbies…not really… I follow the transformative artform that is WWE, especially Dean Ambrose, and love visiting historical sites and reading about history, but that can hardly be called an active hobby… I also make some photo and video edits for fun, but lately my writing has taken much of the time I used to dedicate to that. Yet I feel that what I have is enough – I have no desires for an active life with lots of different hobbies and activities.

Any tips for writers looking to post their first (or second, or twentieth) fic?

I hope this doesn’t sound too harsh, but it would be really cool if even those who write only for ‘shits and giggles’ would do some basic formatting and language checks… Things like how to indicate dialogue, spacing between paragraphs and when to apply them, and of course, basic grammar. There are nowadays so many websites advising about those things, as well as free tools (for example Grammarly), that they are accessible to every person with access to sites posting their stuff – and a simple Google search is your best friend. I recommend this because ignoring those things may easily drown even the most amazing story in these times of fic over-abundance.

Other than that, write the stories you would like to read yourself, and the scenarios you would like to see in the canon. Study the writing style of the writers whose stories you admire and see if you could pick up a trick or two from them (but not plagiarizing, naturally). And if you can, get a beta – it is not absolutely necessary, but would give you a second opinion and advice from a trusted person. Oh, and give yourself a break between writing and final editing – ideally have a buffer of chapters in a draft phase before starting to post, so whenever you write something new, you can afford to let it rest for a while before getting back to it with fresh eyes. And have fun!

Anything you’d like to say to writers in general?

Don’t get hung up on statistics or comparisons. Think why you are writing – is it because everyone does it and you feel you should too, or because you truly enjoy it, or because of the stories themselves, or because you have an internal urge to do it, or it is part of your social networking activities… all are valid reasons, but once you define what they are for you, the easier it is to focus on it and the satisfaction it gives to you.

Anything you’d like to say to readers in general?

If you like a fic, don’t be shy about commenting, as it truly means so much to the writers… Even simplest comment is gratefully received. If you feel like wanting to pass on constructive criticism, first ensure the writer welcomes it, then formulate it in the politest possible way with positivism thrown in as well (and of course, make sure it is actually constructive). Marvel the choices and abundance of fic availability and acknowledge what a joy it is to live in this time and age when all that is possible. Enjoy!

Anything you’d like to say to the SanSan fandom in general?

Do not give up hope – Game of Thrones is over soon and we can get back to canon content, hopefully soon with The Winds of Winter. Whatever the further story of Sandor and Sansa is there, we know how important it has been already and nothing can take that away!

Read LadyTP’s SanSan here!

Read LadyTP’s full library here!

[slytherindragonfly]

Prejudiced - Pt. 8

Part I || Part VII || Part IX 

Recap: A storm has finally broken upon Hogwarts, so you met Sirius in the Owlery tower to proceed to the final step in your process of becoming an animagus.

Word Count: 3.4k (hope this makes up for the dryspell!)

A/N: Special shoutout to the anon who sent the idea that inspired the second half of this ‘chapter’ - you unblocked my writer’s block! Also, I’m exceptionally using Sirius’s perspective in this, hope you all enjoy xx

Watching you transform felt bizarre to Sirius. He’d always felt more at ease seeing James transform than Peter because somehow, someone growing into a larger form was easier to process than the shrinking. Fortunately for him, you shrank quickly, and your new form wound up trapped in the fabric of the dress you’d been wearing.

Shit, he thought. He’d forgotten to tell you about how even though it’s pretty easy to transform your clothes along with you, it just doesn’t happen during the first transformation. 

“That’s going to be awkward when you turn back,” he thought out loud.

He was watching you, or rather, your animagus version, try to scuffle out of the trappings of the dress, feeling you’d rather try on your own before he intervened, even though he was extremely curious as to what you’d transformed into, the shape currently indiscernible.

Indiscernible, that is, until you stepped out of the hem, a white stumbling flutter of feathers. Sirius whistled jokingly, watching you trying to figure out this whole new body thing.

“Nice. A barn owl, uh?” Sirius said, trying to sound laid-back despite being terribly excited by your successful transformation. “Ooh, do you think you can do that freaky neck twisting thing?” he asked, eyes wide.

You couldn’t answer him, but your glare back at him was pretty straightforward. And, coming from an owl on the ground, comical enough.

“Now love, no need to get mad. It all went perfectly well, didn’t it?” he smirked. 

Thankfully, Sirius had gotten used to talking to his mates in their animagus forms, so talking to you while you couldn’t answer wasn’t awkward. In fact, he’d always liked being able to tease someone and watch the look in the eyes of their animal forms, that one look that meant “you’re enjoying this, aren’t you.”

Seeing that you seemed to have gotten the hang of walking around on these tiny claws, he decided to prompt you to take things further. 

“I say it’s time you try these wings of yours,” he taunted, crouching down. 

He could tell his teasing was working, because almost instantly you spread out your wings, flapping them clumsily, but not taking off. 

“Here, I think you need to be free falling for the instincts to kick in,” he said, extending an arm as he approached, which you instantly rejected by fluttering your wings in his face. Needless to say, the gesture felt to him like he’d just been flicked on the forehead.

“That,” he muttered, eyes closed, “was unnecessary.”

He opened his eyes to see you managing to fly up to the window, which really was just an opening in the wall. Seeing you perched up there, he could tell you were gaging the distance to the ground.

“Come on now, what’s a little risk like this compared to all you had to do to get there?” he told you, referring to the months of sneaking around you’d dealt with in order to transform.

Now, Sirius Black was no expert in owl body language, but he could’ve sworn you’d nodded. He kept on observing curiously, patiently waiting as you seemed to almost go in two or three times, but backing out at the last second. As he was debating whether he should scare you to make you jump from the windowsill, you took the leap yourself, and he felt his stomach drop.

Running to the window, he searched the darkness below, trying to spot if you’d made it. Even though the storm had quickly softened, he was suddenly filled with dread.

“Come on, come on...” he murmured expectantly, still scrutinizing the void below. 

All of a sudden, you came blazing past him from below, inches away from his head. Shocked but tremendously relieved, he let his head fall between his elbows, loosening the tight grip he’d had on the bricks, chuckling. Quickly, he took a step back to give you some space to get back inside the tower.

It took you a minute, but you found your way back. However, the landing was something you’d have to work on; you completely passed the windowsill and landed abruptly on the stones of the floor, sending stray hay flying in the scuffle, which earned you an earnest laugh from Sirius.

He was still grinning as you tried to get as much dust off yourself as possible, before flying off to the hollow brick in which you’d stashed the vial, which laid on the ground next to the wall. 

He looked at you do so intently, curious as to what exactly you were aiming to do. He rolled his eyes when he saw what else had been hidden in the hollow brick. More or less gracefully, you picked up a sleeping mask by its elastic and pulled it out of there only to drop it at Sirius’s feet, sending him a look that left no doubt to the purpose of the mask.

“That,” he began, crouching to take the mask, “really is no fun at all,” he smirked. “I can’t believe you actually planned this, you control freak,” he commented, putting on the mask. “There, now you can go about your business.”

Facing the wall, mask on, Sirius was now waiting for you to transform back. You hadn’t kept your owl form for that long, but it was recommended for new animagi to ease into their animal form on shorter intervals of time at first. As he was desperately trying to think of anything but your naked body upon transforming back, he heard the faint sound of the reversed transformation only a trained ear would identify. 

“Are you back in your skin and bones?” he called out, his voice impish.

“Please keep the mask on,” you begged, but he could hear the giddy smile in your voice, which made him chuckle.

“Honestly, after all I’ve done for you here, you’d think I’d be entitled to a little thank you gift,” he joked to make sure the atmosphere remained light.

“Shut up, you git,” you laughed. “Alright, you can take the mask off.”

He did so gladly, turning around to face you. While he was keeping his mind from wandering in a certain direction, he’d remembered a little prank he didn’t get to do too often.

You were pulling at the hem of the dress you’d just put back on, and he was staring eyes wide at you.

“What?” you asked, perplexed. “What is it?” you asked, nervous, reaching for you cheek.

“Alright, don’t freak out, I’m sure it can be fixed,” he began cautiously.

Your eyes grew wide in panic for a split second, before transforming into a death glare.

“I hate you so much,” you told him, but couldn’t keep a straight face and started chuckling. 

“Damnit,” he laughed. “I really thought I could get you, with Peter he believed it for a full ten minutes, it was glorious.”

“You’re the worst friend, Sirius,” you scolded him, giggling. 

“Ah, now, enough about me,” he brushed it off as if it had been a compliment. “How was it?” he asked you.

He saw something shift in your eyes, like they actually twinkled for a second.

“It was everything,” you said, trying to contain your excitement. “I don’t know how to describe it, but... I mean, you know!”

“Yeah I know,” he chuckled at your giddiness. “I know precisely,” he smiled.

“So what now?” you asked, eager.

“Now?” he repeated, amused. “Now you go and get some sleep, once you ride out that high you’ll be crashing pretty fast.”

He was amused by how you seemed to deflate yet remain unbelievably happy.

“Alright then, we should probably be on our way,” you agreed. “Wouldn’t want you to miss out on an exclusive Gryffindor event,” you joked, referring to the party he’d gotten out of to be there with you.

“Trust me, this event right here was much more exclusive,” he winked. 

A moment passed, and he saw a million thoughts go through your head. He was about to frown, when your face relaxed and your lurched forward to give him a quick hug.

“Thanks for being here with me tonight, Sirius,” you thanked him, and he felt your heart pounding from the adrenaline against his chest, making him smile to himself. “I definitely needed that... security.”

“No problem,” he chuckled, not bothering to find a witty reply.

You stepped away, and he couldn’t help but catch a whiff of the smell of your shampoo as you did so. Something floral, and something woody, too. Why did it feel familiar to him?

“Alright, no need to hang around here any longer,” you said, looking around.

“After you,” he mock-bowed, smirking.

The following day at lunch, Sirius was sitting with James, Remus and Peter as usual. He was fiddling with his fork in his emptied plate, half-listening to James doting on about Lily and what he should get her for Christmas even though they’d only started going out two weeks prior and there was over a month left until the Holidays.

He was growing increasingly bored, when his gaze caught you on your way to leaving the hall. He followed you with his eyes a second too long, because unbeknownst to him, Remus had followed his gaze.

“So sorry lads, I just remembered, I have some homework to get on with,” Sirius excused himself, getting up.

“You seem awfully eager to get to that homework, mate,” Remus teased knowingly.

“Yeah that doesn’t even make sense Pads, it’s a Saturday,” James scoffed, genuinely puzzled.

“Detention homework,” he shrugged.

“Oh right,” Peter nodded.

Sirius took the occasion to start walking away, fast.

“Wait, we didn’t even get detention this week!” Peter exclaimed, and the three pairs of eyes followed him out of the great hall, only Remus having an idea of where he was truly headed.

“Y/N, wait up!” he shouted after you.

You turned around, a puzzled look about you, before smiling when you saw him.  He jogged up to you, not failing to notice your smile. 

“Someone’s in a good mood today,” he said having caught up. “Are you still glad it all went well and you’re not permanently feathered or are you simply happy to see me?” he teased.

“A little bit of both actually,” you smiled earnestly.

“Ooh, sincerity,” he noted, surprised. “Is that our thing now?”

