#my jim tag on this blog is really scary all i do is put him in his revealing little outfits

[cannedvvurms]

gotta put this guy into a situation for television i guess

[ennaku-sirri-da]

Jimbit (Jimothan X Habit) watches a movie HCs courtesy of me and Mika [Part 4 ]

Jimbit( I literally love writing the ship name like one person) watching a movie and habit is in suspense so he grabs jimbo......Hes moving in closer😳(flustered emoji)

Honestly like all those ''I dont know personal space'' things Habit does that Jimothan was just like haha lol before must be really flustering now.

For sure!!! He’s trying to act cool but now he cant sit still hes not even really watching the movie

He’s watching....HABIT!!!!(plain text: Habit!!!)

He tries to do the (yawn, arm around you) thing but Habit thinks hes actually tired and gets up to grab him a blanket

Parsley in the corner: hey Kam could you reign in your husband over there god

Kamal: nah

Jimothan is like WHAT (plain text: What) can you sit down? please dont leave me this part is so scary actually!! what if the bad guy shoots him😭(sobbing emoji)

Parsley: dude hes destroying my dad over there WTF dude

Kamal: so? he should be used to it by now thats his problem

I’m sorry dude I’d help you out but Rose has me in a contract ''not to interfere with Jimbit’‘

(Rose is the Flower Kid of this AU and hes my self insert and a bitch😁(smiling emoji))

rose and buddy always tag along but only to supervise and giggle in the BG

(Buddy is my friend Mika’s sona\OC! And Habit plus Kamal’s other husband hee hee )

Parsley: Kamal please....For our friendship

Kamal: Parsley bro do you want me to live or die rn?

Parsley: What does that little kid even have on you? dude this is pathetic

Kamal: He said he'll steal my firstborn child

Parsley: What fucking child?

Kamal:um.....

Parsley: oh Kamal no not that shit again oh my god dude

Context: Kamal is a Marvel nerd and he believes hes pregnant\going to carry the Spiderman X Deadpool child across the astral plane. Hes really serious about his RP.

Jimothan is like Chellam (means something like Darling) please sit down🥺(pleading emoji)

Jimothan pulls out the nicknames when the situation is critical

🤭(giggling emoji) !!! Habit agrees to stay but only if the sleepyhead lets him hold Jim through the scary parts. Habit will be the blanket( He is very warm with lots of hair and fur!!!)

They sit like Habit behind him, sprawled out on the couch and holding Jimothan in front of him and trying to encircle him. if Jim wasnt sleepy before he sure starts to be.

Habit kisses him on the hair and hums into it. Imagine feeling that deep voice reverberating through you, holy shit. Also Habit copying the Buddy purrs....🥺(pleading emoji)❤️(heart emoji) 

Context: Buddy has cat traits!!

Parsley: Bro I can’t watch this. Can we just leave for a bit?

Kamal: Nope, I’m invested now.

 If it comforts you its the best feeling ever when he purrs into you like that. It transports me right to Habit Hell, heh

Parsley: I feel worse now

Kamal has popcorn and Pars needs a new friend group desperately. He is absolutely traumatized.

Parsley: I’m sorry but you all are a bit too '''invested''' in romancing my dang dad

Kamal: Does it help if I like your other dad more....If you could put in a good word with him that'd mean a lot actually--- (cut off)

Parsley: No and No

Context: Kamal thinks Trencil is hot and wants to be friends but they’re forever  un-friends after kamal yelled '’NOT TODAY SATAN!!!!’’ [plain text: Not today Satan!!!] at him when he was habitician-hunting with Mirphy (Mirphy and Kamal rounded up a lot of Habiticians for Habit starting out in this AU)

He almost staked him with a garlic necklace yelling. It was embarrassing.

So he’s just vaguely flustered around Trencil and Trencil ignores him LOL.

[ GIF: The Looney Tunes end screen with ‘’Thats all Folks!’’ in cursive. The BG is a red circle in progressively smaller parts with shading. The innermost circle is dark blue. end ID]

For now!! 😁(smiling emoji)

-----------

For @zeromet A very talented person whose @askpabit blog you should check out...!!

And heres the fanfics you asked for! (not by me)

https://archiveofourown.org/series/1460020 (links to The Habit-Botch Fambily [translated: The Habit-Botch Family] by asandygraves on Ao3)

They are extremely sweet and I hope you enjoy reading them if you have time and\or can! I think this is what got me into Jimbit haha...🥰(smiling face surrounded by hearts emoji)

[annakie]

A Post about Patchy

Hey would you like to read a lot of words about and see some pics of this cat?  Because I’m going to do that below this cut.

Don’t worry, longtime followers, this is a happy post.

Those of you who have been following me since 2014 or before may remember Patchy.  I don’t talk about her much on the blog, but I think it’s time. 

If you were worried this may be a post-mortem post, don’t be.  She’s happy and healthy.

