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obscuremarvelmuses · 3 years ago

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At one of the boards I play Shaw at, I’m going to be running a “kidnapping the X-Men as experimental guinea pigs” plot with Shaw at the helm (based on THIS DROPPED PLOT POINT from canon) in October. I plan to use several canons as NPCs in the plot so that the X-Men have more than just Shaw and Emma (who is played by someone else) to face, and as October approaches, I’m writing a series of small fics for the board that introduces each NPC so they’re more than just names. This is the one I did for Monica Rappaccini and June Covington, the lead scientists in this RPG. No, they never worked for the Hellfire Club in canon, but given that June is an amoral monster whose genetic plug-in technology would work PERFECT for this, she was a shoe-in. But what about Monica? Her ideals are far from those of the Hellfire Club, and she doesn’t care about money. So, what’s she doing there? This fic explains that, sets up her dynamic with June, and lays the groundwork for how I plan to have her turn on the Hellfire Club and help the X-Men. Because that would make sense for her in this scenario and I think having an NPC on the inside is going to help the plot along. Again, this is not based on anything in canon, nor it is it canon to this blog, it’s for a plot at an RP board. But since it features two ladies from my multi, I thought it would be worth posting here. Warning for mentions of eugenics, ableism, etc.

Dr. Theresa June Covington was the typical blonde blue-eyed beauty, with an unnatural “natural” perfection thanks to her own work on herself. Shaw often wondered if she’d done the same for Emma. Dr. Monica Rappaccini, on the other hand, was a more unusual but no less lovely blend of Italian and Southeast Asian heritage. But, contrary to popular belief, he hadn’t hired these ladies for their looks. No, far from it. Both were brilliant in exactly the way Shaw needed for this project. . .and both were disgraced, unable to find work from any reputable company or university lab. Monica was a radical, a proponent of various anti-establishment beliefs that had led her down the wrong side of the law. Shaw didn’t agree with her politics, but her work in the fields of chemistry and biology more than made up for it. And it seemed that, like everyone in Shaw’s opinion, she could sacrifice her principles for the proper funding. But as much as Monica was worth, far more essential was June. It was her work on “genetic plug-in technology” that was the entire backbone of this project. It was a remarkable development, allowing her to take genetic material and essentially implant it into others, where it would then activate and express itself as naturally as if the person have been born with this gene or genes. She had based her work on knockout mice, a genetically modified lab mouse in which researchers have inactivated, or "knocked out", an existing gene by replacing it or disrupting it with an artificial piece of DNA when the mouse is still a mere embryo. But Theresa had taken it far beyond that, to humans who were already adults. Including herself; that work she’d had done hadn’t been with a scalpel to her beautiful face, but plug-in technologies to edit out all her perceived little physical imperfections. And once she’d done that, she started designing a few internal changes. had altered her bones so they soften to diffuse impacts, she could dislocate her joints with ease thanks to new glands that distributed relaxins, her saliva was antiseptic, and, just in case anyone was ever fool enough to cut her, her blood was seething with neurotoxins. She, of course, was immune to it---who’s the REAL Rappaccini here, Monica?-- but if someone else touched it, well. . .they might as well have downed a pint of hemlock. So why wasn’t she raking in the millions? Why weren’t people lining up for plug-ins for everything from blue eyes to building muscle rapidly to electric eel organs? Well, in order to get such a work accomplished, there’d had to be. . .sacrifices. Mostly homeless people, but when she’d sought out a healthier stock of guinea pig, she’d started taking out people that she just felt didn’t have a right to live. There were haves and have-nots, you see, and the latter, well, they just didn’t have the same entitlement to life as the former. Like, say, people who watched Jersey Shore; could that really be called a life? And therefore, was it really murder? While Monica shared her opinions about reality TV, the rest of June’s beliefs enraged her to her core. And June, in turn, didn’t think much of Monica and her silly ideas about. . . .what was it, starving children in Africa and Asia and shit? June thought about what Shaw did of that. But unlike Shaw, she wasn’t employing Monica, and Monica didn’t have to put up with hearing her repulsive eugenicist tripe all day! Which was exactly what she’d just told her. Screamed at her, really. “Eugenics? Really?” June replied, and she didn’t sound upset at all, “My work is based on encouraging diversity, Monica, not culling it. Taking all the best traits. . . and putting them in the best people.” “That’s exactly what I mean!” Monica jabbed a finger at June, though not quite in her face---she doubted that blonde viper was above biting it. “Your idea that there *is* a “best” people---and who those are!” “Don’t try to make me out as some racist, Monica,” June placed her eerily sharp-nailed hands on her model-slim hips, “Just because I may look like the poster child for the Aryan nation, doesn’t mean I subscribe to such silly skin-deep notions about what makes perfection. My definition of elite is intellectual. A matter of character, not color. Physical flaws, though? Those can be fixed. That’s the point. Or do YOU think that a mind as phenomenal as Stephen Hawking’s should have been confined in that poor twisted prison of a body?” “That’s MY point!” Monica bellowed back, “It shouldn’t MATTER whether he has a mind you deem “worthy” of a better body, he deserves a cure either way! Everyone ill does!” “Some people don’t have an illness, Monica,” June purred. They were on a first-name basis at this point, but it wasn’t out of friendliness, “Some people are an illness.” “You know,” Monica seethed, her voice at normal volume and yet now even more angry, a deep and brewing rage like a volcano prior to eruption, “I think you’re right.” *** Monica worked late that night, blowing off steam. While the work itself was distasteful, and done for people she found disgusting---the Hellfire Club and its “everything for profit” mindset was everything she DESPISED about Western society---she poured herself passionately into it, knowing that, when this was all over, she could use it for good. Not only would she be rolling in millions that she could use to fund further work, but the knowledge gained here. . . as vile June was, the genetic plug-in tech was a miracle. Monica’s mind had raced when she heard about it, imagining all the ways that mutant powers could HELP the world---not just humans, but nature too. But, June was right about one thing---it had to go to the right people. Not the wealthy who would use it as toys or weapons, the grotesque commercial and military uses that the Hellfire Club had in mind. She kept her dominant thoughts occupied with work. She didn’t dare think too much too often about this. Not within the walls of these labs, where the likes of, say, Emma Frost could walk in any moment. Hell, would Frost even need to be here to read her mind? She shuddered at the notion of someone remote-viewing her mental processes like lab microfilm from miles away. Still . . . Monica was starting to think some very dangerous things. Dangerous for her, that is. And for the Hellfire Club’s entire operation.

#my fic #june fic #monica fic

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qarea · 4 years ago

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Roles and Responsibilities on a Software Development Project

When starting a software development project, we want our team to consist of experienced and skilled individuals, professionals who know all the ins and outs of their craft. But hiring good specialists doesn’t necessarily mean they will form a good team or establish a truly effective software development process.

Pre-development

Before your developers write the first line of code for your future product or service, there is still a fair amount of work and thought to be put into your project. From initial meetings with your vendor to planning and understanding what it is that you’re all trying to produce here, this section will introduce you to the key people you meet during the discovery phase of your software development project, before the contracts get signed and the development truly takes off.

Account Manager

Account managers play a crucial role in any B2B relationship. And software development outsourcing is no exception. The account manager is the first person you meet when you approach a software development company with a project you need help implementing. Account manager responsibilities include building and maintaining a healthy, long-term relationship between the client and the outsourcing vendor they represent. They will also serve as your client success manager after the vendor’s part in your project is over: check in on the health of your business, the software product or service their company helped you build, and handle all of your further requests.

The account manager is your main point of contact with the vendor. They are there to understand what it is that you’re looking for and where you’re trying to go with your business needs. They will analyze your request and guide you through the presale process, making sure you get all the information and resources your project requires.

As an output from this initial phase, the account manager will provide you with two key documents:

An estimation document that is broken down into approximate costs, timelines for the project, and terms and conditions, clarifying details such as payment options and collaboration models.

A proposal document that walks you through the tech and business approach your vendor has chosen for the implementation of your project, including the outline of inputs and outputs expected from both the client and the vendor.

These documents will help you get a rough idea of the processes your vendor is trying to organize for your project, the team they’re putting together, the potential risks and assumptions involved, and finally where exactly all those costs are coming from. Soon after you’ve received the aforementioned documents, your account manager might follow up with a call to talk you through them with answers to all of the questions on the estimates and why some of the rationales were made.

Business Analyst

When you’re happy with the estimation phase, you might want to move straight to development. But such transition would require you to be certain that you can successfully achieve your business goals with what you have on your mind. And this would be the case if you had all of your business analysis, technical requirements, and other documented project data ready from the start. In our experience, however, most of the clients don’t really know what exactly they want to build straight away. So we move into the discovery phase instead, to help them figure it all out before the full development team is assembled.

A good discovery phase is a critical part of your software development process. Here, you’re laying the groundwork for the success of your software solution. This may take anywhere between a few hours or a few weeks, depending on whether it’s a big, complex solution or a small project.

One of the first people you meet in the process is a business analyst. Quite often overlooked, unfortunately, this is one of the most valuable roles in your development environment. But what does a business analyst do?

Their main job is to polish and verify your business idea so that you can be sure you’re not wasting your time and money building something your stakeholders neither need, nor want. A business analyst takes you through the outsourcing vendor’s understanding of your business needs and highlights where those could be refined or even expanded. With a data-oriented mindset, business analyst’s assumptions and suggestions are always supported with comprehensive data.

In the course of the discovery phase, together with a software architect, delivery manager, and possibly even a UX/UI designer (roles we will get to shortly), a business analyst defines and further refines the features your software solution should have from a business perspective. They translate your business needs to requirements, help you craft a product vision, and make sure the technical side of things is going in the right business direction—towards achieving the project’s product/market fit.

The key deliverables a business analyst provides are:

Business Requirements Specification which includes data such as a problem statement, business drivers, business model, business use cases, and other business requirements.

Functional Specification that is the collection of all the functional requirements and features for the product such as system use cases and user needs.

Non-Functional Specification that provides requirements for the future product’s performance, security, maintainability, compliance, and other non-functional requirements.

The key responsibilities of a business analyst include:

collaborating and leading effective communication with all stakeholders to identify opportunities and potential benefits for the project and meet the user needs

creating documentation, formulating goals, and building business architecture to meet quality requirements

making sure project outcomes are aligned with the product vision, business model, and strategy.

Software Architect

Some clients come to us when they have absolutely no idea of the technology they want to use in their software development project. And that’s okay!

So, we need to put someone in front of them who knows what tech would complement their business requirements best. This person is called a software architect—the technical brains of the operation.

Proper software architecture is crucial when it comes to high-quality projects. The key responsibility of a software architect is to define the best architectural structure, the software’s model and function for your project. They will reduce technical complexity and provide technical leadership for your project, focusing on clarity. They are in charge of all the high-level design choices on the project, including the coding standards, environments, tools, platforms, etc.

Where a Senior developer would be enough to handle the tech matters on a small project, you definitely need to involve an experienced software architect on a big project with complex non-functional requirements to solve. Even when you already have a tech stack on your mind, they may still suggest different, better-suited technologies and solutions based on non-functional requirements to potentially save you money and time.

Last but not least, a software architect will provide you with a comprehensive system design document as part of the discovery phase. An architectural document that shows you exactly how the vendor plans to put together your solution—design and programming guidelines, iteration contents, and a collective understanding of what the client needs from the tech solution and environment as a whole.

Delivery Manager

Shortly into the discovery phase, you will be introduced to another key figure called a delivery manager. This fundamental role in the Agile software development environment is accountable for the management of your expectations, overseeing the delivery process from discovery to deployment, and ensuring that your needs are met in a timely fashion. This is the person in charge of coordinating the presale and discovery phases and serves as your main point of support and escalation throughout your software development project.

A delivery manager effectively understands what the client needs not just from a technical perspective but based on how the client is going to drive their business with it as well. They are there to help you understand exactly what it is that you’re after.

For example, a client might want to implement a transformation project to reorganize their business in order to either save money or effectively grow in a particular direction. A delivery manager can add value because they understand both the business and the technical element of the problem the client is trying to solve. They will identify the best processes or delivery methods to use, provide the client with the data they need to make informed decisions, and help them measure and evaluate outcomes. In case the project faces a challenging obstacle, the delivery manager will integrate various team efforts to remove the blocker, maintain delivery momentum, and get the best value within these constraints.

Among the aforementioned duties a delivery manager performs, the broad range of their responsibilities includes:

maintaining proactive and reactive communication with the business owner and stakeholders to interpret their technical and business needs, facilitate difficult discussions, and provide delivery confidence

setting up the environment your development team needs to ensure efficient collaboration, communication, and focus on achieving project goals

bringing people together to form a motivated team, protecting team members, and facilitating the delivery flow with an iterative plan to work towards

coaching the team to help them become more autonomous, better at organising their own work

proactively addressing all the internal and external risks, issues and dependencies with budgets and people

driving experimentation and continuous improvement with the most suitable agile practices and tools for the project

Domain Expert

During the discovery phase, your business analyst may suggest involving a domain expert or, as they are sometimes called, a subject-matter expert. These people are true professionals with deep knowledge, broad skills, and extensive experience in a particular industry or business area. Like, for example, an accountant is an expert in the domain of accountancy. The input from such experts can save you a lot of back and forth on refining requirements.

Domain experts serve as consultants to your software development project. Their superior knowledge of the domain helps your software development team create a higher-quality software product vision statement during discovery and verify if the business and technical requirements were met in full during user acceptance testing.