“I don’t know, do we have a “thing”?” you replied, smirking.

“Why does this feel like a trick question?” he pondered.

“I don’t know, does it?” you asked back, amused.

He shook his head, chuckling, before shifting the conversation back to the purpose he’d ran after you for. 

“Listen, if you ever want a safer spot than the owlery, to, you know, “train”, even though I’ll admit it is fairly fitting-” he started, but was cut off by his own confusion.

He’d caught another whiff of the same scent he’d smelled off you the previous night, but this time stronger. He couldn’t help but be overpowered by the feeling he’d already smelled that exact scent, but he couldn’t pinpoint why, and he somehow knew it was important.

“Are you okay?” you asked him, somewhat worried. “Am I witnessing a stroke?”

“No, sorry, I just, uh, something just randomly popped in my mind,” he brushed it off. “Anyways, what I was saying is, if you’re not doing anything, I have a pretty sweet spot I could show you,” he added.

“Yeah, okay,” you replied, still wondering what had taken over him.

Great, now she must think I’m dim or something, he internally groaned. 

“Got your wand with you?” he asked, since you’d need it.

“A good witch always does,” you winked playfully. 

“Alright then, follow me,” he chuckled.

He sneaked the two of you out of the castle and to the edge of the forbidden forest. You’d chatted lightly on the way, but when you realized where he wanted to go, you hesitated.

“Sirius, that’s the forbidden forest... As in off limits,” you pointed out, worried. 

“Oh okay, so illegally becoming an animagus is perfectly fine but Hogwarts rules are sacred?” he scoffed, not having considered that now would be the time you’d have scruples. 

“You are actively trying to land us in detention again, aren’t you?” you argued, unfazed by his rhetoric.

“Listen, if you’d rather hang out on the school grounds and risk being spotted be my guest, I’m just trying to help you out here,” he replied, suddenly defensive.

He watched you take a breath and evaluate your options. Somehow, he always expected things to go a certain way with you, and they never did. He hadn’t decided yet whether it was exciting or frustrating. 

“Okay, let’s go,” you conceded.

He smiled triumphantly, and unconsciously extended his hand to you before getting going. His heart skipped a beat when he realized that you were looking at his hand with your eyebrows raised, a look about you at the crossroads of hesitant and stunned. You were turning this into a bigger gesture than he’d meant, and he was going to drop his hand, but you caught it at the last minute. 

“Let’s go,” he nodded, biting his lip to stop a smile.

He couldn’t help but feel glad you finally trusted him. After all that had happened, from the hallway encounters to the detention to the transformation, some part of him felt better knowing he was no longer just the prick who’d sent your robes on fire in the first year to impress his friends. He realized he no longer thought of you as that Slytherin girl with the Gryffindor little brother. Perhaps that was what had drawn him to you in the first place, your situations sort of being at opposite ends.

“So, uh, how has your brother been?” he asked you, his wandering thoughts having caused some sort of silence. 

“You probably see him more often than I do at this point, to be honest,” you replied, amused and a twinge bitter.

“Right,” he nodded. “Just like you probably see Regulus more often than I do,” he added.

“Right,” you nodded. “Household rivalries, truly what holds this school together,” you said mockingly.

He didn’t reply right away. Like most students, he’d loved the feeling of belonging to his house more than any inconvenience it could have ever caused.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve said something along those lines,” he simply noted.

“Sorry,” you said, and he could’ve sworn you were biting your tongue.

“You know, if something’s on your mind, now’s as good a time as any to let it out,” he suggested. “Away from any other set of ears.”

Your hand slipped from his as it went to scratch your neck, you shoulders tense. 

“It’s just that...” you started, looking to the ground, “My brother and I were super close when we were younger. And now he barely smiles at me when I see him and he’s with his Gryffindor friends, and to be honest it kinda sucks.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he scoffed. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I never really got along with my family, but sometimes I wonder if things would have been better if I hadn’t gotten sorted into Gryffindor. If they hadn’t seen it coming,” he reflected.

“I didn’t know you were in such a bad place with your family,” you replied quietly. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, and besides, I’ve found a new family here. One that’s better for me,” he said. “I would’ve gone insane without them.”

You nodded, silent. People didn’t talk about these things at Hogwarts. He’d never met anyone who questioned the house system. 

“I’m not saying this to change your mind or anything, though,” he added, looking at you to see if he could discern your thoughts on your face.

“No, it’s good to see things from other perspectives,” you said. “It makes for a healthier... discussion.”

He could see you were holding back, like you hadn’t finished saying what you had on your mind. He wondered whether it was more appropriate to touch your shoulder, or your arm, or keep his hands to himself to show he was open to you going on. He was about to reach for your shoulder when you sighed loudly, and his hand fell back to his side.

“It’s just, I see how it may be good to put like-minded people together, but for seven years?” you began. “I don’t know, sometimes I’ll be in our common room, and I’ll hear whispers, and I won’t like what I think I’m hearing.”

You paused again, and he felt that somehow your conversation had just gotten a lot deeper. For people who usually talked about party snacks, this was a new thing. He hadn’t had that kind of talk with anyone besides Remus in recent years.

“What’s your stance on divination, Sirius?” you asked him, and you stopped walking to get a good look at him.

“That I’m not particularly gifted at it?” he answered, unsure what you wanted to hear. 

You nodded, seeming to ponder whether you’d keep going.

“The other day we got to use the crystal balls in class. Mine filled with some sort of murky green smoke, and then the smoke started to move like there was a storm in there. And then there was a flash of bright green. And the smoke transformed into ash, and it filled the ball so much it cracked, and the ash leaked onto the table,” you recounted, your voice much less stable than it usually was.

Sirius could hear the fright in your voice. Frankly, he was feeling uneasy himself.

“So what does it mean?” he asked carefully.

“Nothing, if you don’t believe in divination,” you scoffed. “Nothing good if you do. It was sent to the department of mysteries at the Ministry.”

At this point, you were both deep into the forbidden forest, and Sirius had absolutely no idea how to react to what you’d just said. 

“Sorry, I don’t know why I brought it up,” you apologized, and a tear spilled out of your right eye.

“Hey-” he began, wanting to do something, anything to comfort you.

“Merlin, I don’t know why I’m so emotional,” you said, wiping your cheek, annoyed. “I guess it’s from finally talking about it out loud,” you shook your head. “Of course this couldn’t just be a nice walk through the forest,” you scoffed.

“Listen, it’s okay,” Sirius intervened, and he instinctively pulled you in his arms. “I’m glad it’s off your chest, that sounded intense. Sorry you had to see that,” he said to let you know he wasn’t bothered.

Now that you were in his arms, however, he somehow felt incredibly awkward, as if he’d forgotten which way was okay to hug a friend. Should he hold you tighter? Should he stroke your back? And on top of it, his nose was now right next to your hair, and there was that smell of flowers and some type of wood again that drove him crazy by not knowing how he knew it.

“Thanks,” you breathed, and you stepped away, ending his anguish. “Sorry if I freaked you out with all the serious stuff, I don’t know what took over me.”

“Please, serious is my first name, I can handle you speaking your mind,” he chuckled.

You let out an exasperated laugh, shaking your head.

“And just how many times have you made that joke exactly?” you asked, amused.

“Oh, far too many times,” he conceded. “Anyways, I didn’t want to kill your whole vibe there before,” he started, but you interrupted him by playfully punching his arm, “Ow! Anyways, we’re here.”

He saw you looking around, searching for a particularity to the spot.

“A few more footsteps actually,” he corrected himself.

He took your hand, this time confidently and without waiting for you to accept, and lead you forward through some drooping branches, making sure to hold them out of your way so they wouldn’t snap on you. And sure enough, there it was; a nice clearing, with a clear view to the sky. It looked innocent enough, but his trained eye immediately went to the trees where James had left marks from rubbing his antlers, or the scarce patch of grass where he himself had decided to test out how long he could dig as a dog without getting tired.

“Nice spot,” you smiled. “So, should we get to work?”

“Might as well, having come this far,” he replied, happy he’d brought you there.

[1921designs]

Find your beach

ACROSS THE WAY from our apartment—on Houston, I guess—there’s a new wall ad. The site is forty feet high, twenty feet wide. It changes once or twice a year.

Whatever’s on that wall is my view: I look at it more than the sky or the new World Trade Center, more than the water towers, the passing cabs. It has a subliminal effect. Last semester it was a spot for high-end vodka, and while I wrangled children into their snowsuits, chock-full of domestic resentment, I’d find myself dreaming of cold martinis.

Before that came an ad so high-end I couldn’t tell what it was for. There was no text—or none that I could see—and the visual was of a yellow firebird set upon a background of hellish red. It seemed a gnomic message, deliberately placed to drive a sleepless woman mad. Once, staring at it with a newborn in my arms, I saw another mother, in the tower opposite, holding her baby. It was 4 A.M. We stood there at our respective windows, separated by a hundred feet of expensive New York air.

The tower I live in is university accommodation; so is the tower opposite. The idea occurred that it was quite likely that the woman at the window also wrote books for a living, and, like me, was not writing anything right now. Maybe she was considering antidepressants. Maybe she was already on them. It was hard to tell. Certainly she had no way of viewing the ad in question, not without opening her window, jumping, and turning as she fell. I was her view. I was the ad for what she already had.

But that was all some time ago. Now the ad says, Find your beach. The bottle of beer—it’s an ad for beer—is very yellow and the background luxury-holidayblue. It seems to me uniquely well placed, like a piece of commissioned public art in perfect sympathy with its urban site. The tone is pure Manhattan. Echoes can be found in the personal growth section of the bookstore (“Find your happy”), and in exercise classes (“Find your soul”), and in the therapist’s office (“Find your self”). I find it significant that there exists a more expansive, national version of this ad that runs in magazines, and on television.

In those cases photographic images are used, and the beach is real and seen in full. Sometimes the tag line is expanded, too: When life gives you limes . . . Find your beach. But the wall I see from my window marks the entrance to SoHo, a district that is home to media moguls, entertainment lawyers, every variety of celebrity, some students, as well as a vanishingly small subset of rent-controlled artists and academics.

Collectively we, the people of SoHo, consider ourselves pretty sophisticated consumers of media. You can’t put a cheesy ad like that past us. And so the ad has been reduced to its essence—a yellow undulation against a field of blue— and painted directly onto the wall, in a bright pop-art style. The mad men know that we know the SoHo being referenced here: the SoHo of Roy Lichtenstein and Ivan Karp, the SoHo that came before Foot Locker, Sephora, Prada, frozen yogurt. That SoHo no longer exists, of course, but it’s part of the reason we’re all here, crowded on this narrow strip of a narrow island. Whoever placed this ad knows us well.

Find your beach. The construction is odd. A faintly threatening mixture of imperative and possessive forms, the transformation of a noun into a state of mind. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. On the one hand it means, simply, “Go out and discover what makes you happy.” Pursue happiness actively, as Americans believe it their right to do. And it’s an ad for beer, which makes you happy in the special way of all intoxicants, by reshaping reality around a sensation you alone are having. So, even more precisely, the ad means “Go have a beer and let it make you happy.” Nothing strange there. Except beer used to be sold on the dream of communal fun: have a beer with a buddy, or lots of buddies. People crowded the frame, laughing and smiling. It was a lie about alcohol—as this ad is a lie about alcohol—but it was a different kind of lie, a wide-framed lie, including other people.

Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if—as in the case of this wall painting—it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty.

In an exercise class recently the instructor shouted at me, at all of us: “Don’t let your mind set limits that aren’t really there.” You’ll find this attitude all over the island. It is encouraged and reflected in the popular culture, especially the movies, so many of which, after all, begin their creative lives here, in Manhattan. According to the movies it’s only our own limited brains that are keeping us

from happiness. In the future we will take a pill to make us limitless (and ideal citizens of Manhattan), or we will, like Scarlett Johansson in Lucy, use 100 percent of our brain’s capacity instead of the mythic 10. In these formulations the world as it is has no real claim on us. Our happiness, our miseries, our beaches, or our blasted heaths—they are all within our own power to create, or destroy. On Tina Fey’s television show 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy—the consummate citizen of this new Manhattan—deals with problems by crushing them with his “mind vise.”

The beach is always there: you just have to conceive of it. It follows that those who fail to find their beach are, in the final analysis, mentally fragile; in

Manhattan terms, simply weak. Jack Donaghy’s verbal swordplay with Liz Lemon was a comic rendering of the various things many citizens of Manhattan have come to regard as fatal weakness: childlessness, obesity, poverty. To find your beach you have to be ruthless. Manhattan is for the hard-bodied, the hardminded, the multitasker, the alpha mamas and papas. A perfect place for selfempowerment—as long as you’re pretty empowered to begin with. As long as you’re one of these people who simply do not allow anything—not even reality —to impinge upon that clear field of blue.

There is a kind of individualism so stark that it seems to dovetail with an existentialist creed: Manhattan is right at that crossroads. You are pure potential in Manhattan, limitless, you are making yourself every day. When I am in England each summer, it’s the opposite: all I see are the limits of my life. The brain that puts a hairbrush in the fridge, the leg that radiates pain from the hip to the toe, the lovely children who eat all my time, the books unread and unwritten.

And casting a shadow over it all is what Philip Larkin called “extinction’s alp,” no longer a stable peak in a distance, finally becoming rising ground. In England even at the actual beach I cannot find my beach. I look out at the freezing forty-degree water, at the families squeezed into ill-fitting wetsuits, huddled behind windbreakers, approaching a day at the beach with the kind of stoicism once conjured for things like the Battle of Britain, and all I can think is what funny, limited creatures we are, subject to every wind and wave, building castles in the sand that will only be knocked down by the generation coming up beneath us.

When I land at JFK, everything changes. For the first few days it is a shock: I have to get used to old New York ladies beside themselves with fury that I have stopped their smooth elevator journey and got in with some children. I have to remember not to pause while walking in the street—or during any fluid-moving city interaction—unless I want to utterly exasperate the person behind me. Each man and woman in this town is in pursuit of his or her beach and God help you if you get in their way. I suppose it should follow that I am happier in pragmatic England than idealist Manhattan, but I can’t honestly say that this is so. You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. “A reality shaped around your own desires”—there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

It is also a fair description of what it is to write fiction. And to live in a city where everyone has essentially the same tunnel vision and obsessive focus as a novelist is to disguise your own sociopathy among the herd. Objectively all the same limits are upon me in Manhattan as they are in England. I walk a ten-block radius every day, constrained in all the usual ways by domestic life, reduced to writing about whatever is right in front of my nose. But the fact remains that here I dowrite, the work gets done.

Even if my Manhattan productivity is powered by a sociopathic illusion of my own limitlessness, I’m thankful for it, at least when I’m writing. There’s a reason so many writers once lived here, beyond the convenient laundromats and the take-out food, the libraries and cafés. We have always worked off the energy generated by this town, the moneymaking and tower-building as much as the street art and underground cultures. Now the energy is different: the underground has almost entirely disappeared. (You hope there are still young artists in Washington Heights, in the Barrio, or Stuyvesant Town, but how much longer can they hang on?) A twisted kind of energy radiates instead off the SoulCycling mothers and marathon-running octogenarians, the entertainment lawyers glued to their iPhones and the moguls building five “individualized” condo townhouses where once there was a hospital.

It’s not a pretty energy, but it still runs what’s left of the show. I contribute to it. I ride a stationary bike like the rest of them. And then I despair when Shakespeare and Co. closes in favor of another Foot Locker. There’s no way to be in good faith on this island anymore. You have to crush so many things with your mind vise just to get through the day. Which seems to me another aspect of the ad outside of my window: willful intoxication. Or, to put it more snappily, “You don’t have to be high to live here, but it helps.”

Finally the greatest thing about Manhattan is the worst thing about Manhattan: self-actualization. Here you will be free to stretch yourself to your limit, to find the beach that is yours alone. But sooner or later you will be sitting on that beach wondering what comes next. I can see my own beach ahead now, as the children grow, as the practical limits fade; I see afresh the huge privilege of my position; it reclarifies itself. Under the protection of a university I live on one of the most privileged strips of built-up beach in the world, among people who believe they privileged strips of built-up beach in the world, among people who believe they have no limits and who push me, by their very proximity, into the same useful delusion, now and then.

It is such a good town in which to work and work. You can find your beach here, find it falsely but convincingly, still thinking of Manhattan as an isle of writers and artists—of downtown underground wildlings and uptown intellectuals—against all evidence to the contrary. Oh, you still see them occasionally here and there, but unless they are under the protection of a university—or have sold that TV show—they are all of them, every single last one of them, in Brooklyn.

[easyhairstylesbest]

Cicely Tyson on the ‘Power’ of Her 1973 Oscar Nom: ‘That Was My Dream’

The day I learned I’d been nominated for an Oscar, I was filming a small role for a new Black director. Just as I was delivering an important line, I heard laughter on the sidelines of the set. “Don’t they know we’re shooting in here?” I snapped. “What’s the matter with them?” A moment later, a producer walked in. “We’ve just gotten some good news,” he said. I held up my hand. “I don’t want to hear anything,” I told him. “Whatever it is can wait.” When I am working, I show up to do exactly that. All else is a distraction, a disruption to an unfolding moment. The gentleman smiled, shook his head, and left.

The director, who must’ve heard the news that awaited, gave me a strange look before we resumed. We completed the scene, and even on my way out, I wouldn’t let anyone tell me anything. It was upon arriving home, at my agent Haber’s place, that he gave me the exhilarating announcement: I’d been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. “Really?” I said, the living room suddenly swirling out of focus. “Yes!” he yelped. As tears flooded my face, all I could think about were my friend Arthur Mitchell’s words to me: “You’re going to be nominated for an Oscar.” My friend’s what-if had come true.

I don’t care what any actor says, that golden statue matters. It is what we’re all vying for—the ultimate validation from our peers. You empty yourself into a character, you labor hour upon hour to get every single gesture and sentence precise, and you mean to tell me that such an affirmation means nothing to you? It holds tremendous power. When I was just getting into the business, I’d looked on in awe as Sidney Poitier earned that affirmation for his marvelous work in Lilies of the Field, becoming the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. That evening, as I watched the ceremony on my old black-and-white RCA set, I said to myself, I’m going to sit in the front at the Oscars one day. That was my dream. But as my career carried me mostly toward stage and television, that hope seemed unlikely. That is why, long before I did Sounder, I’d quietly accepted that the Academy Awards would probably not be part of my path. And yet, lo and behold, here I was, on the verge of taking a seat in that front row I’d envisioned for myself.

Cicely Tyson as Rebecca in Sounder.

Stanley Bielecki Movie CollectionGetty Images

My good news was just the beginning. Sounder received a slew of nominations, for Best Picture, Best Writing (Lonne Elder), and Best Actor (I was as delighted for Paul Winfield as I was for myself). The film’s message also reverberated beyond our shores, earning a BAFTA nomination for its score, created by Taj Mahal, who also earned a Grammy for his work. Kevin Hooks, who played my son (and who, in real life, is the son of director and actor Robert Hooks), received a Golden Globe nomination. That awards season also became a landmark recognition of Black talent: Diana Ross was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Lady Sings the Blues, as was screenplay writer Suzanne de Passe. The 1973 nominations for Diana Ross and myself were the first time Black women had been nominated in the Best Actress category since trailblazer Dorothy Dandridge received the honor in 1954 for her role in Carmen Jones.

The morning after the official nomination announcement in Los Angeles, I called my mother in New York. On television, she’d seen how all those white folks had stood and applauded me. “Well?” I said to her. “Well, what?” she said chuckling. “You’d better tell me something,” I said. The line went silent. “I am so proud of you, Sister,” she finally said. I could feel tears brimming and I let them fall, unable to speak because I was so overcome by what I’d longed to hear. If I had not heard those words from my mother, none of this would have made any difference. If she had not been able to participate in the acclaim I was receiving, all of it would’ve felt empty to me.

I, of course, already knew she and my father recognized my work. “Why do you do such sad movies?” my dad once joked after he’d seen me in Brown Girl, Brownstones. Likewise, Mom would often tell me what her friends were always asking her: “Why is she always wearing rags in her movies? Doesn’t she ever dress up?” Though their teasing was an indirect acknowledgment of their pride, I needed my mother, in particular, to voice her validation. She’d been my greatest source of energy, the reason I’d devoted myself so wholly to my work. She had believed I’d go out and become a slut of some kind, had no idea this Hollywood journey could lead me to play a character as honorable as Rebecca. My nomination did more than just prove my mother wrong. After a childhood during which my mother’s opinions drowned out all others, it gave me the last say.

“If I had not heard those words from my mother, none of this would have made any difference.”

I flew my mother to Los Angeles to attend the screening of Sounder. We were seated in the mezzanine, and she was one row behind me. In the dark, just as the curtains parted, she tapped me on the shoulder. “Ed Sullivan is sitting behind me,” she said, pronouncing his last name Sulli-wan, because for whatever reason, West Indians can’t say v’s. For years, she’d never missed The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights. I turned around and whispered to her, “And I am sitting here.” We both snickered, her loudly enough to prompt Ed Sulli-wan to smile in my mother’s direction.

To celebrate Sounder’s cascade of nominations, the studio hosted a splashy New York premiere. I called upon acclaimed fashion designer Bill Whitten to design my dress (years later, Bill would design Michael Jackson’s rhinestone glove to cover the singer’s early signs of vitiligo). “I want to create the kind of gown that Rebecca might have worn if she’d had money,” I told Bill. That sent him in search of the prints and cottons poor colored women would’ve worn in 1933. Using the fabric remnants he found, he pieced together a treasure. The dress, antebellum in style, came with a fancy apron that served as a flower sack. He filled it with cotton balls he’d sent for from down South. It was the most glorious creation. The same woman who braided my hair for the movie created a crown of beautiful cornrows to complement my look. When I strode into the theater that evening, chin lifted, pride on my brow, I showed up in the name of the ancestors whose sweat and sorrow had carried me there.

In the months leading up to the ceremony, the devil got to work doing what he does best: attempting to pit Black women against each other. In the lead-up to the Oscars, one of Diana Ross’s designers tried to keep my dress from being finished by hiring my designer to make suits for the Jackson Five. I don’t know whether Diana knew anything about it, but I heard the whispers. The media, for months, had been playing up the narrative that there was some big competition between the two of us. I refused to feed into that storyline, which was false. I have never been in competition with anybody but myself, and I wanted no part in such unpleasantness. Just Breathing While Black is trouble enough.

