#poetry is meant to be mysterious and vague so people can make their own meanings from them

[the-coffee-fandom]

Psht 25 poems and 1 Moodboard deleted? No I would never.

If you saw any of my Tag Team Tournament submissions, no you didn’t

Submitted 27 things total and none of them counted due to insufficient tagging on some of them.

See you next year 😎

[machinavellian]

hi :)

i just wanted to pop into your ask box to say thank you for writing interstate! (as well as precedence!). interstate is, to this day, my favorite fic, and also, it is the fic that inspired me to start writing fanfiction. i've read it like a million times- i have a pdf on my computer and an epub on my phone so i can highlight my favorite parts. (i swear i'm not crazy, just autistic lol). i could go on and on about how your writing is perfect. the characterization, the plot, the prose itself. i generally hate happy endings in fics but you managed to write one that i love. i'll never stop thinking about how you wrote the sex scene in one sentence. to be able to get across the whole essence in one simple sentence takes so much talent i could never. and the way you did the pov switch without switching povs (where norman is imagining what ethan is doing) was brilliant! (i am awful about accidentally switching povs)

i wish i could explain myself better, but i'm not as good with words as you are.

anyway, since i'm here i also have a question, and i hope it's not too vague or stupid etc. but how do you do it?? (i guess what i mean is, what books/other media inspires your writing? do you have a writing routine or a secret tip? or is it just natural talent?)

sorry for being a weirdo but your fic is my roman empire so to speak

thanks again for writing and publishing (especially in our tiny little fandom!!)

pardon how late this is, i'm not at all good at tumblr lmao. but ahhh, thank you, you're very kind! it's so great to hear that something i wrote meant so much to someone else, and it's SO great to hear that it got someone else writing their own fic! no judgment whatsoever about the hoarding of copies, my autism is the cause of many mysterious choices i make in life 😌

it's a little embarrassing in a way because i most definitely don't consider myself a creator of great literature or anything, i just work hard on my fics and take the process of writing them seriously (maybe too seriously)... but i'm going to try to answer your question/request for tips as sincerely as i can!

read. like for real, read other people's writing! i actually don't do this nearly as much as i would like to anymore and i can tell my writing is a little rustier for it. when i read other people's writing, i sometimes feel like i'm filling up an invisible "tank" that holds my ability to do words good. :') as a personal example, i have a short story anthology by vladimir nabokov that i've been slowly whittling my way through for a million years -- i loved his prose the first time i read it in middle or high school and i think it has been a big influence on my desire to look for unexpected turns of phrase and vocabulary words i didn't know before. sometimes i like to keep a list of new vocab words i encounter as i read to look up later, but usually i end up getting distracted and looking them up as i go. 😩 though this is easier than ever if you're reading digitally, i suppose! i think learning to identify the things you like in writing is really important. for me, that has a lot to do with not only finding the exact words i want to describe something, but also their cadence/musicality in a sentence. i remember very little about the poetry terms i learned in school, but i think learning about the anatomy of poems can be a really useful tool when it comes to prose also! or if nothing else, it can be fun to try experimenting with shuffling around the order of words or substituting one synonym for another to see how it changes the overall sound and feel of a sentence.

write! then tweak/rewrite. i actually hate the advice "you gotta just write" lmao... pisses me off every time because i know it's true 😭 i can dick around writing notes/meta as long as i like (and i do), but there's truly no other way to make progress like just fucking writing SOMETHING down even if you hate it and think it's bad. i used to get academic papers done in college and grad school by quickly and sloppily blasting down the basic gist of my main points like a 10 year old and then going back and revising it to sound like an adult. it's a little different with fiction because i'm writing something i already actually want to write, but it can still help to jot down the bare bones of a scene even if i don't even use it in the end. writing out dialogue can help a lot in my experience. i do feel pretty strongly that revisions are nearly always necessary -- i don't always get my fics beta'd by another person, but at minimum i have to put it down and re-read it for myself to make sure everything is flowing the way i want it to. betas really are helpful, though, because a LOT of times i'll think something makes perfect sense in my head only to find out my friend has no idea what i'm on about lmao. this can also help with things like switching povs, like you mentioned! there's nothing wrong with having a pov switch happen in your fic, mind you! it's just that ideally it's happening because you wanted it to happen instead of like, uh-oh, i need to convey some information about norman that ethan doesn't have a way of knowing. it's funny you mention the fap/fantasy scene because i think that's literally what happened when i was writing it, like... i think i was like "hmm, i want to emphasize that ethan is most definitely Into norman and this thing that's growing between them, but i've stuck with norman's pov this entire time and i don't want to put one solitary scene of ethan pov in there, if i can help it... but hey, norman's a profiler! visualizing what people do when they're alone is his whole thing!" so that was the perfect excuse to frame it that way in the end. ✨

canon review for characterization. this has less to do with the mechanics of writing, but honestly, if i had to choose, i'd much rather read a fic that totally nails the characterization than one that's perfect on a technical level. y'know that meme that's like "he would NOT fucking say that"? i do everything i can to avoid eliciting that response lfkdslf. iirc while i was writing interstate i basically always had an LP of heavy rain playing so i could observe the way the characters react in different situations, listen to their speech patterns and the types of words/language they use, and just kind of... idk, absorb the general vibe a little bit, i guess? i know i just mentioned you have to write Actual Story and not just notes to make progress, but i do also tend to have a LOT of notes about like... "okay so norman actually really likes this guy, but the reason he's holding back his feelings is because he's given so much of himself to his work and he's so used to looking at people in the abstract that he struggles to connect with them, leading him over time to decide that he can't or isn't good enough to be what ethan deserves, and what could ethan maybe say or do to help challenge that so they can move forward?" etc etc.... at the risk of being Very Autistic, i find i do a lot of if/then calculations when it comes to plotting character beats. 😅 "if these two particular lonely dudes start to form a connection one night at a bar, what then?"

have a thesis. this feels kind of ridiculously pretentious when i write it out, but it honestly really helps me a lot with staying focused: it's basically me answering wtf my point is. why do i think this fic needs to be written in the first place? it's the thing i want to accomplish, the idea i want to share with people who read it. even if i don't have a solid statement to make, there's always SOME kind of central question i'm trying to answer -- a lot of times, that question is as simple as "man, you know, i really wanna see these two bone. what has to happen for that to be possible?" for precedence i think it was basically just "hey wouldn't it be fucked up if...?" and for interstate it expanded to "hey i think these two deserve a happy ending and they deserve to share it together. what does that look like?"

so i dunno, hopefully all that is at least slightly useful and not just self-indulgent rambling, but thank you for giving me the ability to self-indulgently ramble if nothing else 😭

but above all, please do not doubt your own ability! writing is hard and sometimes sucks but it's also a lot of fun and there's not a right way to tell the story you want to tell, it just matters that you tell it. so... DO 💪

[sloanemiller-blog]

❊Sloane Miller Application

Just posting my application for more insight into them and their feelings and feel free to go off this to plot with me!

in character: overview

Full name: Sloane Marie Miller

Used name(s): Sloane, Lo to her sister

Date of birth: February 26th, 1970. Born in the month of love and filled to the brim of it it seemed like an omen of good fortune.

Zodiac sign: Pisces. Pisces are very friendly, so they often find themselves in a company of very different people. Pisces are selfless, they are always willing to help others, without hoping to get anything back.

Pisces is a Water sign and as such this zodiac sign is characterized by empathy and expressed emotional capacity.

Gender identity and pronouns: They/them, sometimes she/her. They alternate between the two in different social circles and company, depending on the level of acceptance or mood of the day.

Sexual orientation: Pansexual, panromantic

Occupation: Author

in character: details

(1) Discuss your character. This can be formal or informal, and can be as long as you want. You can talk about any aspect of their characterization, any plans you have for them, and so on.

She lives to live, lives to breathe in the glow of sunlight and the coolness of a breeze on her skin; she lives for the laughter of her friends, the trickle of juice down her chin, and the steady stream of leaves skittering down the sidewalk. Life is hers for the taking and so she lives. She fills every inch of it, gives the air the breath it needs, brings light where there is none. Wide-eyed wonder, smile wide enough to break the tension that filters any room as they approach. Their sister standing guard behind them, gaze spearing anyone who dares approach with harm.

While somewhat initially shy, Sloane blooms like a soft rose stretching, grasping towards the sun. It is not that they are self-conscious or even hesitant to speak, it is just that they choose their words carefully around those that they do not interact with often. She’s far too earnest to mean much harm but she knows the harm that words can cause, the scars they leave behind, and tries to shape their words around the person who needs them most. It’s the soft words spoken underneath a staircase hidden in darkness or a comforting hand curling around a forearm that they offer more freely than the poetry in their head.

Growing up in a world where money is thrown about so freely and never much needed had a strange effect on Sloane. College was never an issue, clothes gifted freely, coffees already paid for before they stepped inside the shop. It is because of this that she tries to seek something deeper and something higher than just the frivolity of their possible lifestyle. Their mother called them an ‘old soul’ that preferred the company of books and endless questions about life that never got very far. Daisy was always the more wild of the two and so Sloane became more responsible by default in an attempt to stake a claim to their own identity. Being known simply as “Daisy’s younger sibling” carried enough weight and expectations that threatened to collapse their own identity and so they acted out entirely differently, despite the few opportunities to let loose. She was more controlled, more introverted, but more thoughtful in all the ways she thought mattered. Anything she wanted she worked her ass off for, regardless of any connections her parents tried to bring up. Her kindness grew from wanting, no, needing a connection of her own to people and being known for something other than those around her.

In preparation for their next novel, Sloane wants to dig deeper into the mystery of Joel’s death. For a night shrouded in so much red tape and confusion everyone seemed to accept the idea of it being an accident or suicide. She’d been high as a kite, floating loose and aimlessly through the crowds with too many joints passed her way to set them free. It had been a night of release, for everyone to celebrate, and Sloane had been swept up in the desire to do something different. But the shock of the night and loss of a friend in their social circle had shattered everyone’s high and trickled down into something akin to mourning.

(2) Headcanons

Whenever Sloane gets prepared to write, she absolutely covers her room in sticky-notes with different colored gel pens scattered about her room. It’s almost a hazard, the way papers burst into the air whenever she flops onto her bed only to scramble to piece them back together again. Most are barely legible, just prompts and words meant to be cobbled together for a broader story that only succeeds in turning her room into a nightmare. Notes are her preferred method of jotting down ideas due to the iBook being more of a hefty paperweight than the convenience she wants it to be.

Despite the popularity of her first novel, exposing the secrets of her friends and broader net of acquaintances, she’s been hitting a dead end of writer’s block. All of her work isn’t up to her standard besides the two other novels she forced out after the success of her first one to middling results. The reunion of Joel’s death brought her back to New York from her sabbatical to gain muse once more. Her newest novel idea was a delicate and empathetic exploration of loneliness. Of what it means to feel the edges of the space someone inhabits shrink inward and inward, until the world as they’ve known it is reduced to what’s inside of them; until it’s distorted into jagged lines that don’t fit together anymore. It was a reconnaissance on love or the lack of it, and the thousands of ways it can break you. It was an intimate look at slowly losing your mind. Or, at least vaguely, into the mind of Joel Buchanon and his last few months. All wrapped into a mind bending murder mystery of a man running from everything.

In the case of Joel Buchanon, Sloane was never as close to him as they imagined. No, Daisy was much more loud and out there than she ever was and claimed attention for herself. Still, she managed to find him coming down from a high here and there, guided him to the nearest flat surface and brought him water as he babbled. It was never more than a string of words guided by the pretty white powder in his pocket and a “Hey, you’re Daisy’s sibling right?” but it was enough. They were on the in’s and out’s of their social circle at times, younger than the rest of them, but Joel still recognized her on the off chance he wasn’t fucking around with something he shouldn’t have. His loss hit them surprisingly hard because Sloane had always tried to be there for him, tried to take him under her protective wing as much as she did anyone as he had been dealing with enough. It didn’t make a difference in the end.

Sloane’s gender identity was a struggle when they were younger, always confused on what was proper since they never felt entirely comfortable in tweed skirts and high heels. Daisy was always a trailblazer first and their clothing line led to obvious attempts at dressing Sloane in various outfits for help. Defining themself through clothing became an easy way of expression to defy expectations in the small ways they were comfortable with; coats became blazers, button-ups became sloughy t-shirts, pressed slacks replaced some of the more confining body suits. As they became more comfortable with the idea of being gender fluid and non-binary, they slowly eased into something more understandable and incorporated genderless pronouns into their life. Despite liking the anonymity it grants them, Sloane still enjoys a slight feminine side on certain days and isn’t above wearing a skirt now and then or presenting as more obviously feminine. Makeup and its ties to femininity became something of a statement; mascara here and there or a neutral lip gloss remained about as far as she would go most days. It’s more of an acceptance of themselves and all that comes from it and enhancing everything to the point of disguise never sat well with them.

Their writer’s name is Addison Swyft, an easy bypass to any questions that arise when the topic of their next novel is broached in the papers. Most have simply assumed its a man spinning tales of debauchery and living a high life supported by bottomless bank accounts. Sloane prefers it that way and deliberately left their identity up for interpretation as some of the things they intend to write about would leave them a social pariah.

Out of everything, their worst fear is not being enough. It covers a broad spectrum of everything from not being good enough at school or writing or even not being enough for her friends and loved ones, of being the rock that they desperately count on. Failure is crippling and the brief second guessing leads to tears hidden under staircases covered up by a bright smile and slightly shaking hands. She’s gotten so good at pretending she’s alright, that everyone’s fine, that everyone merely assumes she’s got it all together despite the desperate and aching loneliness she feels buried in her chest. They know that they’re good, that they’re honest and genuine and everything that they so desperately strive for. But it only makes it that much harder when it’s not. Joel’s passing has led to a flicker of doubt that nobody is safe from losing it all and she’s the only one picking up everyone else when they’re down that sometimes she needs someone to look at her a little more closely.

extras

So I created a little Pinterest board for some inspiration:

https://www.pinterest.com/chloefairy1/sloane-fortunate-age/

And a sample of my writing from another rp account:

His eyes have been on her since she’d stepped into the room.

She’d dallied as long as she had been able to, flirting with senators and cooing with their wives over their small babes that clung to their hips. Looking from under the haze of her lashes shows he remains glued to her form, hanging onto her every word and tracing the curves hidden beneath her gown. She deliberately traces the border of her dress’s plunging neckline, fingernail catching on the jewels lining the edge, and hears him audibly gulp.

When she moves to leave he follows. He grabs her elbow, palm callused and warm and rough against her arm, and stops her from walking any further. His chest grazes the back of her shoulder. She has never been so close to him before. And she doesn’t—and she can’t- he’s absolutely radiating heat and the wine she’d consumed swims suddenly into focus. “You meant to leave without saying goodbye?” His breath is moist against her neck, lips brushing freckles until shivers rattle down her spine. A fingertip brushes down the knobs, chasing those bumps until they snag on fabric and continue to settle on her lower back.

“You knew where to find me,” she whispers, eyes fluttering shut. He hums in agreement and her pulse speeds up when his grip tightens on her arm. The air around them feels swollen with possibilities, with all the potential for chaos, and her brain is drowning in wine, dizzy and looping with possibilities—she can’t process what she hopes is about to happen, can’t wrap her mind around dallying with a man who has dogged her steps for months now—Alexander the Great, a god in his own right—he isn’t easy and he isn’t patient and he will ruin her, she can already tell, and she will regret him, she will regret this, and she will buckle under the weight of his desire and she will survive, yes, she will always survive because that’s what she was born to do, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t hurt if he leaves. But she has not once touched his heart or his desire, not pressed inside to see where his longing truly lied, and yet here he is to claim her as he has claimed every other city that falls beneath his touch.