The pic above was taken in October 2010.  It’s the earliest picture I have of Patchy.  By this point I had already known her for about a year.

Back in like 2009, around the time I got Cebu, when I started actually looking out in my backyard, I realized that there were several cats who hung out back there at night.  I just have a chain link fence in my yard so it’s not surprising they could easily jump it from the alley or side yards, and I have a pretty large patio with some comfy patio chairs, so I guess it seemed like a good spot for them to hang, since I wasn’t out there much. 

I wouldn’t know that TNR was a thing for awhile, and since I have a soft spot for cats, I’d leave them out some kibble, I’d just buy a bag of the cheapest stuff at the grocery store and throw a cup out a night to keep them from starving to death back then.  There were often 5 or so cats back there, and if I’d have known then what I know now, I would have started TNR way earlier. 

The cats would come and go, and there were so many that I just called them by identifying characteristics.  “Brown-nosed tabby” and “Tuxedo” and “Orangie” or whatever.  So this Calico just became “Patchy” since she has patches of color.  For awhile, she was just one of that gang.

Cats would disappear, new ones would show up.  Patchy and Moustachio, a shorthaired B&W cat with a mustache, were around the longest.  I’m not sure what happened to most of the other cats, I’m sure they got hit by cars and picked up by the pound and other unpleasantness.  I had to dispose of a few myself.

Patchy, somehow, kept surviving.  Although there were a few times when she’d disappear for weeks at a time and I guessed that was the end of her, but she’d show up later all skin and bones, and then I’d switch her to my cats’ expensive, grain-free food and even give her wet food to get her back on her feet.  Once she even showed up bloody with a very scary gash on her head.  Not being able to touch her to put like, neosporin or something on that was killing me and I did what I could to help her recover, which was mostly just making sure she had plenty of good food and water.  She made it.

And in these first few years, several times, kitten litters showed up in my backyard.

Cebu... get out of the way.  (He was always real good about knowing exactly where to be for being in the way.  I miss him so much.)  (Pics taken in May, 2013.)

Ah, yeah, there’s Patchy with two litters of kittens, one of which was hers and the others were her own grandchildren.  I rescued two out of those eleven and still kick myself for not doing more.

After having to clean up a few of her messes and over a few years saving over a half dozen of her kittens, and not saving many more, I decided it was time to do something about this.  I started by getting her to trust going into my house.

My master bedroom has a sliding glass door to the patio.  (The door you see there goes into the garage, sliding glass door is to the right.)  So I started trailing food into the house and into the master bathroom to get her to explore there, and under the bed so she saw a safe place to hide.  I’d then hanging out in the bedroom reading and letting her come in to explore the inside.  I got her to understand there was food and clean water, and shelter there.  

I thought I wasn’t far enough along with trusting me when she was pregnant once again in spring, 2014.  But one night she did run right inside the house when I opened the sliding glass door to let Cebu out, climbed into the lining that had been ripped out a bit under my bed, and set up camp.  For the next few months, she lived there.  I contacted a feral rescue group in my area who agreed to let me foster the kitties and they’d get them adopted, then loan me a trap to get Patchy TNR’d.  So that was a relief.

Also?  Patchy picked the spot where she wanted to “go”, and after I cleaned up that first mess I put a litter box there and she took right to it, have NEVER had a litter issue since.

The long, and complete story about the next few months can be found on my Rescue Kitties tag, with many many pictures and updates.  But I’ll still post a few, and a summary.

She never came out from beneath the bed if I was in the room, but I would go hang out with her when I got home from work every day, lay on the floor and sing to her and talk to her, give her yummy wet food, and sometimes, if she felt frisky, she’d play laser pointer with me when I would lay in bed before sleeping at night, always on the floor, never daring to get on the bed.  That’s fine.

In April 2014 one morning I awoke to kitten noises.

She was such a good momma to those kittens.  After the first day & night in the birthing box I set up for her, and she did even let me change out the towel (but got real mad when I tried to move the food bowl slightly away), she brought the babies back under the bed and I’d have to peek and use my camera to even see them.

Eventually, they got old enough to get curious, they came out to play, and she let me play with them and socialize them. 

And after a few more weeks, the babies went to the rescue group, and found their forever homes. 

It took TWO MORE WEEKS of making Patchy very unhappily live inside before I could get her into a trap, so she could be TNR’d.  Although she was OK with me touching the babies, touching was strictly off-limits for HER.

But hey!  We did it!  She went and got TNR’d, got a clean bill of health... and went back outside.

I didn’t see her for like two weeks, and when she came back she was skin and bones, and decided that maybe it was OK to be back here and let me give her food again, after all.

And then for the next year or so, well, if it were really hot or cold or storming outside, when I’d let Cebu out before bed, maybe she’d decide to spend the night under the bed, after all.  But she wanted to go back outside during the day.  That’s fine.  The other cats hated being locked out of the bedroom sometimes, but they got used to it.