A month before the ceremony, the studio sent me overseas on a promotional tour in Europe, my first time in Paris and London. Months before I left town, I’d rubbed elbows with British royalty. Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, First Earl of Snowdon, was then husband to Princess Margaret and an avid photographer and filmmaker. Lord Snowdon had taken quite an interest in Arthur’s work at Dance Theatre of Harlem. The two began a partnership, with Lord Snowdon investing in the school. Arthur connected me with him, and during one of Lord Snowdon’s trips to New York, he and I met for appetizers and a brief conversation. As we awaited our order, he kept glancing over his left shoulder. How strange, I thought. I wonder if he’s expecting someone. As it turned out, he was on the lookout for the paparazzi, who of course had followed him to the restaurant. Later, on another one of his trips to New York, Lord Snowdon photographed me wearing that Bill Whitten masterpiece of a dress. What a memory.

Cicely Tyson at England’s Heathrow Airport in February 1973, a month before the Oscars.

George StroudGetty Images

In London, the marveling began with my ride from Heathrow in an enormous black taxi, a Hackney carriage so gargantuan that I could stand up inside of it! In a penthouse suite in the Dorchester Hotel, I spent a half-hour just wandering around the space, gawking at the grandeur of the accommodations, thinking back on those days when my siblings, Emily and Melrose, and I had all been squished together on a rollaway bed in our parents’ living room.

And to think that I now had this sprawling space to myself, in a world where my name was plastered on billboards all over America and Europe. It was nothing short of spectacular. The same was true of my time in the City of Light, where, from my balcony, I gazed in awe at the Eiffel Tower, head held high and preening in the distance.

“When I strode into the theater that evening, chin lifted, pride on my brow, I showed up in the name of the ancestors whose sweat and sorrow had carried me there.”

Back in New York before the ceremony, the surrealism continued. In another head nod to Rebecca, I wanted my hair done in a croquignole, the deep-wave style that would’ve been popular for well-to- do women during the 1930s. “Do you know how to do that style?” I asked my hairstylist Omar. “No,” she said, “but my mother can.” Can you believe that child’s mom came out of retirement just to create my waves? The words thank you fell short of expressing the gratitude I felt. Designer Bill Whitten turned up the luxury by creating a white silk-wool fitted dress, with a touch of grey in it, complete with a heart cut-out, lace-trimmed detail across the décolletage. Gracing each sleeve was a glistening row of tiny gold buttons, with the same buttons stretching down the back. It was absolutely stunning.

When Arthur arrived, dashing in his tuxedo, he escorted me by the arm to the awaiting limo. The evening, for us, marked two celebrations: the Forty-Fifth Academy Awards, and my dear Arthur’s thirty-ninth birthday. The quintet of hosts—Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Charlton Heston, and Rock Hudson—took the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. My dream was to be in the front row, and there I sat, delighted that my fantasy had come to pass.

But as for the possibility of garnering the gold statue, I had done my back-of-the-napkin math. I’m logical that way, a pragmatist who is always weighing the odds, and in Hollywood politics, those odds were decidedly not in my favor. That same year, Liza Minnelli had been nominated for her role in Cabaret. Her father, Vincente, was a big-time director, which gave her one advantage. Check. Her mother was Judy Garland. Double check. Neither of them had ever earned an Oscar. Triple check. And at the time, Liza was dating Desi Arnaz Jr., son of Desi and Lucille Ball, Hollywood royalty. Quadruple check. Common sense told me that I had no chance amid the schmoozing and vote-securing that goes on in back rooms.

So as I sat near the stage that evening, I relaxed into the joy of just being there, with Arthur to my left and with Rebecca’s spirit dancing on my shoulder. So certain was I that this was Liza’s year, when Gene Hackman said, “And the winner is…,” I turned to Arthur and said, “Liza Minnelli.” Liza made her way up to the stage, tearful and jubilant, and I sat there, palm over my heart, relishing my presence in the arena. This journey of mine, this path so unpredictable, had somehow carried me from 219 East 102nd Street in the slums to the front row of movie magic at Hollywood’s most grand affair. As Liza accepted her award, I’d already received the only prize I have ever truly wanted—the affirmation of the dear woman who gave me birth.

From the book Just as I Am: A Memoir by Cicely Tyson with Michelle Burford. Copyright © 2021 by Cicely Tyson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Cicely Tyson Cicely Tyson has been nominated for 40 television and film awards and has won 42, most notably an Oscar, a Tony Award, 3 Emmys, 8 NAACP Image Awards, the African American Film Critics Special Achievement Award, the BAFTA Film Award, the Black Film Critics Circle Award, 4 Black Reel Awards, the Elle Women in Hollywood Award, 3 Lifetime Achievement Awards, and many more.  Ms.

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Cicely Tyson on the ‘Power’ of Her 1973 Oscar Nom: ‘That Was My Dream’

[blogwritetheworld]

The Write Place: ‘Tis the Season - My December

by Lisa Hiton

Looking for the right advice on pursuing the writer’s life? You’ve come to the write place!

My family is Jewish. We don’t celebrate Christmas. And yet, isn’t going to a movie and eating Chinese food while the rest of the world closes down for a day a kind of ritual—its own kind of made-up holiday? I’m sure that these details seem usual as well. But, dear writers, a lot more is there than meets the eye. Your family’s traditions, rituals, and habits—no matter how ordinary they seem—can be made extraordinary by turning them into words.

Family Hanukkah with multiple Hannukiahs! These are different than menorahs as they hold nine candles instead of seven.

PANNING FOR GOLD

An easy way to describe your holiday season to someone else (and kickstart your writing process) is to make a list of traditions and rituals that you think of when this time of year comes around. Mine looks something like this:

Tuesday before Thanksgiving

take a train into the city

to go to the Art Institute with my mom

followed by shopping for new art supplies

and a nice dinner

and train ride home

Thanksgiving Eve and Day

prepare spinach balls

set table

cook cook cook

eat eat eat

play games with cousins

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

hang Hanukkah stockings

attend Cathy Nathan’s x-mas party

cook a big breakfast including eggs, fresh squeezed OJ, and bacon

open stockings

hang out

go to a movie at the theatre

cook a nice dinner (Chinese food takes too long in my hometown since we live in a pretty Jewish part of Chicagoland)

watch holiday movies with mom and brother, especially The Family Stone

Winters in Chicago can be brutal; there’s no better antidote than playing in the snow! Here I am enjoying the snow with my first friend, Rebel.

Are you bored yet? This isn’t even counting Hanukkah since it doesn’t always fall near Christmas! All of these things may seem pretty usual. That might be true if you make your list of traditions as well. You might decorate a tree, hang twinkle lights, go caroling, go to the same person’s house every year to celebrate, leave out cookies for Santa, etc. Most neighborhoods and cultures have their usual lists of traditions. Part of your goal as a writer is to pan for gold among them.

Looking at this list, I began to ask myself, Why is it that my mom, brother, and I do these same things every single year? Some of it seems like the larger culture, but some of it was made by us. As I think about why, it’s clear that a lot of these rituals are in some way related to my parent’s divorce. Through that lens, I might start panning for my own gold—to sift through this litany to find something that might be worth more than meets the eye. Each of these seemingly usual bullet points, in fact, triggers different memories for me. In that field of memories, where might I find a scene that begins a longer story? How might I organize these scenes and memories into something cohesive for myself and my readers? I’ll begin with my freshman year.

My freshman year of high school marked the first year of spending winter break with divorced parents. While breakfast time was never particularly special in my house, Christmas day posed a dilemma: what would my mom, brother, and I do in this new situation, just the three of us? Especially since nearly everything is closed on Christmas day and people are with their families, filling the time posed some anxiety for my mother and me, especially with my young, shy brother.

To be sure, I already had thrown one tantrum about adjusting to these new circumstances. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. In elementary school and middle school, I normally had that day off as part of my holiday break. In high school though, this was not the case. It was second period when I received a pink slip during chorus to report to my advisor’s office. As a self-proclaimed academic, I was not used to be in trouble. With a room full of eyes on me as I left the choir room, my angst only increased.

It seemed my senior leaders had gone to my advisor worried about my general sadness. In my humiliation that anyone had noticed such negative energy, I proceeded to have the first of many tearful conversations with my advisor about adjusting: to high school, to a new home situation, and more. My mom came and picked me up from school so we could play hooky and keep our one ritual of going to the Art Institute of Chicago. I knew it was a temporary solution to a larger problem, and that this was just one of many adjustments I’d have to make. Yet, the gesture helped me persevere despite my pain.

That choir room would continue to serve as a literary backdrop for growth and tough love throughout high school. It was also a common community I kept throughout high school while everything else changed. For our annual fundraiser, we sold grapefruits and oranges by the box. When the trucks pulled up to the high school, we passed the boxes one by one down the line, just like the who’s down in Whoville, singing all the while in the face of another frigid Chicagoland winter.

While I’m more of a night owl than a morning person, and certainly not a big breakfast eater, this introduction to ripe grapefruits became my exception. Cut in half with a little bit of sugar was all I needed to jump-start my day with a jolt of Vitamin C. And so when the week of Christmas came around, my mom picked up a citrus juicer. The morning of Christmas. My brother and I sat on the island in our kitchen cutting oranges in half. We took turns pressing oranges onto the machine as it whirred and whirred. In an absolute mess of pulp, we finally squeezed enough halves for three cups of juice, just as our bacon was coming out of the oven. It was a new tradition, mundane as it may seem now, and a way of lightening the day and passing the time on a holiday that is not ours.

Christmas may not be our holiday, but it would be a boring day without our own tradition of “Hanukkah stockings”. My brother, Merrick, and I still give each other socks and chapstick as a ritual!

AMONG THESE ROCKS

Among the rocks in the river, there are some that are worth spending time with as a writer, and others that probably don’t add much to the larger story. The larger story in a personal essay is not always about a narrative arc. In the passage I just wrote about making orange juice, the larger story is about recasting the family unit as three instead of four, connecting to my younger brother, and trying to lift my spirit despite how hard it was to start high school with divorce at the forefront of my thinking and feeling. While all of that may not have come out precisely, writing this little passage is a signal that with time and effort, I could write that longer essay. Now as a writer, it will be up to me to describe these anecdotes as scenes, make characters out of my self and my family members, and reflect on the meaning. If this can all be done well—the showing and the telling—then it’s likely the reader will feel a similar sense of nostalgia.

The house where I grew up is on a hill whose swale leads to the north fork of the Chicago River. My fondest memories of winter are sledding down that hill and walking on the frozen river. Here I am teaching a new friend, Miriam, about these prairie-land games.

That is, perhaps, the most important way to approach material. If something is significant, memorable, or worthy of reflection to your own sense of self or personal narrative, there is probably a way to translate that to your reader in writing. Take for example Vani Dadoo’s My December piece from last year, “December in Delhi”, about waiting for the train:

Winter is not good for a polluted city like mine. December, being the main month of winter in India, is always the coldest.

All things in nature huddle together in winter, trying to find, or steal, some warmth from the other.