She stays.

She kisses him and it's like the lavender blush of a sunrise has melted into the red-orange haze of a sunset, like the briny swirl of high tide has infiltrated the sand-speckled slosh of low tide, like the glow of the moon and the rasp of the clouds and soft silk sliding through her fingers as she wishes and wants and prays— She kisses him, and he shivers. He kisses her, and she burns.

[theswiftarmy]

#28 - The Jitterbug Mystery

Music has a way of bringing anything back to life after it’s gone, or over.  If you don’t get this now, you’ll understand this when you listen to a song years after you’ve lost a friend, a lover, or a family member.  Music becomes a magical doorway into a world you once knew but lives in the present inside you.  But with every magic music memory doorway, exists a second door that can open unexpected memories.  It’s a bit like that scene in the movie Labyrinth, one door leads to the castle, the other to certain death, well, certain not death, but it can certainly bring back those memories you’d rather forget.  Good with the bad.  Some songs fish out good memories and some fish out creatures from the sea of bad memories.  Memories tucked away in the pages of a journal that sits on your shelf, and you stare at it from time to time, but don’t dare to open it up for fear of remembering that past.  Click click click… Flash flash flash…

The street was empty.  Kymmie Lawyer opened her closed eyes and found herself standing outside The Microsoft Theater.  Everyone seemed to be gone.  The sun had set.  The streetlights glowed.  The show was over.

“Where is everyone?!”  Kymmie said to herself.  Then she shouted looking around.  “Hello!  Anyone!?!?”  She felt tightness in her chest.  She was on her own, lost on this empty street.

“I don’t know.”  Her dad replied from beside her.

She smiled at him, just glad she wasn’t alone.  The fear in her chest dissipating.  She took a breath in as the tightness eased.

He looked up and down the street.  “This place is a ghost town.  There aren’t even any cars driving around.  I’ve never seen LA like this before.”  He looked at his phone, trying to get a signal.  “Hmmmm…”

“What is it dad?”

“I can’t seem to get a signal.  It just says SMPTE error.”

“You mean a Swiftie error?”  She looked up at him.

He pulled the phone in closer and squinted at it, “No, it says… SMPTE.”

She shrugged back.  “SMPTE.  Never heard of it.  Weird.  Maybe try walking around in circles.”

Carl knew what SMPTE was, he just wasn’t sure why his phone signal would have been replaced with the words SMPTE error.  He’d certainly never heard of a SMPTE error.  SMPTE stands for Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and to have an error with SMPTE didn’t make any sense.  “I think I might do that, I won’t go far, just stay here.”

Kymmie smiled at her dad, and then turned her attention to something fluttering in the wind.  Pages turning.  A small notebook on the ground.  She walked over to it and picked it up.  She inspected the notebook for a moment then opened the first page.  “The Perfect Playlist…”  She read out loud.  Maybe it was a journal, or a diary.  There were numbered lines but they were all blank, like someone had decided to make a playlist but never started it.  She flipped through the notebook noticing small bits and pieces of incomplete information.  Some celebrity must have dropped this, she thought.  It had to be someone from the red carpet!  She felt a rush of excitement.  They were standing very close to where the red carpet had been.  There were random doodles and a note here or there.  Some looked like lyrics, or perhaps poetry, some looked like movie set notes and reminders, photo-shoot dates in the margin, costume notes, make up, hair, tiny journal entries, tiny stories, tiny entries.  This IS a celebrity’s notebook!  She quickly flipped through the pages wondering whose it could be.  There were Ideas and doodles here and there.  But the center of every page was blank except for the numbered playlist on the very first page.  ‘The Perfect Playlist…’ Kymmie decided it needed to be filled in.  The notebook, or journal, or whatever this was seemed like it was meant to be written in.  She was now tasked with the responsibility to create The Perfect Playlist.

“Dad!  Can I have a pen?”  She yelled in his direction.

“Sure.”  He stopped walking in circles trying to get a signal and jogged over to her.  He handed her his special lawyer pen.

“Can I keep it?”  She asked.  Examining it.

“Well, how about you hold on to it until I need it back.  Okay?”

“Sure.”  She thought for a moment then wrote her name on the very first page.  She pressed the pen to the paper and went over the letters multiple times when she was finished Kymmie Lawyer displayed in bold at the top corner of the journal.  She closed the notebook and placed the pen back in her pocket.  She wasn’t quite ready to start filling in the playlist.  After all, how does one decide the exact songs that are just the right fit for a PERFECT playlist?  “What now?”  She asked.

“Let’s just wait here for a bit okay?  We’ll see if anyone else shows up.”

“Okay.”  She looked at the journal in her hands.  She felt another wave of excitement rush over her.  Then she looked up again at her dad.  He was restarting his phone.  “Are you trying to call your boss… Mr. Whale?”

“I was trying to call your mother, actually, but I’ll need to call him at some point too.”

“Why do you call him The Whale?”

Carl reflected for a moment.  “It’s a long story, a whale is a person with a lot of money.  It’s an old term.”

“Oh, so it’s an olden days thing.  I was going to say he doesn’t really look like a whale.”

Carl laughed and shook his head no.  “The nickname has nothing to do with his physical appearance.”

She blinked, then blinked again, thought about it for a moment, then moved on.  She opened the journal once again.  She decided the playlist NEEDED to be filled in and since she needed SOMETHING to keep her mind occupied now that her phone was broken, this would have to do.  Mostly, it was hard to leave a waiting playlist empty.  It was pulling her in.  The question was, what songs made the perfect playlist?  Kymmie couldn’t decide.  She would have to think about it.  Maybe just add some of her favorite artists.  She turned to the second page and created a new list, she called it ‘STAN LIST’.

Kymmie wrote ‘Stan Ariana Grande’ at the top in the number one spot.  Then she wrote ‘(OBVIOUSLY)’ in big bold letters.  She made a small heart drawing beside her idol’s name.  Then she wrote on the next line ‘Justin Bieber (is okay too).  Then she wrote, ‘Billie Eilish is pretty stylish’ on the third line.  She wasn’t about to full on stan either of them but she decided they were cool.’  She made a little smiley face.  Then she wrote Taylor Swift’s name down below that with an undecided question mark.’  Then she thought of the cat and drew a picture of the cat next to Taylor’s name.  She wasn’t sure how she felt about Taylor right now, she knew how other people felt, some loved her, some didn’t, but she wasn’t entirely sure about a lot of things at the moment.  She moved the pen back up to Ariana Grande and underlined her name. Okay, she knew that much at least, she’d do ANYTHING for Ariana.  Arianator for life.

She turned to the next page and wrote PLAYLIST POSSIBILITIES at the top.  She added more artists on her mind besides Ariana , Justin, Billie, and Taylor.  Cardi B DEFINITELY, and Roddy Ricch. She paused, thought, then continued writing, The Weeknd, Harry Styles, CHVRCHES.  She wasn’t sure what order and what songs she wanted this playlist to be in, she would reorder it later, right now she was just writing down artists she liked.  “I’ll just make a list and then cross the numbers out and change it later.  Ugh, paper.  Why do you have to be so difficult?”  She was talking to herself.  She tried to remember what she had saved on her phone.  She wrote down more names, Drake, Tones and I, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Lewis Capaldi, DJ Khaled, Dua Lipa…

She stopped writing for a moment trying to think of more.  She was drawing a blank, there were so many more SOOO many more she just couldn’t think of them!  Instead, she wrote down, ALL OF COACHELLA, even though she’d never actually been to Coachella, because her mom wouldn’t let her, but she watched it on live stream and it seemed like the best ever.  She thought back to Ariana’s Coachella performance, so amazing, ohhhh and Beyoncé!  Beychella.  She wrote down Beyoncé.  Then she went back up and underlined ALL OF COACHELLA.  Then wrote “ARIANACHELLA GRANDECHELLA”.  She lifted the pen again and looked up at her dad trying to get cell service.  “Hmmmm… THIS THING IS SOOOO COOOL!  I love this journal dairy book thing.”  She flipped through a few pages and found some writing in the margin.

The Jitterbug Mystery

“The Jitterbug Mystery?”  She read it again.  “Dad, what’s a Jitterbug?”  She yelled in his direction.

“It’s an old dance.”  He said back in her direction after looking up from his phone thinking for a moment.  He started walking towards her still not having any luck with getting service.  “I thought you didn’t like bugs?”

“Hmm, well, yeah, but this bug sounds interesting.  Is it as old as The Whale?”

Carl laughed.  “I’m not going to comment on the age of my boss.  If it gets back to him, I could be in some hot water.  I will comment on the dance, the Jitterbug dance is pretty old.  Why do you ask about The Jitterbug?”

“It’s written here.”  She pointed to it in the journal.

Carl looked over at the faded and worn looking notebook his daughter was holding up for him to see.  “Where did you find that?”

“It was over there.”  She pointed to where she found it.  “Someone dropped it.  It’s mostly blank, but…”  She pointed back to The Jitterbug Mystery writing.  “There’s some notes written here and there.”

He eyed the cover, it looked vaguely familiar, like an Art Nouveau painting, but he couldn’t quite place where he’d seen it. “Well, if you find a name, or figure out who it belonged to, we will have to return it to its rightful owner.  Just don’t get too attached to it, okay?”

“Ummm, I already wrote my name in it.  Sorry.  No big deal.  Where’s the undo on this tablet thing.  I’ll just undo it!”

“It’s pen and paper, you can’t undo it.”

“Oops.  Ugh, pen and paper, it’s like making life mistakes, you can’t go back!  It’s like that time I un-friended one of my best friends because they couldn't stan the same musician as me.  And then I was like, I miss my best friend.  Life is so hard when you can’t undo!”

Carl chuckled.  “I don’t think I’ve ever met this Stan friend of yours is, but hopefully you learned a valuable lesson from losing your friend.  Just remember, someone else is missing that book right now.  It will be up to you to take care of it for them.”

“Dad, stan isn’t a friend, it’s when you… Never mind.”  She pulled out the pen and thought for a moment. “Hmmmm…”   She pressed the pen into the paper and underlined The Jitterbug Mystery.  “I’m going to get to the bottom of this Jitterbug Mystery”, she said to herself the noticed more writing below, written in ink the same color as the paper, nearly invisible, but it was there if you held the notebook at just the right angle.

A perfectly imperfect playlist

Me… The right songs in the wrong order.

You… The wrong songs in the right order.

Us… The right songs in just the right order.

She read it again.  Kymmie let a feeling of awe wash over her.  “A perfectly imperfect playlist.  Me… You… Us.”  She ran her hand over the words.  Someone else’s words were grabbing her; the journal was pulling her into its mystery, its Jitterbug Mystery.  She started to wonder about its history, “Who are you?“ She said to the journal.

She removed the pen from the page and paused again to think for another moment, wondering which shelf this journal would sit upon were it not for this fork in the road, then turned back to the playlist page.  She wasn’t going to fill it out yet but, why not… it’s not like it was going to be a perfect playlist, at least not at first anyway, it was going to be perfectly imperfect, the wrong song or the wrong order, a perfectly imperfect playlist.  Kymmie decided to add her missing friends to the playlist.  She wrote down Justin Bieber, then moved the pen to the next line and wrote Billie Eilish.  She left the songs blank, she decided she would fill those in later.

Kymmie looked up from the journal after writing their names and spotted Billie and Justin walking down the street.  Billie was holding Justin up every few steps, but he seemed okay.

“Dad!  Look!”  She yelled.  “BILLIE!  JUSTIN!”

They picked up their pace, walking quickly over to her and Carl.

“Are you two okay?”  Carl asked.

“Yeah.  I think so?  I mean, we feel okay.”  Billie pointed to Justin and herself.  “I’m… just not exactly sure what happened.  I remember going through that doorway and then, it was a bit like that scene in Contact when Jodie Foster goes through that space gate, you know when she falls right through and no one believes her journey story because there’s nothing on the tape, it was a blank tape but then the one person points out that sure the tape was blank, but it recorded 18 hours of blank tape and then you’re mind is blown because you’re just like WHAAAAATTTTT, THIS IS REAL!  I love that part.  Anyway instead of space this was… what was it?  Some kind of an earworm wormhole?”  Billie looked at the others and they shrugged back at her.  The agreed to call it an Earworm Wormhole as that seemed to work.  “After the wormhole, everything went hazy and we were just here in the street.  To be honest, I was expecting something cooler at the end of the earworm wormhole.”

“Yeah, me too.”  Bieber added.  He looked a little like he was about to throw up, but then seemed okay again.  “So it kind of is like contact, all that wormhole traveling and you end up right back where you started.”

Everyone nodded. “Yeah.”  Carl replied with a furrowed brow.  “It was more of an exit door than an earworm wormhole.  One heck of an exit door though.”

“Where are the others?”  Billie asked.  “Where’s Lizzo, and Kanye?”

Carl looked back at Billie unsure.  He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.  “I don’t know.”

“Ohhh!  I should add them to this playlist too.”  Kymmie fished her hand into her pocket and pulled out the pen her dad gave (loaned) her (we all know he’s not getting it back), she opened the journal and wrote Kanye West and Lizzo on the playlist.

“I hope they’re okay!”  Billie looked up and down the street.

“Wait, Kymmie, you said playlist.  What playlist?”  Justin asked.

“This journaling book I found!  I don’t know… it was just lying over there.”  She pointed to the spot on the ground where she found it.  “But you're on it now!  See!!!  I added you, it was blank when I found it, but now you’re in it.  And Billie, so are you!  I just haven’t decided what songs of yours I want.  But don’t worry, I’ll pick something from each of you.”

“She’s going through phone withdrawal.”  Her dad said to Billie and Justin.

“Oh.”  They nodded.

“DAD!  I am not going through phone withdrawal.”

“Yeah, you are.”  He smiled at her.

She shook her head and rolled her eyes.  Kymmie pulled out her phone, it was still locked on the same screen.  Even a secret doorway couldn’t fix it.  She held it up.  “An earworm wormhole couldn’t bring my phone back!”  She put it back into her pocket.  “Oh well.  At least now I have this cool notebook journal thing.”

“You’ll just appreciate your phone that much more when you finally get it back.”  Billie smiled at Kymmie.  “Just keep writing in that book.  It IS pretty cool looking!  Look at that cover!”

“Yeah.  It is pretty cool looking.”  She repeated and smiled back at Billie.

“Kymmie, do you mind if I take a quick peek at that notebook journal”  Billie asked, eyeing the notebook. “Just real quick?”

“You promise to give it back?”

“Yeah.”  She crossed her fingers behind her back.

“Okay.”  Kymmie handed the mystery book over to Billie.