Slowly, throughout 2014 and 2015 her inside stays got a little longer and a little longer.  It was too hot or too cold out for days at a time, then weeks at a time.

The worst part about this time is that she’d get fleas.  And then Cebu would get fleas, and then Jim, Leela, Fry and Pemily would have fleas.  And then I’d have to do an expensive round of flea meds on all 5 of the inside pets, and not being able to touch Patchy to give HER meds was a problem until I found some like, garlic pills online that I’d mash into her wet food and give to her.  Luckily, between that and flea-powdering (the vacuuming) the carpets, the fleas would be taken care of.  I think I went through this three times.  Eventually I just started giving her a flea pill once a month.  I didn’t love doing it because apparently some cats have bad reactions, but it was that or... stop letting her into the house because I couldn’t keep exposing the rest of the pets to fleas.  Luckily, it worked.

Of course when Cebu died at the end of 2016 I had a lot less reason to ever go to the backyard, so, she had a lot fewer chances to try and go outside, anyway.  But it’d been awhile before that since she’d go out.  I used to leave the door open enough for Cebu to go out and come back in during nice days, and she wouldn’t bother most of the time.  And usually, even when she did, she’d be back inside for bed.

She did get out for like two minutes once last year, but she made it to the end of the backyard, saw I was going back inside, and ran back to me and inside all on her own after that.

She’s at least ten years old now, I think she’s happy to be settled.

I feel bad that she lives her entire life in one room.  I’ve tried a few things to see if she wants to integrate.  Pemily is my most social and outgoing and friendly cat, and also she is literally Patchy’s granddaughter, and several times Pemily has managed to sneak her way into the bedroom, she’s very wiley.  Patchy DOES NOT LIKE IT.  Usually within 10 minutes there are growls, spits and hisses.  Once or twice Pemily has made it into the bedroom without me noticing, and I’ll find her sitting by the door VERY READY to leave when I go back in.  Patchy and Fry would never get along, and she’d probably bully Leela, so... she’s a bedroom cat.

We still play laser pointer, I made sure we has a few hunting-type toys, which are the only thing she responds to.  I’ve tried several “enrichment” toys that the other cats like, stimulation toys, hiding toys, a mini-cat tower that she only uses the brush on, special places to lay down... whatever.  I also bought her a life-sized stuff cat for companionship and NOPE, she hissed at it.  I left in in the room just in case she gets used to it and she ignores it. She doesn’t really care. She likes to hunt fake mice and the laser pointer, everything else is “Meh.”  

She used to dump her water out all the time and I realized she likes to drink moving water, so I put Cebu’s water fountain in there and she loves it.  She has the view of the backyard from the sliding glass doors she spends a lot of time looking out at.  She has crunchy food always and gets some wet food when I get home from work, I spend a few minutes with her when I come home from work every day and at least an hour hanging out in bed watching shows and playing laser pointer... and she seemed happy.

In January, 2016 I woke up one night and found a warm lump next to my feet.  

It may have been a little earlier than that, but not much.  Patchy figured out that it’s more comfy ON the bed (well, she had been sleeping up there when I wasn’t in the room before then, but never while I was there) and hey, humans are warm!  Actually now that I look at it, I think this pic was taken in the afternoon, so maybe this was one of the first times she came onto the bed when she knew I was awake.  (Hey, I’m big on weekend afternoon naps.)

Further strides.. were slow, but measured.  The first time she’d come up on the bed while I was sitting up.  The first time she walked on me when I was laying on my side.  The first time she walked on my stomach and smelled my face.  Figuring out that sleeping higher up on the legs is even warmer.  Figuring out that purring and making biscuits on the human’s leg was really nice.  Oh man, I cried the first time she made biscuits and I heard her purring.  That was probably early 2017.

I had a few aborted attempts at trying to touch / pet her, including thinking she was Pemily while I was still half alseep.  These always lead to setbacks that took awhile to get that trust back.

After awhile, she’d sometimes even do stuff like... this.

This was a huge deal because it was the first time I had even thought to record her and she just came right up and said hi, and she laid there for like 20 seconds while I talked to her.

And then I asked her if she wanted pets, and she immediately backed off.

But hey, she backed off to go do this...

So it wasn’t so terrible.  A little biscuit making before settling down to hang out.

I decided about a year ago, that to move forward, what I needed was to get her used to my hands. So I began Operations: Hands are OK!  For literally the last year, every day I just try to spend a few minutes with my hands somewhere near her when she settles in.  And I started trying TINY PETS on her paws when she was relaxed.  This was a gamble because most cats hate having their paws touched.  But she could see my fingers touching her paws, and tiny gentle paw strokes that did not hurt were something she could control, and remove her paws from.  Which usually she did, and at first she’d get up and move, but eventually, she’d just tuck her paws under.

Sometimes... even something like this would happen...

See?  You can touch MY hands, too!  It’s OK!