Although domain experts usually lack any kind of technical expertise, this should be considered a strong point. The lack of technical knowledge helps them focus purely on business outcomes, which provides your team with deeper insight into the problem you’re trying to solve. They can also prove a great contribution to the creation of your early-stage wireframes and prototypes.

Development

A lengthy but less complicated process than discovery and planning, the development phase is where the actual coding starts and you get tangible results of what you’re actually paying your vendor for. The process is pretty straightforward: from iteration to iteration, the coding and related tasks are divided between software development team members according to their area and level of expertise.

Project Manager

Moving from the discovery to delivery phase, your software development company sources, interviews, and onboards the required talent to your project. The hiring process is usually coordinated by a dedicated software project manager who makes sure all the candidates are handpicked to best suit your project goals.

But before we dig into the role of a PM and their responsibilities on the project, you should learn about the two important documents a project manager provides you with prior to the development stage:

A project initiation document a.k.a. a project management plan is a document that defines how the client and the vendor will manage communication, the roles and responsibilities on the project, as well as the risks, issues, quality control, change control, etc. The document acts as an engagement between the two companies and provides insight into the escalation process between the two.

A work breakdown structure organizes and defines the total scope of the project. It tells the client what needs to be built, why, and gives them full transparency into the development processes. The document includes information about work on each of the features, associated technology stacks, and costs broken down by each and different elements.

Back to responsibilities now. Simply put, a project manager is a person responsible for keeping your product delivery on track and within budget. In comparison to the role of a delivery manager, your PM is more focused on micromanaging the team. They manage every development process directly, coordinating the team in accordance with the agreed software development practices and approaches. They continuously assess the performance of the project and each individual team member to introduce process improvements that would enable faster and higher-quality iterations. The goal is to keep the team members high-performing and provide everything they need to get the work done.

Among the key duties the project manager performs are also maintaining frequent and consistent communication with the client and ensuring a good working relationship. The PM manages meetings and documentation, identifies and monitors risks. When something unexpected happens in the course of development, their job is to solve the problem and ensure it doesn’t reappear in the future. Having an experienced project manager to rely on, you no longer need to keep track of every little activity on the project and can focus entirely on your business instead.

UX/UI Designer

Although we’re introducing you to the role of a UX/UI designer here in the development section of the article, it is quite likely you have already met this person during the presale and discovery phases. The UX/UI designer is responsible for turning your product vision into a compelling, friendly, and intuitive user interface that provides great user experience and brings high conversion rates. Their focus is set on product usability, functionality, and visual design.

More often that not, the UX/UI designer joins the project prior to the delivery phase, providing you with the following:

A general design approach, a design philosophy that serves as a kind of a guide that explains the goals and the overall design direction for your product in line with the work of your business analyst. This also usually means well-defined screens and user stories ready for the first sprint.

A flowchart, a diagram or visualization of user steps and screens that make it easier for the client to understand the future structure of the product.

Wireframes, the basic structure of your future product with more detailed depiction of user journeys and layout of content and functionality. They help provide better estimates for the project and define the main tasks.

A clickable prototype that serves as a full visual representation of the user interface of the future product. And unlike static wireframes, a clickable prototype may include all the animations, transitions, sliders, as well as other effects and functionality. A good prototype can sometimes even be visually indistinguishable from a finished product.

When it comes to product development, designers play a very important role in the process. Especially in the early stages, helping the client better understand how exactly their product will be working and making it easier for them to convey ideas to their stakeholders and raise money.

Even though this means less profit for the vendor in the short term, this provides significantly more value to the client and serves as a great foundation for a long-term, trustful relationship. When the client does secure that investment, they are more likely to bring further product development to the company that has already shown their reliability with deep expertise and budget-friendly solutions.

The key duties of a UX/UI designer include:

working closely with the business analyst and software architect to transform business ideas into mockups and prototypes

establishing design patterns and iterating them using a variety of design approaches and prototyping methods

designing intuitive end-to-end journeys and interactions that help users complete their goals with ease and enjoy the process

creating layouts and individual design elements that underpin interactions and ensure visual attractiveness of the product

communicating ideas to the development team and other team members throughout the build process to ensure everyone stays on the same page

Your UX/UI designer is one of the key players responsible for the success of your product. So never assume that they do all their work up front and then move onto another project. No matter how little design work your product or service requires, the UX/UI designer will be actively involved throughout the entire delivery process from translating your business goals and ideas into clickable prototypes to supervising feature implementation, assessing feature design performance, and introducing the necessary UI fixes over time.

Software Developer

Software developers, also referred to as coders, are your main and indispensable troops on a software development project of any complexity and scale. Their role on the project is pretty straightforward: writing and implementing clean, efficient code based on the provided technical requirements. It wouldn’t hurt to mention that the more effectively the management communicates the technical requirements to your dev team, the lower the risk of accumulating technical debt.

In the course of writing code and building your software product from the ground up, your software developers will also be required to:

provide estimates on the amount of time needed to deliver a given task

communicate the status of their work or when they reach a milestone to their team lead or project manager

support specific project management activities to improve the development processes

collaborate with other team members to design features, review specifications, test and document the written functionality when necessary

There are three primary types of software developers who are responsible for different layers of your software solution:

Front-end developers are responsible for creating the part of software your users can actually see and interact with. This part of your software product is called the presentation layer and includes everything from layouts, texts, and buttons to colors and animations. They work closely with the UX/UI designers to ensure the smoothest and most enjoyable experience for your users.

Back-end developers build and optimize the data access layer—server-side stuff, or, one could say, the guts of your software. This includes complex application logic, sophisticated algorithms, servers, databases, and powerful engines that make the magic happen from under the hood of your software product or service. They are in charge of the security and stability of your software and seamless integration of external modules.

Full-stack developers are experienced professionals, mostly Middle or Senior engineers, specializing in building and optimizing both the client and server side of your software solution. Full-stack developer skills include all layers of software—the full stack of technologies, languages, and frameworks that make up your software product or service. They also tend to be very well-versed in data structuring, business logic, and user experience.

#software development #itoutsourcingcompany

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the-coldest-goodbye · 5 years ago

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Sansa Stark - NSFW Alphabet Headcanons

Sansa Stark x fem!reader

Requested by Anonymous

A/N: I wanted to write something that acknowledged the trauma Sansa would have after her experiences. Because of that, this is less smutty than other NSFW alphabets I’ve written for other characters. It can be hard to figure out how to write trauma and recovery, so quite a bit of this is based on my own experiences with overcoming trauma. I hope I did an okay job.

TW: Mentions of abuse, rape, trauma, and Sansa’s struggles to overcome them.

Also, if you haven’t yet, make sure you check out my SFW alphabet headcanons for Sansa.

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

Sansa requires a lot of aftercare to feel safe and secure. Cuddle up with her, get extra snug with some furs, and stroke her hair. Check in with how she’s feeling. It’ll mean a lot to her knowing that you care for her wellbeing. Her sexual experiences with you are nothing less than beautiful and loving, but they can still elicit some bad feelings, thoughts, and memories stemming from her past trauma, especially near the start of your physical relationship. Hold her. Listen to her. Make sure she’s warm. Maybe take a bath with her and brush out her hair. Most importantly, stay with her. Don’t rush off. She needs the security of knowing that you care about her and that you won’t leave her when she’s vulnerable.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

She has a difficult relationship with her body. She’s covered in scars, very real reminders of the abuse she suffered at the hands of Ramsay. Sansa rebuilding her appreciation for her body is a long process, but it starts off with her coming to like her hands. She loves the way her fingers look entwined with yours, the way they gently explore your skin, the way they can make you moan in pleasure.

Her favorite part of you is your neck and shoulders region, especially loving to place kisses there and against your collarbones. When you hold her, she’ll bury her face into the curve of your neck or rest her head on your shoulder, feeling secure and at ease.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

Sansa finds nothing more beautiful or erotic than how you work so diligently to make her wet and how you then savor her juices. Her only physical experiences before you were with Ramsay, and he didn’t care whether or not it felt good to Sansa. In fact, he got more sick and twisted pleasure from having her suffer. Seeing the way you spend so long teasing her and stimulating her to make her wet and then seeing how you absolutely adore her juices, licking up every last drop, means the world to her. One of the most erotic moments she ever had was the very first time you brought your fingers up to her mouth after you gently dragged them through her folds, urging her to taste herself. Ramsay took pleasure in her pain. You took pleasure in her pleasure.

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

I’ll explore this a little more under “W = Wild card,” but Sansa’s dirty secret (that you obviously come to learn) is that she’s not straight. In a society like Westeros where strict gender roles reign, queerness is taboo, particularly for someone as high-profile as Sansa.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

Sansa’s not experienced when it comes to sex because her experiences with Ramsay weren’t sex; they were torture. She’s very slow to pursue a physical relationship with you, and it’s a learning experience for the both of you as you begin to open up to each other, explore your likes and dislikes at a mindful speed, and become more comfortable with each other. It’s a slow process, but it’s important not to push it too far or too fast.

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

Initially, Sansa would prefer being on top or having the two of you both laying on your sides because it helps her not feel completely powerless. As she becomes more comfortable with your physical relationship and works through some of her trauma, she sometimes allows you to be on top, but it would take a long time to build up that level of trust for her to feel fully comfortable in that kind of position.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

Sansa is quite serious, but she can become a bit more playful and giggly once she feels more secure and becomes more confident during sex. It takes a while to get to that point, though, and sex will never be something she takes lightly. She views it as a very real commitment to each other, and so there will always be a fairly serious undertone during intimate moments.

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Her hair down there is naturally pretty short and neat, and so it doesn’t require much upkeep to remain tidy, if any. It’s a similar shade to the color on her head, perhaps a little darker.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

Sansa is used to being used as someone’s plaything, being treated like a literal object. Therefore, it’s of utmost importance to her that you two have a strong connection during any sexual act. To keep the experience feeling very real and very human, Sansa likes to make eye contact or be face-to-face. She always tries to remain fully present when the two of you are together. It feels like you’re the only two people in the world when you’re together. It’s never spur of the moment, and the build-up of passion that leads up to the sex really emphasizes the undeniable connection between you two when you make love.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

Sansa rarely masturbates.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

Honestly, Sansa wants and needs things to be pretty vanilla between you two in bed. Most kinks would either make her feel uncomfortable or foolish.

This is not a kink per se, but Sansa does tend to be a bit more dominant in bed. She’s actually fairly vers, but she tends to take a slightly more dominant role in bed since she would want to be the one to set the pace and to take the lead to feel more empowered and confident in the experience. It’s a big deal when she is able to trust you enough and feel comfortable enough with you to just lay back and let you take the lead with pleasuring her.

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

Sex is something she would save for the bedroom. It’s the only place she’d find it appropriate.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

It takes a long time to get Sansa going. First and foremost, she needs to feel loved, secure, and empowered before anything goes down. You need to lay the groundwork much earlier and build up to it slowly over the course of the day with knowing glances, sly smiles, gentle touches, and loving words. There needs to be a development of tenderness and intimacy to make her want to bed you. She isn’t DTF at the drop of a hat.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Sansa would refuse to do anything that made either of you uncomfortable or that would hurt either of you. She is particularly turned off by bondage, gags, and pain. She isn’t into anything too rough or fast, and she also wouldn’t be into extreme dom/sub dynamics. Also, she wouldn’t feel comfortable with being penetrated, at least not for a long time.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

Sansa starts off preferring to give oral rather than receive because she’s not ready to have anything like that done to her; but as she grows more comfortable with physical intimacy with you, she comes to enjoy giving and receiving equally. She doesn’t quite know what she’s doing at first, but she’s a fast learner and eager to please you, wanting to hear you whimper and feel you writhe in pleasure because of her.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

Your earlier sexual experiences with Sansa are slow paced and shy because of her hesitance, but she becomes more sensual (but still fairly slow) as she grows in confidence. She would much rather take her time and savor the experience. Fast or rough sex would be avoided at all costs, and she would feel relieved that you understood and were fine with that.

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

Nope, no quickies here. She needs a slow build-up and lots of aftercare.

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

At the beginning of your relationship, her past trauma makes any and all sexual interactions feel like a risk. It takes Sansa quite a long time before she even considers physical intimacy with you beyond kissing and cuddling, and so she isn’t game to get experimental too quickly in your sexual relationship. As she gets more confident, though, she’ll get more willing to try out new positions and techniques, but she still wouldn’t be willing to try anything too kinky or risky.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

Usually one round is enough for Sansa to call it a night, but sometimes she might surprise you with a second round. Early on in your physical relationship, it takes her a fairly long time to reach orgasm, though, because she’s get stuck in her head and wouldn’t stay present in the moment. When she’d manage to shift her focus to being more in the moment with you, she’d cum quite a bit faster.

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

She doesn’t own any toys. If you wanted her to use any on you, she’d be willing to give it a go. She likely wouldn’t want you to use them on her, though.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

As Sansa becomes more confident in her abilities to pleasure you, she sometimes can be a bit of a tease, liking to vary speed and pressure to keep you on your toes.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

Sansa is pretty quiet in terms of volume. At first, she would be so quiet that she was very clearly lost in her own head instead of enjoying the moment. You wanted to make sure she was having a nice time, so you encouraged her to speak up and to tell you whether or not she liked what you were doing. She would be shy about it at first, but she would come to communicate quite a bit during sex, telling you what felt good, what didn’t feel good, what she wanted you to do, etc. It meant a lot to her that you always listened to her and empowered her to call the shots while physically intimate. When in pleasure, she moans and gasps lightly and whispers out, “Oh yes, Y/N! Right there. Right there.”