Billie’s thoughts flashed to what she was told backstage about the fabled celebrity suicides book, not that she was sure it even existed, but if THIS was it, Kymmie wouldn’t be getting it back, Billie would burn it, destroy it, without question, there’s been enough suicides in the world, let alone celebrity suicides in the world already.  She decided if that journal did exist, she could find it and destroy it, ESPECIALLY if The Whale was using it to gain control of valuable art assets to build his stronghold over all of streaming media.  She took a deep breath and opened the mystery notebook.  She quickly scanned through a few of the pages then breathed a sigh of relief.  It didn’t seem to contain any suicide notes.  Perhaps Emma Watson really was keeping the real collection of notes hidden somewhere only she knew, Emma and her mental fortitude not to read it.  How impossible it must be to have a book in your possession that you are never to read.  Billie returned the book to Kymmie.  As the journal left her hands she suddenly realizing if it HAD been the suicide book, what then?  She opened the book so eagerly, as if, she wanted to know if it was THE NOTEBOOK, it was as if she HAD to know.  ‘Don’t read it… don’t open it’ was her first thought, but, ‘I have to know!’  …was her second.  Maybe that’s how it worked, maybe you had to know.  You had to read it.  The curiosity of its mystery as it sat on the bookshelf drove you mad.  You knew what it did, you knew it was cursed; you knew it was destructive, but you couldn't stop, you wanted more.  She felt dizzy for a second, sick.  Billie made a small wish under her breath…

Emma Watson, don’t let a soul near that book.  If you really have it, if you REALLY do, it’s up to YOU to save the lives of anyone who might otherwise get their hands on it.  Keep it locked up tight.  And whatever you do, never open it, please, please, PLEASE, never read it, no matter how curious you might get.  Promise you’ll never read it.  You need to promise me you’ll never read the notes, not even one, because that’s how it starts, you read the first one, and then you can’t stop until it’s too late.  Like reading every terrible troll social media comment about a celebrity, each one burrowing its way into your mind with just a tiny bit more of that melancholy mixed with infinite sadness.

           “Wait where’s uncle Scott?” Kymmie asked.  She had been holding his hand when they went through the earworm wormhole.

“He’s your uncle!”  Justin exclaimed.  “Are you related to everyone!?”

“No… We just call people my dad knows aunt and uncle, I don’t know why we do that.  Dad why do we do that?”

Carl Lyle Lawyer shrugged back at his daughter Kymmie Lawyer.  “Ummm… It’s just something we’ve always done.  I don’t really know either, my dad and used to do that, so I do too.  I never really thought about it before.  I honestly have no idea where it came from.”

It’s a curious thing to consider, not knowing the origin of something in your life that you do.  Everything came from somewhere.  There’s a history to everything about everyone.

“Do the others make music?”  Kymmie asked suddenly, seemingly out of the blue.

“As far as I know they all play instruments, I mean Oak is a famous music producer and writes music and Pop too, Scott plays an instrument, I believe.  Why?”

“I was going to add them to my playlist.  You know what, I’m going to put them on this playlist anyway.  I can always scratch their names out, TAKE THAT PEN AND PAPER!  You aren’t so permanent after all!  And anyway, everyone has the ability to make music!  Who am I to judge?  I’m not a judge, I’m a lawyer.”  She started to write down each name on the playlist beside a number.  She even wrote down the man of mystery who opened up the earworm wormhole that they has just traveled through, William B. Way.

“Oh Kymmie.”  Billie rolled her eyes laughing at Kymmie Lawyer’s joke.

Justin and Carl laughed too.

“I mean, that was kind of funny.”  Justin cracked a half smile.  “You know, for a lawyer you’re funny.”

Carl stared at Justin with a very serious look on his face.

“It… Umm..” Justin pulled at his collar, “It was a joke.  I tell ya… can’t get no respect.  Soooo… how about that unrelated sporting event?  Go Maple Leafs!”

Carl continued to stare at Justin.

“Look!”  Kymmie yelled and pointed, as if she were recognizing some old friends at a concert.  Lizzo, Oak Felder, Scott Borchetta, Kanye West, Pop Wansel, and even Will B walked out of a shadow and into the street.  “HEY!”  Kymmie waved.  “OVER HERE!!!  WE’RE OVER HERE!”  She waved her arms wildly jumping up and down.

They ran down the street to make the group whole again.  Everyone had made it safely to the other side of the wall of sound earworm wormhole.

[brigdh]

October Readings

In which I read a bunch horror novels because it's Halloween. Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. A novel in the recent genre of "Lovecraft but with antiracism". In this one, the main character Atticus Turner is a young black man in the 1950s who has just discovered that he is the closest living descendant of a powerful wizard from early America (via Atticus's great-great-great-however many times grandmother, who escaped from slavery the same night the wizard accidentally immolated himself and everyone he was close to in an attempt to gain greater power). The wizard's surviving followers have tracked Atticus down and would like to use him for a ritual he is not intended to survive. They kidnap his father to force Atticus to follow him to their creepy small town in rural New England. This sets off a series of events in which Atticus, his extended family, and several friends are repeatedly caught up in supernatural events: a coup within the wizard cabal, haunted houses, magic potions that grant tempting powers, visits to distant planets, devilishly evil – literally! – cops, treasure hunts for mysterious artifacts, and so on. Each chapter is relatively disconnected from the others and focuses on a different character, so the book has somewhat of the feel of a series of short stories rather than a regular novel. Since Lovecraft himself was more of a story writer than a novelist, the homage is obvious. Through it all, though, the specter of Jim Crow racism proves more dangerous and pervasive than any creature from another dimension. One of the most haunting sections is a flashback to the childhood of Atticus's father, when he escaped the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. I wanted to like this book more than I did. There's nothing wrong with it, exactly; I just wanted it to go a bit deeper or explore further than it ever actually did. Most of this is down to the short story-esque format; since each one has a new narrator and plot, I never got to know any of the individuals well enough. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly scary book either, though to be fair it's not trying to be. The concept of wizards competing over ancient books of power is really the only detail it takes from Lovecraft. There's no ancient gods or mind-breaking geometry man was not meant to comprehend here, nor races of squid-people. Lovecraft Country is apparently being produced by HBO as a series, which seems like a great idea. I suspect this is one of those cases where an adaptation (particularly a serial one, like a TV show) could do more with the material than the original did. Bone White by Ronald Malfi. A horror novel set in contemporary rural Alaska. Paul Gallo has a contentious relationship with his drop-out druggie twin, Danny, but ever since Danny disappeared a year ago while on a trip to "find himself", Paul has been dedicated to figuring out what happened to him. Then a serial killer surrenders in the small town of Dread's Hand, Alaska – the same place Danny was last heard from. Paul, of course, heads to Alaska to start his own investigation, and discovers that something supernatural may be going on. The people of Dread's Hand tell stories of a devil who turns people "bone white" – poisons them from the inside, leaves them soulless and dangerous – and everyone, from the local cops to the hotel owner to the serial killer himself, is clearly helping to cover up whatever happened to Danny. This was an absolutely fantastic book. Malfi is not only a master at creating creeping tension, conveying the horror of absolute isolation, coming up with straight-up uncanny images, and just generally being scary, but his prose has a beauty that's rare in this genre. A few random examples of lines that struck me: Daylight broke like an arterial bleed. He could feel the slight increase in his heartbeat, and despite the cold that he’d carried in with him from the outside, a film of perspiration had come over him. He felt amphibious with it. Blink and you’d miss it: a town, or, rather, the memory of a town, secreted away at the end of a nameless, unpaved roadway that, in the deepening half light of an Alaskan dusk, looks like it might arc straight off the surface of the planet and out into the far reaches of the cosmos. A town where the scant few roads twist like veins and the little black-roofed houses, distanced from one another as if fearful of some contagion, look as if they’d been excreted into existence, pushed up through the crust of the earth from someplace deep underground. There is snow the color of concrete in the rutted streets, dirty clumps of it packed against the sides of houses or snared in the needled boughs of steel-colored spruce. No one walks the unpaved streets; no one putters around in those squalid little yards, where the soil looks like ash and the saplings all bend at curious, pained, aggrieved angles. And even farther still, he saw what appeared to be an impromptu landfill—a conglomeration of old washing machines, truck tires, TV antennas, and even an entire discarded swing set lay in a jumbled heap in the overgrown grass, like some beast that had succumbed to the elements and left its skeleton behind. Sure, it's not poetry, but it's a damn sight better than the workmanlike prose that I expected, and is a major part of why I loved this book. Another thing I adored was Jill Ryerson, investigator in Major Crimes Fairbank and the book's secondary narrator. Despite Paul and Jill being relatively the same age and both single... they never hook up! They never even waste time experiencing 'sexual tension'! They just get on with their jobs, interacting like two platonic professionals! DO YOU KNOW HOW RARE THIS IS? I was ecstatic when I realized that there wasn't going to be some dumb romantic subplot. Jill even gets this wonderfully un-feminized description when she fall ill at one point: "A whip of Kleenex corkscrewing from one nostril and a steaming mug of Theraflu on the counter, she’d listened to McHale’s voice in disbelief." There are complaints I could make about Bone White: there's a dumb recurring theme of powerful chakras, and the ending felt a little anticlimactic. But all of that is minor compared to the all-important trio of 1.) a genuinely scary book, with 2.) lovely writing, and 3.) well-written, competent female characters who are not there to be sexual foils for the male heroes. This is the first book I've read by Malfi, but I was incredibly impressed and will definitely be reading more. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. This is one of those books where just figuring out what the hell is going on takes until the end; they can be fun to read, but they're damn hard to review. So here's what we know: a significant portion of the southern US (I assumed, though now that I think about it, I believe the country is never actually specified) has been cordoned off by the government for decades and renamed "Area X". Exactly what happened to Area X – something supernatural? alien? environmental? disease-related? radioactive? – is either unknown or deliberately suppressed, but the only humans allowed into the area are small teams of explorers. Our unnamed narrator, known only as "the biologist", is a member of the twelfth expedition, along with three other women: the anthropologist, the surveyor, and their leader, the psychologist. All members of previous expeditions have died, either within Area X itself – whether of suicide or killed by other members of their team – or after returning, due to aggressive cancers. The biologist is meant to study the pristine wilderness created by humans having abandoned the area, but she slowly realizes that the act of observation is changing her as well, turning her into something that may not be quite human. Her past and her reasons for taking such a job are also slowly revealed. It's a short novel (about 130 pages), and though there's plenty of unsettling descriptions, we never do get a firm answer on what's going on with Area X or why any of this is happening. Annihilation reminded me a lot of House of Leaves. There's that same sense of the normal being made uncanny, though in this case it's swamps, a lighthouse, and dolphins with too-human eyes rather than a four-and-a-half minute hallway. Nor are there any explanations to be had, except in the vague sense of symbolism and the main character's psychology. Unfortunately, unlike House of Leaves the cryptic nature of Annihilation didn't quite work for me. I'm all for open endings, but when the characters, the plot, the setting, and the meaning are all vague as misty streaks on a cloudy night, I'm left with nothing to hang on to. It had some lovely descriptions of plants, I'll give it that. Invasive by Chuck Wendig. I asked for recs for scary reads over on twitter, and call_me_ishmael provided me with a list, of which I chose this one. There's a very simple reason for that: it's a horror novel about ants. A lot of people are creeped out by spiders. Me, I've never been able to stand ants. The shiny blackness of their surfaces, more like metal or plastic than any organic substance; the unnaturally sharp angles of their joints and segments; the flat reflectiveness of their eyes; the pointed mandibles in the base of their overly aerodynamic heads... it's wrong. Alien, robotic, monstrous – I'm not sure which, but they just don't seem like something from Earth. And so an entire book focusing on a creature that already makes me uncomfortable seemed like the perfect read for October. In a rural cabin in upstate New York, FBI consultant Hannah Stander is called to what may or may not be a crime scene. An unidentified body is found with its skin having been eaten by ants; the ants themselves were later killed off by a cold snap. Hannah and others at first assume the guy was probably dead before the ants arrived, but as they investigate further they discover the ants are of no known species. Or rather, they're of multiple species: the ants are genetically modified organisms combining the traits of many different kinds of ants to make them uniquely and viciously deadly. They possess a venom potent enough to paralyze a human with anaphylactic shock after a single sting, and they're drawn to harvest human skin for its yeast in much the same way leaf-cutter ants collect greenery to grow fungus. An investigation of their DNA finds markers tying the ants back to the company of an eccentric billionaire of the Richard Branson/Elon Musk type; he, of course, denies all involvement, but Hannah is invited to travel to his privately-owned island where his team of scientists do cutting-edge research. And where they are all horribly isolated when the ants break out. Hannah is a fantastic character to be the narrator of a horror novel. She suffers from panic attacks and has anxiety about everything – global warming, antibiotic resistant diseases, turbulence, etc – so her constant low-grade tension builds suspense before anything even happens. On the other hand, she was raised by off-the-grid doomsday prepper parents, so when the shit hits the fan she has the training and drive to survive the end of the world. She's complex, likable, and flawed, and I enjoyed spending time with her. Invasive is apparently a sequel to Wendig's Zer0es, but there is relatively little overlap between the two (Hannah, for example, seems to be new for this book), so I had no problem reading it as a stand-alone. I do have a few complaints: the section of the book between the first death and before the ants are released is pretty slow-going, as Hannah just wanders around interviewing scientists and contemplating who might be lying. But once swarms of ants are covering the island, things kick up to such a high gear that all that boring stage-setting is redeemed. Secondly, the ultimate reveal of who made the ants and why wasn't satisfactory. Still, the horror genre as a whole can almost never stick their landings, so I suppose I can't hold it against Invasive too much. Overall, this was the perfect horror techno-thriller: exciting, gross, and cheesy in just the right amounts. The Wishing Tree by Aline Hannigan. I'm pretty certain I bought this because it was written by a fanfic author I enjoy, but of course now I can't remember whose penname it is, so maybe I was mistaken about that. Anyway. In this novella, Theodora Miller – expert in weird supernatural shit – is called from her home in East Harlem to a small New Hampshire town suffering from a plague of mysterious murders. They seem to be connected to the 'wishing tree', an old oak in the nearby forest that local folklore has caused to be carved with the initials of every resident. Also, it turns out that there's a deadline: Theodora has only a few days to solve the case before the entire town will be destroyed. The Wishing Tree suffers from a few minor grammar mistakes (though if the author was one of you, let me know and I'm happy to do a beta), but overall I liked the inventiveness of the mystery and its resolution. There's a twist at the end that nicely ties up the plot, the creepiness of the scenario is well-developed, and both Theodora and the local sheriff were interesting, effective characters. Fifty pages doesn't give one much room to build up the world, but I see the author plans to write the further adventures of Theodora and that could make for a very promising series. It kept me engaged despite reading it on a turbulent flight, and what more can humanity really ask for from our greatest literature?

[DW link for ease of commenting]

[downwithwritersblock]

I'm a 13 yr old bi writer in a very homophobic country. I wrote a couple of stories (personal+vent), and my dad wants to publish them. He is v v homophobic and my stories have many lgbtq+ characters (he hasn't actually read them yet.) I don't want to change my characters sexualities, but people over here get killed for being lgbtq+ or even supporting them. I wanna make it more subtle without actually erasing their sexuality, any advice? And can I just have some general writing advice as a minor?

I want to start off by saying that I am sorry. When I first started writing, I was just a bit younger then you are now, and I was about 15 when I first started realizing that I wasn’t straight. Now here I am, years later, a grown adult, and I am still too afraid to share my stories with my family, and I am even more afraid to come out to them. My circumstances arent any where near as harsh as yours. I live in California, in the U.S, and for the most part, we are pretty chill on the homophobia here, at least in my experience, and while my parents arent extremely homophobic, they still tend to look at LGBT+ very differently. I know the worse thing that could happen to me if I came out is that my parents start to look at me differently, but that still terrifies me, but If I am scared, I can’t possibly imagine what you are feeling. So I want to give you some pieces of advice that I wish people would have told me when I was your age.: 

1. Your writing is yours. You don’t have to show it to anyone, you don’t have to publish it, if you want to keep it to yourself, then that is fine. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. If your dad is persistent in wanting to get your writing published, find good reasons not to; Tell him they arent complete or that you arent finished with them (that’s what I tell my parents when they ask to read my story), tell him that you want to wait till you’re older when you have more experience and confidence and more possibilities. Make up whatever excuse you have to. If you don’t think you are safe to publish them, then don’t. It’s not worth your life. Nothing is worth your life. 