I also let her sniff my hand any time she was close enough, and she got used to that, I started using it as a greeting.  She was totes OK with touching any part of me that was covered up with a blanket at this point.  So I’d also put my hand under the blanket sometimes and then under her paws or side.  She didn’t like this much, either, but would tolerate it in small bursts. 

I was patient with her and tried to not push her boundaries too much.

The thing is, though, she has not been to the vet since getting TNR’d in 2014, and she’s now at least 10 years old.  I don’t want to take her if it’s going to set her back, and I don’t want to someday have her be sick and still terrified of my hands, of touch, so... I pushed forward.

The last few months... I started feeling like she knew she wanted something else, but she didn’t know what she wanted or how to ask for it.   So I went for pets with the back of my hand a few times, slowly, letting her know where my hand was at all times and she’d... run away after a short brush.

She’d hang out... close, like this, though.  Looking at me like... “I need something.  What is it that I need?”

Less than two weeks ago, on June 12, I had to wake up at 4am for a work thing, made it back to bed at 6:15ish, then woke up, oops, an hour later than I meant to around 9am.  I really needed to get up and get to work, but woke up to Patchy laying with me, then when she saw I was awake she climbed up to my stomach, purring.

“Okay, we’re gonna try pets again,” I said to her, and showed her the back of my hand.  She sniffed it, then I lightly brushed it against her side.  She didn’t move.

“Okay, we’re gonna do that again,” I said, and for 4 or 5 strokes, she let me.  So I got bold, and went for the regular front-hand full body pet down the spine.

She let me.  I held my breath and looked at her and she didn’t move.  I tried again and she let me.  And after a few seconds... I was just... petting her.  Like you would any other cat.  I literally got teary eyed as I told her what a good girl and brave girl she is.  She... leaned into it.

After about a minute, I got really bold and tried a neck scratch.

SHE.  LOVED.  IT.

This was after about five minutes of neck-scratch / body pets switching.  I grabbed my phone off the nightstand to capture the moment, and she was totally cool with staying still while I shifted a bit to take the pictures with my left hand.

I probably hung out with her for ten or fifteen minutes and actually had to push her away to get up and run into work and not miss a meeting I was supposed to run at 10.  I’ve been so. damn. happy. about this.

It took ten years you guys.  Or damn close to it.  A decade of knowing this cat, of getting her to trust me bit by bit.  

And now, when I hop in bed at night, whenever she’s ready she’ll jump up and hang out.  A few nights ago she even let me pet her while she was standing up and I was sitting up for a moment, and once while I was sitting up and sitting cross-legged, she laid down on the pillow in front of my legs and just let me pet her that way.  

She even woke me up in the middle of the night last night going “Uh, hey, that thing you do now?  Do that some.”  She lays there and purrs and lets me pet her for a long time.

She still mostly runs under the bed if I’m in the room and not on the bed, but the last year or so she’s been lazy about it, instead of jumping up terrified and running under the bed it’s more like “Oh... you’re here.  Ok.”  More like a routine than a necessity.  The last few days she may even be outside of the bed under the nightstand or just... NEAR the bed if I’m walking around, but I haven’t pushed that boundary yet.

My goal is now, by the end of the year, have her tolerate me picking her up, or at least pushing her around.  Get it so I can get her into a carrier and... if I’m real lucky, get her to the vet before 2019 is over.  We’ll see.

Maybe, but not likely, someday I can open the bedroom door again, sleep with the other cats (I do occasionally sleep in the guest room so they can hang out with me, but that bed is nooot as comfortable.)  For the last few years I was doubtful we’d ever get this far.  So who knows.

Thanks for reading this far!  I have been wanting to just record this story for awhile and made myself sit down and do it tonight.  I’ll post further updates if warranted. :)

[azuregold]

ALL OF THEM (°∀°)b☆

You’re evil. XD This was fun, though!

When did you first start writing?

I don’t remember, exactly? I know I was making tiny books for my toys by the time I was seven. The stories weren’t very long, but I remember being proud of them.

What was your favorite book growing up?

Hmm…IDK if I can remember a specific one? I had a lot of books I liked when I was a kid. Marguerite Henry’s books were pretty high up there, I think. And then when I was…IDK, nine, maybe? my mom got me Katherine Kurtz’s Chronicles of the Deryni trilogy and those (and the other books in that world) were my favorites for a long time.

Are you an avid reader?

Definitely. I don’t get through as many books as I used to internet + fanfic are great at eating up my time, but I read at least a little bit pretty much every day.

Have you ever thrown a book across the room?

I’d never do it physically, but it can be very satisfying to do it in my head when I’m really upset with a book.

Did you take writing courses in school/college?

A little bit. It didn’t work out for me all that well. I can’t write on command, and prompts and such don’t do much for me, so if I wasn’t inspired during class, or we were told to write about a theme I couldn’t think of anything for, things got very frustrating very quickly.