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

Sansa Stark ain’t straight!! (My *personal* headcanon is that she’s a lesbian; but for general audience purposes, I’ll just say here that she’s some flavor of Not Straight.) As a child, her fixation on finding her Prince Charming and her idealization of knights in shining armor was a result of their society teaching her that her only goal was to become the perfect wife to the perfect man and to give him the perfect babies to carry on his family name. It’s compulsory heterosexuality, baby!!

Her sapphic awakening came when she developed a crush on Margaery. Their interactions were particularly impactful on Sansa, especially when Margaery would imply that she was attracted to women. Sansa spent a long time repressing her feelings because it doesn’t follow the strict gender roles in Westeros, and so having Margaery imply this really put the idea on the table for Sansa to explore.

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

Her body is fairly slender with light curves. However, she’s covered in scars and markings from Ramsay. She’d keep them covered up as much as possible because she didn’t want to see them.

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

Sansa’s sex drive is not very high. Sexual intimacy would happen only if/when she felt ready. She would never want to be used like a sex toy again. She hopes that she’ll have a partner who respects her enough to understand that she needs time instead of pressuring her into anything.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

Sansa requires quite a bit of aftercare, so she doesn’t fall asleep quickly.

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freyaevephotography · 5 years ago

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FINDING FASHION

Starting university was probably one of the most daunting decisions I have pursued so far; moving 400 miles away from home and moving into shared accommodation with a bunch of strangers … I don’t think I could have taken a bigger jump if I tried! On starting my course, I always felt as if I didn’t have as much photographic knowledge as everyone else, despite studying the subject at A-level. I spent a lot of my first semester doubting my skill and sitting shyly at the back pretending I had the same expertise in the subject as everyone else. However, I soon realised I didn’t need to doubt myself or pretend! My first semester will forever be the foundation to my creative career due to the invaluable lessons I have acquired.

I very quickly found my passion within photography, starting with a portraiture-based project in my very first semester, ‘The Portrait Element’. Within this brief we had to use two different models and take 4 varying portraits:

1. A Formal, Fully Lit Portrait using studio lighting or portable light kit. This portrait will be taken in a controlled situation, either in a studio or in a setting of your choosing, where you are in complete control.

2. The Faceless Portrait. This is a portrait of your model that does not show the model’s face but gives the viewer a sense of who the model is.

3. Shallow Depth of Field Portrait. Utilising your technical knowledge of depth of field and relation to aperture, photograph your model so that they are in focus while the background is not.

4. Deep Depth of Field Portrait. Again, with your understanding of how aperture affects depth of field, this portrait will show your model in focus along with the background.

For this project I straight away undertook a lot of research into fashion photography, looking into photographers such as Umit Savaci and David Benoliel for artist research and inspiration. I discovered these photographers through looking at fashion magazines as my stimulus for this module. I was drawn to these artists due to the bold colours and environments used within their imagery. But the eureka moment for me started when I entered my university’s ‘Studio One’ and created my Faceless Portrait with model Harry Boulter, and my Formal Portrait of Sadiye Kirbas.

I experimented massively with this imagery using the basic lighting skills I had learnt during a workshop in the first semester. Being able to know which flash heads and light boxes to use, in order to create or diffuse shadows has helped me produce a variety of moods dependent on my photographic style. For example, using a flash head to create a silhouette by lighting the backdrop behind my model for the faceless portrait. One thing I have always strived towards when creating my imagery is that no one else is creating something that resembles anything like my own work. I made it my mission to make sure my portraits were out of the ordinary. I grabbed myself a rainbow of coloured gels (inspired by the boldness of Benoliel’s work) and used these to light the background as well as my models face. I was so pleased with the outcomes, as I already felt as if I had learnt so much to be able to produce such striking and bold photographs within my first semester. This is where my love for fashion began.

So, at this point I had learnt about the varying ways of taking a portrait but ‘The Person at Work’ was a brief within my first semester that has been the groundwork of each and every photo I have taken since. ‘The Person at Work’ didn’t necessarily fulfill my interests in photography but it really taught me how to shoot. This sounds ridiculous right? But it really wasn’t; until this brief I didn’t know how to properly construct a photoshoot. Before, I was simply taking photos of a person, but this module made sure that I always took a detailed image, an establishing image, an observed image and a formal portrait. These four images made sure that I had a series of images that told a story or set the scene of each shoot.

Having established the foundations of my photographic career within my first semester, I moved onto further exploring my interests in fashion photography. However, there are two very strict factors that really came in to play when exploring ideas for my shoots:

1. My really obsessive need to be different to everyone else

2. Each photograph I take has to have a meaning behind it (otherwise it just doesn’t seem to make sense)

I took inspiration from a fashion campaign shoot, that I had completed for my a-level photography degree. This shoot was a fashion shoot designed as a campaign against the Brexit movement, using clothes created by a graduate fashion designer at NUA. I loved this shoot and everything that it stood for. The designer used her collection to voice her opinion on that moment in time of political unease; “My collection was my voice”. It was bold and nothing like anyone had seen before. This is when I decided that I wanted my photography to stand out by raising awareness of topical issues using fashion as a medium. So I decided to create a fashion campaign used to raise awareness of the issue of plastic pollution. How do you do that you might ask? Well, I took the key element from the issue, plastic, and what it was polluting. The Ocean. Having designed and planned the shoot, I ended up photographing my model on a Norfolk beach surrounded by a blanket of plastic bags that I had sewn together. Reflecting back on it, it definitely wasn’t photographically perfect, but it sparked so many ideas for more campaigns I could create in the future. All this experimentation and learning from my first semester led me to create one of my favourite shoots from my three years at university, ‘Has fashion set the trend for fossil fuels?’. I came up with this shoot as I was flicking through ‘Elle’ magazine and found a series they had published with supermodel Kendal Jenner. She was wearing a ‘to die for’ hot pink two piece, whilst draped over the most elegant classic car. For a second, I got sucked into thinking wow, I want that lifestyle but then it got me thinking, that what we actually have is yet again a very traditional supermodel (not representative of the majority of society) draped over a car which is in reality a personalised pollution factory? Why has Elle created a shoot that on so many levels does not represent the world we live in? My shoot was therefore a rebellion against the use of fashion to promote something so deadly to our environment. My shoot gained so much positive feedback from my peers and even won the ‘Essence of Cornwall’ Press Award. I felt so motivated and inspired having created imagery that had such strong connotations and resonance with people. It felt like my work had a purpose and I was using my skill and creativity to produce something that was more than just an image, but a message and something that could contribute to the greater good.

At this point I felt very comfortable with my personal concepts of how I wanted to use fashion photography, but I still feel as if I am on the journey towards finding my niche photographic style. However, it is still early days and I feel as if I have learnt so many techniques that I am able to keep experimenting with them and not necessarily tie myself to a style yet.

I diverted my attention away from using studios to produce my work … I don’t know whether this was due to the lack of availability of studios or due to my passion in fashion photography changing after my second year? The second year of study was a very tough one for me and one where I fell out of love with my course and the whole university experience. The work I was creating and the environment I was living in made the whole university experience a very negative place for me to exist. This experience began to really impact my mental health causing my creative skill and motivation to deteriorate massively. I just didn’t want to do it anymore. It saddens me to know that ‘Has fashion set the trend for fossil fuels?’ was the only series of images that fuelled my visual passions throughout this whole year of study. Nevertheless, this series is one that I am extremely proud of. I only wish at the time, that my mental state was such that I could keep up the momentum of producing such imagery. Instead, I began to turn to the written side of Press and Editorial Photography to try and stimulate and maintain my motivation for the course. I immersed myself in the themes of the fashion industry, specifically fast fashion, which proved to be extremely compelling, to my surprise. This was such a negative period of time for me, but if I reflect on the positive, without this decline I wouldn’t have absorbed myself in reading all the information surrounding fashion and trends. This was a huge factor that led me to discover my love for the social media side of fashion, and creating content for influencing figures and brands.

After getting back on my feet in my third year, I very quickly started using natural environments for my fashion shoots due to accessibility. One particular workshop has always stuck with me when shooting outside and that was attending a 1:1 workshop where I learnt to light my models in different environments with fashion photographer Rosie Blake. But what I really loved about this workshop was that Rosie helped us experiment with the lighting kit so that we could explore with finding a potential niche in the future. We used the B2 Profoto lighting kit to create false lighting scenarios (making a cloudy day appear to be a warm and sunny one) and to play with coloured gels just as I have previously in a safer studio setting. She gave me so much confidence in being able to shoot everywhere and anywhere!

My photography style has changed a lot now I reach the end of my third year and I believe it’s more professional due to the work I am producing and who it’s being produced for. Could this be due to the fact that the source of demand for the work I am producing has changed? One of my biggest influences for this is Influencer photographer Rebecca Spencer. Rebecca Spencer is a freelance photographer who is hired by fashion brands to photograph influencers to promote their products. I would spend hours gawping at her Instagram page and watching her youtube videos thinking wow, that’s what I want to be doing and how on earth does she do that? The most invaluable tip I took away from watching her youtube videos was how she uses a 24mm lens to photograph her models … I mean technically speaking that’s not the lens you’d use for a portrait. I feel like from the moment I started studying photography I was trained to always pick up a 35mm, 50mm or 85mm lens when it came to portraiture. I remember thinking really? A 24mm lens? So, I tried it and I have loved the work I have been producing after experimenting with Rebecca Spencer’s shooting style. I feel extremely comfortable with where I am in my photographic career, travelling around the UK to photograph for influencers and brands and although I am still trying to develop my own photographic niche, I wouldn’t be able to experiment in doing so, without all the workshops and knowledge I have absorbed throughout my degree.

#uni education fashion love photography

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cielrouge · 6 years ago

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I attended the 2019 Split Screen Festival at the IFC Center this past Sunday, to attend the Queen Sugar panel, where the festival premiered the first episode of season 4, followed by a panel discussion with the main cast (Dawn Lyen-Gardner, Kofi Siriboe, Rutina Wesley) along with showrunner & episode writer Anthony Sparks, and producing & episode director Cheryl Dunye.

NOTE: This is NOT a spoiler-free recap, so if you want to avoid episode 1 spoilers, read this AFTER the season 4 premiere on June 12th lol.

What Makes Queen Sugar Resonant So Deeply with Audiences

The host noted that Queen Sugar is unique in the way that "it's engaging as a fantasy show, yet everything on it could still feasibly happen."

"Fans have embraced the characters like their own, as if they're in the room with them."

Cheryl noted how most of the crew has been around since season 1, and she partially attributes the success of the show to its special form of storytelling where audiences have been responding differently, because "it's feeding into this new body of storytelling." She dubbed it the "Queen Sugar Way" in reference to some of the artistic choices that she and the rest of the cast and crew consciously make.

Dawn noted that when she first saw the script back in season 1, she felt "there was something deep in it that set the tone for everything."

Dawn went on to emphasize how the show emphasizes the "epic in the everyday" which the rest of the cast and crew adopted, and was in total agreement of. Since essentially, the show allows for these "domestic, almost pedestrian" experiences to occur, yet it "regards the characters as heroic, and is all about tracking the heroic journey" for the Bordelon siblings.

"All the approaches to storytelling in the show this way, moving and changing in ways that emphasize the epic and the phenomenal."

Cheryl also noted that she understands "what power we have in storytelling," since she truly believes that “the personal is political."

What It's Been Like Coming Back to Season 4 for the Cast & Crew

Anthony started the panel making a quick shout-out to the festival venue, the IFC Center, since back in the 1990s, he literally lived two blocks away when he started pursuing his dream for writing for television.

When Cheryl first got the call from Ava DuVernay to direct for Queen Sugar (she got her start with episode 2 of season 1), she knew taking this job meant being entrusted with a lot of responsibility,” but still felt it was "an honor to be responsible for dreams and storytelling.”

This is because Cheryl "knew what it meant to come abroad to direct a family." Since season 1, Cheryl has particularly enjoyed the ability to shepherd other women directors, as they bought on a new roster for season 4.

The main cast, particularly Kofi, all agreed that they felt "right at home" with their respective characters, and Dawn noted that Anthony, as an episode writer since season 1, holds the key ingredients that really glue the show together.

Character Craft Characterization (with the Bordelon Siblings)

When asked about Nova, Rutina noted that "Nova is always with me, and playing her is never just a job to me." At times, it's been a tough emotional journey for Rutina, and she’s well aware that this upcoming memoir storyline is going to drop an emotional bombshell for the rest of the Bordelons.

Rutina describes Nova as a character who is a mess, but "always a beautiful mess." However, for this upcoming season, Nova will "finally find some clarity in this mess, and have this weight lifted off her shoulders."

Rutina admitted that this upcoming season is some of the most challenging work she's done in awhile, in which Nova will undergo a wide emotional range, but also have the essence of her character changed in a profound way.

When Kofi was asked if he uses "life to imitate art," specifically modeling his performance as Ralph Angel based on people he knows in real life, he answered that being an actor allows you "the privacy to use what you know" in a spiritual and personal way.

Kofi emphasized that as actors, sometimes you "feel the emotional baggage of your character," and if you truly connect and know how to navigate this, then your emotions can't be faked at that point, since you sometimes may adopt characteristics from the role you’re playing. Kofi noted that this happens when you yourself are trying to grow as a person, because since there’s a "synergy that you adopt," which can not only transform the character (Ralph Angel) but you yourself as a person too.