The clouds creep towards the ground. The fog and the smoke meet and embrace, and together try to steal the little sunlight before it touches the earth. The smog becomes denser, trying to wrap the earth in a heavier, grayish blanket, like the people sleeping in woolen quilts in their homes.  Evening darkness approaches faster than before, as if the smog did succeed in robbing the sunlight. Even after twilight, the smog refuses to diffuse. The air becomes thicker, but the world puts on an old, dull, sweater and wraps a muffler around its neck and walks on.

Some evenings, it coughs and some mornings, it can see its breath. But most days, it can’t peer into the distance.

This year, my father decided to travel to escape the harsh winters. “Migration over hibernation,” he called it, and, “better to get the sun somewhere than get closer to that old, rusty heater at home,” is what he said. We decide to journey to the western coast around Mumbai by train. Indian Railways was a part of family, as all cross-country trips; from Himalayan foothills to the Rajasthani deserts, were made by train.

As we take a cab to the New Delhi railway station, the moon is rising. The moon is a blurred piece of white in the black sky, clouds and smog. The street lights, though, filter through this, illuminating every speck of dust. The cars zoom past on the highway.

One can rarely see stars in my city.

Dadoo wavers between a present-tense meditation on December, and a swell of memory related to waiting for a train in Delhi. While these may be ordinary in another context—waiting for a late train or reflecting on the season—Dadoo weaves these two threads together, a double helix, to arrive at grand statements of the human condition: that like waiting for a train, we wait for a season’s end so that we may be carried into a new one.

Dadoo also brings us Delhi in her sensory details. From the opening passage about all things in nature “huddling together”, Dadoo mirrors her descriptions to match the crowded and polluted city around her. Just as Dadoo was able to give the details of December in Delhi while waiting for a train, you can give your own details as you think about your family—their traditions and rituals, the personalities of each member, and the things that make you nostalgic.

A reader gets a clear sense of a train station in Mumbai from this piece. If you’re familiar with such a place, you will get swept up in a shared nostalgia. If you’re unfamiliar with this land, you may find these descriptions to be exotic. In both cases, the very things that are both familiar and new bring the reader into a shared sense of the human condition with the writer herself. That shared humanness is the the entire point of sharing stories! And all of that came from writing about waiting for the train!

So, dear writers, as you think of Decembers past and enjoy your current December, what memories and rituals are for keeps? What gold will you find in waiting for the train, cooking with your grandmother, visiting a museum, playing in the snow? Show us your favorite places, traditions, and people at this time of year by tagging your stories and images with #MyDecember on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

About Lisa

Lisa Hiton is an editorial associate at Write the World. She writes two series on our blog: The Write Place where she comments on life as a writer, and Reading like a Writer where she recommends books about writing in different genres. She’s also the interviews editor of Cosmonauts Avenue and the poetry editor of the Adroit Journal.

[khalilhumam]

Trinidadian writer Ingrid Persaud talks about her new novel, ‘Love After Love’

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/trinidadian-writer-ingrid-persaud-talks-about-her-new-novel-love-after-love/

Trinidadian writer Ingrid Persaud talks about her new novel, ‘Love After Love’

‘Why are we seeking permission to use our English?

Ingrid Persaud's new novel, “Love After Love,” set in Trinidad. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin, used with permission.

In a review of Trinidadian novelist Ingrid Persaud's latest offering, “Love after Love,” poet Shivanee Ramlochan described the book as “a take-no-prisoners trip into […] three hearts.” The hearts she speaks of belong to Betty Ramdin, a survivor of domestic violence who is “more than her collection of bruises”; her son Solo, who is “more than a shy only child”; and their lodger, Mr. Chetan, who “elides easy pigeonholing reserved for queer Caribbean characters.” Chetan comes to board with them after Betty's abusive husband dies, and the trio forms a family of sorts. As they try to help heal each others’ wounds, however, secrets come out that change everything, leaving them struggling with questions of identity, duty, community, desire and reconciliation. Perhaps most importantly, the shattering revelations guide their individual struggles along the journey to self-love, a theme that the book, which shares its title with Derek Walcott's poem, examines. Set in Trinidad, the island of Persaud's birth, the novel pays tender reverence to the inimitable way in which Trinidadians communicate, imbuing the story's universal themes with local colour and vibrancy. I interviewed Persaud via email to discuss the novel, her first since winning the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award.

Author Ingrid Persaud; photo used with permission.

Janine Mendes-Franco (JMF): Are you at the level of self-love that Walcott wrote about? 

Ingrid Persaud (IP): I borrow the title of Walcott’s poem with deference and gratitude. In the act of loving another, do we not often carelessly lose sight of ourselves? I’m sure everyone can identify with that challenge. I’d like to think I’m getting better at coming back to my own door, my own mirror, to show myself a little compassion. We should all heed that famous last line where the poet directs: ‘Sit. Feast on your life.’

JMF: With “Love After Love,” you’ve taken the approach of telling stories through a definitively Trinidadian lens to a new level, not just with your use of local dialect, but with its accompanying rhythm and pace. Was it a conscious decision or did the story just demand to be written that way?

IP: “Love After Love” is set in Trinidad and the characters are all ordinary Trini people, so it’s arguable the story demanded our English. But there’s more at stake than place dictating language. This is our authentic English with the same validity as any other. It’s only dialect if you aren’t one of the millions from the English-speaking Caribbean. Why are we seeking permission to use our English? Badass [writer] Sam Selvon was successfully owning it 70 years ago. The issue isn’t why a mainstream publisher like Faber bought this book but rather why it took so long for the industry to embrace work like mine.

JMF: You say that, but in the Caribbean, there has been a lot of discussion around the use of the Patois/Creole language as opposed to the Queen’s English – its viability, what it communicates in terms of intelligence, social class, etc. How do you feel about what still appears to be an effort to humiliate (or at the very least, de-motivate) dialect speakers and keep them in their place, so to speak?

IP: While we hold the English of a tiny minority as the absolute standard, any different use of English becomes othered. By deciding that our English is less than this gold standard we are colluding with the othering of ourselves. As if this weren’t ironical enough, we are having these debates within the region precisely when our English, our Caribbean sensibility, is being feted elsewhere. Roger Robinson, a Trini, licked up both the prestigious T. S. Elliot Prize and the Ondaatje Prize for his collection, “A Portable Paradise,” [and] “Golden Child,” by Claire Adams has won several prizes. Caroline McKenzie has just published “One Year of Ugly.” Ayanna Lloyd’s novel has so much buzz already and it’s not coming out until 2022. As a country we should be celebrating.

JMF: You were confident in your decision not to soften the dialect or explain the terminology. There was no glossary, for instance, as exists for the Ibo words in Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.” Was it a difficult sell to your editor to go this route?

IP: Louisa Joyner, at Faber, and Nicole Counts, at One World, were incredible editors and I am full of gratitude to have learnt at their feet. Neither asked for a glossary. Indeed they were against the inclusion of any explanatory notes. The integrity of the writing would have to be sufficient. Hopefully the context of an unknown word or expression was enough for the non-Caribbean reader. Even better would be that readers left “Love After Love” with an increased vocabulary of words like steupse and bazodee, idioms like “cockroach have no right in fowl party” and expressions like “jeez” and “ages.”

JMF: What kind of feedback have you got from non-Trinbagonian readers about the language?

IP: Before publication, I made the decision not to look at comments from readers on the usual sites like Goodreads or Amazon. It just wasn’t going to be good for my mental health. All that to say the feedback I have had is limited to those who have sought me out specially and they naturally said nice things about the language in “Love after Love.” I don’t know about the swathes of readers who find the language off-putting. And that’s cool. To please everyone, I would have to be an Ali’s doubles with slight pepper.

JMF: You’ve been living outside of Trinidad for some time now, yet the language and the lilt have never left you. How do you manage that?

IP: Thank you for saying [it] hasn’t left me. I’m not always confident that I still hear it or hear it properly. When the doubt and longing sets in I pick up the phone and soak up the Trini voices of friends, family — anybody who will bother with me. Of course, language is a living thing. An expression might have evolved or vanished from everyday speech, so I pay attention to current usage. Our people are so creative that new words and idioms are constantly emerging. And we police our language as much as any other group. It would be literary suicide to write without consulting Winer’s huge tome – “Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago” or to abandon my well-thumbed copy of “Côté ci Côté là.”

JMF: Has that distance given you a unique perspective on identity and belonging?

IP: I don’t know if living outside of Trinidad has given me a unique perspective but it has made issues of identity and belonging central to my practice. Everyone needs a place called home, yet how that is constructed is always precarious and contested. I would point at San Fernando in south Trinidad and say — my navel string’s buried there. That is where I belong. Now I’m less sure GPS can locate my home. Years of self-exile have broken and remade my thinking. I’ve come to embrace the liminal space of non-belonging — simultaneously all and none of the places I inhabit. It’s closer to the everyday, lived experience without the push of alienation and pull of attachment.

JMF: Domestic violence and homophobia are themes that resonate strongly in the regional experience. Why did you want to examine them?

IP: I wrote about ordinary lives and, as you’ve said, domestic violence and homophobia are urgent and troubling everyday issues in our region. If you have gay characters then it’s impossible to ignore the homophobia that limits their life choices. I let the characters lead me and often, I wasn’t too sure where we would find ourselves. It was the only way I could navigate these themes.

JMF: You’re always able to hone in on the crux of a good narrative and structure it compellingly so that the reader is happily brought along for the ride. Describe what happens from the moment you think, “That’d make a good story.”

IP: You know how to make a bush bath to cleanse bad vibes that are clinging to your body and mind? I’m guessing you don’t. Maybe you can consult an old auntie who directs you to throw black sage and blue soap in the water. Then, you might ask a neighbour and he might add to the list of vital ingredients or even contradict what the old auntie suggested. Same thing with the creative process. Looking in, it feels like there must be a special alchemy that makes good writing. There isn’t any — or at least none that I’ve found. All you can do is show up at your desk every single day and write. If you do that, you might occasionally glimpse pure magic.

< p class='gv-rss-footer'>Written by Janine Mendes-Franco

[mikeyd1986]

MIKEY’S PERSONAL BLOG 145, February 2019

On Monday night, I went to my Boxing small group fitness class at CinFull Fitness. Tonight was much warmer than I was anticipating and I was slightly worried about passing out but I found myself to be managing okay. I also rocked my official CinFull Fintess grey activewear shirt tonight and that felt really good. We did some warm up drills, a “Line of Fire” and an AMRAP (4 rounds) consisting of: 20 high punches, 10 situps/crunches, 20 uppercuts, 10 star jumps, 20 Russian twists and 10 squat kicks. This was really tough for me but I managed to get through it.

My brain was starting to lurk back into the past a little, back when I was training with Luke and Nick at UFT Playgrounds. I was always the slowest one in the group and that fact made me feel like shit. My anxiety had a field day flooding my mind with thoughts like “you’ll never keep up with the others. Why don’t you just give up now? You’re not good enough!” It’s one of the reasons why I left because my mindset was full of self-doubt and I was left on the sidelines.

Luckily, CinFull Fitness is a very supportive and encouraging environment to train in so thoughts like those usually deflate pretty quickly like a balloon. Comparing yourself to others doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s not productive at all. And at the end of the day, who cares? I’m also feeling a lot better about the fact that I tend to sweat a lot. It should be something to celebrate, not criticise. It means that I’m working out really hard which can only be a good thing.