Have you read any writing-advice books?

Quite a few, yes. Sometimes they can be dry, or they give advice I don’t agree with, but they can be helpful. And How Not to Write a Novel is hilarious. XD

Have you ever been part of a critique group?

Not really, no! I’m not sure I could handle it, at least not yet.

What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten?

I love all of it! I don’t think I’d appreciate a flame, but thankfully I’ve never gotten one of those *knocks on wood* My favorites are probably the ones that either go into detail about what they think, or are a mess of excited flailing, though. XD (But seriously, it’s all great!)

What’s the worst piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten?

I haven’t gotten anything actually bad, but I did get a review once that said one thing about my story, then spent the rest of the review telling me about their story and asking me to read it. It was kind of awkward.

What’s your biggest writer pet-peeve?

Not having at least semi-decent SPaG. If you’re constantly misspelling things or using the wrong word, if you put multiple speakers on the same line, etc, you’d have to have the most amazing plot in the world for me to even consider continuing.

(Special mention because I’ve seen this a lot recently: putting one character’s actions on the same line as another character’s dialogue. IT GETS SO DAMN CONFUSING. Especially if not every line has a dialogue tag. You can start a new paragraph with action, you don’t have to wait until the moment someone else speaks to go to the next line. Really. I promise.)

What’s your favorite book cover?

I know I’ve seen some awesome ones, but right now IDK.

Who is your favorite author?

Seanan McGuire! Jim Butcher would probably be second.

What’s your favorite writing quote?

No idea? I’ve seen some good ones floating around, but I don’t keep a list or anything.

What’s your favorite writing blog? c;

Like, writing-advice blog, or person-posting-their-writing blog? Either way, I’m not following/reading very many, so it’s hard to make a comparison (Ceren’s writing is really good though!).

What would you say has inspired you the most?

Other stories. Which is not to say that I copy stuff, just that, like, I’ll read a story about ghosts, get interested in the topic, and want to create my own, or I’ll want to write a story that leaves me with the same sort of feeling as what I just read or watched. Stuff like that.

How do you feel about movies based on books?

I still get excited about them even though they rarely come out well compared to the books. I can’t really separate them in my head even when I try, so I’m usually disappointed, but I keep trying and keep looking forward to the movies anyway.

Would you like your books to be turned into TV shows, movies, video games, or none?

Once I actually have books, yes! Any of them, really. I’d want to be sure that whoever was adapting them was treating them with respect, and I’d prefer to have some control over what parts were changed or cut out (or added). And I’d want it to have a decent budget, so it wouldn’t come off looking like a b-movie (TV show, etc).

How do you feel about love triangles?

No thank you. There are stories I’ve liked that had love triangles, but I can’t think of any time where the triangle itself was one of the things I liked. (Someone changing their affections from one character to another I liked better, yes, but not the whole liking-two-people-at-the-same-time-however-will-they-choose thing.)

Do you prefer writing on a computer or longhand?

Computer. Definitely computer. My handwriting is super slow and tires my hand easily. Also, I write with my left hand, so I get ink/graphite all over it when I write. OTL

What’s your favorite writing program?

I’m using LibreOffice at the moment, and it works fine. I’ve heard about some that are supposed to be good that I’d like to check out sometime, though. I’ve been meaning to give Scrivener a try for a while now.

Do you outline?

A general outline, yes. I don’t usually have all the little details figured out, but I know where the story is headed.

Do you start with characters or plot?

Plot, mostly, though sometimes I get an idea for a character that doesn’t really fit in with any of my current stories.

What’s your favorite & least favorite part of making characters?

Favorite is probably getting the initial idea and filling in the general outline, especially when I know just how they’re going to fit into the story and I can feel things starting to click into place.

Least favorite, either designing their outfit (I’m okay with physical appearance, but clothes in particular are not one of my strong points), or getting into the super detailed stuff that shows up on those OC questionnaire lists and will probably never be in the story. I can’t really decide how a character would feel about X topic or what other characters would say about them behind their back or whatever before I’m actually writing the story. When I try, it feels like I’m locking myself into a position and can’t easily change it even if the story would be better if I adjusted the character’s personality.

What’s your favorite & least favorite part of plotting?

Favorite is figuring out the big picture and deciding where it’s all going to end up. Least favorite, probably the stuff in the middle, where I have to figure out exactly how things are going to progress from point A to point B (and all the way on to point Z).

What advice would you give to young writers?

Write! Read! And check out some guides on spelling, punctuation, and grammar at some point. XD

Which do you enjoy reading the most: physical, ebook, or both?

Both! It’s easier to turn pages on ebooks when I only have one hand free, and I love the dictionary function and being able to search for a specific name or word if I don’t remember where in the book I heard it last I also love being able to check out ebooks from the library without leaving the house. But I’ll always love physical books and want to have physical copies of my favorites. They’re easier to flip back or forward to check things, too, like when there’s a map in the front of the book and the characters keep talking about the different cities and countries it’s also easier to spoil myself on the ending if I want to make sure a character survives. ( ￣３￣)～♪

Which is your favorite genre to write?