Discussing Artistic Choices Made by the Cast & Crew

Anthony noted that as a television writer, "he always knows that I’m connecting the show when I’m literally dreaming about it."

When asked about her experiences as a producing director on set, Cheryl didn't initially foresee how this role meant being the go-between writers and actors, but nonetheless, this has become a role that she enjoys.

During the episode, Anthony addressed the scene where Ralph Angel is running in the sugar cane fields after finding out that his parole has ended. Anthony was initially unsure if this scene would have been hitting it too over the head for the audience, with this sequence of "black man, running, and freedom.” So, it was important to "pull off this scene in a way that speaks to the audience" which he felt it did, after he poked his head in the middle of the episode screening, and heard all the loud cheers and hoots during this scene.

Anthony has a tendency to be the creatively "gung ho" type of guy, so Ava is usually the one that has to slow him down to "luxuriate" in the episode. For example, during Aunt Vi's party where Nova is simply dropping off her book, Anthony told post-production that "it should feel like she's dropping off a bomb!"

All joking aside, Anthony noted that the "explosions" of this show usually come from “a deep emotional well,” and "it is still nerve wracking to play these intense characters and scenes."

In terms of Nova's anxiety dream sequence, which almost felt like a Terrence Malik-esque scene, Cheryl admitted that she was able to incorporate some of her original background in experimental filmmaking in this scene, so she knew exactly what to do.

For this dream sequence, the idea was to "play with the land and dreams," where the scene cut together real well in the end, and "set the groundwork for other dream sequences" in the upcoming season.

The Importance of Land as the Setting & Overall Show Themes

The cast and crew noted how important setting is to the show, where "land is the unspoken character." It was noted that most of the cast had "never seen a show that displayed black characters and sugar cane lands” before Queen Sugar.

So, Cheryl noted that the "history of these things: land, family, love" are all infused with the land and display "how we love, fight, breathe."

Anthony emphasized that one of the recurring themes in Ava DuVernay's entire body of work so far is "the relationship between land and the penal system," which is a theme that is "dear to Ava's heart." This essentially focuses on how enslavement in the US has essentially evolved in terms of restrictions related to property ownership, and this "relationship with land and property" is very evident on this show.

Anthony admitted that when he started writing for Queen Sugar, this actually allowed him to the opportunity to reconnect and apologize to his brother, who had served two prison stints. While developing Ralph Angel's storyline in season 1, Anthony had long discussions with his brother about his time in prison, and this made him realize that "he wasn't as attuned to his brother's life" when he was serving time.

What struck out to Anthony was when he asked his brother, "What made you decide that you were never going to go back?" And his brother answered it was when his children would come to see him in prison and kept asking why he couldn't come home. Anthony felt that this helped develop Ralph Angel as a character who is very flawed, but very human as well.

What's Next Ahead for the Bordelon Siblings in Season 4

Anthony noted that they've bought on a new roster of writers for season 4, and they've already had lots of conversations about the characters.

Anthony noted that he feels it's important for the show writers to actually meet the cast, who have been embodying their characters for several seasons, because this results in "emotional listening sessions" that help develop the craft.

For Nova, Anthony noted that she's "like a kind of a liberator, this show's Harriet Tubman." So while Nova's character arc won't exactly be a pretty process, he still predicts that "you might not feel the same way about Nova midway through the season, in comparison to how you may feel about her at the end of episode 1."

An audience member pointed that with the Bordelon sibling trio, they're at a point in the show where "everyone's hopes and dreams are coming to fruition" (Nova with her book deal, Charley with the sugar mill and her new romance, and the end of Ralph Angel's parole) but perhaps not in the way they want, or are expecting in the end.

This prompted Dawn to emphasize how "you, as the audience, know everyone's stories in the show" so in terms of the upcoming storyline with Nova's tell-all memoir about the Bordelons, "it becomes tricky when somebody else tells a version of your own story." So this storyline will raise the question about permission - who can tell what about who and why.

Dawn noted that "no matter the good intentions, the costs are still real." Therefore, the "show is doing good job of testing bonds of family: with, love, loyalty and what defines them." The idea is "can you confront yourself fully?" Because each character would have a different response when asked about what's happening in their lives.

After a brief Q&A portion, the cast and crew was quickly ushered off the stage, though Kofi did take the time to take selfies with some fans, which I thought was pretty nice, and he seemed really touched by the general outpouring of love that the audience showed overall.

#queen sugar #queen sugar spoilers #queen sugar s4 #queen sugar season 4 #ifc center #ava duvernay #rutina wesley #dawn lyen-gardner #kofi siriboe #anthony sparks #cheryl dunye #bordelon siblings #ralph angel bordelon #tbh i am just proud of myself for not immediately fainting #over the fact that I was like a few feet away from dawn lyen-gardner #like i get why half the women in the audience were swooning over kofi #but literally i was just swooning over dawn lol #celeb encounter series

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artist-blogger-9 · 3 years ago

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Are Artists Born Or Made? Success Tips For The Self-Taught Artist.

Through formal training, artists are mentored and guided to improve and hone their creative skills. Via an art education, the artist gets an opportunity to explore and use various media, styles, and techniques, under the guidance of a teacher. When it comes to finding jobs and internships, having a degree in fine art is a great way to make you stand out and gives you a head-start over the self-taught artist.

While I have a great deal of respect for art grads, I believe like many others, that art is an energy that is fuelled by passion – the kind of passion that cannot be taught. I believe that art is a creative calling cant be taught.

#Indian paintings #Aesthetic paintings #Zen Artist Sabrina Gill

Shop these now at https://www.etsy.com/shop/RengeBySabrina and http://sabrinagill.in

I Am Seeking, I am Striving, I am In It With All My Heart

The achievements of renowned masters like Van Gogh, Monet, the more recent M.F. Hussain, bear testimony to the fact that the lack of an art degree, does not mean a lack of talent. Vincent Van Gogh studied art briefly at the Antwerp Academy, but this had little influence on his approach to art. Some of the world’s best and most famous artists never had an art education.

A huge number of art aficionados, curators, collectors, gallerists and others from the world of art, believe that an art degree can curb spontaneity and prevent creative people from demonstrating the true depth of their talent – creativity cannot be hemmed in, structured, or taught – it has to be expressed. American Art historian Barbara Rose claims that educated artists, at times, produce art that looks “like homework.”

Unlike “homework art“ that follows the rules, art made by self-taught artists conveys a spontaneous, passionate, unbridled energy. The self-taught artist, through a process of experimentation, trial and error, adopts a completely different approach to art. Undefined by rules, the art a self-taught artist creates are expressions of passion – a passion that cannot be tamed.

Disciplined and focused, self-taught artists work well alone. They learn and pursue only what is essential to the art they wish to create. Creatively, they are able to think out of the box, and continually experiment and innovate to perfect their style of art.

There is great freedom to creating without instruction. If you don’t study art, your approach to art is entirely different. Everything comes from within you – which has its merits and demerits.

You could argue that an art degree is necessary for artists to learn the techniques of their craft and the greatest benefit of going to art school is that the system prepares you and directs you towards a job and an art career. On the other hand, finding career opportunities and openings are a struggle for the self-taught artist.

So are artists born or made? Success as an artist requires and combination of talent, perseverance and enterprise. With no formal training, what is the best route to take to grow and carve a niche for yourself artist? “Today you can learn almost anything yourself if you have the patience and tenacity”, says Ignasi Monreal, a self-taught artist. The internet has made it possible for artists to master the nitty-gritty of digital marketing and social media marketing to promote themselves. Here are some tips for self-taught artists to succeed.

Motivation

Motivation is a prerequisite to success in any field. The motivation to be the best is what drives an artist to put in the hours and master the craft. Make every art session count and take your skills to the next level.

Do the groundwork – research the market

The first step in selling your work is to conduct thorough market research. This preliminary groundwork work can help you plan and build the right website, create opportunities to further your art career and establish an identity as an artist.

My advice to newbies in the field of digital marketing is to pay an expert to build a strong website. Subsequently, driving traffic to your website and marketing your art is a job that you alone can do justice to.

Build a strong online presence – showcase your work online.

As a self-taught artist, you control all aspects of your creativity and marketing strategies. The demand for your work depends on cultivating an inspiring persona— both, in person and online – build a website where you feature your body of work and chronicle your creative journey.

Performing in-depth research and following the steps listed below, will equip you with information and facts to identify and reach your target audience.

Stay abreast of the competition

Explore the kind of art your competitors are creating by checking online and at art shows.

Harness the power of Social media to market yourself and your work.

Set up a Facebook page, an Instagram and a Twitter handle and post your work regularly. Run social media adverts and create your social media target audience. This might seem daunting and overwhelming at first, but it is quite easy to educate yourself on social media marketing via Pinterest tutorials, YouTube videos and a host of online courses available on the subject. Learn the in’s and out’s of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and drive traffic to your website by regularly posting SEO compliant blogs.

To sell your work, you also need to use your website to develop a presence on high-traffic platforms like Etsy. Along with talent and determination, you must smartly market yourself and your work. How well you execute and follow through with what you learn can help you create a standing for yourself in the art community. Here are links to tutorials, videos, websites that helped me understand the complexities of SEO, blogging, and social media marketing – https://pin.it/Ky4CnbP, https://pin.it/4iHS9Pi, https://pin.it/3ieNQot, https://pin.it/3CF6GiM, https://youtu.be/BXgYpJQlfuk. There are a lot of free courses on digital marketing, SEO, blogging that you could enroll in. Scour the pages of Google, YouTube, Pinterest and find those courses and develop your digital marketing skills.

Beat the competition

Beat the competition by pricing your products lower than your competitors. Set a price your competitors can’t match.

Be your own worst critic

It was easy to view your own work with rose-tinted glasses but in order to grow, you need to set very high standards for yourself.

Submit your work to competitions and galleries to get unbiased feedback.

Expect nothing, but aim to be the best

It is important to be patient and enjoy the process of becoming an artist, without high expectations. It is important to have unbound optimism. This is what propels you to move forward. In fact you should certainly not achieve everything you desired when you embarked on your creative journey- if you have, you did not dream big enough.

Connect with the art fraternity – stay current with art market trends.

For artists, hanging out at events like art shows, art inaugural events, art fairs keeps you in touch with art trends, art market trends, artists, buyers and helps you forge connections with potential buyers. Every interaction and experience with the art community builds your network, audience, and brand – never lose an opportunity to hob-nob with gallerists, curators and the likes. Attend workshop sessions conducted by artists who inspire you, get yourself mentored by your dream master artist and collaborate with fellow artists for group exhibitions, online shows, etc. Energy and passion are infectious so spend time with other artists to stay inspired.

Fall in love with the process of becoming the best artist you could ever be. The goal isn’t just getting there – it is also to have fun along the way. When you enjoy the process, your goal becomes a milestone, not a finishing line.

Shop these now on https://www.etsy.com/in-en/shop/StudioSabrinaGill

and http://sabrinagill.in/

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mindthump · 7 years ago

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The untold story of how the XPS 13 defied odds to become the world’s best laptop https://ift.tt/2vCoc4N

Dell.

What does that name make you think of? You’re answer is likely beige boxes, affordable laptops or – if you’re a child of the ‘90s – the infamous ‘Dude, you’re getting a Dell!’ guy. Despite his best efforts, Dell spent most of its life as the very definition of dull. The company’s computers were affordable, practical, reliable, but never exciting.

Not anymore. Dell’s XPS 13, our favorite laptop three years running, has redefined what people expect from a premium Windows-powered notebook – and its 2015 release was just the beginning. The company has since unleashed salvo after salvo of cutting-edge products across both its Dell and Alienware brands.

Change like that doesn’t happen overnight – but, as we found out, it can be spurred by just a few talented people with ambitious ideas.

The Birth of the Adamo

XPS (Xtreme Performance System) is not a new brand for Dell. It’s been around for over fifteen years, a carry-over from a simpler time in computers and technology. We all remember those days, right? Gateway controlled the market on high-end consumer PCs, Windows 95 reigned supreme, and Apple was known only as a desktop computer company.

In many ways, Dell’s feet are still firmly planted in that world. It’s a massive corporation that still makes a large chunk of its revenue selling computers to corporations in bulk. Yet something was in the water in the late 2000s. While the MacBook Air was developed in Cupertino, Dell was attempting to pioneer its own radical new direction for the future of computing.

Dell Adamo 13

It was called Adamo — a quiet, short-lived experiment within the walls of Dell that would pave the way to a very different future for the conservative computer manufacturer. It was built by a small team, created as if out of thin air, and disbanded within two years – but the groundwork it laid within the walls of Dell would change it forever.

“It was what we called a dark program,” says XPS Lead Marketer Donnie Oliphant. “It was a ‘need-to-know’ basis. It was literally like three guys in a room upstairs that had a lock on it. If we’d had more exposure to the rest of the business, it never would have made it out the door. We let the rest of the company in on it about six months before we shipped it.”

While the MacBook Air was in development in Cupertino, Dell was attempting to pioneer its own radical new direction for the future of computing.

Oliphant was moved over from the Latitude business at Dell, and he’s the longest-standing Dell employee in key roles on the current XPS team. He was joined by another key figure: Nicolas Denhez. You may not have heard the name before, but the French designer is responsible for some of the most celebrated modern technology concepts such as the Xbox One S and X, HoloLens, and the Microsoft Courier project. Before he moved over to Microsoft, he worked on multiple laptops in the Adamo line laptops, all of them futuristic, risk-taking, and doomed.