On Tuesday morning, I had a blood test done at Pound Road Medical Centre in Narre Warren. No matter how many times I go through this, I always seem to get myself worried for no reason over having a needle in my arm. Thankfully, the pathology clinic was quiet as when I got there and barely sat down when I got called up. I did everything I possibly could to relax my mind and body. I refuse to look at the needle because that just makes it worse for me.

I was even using mindfulness techniques like listening to the nurse’s voice and casting my gaze over the dark grey medical cabinet, signs and a generic image of smiling hospital staff. At one point I did think “Hey, I’ve got this. Maybe I won’t have a bad reaction this time.” BOW BOW! Of course I did. Here comes the spontaneous outbreak of sweat, uncontrollable fever-like symptoms and weird buzzing in my ears. https://www.labtestsonline.org.au/understanding/coping-with-discomfort-and-anxiety

I actually did a good job of acting like I was perfectly fine as I signed the blood test paperwork and left the clinic. I guess it’s similar to riding a wave. Once I’ve overcome the part of my blood getting extracted and my body has cooled off from that reaction, then I’m okay. It’s still not a pleasant experience to go through but I’m very much used to it now. Plus it’s important especially if I want to get some answers about why my sleep patterns are so messed up. https://www.clinicallabs.com.au/patient/collection-information/preparing-for-your-test/

On Tuesday afternoon, I attended an Introduction to Creative Writing session held at Balla Balla Community Centre in Cranbourne East. Writing has been a passion of mine for most of my life. I remember writing highly imaginative stories back in primary school and receiving cool looking stickers on my work. It made me proud. 25 years later, I’m still doing it through my blogs, posts and reviews because it’s something I really enjoy and my best form of self expression. But I’m by no means in the same universe as writers like J.K. Rowling, Stephen King or Matthew Reilly.

This intro session was facilitated by Roderic Grigson who is a published author himself, writing mostly on the 1980’s civil war in Sri Lanka where he was born. He broke down the main characteristics that make for a good writer including: finding the time and discipline, the importance of reading, having sources of inspiration, writing about what you know and love, doing your research, the power of words and allowing your mind to wander.

He then talked about the writing process which includes the following steps: Prewriting, Writing, Revising, Editing and Publishing. This is not a linear process as writing is often drafted and re-drafted many times before the finished product is produced. Next he went through the building blocks to a story which include: Character, Plot, Structure, Setting and Theme. Lastly, he went through the different ways of getting your work published including traditional publishing and self publishing.

The next step will be to sign up to the 8 week Creative Writing short course which will begin in Term 2 of this year. I’ve actually considered doing a course like this for a while now but found many TAFE’s and educational institutes were far too expensive, too technical and out of my league. Whereas doing it at a community centre is much more affordable and accessible for me. Plus I’ll be learning a lot of new things and hopefully improving my writing as I go along. https://www.ballaballa.com.au/programs-activities/special-interest/

On Thursday night, I attended this month’s Aspergers Victoria Young Adults Peer Group Meeting. Tonight we all learned how to play lawn bowls at Caulfield Park Sports Club. The group leaders put on a BBQ dinner when everyone arrived at the Bowling Club. Led by guest speakers David and Paul, they explained the basic rules of the game plus how to hold and release a bowl. It’s all about precision, accuracy, speed, angles and distance.

The main aim is to get your bowls as close as possible to the jack or the white ball. You also have to be mindful about the target being to the left or right of the jack and knowing how much the bowl is going to curve. Then there’s the proper bowling technique, stepping forward with the preferred side of the body then kneeling down on the opposite side before releasing the bowl in a forward motion, all in one fluid movement.

The trickiest part for all of us was knowing how much force to apply as this game is very different to ten pin bowling. It’s very technical and takes a lot of practice to get right. We had to partner up and learn the basic skills of the game. I found that I was pretty ordinary to begin with, getting lots of gutter bowls and terribly aimed shots. But slowly I was getting the hang of it.

Being something new, it can take a while for it to finally click in and happen for me. We also spent some time inside watching a professional game of lawn bowls on Fox Sports and gaining some technical insight into what goes on. I was generally feeling pretty shy tonight but I met a couple of new people and most importantly had a good time learning something that I’ve never tried before. https://aspergersvic.org.au/event-3198926

“Everybody knows. The demons come and go. To have regrets is only human. But I just can't escape. The memories of mistakes. Round and round instead of moving on.” Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Until The Starts Collide (2014)

[perspectivepodcast]

[Transcript] Side A: The Art of Letting Go

This episode consists in large part of a translation I made of an article written by Sara De Simone, published on the online magazine Femministerie in November 2018, and originally entitled ‘Che cosa significa imparare a perdere: Elizabeth Bishop, la poesia e le cose che cadono’.

Dearest.

You talk to me about letting go. Fear of abandonment, people who change, endings, stuff like that. Well, it seems to me that before anything, we should make a very important distinction. Because there is a difference between the art of letting go and the art of losing. They are implicated, of course. But it’s also more complex than that.

Let me tell you about a person who knew very well what losing meant. She knew about it so much that she even wrote a poem about it. The title is, unsurprisingly, ‘One Art’, and the poet was Elizabeth Bishop.

Now, this particular poet was one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. And her life was a constellation of losses. Not that any life isn’t a constellation of losses: we are, every day, all of us exposed to the disaster of loss – of our own lives, or of other people’s, even of objects.

What changes, if anything, are the different lengths of the streaks loss likes to smudge our lives with, the different degrees of intensity: for some human lives, loss is a constant, principal theme, it plays the rhythm, it holds the texture together. These lives are organized around their own hollows, around absences, as some architectures develop – and sustain – around empty spaces.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911, in Massachussetts, and in that same year she lost her father, William, due to illness. It wouldn’t be long before she lost, so to say, her mother as well, who was confined in a mental institution and never left its grounds until her death, in 1934. Bishop was, therefore, forced to move around and live with several different family members: she lived with her grandparents first, then with an aunt, so her early life was an endless chain of separations and readjustments, lost bonds and new relationships, houses left behind and strange places to get used to.

It’s also for this reason that, once in her twenties, after graduating in Literature, Bishop started traveling the world. She visited the whole American continent, and then Africa, then Europe, and as she was traveling, moving, she also observed the world: what gave her life, what allowed her to finally discover herself, was this going into the distance and into the unknown, going into this orbit around elsewhere.

Moving and decentralizing herself continuously, Bishop learned, loved, squandered the time and energy she needed to “lose”, she wrote letters (many), and poems (few). She didn’t feel productive though, she was lazy, unruly, she said she was a poet “by mistake”. And in fact it’s only thanks to the constant and motherly support of another extraordinary poet, Marianne Moore, that at 35 she can publish her first poetry collection, North & South, in 1946.

The longest trip she took was in the 1950s, to Brazil. Here she found a country that confused her and made her happy at the same time, and she also found her great love: the reckless, charismatic architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Both Brazil and Lota seemed to be the necessary counterpoint to Elizabeth: the warm climate, the flavorsome fruits, and the tropical flora made the cold and lonely landscapes of her childhood resurface in her mind, as if in contrast, and this is how she was finally able to write about them. In the same way, the fearless, dramatic Lota – so different from her, so shy, quiet, and reserved – made her want to stay, and allowed her to concentrate on her work as a writer.

As a love gift, de Macedo Soares designed for her, within her estate in Petrópolis, a studio “of her own”: a sort of refuge of white bricks, a space meant and offered as a place for writing, separated from the rest and yet connected with the rest. There couldn’t have been a greater gift, because – Lota had understood this – it was exactly like this that Elizabeth needed to feel: at home but not at home, alone but also together, free but also within connections, distant enough to be close at hand.

It’s while living in this ‘elsewhere’ that Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1955. In the meanwhile, she kept publishing in The New Yorker, and she finally put together, slowly but constantly, her third book of poems, Questions of Travel, which was published in 1962, and was dedicated to de Macedo Soares.

But the time of loss, and with that the time of travel, comes back always: after sixteen years into this intense relationship, Bishop lost also de Macedo Soares, who killed herself in 1967. And she lost Brazil as well, as she gradually left to go back and live in the States.

All this, and much more, is what accounts for the poem I mentioned, ‘One Art’, which was published in the collection Geography III in 1976. The art in question is not that of literature, but precisely that of losing.

This is the poem, ‘One Art’, by Elizabeth Bishop.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

  Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

  I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

It’s amazing, right? Only when in the list of things lost, or losable, comes the ‘you’, the sublime, painful irony of the poem pauses to point at the crack. And still, to say the loss of her beloved, Bishop, first-string expert of loss, uses brackets, as if she wanted to reveal where on the page the broken mesh is, where the hole is, circling it with her fingers, and writing it because (she must write it). And so, within the poem’s lines, the beloved never stops being lost, but is partially retrieved in its “writability”.

So you see, Elizabeth Bishop gives us the words to say what we couldn’t be able to name otherwise. Because, how do you name emptiness? How can a mouth articulate it? How can you place your finger on something that will vanish? Especially if the point isn’t only to say its presence, but especially to say its absence. Say all the syllables of the fall, of the dissolving.

Elizabeth Bishop, master in the art of losing, was able to do it. But is it possible to learn to lose? Is it a skill, a knowledge that one can acquire over time, loss after loss after loss?

Of course not. The irony Bishop employs to write about it clarifies this well. It’s not an instructions’ manual, nor a philosophical journey: there is no wisdom to aspire to, no balance to achieve. What Elizabeth Bishop shows us is rather a possible attitude, a way to look and to live through pain: we will not love what we love less because we have lost it, nor will we live in the constant, paralyzing anguish of loss.

Be it losing an object we were fond of, or leaving a house we grew and learned in, or a country we’ll never go back to, or a dream that has nourished us, or a love that we’ll never be able to revive – it will always be a disaster. But it’s a disaster we can live through, if we let ourselves travel it from one end to the other, and let it travel us.

There is no doctrine, Bishop knew this well, that can teach us how to let go of things when it is time. And accepting to lose means always, also, to accept to feel lost.

And yet, it is exactly because she has let herself be traveled by emptiness, that she was able to give space to emptiness, to write the poem: the truest word comes alive and breathes and moves into that hollow, without the hollow to welcome it and embrace it, the truest word can never be. For this reason, Bishop never made the mistake to believe herself uninterrupted, and rather exposed the cracks and celebrated the subtractions.

With her and with her poems we will perhaps be able to stammer our own losses as well. Try to say them. Allow ourselves to feel without compromises a bewildering emotion, that Rainer Maria Rilke talked about in his Elegy X: “the emotion / that almost overwhelms us / whenever a happy thing falls.”

And this is not because there is a fascination for tragedy, or because learning to give up is a sign of nobleness (it is, sometimes, but this is not the point). It is only because things are the way they are, and things fall. To see them fall will always be a disaster. But also a deep emotion, therefore, a transformation.

How can that transformation begin, you’ll ask me? Well, you know me, the only thing I could answer is: through kindness.

There is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye entitled ‘Kindness’ which, what a coincidence, begins like this:

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

  Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

  Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

  Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

What I want to say, is that sometimes you need to let go of the things you lose. Because they are lost anyway. Because life needs to go on. Because you can be dead when you’re dead.

But that doesn’t mean that they’re lost on you as you think they are.