Supernatural/fantasy. Especially in a more modern setting (though I’m not so big on most sci-fi. I like magic and ghosts and demons ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

Which do you find hardest: the beginning, the middle, or the end?

The middle. Not that the rest is easy, but the middle is usually the hardest.

Which do you find easiest: writing or editing?

Editing, usually.

Have you ever written fan-fiction?

Considering I started this blog because of my fanfiction, I’d say yes. XD My fanfic is longer than anything original I’ve written so far, actually, ahaha.

Have you ever been published?

Nope.

How do you feel about friends and close relatives reading your work?

Pretty scary. Maybe even more than showing strangers, unless it’s a friend I met through writing. *squishes @sircerenade*

Are you interested in having your work published?

Absolutely. Someday. OTL

Describe your writing space.

My computer desk. It’s not super messy but there’s not a lot of free space, either.

What’s your favorite time of day for writing?

Hmm…probably either early afternoon or at night.

Do you listen to music when you write?

Most of the time. Instrumentals only. And occasionally I prefer silence.

What’s your oldest WIP?

For original stuff? A thing I wrote for a school assignment and decided to expand into a book. I’ve kind of lost the inspiration for it, but there’s always a chance I might come back to it someday. For fanfic, From Mist and Ashes.

What’s your current WIP?

For original stuff, an idea that’s very special to me, with the current working title of Afterword. For fanfic, again, From Mist and Ashes. Plus a dozen or so other ideas crammed in a folder. XD Hey, some of them have a paragraph or so written! They count as WIPs! Honest!

What’s the weirdest story idea you’ve ever had?

Nothing I want to talk about. >.> My really weird ideas never leave my head.

Which is your favorite original character, and why?

From my original stuff? I love them all. But Razai is one of my oldest and probably has the most put into him, so if I had to choose… Kazuya is probably the one I’m most excited about at this moment, though.

What do you do when characters don’t follow the outline?

I see where they want to go, then either I agree with them, we compromise, or I rein them back in and explain why things can’t happen that way.

Do you enjoy making your characters suffer?

I want to? I have a hard time following through, but I try. XD

Have you ever killed a main character?

Does it count if I kill them before the story starts? XD If so, then I’ve killed almost everyone in both my original stuff and Mistyverse. During the actual story…not really, no. Do villains count as main characters? What if they come back to life later? I’m not a fan of character death, so I don’t usually put it in my stories unless there’s something more to it.

What’s the weirdest character concept you’ve ever come up with?

IDK, none of them seem all that weird to me. Though that may just be because of all the manga and anime I’ve been exposed to. X’D

What’s your favorite character name?

I couldn’t pick a single favorite.

Describe your perfect writing space.

I don’t know about physically (I feel like something different than what I currently have would be better, though I couldn’t say what would be ideal without actually trying it), but I need to be alone in the room (kitties are an exception). I can’t focus on writing if there’s anyone else in the room with me.

If you could steal one character from another author and make then yours, who would it be and why?

Tybalt, probably. But only if I could just keep him for myself and wouldn’t be expected to actually take over writing him or anything.

If you could write the next book of any series, which one would it be, and what would you make the book about?

I could never. Way too much pressure.

If you could write a collaboration with another author, who would it be and what would you write about?

I don’t think I could ever do that. I’d be too scared to mention my ideas in case the other person didn’t like them, and I’d be too intimidated to turn down an idea of theirs I didn’t like. Then I’d get frustrated that I couldn’t take the story in the direction I wanted, and the whole thing would end in pain. “OTL

If you could live in any fictional world, which would it be?

My stock answer to this for years has been Pokemon, but I’m sure there are other worlds I’d enjoy as much or more especially if healing/medicine were more advanced than the real world, and there were better opportunities to support yourself by doing something you loved. I wouldn’t want anything too dark or evil, and it would need to have something approaching modern technology or a magic equivalent I don’t want to live in a world without indoor plumbing, thanks.

[tshirtfashiontrend]

Meet Lena Dunham’s Podcasting Partner, True Crime Zine Queen Alissa Bennett

Link Buys Now: https://kingteeshops.com/meet-lena-dunhams-podcasting-partner-true-crime-zine-queen-alissa-bennett/

Meet Lena Dunham’s Podcasting Partner, True Crime Zine Queen Alissa Bennett

“You know what rich people love? Fucking Egypt,” says Alissa Bennett, director at Gladstone Gallery, zine queen, Lena Dunham’s newly minted podcasting partner, serial muse to artists like Alex Bag, ex-model, and ex-ex-wife of Banks Violette, the bad boy breakout artist of the early aughts. (They married and divorced, twice.)