2. If you really do want to tone down the LGBT+ themes in your writing, it’s easy; First, avoid all romantic relationships. That’s the dead giveaway, try not imply anything either, leave it at friendship, or up to reader interpretation, and if anyone asks, you could tell them it’s just a friendship. Don ‘t explicitly say anyone is a member of the LBGT+ community, you can imply it, if you have a bi female character, and you want to calmly express that she is bi, let her check out another female. If anyone asks, chalk it up to her admiring another girl, or that she’s jealous of other girls beauty or something. I’ve used this one a few times as well. Leave everything kind of vague, don’t get too specific. Make everything so it could be LGBT+ rep if looked at a certain way, but to most, it would just be friendship, or closeness, or something. I often find that while it’s disgusting and harmful at times, heteronormativity can also be lifesaving. Most straight people will automatically assume things are straight until given too many clues to say otherwise. Use that to your advantage. 

3. Writing is hard. When I was 13, I thought writing was going to be this easy thing, I thought you just made up characters and scribbled out a little story about them. I had no idea how hard writing actually was, and it shows. If I go back to look at my writing from that time, it shows how little work I actually put in. Give writing all you’ve got. Take your time with it. Build your characters and your world and your plot as much as you can. Save all the resources you can find. People make writing out to be easy but it’s not, and you can’t let that derail you. Keep going. Take it as a challenge. Keep writing no matter how hard it gets. 

4. Don’t let anyone tell you that you cant. I don’t care who it is, or what reasons they have to tell you that you shouldn’t write, do not listen to them. When I was a little kid, I used to sing all the time, I loved to sing, and everyone encouraged me to do so because I was a kid and it made me happy. My parents even thought about sending me to singing classes. Then one day my big sister told me that I wasnt as good as everyone said I was, that they only said that so they wouldnt hurt my feelings. After that, I lost all confidence in singing. I never took those classes, I never felt comfortable singing in front of people. It was years before I sang in the car with my own mother without feeling uncomfortable, and it’s still bad. I have a full mental breakdown if I try to sing in front of people without lyrics to sing along to, and being a theater student, that meant musical season kicked my ass every year. I know that was a long, unnecessary story, but my point is, people, no matter who it is, are going to tell you stupid things. They could mean to bring you down, and it could just be an off-hand comment, but you can not let it get to you. Take everything as a challenge. If anyone ever doubts you, prove them wrong. Never stop doing something you love, just because of something someone says to you. 

5. You’re young. You have a lot to learn. Don’t deny that. No, I am not calling you stupid, the opposite actually. When I was your age, I thought I was so damn smart for my age, I thought I knew everything, I thought I was above what people could teach me. That was stupid. I wish I had reached out to people. I wish I had asked people for help, for advice, for guidance. I wish I had the confidence to ask people for help when I needed it, but I never did. You did. You had enough confidence to come into my inbox and ask me for help. Keep that confidence. Find people you can trust, make friends in the writing community, find mentors. You might think you don’t need one, but trust me, growing up in the writing world, you will find a lot of moments you are going to wish you had someone you could easily reach out to for help. You are not stupid, don’t let anyone tell you are, especially because of your age. But avoid the mistake that I made, and realize that you are naive, and that you do have a lot to learn. Writing is an ever evolving trade. No one is a master in writing, thinking that you are is only going to mess you up, and ruin your confidence later on, and weaken your ability to learn and grow later on. Trust me, I know. 

6. Don’t cater to anyone. Do not write what other people want you to write. Write what makes you happy. Write for yourself first, other people later. Write the story you want to see in the world. Write something you would want to read. I guarantee you if you would like to see that story, then so would other people. I spent a  long time trying to write what I thought people would like to see me write, and that resulted in me not liking my own stories. I hated my own stories, I was bored with my own stuff, because I wasnt writing what I liked to write. 

7. Practice! Practice! Practice! The best way to grow in writing, just like with any other art form, is to practice. Find writing exercises, keep journals, play with prompts, Make short stories, try poetry, try song lyrics, Just write. 

8. It wouldnt kill you to read a book. Read books of every genre, read poetry, read plays, read novels and autobiographies. Read. Reading can help inspire you, and can help give you basic writing guidelines, and it could help you find your style. The kind of books you like to read? Guess what? That’s the kind of writing you should be doing. If you love mystery novels? Guess what you’ll have loads of fun doing? Hate romance novels? You know the kind of genre to avoid trying to write then. Dyeing for a good horror fantasy book? Write it yourself. (Also, side tip: Your favorite books? Get two copies if you can. For many of my favorite stories, I have two copies if I had the opportunity. Why? Annotation of course. I break them down. Like a puzzle, find what I like about them. What I don’t like. What works. What makes them so good to me. It adds fuel to my fire.) 

9.  This isnt completely about writing, but it is something I wish someone had told me: Your life is so valuable. I know you said people in your country can be killed for being or supporting LGBT+ so I just want to remind you to be careful. Don’t do anything that could put your life at risk, please. I struggled a lot at your age, for many different reasons. I wish someone had told me that my life was valuable. That my future is worth living for. Hell I wish I had someone to tell me that now. Look, the future is a wild thing, and you never know what it has in store for you, but I promise you, it’s worth finding out. I promise you that If you want it to, and if you try hard enough, the future can be a great place. You just gotta fight for it. You gotta fight to see it. I don’t know if that’s something you are struggling with, but just in case you are, or just in case someone tries to convince you that publishing your stories the way they are would be worth it, I need to say that: Do not do anything that could get you hurt. Do not risk it. Save them, save your stories for a time in your life when you can publish them they way they are meant to be. You’ve got a long life ahead of you, and you’ve got a lot more stories to write. Don’t let anyone or anything keep you from that. 

I really hope that helps, and I wish you the best of luck with everything. If you ever need anything else at all, please don’t hesitate to ask me. My inbox is always open! 

[lubdubsworld]

Perfect Husband ( Jung Kook/Oc)

Chapter 5

In the early light of dawn, Ah Reum looks like a child, Seokjin thinks, watching the gentle slope of her bare shoulders half covered by the white silk of their bedcover. Her hair is messy, soft and fluffy, like spun silk in his hands, slipping through his fingers like flowing water . He almost reaches out and cups her cheekbones, but stops himself , wary of waking her up . Her breathing is gentle and uninterrupted, her face completely at repose and he's sure that she's never looked more beautiful.

He remembers the first time they'd made love. About a month after their marriage. He'd been eager, excited, looking forward to a lifetime of the vibrant , beautiful girl who was kind, selfless and adorably funny.

But she hadn't wanted it .

Of course, she hadn't said so. She'd nodded, agreed and said yes. Once , twice and then a countless more times when he'd slid into her, pressed her into the soft downy mattress in the oak, four poster bed of their 5000$ a night  beach resort, the sound of the waves and the rain permeating the air while he moved inside her in smooth, gentle strokes, her face framed in his hands while she had  stared sightlessly at the ceiling over head. Her gaze had been glassy and ... lost. Like she wasn't sure who she was, where she was, who was inside her and it had hit him like a cannon ball.

He wasn't the one she was thinking of.

He hadn't pressed the issue. Hadn't even brought it up.

She had let him kiss her, pressed her perfect lips against his, allowed him to explore her with his tongue, to taste every inch of her skin, to touch and savor every curve dip and recess of her body with his clever surgeon hands. And she had enjoyed it, there was no doubt about it. Ah Reum was too inocent to fake pleasure , and Seokjin wasn't exactly a bad lover. She had enjoyed herself, exploded around his fingers, his tongue and his body on countless occasions.

But  she hadn't wanted it.

He straightens, moves away from the bed and moves to the bathroom, opening the door cautiously and stepping into the sprawling white room. He stops in front of the oval mirro, staring at himself.

He looks starkly beautiful, a kind of lifeless beauty he thinks. Seokjin is beautiful only when he's perfectly still, hair styled perfectly, lush lips curved in the barest of smiles and wide brown gaze steady and sincere. He's beautiful when he's slipping into his pure white coat, slipping the stethescope around his neck, perfectly buttoned up shirt underneath, stretched creaselessly across wide, wide shoulders.

He's beautiful when he's saving lives, maybe, but not beautiful in general.

Not beautiful in the way Jeon Jung kook is beautiful.

Seokjin is art in repose. 

Jung Kook on the other hand, is poetry in motion.

Jung Kook is young, handsome in a masculine , rugged alpha male kind of way. Dangerous, sexy and alluring. Mysterious. . Probably the first to throw a punch in any fight.

Words that would never be associated with someone like Kim Seokjin.

Seokjin is a pacifist, a healer. He sticks his fingers inside living things, puts together broken pieces of muscle, bone and sinew and tries to restore order whereas Jeon Jung Kook is chaos personified. He destroys lives, wrecks them with his beauty, enchants with that angelic voice and enamors people with the way his hips move.

How could Seokjin compete really? It's not a fair playing ground by any means.

They were both so different.

Like Summer sun and torrential rain, Seokjin thinks, washing his face carefully, smoothing in his foam cleanser into his face. He uses a no-nonsense , anti bacterial kind and he has less than an hour to be at the hospital so he can't afford to spend a lot of time getting ready anyway.

It’s not a fair playing fround, but Seokjin isn’t going to give up, yet. 

When he walks back out of the bathroom, towel slung low on his hips he finds her sitting up, bleary and confused. She's fumbling across the bed, fingers patting the sheets looking for her clothes. He catches sight of the bra at the foot of the bed and hands it over. She's too sleepy to feel shy, he muses, when she sits up straighter, lets the sheet fall off her upper body, pooling around her waist . 

Seokjin feels his throat go dry. He’s a doctor. The human body ought not to arouse so much reaction in him but fucking hell, she’s gorgeous. breasts that fit perfectly into his arms, perky pink nipples that look like they can cut glass, a flushed pink tint to her skin as she shivers lightly against the cold. 

He stares at her, while she slips on her bra and buckles it up at the back. Her T-shirt follows and then her simple white shorts. He wants to climb back in, peel off every inch of fabric and slide into her again. He’s so cold and there’s nothing warmer than sinking into her, letting her close around him , letting her scent permeate all the cold recesses of his heart. He wants her. He wants her bad. 

But he curbs the urge. He’s late. She’s still tired from last night. Probabaly sore too. He’d been a little tense after work and ... he hadn’t exactly been gentle. 

He wondres if it makes him a bastard. Knowing how much it probabaly hurts her to let him touch her that way and not do anything about it. but he tries not to think about that. He thinks , with time, Ah Reum will learn to love him. 

Once she's dressed , she stumbles out of the bed and zombie walks to the bathroom while he moves to their shared closet space.

By the time she comes out, he's dressed, slipping his watch on and adjusting the knot of his tie against the collar of his powder blue shirt.

"You look nice." she smiles and he returns the gesture. He knows she means it. And that's the essence of the problem, he thinks. His wife has never misled him. She's  pliant , adjusting, reasonable. She likes him, possibly even loves him. But she isn't in love  with him. And Seokjin has never felt the difference between those two phrases so strongly before. So strongly that he feels like someone just stuck their bare nails into his chest, clawed their way in, gripped his insides and were now ripping him open. He swallows the hurt and manages a weak smile.

"I have a meeting. It may run late. Don't wait up for me." He smiles and she nods, without moving.

He glances at the digital calendar on the wall. It's the end of september already, just a few more weeks to their second wedding anniversary. For their first, he'd taken her to Paris. For her birthday, he'd flown her down to Macau and Vietnam and then spent a week in the Maldives. He knows now that the problem isn't the place but the partner.

So he'll let her choose, although he knows she'll want to go back to Seoul. She'll smile at him assure him that she'll stay with her parents for a while .

I miss them, Jin, let me stay here for a few days, she would whisper.  Okay, shall I ask someone to pick you up later?,   he would ask.  No, I'll be fine. You should go back to Busan. she'd probably reply.

And if he had an ounce of self respect, he'd leave her. Really.