“The mechanical carcass cost on that was $570,” says Oliphant, pointing to the solid chunk of aluminum in an Adamo laptop’s chassis. “They were ridiculously expensive, and that wasn’t because of the material choices. It was because of our ineptitude with regards to design.”

The Adamo line produced two products its short life, the Adamo 13, and the Adamo XPS. They’re among the strangest PCs ever released commercially. Launching within six months of each other, they featured an all-aluminum body, and hefty pricetags to match. The Adamo 13 was $2,000 for the lower-priced model, and $2,700 for the higher-end model. But from a design aesthetic perspective, the Adamo 13 was far ahead of its time, even compared to something like the MacBook Air.

Dell Adamo XPS

“It was basically myself and [Denhez] that sat upstairs and built ID models on what we wanted it to look like. And then we took it to engineering and said, ‘put a computer in this.’ Typically, it’s the other way around. Typically, we do a design — architecture, features — and then we wrap a skin around it. This was done the opposite. If you think about it from today’s design philosophies, they were done ass-backwards.”

The Adamo XPS had a very different design story, though it was even more experimental in its conception. Dell completely out-sourced the design and development of the product, hoping to save a few bucks along the way.

“We used an outside design house — so, non-Dell employees. The idea was that we could offshore the development,” he says. “The thought process was that was going to be cheaper, but it just turned into a major headache — and we still had to finish it for them. There was a little bit of animosity toward that second system. But it was cool, because it was sub-10mm.”

Dell’s Adamo XPS is tiny even by today’s standards at just 0.4 inches thick.

In fact, the Adamo XPS was declared the thinnest laptop in the world when it was launched at CES of 2009. At just 0.4 inches thick, it’s tiny even by today’s standards. Oliphant would be the first to admit that ultra-thin designs come with its own flaws and compromises, but the desire to create bold, sleek products would live on in future XPS products.

“When I inherited XPS in 2010, and we took the products that were going to be the next-generation Adamo and we put those on the XPS roadmap,” said Oliphant. “The first XPS 13, codenamed Spider, launched in early 2012. That really should have been an Adamo product if we had kept [Adamo] alive.”

Going from Adamo to Dino

In 2006, Dell purchased Alienware, a popular gaming PC manufacturer based in Miami, Florida. The acquisition made great business sense, giving Dell access to a new market for high-end gaming rigs. Yet Alienware was a very different company than Dell. It was scrappy, down-to-earth, and completely consumer-focused. That ethos was about to get injected into the company in a big way.

Frank Azor Bryan Steffy/Stringer/Getty Images

The face of Alienware today is Frank Azor, who might be the most casual and earnest tech executive you’ll ever meet. He’s the kind of guy that’ll tease his employees for wearing a suit to a meeting and can just as easily talk about the internal components of a laptop or the latest gaming trends. While Azor and his team brought a casual attitude to Dell, for him, a corporate culture of risk-taking is what made the XPS 13 possible.

“You have to have a culture that is willing to innovate,” says Azor. “You can’t have ID with these crazy fucking ideas that are far out there, and then have a product planning team that say ��I like some of them, but those are too expensive, or ‘my engineering team will never let us do that.’”

Azor started working at Alienware when he was just sixteen years ago, as one of just four other employees. Now, he’s the manager of both Alienware and XPS lines at Dell — and he’s determined to transform Dell’s stuffy culture from within.

“We’re an aircraft carrier,” he says. “To make a turn, it takes a long time. You need to start gaining momentum, and then you’ll start making the turn. I would say we’re in the momentum phase right now. This stuff is leading the company’s image — it’s leading the kind of culture we want to be. It’s all stemmed from the type of stuff we’ve done on XPS.”

Within just a few years of its launch, the influence of the XPS 13’s design has reached just about every screen we look at today.

Compared to the Adamo products, the XPS 13 might not look that strange, but it took significant risks. Starting the trend of thinning out bezels, the XPS 13 dared to move the webcam below the screen. The result when using the webcam was (and still is) odd, shooting right up your nose, and giving you a double chin. The team received its fair share of criticism for it, but the XPS team has stuck to its guns rather than caving in on the decision.

“When everybody’s like ‘we’re bought in, we’re going to be a culture of innovation, we’re gonna take risks, we’re gonna augment the engineering process to help solve for those defects and risks,’” he says. “But we’re going to go into this together with risk — a higher risk than we would if we built a “me-too” product — then you can make amazing things happen. If that hadn’t happened, we probably wouldn’t be where we are right now.”

During our tour of the Dell headquarters, we received an in-depth look at all the advanced engineering that powers the next generation of XPS laptops. (Photos: Luke Larsen/Digital Trends)

The legacy of XPS

Design trends come and go, but they always start with a trendsetter. The 2015 version of the XPS 13 was such a device. Manufacturers of televisions, monitors, smartphones, and laptops have all been on a mission to remove bezels — and that was set in motion by the XPS 13. On the smartphone front, you need only to look to the iPhone X or Galaxy S8 in your pocket. In laptops, look at the MateBook X Pro, which takes the bezel-less approach to the next level.

Dell’s XPS devices even make the MacBook Pro look a little outdated. According to Oliphant, that was always the goal, and the XPS 13 proved it was possible for PC manufacturers.

“Apple was very successful during that decade,” he said, speaking of the late 2000s. “Before 2015, most ultra-notebooks were just deemed MacBook Air-knockoffs or wannabes. What we saw shift with the introduction of Dino, our XPS 13 in 2015, was we started winning some of those head-to-head comparisons. We were actually delivering products with things that Apple didn’t have.”

Like any success, the XPS laptops didn’t spring out of nowhere. It was forged in a fire of bad experiments, lost profits, and finger-crossing moments. Yet Dell stuck with it, because the people behind the XPS 13 believed in the quality of what they’d built. Instead of retreating, they improved, tweaked, and revised. The result was a laptop that impressed critics and changed the company that built it.

“We’ve had to create a subculture for XPS. And from a consumer perspective, we’re trying to change the perception of customers or potential customers of Dell,” Azor said. “That’s what XPS is here for.”

#IFTTT #Feedly #hmmm #tech #good to know

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asoenews · 4 years ago

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ywhiterain · 7 years ago

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The Originals Did Fine Without Klaroline

You might be saying, WR, give @candyumbrella a rest and finish up your InoSaku or other lady centered meta that’s been requested. But. No.

Also. This is way more fun than reading about eating disorders for grad school.

First, here’s a claim:

So TO wasn’t created out of love for Klaus, really it was created FOR STEFAN at Klaus’s EXPENSE. Here’s the thing. This is a wilddddd as fuck claim. My personal interpretation is that The Originals was created because TVD was pretty successful for a CW show and The Original family was quite popular so Plec was like ‘Hey, execs, let’s expand our universe a la Arrow’ and considering that Arrow/Flash/Supergirl/Legends are all doing pretty well the execs were like ‘let’s give it a go’.

Evidence: there is money in expanded universes. See: DCU and MCU. $$$. Also, Universal. Arrowverse is doing pretty well, for the CW.

I could probably go further and look around and see what was officially said and done during the time. But I’m much too lazy and this is the least interesting part of her argument for me. I only bring it up to showcase how badly @candyumbrella makes her point. She simply claims that The Originals was made at Klaus’ expense because that matches her theory. But Ted Structure isn’t commonly accepted theory like Three Act Structure. For more on theory in fiction, watch Lindsay Ellis argue the power inherit in the three act structure for studying film.

For a theory as flimsy as the Ted Structure, she’s gonna need to do more groundwork than she’s done. I’m going to take her post, here if you want to read it, in order to explain why I think her argument as it stands is flimsy. Also, misogynistic.

To be clear: I’m not saying any of this was CONSCIOUS for Plec. I don’t think it was, at all. This is a neat trick on Candy’s part. You see, it’s really hard to argue about the unconscious. No one can completely discard everything Freud said - because how the fuck can disprove the psychosexual stages of development? It’s really hard to figure out what’s going on in an infant’s brain and to figure out how that impacts mental health in adulthood. We haven’t really figured that out yet. What current psychologists do, instead, is attempt to create a theory using something that is falsifiable. A hypothesis. Then this hypothesis is put into a larger framework.

Example: thoughts, feelings, and behaviors inform and influence one another is a theory in cognitive psychology. A hypothesis to test this theory is to set up an experiment where a group of people have their automatic thoughts (def: does what it does in the tin) through Socratic questioning over the course of a month or so and another group of people not go through the Socratic questioning. Do a pre-test/post test scale measuring people’s self esteem. If those in the Socratic group have more self esteem, it supports the underlining theory that guides all of cognitive psychology.

Here’s what it doesn’t do: prove that the cognitive view of psychology is correct. Contemporary social science proves nothing. We create theories with evidence. What we know now will likely be proven incomplete, as history has shown (example: Newton’s Laws have been modified by Einstein’s work).

Why a I getting into theory about psychology? Because that’s Candy’s trick. We can’t prove or disprove what Plec’s unconscious motives are. If she said that Plec created The Originals to prop up Stefan than disproving that would be easy: just ask why Plec developed The Originals.

Unconsciousness, and by that Candy means implicate bias, is really tricky to study. It’s there. We can, say, conduct a study’s looking at how people of color and women are perceived and treated in an experimental study. But our conclusions are going to be more general like: people do perceive Black faces as more threatening than White ones using this criteria. We’re no going to be able to say exactly how or why this happens except in context of broader theory developed by the likes of bell hooks.

In short: creating academic theory to explain a phenomena is a lot of work. And Candy isn’t even doing the really easy shit like I did in the beginning of this post.

Stefan’s endgame shows she’d gone off him by the end of TVD, but this was years before that, when he was still fundamentally her highest priority. Stefan saved the world. He got to molest Elena’s hair. Lexi was waiting for him after death. The very last scene is him finally getting his beloved big brother to come home to him and hug him. I think that’s a pretty neat ending for a secondary main character.

Do you agree with my interpretation? Maybe. Maybe not. But my subjective interpretation demolishes her argument because my view of the ending supports that Plec loved Stefan and gave him a hero’s ending. In order to account for my interpretation of her Universal Theory of TV, Candy’s gotta account for it somehow.

And the block to admitting Caroline as Klaus’s Robin was rooted in respect for Stefan’s opinion and values, and resistance to Klaus’s values superseding them in any way. Tell me, again, how TVD bends to Klaus’ point of view?

They went for Klayley first, but then backed off and kept it platonic. It was a one night stand between two people who didn’t really like each other but had fun bantering. It produced a baby. Klaus and Hayley then spent four seasons getting to know each other, learning to care about each other, and learning how to parent Hope properly. Klaus and Hayley’s parents failed them, they are doing their damnest no to fail Hope. That is Klaus and Hayley’s story. Don’t agree? Tell me why. Use the text to argue, like this:

3x01, Hayley is cured from the curse Klaus put her under. For three months, Hayley wasn’t able to be with her daughter. Klaus put his need for revenge over Hope’s need for her mother. Hayley is enraged - not just because she was cursed - but because Klaus betrayed the understanding they had: they would do better for Hope. She turns around, and sees Hope walking. She missed Hope’s first steps. Klaus took that from her. This scene showcases the themes of parenthood and trust that run between Hayley and Klaus’ story.

They tried Klamille but the Tobin-block of Klaroline made it lukewarm and unthreatening—it fails all the Tobin Rules—which is why so many people who resent KC are willing to co-ship Klamille, even if Cami isn’t their fave girl Uh. Wow. No. I found Klaus/Cami serviceable enough but worried about Cami’s agency not being addressed as Klaus manipulated her and pushed her at Marcel. The turning point was Cami using the code she built with her dead twin brother to figure out how Klaus has been abusing her and frees herself. My favorite Klaus/Cami moment is when she’s trying to make the choice about becoming a vampire or not - she knew who she was as a human. She wasn’t sure who she would be as a vampire.

Look, the text failed Cami, I think, by killing her. But Cami consistently had moments of agency and her own story to tell. Her brother being cursed and murdered defined her professional choice to be a counselor - she wanted to help fix trauma. She wanted to fix herself and how much it hurt not to have her brother around. She was drawn to Klaus because she was drawn to toxic people. Her brother seemingly murdered innocent people for no reason, Klaus is a monster who murders people for the pettiest of reasons. Maybe she finding Klaus’ humanity will help her find her brother’s. It did. He was cursed against his will.

I liked this story. I feel like The Originals lost a lot when Cami died. Her knowledge and perspective about trauma added to a story that’s ultimately about generations of abuse.

Not everyone had this reaction Many people hated Cami or didn’t care. But why is their reaction more important than mine in determining TV magic?

though legit the only block people have against KC is that it didn’t start in the pilot and they think Caroline is too ~lowly to be that important, LOL Uh. No. I think Klaus’ random interest in Caroline was a knock on the writing of his character. Caroline’s beautiful reaction in season three WHAT THE FLYING FUCK was fantastic. I don’t think Klaus and Caroline were a bad ship because Klaus is too good for Caroline - I think it’s a badly constructed ship because I have no idea why the fuck either of them are drawn to each other. These days, I’ve developed a fond distaste for them because Klaus’ thirst has become hilarious to me. I’m here for Klaus crushing an indifferent Caroline. It’s not the story I wanted from them, but I’ll take what I can get.