Gesturing at the majestically tacky granite sculptures of sphinxes flanking the entrance, Bennett murmurs in her wry deadpan, “I can’t believe no one leaves this bitch any flowers.” We’re marveling at the hulking Egyptian revival mausoleum of Barbara Hutton, famously dubbed “Poor Little Rich Girl” by the press for throwing a deb ball at the Ritz during the Depression that would have cost $842,000 today. (Within a few years, Woolworth Girls—the little-appreciated cogs in the machine that was Hutton’s father’s well oiled fortune—would lie in wait outside hotels to throw eggs at her.)

I’ve tagged along to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx for Bennett’s annual pilgrimage to celebrate the socialite. Bennett dedicated one of her zines about bad behavior to Barbara Hutton, out of reverence for the heiress’s belief that money should be spent, and happiness can be bought. The grave’s opulence mirrors its inhabitant’s distaste for boredom and being scaled, and highlights her yen for exoticism, largesse, and trinkets. For one wedding—she married seven men—Hutton demanded Cartier make her a “Balinese wedding tiara of tortoiseshell, with a diamond pattern identical to the blossoms of her wedding veil.” (Later, she bought Catherine the Great’s jewels.)

This isn’t Bennett’s first time in a graveyard. In fact, most of Bennett’s interests start with a dead body. As a young fashion model with bleached eyebrows, she was locked in Père Lachaise, in Paris, after drinking too much champagne on Chopin’s grave with “two boys, one of whom was later hit by lightning and died.” She remembers, as an ex-model, “hauling my gigantic pregnant body past 29 Avenue B” to see the building GG Allin died in. When that baby was in elementary school, she guiltily stalked a memorial using her “young child and his poor skateboarding skills as a means of moving closer to the gathering in the park.” (The next day her anonymous sources at the memorial clandestinely sent her the “holy grail” of postmortem ephemera: “A link to a 13-page typed transcript of the seven eulogies delivered at the funeral.”)

I should mention that—besides having a rolodex of people who want to talk about dead people—Bennett is whip-thin and translucently white as a ghost. And that her dear friend, the artist Bjarne Melgaard, put a picture of her brushing her teeth on the cover of a book called Alissa Bennett: Laying the Ghost? And that we were originally introduced, one person removed, by a decorator who selected rosewood closets for Larry Page’s house, only to get an irate call that the scent was “killing him.” (The decorator has since died, unexpectedly, of unrelated causes.) And that she’s published an entire series of zines about criminally-minded fuck-ups, many of them now deceased, with the cult avant-garde publisher Frank Haines, a psychonaut from Florida who moonlights under an alter ego anagram of Ted Bundy.

This year, she launched The C-Word with Lena Dunham, a podcast that trawls through binders of dead or forgotten women dismissed by society as crazy, cataloging crimes and misdeeds, from murder to merely having once been alive. The opening line of the podcast? “I’m internationally reviled celebrity Lena Dunham, and I’m Alissa Bennett, historian of bad behavior.” Who better to talk about women society hates—from Judy Garland to Johnson and Johnson heiress, Casey Johnson—than a celebrity we all love to hate, and a woman who dedicates her free time to stalking dead people?

The podcast is a savvy marriage of Dunham’s mood—the distillation of years watching people online say she’s nuts—and Bennett’s life’s work, a series of true crime revisionist zines: Dead is Better (2016), Legalize Crime (2016), Bad Behavior (2017), I Expected Something Nice (2017), and Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2019). I say revisionist, because Bennett plays a sympathetic graverobber of sorts, retelling the stories of those who have been subject to the “drive we have to exsanguinate public women.” It might be more accurate to call Bennett a eulogist gone off the rails, in that she addresses the dead directly. She’s written “short devotional texts” personally addressing Michelle Carter (the teen who texted her boyfriend to kill himself), Anna Nicole Smith, Heidi Fleiss (Hollywood madam), and artist Theresa Duncan (“You began attending 9/11 truth movement meetings…people still wonder if we will ever get to read the 27-page legal document you were preparing for your Scientology lawsuit”).

Bennett takes a non-consequentialist tack in writing about her heroines’s tragedies. She appreciates, above all else, a story girded by a kind of tragic, even poetic, optimism. “I appreciate your commitment to the idea that a new life is just a Greyhound bus ride away,” she writes. “Oh I have dabbled in reinvention myself—I have pretended to be studious and organized and ‘engaged.’” Activities someone else might write off to derangement, Bennett celebrates as creativity: “Your interrogation tapes are incredible…You used the euphemism ‘nose job’ to describe the initial gunshot to Ryan’s face.”