But she's still my wife, he thinks stubbornly. Mine, not Jung Kook's.

~~~~~~~~~~~

"Jeon Inc., CEO is planning on retiring. ." Seokjin said casually, while I finished clearing up the plates from dinner. It was one of those rare occasions when my husband had come home for dinner, early. 

i didn’t cook. 

My fingers trembled of their own accord and I dropped the forks on the ceramic plates, the resulting sound feeling like some sort of an accusation as I tried to get myself together.

"Mr. Jeon?" I said nervously, my voice shaking a little bit more than my fingers. Seokjin hummed and stepped right next to me, gently nudging me away and taking the dishes himself. 

He cooked whenever he was home, so I usually cleared the dishes but my brain was slow to catch up and I let myself sit down on the chair.

Jeon Jung Kook. I wanted to cry.

It had been three years but I still wanted to cry when I thought of him.

"His son would be stepping in as the CEO , I guess." He said , very pointedly  looking at me as he took the used glasses as well. I hesitated, not sure what to say.

"He's an idol. I don't think-"

"Not an acting one. Just as the face of the company. " He shrugged, " Like me."

I nodded absently and fumbled with the ring on my finger.

"You do that whenever we talk about Jung Kook." Seokjin said suddenly and I froze.

"What?"

"You touch our wedding ring... When I mention Jung Kook...Like it's a handcuff and not just a ring." The bitterness coating his tone felt like ash on my tongue.

"Jin..."

"It's alright. I'll put some of the leftovers in the freezer. You can finish it off for lunch." He said swiftly, gathering the rest of the crockery and moving out of the dining space. I sat there, confused and guilty. I hadn't meant to hurt Jin. Hadn't meant to hurt anyone.

When we settled down to bed, Jin stayed a good foot away from me. I didn't remember the last time we'd made love. it had definitely been more than a few weeks. It didn't matter, i thought vaguely, staring up at the ceiling while he breathed evenly next to me. It didn't matter whether we had sex or not, whether we talked or not, whether we smiled at each other or not.

Because at the end of the day, we  didn't matter.

There was no Ah Reum and Seokjin. There never had been. Probably never would be. How could it? When I spent most of my time worrying and thinking of Jung Kook.

It was hard not to.

Of all his friends, only Yoongi after several failed attempts had agreed to talk to me. He had been blunt and brutally honest. Jung Kook was pissed, annoyed, and angry. He couldn't accept that what had happened was for the best. Neither could I. After three years, things that had seemed so important back then were just vaguely distressing now. It struck me that there would have been other ways out for me, from that predicament. My father would have found a way...

But I'd done something irreversible. I'd ruined , not just my life but Seokjin's too. The guilt weighed heavily on my soul.

"I'm sorry." I said softly, when the breathing next to me hitched.

"Don't" His voice was sleep heavy but firm.

"We could... We could divorce. If that's what you wanted." I said nervously.

Jin didn't reply. But I couldn't let it drop.

"You deserve better...I..."

"And you deserve someone like Jeon Jung Kook? Wild? Rough? Reckless. " He said sarcastically.

"I don't know. But I certainly don't deserve someone perfect like you." I choked out. He sighed deeply and then turned around to face me.

"Stop it. Stop this nonsense. " He said firmly.

"I..."

"Jung Kook is getting engaged next month. He's going to marry the daughter of Kingdom Corp., Her name is Lisa and she's also an idol." He said bluntly.

I stopped breathing.

"I didn't want to tell you this but as one of the partners with Kingdom corp., I'm going to have to be there. And you would too."

I was going to be sick. I really was.

"I... I need water..." I stumbled out of bed and barely got my bearings before he caught me close. I tried to wriggle out but his grip tightened.

"Listen to me and listen close. Whatever was there between you and Jung kook, I won't let you destroy yourself over it. He’s not coming back to you. You’re my wife and i don’t want you to fucking ruin your life over him!" He said roughly and I whimpered in protest.

"Let me go ...I..."

"You thinks it's funny? Watching you play martyr is the most horrible thing I've ever gone through. Make up your mind, whether you want to be an idiot for the rest of your life?. Whether you want to spend the rest of your life with him in your head and me in your bed ." He snarled and I lost it . Shoving him hard I moved away.'

"Shut up.... Shut up. You don't know anything about me. Anything. " I hissed out, the vehemence in my voice surprising even me.

Seokjin scoffed.

"I'd venture I know enough to say that you're a hypocrite. You act like you don't care about him...Like you don't think of him every fucking minute of the day but you're too much of a scared cat to actually accept it . Why don't you stop putting both of us through hell and own up to your feelings for once? Accept that it’s fucking over. If you don’t do it, I’m going to have to do it for you. "

i stared at him, stunned. Seokjin had never yelled at me.  Never.

Finally I sighed.

"Do you think i haven't tried...I... don’t know what to do... " i said helplessly. Seokjin stares at me.

"I'm too old for this, Ah Reum. I turn thirty in a couple of years. i can't... stay in a relationship that ... " He stopped and I felt something very cold grip my heart. Like an iron fist.

"I understand." I said.

"It's not that...it's not that I blame you for the way you feel;. I just...i don't think it can... Not when you're thinking of someone else. It's unfair to everyone involved."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want you to move on."

"Seokjin..." I said, startled. I could feel my heart start to cave in.

“I think I’ve been patient enough, don’t you think? It’s been three years. I want us to start a family. I want children.”

Jung Kook. I love you. Only you. No one else. It will always be you.

Nausea.

When i just looked at him he shrugged.

"You don't have to answer, now. But think about it. " He said softly, finally letting me go. I opened my mouth to say something...what, i didn't know but Seokjin's pager went off at the exact same moment.

"i have to get to the hospital..." He moved to the closet but stopped to stare at me.

"Pack some clothes. We'll leave to Seoul after I inform the hospital." He said calmly.

"You look good." 

Jung Kook stopped fumbling with the collar of his shirt and sighed.

"Thank you mother." He said politely. 

"You don't have to do this. No one's forcing you to marry Lisa." Mrs. Jeon said patiently and Jung Kook felt his fingers clench a little.

"I love her." 

"We both know you don't." 

He gritted his teeth.

"Mother I..."

"It doesn't work that way... Just because you keep saying that it won't be true." His mother said desperately and Jung Kook swallowed. 

"I want to be alone now." He said blankly. Mrs Jeon hesitated and then sighed deeply.

"Lisa is only eighteen. She isn't like you. She's still young and innocent. Don't break her heart because someone broke yours." She said gently. 

When Jung Kook didn't reply, she quietly left. As the door closed behind her, Jung Kook stared into the mirror. He looked very handsome he could tell. Lisa and him would make a beuatiful couple. He was already famous and she was too. They could be so good together. 

And his mother was wrong. 

It was possible to marry someone and then hope to fall in love with them.

Hadn't Ah Reum done just that?

He swallowed the dryness in his throat. He wanted to move on. To stop feeling this way. It wasn't enough. Nothing was enough. He would have millions roaring at him, a wild crowd, women screaming, wrapped around his finger, dying for a glance from him but it wasn't enough. He wanted that feeling of emptiness to go. He wanted to go back in time. To the time when he'd been with her. He'd had nothing then. No name. No fame. No money. But he'd had her by his side. And he'd felt complete.

Happy. 

Something that even being in the most successful kpop group in history , didn't give him. He wanted that back. He would never forgive her for taking it away from him. From them. His friends had tried to change his mind but he couldn't agree with them. 

She loved you...

they said, over and over again but he couldn't believe them. You didn't leave the people you loved. You stayed by their side, kept them close. When you lost your grip on their bodies, you began to fall. The way he had began falling, that night three years ago, watching her get married to another man. The way he had never stopped falling, ever since. 

She didn't love him. She had never loved him. If she had, how could she have left him?

She had likely pitied him, he thought miserably. 

Pitied him for being an abused, money-less teenager with no future in sight. 

He gritted his teeth at the sharp stabbing pain in his heart. He didn't know what to think or feel anymore. He hurt so badly and he had no idea how to make it stop. 

~~~~~~~~~~

When Jung Kook walked into his office at Jeon inc., the last person he expected to see there was Kim Seokjin. 

"You..." He stopped short, too stunned to move or react. His mind and heart and body just shut down completely. 

Seokjin looked worse than him, if that was possible. His shirt was rumpled, his hair messy but he still looked like a walking painting. Like the prince charming in every cliched fairy tale that was ever written. Jung Kook could feel bile rising inside his throat. 

"What the hell are you doing here?" He snapped, moving to sit behind his desk.

"Before you call security , hear me out." Seokjin said casually and Jung kook remembered suddenly that the man was five years older than him. 

"You have five seconds." Jung Kook snapped. 

"Ah Reum and I want to wish you congratulations on your engagement. This is difficult for her too, So I’d appreciate it if you … give her some closure. Break things off properly.  "

Jung Kook thought it was remarkably amazing that he didn't immediately react.

Trying to keep his voice steady, he managed a little smile. 

"Full points for the delivery , doctor. Why isn’t she here then? If she wants to move on? “

“ I wanted to meet you alone.”

“  Is that a line?  Sorry, I don’t swing that way.  " He said, deliberately provoking.

Seokjin's fingers clenched into fists and Jung Kook felt satisfied. 

"I don't even know what she sees in a jerk like you. But it's the way it is, i suppose. i just wanted to tell you this. You have the information. What you choose to do with it, is up to you." Seokjin said calmly, before moving to the door. Jung kook could feel fury bubble inside him like molten lava.

He had known. Kim Seokjin had known that Ah Reum loved and he'd still gone ahead and married her. He wanted to pummel him into the floor. 

"Get the fuck out of my face." Jung Kook snarled.

Seokjin gave him a smile.

"You can talk to her and at least hear her out , like an adult. Get off your high horse for one minute and consider that there might be something more to her story." He said softly.

"You're pushing it, Seokjin. " Jung Kook snapped, annoyed by how flippantly Seokjin was talking about Ah Reum to someone else.

Did Ah Reum know her husband was here. Jung Kook could guess that she probably didn’t. No girl would want to have her feelings or thoughts shared with others like this. . Did the man not care about how his wife would feel about his actions? The thought made Jung Kook want to kick him. 

But Seokjin wasn’t finished.

"Now that I've got that off my chest. Let me tell you what i really think, Jeon Jung kook. I hope you stay the fuck away from her. I hope you go ahead and live in denial for the rest of your life. And I hope she finally gives up on you and comes to me instead. That's what I hope will happen. And considering the kind of asshole you are, there's no doubt that , that is  what will happen.  " He said before turning around and stalking out. 