My block for K/C is my feminism and taste for well narratives that work in context of the story being told. Caroline is way more important to me as a character than Klaus, who I only started liking as a character in his own right because of his fumbling love for Hope. I was here for Caroline with her tone deaf reaction to Elena’s grief in the pilot. She was a character who made an impression by her merits alone, and not because he was a threat to my favorite.

My personal interpenetration of Klaus and Caroline debunks Candy’s entire thesis of why some people are cold on the ship.

Consider what significance the ship must’ve had in the writing room—and how large it must’ve loomed over everyone there—that a writer would tweet something like this upon leaving the show. He’s finally ALLOWED to say he loves Klaroline. LBR they knew on some level it was the key. Plec just didn’t want it to be true, and she didn’t love Klaus enough to admit it.

Or his tweet about Klaus/Caroline was made in context of a light hearted letter. The use of hashtag here significance he was speaking in jest. He may be rooting for Klaus/Caroline - doesn’t mean he thinks he was seriously silenced.

And that’s why TO has faded so much over the years. Because it was a show that didn’t love its Ted ENOUGH We’re getting another season. I just. What. Explain the metrics of fail/success please.

Even much the shipping for Klamille and Klayley is a reaction to Klaroline on some level–a huge chunk of it is “At least she’s not Caroline/At least she keeps Caroline from getting Klaus”

Naw. Before I was a full on shipper, I still appericated Klaus/Cami because there was effort. I got why Klaus was drawn to her and Cami him in the text (her way of thinking caught him by surprise and validated his humanity; she had a psychological need to see his humanity because of the circumstances surrounding the death of her brother) as opposed to my fanwank for Klaus/Caroline (she looks like Rebekah; her untreated trauma related to Damon makes it hard for her to separate abuse and love).

It’s what led to Jackson being killed off so early, whereas if the writers had felt him as a romantic foil for Klaus then that story would’ve gone on and on

Uh. The show I watched had a Jackson/Hayley/Elijah triangle. Klaus’ main reaction to it all was to tease Hayley about banging his big brother/wanting to see them both happy as they grew closer. Also Jackson helped protect his precious Hope.

It’s why TO has increasingly sacrificed Klaus and Marcel and Davina to the Original Family. Which is why they had such a lovely reunion when Davina came back to life. OH WAIT.

CORRECT instincts in initially sidelining Bex and Elijah ASAP Claire Holt didn’t want to be a series regular. They still brought up Rebekah all the fucking time and brought up a body hopping plot. I would agree that Elijah’s arc was poor in season four - but I would argue that it was uneven or poor for everyone in in season four, save Vincent. My belief is being because the writers were trying to condense a 22 episode arc into half the time. But maybe them just not loving their Ted was the reason. You decide, audience of mine.

Bex and Elijah drag Klaus down because they’re dull, uninspired flops.

Elijah is the main reason Klaus wasn’t killed in season two because everyone loved Daniel’s portrayal. Elijah is a fan favorite. Rebekah leaving in the show was meet with a whole lot of sadness from my corner of fandom. Elijah and Rebekah are flops to Candy. Not to everyone.

What’s the plot development that did let him disregard his siblings’s safety? The Krossover in S7. Because briefly, he got his Tobin back again. The crossover, where Klaus showed that he’d grown beyond his selfish desire to have Stefan’s complete devotion and loyalty by a) saving Stefan’s life and getting his big sister to help, b) showing concern for his suicidal devotion to Damon, c) wishing him well. In response, Stefan helped save Klaus’ life and actually opened up to Klaus in a way we haven’t seen him do since the 20s by speaking openly about his feelings for Caroline. Look, Caroline and Klaus had a moment. I think it was pretty good. Because it built on the themes in Klaus’ character arc. Klaus got good moments with his vampire babes in Mystic Falls because he’d grown enough as a person to treat them as people instead of objects.

This is great news for Klaus/Caroline. But it was good for Klaus’s character and his relationship with Stefan too. Despite everything he put Stefan through, there was a sense that Stefan was warming back up to him.

Strategically speaking the wisest commercial decision for her would’ve been to concede Caroline to Klaus’s spinoff– The fuck does Caroline want with Klaus and the family who has terrorized her and the people she loves the most in world? Shoving Caroline onto The Originals just so Klaus could get the girl he wanted would be treating Caroline as a prop way more than we ever got in TVD.

Look at all the conversation around Gossip Girl, at the 10-year anniversary of its premiere. The main thing people remember about that show are Chuck/Blair and Dan being GG. What people remember about The Office is Jim and Pam. What people remember about Cheers is Sam and Diane.

What people remember about Buffy is that it was a breakout genres show embracing feminist themes. What people remember about Avatar is fantastic world building and characterization. What people remember about Xena is delightful camp and lesbian. What people remember about Dawson’s creek is Dawson’s cryface:

Gossip Girl is much derided, not because of endgames themselves, but abuse apology, a plot twist so bad it’s hilarious, misogyny in general.

Plec could’ve had one show driven by a Humanity Tobin and another driven by Vampire Tobin, done and done

Except, the story that Plec wanted to tell was about Klaus and the Original Family. And that’s no crime. Five seasons for a spin off show on the CW is a pretty good mark of success in my opinion.

#the originals #tor meta #klaus mikaelson #caroline's way too good for klaus #i mean #come on #what #tvd meta #JAKE GETTING INTO CASSIE: THE POINT OF ANIMORPHS #ted structure monkey magic

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takerfoxx · 7 years ago

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As someone who's only now trying to put a long-term fanfic idea into words, I have no idea how you managed to do it for all those years. Shit's hard. Also, Regarding the Science Children, which one is "Mod it until it breaks!" and which one is "Vanilla games only"?

It honestly gets easier once you settle into a groove. When I started IM, it was mostly on a whim to see what would happen, and all I had was a vague outline with a few high points to hit in mind, with most of it being reworked and improvised as I go along.

The trick is to figure out what writing style works for you and go with it. Everyone’s different, and what works for one person might not work for another. Personally, I took the “road trip” approach, in that I knew where the story was eventually going to end and I knew all the major stops along the way, but the path to hit those stops was made up as I went along, with each in-between chapter being mainly used as a vehicle to built up to the next high spot while laying the groundwork for all the others down the line, and all the while I would work and rework those high spots in my head, ironing out the details and making changes as needed. It also leaves things open for beautiful, unplanned detours that you may have not seen coming but just develop naturally. Example: Marisa’s death was set in place years in advance and a lot of what I stuck in was to prepare for that, but Rin and Flandre’s friendship was literally made up on the spot and ran with, which caused me to alter a lot of my long-term plans to compensate. You take the surprises as they come, making the necessary adjustments, and just keep going. But again, that’s just what worked for me, and your own style might be very different. The important thing is to stick with it, never break the chain, and look forward to writing out what happens next. The feedback helps a lot, and you really do come to look forward to reader’s responses as a form of motivation.

A few technical suggestions: sometimes, if I’m struggling with a scene (mostly the introductions, descriptions, and inner monologues), I would mark it with three question marks and skip the part that’s giving me trouble and instead just jump to the bit I already have planned out and can just get out easily. And if I have a long stretch of dialogue, it helps to just write it out in script form, with just the conversation and no narration whatsoever. My first drafts of each chapter tend to be pretty skeletal, but when there’s some kind of framework in place and I’ve had a few days to puzzle out the hard parts in the back of my mind, it’s much easier to then go back and fill in the parts I’ve skipped.

But whatever path you take, just remember to have fun with your project, don’t be afraid to experiment, accept that you’re going to try things that aren’t going to work, some risks won’t pay off, you’re going to do things that people aren’t going to like, and even if you’re hit with backlash you just got to compensate and keep going. Writing in the long term takes a lot of hard work, but is a very fulfilling experience. Good luck!

And the MamiNagi kid is definitely the most creative and experimental of the bunch, while the KyoSaya kid doesn’t really deviate from what she’s comfortable with. But with her friends’ encouragement she does loosen up as she gets older.

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gyromitra-esculenta · 8 years ago

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Reaper76week stuff, day 2. Pardon my french, Je l'ai étudié six mois il y a dix ans. role/body swap. If you can find the point where the dreaded drabble got away from me... Translations for Widowmaker under link.

“Reyes, I’m telling you, as your SIC, stay where you are and let it all blow over,” Jack sounds so irritatingly calm for someone who drugged him earlier and left him in some god-forsaken safehouse on the other side of the globe. “Serious shit is going down, the kind it’s better for Strike-Commander to be away for.”

“You mean all this chatter on the news about Blackwatch storming Zurich?”

“I’m trying to minimize the casualties. Whole building is compromised. There are demolition and concussion charges set throughout.”

“And you want me to believe that, Morrison?” Gabriel grinds out.

“You know that over the half of the committee you were scheduled with didn’t arrive? They didn’t even have charters, Reyes. They never intended to set foot in Zurich.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. This was an assassination attempt. I left you all data on our internal investigation. You’ve trusted me so far, even with the leak, trust me now. We’ve got almost everyone out, working on disabling the charges. Besides, you called me, not anyone else.”

“You could have told me, Morrison!”

“You wouldn’t have listened. Other thing, it’s not in the report, Gerard is al…”

Whatever the blonde is trying to tell him, it gets lost in electrical whine and then, static. Gabriel’s eyes flick to the holoscreen, where the building of Zurich Headquarters trembles and then collapses on itself. Shit. If there was an emp charge, Jack’s comm unit should have restarted by now, unless it got bricked. Seconds trickle by.

“…fuck… they activated them remotely…” There is a cough in the static, wet and unpleasant. “…’s maybe better for you… to stay dead… Gabe.”

“Where were you exactly in the building?” Gabriel asks through gritted teeth.

“…don’t bother… either gonna suffocate… or drown… won’t let me live anyways… no-one’s gonna get to basements…”

“Jack.”

“…considering… stay dead… with me,” there is a plea in the blonde’s voice. Gabriel closes his eyes. “…not long…”

“I’m here, Jack.”

“…thanks… not long…”

“I’m here.”

Sounds of labored breathing on the other side stop five minutes later.

“We have incoming reports that Strike-Commander Gabriel Reyes might have been caught in the blast that leveled down the Overwatch Zurich Headquarters. He was seen entering the building before the combatants, now identified as part of infamous Blackwatch, stormed it. There are eye-witness accounts of a dispute between Strike-Commander and his second in command, Commander Jack Morrison…”

Gabriel mutes the holoscreen and stares at it. How? He wasn’t even there, he isn’t even on the same continent – he is in fucking South America.

He shakes his head and skims the report Jack left him. It is a lot to take in, he needs a lot of time, and…

“I made a fail-safe, if everything goes fubar. You will probably get reported dead, sorry for those ‘personal effects’, I’ll get you a new coat if anything, so, again, in case it all goes to hell, you can lay low until it unfucks itself. The house is stocked with everything you might need, out of OW and BW notice. Here’s a list of those I have around.”

So that’s where a part of those disappearing funds he never managed to track went. In recent years he accused Jack of being paranoid. Now he knows it wasn’t without a reason.

“Now, I’ll probably get my ass killed, but you will have me to blame for everything, so OW’s going to be probably all right in the end. There’s a lot I didn’t manage to track, but that’s a good starting point. There are some definite hits on OW agents. Hope I managed to take out some of them. Most were under my nose, regardless. This shit goes deep. I’ll leave you to it. Love you. See you around. Jack.”

Fuck. Jack could have come to him. But Gabriel realizes that he had. Several times. He just wasn’t listening then and the blonde wasn’t pressing. When did he start to formulate a plan like this?

Two days are spent looking for a suitable body. He arms the self-destruct charges at the safehouse. It is better to stay dead.

Groundwork takes three years. By this time, he stops using Jack’s safehouses, more so when it becomes evident someone else is using them too – subtle traces of one’s presence, never too much, but nonetheless, it is there. He has his own set up now around the globe.

Gabriel briefly wonders who else could have the access to Jack’s list.

Rumors about a new mercenary tied to Talon resurface. The only things consistent in the reports are his ruthlessness, apparent vendetta against Overwatch personnel and dislike for getting recorded.

Word is out that this ‘Reaper’ is a ghost moving through walls, sucking out people’s souls, and no-one is ever left alive in his wake.

Gabriel notices the Blackwatch symbol in one of the rare pictures taken.

Some of the agents taken out by Reaper are the same ones as the names in Jack’s report, Gabriel realizes.

It sets him on edge

The news start to call him ‘Soldier Death’. Gabriel decides to keep the image.

The bounty on McCree goes up again, ten times up now. It shouldn’t be a surprise – Jack trained that kid personally. Fought for him.

If anyone’s going to have any pertinent information about the inner workings of Blackwatch Gabriel doesn’t know himself, it’s going to be Jesse. He only needs to find him before Reaper does.

Everything goes to shit when he tries to access the mainframe in one of the abandoned Blackwatch safehouses. Reaper is deathly silent in his approach and only pure luck saves him from getting his head shot off. The rifle seems familiar, Gabriel thinks.

There is so much anger behind that strange mask it’s palatable in the air. Gabriel manages a hit dead centre on the mercenary’s torso and the man scatters literally into dark smoke that hisses at him. It moves with a mind of its own, floats away.

He gets drunk that night. People don’t turn into angrily hissing smoke.

He tracks down McCree two months later. Gabriel doesn’t approach, because Jesse is talking, of all the people, with Reaper. The mercenary throws something to the kid and then again turns into smoke and blends with shadows.

He doesn’t drink again. Twice isn’t some wild hallucination. It’s a start of a pattern.