It’s important to note that she doesn’t frame anything as a cautionary tale. They’re more like sendups, as if she’s submitting a post-mortem application for her subjects’s icon status. Of Elizabeth Siddal—the 19th-century artist’s model who miscarried “rowing a boat around a lake at night and writing a poem to the dead baby” inside her—Bennett writes, “I understand why you finally had enough and overdosed by your fireplace with a note pinned to your nightgown.” Her subjects aren’t A-list celebrities, or rarely. “There are always going to be people who are interested in investigating culturally significant people. I’m more interested in failure. I relate most to disappearance,” she says. Spectacular failure, really, is her subject, and it throws her into a “death obsession lustmord.” (Of Peaches Geldof: “I read that Reddit feed about the time she did heroin with a stranger and then took him to the Hollywood Scientology center where they took tons of Niacin and sat in the sauna…”)

Much of Bennett’s scholarship occurs in semi-abandoned corners of the internet flat with the dust of understimulated hit-counters. She scours websites like Bestgore, Websleuths; FindaDeath.com (“Amanda [Peterson] you are special to me as the only celebrity I ever commented on in a public forum. I would call this forum a must read.”); dead people’s mother’s blogs; even self-published, unauthorized, fan-written scandal biographies. In Bad Behavior, she addresses “Call Girl Killer” Alex Tichelman, the woman who accidentally killed a Google executive: “In my experience, the parents of murderers are not reliable judges of character, so I felt very lucky when I stumbled upon a 46-page-long Topix forum… One of the most remarkable things about these comments is that almost everyone who knew you as a teenager uses exactly the same word to describe you, and that word is off.” Bennett happily watches YouTube tapings of 48 Hours, Dateline, Hard Copy, Dr. Phil, E True Hollywood Story; Nancy Grace; Lifetime re-enactments of crimes; Candice DeLong’s “Deadly Women”; episodes of Unsolved Mysteries. She sources National Enquirer post-mortem photographs; she reads non-fiction books like Mike Sager’s Scary Monsters and Super Freaks and Suicide in the Entertainment Industry (which she read while attending “a pathetically produced murder mystery weekend in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania”); and pornography forums.

She notes that a Yahoo group dedicated to Brittany Murphy claims that she picked up her Vicodin under “Lola Manilow,” and uncovers a website Murphy’s ex created after her death “where he posted a lot of horrible photographs that he took of you [dressed] as a clown.” She finds someone selling the handles from Judy Garland’s casket.

At the end of the day, though, the most interesting person in the zines, again and again, is Alissa herself. Like most obsessives, she’s worth obsessing over. It’s hard not to view her as a little touched. A snapshot of her 20s (I’ll let you find out about the rest of her life in the zines): Seventeen-year-old Alissa follows an older man to New York from Rhode Island after high school. He dumps her, so she rents an apartment in Brooklyn with the money she steals from her cashier job at a hair salon downstairs from the Saint Mark’s Hotel. (“A real loser job for 1996.”) Within a year, she’s discovered by a model scout, who cuts her hair and sends her to London to meet Edward Ennufil, who books her for two shows on the spot: Junya Watanabe, and the now infamous Hussein Chalayan “Burka show,” with models dressed in successively diminishing fabric. (“I was the cut-off before Zora Star showed full bush.”) She’s twenty years old. Steven Klein starts booking her for dozens of magazines. She moves to London, where lands the cover of i-D, and Dazed and Confused, and Juergen Teller includes her in his famous Go-Sees portrait series. She meets her future ex-ex-husband Banks Violette, the catalyst for an epiphany that “this guy is so smart and I’m like a stupid idiot.” This is the kind of epiphany, for a normal person, that would lead to a new hobby, or something.

But Alissa, incapable of doing anything halfway, quits modeling and moves back to New York to become a “passionless shop girl at If Boutique.” It’s just more dignified. For a few years, she actually believes this. She marries Banks, and gets another shopgirl position. But watching people spend money all day is demoralizing. Her whole life was suddenly demoralizing. (Banks was getting “really, really famous and I’m like, I’m just a loser who works at the Alexander McQueen shop.”) In a fit of panic, she applies to college at the New School, where she…meets a virginal 18-year-old Lena Dunham, crying in a bathroom stall after their Fashion and Identity Formation seminar. (Lena transferred to Oberlin soon thereafter, but their friendship was clearly written in the stars.) She graduates, and Banks gets her a better job, working at the gallery Luxembourg/Dayan. They divorce, remarry, and divorce again. She’s still in her twenties, by the way, and coming to the only worthwhile lesson from that decade: it’s just easier if you make something of yourself than to be somebody’s +1.

“Not only did I feel contaminated by the failure of a marriage that I had been counting on to save me from ever having to accomplish anything myself, but I also suddenly understood that I’d been foolish to believe that a rich person could like me on my own now that I was without an art-star husband,” Bennett writes in her newest zine.

It makes sense, in retrospect, that someone so committed to seeing herself as a loser, a word Bennett uses a lot to describe herself—despite everything always being, in my opinion, kind of glamorous—would become a historian of fuck-ups and bad behavior. (For the record, Bennett remains in the art world to this day; she has the same job as Jennifer Lawrence’s fiancé.)

No one tell her she’s cool; the work would suffer.