Jung Kook fumed as the door shut behind him. 

~~~~~~

He'd thought of this moment a million times. The moment when he would finally see her again. But it still knocked the breath out of him.

She couldn't see him. He was behind the one way mirror of his office and she was here with Seokjin, politely bowing to all the other officers and the interns and the secretaries. She was here out of politeness. Now that his father was no longer in power, the board of directors had agreed to invest in her father's company. She had come to offer her greetings.

His gaze fell on her hair, long and hitting her waist again and he could feel his throat beginning to close up.

She looked painfully different from how he remembered her. She was thin now. Not just slim but thin. There was no brightness in her gaze, no playful smile , just waiting to get out, tugging at the corner of her lips. He stared at her like in a trance, noting the sloping curve of her shoulders, bare to the world. He felt his jaw clench at the sight. She used to wear shirts, he remembered. Shirts that displayed no skin. She hated having her skin bared but now here she was in an off-shoulder blouse in  candy pink, long long hair perfectly styled.

Her slightly knobby  ankles were fitted into high heeled sandals. He could still remember how they'd felt underneath his fingers when he's carried her on his back, on the river bank three years ago. He'd teased her about how they were. Like dried prunes, he'd said impishly. 

She had laughed . Not a lady-like mild little giggle but a full on laugh. Did she laugh like that now? Somehow he doubted it. 

They had destroyed her, he thought, fingers beginning to tremble.

The girl he'd fallen in love with wasn't there anymore. 

No short , soft hair. No pretty laughing eyes. No happy, honest smile. Instead she had been turned into just another trophy wife. 

And then without any warning she turned around and looked right at him.

Jung Kook staggered with the force of her stare. There wasn't anything substantial in her gaze but it still terrified him. 

It took him a second to realize that she couldn't see him through the glass. But she was staring right at him and he couldn't breathe. 

He couldn’t breathe but everything just changed. He didn’t even fucking remember Lisa’s face anymore. This was her. This was the girl for him. The only girl for him.

And he wasn’t going to let her go.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"I want her back." Jung Kook said into the receiver. For a second there was no response.

"You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. " Seokjin said , voice shaking just a little bit. 

"I don’t fucking kid, Doctor. She’s my girl. She’s always been my girl. I’m just taking back what’s rightfully mine.”

Silence.

“What she is, is a person. She doesn’t fucking belong to anyone: you or me. But right now, she’s also my wife. The next time you refer to her as anything else, I’ll hand you your teeth in a fucking platter..” Seokjin gritted out.

“Look whose grown a fucking spine… “ Jung kook sneered. “ You think she won’t ditch your sorry ass if I called her right now?”

“Try it. You and I both know Ah Reum will never cheat on me. Just face it, Jung Kook. You had your chance and you screwed up. She’s my wife now. No one forced her to do it. She did it all on her free will. ”

Jung Kook took a deep breath.

“I’m coming for her. You better be fucking prepared.” He gripped the glass of scotch on his desk in an iron grip.

Seokjin laughed.

“And she’ll be coming for me. The way she’s done, every single night for the past three years.” He whispered.

The glass shattered, slicing through Jung Kook’s skin , tearing through the white expanse and painting it red. He watched the blood drip down the desk, the pain momentarily clearing his head of the excruciatingly painful image of Seokjin touching Ah Reum…

Of Seokjin actually ….

“You just signed your death warrant.” He gritted out before hanging up.

AUTHOR’S NOTE : My apology for the lack of originality but this is actually a literal kdrama fest so, expect more cliches. Thank you. Let me know what you thought without fail. 

[lynchgirl90]

Ep. 8 Of #TwinPeaks Is David Lynch's Purest Marriage Of Television And Video Art

Adam Lehrer ,  CONTRIBUTOR

It’s hard to describe how inestimable an impact David Lynch had over me when I first saw Mulholland Drive as a 14-year-old. Something I’ve been discussing with fellow artist friends of mine is the fact that the art that changed our lives the most and still carries the most weight over our own sensibilities is the art that we were exposed to very young, maybe even too young to fully understand what it is exactly that you’re viewing. I developed a taste for disturbing aesthetics at a very young age; when I was about five or six-years-old, my cinephile father would have “movie nights with dad” when my mom would go out with her girlfriends, and he would let my brother and I watch watch Ridley Scott’s Alien, James Cameron’s Terminator, and/or Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop when I still should have been reading children’s books (and boy am I thankful for that).

That early exposure to art, whether it be John Carpenter films, or Brian DePalma films, or Bret Easton Ellis novels, or my favorite music (Wu Tang, Lou Reed, or Marilyn Manson), is still the art that I think about and gravitate back towards even after decades of being exposed to just about everything contemporary art, cinema, literature, poetry, and popular music has to offer. But watching Lynch’s Mulholland Drive for the first time feels like a monumental point of epiphany in my life. A point where I thought to myself, “Maybe I want to create stuff when I grow up.” I had no idea what Mulholland Drive’s fractured plot meant, but its images left me confounded, and fascinated. I loved the dreamy, hallucinatory Los Angeles Neo-noir stylizations of its setting. I had never felt more terrified than when I first glimpsed that monster lurking behind the Winkie’s diner.

That film made me blissfully aware that cinema and art could be a simultaneously erotic, horrific, and thrilling experience. I knew how powerful art could be,  but Mulholland Drive gave me my first taste of the sublime. Since then, I’ve been a David Lynch fanatic. I’ve watched all of his earlier films, binge watched Twin Peaks over and over (finding myself asking new questions each time), wrote college essays on Eraserhead and David Foster Wallace’s article that documented Lynch’s process on the set of Lost Highway, have searched out all his early forays into video art, have found merits in his more oft-overlooked output in advertising (his 2009 commercial for Dior is Lynch at his funniest), and have read countless analyses on the man himself and his cinematic language.

So, when you read what I’m about to say, know that I do so with much hesitance, consideration, and ponderousness: the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is the piece of filmmaking that Lynch has been building towards for his entire career. It is a singular cinematic and artistic achievement, and the purest distillation of the multitude of ideas and concepts that live and breathe in the Lynchian universe. I believe that years from now we will be looking upon this single episode as one of, if not the single most, defining artistic achievements of Lynch’s unimpeachable career. Bare with me.

Aesthetically, episode 8 would leave a powerful impression on even the most half-hazard of David Lynch converts. A hallucinatory, nightmarishly kaleidoscopic consortium of images of blood, flames, fluids, and demonic figures spews towards the viewer while Krystof Pendrecki’s tortuously atmospheric soundscapes underline the episode’s inescapable atmosphere of existential dread. Episode 8 is an hour long work of experimental video art, no doubt. But if you have been paying attention to this season of Twin Peaks and you know enough about the mythology of the show and know even more about Lynch’s artistic interests and visual touchstones, then you know that this episode was no mere act of meaningless artistic overindulgence. In fact, this was Lynch telling the origin story that set the entire series of Twin Peaks into place.

This was the origin story of BOB, the demonic force that forced Leland Palmer to rape his daughter for years and eventually murder her in Twin Peaks’ initial 1990s run. BOB, we learn in episode 8, was forged from the the United States' earliest forays into nuclear bomb testing.  BOB was already the perfect metaphor for mankind’s capacity for cruelty, depravity and evil, and becomes an even more powerful metaphor now that we know his nuclear genesis. Any Lynchian fanatic will rave to you how delicious this notion is. What David Lynch has done, and in many ways has always been trying to do, is to create a piece of pure atmospheric video art that also works as a classic piece of narrative storytelling. In this episode, Lynch has perfectly located a zone in which vague and aesthetically menacing imagery also serve as clear and precise storytelling and, like the best cinema and storytelling, illustrates a metaphor for modern human existence. While Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, Lost Highway and Blue Velvet utilize video art aesthetics, they are also pieces of storytelling with easily identifiable stories if you look for them (well, maybe not Inland Empire). Episode 8 of the return of Twin Peaks is a mostly dialog-less piece of distorted, haunting images. It is art. But it also still tells a story. The story of a television series no less! This is all the more impressive in that television as a storytelling medium is the most reliant on expository dialog and over-crammed storyboarding.

David Lynch pays heed to the form while mainly utilizing the language of pure image. Who needs a script, and who needs dialog, when you can see that delectably menacing, fascinating and torturous world of Twin Peaks from inside the actual head of David Lynch? Episode 8 was the truest portal to the imagination of Lynch that has yet been put to screen.

I’m sure there are more casual David Lynch fans that are growing impatient with the restrained, at times glacial pace of this new season of Twin Peaks. I however have understood what he’s been doing this whole time. He hasn’t just been making a television season, he has been commenting on the current importance of television in our culture. Television has replaced cinema at the heart of cultural conversation for many reasons. Partly, this has been a result of the groundbreaking work that has been done in television over the last two decades: Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, and more recently, The Leftovers have all expanded the possibilities of what people believe can be done with the form. There are also financial concerns: as major film studios continue to spend their whole wads on sure thing blockbuster action and superhero films, auteur filmmakers have had harder times getting their films properly funded. Cable and streaming television services like HBO or Amazon however have the means to give filmmakers the funds they need to realize a vision, and indie filmmakers have resultantly flocked towards the small screen.

Television’s prevalence has had connotations both positive and negative on culture. The negative, in my opinion, stems from its causing people to no longer be able to get lost in a pure, imagistic cinematic experience. Even the best shows are still mainly concerned with story and dialog, whereas cinema is about mood, atmosphere, and aesthetics. When Twin Peaks premiered in 1990, Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost (a television veteran) were very much interested in marrying the Lynchian world with the conventional tropes of television: serial drama, mystery, and even soap opera. Throughout its first season, it worked beautifully. Both Lynch aficionado cinephiles and mainstream television viewers alike were captivated, and the series was one of the year’s top-rated. But after the second season revealed Laura Palmer’s killer to be her demonic entity-inhabited father Leland far too early during its run, Lynch’s boredom with the constraints of television grew apparent. The show starts to feel like a standard nineties television show, albeit one with a quirky plot and wildly eccentric characters. Lynch mostly dropped primary showrunner duties to focus on his film Wild at Heart only to come back for Twin Peaks’ stunner of a series finale, when the show’s protagonist FBI Agent Dale Cooper travels to the mystical red velvet draped alternate universe of the Black Lodge, and eventually becomes trapped inside that Lynchian hellscape while his body is replaced with a doppelgänger inhabited by the demonic entity Killer BOB and set out into the world.

In the Black Lodge, Laura Palmer tells Cooper that she’ll see him in 25 years, and that's exactly where Twin Peaks: the Return starts off. It was apparent from the premiere episode of this new season of Twin Peaks that Lynch is benefitting from a new TV landscape in which Showtimes has awarded him full creative control over his product, and he’s directing all 16 episodes of this new season. Also, it’s quite obvious that the technological advancements over the last two decades have enabled Lynch to fulfill the fullest extent of his vision. Twin Peaks: The Return is a much purer marriage between narrative driven television melodrama and Lynch’s hallucinatory experimental video cinematic language. That first episode barely spends any time in Twin Peaks, but spends plenty of time with Cooper in The Lodge. There are some truly unforgettable images in that first episode: a demonic entity appears out of thin air in a cylindrical orb and viciously attacks a young couple having sex, a woman’s corpse is found on a hotel bed with most of her head missing, and who can forget Matthew Lilard, perhaps the newest victim to be inhabited by Killer BOB, in a jail cell accused of murder while Lynch moves the camera from cell to cell until we see the horrifying silhouette of BOB himself in high contrast red and black ghoulishly smiling? But at the same time, Lynch is able to move the plot forward in ways that should be familiar to all television viewers; through procedure, dialog, and plot device. Lynch is still working within the confines of television, but has peppered the narrative scenes with unforgettable imagery. It’s been almost as if he’s been subtly preparing us, the viewers, to not just respond to what we normally respond to in television: story, story, and story and dialog, dialog, and dialog. And to slowly reacquaint us with the thrilling experience that can be derived from watching a set of shocking, beautiful, erotic and terrifying images move along in a sequence on a screen.

And episode 8 of this new series is the pinnacle of this new body of work, and very possibly of Lynch’s career at large. The episode begins similarly enough, with evil Cooper escaping from jail only for his escape driver to attempt to murder him out in the woods. And that is when Lynch kicks it into overdrive. As evil Cooper’s body is bleeding out, a group of dirtied and horrific men called 'The Woodsmen' start picking over his body and smearing themselves in his blood, with Killer BOB himself appearing and apparently resuscitating Cooper’s lifeless body. And then, Lynch proceeds to tell BOB’s, and quite possibly Laura’s, origin stories through a 45-minute nightmarish experimental video art piece. The NY Times has called this episode “David Lynch emptying out his subconscious unabated.” That is totally accurate, and there has never been and most likely never will be an episode of television like this ever again. This episode was video art, but it was also still television, and it also served as a piece of and critique of cinematic and television languages. Allow me to explain.

Episode 8 functions in a way similar to that of the video art of Janie Geiser. Without any knowledge of the world of Twin Peaks or the themes of the Lynchian universe, one could admire this piece similarly to how they would admire the experimental video art of Janie Geiser, and in particular Episode 8 recalls Geiser’s film The Fourth Watch in which the artist superimposed horror film stills within the setting of an antique doll house. Episode 8 uses that same nightmare logic, but empowers it with the budget of a major Cable series. There are also similarities to scenes in Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant Under the Skin when the alien portrayed by Scarlet Johannson devours her male prey in a grotesque nether realm. And perhaps its greatest antecedent is Kubrick’s Big Bang sequence in 2001: A Spade Oydyssey, and in many ways Episode 8 is the hellish inverse of that epic sequence. Like the Big Bang, episode 8 tells an origin story of a world created by an explosion, but instead of a galactic explosion, Killer BOB and his world of evil were born of a nuclear explosion. Brilliantly, Lynch believes that Killer BOB was birthed by man made horrors, going back to something FBA Agent Albert Rosenfield said in the original series about BOB being a “manifestation of the evil men do.” Indeed, in Episode 8 Lynch brings us inside an atomic mushroom cloud set off during the first nuclear bomb test explosion in White Sands, New Mexico in 1945. As the camera enters the chaos and giving view to one horrid abstraction of flames and matter after another, we eventually see a humanoid creature floating in the distance. The humanoid eventually shoots tiny particles of matter out of a phallic attachment. One of those particles carries the face of none other than Killer BOB. The imagery is clear in its meaning: once humans created technology that could kill of its own planet, a new kind of evil had emerged into the world. Killer BOB is that evil imagined as a singular demonic entity.

But enough about the content, or the plot of the episode. There have already been plenty of recaps documenting its various thrilling enigmas: The Giant seemingly manifesting Laura’s spirit as a mutant bug that crawled into a young girl’s mouth via her bedroom window, or the horrific drifter walking around asking people for a light before he crushed their skulls with his bare hands and delivered a terrifying and poetic sermon over a radio airwave, or the impromptu Nine Inch Nails performance that preceded the madness. What is more important to note is the fact that there is a strong case to be made arguing that this episode was the pinnacle of all that David Lynch has ever tried to achieve. Lynch has always been a kind of pop artist. He comes from a background in abstract painting and sculpture, but he also has a deep and profound love for cinema that eventually influenced him to sit in a director’s chair. All kinds of cinema, from the kind of abstract cinematic geniuses you’d expect like Werner Herzog and Federico Fellini, to rigorously formalist filmmakers like Billy Wilder. From Eraserhead on, Lynch has tried to marry the formal conventions of cinema (plot, narrative, tension, juxtaposition, conclusion, etc..) with abstract and surrealist contemporary art. Twin Peaks was initially birthed of his interest in marrying conventional TV tropes, like soap opera and mystery, with that sense of terror art that he got famous for. But nevertheless, the constrictions of TV in the early nineties exhausted, and eventually bored, Lynch and he moved on. But now, he has been able to bend the conventions of television at will in this new season of Twin Peaks, and episode 8 was when he blew them up entirely. This hour of TV finds him drawing on all of his cinematic language and themes, from the surrealist ethos of his subconscious dream logic to origins of evil to the concept of dual identity (as this episode alludes too, Bob and Laura might be each other’s opposites, two side of one coin, if you will), while still working as a plot building episode within a contained, albeit sprawling, television narrative. There is no doubt that this episode will make the broad and at times confusing plot of the new season of Twin Peaks come into focus as it continues.

It was also the most mind-blowing cinematic experience I’ve had in years. And I watch everything. By successfully pulling off this episode, Lynch has also reminded viewers of the overwhelming potency that cinema and moving images can have that other mediums just don’t come close to. There is a lot of great stuff on TV right now, and one could even argue that something like Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers had some jaw-dropping moments of pure cinema. But after watching Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, even the best shows feel like hour long scenes of conversation between people without much cinematic impact (on his podcast, American Psycho author and famed cinephile Bret Easton Ellis argues that television can’t do what cinema does visually because the writer is the one in charge, not the director, but that’s for another think-piece). Episode 8 is a reminder of the power of cinema, art and images. But it also still works as plot device for the over-arching narrative of the show. More than ever before, Lynch has pulled off a piece of work that indulges his wildest artistic dreams while still paying heed to the kind of formalism that television production necessitates. I don’t know about you, but when Twin Peaks: The Return returns for its second round of its 18 episode run this Saturday, I can’t wait to see what Lynch does next. We are witnessing something that will be written about by art historians as much as it will be by academics of pop culture. This is thrilling.

Link (TP)

[aikainkauna]

I still can't reply to replies because of Tumblr's new interface, so I have to respond to this very good point by @acitymadeofsong this way.

And yes. This is a big problem, because it seems like many writing gurus and teachers and BOFQs seem to treat it as an either/or thing: either you write sparse, sober prose *or* turgid, purple prose; there's *nothing* in between. Now, I know that especially in the zine era, there were mountains of azure orbs and limpid pools around. So that led into an attitude where every bit of poetry and every metaphor resulted in a kneejerky "that's badfic!" reaction from the critic and the readers and the writers themselves. And that deprived us of a lot of really good poetry, I feel. Hell, *I* have a superbly honed sense for romance cliches myself by now--and don't get me wrong, this puritanism did, in fact, help me as a writer in a "know the rules before you start rolling up the rulebook and smoking it" kind of way--but this terror of the dread demon of purpleness has got me to a point where I have to *constantly* slap myself upside the head to remind myself that it's not only ok, but *in character* for me to put poetic thoughts and lines into my characters' heads and mouths when I'm writing Thief of Bagdad fic.

The movie itself is a really great example of beautiful, poetic language that does hold together well even now, despite there always being some whiny, cynical asshats in the audience who think they're tough by moaning about its "corniness"--and I always think that they are doing themselves--hell, even their very own humanity--a disservice. "Were you never an innocent, dreaming child?" I think. "Are you *happy* in having thrown your dreams of romantic adventure and beauty onto the pyre of postmodern nihilism?" Because of course, those people aren't--the whole point of that film was to allow people to escape (especially since WWII broke out during filming), and it's *explicit* about the value and power of the mind of an innocent child. It's the last, defiant dying cry of Romanticism before the war crushed it. Its dialogue and storytelling were unabashedly Romantic even for the time, a loud cry in favour of the fairytale without a *shred* of cynicism, thanks to which the film is so incredibly pure--and thus refreshing, a merciful respite, a balm. So it was serving that same urge that I am defending here, really; therefore, I would be committing a crime against it were I not faithful to that same spirit of hope and passion that ran through it.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the whole sparse prose mafia thing. I think that this is also heavily cultural. I keep seeing posts on here from American kids complaining about their teachers wanting to make everyone write like Hemingway. Ah, Papa Hemingway. Now, he's a particularly painful example in that you can see the guy *did* feel, and did have even crazily romantic emotions, but his work reads like a classic process of machismo crushing all that, suffocating that, and him just not having been given any tools for handling those emotions because society robs men of that. If anything, it should be analysed as a warning example of how the culture of masculinity fucks guys over.