“Pardner, they not gonna pay the bounty, you realize?” McCree drawls, inhaling the smoke of his cigarette, not fazed by the barrel of a shotgun digging into back of his head.

“I’m not interested. I want information.” Gabriel nudges him and Jesse turns.

“My lucky day,” the kid spares him a glance. “Soldier Death himself. What can I do for you, pardner?”

“Blackwatch operations.”

“No wonder he’s itching to splatter you against a wall,” Jesse rolls his eyes. “Left before shit went down, can’t help you much.”

Gabriel growls and pulls back his hood, and then undoes the clasps of his mask. McCree’s eyes grow big.

“He’s gonna shit himself when he hears that… Commander Reyes.”

“We’re going to have a good long talk, McCree.”

They sit in one of Jack’s safehouses. It’s evidently lived in.

“I’m using them too,” Jesse offers unquestioned. “He just told me to go along and keep safe. And wait for orders.”

“Not doing so good on that,” the shotgun rests between them on the table. “Reaper.”

McCree visibly winces.

“He is… was Blackwatch. Loyal. On a team in Zurich. They used experimental tech trying to keep him alive, went very wrong.”

“Ziegler’s nanotech.” It all comes together. Twice is a pattern.

“Yeah. Apparently not so good on someone dead already. Try not to get in his way, he’s got memory issues since then, might not remember you’re on the same side. You know, Commander,” Jesse looks to the side, undecided, and then writes something out on a scrap of paper. “About Morrison. There’s a cache in Dorado. He wanted you to get it in case he… died. The Blackwatch stuff, you’re going to find it there. Full copy of everything, of stuff that never made it to the archives.”

Gabriel takes the coordinates.

“And Reyes… Jack. I think he was in love with you.” There’s a hint of reproach in McCree’s words.

“I know,” is all that Gabriel can answer.

He makes it to Dorado. At the end of the first day he’s shaken. There’s so much of it all, of all the things Jack kept from him, of all the things he never authorized that bear his own signature.

There are surveillance photos of a man that bears striking similarities to Gerard Lacroix. Marked as Talon operative. There are even more pictures of him meeting the members of UN Overwatch Committee.

Gabriel’s bounty goes up with last hit on Talon operations, and he smirks. He might not be doing much, but he manages to hit them where it hurts. Where it counts.

The mercenary finds him next day and they reach a stalemate, each with gun trained on the other. Gabriel observes as the tension slowly leaves the man and his finger on the trigger eases off.

“Good job,” the voice is like a metallic rustle of filings. Reaper lowers his rifle and retreats without a shot fired.

Again he is left with more questions than answers.

He alternates now between his own and Jack’s safehouses. Three months later he finds one that is occupied. He enters with his shotguns drawn.

Familiar cloak and mask lie on the table. The man that sits in the chair with his back to the doors has white hair and pale skin. On his visible arm there are splotches of grey that look like they are changing shape and moving.

“If you invade someone’s home, have at least decency to knock, Gabe.” The voice is all too recognizable and Gabriel feels his hands waver.

“Jack…?”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Jack laughs, standing up and turning. Two deep gashes cut his face, the eyes are blue and glowing, without pupils, and there’s a fucking stitched autopsy incision on his chest and stomach. “No shit, you look like your heart’s going to give up any second…”

Gabriel throws away his guns and closes the distance between them. He grabs Jack’s head between his hands and kisses him, and after a short moment it is reciprocated, and, god, why had he never done that before?

“So,” Jack chuckles in the morning, ”it only took me almost dying for you to…”

Gabriel stares at him. ‘He’s got memory issues since then’ echoes in his head and Jack stares at his own arm, at the patch of grey moving towards his wrist with a strange focus.

“Shit, shit, shit… What’s the date?”

Jack wolfs down cold stew like he hadn’t eaten in days.

“What I’m saying is, at best, I’m like sci-fi zombie or vampire that reanimates all the time. At worst, I’m a sentient cluster of nanomachines carrying biomatter and I only think I’m myself,” he explains matter-of-factly. “And memory retention’s shit. Takes time to get a hold of it.”

‘It doesn’t matter’ is what Gabriel wants to tell him. Instead he merely nods.

“Only had to get almost blown up, huh?” Jack asks next day.

“Had me scared there,” Gabriel humors him for a moment.

“It’s hard keeping it all there, it’s like they don’t want me to change a bit. It depends on things around me when I wake up, like they pull up associations rather. At least it keeps me consistent. Go down as Reaper, wake up as Reaper.”

Gabriel wakes up to a soft mantra of repeated words, Jack kneeling by him, clutching the mask to his chest, tears falling down from his chin.

“You’re alive,” he says it again, like a prayer, and Gabriel brings up his hand to Jack’s face.

“Focus, Morrison.”

“It’s turning real bothersome, isn’t it?” Statement, not question, as Jack looks at him over the table.

“I don’t mind.” He doesn’t. “We will work something out.”

“Don’t wanna to intrude on a moment,” McCree calls from the hall. “But remember that job you pulled in Gibraltar, boss?”

Jack stills for a second, eyes closed, concentration plain on his face.

“Data retrieval I half botched?”

“That one, boss. Winston’s doing a recall.” Jesse sits down in a free chair and eyes them both suspiciously, purses his lips noting their state of undress. Gabriel remembers he had an obvious crush on Jack. “Immediately after. Had a problem locating you.”

“I wasn’t keeping up with… stuff.”

“I noticed,” McCree, the little shit, inclines his head to Gabriel. “What’s on your mind, boss?”

“Petras is still in effect, it’s going to be problematic. You want to sign up, Jesse?”

“Maybe. The bounty is becoming bothersome, boss.”

“You should join them too,” Jack quips week later, mask askew and lips grey, while they wait for their target.

“Morrison, you died for me. The least I can do is to stick by your side.” Gabriel shakes his head. “We both come back, or we don’t.”

Jack scoffs.

Every morning is like walking on broken glass. One can get used to it.

“They’re not happy.” Jesse is mumbling on the line. “Not about boss.”

“Then fucking tell them I’m coming and I’m bringing him with myself. Not Soldier, fucking Strike-Commander, and he comes with me. So they can stuff it.”

“You sure?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

They’re all tense. Gabriel stops and Jack has a claw hooked in leather of his jacket. He doesn’t need to look back to know there are dark tendrils trailing behind them both.

He slides his hood off and slowly takes off the mask with teeth painted on. There are gasps of disbelief.

“Told you all,” Jesse smirks, but Gabriel concentrates on Angela’s look of horrified realization.

“You, Ziegler, and I, we are going to have a good long heart to heart. You keep your mouth shut. You’re not going anywhere close to him before that, understood?” Jack shudders behind him. She just nods. “We’re taking commander’s quarters.”

“So you’re hiding me in Gibraltar?” Jack murmurs sleepily and Gabriel smiles, lacing their fingers together.

“Pretty much.”

“How long was I out?” Blue glowing eyes blink, unfocused.

“Too long, Jack,” Gabriel places a kiss on his forehead. “Focus on what you remember last.”

They have a routine worked out. Gabriel worries about times he might not be there when Jack wakes up.

Jack disappears after a raid on Talon’s weapon transport. He comes back several hours later, sneaks into their room, unconscious Widowmaker in his arms.

“Jack?”

“She could’ve shot me. She didn’t. That means it’s wearing off,” Jack looks to the side. “They’d notice it soon and recondition her again.”

“What am I…” Gabriel shakes his head.

“Call Ziegler.” There’s determined finality in Jack’s voice. “Have her come here with a gurney.”

Have her see how the room is arranged, have her see me, is what Jack means.

They are alone in the infirmary, if not for Widowmaker in her containment cell.

“Le traitre,” she welcomes Jack, hissing.

“You can stop pretending, Amelie,” Jack responds in his normal voice and she recoils, distrust written on her face, eyes scanning the room. “You’re not going back there.”

“Comment dois-je vous faire confiance?”

“You’re not going to be how you were before,” Jack removes his mask. “But you are going to get better.”

“Ah, commandant Morrison,” her gaze lands on Gabriel. “Commandant Reyes. Ces promesses.”

“And you can help us take Gerard down.”

Amelie smiles like a predator.

“J'écoute attentivement.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Jack,” Angela whispers as she cuts into his arm, but Jack refuses to look at her, his eyes steady on the wall – if there is any pain, he doesn’t acknowledge it – he doesn’t acknowledge her. “They said they’ve found the body, and I was desperate. I wasn’t losing both of you. I had no idea…”

Widowmaker chuckles from her cell.

“That’s enough,” Gabriel takes a hold of Jack’s arm and feels the flesh give under his touch, the electric buzz under his fingers. “You have your sample. Get to work, Ziegler.”

She nods, eyes closed, moisture at the edges, but Jack is shimmering between his arms, dark tendrils evaporating in the air, so Gabriel brushes his thumb over pale cheek before sliding the mask down.

“I’m here.”

“Chacun de nous a ses propres monstres, médecin,” Widowmaker laughs at Angela as they leave.

Gabriel wants to say something as Genji takes a seat at the same table but fingers digging into his thigh stop him – he only stares.

“I thought this was a persona non grata space,” Jesse mutters, squinting over his coffee.

“I’d say, but there’s only one person that would command such a loyalty from the mangy coyote,” the cyborg chirpily offers.

“Good to see you again, Genji,” Jack greets him with a voice like rustling shavings, his clawed hand outstretched over the table. Genji takes it and shakes.

“Good to see you more alive than dead, commander,” the cybrog smiles.

They take off for Egypt, alone.

“The word is not out, that I’m no longer taking jobs for them. I don’t think they know it yet,” Jack laughs lightly. “Probably think I’m just on hiatus and fucked off to do whatever it is that I do in my own time.”

Gabriel wonders how is it possible he’s not burning inside all of this leather and then catches himself before he asks. It brings a smile to his lips. He pulls Jack for a kiss.

“Everything’s very crude,” Jack mutters with distaste over the radio. “Miracle if anyone shows up. At worst we could check up how’s Helix doing on their containment, maybe take a look inside.”

“And the bounty?”

“Of course nobody’s going to pay it out. Unless you’re scary enough.”

“Let’s wrap it up for today,” Gabriel shakes his head. In the sweltering heat he feels like he’s swimming in his gear, and the telltale shimmer behind is cut short by the sound of single shot ringing out over the courtyard.

“…up there,” Jack’s voice is a metallic rustle with his throat blown off by the force of impact. “Catch her.”

They sit in a little room overlooking the city. Ana regards them both warily.

“You want me to come back,” Jack hesitantly moves his mask back and smiles, corners of his mouth quivering anxiously. “Should have figured it was one of you. You both always had a flair for dramatics.” She chuckles and Jack’s smile gains conviction. “Got you both dying to finally get together.”

“I died. He just pretended.”

“Vous ne me blâmez pas pour cela, vieille fille.” Widowmaker observes, her golden eyes not leaving Ana for a second.

“No, Amelie.”

“Bien.” Both women relax. They shake hands tentatively.

“No, Ziegler, you’re not getting another sample,” Gabriel looks up at her. “You got one, you still have it.”

“I need a bigger one. I think I have…”

“You think. I told you once already,” he growls and seeing her shrink from him brings him minute satisfaction, “you’re not coming anywhere close to him unless you have a definite way to fix it or know how to kill him.”

“But the data…”

“No means no, Ziegler.” She slinks away. Jack’s shape solidifies by him.

“Kill him, huh? Not a bad idea,” he murmurs, head on Gabriel’s shoulder.

Widowmaker sits down with them, back rigid, head held high – McCree coughs choking on his toast.

“Beurre?” Genji offers her some.

“You, like, okay with that?” Jesse asks incredulously.

“As long as she doesn’t flirt with me.”

“Je n'ai pas de lecteur de sexe,” Amelie responds bluntly and Jack laughs. Gabriel smiles behind his cup at the sound.

“She said something about sex, what did she say?”

“Rien d'intéressant, imbecile.”

“Cibler dans le viseur,” Amelie’s steady voice rings out and everything turns sour few seconds later. There is only an aftershock – an echo of a thunder. “Sniper dans l'est. Bâtiment rouge. Toit.”

But all Gabriel can hear is a rising roar, and Jack is on the assailants, close and visceral, his silhouette disappearing and reforming from a black cloud of nanites, claws ripping flesh and something else from them, and, god, Gabriel will never grow accustomed to that thing Jack does that leaves bodies grey and frail, but in turn gives his skin a memory of color.

Another shot chips at the brick wall.

“Sniper est neutralisée. Amateur.” There’s a tinge of satisfaction in Amelie’s words, but all Gabriel can feel are Jack’s hands on him, shredding his jacket and armor, and the pressure from inside in his wound. All he can see is the face above him illuminated by a glow of the emitter. Somehow, he finds strength to bring his hand up and pull Jack closer for a kiss.

“Keep tight, luvs, Mercy’s on the way,” Lena hops by and Gabriel sighs at the contact lost when Jack startles away, looking at her. “Commander Morrison…?”

“Lâcher le morceau,” Amelie sounds more amused than she should be able to.

“You can do it. We can do it,” Gabriel rests fingers on Jack’s shoulder and his form stops wavering.

“If you say so, Commander,” Jack looks away as he takes a step into the corridor without his mask on.

Angela doesn’t show her face for a whole week.

It takes several months. Jack still manages to pull up inside information on Talon, even if he’s burned with them after that incident.

“I have my operatives, Commander. Remember the divide,” he chides when Gabriel asks.

They have the place. They have the date.

It’s Zurich.