This is the whole point of this long and boring letter to you. The wonderful Ella Frances Sanders once wrote: ‘Letting go can look like a wide, if not endless, variety of things. It often takes the shape of weather or movement or snapping, of silence or early mornings or time. Occasionally it can even look like holding on, which isn’t helpful when you’re trying to explain how it was that you let go.’

Ezra Pound in his ‘Canto LXXXI’ rephrased this exact same concept when he wrote:

What thou lovest well remains,

                                                  the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt used an even smaller number of words to say the exact same thing: “What you give […] is yours forever. What you keep is lost for all time!”

But perhaps, what I really wanted to say, my dearest, the only thing I could ever tell you about letting go, the four words that summarize this long letter to you, are something John Steinbeck once wrote to his son in a letter about love: Nothing good gets away.

No loss, no geography, no character change, no life choice matters. Nothing good gets away. And that’s the only thing you need to hold on to.

 With all my love,

A.

[webpostingpro-blog]

New Post has been published on Webpostingpro

New Post has been published on https://webpostingpro.com/can-livestreaming-replace-blogging-one-fashion-influencer-says-no/

Can Livestreaming Replace Blogging? One Fashion Influencer Says No

If you regard live streaming because the undisputed “quality” advertising tactic, you haven’t been in advertising and marketing long, specifically If you think it’s a standalone approach. Installed manufacturers recognize getting traction for a full blog requires correct, regular writing combined with staying power and size, in particular, if tying in video — edited or stay.

Can Live streaming Update Run a blog

One live streamer and the public speaker say Blogging is profitable for several reasons. In case you’re unsure approximately the cost of great Blogging on the net, Rebecca Casserly’s method will set you directly. Small Commercial enterprise Tendencies first met Casserly at a live streamer’ meetup in New york City in June of 2016. Her expertise of where Blogging overlaps with brands, live streaming, boom, metrics, events and exposure became why we reconnected for this interview.

Rebecca Casserly, known on-line as “BecBoop is a London-based totally live streamer and blogger. She is a finalist in the 2017 Shorty Awards for Periscope of the Year and was a finalist in the United kingdom blog Awards 2016 for best use of social media. Casserly blogs approximately fashion, splendor, travel, and way of life at BecBoop.Com even as attractive together with her community of over 135,000 followers across her social media structures. In 2016, Onalytica.Com ranked her the number 4 global beauty influencer primarily based on Twitter have an impact on, and top 50 fashion influencer in 2017. Casserly has labored with many global manufacturers on her weblog and turned into also the first life streamed to cowl London fashion Week on her Periscope channel. She has supplied as an enterprise professional about her live streaming revel in at Twitter United kingdom’s 10th birthday event and additionally at MojoCon, the arena’s largest mobile journalism conference.

Small Enterprise Developments: I was glad to analyze which you’re aware of the Moz metric named “Domain Authority”, or DA for the brief. in which did you learn about DA? What’s your favorite web page to learn extra approximately it?

Leveraging Live Streaming: How to Make Live Streaming Work for You

Nowadays, it is extremely easy to host a live flow to your website online. There are websites that make it easy to embed a live circulation being hosted on any other site, and there are some of the programs in an effort to allow you to circulate your own occasion.

In case you’re going to be web hosting a live circulate in your very own website online, you may want to ensure you’re taking complete gain of it. In any case, it’s possible that the movement will carry a super deal of traffic on your website. You want to make certain that traffic come again for more.

One of the first things you should do is make sure that you have other interesting, applicable content material it is sincerely available for your website. For instance, you would possibly need to make certain that a number of your most popular posts may be visible in the sidebar.

make sure that site visitors can see more than simply the identity of other posts. You need them to see an enticing picture as nicely. Studies have shown that human beings are some distance more likely to click over to a submit in the event that they see a picture above the link.

It is also a clever concept to make certain that people can smooth find your site again.

Make certain you have huge buttons that allow human beings to like your web page on social media. You need to also try to inspire humans to sign up for your electronic mail mailing list. You may get loads of subscribers this manner!

There are a number of humans accessible who are not nicely leveraging the stay streams that they host. ensure which you’re not one of these humans. Get the maximum from your streams, and make certain that those visitors have a terrific motive to come back.

make certain that interesting and attractive content material is conveniently viewable to your website. You can need to place it in your sidebar. make sure humans take a look at extra than simply the stream.

Ultimately

You must make certain that it will likely be clean for people to discover your website at a later date in the event that they see something they like. Encompass large social media buttons in order that humans can observe your site and notice new content material that you percentage.

You may be doing a lot greater with live streaming than you currently are. make sure which you take full benefit of this generation. quite a few internet site proprietors are reaping benefits extremely from streams, and You may be considered one of them. have a look at what a stay move ought to do for you.

Why I Love Blogging

Human beings blog for lots motives. Firstly, I began my weblog the end of 2013 as a writer platform.

But as time passed, I found out my weblog supplied a lot greater than an author platform and it wasn’t all about the numbers. Blogging served an exclusive and extra profound motive. I might even say that it is modified the way I take a look at and live my existence.

This is why in case you’re considering starting a blog, I would quite recommend it. This is if you’re Running a blog for the right reasons.

If you’re starting a blog to get wealthy or even to eke out a residing

Nicely, don’t anticipate it. Monetizing a blog is brilliant tough in recent times. In fact, after 3 years, I am nevertheless not getting cash from my blog. By the manner, don’t believe all of the hype from People promoting online publications that try to persuade you Running a blog is a splendid manner to make passive income. Make no mistake, writing and selling a blog is a ton of work. There may be not anything passive approximately it.

In truth, it’s so clean to get pissed off while you first start a blog. As a technically-challenged individual, I needed to analyze WordPress. Then, I spent numerous time selling my blog and trying to find a target audience. Something else I knew little approximately. As with maximum bloggers, I quick became obsessed – and depressed – with the numbers and how many site visitors, subscribers, and Fb fans I had on any given day. Seems constructing up readership for a blog takes loads of time, attempt, and patience.

So Why weblog

A few Human beings can also disagree with me, But I assume Blogging should not simply be approximately creating wealth, drumming up the commercial enterprise, gathering a huge following, chasing repute, or seeking to sell books.

Blogging can function an innovative channel to voice ideas, thoughts, opinions, ideas, and emotions. On top of that, writing a weblog affords a splendid opportunity to encourage and touch the lives of different Human beings in a positive way.

How Blogging changed My life

My weblog has certainly seen me thru many united states of American downs those past few years. I’ve written approximately pleased moments like an experience to Chicago with my husband to have a good time our anniversary, a day spent gambling within the snow with my grandchildren, watching Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones at Wasteland experience, and a short weekend ride with my kids to San Francisco.

I have also poured my coronary heart out whilst caregiving for my Mother

Who suffered from Lewy Frame dementia and wrote about her eventual dying. I shared my angst when my mother-in-law died from ovarian cancer and my son went via a painful divorce and custody struggle that equal yr. (Satirically, rapidly once I started writing a weblog about happiness, I had the worst year of my existence.)

Yes, I love reading, which affords a welcome respite from my issues, However writing is my real breakout, outlet, and ardor. Once I write, I become so targeted, my issues fade away for awhile, giving me a much wanted to destroy. In reality, if you’re certainly a creator, believe me, it’s far a lifestyles-lengthy addiction!

Significance of Fashion

It is a new month and final month’s cloth cabinet is becoming useless and old, no trouble, you could strive out new trends inside the marketplace, that is going well with your flavor. Aside from the typical stripes, we’re used to, you could try out something else, upload matching skinny scarfs, and your outfit will be terrific. With the cold weather, the dressmaker has developed collections of clothes that suits the character. Other than assisting you to express yourself and revealing your precise inner personalities, fashion also makes you secure, change your life, indicates kind of creativity.

Additionally, it is through fashion that we communicate to human beings, the mode of dressing we put on tells more approximately us, the reaction in fashion relies upon on the message related to your desire of dressing. The statistics ca both be perfect or an outcast to the outdoor global, in particular on people who has the private identity, the celebrities,

Politicians, preachers, and the younger generations.

The fashion also is an expression of social, cultural and nonsecular values. fashion is like artwork, just like an architecture that gives his development d the shape and the layout that he/ she goals, so does to the fashion. It means that garments are non-verbal kinds of communications. style additionally do have an impact on our notion of a character, for instance, whilst someone places on an in shape, It’s miles greater prepared and comfy, and in flip, the healthy adjustments the gestures of that individual and the manner he speaks. Or when someone places on denim and T-shirts the notion is that such man or woman is feeble and liberal.

The style is a display of creativity; we choose someone’s

Creativity depending on the sort of desire of garments he/she puts on extra frequently. However you need to be wondering how fashion improves someone’s creativity, However, for example, while we are setting on the clothes, we remember several factors, considered one of them is that

[blogwritetheworld]

The Write Place: Observing Like a Writer

Looking for the right advice on pursuing the writer’s life? You’ve come to the write place!

by Lisa Hiton

Whether you’re deep into your amateur sleuthing as a mystery writer, or tapping out your town’s top stories as a fledgling journalist, asking good questions and making keen observations are key skills for any writer. For me, amateur sleuthing is where I first began observing the world around me like a writer.

By sixth grade, after our first encounter with Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo and North by Northwest to be precise), my best friend and I became consumed by the elements of mystery. I remember us taking the train into the city of Chicago, armed with hand-sized steno pads. As we sat in the quiet of the train, we began taking notes. The man across from us wore red sneakers. He kept looking sideways from his newspaper. He flipped the pages of the paper faster than it seemed someone could be reading. These notes were the beginning of a mystery for us.

While in the end, no great narrative came from observing this gentleman ride the train, the exercise was the beginning of a life’s commitment to observation and asking questions. To that end, I became a writer, while my friend became an analyst for the intelligence community. She may have more of a foray into the real mysteries than I do, but I’m happy to use these skills in other pastures.

Alfred Hitchcock was a master observer of the human condition, allowing him to make films that get to the core of our biggest fears.

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR

Observation and questions are important in all fields of study and all genres of writing. A food writer may observe how a chef cooks, what different dough rolling techniques are like in different cultures, how different spices smell. They might also take those observations to generate questions for their larger story: Why do different cultures roll out dough using different techniques? How do these ingredients tell a story? Is it a family story? Or the story of a larger culture? The relationship between observations and the questions they lead to allows writers, journalists, and storytellers to keep with a subject deeply, and sometimes, for years.

And so, dear writers, as we go ahead into our life’s work, we must practice these observation skills. We must dedicate our time and power to giving readers the details—of characters, real people, landscapes, sporting events, far away places, the world. It is only through taking these notes down and braiding them together that we can share parts of the world and our imaginations with others.

I SPY, WITH MY EYE...

Many of us have memories of riding in the car or taking public transport with our family. While on a given drive to grandma’s house or  on a train ride to a different state, to occupy the time, we often play games. The simple act of playing “I Spy” while on a road trip is a great way to understand the role of observation for writers.

In a car, on a train, or even on foot, a journey presents us with an evolving landscape. The “I Spy” game is a way to mark how a landscape changes. You can go from an urban area full of buildings, pedestrians, trucks, and noises, to a pastoral full of cows, horses, sky, cornfields, and intermittent barns. On foot, you may go from the cut-grass of a lawn, to a sidewalk, to a park, to the woods. Noting these changes—whether it’s as small as noticing the sound of a cricket or as large as suddenly seeing a city’s skyline in the distance—fuels our understanding of the world in and out of books.