But in other countries, it's crazily different--I knew a Spanish girl who was an aspiring academic, and even at her university, the teachers pressured everyone to write academic text in this really old-fashioned, formal, conversational style. As in, "we should be grateful for the way the ancients..." and "the old truth of X has been aptly demonstrated by the brilliant Y here..." and all these other near-Victorian turns of phrase that are nowhere near a neutral, impersonal scientific POV. And then you've got the extreme politeness and formality in highly-educated Indian correspondence, and conversely txt spk being universal among even grown-up Middle Eastern and South Asian folks on the internet (I always wonder if this is because of having to switch between different writing systems, some of which skip many vowels), etc. So the cultural expectations of what's good language use is hugely varied.

But, yeah, poesy is being weeded out more and more as somehow embarrassing and naive (and always with that unconscious feel of its emotion being "feminine"=weaker, lesser, thus less strong and valuable--even the word "sentimental" is an insult when it just fucking means "something with feeling!"), all over the world. Yet, just like love and passion and intense emotion and awe at the grandness of grand things (the definition of Romanticism, obvs) cannot be killed because it's such an inherent part of human nature, poetry has found ways to survive through song lyrics--and a lot of bad writing that doesn't know what bad writing and cliches are. People still go for it, just like they still do ritual and devotional and spiritual things in a seemingly secularised Western world, because that kind of thing is how the human psyche works. (And there's a gender divide there as well, sadly--why is it that the rantiest, angriest atheists and puritan fundamentalists are angry men aiming to strip weaknesses and frills from human behaviour in favour of bleak brutality, and then it's either ditzy hippie chicks who are into all the fluffy superstitious New Age stuff or superintelligent academic women setting out to construct feminist witchcraft? Oh, wait, candles and incense and yoga and being kind to yourself and others are *girly.* Reason and strict rules and punishments are upright and manly!) Why are humans like this and can't just seek a balance from the best bits of both reason and compassion... *sigh*

So, yeah, that crazy polarisation is just lame, in everything ever, because... variety and diversity, please. I digressed hugely again, but one has to point this out because people really don't seem to see how stupidly b/w--and gendered--it all is. We've been lured into this idea that just because in society, the default for "human" is male/masculine and therefore, pursuing that leads to equality somehow, whereas it's just rubbish--and not just because of the poisons of modern ideas of masculinity, but because just like all gender bullshit, ideas of what's manly have varied like crazy from place to place and from era to era. Looking at history, you've got beautiful and emotionally complex poetry and Romanticism from guys, but now we're all supposed to just suffocate that and be bland and dead. To serve what purpose (if we're not aiming to become emotionless killing machines, the only reason a culture of sparseness/emotional coldness was ever developed for), I don't know. What if Bob wants to be as wild as a Dionysian devotee and compose wildly florid songs in praise of the moonlit meadows of Arcadia--where does he turn to hone his craft; who listens to him sing? What if Anne wants to be swept up in the arms of a wild romance and make her prose shine and glisten like the dew on that moonlit grass, without slipping into a limpid pool on the way? Where's the cave in which XYZ could hone hir poetry to soar like that of Inanna's dragtastic priests in fervent, orgiastic abandon?

My only answer to that would be to just... well.

Read tons of old shit.

Write tons of new shit.

And then *interact* about it, be *supportive* about it, *discuss it.*

Because, just like you said, we don't have enough of that right now.

But even then, I would just say, even to poetic writers whose work I might find bad, *keep fucking going.* Because if you are dedicated and exercise a constant, honest self-awareness about your flaws, you'll keep getting better. Even if you are writing in a vacuum, or think you're writing in a vacuum (because fuck knows it feels like it in today's "too scared to comment" culture), KEEP WRITING. You owe it to yourself and your soul, as an act of fierce honesty towards what you really are.

Besides, and most people don't seem to realise this, writing poetic language is *hard.* Even if you're not writing rhyming couplets, just constructing a sentence is more difficult if you want to evoke really specific images and emotions; the word order itself gets more difficult when you step outside the "see Spot run" style. That's why Twilight is so bad: because the sentence construction is clunky and godawful, and because the thoughts are really vague and drifty and not definite. When saying a bitch fancies a guy, saying "She also thought of other things" is horridly opaque, especially when it's not even meant to be mysterious: if you want to be mysterious, you have to signal that better. So you'd be better off saying "other thoughts also entered her mind, thoughts she was unable to understand or process; therefore she pushed them into the deepest peripheries of her mind, out of sight." Because that shows to us a hint of why these thoughts are vague and unprocessed; the *prose* can't be vague even if the heroine's experience is. That draws the reader in and helps her understand what's going on; the vague "other things" just leaves one hanging and WTFing.

But... yeah. That's the kind of thing I mean. I still stubbornly believe you can get away with anything if you just work hard enough on the suspension of disbelief part, work hard enough on the characters to make their actions seem like they were the sorts that character would commit, if pushed.

I can't remember if I actually made a post at any point talking about Romantic/poetic writing and how to make it work? Probably on LJ, or then I am thinking of fic comments? Because, really, if there *is* need for such, I could throw something like that together. But I don't really feel like I'm some kind of authority on the matter, that's the problem. For all I know, most people consider my stuff too purple, and there's no telling how objective that is--whether it's just a matter of taste, or some (however ephemeral and subjective) standard one either achieves or falls short of. So I don't want to become like one of those conceited people who get really puffed up if they've been published once, and actually write fairly mediocre fiction, and then suddenly start behaving like they're gurus.

(Plus, I've had so much shit for creative word choices in DW and B7 fic that I fear it'd just look like I was defending overt poetry where it doesn't work. I'm *fully* aware these days of how fandom-specific it is, and that's why I've burrowed myself firmly into ToB, so I will never have to come out into sparse-prose writing ever again. I still remember groaning at a fic that randomly described Romana's inner labia as "petals," whereas with Jaffar looking at Yassamin's bits? For a guy who describes her eyes as "Babylonian," "Petals" is par for the course and wouldn't even stand out.)

Anyway. I just hope these rants and discussions will shake up and/or encourage at least some people who have had their poetry suffocated. I will go and have a look at my notes and old LJ posts to see if I have, indeed, written anything that'd come close to the sort of poetry-encouraging writing guide you describe. Because I do feel like I *have* written about getting away with it at some point. I'm sure it all boils down to a) "learn the rules and *then* bend them," b) "avoid the most *obvious* cliches," c) "describe the poetic stuff in a new, original way or aim for a perfect pastiche," and d) "choose a poetic world and stay there," but I'll have a look anyway!

Also, JFC, this became long! But it really is a matter worth talking about. I want a whole fucking literary salon dedicated to getting Romantic/poetic writing right, and celebrating the style without shame. Who's with me?

[jacksmiles98-blog]

Evaluation for Final project:

This is my evaluation for our final project.

Introduction:

Eliza is our game that we have been working on for the last few months of our final major project. For this project, I was placed as a part of the Writing team, led by Jamie Hollyoak. I and the writing team worked very well together, in creating scripts, character bio’s, locations, and overall underlining the overall story of the game. Our original concept of our project was something fairly simple. It was a Third-Person action-adventure with about Eliza, or Clementine (her initially planned name), and her journey to uncover the mystery of what had happened to her parents. She would be assisted by her Pet cat Marbles, Originally Montgomery, and her mysterious acquaintance the Shadowman. They would be travelling across the town of Wencliffe (originally unnamed) to uncover this mystery. She would meet individuals who would slowly help bring back her personality. The overall concept hadn’t really changed all that much. The only major changes in our project were things like gameplay, a few locations and a few minor additions. But I shall go in more detail, below.

Research:

What research have I done? How did I do it? And why?

I have researched many things to help me in my creation of work as well as getting more views and ideas in my head. For the majority of my writing, I have been trying to understand how to write for Video Games, as it isn’t as simple as you would think. So I first looked at a book called Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Games Design written, by Scott Roger. This book helped me understand most of the complexities of making a Game, but also helped me to figure out how to approach the narrative of the game. But that just helped me understand how to approach it, but not write it; as finding your prey is the easy part, you now have to kill it. So I went to YouTube to find anything that could at least somewhat help me to figure out the writing of this game, as we had been trying to write it like a book. I was very pleased to not only find a great source for writing, but a source that looks at Gaming, the creations of it and the philosophical debates around it; A YouTube channel by the name of ExtraCredit. From watching their many videos on the subject of writing for Video Games, I had ultimately understood how to what our, and many others, problems were with this task. A video game is interactive and therefore open to many different types of narrative structure. Once I had that understanding, I could look at the story as the flow of the Gameplay. I had think of things that made my script seem to interact with the world, so I wrote with things like taking an alternate path would add extra dialogue and character growth. I also looked at other games that had some narrative things that really interested me. Things like using the Gameplay, Locations and World to portray the narrative; create interesting characters; using interactivity to add extra narrative expansion to the game and story; et cetra. One Game that kept on leaping out to me was Dark Souls. Though compared to our game, Dark Souls is heavily morbid and…dark, which is something that we did try to steer away from in our development. But Dark Souls had lots of interesting concepts to provide that I wanted to integrate into my work. For example I found that the lack of makers and maps to be a thrilling and free experience. That also allowed exploration to feel more like you are discovering and finding secrets in this world. Also additionally, endings like the Usurpation ending (the hardest ending in the game) are made far more special by the fact that there is no outline indication of how far you have completed it, or anything of that stature. I also loved how vague everything was, to allow interpretation to be a mandatory part of storytelling. There are other games like Undertale, which had the goofy characterisation and narrative; Red Dead Redemption, with the interesting and imaginative characters; Fran Bow, with the dark and creepy aesthetic; and Witcher 3, with the use of consequences to your actions within the game. All these games I researched to help me understand how I could use these varying techniques to give our narrative a defining and interesting feel to it. We also, as a team, had questionnaires available for people coming to our table during exhibition. Though I will mention a lot more, further down, but I would just like to acknowledge the feedback given. A lot of the feedback was positive, with some well needed criticism. The most common being about the lack of information about all the characters and how they are connected. With a few fearing that we were heading towards, cliché horror stereotypes. But all the other feedback just mentioned their favourite characters, and places, as well as pointing out that they wouldn’t/couldn’t change anything about our work; which is positive in that we did our job well, but negative in that we aren’t too sure on how well we have done in terms of providing our games narrative. But at least we understand that the people who were most interested in our work, were people of around our age (16-19) rather than our intended audience. But I’ll get back to it later on. But all in all, though this research was plentiful, it did not help me to the level that you would have expected. The challenge was, to try and use these techniques whilst not making the narrative and overall view convoluted. As well as that, we couldn’t change our games narrative information to fit our audience. In most part, implementation of ideas like using interactivity as a narrative feature and trying to make interesting and goofy characters, were successful and overall made my writing slightly better. But other things like some of the Dark Souls stuff were not going to be easy to write in, as it would complete mess up the stories continuity, which I thought was far more important than using these narrative techniques.

What did I do well?

In the end, I was very proud with the amount implementation that I had succeeded in. I had been worried that I wouldn’t be able to implement any of my research to my work, as a lot of it needed more factors to be considered than we actually had. But nonetheless, I was very pleased with the sheer amount of research I had conducted, as well as being pleased with the feedback we had been given, as it allows us to understand that if we wanted to continue this project, we would need to give a little more information without ruining the plot. Well if we were doing another exhibition of the game that is.

What would I do differently?

I would definitely look for feedback far sooner. For instance, we could have done a little shindig where we would allow our intended audience to view the narrative of the game, and give feedback on what they felt. Because we really could have done with serious feedback, as you could find the holes in the plot very easily, which is something we don’t want to have in our narrative. Also I would believe that I could have looked at far more sources than I did. As there is doing a lot of research, but within my role and what I am meant to be doing, a lot isn’t enough. I needed to do a momentous amount, but not only within the confines of Narrative research for gaming. I would need to look at Literature, poetry, Philosophy, History, Psychology and on and on and on, as looking at different things will make my work seem and feel far deeper in meaning.

What have I learned?

Well in terms of research, I have learnt how to properly write a script within the confines of gaming. Because I learnt these techniques of how to write a script, I will become more adept to writing scripts for future works. I have also learnt how important it is to pick a variety of sources to research. If I looked into more different sources, I may have actually been able to write a deeper narrative than the one I had actually written.

Pre-Production:

What I have done? Why did I do it? And How?

For the writing team, we didn’t really have a lot of pre-production to do. Unlike the artists and the games designers, we couldn’t make too much concept work. However we did attempt to create concepts and other pieces of pre-production. For instance, I created a concept map of where the game is set. I had a large number of names of places that I thought the world would be set in. Here you can see what I came up with. I simply looked at how people created maps in that early world style, as well as looking at how islands form.

Another concept piece I did was the orphanage level. We were indecisive on how we were going to portray the narrative, so we all wrote the narrative in the way we felt it should have been written. I would say it didn't turn out too well, for me that is, as that wasn’t the correct way to write a video game story; hence why I researched how to write a video game script. I also did a one sheet that allowed me to focus on what we knew the narrative, locations, and characters were. As well as a bit of the Game Design Document, which was the same as the one sheet, but slightly more detailed. Both of these were mostly individualist work. So we did it on our own. As a team, we had done lots and lots of documents on how the narrative was going to play out. Our plan, you could say. This was a team effort as we all needed to figure out what the Narrative needed, like characters, places and plot points. This was our greatest success, as when we had done it, we were able to start think of who was going to do what part, and so on and so forth. Finally, we did lots of concept writings on the characters. Mostly of our three main characters like Eliza, The Shadowman, and Marbles, as well as minor characters like, Gregory Gills, The man (cut-out), the warden and the trickster. This was just another individualist piece of work as our leader Jamie had decided who was going to do what.

What did I do well?

I would say that the GDD, the One sheet, and the plan were our best pre-production pieces, as a lot of it was implemented and adapted later on in our work, while things like the character concepts, the Game story thing, and my map design were mostly, if not completely, forgotten. So yes, I was just pleased with the outcome of our original pre-production work, as it was all that we could do, and we tried tremendously hard to get the amount that we could do done.

What would I do differently?

I would say that we could have done a bit more pre-production, like more character concepts (with the help of the art team); a better plan, as it was very promising, but it came out very messy by the time we reached production (which is another thing I will talk about later); and I would say that we could have definitely done a concept script which we could adapt to any future plans that came later in the production. But that is all I can think of when looking back at our work. Our Pre-production was more or less exquisite; Or simply, very good.

What have I learned?

I have learnt about the importance of a GDD. I didn’t realise how important it is to a project. Though that being said, our GDD didn’t really have too much impact on what we will create (which is another thing I will talk about later). But overall, compared to previous years, I hadn’t really learnt anything particularly new, except for the aforementioned GDD.

Practical Work:

What I have done? Why did I do it? And How?

What I did mostly in our project is write our script. We all had particular parts to write. For me, I was chosen to write the Sewer Level and the Witch’s Hut cut scene. I did this in hopes that we would be doing some voice acting. I really believed that we would have been able to do that. I also believed that we might have been able to do a live demonstration at the exhibition. The sewer level was a very adventurous piece as I had a lot of techniques that I had learnt, and could actually put into use. I had started writing it on the script format on Microsoft Word. But soon after completing that, Jamie, our team leader, had introduced us to a script writing website called Celtx. We used Celtx to our full advantage, as it allowed us to properly layout the scripts of our game. I managed to complete both of my scripts very quickly. I also did update versions of character bios. I did this for the artists originally, to help them build up the personality of the characters through their design. We also ended up using them for the exhibition, along with our location Bios that we planned. I also created a lore sheet, but I failed to complete it in time of the exhibition. Though it is finally complete now (as I am writing this). I also created a couple of assets for the orphanage level. I did this so that I could help out with Callum’s (Our 3d modellers) momentous job of creating all the games assets. The assets were painting, both of which I made in Photoshop and then added the finished images onto a 3d painting frame that I made in Maya. I sent them both to one of our level designers, Matt. I also created a painting that I planned to get used for the exhibition. It was of the three characters, Eliza, Marbles, and the Shadowman. I made it in Photoshop after drawing it by hand. One last thing I did for our practical work is write a script for a trailer that I planned to use. Though it was one page long, I do believe that it would have been too difficult to recreate at our current state. I used Celtx again to create the script as it is a fantastically useful tool, especially for screen writing.

What did I do well?

I definitely think that I did the scripts the best, as I had really tried to make sure that the script made sense, and that I conveyed the correct feelings through the characters actions. Though I do believe I do more talk than actual act in my scripts, as it I haven’t got used to doing a technique where the characters use their actions to convey the character, over constant dialogue. I also feel that I had done the Assets very well as I wanted them to look nice, which I do believe that I had succeeded in doing so. I am also impressed by the actual paintings that I created for the frames, as I had put genuine time into them.

What would I do differently?