“Bonne nuit, ma chérie,” Amelie whispers while pulling the trigger. Seconds pass and then Gerard’s head explodes in a shower of gore. Moment later another bullet, shot by Ana, collides with his chest. “Je suis libre.”

And then the charges detonate, bringing down the whole floor down.

There will be enough evidence left to shake the foundations of the UN. Enough for public to ask questions that will need answers.

There won’t be any evidence who carried out the strike.

“I remember you,” Jack smiles, awake, when Gabriel comes to. The words are plain, but mean much more.

Gabriel relaxes. They’re never going to be okay, but they will manage.

They are kept on payroll as ‘consultants’. Amelie spends her days reading and tending to the garden. Sombra sometimes brings her adopted daughters along. Jesse and Genji come to drink with Jack and swap stories. Lena comes for advice, age showing in the corners of her eyes.

And Gabriel, Gabriel remembers in the mornings that he said

yes

to a question asked by Jack.

#sometimes i write #word salad #reaper76week #day2 #r76 #reaper76 #amelie's a little shit #Jesse kind of plays matchmaker #shitty french from someone who had a lick ten years ago #an epic almost 4k drabble

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mccotterkayvin · 4 years ago

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Reiki Healing Online Courses Incredible Tricks

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Reiki 4 Chakra

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Reiki Crystal Of Awakening

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#Reiki Healing Online Courses Incredible Tricks #Learn Reiki In Hindi Language

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ncmagroup · 5 years ago

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by Richard E. Boyatzis, Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten

Change is hard. Ask anyone who has tried to switch careers, develop a new skill, improve a relationship, or break a bad habit. And yet for most people change will at some point be necessary—a critical step toward fulfilling their potential and achieving their goals, both at work and at home. They will need support with this process. They’ll need a coach.

That’s where you come in. Whether you’re a boss or a colleague, a friend or a spouse, introverted or extroverted, emotional or analytic, or high or low on the totem pole, you can learn how to facilitate life-enhancing change in those around you.

All three of us work as professional coaches to executives in a variety of career stages, functions, industries, and countries. We’ve also spent the past two decades investigating how coaching works and training others to do it. We’ve conducted dozens of longitudinal studies and field experiments to identify evidence-based strategies, and we’re sharing them here to ensure that more people are equipped to help others become their best selves.

In 1970 one of us (Richard) developed a theory of intentional change, which has become canon in psychology and management science. Intentional change involves envisioning the ideal self (who you wish to be and what you want to do in your work and life); exploring the real self (the gaps you need to fill and the strengths that will help you do so); developing a learning agenda (a road map for turning aspirations into reality); and then experimenting and practicing (with new behaviors and roles).

Good coaches help people through this process. Note that we used the word “help,” not “guide,” “lead,” “push,” or “pull.” You’re not there to tell anyone what to do. You’re there to ask good questions and listen intently, to offer compassion, to explore a person’s individual vision, and to build a caring relationship. Your job is to assist someone else with making a change, and how you go about it matters. You’re there to help him or her spot the learning opportunity set the groundwork, and see things through. This framework will let you support people with challenges that range from very big (I’m unsatisfied in my career) to relatively small (I’d like to interact with others differently). Here’s how it works.

Spot the Opportunity

If you pay attention, you’ll start finding what we call “coachable moments”—opportunities to help people with their development—everywhere. Sometimes people are aware they need to shift gears: The challenge is evident. They get a promotion, are tapped to lead a significant project, or receive some feedback that their approach needs to be retooled. In other cases they experience a wake-up call: They lose their job in the latest downsizing, get a scary health diagnosis, or hit a major birthday milestone. But often they may have only a vague sense or no idea at all that things aren’t quite right in their lives.

Let’s look at the experiences of two executives. The first, Karen Milley, was the head of R&D at a large consumer goods company and oversaw 60 engineers and scientists. As a leader, she was driven and direct. Her focus was on solving immediate problems, and she got results. But when her manager asked her to enroll in a corporate leadership-development program, she began to wonder if her transactional, no-nonsense style was really helping her get the best performance out of her team.

The second executive, Ray Lewis, was a corporate accounts manager at his family’s business, an environmental emergency response service, and on track to succeed his father as president. He’d even enrolled in an executive MBA course to hone his leadership skills. But he was feeling increasingly uneasy.

In both cases, the learning opportunity was clear. Milley was a standout manager who hoped to reach the C-suite, but she hadn’t yet developed an inspiring leadership style. Lewis had never truly thought about or decided on his ideal career path. He’d just followed the one laid out for him, and if you asked him about taking over from his dad, his lack of genuine excitement came through. He needed to discover a passion for his work.

Critically, Milley and Lewis were also ready to grow. Both were finally willing to look at an important aspect of their lives in new or different ways. When you’re considering whether to invest in coaching someone, you need to ask yourself: Is this individual open to change? Is he or she willing to engage in the reflection and experimentation necessary to make it happen? Research by Bruce Avolio of the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business and Sean Hannah of Wake Forest University shows that it’s useful for companies to assess and sometimes enhance the readiness of employees they’ve chosen for leadership development; otherwise, it won’t be as effective.

Set the Groundwork

Numerous studies have shown that people tend to achieve more, in a more sustainable way, when they’re in a positive state both psychologically and physically. How can you get someone into the right mindset? By coaching with compassion. You start by showing genuine care and concern for the other person so that the two of you can build what we call a “resonant relationship.” You also need to display curiosity—asking exploratory, open-ended questions designed to help the person realize his or her personal vision, which becomes the context for your work together.

Unfortunately, when faced with a coachable moment, most of us tend to do the opposite. We drill down into the problem and then offer advice and solutions. As an engineer-turned-marketing-executive we know once said, “When people come to me with a problem, I see the problem, not the person. Actually, I see people as problem-bearing platforms!” This is coaching for compliance, and it can be effective in helping someone achieve a specific predetermined goal, such as earning a promotion. But when it comes to broader behavioral goals, such as becoming a dynamic leader or a great listener or finding a better work/life balance, this strategy is less successful. Indeed, as our studies and other research have shown, it can trigger a stress response that hinders rather than helps progress.

In work with our Case Western Reserve University colleague Anthony Jack, for example, we found that students who were coached for compliance—with an emphasis on targets and on challenges they needed to overcome—were left feeling “guilty and self-conscious.” Coaching that instead focused on personal dreams and how people might achieve them, in contrast, elicited positive emotions and was deemed by study subjects to be “inspiring and caring.” What’s more, our neuroimaging studies showed that it helped activate areas of their brains associated with openness to new ideas, change, and learning.

Compassionate coaching continues with the discovery of the ideal self—getting the person you’re helping to tell you about his or her values, passions, identity, and hopes for the future. This requires you to set aside your own biases, assumptions, and experience, and engage in what MIT professor Ed Schein called “humble inquiry.” You must demonstrate a sincere interest in the person, convey empathy for his or her situation, communicate your deep desire to help, and then let him or her do at least 80% of the talking.

For example, you might ask Milley: Who are you at your very best? What kind of leader do you want to be? How do you want others in the organization to see you? What does success look like to you? What position do you ultimately want to attain? You might ask Lewis: What kind of work do you feel drawn to do? What gives you the greatest energy and excitement as you think about your future? What do you really want to do, and how does that differ from what you feel you should do? Twenty years from now, what would you like to say you’ve accomplished? (And the best last question is always: What other ideas come to mind as you think about this?)

Angela Passarelli, a professor at the College of Charleston, has compared the outcomes of a coaching experience centered on this vision of a positive future with those of coaching that instead focused on career advancement and encouraged people to work through their current problems. She discovered that participants who experienced the first kind of coaching felt happier, expressed higher aspirations, were willing to exert significantly more effort in pursuing their goals, and found more joy in doing so.

We advise everyone we coach to cap off the ideal-self discussions we’ve had—typically they involve multiple conversations—by crafting a personal vision statement. (Dewitt Jones, a prominent corporate trainer, goes so far as to ask that it be boiled down into a short phrase of six or so words and then memorized and repeated as a daily mantra.) This practice keeps people focused on their desire to change, rather than their obligation to. Milley’s personal vision statement was “Live freely, in good health, with integrity, in a future filled with love and hope.” Lewis’s was “Enjoy the freedom to travel the world, meet interesting people, and pursue an exciting, passion-filled life of learning.”

Next, you want to guide the person you’re coaching toward an accurate assessment of his or her real self. This is not just about listing strengths and weaknesses. And it certainly doesn’t involve highlighting places where the person needs improvement. Babson professor Scott Taylor, who has studied self-awareness for decades, suggests that it has two components: what people know about themselves, and their understanding of how others experience and think of them. The point here is to identify the areas where your coachee’s perceptions differ from those of others and, even more critically, where his or her ideal self and real self are aligned or not.

Formal or informal 360-degree feedback can be useful here. So can additional nonleading, nonjudgmental questions, especially ones that focus on the person’s best qualities and how they can be leveraged. Even when discussing areas for development, it’s important to keep those being coached in that positive emotional state. As Andrew Carnegie reportedly once said, “Men are developed the same way that gold is mined. When gold is mined, several tons of dirt must be moved to get an ounce of gold, but one doesn’t go into the mine looking for dirt—one goes in looking for gold.”

We recommend capturing this work in a “personal balance sheet.” In devising it people should consider not only their current strengths and weaknesses but also their most distinctive qualities and enduring characteristics—their traits, habits, and competencies that have held steady over time. This enables them to clarify both what is going well and what might need to change relative to their long-term vision. Milley recognized that while she excelled at maintaining her composure in difficult times and reading power dynamics throughout the organization, she wasn’t adequately demonstrating the care and empathy for others that she genuinely felt. Lewis realized that his strong suit was being a visionary and adapting easily to diverse environments—and that he didn’t want to continue subordinating his own dreams to perceived obligations and the expectations of others.

Next comes the learning agenda. How, exactly, will the individual you’re coaching move from point A to point B? Again, we advocate for a focus on existing strengths, passions, and values. Ask how the knowledge, skills, and traits the person already possesses can be used to close any relevant gaps, and what behavioral change he or she is most excited to try.

The learning agenda is not a performance improvement plan designed to address shortcomings; those feel like work and inhibit the development process. The idea is to leave people feeling energized and empowered to improve. Milley decided that she wanted to be more of a coach and less of a commander and become more emotionally aware and mindful of others. Lewis’s priorities included more fully integrating his personal passions with his professional goals, developing stronger relationships with key people within and outside the business, and making time to reflect on what was most important to him in life. That included activities like hiking, martial arts, and other sports; work with youth groups; meals and get-togethers with friends, family, and coworkers; and occasional extended breaks away from home and the office.

See Things Through

Change efforts of any kind require time and energy. Even the best-laid plans sometimes fail or take a while to pan out. Research by Phillippa Lally and her colleagues at University College London found that it takes 18 to 254 days to form a new habit. Skill building, relationship management, and career change require even greater commitments, with many stops and starts.

So a big part of a coach’s job is to keep people progressing in the right direction—experimenting with new behaviors, testing different tactics, and then practicing and perfecting those that prove most effective.

Focused on her learning goals, Milley met regularly with her coach to review progress. She worked to shift out of her always-busy problem-solver mode and into being more approachable, kind, and playful with her team. She committed to spending more time with her direct reports in an effort to better understand their experiences and soon established more-authentic relationships.

Lewis and his coach also continued to check in periodically to review his progress and discuss certain unreconciled issues. But it took an extended vacation abroad—that is, the time for deep reflection Lewis had deeply desired—for things to finally click. Not long after it, he left the family business and started his own successful company.

A big part of a coach’s job is to help people experiment with new behaviors.

The business of learning, growth, and changing one’s identity and habits is not a solo act. It’s so challenging that the people you coach will need continued support not only from you but also from an extended circle of others. Kathy Kram, a professor emeritus at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, and Monica Higgins of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education call this circle “a developmental network.” We recommend that coachees create a personal board of advisers made up of role models for the types of behaviors they aspire to. The idea is to identify a group of people who have a stake in an individual’s ultimate success and can serve as sources of inspiration and sometimes even accountability.

If you’re a team leader, peer coaching is another powerful option. If you train others in the intentional change framework, they can serve as compassionate catalysts, seeing their colleagues through the transformation they’ve started and perhaps even helping them identify and embark on the next one. We’ve found that one-on-one peer relationships work well, but so do small groups of five to 12 peers.

When Carlos De Barnola, then the director of HR for the Iberian division of Covidien, brought peer coaching to his company, he asked each person to pair up with one teammate and talk, with one of the three of us in the room to help facilitate the conversation. Very quickly, people began to show more concern, ask good questions, and build real, trusting relationships. After a while, Barnola told these pairs to find another pair. They formed quartets, and soon we, the professionals, we’re able to withdraw entirely while the coaching continued.

CONCLUSION

If you’re a manager, your most important job is to help those around you reach their greatest potential. Having been coached themselves, Karen Milley and Ray Lewis now bring what they’ve learned to their teams. “Today I give people permission to have two or three scenarios of a possible future, and I assure them that we’ll figure out the path that’s best for them,” Milley says. “I’m seeing that compassion with each other leads to compassion with customers, constituents, and all others, which creates a performance.”

We agree: When you coach with compassion, it becomes contagious.

Go to our website: www.ncmalliance.com

Coaching for Change by Richard E. Boyatzis, Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten Change is hard. Ask anyone who has tried to switch careers, develop a new skill, improve a relationship, or break a bad habit.

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