To take this childhood game into the realm of a writer’s practice begins by grabbing a notebook and a pen. Then seeing where the world of observation takes you—what questions do your observations raise, and how can you convey these answers and mysteries to readers in every genre?

THE TRAIN GAME

You might make your first assignment as an observer the same as mine: riding a train. This prompt could also be done out of any window—a house window, car window, window at the back of your math class (I’m a big believer in daydreaming during math class…).

The first part of the prompting is about strict observation out the window:

Look out the window. What do you see? Make a list. List everything. List what you find beautiful and interesting. List what is mysterious. List what is boring.

Annotate your observations. How might you rank your observations? How might you categorize them?

A window is a good place to begin because it keeps things simple. Only what enters the frame is allowed into your observations. As you annotate, note when your mind leaps elsewhere, and where it leaps to. Do you imagine where a bird went? Did you keep thinking about that orange house you passed at the beginning of your observation journey? Why? What else might you want to write about those things?

COVERTLY OBSERVING CONVERSATIONS

Once you’ve begun honing in your observation skills, you’ll be observing the world around you everywhere you go. A trip to the grocery store could turn into an entire character study of your local cheesemonger. The next phase of observation is working with people.

We all love people watching. It’s human nature. While it’s not good to gawk or stalk, the casual observations of others, connecting to people we encounter in everyday places, can be fodder for practicing your observing and listening skills, which in turn, will strengthen your writing. So grab your notebook and pencil and head to your local grocery store, library, or coffee shop and be ready to add character study, dialogue, and place description into your observing practice.

First, observe people conversing from a distance where you cannot hear the conversation. What do you notice? What gestures do they make? What is each person’s posture? What clues do these give you about what they may be talking about? Are they arguing? Gossiping? How would you describe their connection? Why?

Next, find a place where you can listen in on a public conversation/dialogue.. For example, get in line at your coffee shop and listen to how the hostess taking orders may respond to different people in line. Make notes about dialogue. But focus more of your attention on the details. The tone, the postures, the gestures.

Annotate your observations. What encounters are you most drawn to? Why? What themes can be made of your details? What follow-up questions would you want to ask if you had the opportunity to do so?

Sometimes, these observations can lead directly to a story by following the questions that are raised. Maybe you noticed a little girl by herself stealing an olive from the olive bar at your grocery store. How did she get there? Why is she alone? Do her parents know she’s tasting an olive? Is this her first olive? Does she love olives? Or did she grab the wrong thing? Inventing these answers can lead to a great character study, and possibly even a scene from a short story or even a novel.

In other cases, the observations and the questions they raise may lead to something else altogether. Let’s say you’re observing a librarian and her interactions with readers like yourself. Maybe you overhear her recommend your favorite book to someone. That connection might lead you to go talk to her. Perhaps, eventually, you ask if she’d be willing to do an interview so you can write a portrait piece on her and her work or a feature on the library as a whole. By simply seeing the world around you, you’ll become more connected to it—in a literal sense as well as an imaginative one.

About Lisa

Lisa Hiton is an editorial associate at Write the World. She writes two series on our blog: The Write Place where she comments on life as a writer, and Reading like a Writer where she recommends books about writing in different genres. She’s also the interviews editor of Cosmonauts Avenue and the poetry editor of the Adroit Journal.

[webpostingpro-blog]

New Post has been published on Webpostingpro

New Post has been published on https://webpostingpro.com/can-livestreaming-replace-blogging-one-fashion-influencer-says-no/

Can Livestreaming Replace Blogging? One Fashion Influencer Says No

If you regard live streaming because the undisputed “quality” advertising tactic, you haven’t been in advertising and marketing long, specifically If you think it’s a standalone approach. Installed manufacturers recognize getting traction for a full blog requires correct, regular writing combined with staying power and size, in particular, if tying in video — edited or stay.

Can Live streaming Update Run a blog

One live streamer and the public speaker say Blogging is profitable for several reasons. In case you’re unsure approximately the cost of great Blogging on the net, Rebecca Casserly’s method will set you directly. Small Commercial enterprise Tendencies first met Casserly at a live streamer’ meetup in New york City in June of 2016. Her expertise of where Blogging overlaps with brands, live streaming, boom, metrics, events and exposure became why we reconnected for this interview.

Rebecca Casserly, known on-line as “BecBoop is a London-based totally live streamer and blogger. She is a finalist in the 2017 Shorty Awards for Periscope of the Year and was a finalist in the United kingdom blog Awards 2016 for best use of social media. Casserly blogs approximately fashion, splendor, travel, and way of life at BecBoop.Com even as attractive together with her community of over 135,000 followers across her social media structures. In 2016, Onalytica.Com ranked her the number 4 global beauty influencer primarily based on Twitter have an impact on, and top 50 fashion influencer in 2017. Casserly has labored with many global manufacturers on her weblog and turned into also the first life streamed to cowl London fashion Week on her Periscope channel. She has supplied as an enterprise professional about her live streaming revel in at Twitter United kingdom’s 10th birthday event and additionally at MojoCon, the arena’s largest mobile journalism conference.

Small Enterprise Developments: I was glad to analyze which you’re aware of the Moz metric named “Domain Authority”, or DA for the brief. in which did you learn about DA? What’s your favorite web page to learn extra approximately it?

Leveraging Live Streaming: How to Make Live Streaming Work for You

Nowadays, it is extremely easy to host a live flow to your website online. There are websites that make it easy to embed a live circulation being hosted on any other site, and there are some of the programs in an effort to allow you to circulate your own occasion.

In case you’re going to be web hosting a live circulate in your very own website online, you may want to ensure you’re taking complete gain of it. In any case, it’s possible that the movement will carry a super deal of traffic on your website. You want to make certain that traffic come again for more.

One of the first things you should do is make sure that you have other interesting, applicable content material it is sincerely available for your website. For instance, you would possibly need to make certain that a number of your most popular posts may be visible in the sidebar.

make sure that site visitors can see more than simply the identity of other posts. You need them to see an enticing picture as nicely. Studies have shown that human beings are some distance more likely to click over to a submit in the event that they see a picture above the link.

It is also a clever concept to make certain that people can smooth find your site again.

Make certain you have huge buttons that allow human beings to like your web page on social media. You need to also try to inspire humans to sign up for your electronic mail mailing list. You may get loads of subscribers this manner!

There are a number of humans accessible who are not nicely leveraging the stay streams that they host. ensure which you’re not one of these humans. Get the maximum from your streams, and make certain that those visitors have a terrific motive to come back.

make certain that interesting and attractive content material is conveniently viewable to your website. You can need to place it in your sidebar. make sure humans take a look at extra than simply the stream.

Ultimately

You must make certain that it will likely be clean for people to discover your website at a later date in the event that they see something they like. Encompass large social media buttons in order that humans can observe your site and notice new content material that you percentage.

You may be doing a lot greater with live streaming than you currently are. make sure which you take full benefit of this generation. quite a few internet site proprietors are reaping benefits extremely from streams, and You may be considered one of them. have a look at what a stay move ought to do for you.

Why I Love Blogging

Human beings blog for lots motives. Firstly, I began my weblog the end of 2013 as a writer platform.

But as time passed, I found out my weblog supplied a lot greater than an author platform and it wasn’t all about the numbers. Blogging served an exclusive and extra profound motive. I might even say that it is modified the way I take a look at and live my existence.

This is why in case you’re considering starting a blog, I would quite recommend it. This is if you’re Running a blog for the right reasons.

If you’re starting a blog to get wealthy or even to eke out a residing

Nicely, don’t anticipate it. Monetizing a blog is brilliant tough in recent times. In fact, after 3 years, I am nevertheless not getting cash from my blog. By the manner, don’t believe all of the hype from People promoting online publications that try to persuade you Running a blog is a splendid manner to make passive income. Make no mistake, writing and selling a blog is a ton of work. There may be not anything passive approximately it.

In truth, it’s so clean to get pissed off while you first start a blog. As a technically-challenged individual, I needed to analyze WordPress. Then, I spent numerous time selling my blog and trying to find a target audience. Something else I knew little approximately. As with maximum bloggers, I quick became obsessed – and depressed – with the numbers and how many site visitors, subscribers, and Fb fans I had on any given day. Seems constructing up readership for a blog takes loads of time, attempt, and patience.

So Why weblog

A few Human beings can also disagree with me, But I assume Blogging should not simply be approximately creating wealth, drumming up the commercial enterprise, gathering a huge following, chasing repute, or seeking to sell books.

Blogging can function an innovative channel to voice ideas, thoughts, opinions, ideas, and emotions. On top of that, writing a weblog affords a splendid opportunity to encourage and touch the lives of different Human beings in a positive way.

How Blogging changed My life

My weblog has certainly seen me thru many united states of American downs those past few years. I’ve written approximately pleased moments like an experience to Chicago with my husband to have a good time our anniversary, a day spent gambling within the snow with my grandchildren, watching Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones at Wasteland experience, and a short weekend ride with my kids to San Francisco.

I have also poured my coronary heart out whilst caregiving for my Mother

Who suffered from Lewy Frame dementia and wrote about her eventual dying. I shared my angst when my mother-in-law died from ovarian cancer and my son went via a painful divorce and custody struggle that equal yr. (Satirically, rapidly once I started writing a weblog about happiness, I had the worst year of my existence.)

Yes, I love reading, which affords a welcome respite from my issues, However writing is my real breakout, outlet, and ardor. Once I write, I become so targeted, my issues fade away for awhile, giving me a much wanted to destroy. In reality, if you’re certainly a creator, believe me, it’s far a lifestyles-lengthy addiction!

Significance of Fashion

It is a new month and final month’s cloth cabinet is becoming useless and old, no trouble, you could strive out new trends inside the marketplace, that is going well with your flavor. Aside from the typical stripes, we’re used to, you could try out something else, upload matching skinny scarfs, and your outfit will be terrific. With the cold weather, the dressmaker has developed collections of clothes that suits the character. Other than assisting you to express yourself and revealing your precise inner personalities, fashion also makes you secure, change your life, indicates kind of creativity.

Additionally, it is through fashion that we communicate to human beings, the mode of dressing we put on tells more approximately us, the reaction in fashion relies upon on the message related to your desire of dressing. The statistics ca both be perfect or an outcast to the outdoor global, in particular on people who has the private identity, the celebrities,

Politicians, preachers, and the younger generations.

The fashion also is an expression of social, cultural and nonsecular values. fashion is like artwork, just like an architecture that gives his development d the shape and the layout that he/ she goals, so does to the fashion. It means that garments are non-verbal kinds of communications. style additionally do have an impact on our notion of a character, for instance, whilst someone places on an in shape, It’s miles greater prepared and comfy, and in flip, the healthy adjustments the gestures of that individual and the manner he speaks. Or when someone places on denim and T-shirts the notion is that such man or woman is feeble and liberal.

The style is a display of creativity; we choose someone’s

Creativity depending on the sort of desire of garments he/she puts on extra frequently. However you need to be wondering how fashion improves someone’s creativity, However, for example, while we are setting on the clothes, we remember several factors, considered one of them is that