I would definitely change how I wrote my script, by adapting it to the other scripts, as that was a problem with our storyline. We were not adapting our stories to each other’s which created a mess of inconsistencies. I did attempt to adjust my scripts to the others, but not to the point where I felt that they worked together. For instance, I had written the Shadowman to be the one who starts the fight with the Frog Bouncer in the Sewer level. But how can that be, when no can see the Shadowman as he is invisible to most people’s eye; which is something that the other writers did. So I managed to adapt my Sewer level script, as well as my Witch’s Hut script to acknowledge his abilities. But that was one thing I would do differently. Another is actually chucking out things that may cause inconsistencies, as there was one that really messed up the plot of the story. For instance: We had written this guy to be the person who had caused the crash that killed Eliza’s parents, and had attached the Shadowman to her. So we planned on wanting to go to a hospital to find this guy (after possibly finding out about his existence). The main characters find him in Hospital’s cemetery, where the game ends, happily ever after. But after much debate, that character got scrapped, so we said that he was dead. Killed in the accident along with Eliza’s parents, which still can work out. Also we planned that Gregory Gills knew of the accident and adopts Eliza, Marbles and the Shadowman as his own. All works out. Then we cut out the Hospital for a church/Clocktower/abbey/whatever. I had a lot of issues with this in particular because of two reasons, one I knew why it was being implemented, and two it would have made no sense in terms of the plot. The first reason in particular had really rubbed me in the wrong way, as I had realised that it was to convey the same feeling that the boss, Maria of the Astral Clocktower conveyed in the Old Hunters Downloadable Content for Bloodborne. But the second reason is just self-evident. We had a hospital level for a reason, and ignoring that reason is just going to leave a big hole in the plot and a bad taste in our mouths. But I will talk about what we did after this predicament occurred in the problem solving part below. Another bit is communicating with the team and the rest of group, as we hardly talked to each other during development. But this is another thing that I will talk about in problem solving. One last thing I felt that I could have done differently is actually try to do more for marketing, as I did feel that I didn’t help at all with that, which I think I should have done. Like actually make a trailer, or did some artwork to promote our game, or even some more writing.

What have I learned?

I haven’t learnt that much in this area either. I do believe this part shares similarity with the research part, as I did really learn how to write a script properly in this project. There were other things like how stupidly important it is to communicate. As we were all very shy to step on each other’s feet to get a word out and say what we believed. It is very scary how impractical it was that we as a team had overall failed to properly communicate. I know it was shyness on my side, but I believe that for the others it was them wanting to get the work done as soon as they could.

Problem Solving:

What I have done? Why did I do it? And How?

As aforementioned, I was going to explain how we solved certain problems. First one was the Hospital level as that was a very major problem for the writing team. We weren’t terribly happy with a few of the changes, for instance, there was the change from the hills to the woody-hills, the GGSC (Gregory Gills Social Club) to the Fishbowl Lounge and then to simply the Fishbowl, and finally the Hospital into the Clocktower. The first two we were somewhat fine with as we hadn’t really written anything about it. It wouldn’t have undercut the plot of the game. But the Hospital to Clocktower change was really something we couldn’t have. We had reasoning for the game to have a hospital, but a Clocktower just really steps on our feet. So as a team we had managed to convince everyone that it could be a Hospital with a Clocktower, as some old Romanesque hospitals have them as a feature. So after that we managed to get the best of both worlds. We got an Abbey/Church that has been converted into a hospital, which not only keeps us happy, but also the people who suggested the idea. Another problem I said I would mention was the one for the Assets, as we had only one 3d modeller making all of the Assets; and he had a large list of major assets that he needed to complete over the enormous list of decorative assets, that also needed to be tackled. Though the particular assets that I had made were very minor, it at least took down a portion of assets that Calum needed to get done. Another aforementioned problem was one about the scripts continuity. All though the majority of the scripts that were created are fantastic on their own individual merit, I still felt that the continuity was completely decimated. I wanted to at least connect my two scripts to the ones that followed and lead mine to make them all work together. In particular, I managed to make sure that the Shadowman fit his character throughout my scripts as well as his abilities. I also tried to make sure that the Beginning of the Sewer level matched with the end of the Orphanage, as well as the End of the Sewers and the Beginning of Fishbowl level/cutscene. The Witch’s Hut cutscene was very difficult to connect with the hospital level, because that was one of the last ones to be finished, so by the time it was finished I hadn’t been able to connect mine to that one.

What did I do well?

Well as I had said, connecting the levels scripts to each other and the creation of the assets were my proudest bits of problem solving as they were both my responsibility. Though I would like to have been able to have completely fixed the connection of the levels, and may been have gone further into it. The first one I mentioned was a team effort, so I didn’t really have too much say in it, though I was in agreement with the idea to try and persuade everyone that it was still a hospital, with a Clocktower on it. But I did most of the problem solving very well, though I will argue that there wasn’t too many problems that me and the writing team had faced overall.

What would I do differently?

I would say that I would have put a lot more time in connecting the scripts, as I have mentioned, I didn’t managed to do it to my own satisfaction. I feel as though I should have done it at a far better degree than I actually did do it at. I also feel that I should have read everyone’s scripts to see what inconsistencies that they and I have made, so that we could have adapted it further to ensure that the script would have been somewhat flawless. Finally I would have sorted out our communication problem, as that was the thorn in everyone’s backside. We were overall unwilling to step on each other’s feet and get our say in it, but we are mostly adults and we should have been far better at criticising and analysing each other’s work. We also should have been able to talk to each other about what additions we had made to specific parts of the Narrative, design and idea of the game.

What have I learned?

Communication, as I said before. There isn’t really too much to add that hasn’t already been added before. We were not communicating enough, and I have learnt how important it is.

Communication and Teamwork:

Methods that I used to communicate?

Every so often, we did a circle of honesty kind of thing, where we would tell everyone our “honest” opinions about the project, what we were doing, and so on. It was a good idea, but I can speak for myself, that I knew that I should have been far more honest with everyone. We also did another thing where we would have a team meetup during our lectures, which were very short talks as we knew what we were doing more or less. We also did attempt to have team meetups during our lesson, but that was a bit of a rollercoaster. Not that it was a thrill ride of emotion and enjoyment, but rather it went up and down in terms of how we managed to communicate what we wanted to say and such.

Times when we worked well?

As a team I do believe we did work very well. I knew what I was doing as well as what Hayden, Harvey and Jamie were doing. Jamie would just tell us what needed to be done and we did it. Very simple. The communication was an undeniable problem, but it didn’t affect how we worked together.

Difficulties that came up?

As mentioned before, Communication was a dire threat to our team. Our planning and placing out ideas was also to be forgiven. As for a while we did seem to have taken over the project in a coup d’etat kind of way. Though we were trying to layer out our plan, but that foundation was completely reworked, whether that was for the best or not is up to everyone else. I however do feel that we did need try and get better compromises as the plot really got knocked on the head for this project. Also the continuity was a major difficulty for our teamwork, as we really didn’t try and fix the problem. I attempted it, but I have no idea if the other 3 did as communication kept on getting the better of us. But our teamwork over was unfazed by these difficulties.

Solving of those difficulties?

The difficulties did remain unsolved in the end, as communication just was the bane of our project. We couldn’t surpass communication as there was a huge lack of it. Therefore solving things like our protection of the plot and its continuity became almost impossible. It would have been possible to solve communication which in turn solve the other problems, but that was up to us to work together as not only a team but as an organisation.

 What we did well?

I would argue that we did our work as a team exponentially well. We did come together to think of how the plot would work out and what characters we might need for the story. I also believe that our leadership was as simple as it needed to be. Our leader needs something done, he then asks someone to get it done, and that someone does it. We were told to do something, we did it, simple.

What we could have done better?

As aforementioned, Communication, continuity and protection of what basis we planned. Though I will accept that the foundation we laid did need some improving, the way we “improved” it didn’t forebode well for our narrative, or for our game for that matter. But overall, communication was a must need to fix. However there is one major thing we could have definitely done better, and that is being more democratic. Because how we approached being democratic is not exactly how democracy would work, because in a democracy it is not simply to add an idea to the pile, but rather to suggest an idea to the larger group and have them decide. A great example of this use is the governments of most democratic countries. For instance, if the head of the group gives out an idea, and the majority of the group disagree with its implementation, then the idea is written. It is rule of the majority which we seemed to lack having the control over as the majority of things being implemented were not for most of the group’s interest, from where I am standing. I wouldn’t know of course as we didn’t really approach it democratically.

What did I learn about teamwork and communication?

I have learnt lots of things for that matter. Some I have mentioned many times of course, but overall lots of things. For instance, the sheer level of importance of communication. It maybe beating a dead horse to say this, but it is ludicrous, how stupendously important it for communication to thrive in a project such as this. I have also learnt the negative repercussions of failure to communicate. For example, during the early stages of the project, Group B from what I could understand and hear, had an incredible amount of angst being built up towards my Group, Group A. This angst could have been far more devastating if it weren’t for the fact that Group A allowed Group B to have a hold onto the reins as so to speak. We did use communication to resolve this problem, but it caused later problems like the narrative being a bit jumbled.

Exhibition:

What did I do for this exhibition?

For this exhibition, I didn’t really do a lot. Well I don’t feel as though I did a lot, compared to some of the others I had done around above average.For instance, I did stall handling for one day at the Rapture Gaming festival. During that I did help promote our project as well as our college. I have heard that a number people who were at rapture and came to our stall did come to our exhibition, thanks to everyone who was at the stall promoting. I felt that I promoted it enough that at least some people who I had talked to decide to come. I also attended the exhibitions openings for a considerable number of days. Though, I did plan to do more, but for at least one of those days I had befallen to a predicament that had messed any chance of getting to the exhibition. But I managed to talk to people who came to it, gave some information about the games narrative and once even helped someone play the game.

What went well?

I would say that the entire exhibition was a resounding success. Though I did have some negative feelings about the outcome of it, I will agree that it was a great showcase of our work. I have heard that some people enjoyed my script, not in particular, but still announced it nonetheless. A lot of people, from the feedback written, showed a mass of positivity towards what we had showcased for the writing team. So I would say that everything that we did layout for our table was read and enjoyed in some degree. As a whole though, I must repeat that it went very, very well. People who played the game were amazed. They liked the soundtrack, the art and our writing which must point out that it went more than well, it went fantastically well.

The Feedback:

I had done an entire blog post on this particular subject. But I will however still give an in-depth analysis of it. Also I did talk about this particular thing above. From the results, I had found that the majority of the people who looked at our work were Males between the ages of 17 and 19. This particular result had not surprised me, as a large percentage of them were from the Level 3 Year 1’s and Level 2 courses. So I am not really confused by it, but rather elated. Though hardly any of our target audience came to see our work, we still gained the attention of people who may be next to doing a project similar to ours. Also from the results I had found that the majority of the people who looked at our work, wished for more information how knew each other as well as a little more depth in the character bios. Though there were a percentage of results that say that they liked the mystery. I did find that very interesting that a large portion of this percentage were also a part of a group of results that wouldn’t or couldn’t think of anything that we could change/improve on. That being said however, I did say a large potion, not all of them. As some of portion of this percentage were also on the more information group, so this has more or less disbanded a theory that I had for the reasoning of this result. That being of course:

I believe the reasoning of why this portion of our results had expressed that they wouldn’t/couldn’t change anything about our work would be due to their intrigue towards mystery, there for preferring the lack of information, and thus not demanding us to add more information.

But overall the Feedback on our part of the exhibition, had be resoundingly positive, showing a lot of support towards our work.

Conclusion:

So throughout this project, I have done what I would deem as fairly well. I had learnt a number of skills, like how to write a script properly, which was tremendously important to know when you are writing the narrative of the story. With this knowledge I may be able to write for future games that I may work on, or even things like Television Shows, Movies or even YouTube video scripts. I also learnt how to make a Game Design Document as well as learnt how to make one interesting, thanks to Scott Rogers who did an entire chapter on the subject. I have also learnt what it means to be a writer. It isn’t just merely writing the story of the game, but creating the Game’s world narrative. Lore, character arcs, Questlines, Bios, et cetra. I now know, that also as a writer, or Narrative Designer, I not only need to help create the narrative, but also work among the artists to give them ideas of how the character my look, as well as gain pointers from the Games Designers of how the flow of the game may work and play out in certain sequences. I understand the sheer intensity of how the industry treks onwards. Not at the speed of any mere mortal, but of a god; and if you aren’t running at the same speed that it is, you will be lost in mere moments. It may be a cruel and unforgiving reality, but the industry can be one of the most rewarding one, allowing those who understand what makes a good game with the praise that it deserves. I understand how the industry is and the process of making a game is not simply to wait until everyone has done everything for you. But working together to get everything done, and creating the best experience you can possibly do I have seen how you can maturely deal with situations. Not by confrontation, but simply allowing the entire team to help resolve it. Getting ideas not from one perspective, but from as many as possible, to give more options to get it resolved. I have also seen how to lead, not from the actions of other, nor from personal experiences, but from the lack of it. I have seen how a team can be run in the most positive way. To allow not only everyone have a say in what they believe is right, but also to allow everyone to accept or deny that idea. For no one individual can merely speak of an idea and have it to come true, but see that if the majority of the team can agree with that idea. With this knowledge of these new skills that I have gained, as well as the understanding of what it makes to become a writer in the industry as well as how it works and how to deal with situation maturely, I will be able to move forward and use them to help craft not only future games, but also to create a team of individual of whom will be able to give their out their own dreams of what they want to build and share. I will be able to be among that commute, to craft whatever games our future may, or even may not, desire.

[bastardtravel]

December 4, 2017. Berlin, Germany.

The first thing I learned was my normal strategy of walking everywhere is of no use here. Berlin is too big. It’s because there used to be too many Berlins, and once Reagan hulk-punched that wall down it became a single, titanic Berlin.

Hostels were in short supply, but I managed to get my hands on a nice $13 a night dealie right off of the Landwehr canal, called the Grand Hostel Berlin. Their delusions of grandeur didn’t stop at the name. They were under the mistaken impression they were a party hostel, and wanted this party to center around what they called the Gin Library.

Now, ordinarily, those would be great things better together, right? Peanut butter and jelly. Peanut butter and chocolate. Peanut butter and whatever arbitrary nutritional asceticism I’m inflicting on myself at present.

No such luck, beautiful reader. It was most assuredly a library a la Ron Burgundy, leatherbound books and rich mahogany, but it also had bar no one ever wanted to tend, obnoxious techno music that kind of disrupted the whole “library” mystique, and a fucking disco ball.

Do you know why most libraries don’t have disco balls? It’s because you need light to read.

When I entered the Gin Library, there were four people sitting around a coffee table, talking over the bad music in various accents about what their favorite types of alcohol are. Pretty standard cultured frat-boy hostel fare. The girls were middling attractive, the boys were “traveler chic” with whiteboy dreadlocks and dated facial piercings.

Laboring under the mistaken impression I could get some reading done in the library, I stood at the bar and tried to order a beer during happy hour. It didn’t work for a few minutes. I went to reception and said, “Hey, think I could get a beer?” The receptionist smiled, nodded, and shouted rapid German at no one in particular.

I went back to the bar and waited for another couple minutes, then decided the hell with it, I didn’t need one that bad, and started back to the corner seat to chip away at a reread of Stephen King’s It.

It wasn’t until then that one of the girls at the table, still squawking something about how Oh she LUVES tequila, deigned to stand up, approach the bar, and say, “Did you want a beer?”

“You work here?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Are you sure?”

She smiled, thinking I was flirting. I corrected this misconception by deliberately stiffing a service worker on a tip for the first time in my life.

Sorry baby. West Berlin’s always been a capitalism.

I started at the Brandenburg gate, one of Germany’s most famous monuments despite its relative youth, at least by European standards. Berlin had been a defensible fort with a sequence of unpronounceable names since Germany was Prussia, but the Brandenburg gate didn’t show up until around 1790. For America, that’s all of relevant history, but for countries like Italy or England, that’s basically yesterday.

I hadn’t done a lot of Nazi-centric sightseeing because the weather is depressing enough and I like to have fun, but considering the Germanic bent my recent journeys have taken, it’s not avoidable. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe is about a block from the Brandenburg gate, rising from a concrete lot like a time-lapse cemetery. Catchy name too, huh? It’s got a beat and you can dance to it.

Concrete slabs of varying heights shoot haphazardly from the ground with no inscription, pattern, or real rhyme or reason. Some look like tombstones, some like coffins, some like tiny Brutalist skyscrapers. The architect, a dude named Eisenman, claims that the blocks are supposed to create a confusing atmosphere indicative of a highly ordered system gone wrong, then in the same breath says that the memorial has no symbolic significance. Sounds like your confusing atmosphere worked better than planned.

The designer’s contradictory Zen-koan babbling doesn’t stop visitors from their interpretations, though. Popular opinion is that entering the monument proper was isolating. The concrete absorbed the sounds of traffic and life coming from Berlin, leaving you in this cold, spooky hallway. The alienation, the echoes, and the imposing bleakness of the corridors reminded me of a slaughterhouse, but I’m not the best central tendency metric for this kind of thing.

Some people call that vague feeling of visceral unease the heebie-jeebies, or something comparably cute. I call it draggin’ ghosts, and I felt them like a physical weight on my shoulders as I walked out of that bleak little grid. At the same time, I was reining in an almost irresistible urge to jump from block to block. That was something I liked to do in graveyards when I was young, until someone saw me. Never met anyone who was thrilled about that.

I turned the corner and a giant brain-blimp shone down from a wall.

“Oh, good,” I said aloud. Berlin’s got a reputation for art, and a lot of what I saw was pretty cool, but we’ll save that for its own post.

I turned another corner.

agreed

I doubled back to the hostel and sat down for a while since I’d somehow managed to walk four or five miles, thanks to Berlin’s comical immensity. Der Hunger was setting in. I asked a spindly blonde receptionist where I could get some food, and she helpfully said she’d tell me in ten minutes.

She didn’t get the chance. A dude who sounded Ukrainian was scribbling a sort of city-overview to the stoner kid I mentioned yesterday and a middle-aged Japanese couple, and I eavesdropped on that until he circled the areas where “all the best restaurants are”. I leaned in, snapped a picture, and disappeared into Germany’s perpetual freezing rain.

What he meant by “all the best restaurants” was “places you could conceivably locate food”. This walk was only a mile, though, so that was… better? The street was called Bergmannstraße, it was itself about a mile long, and it had nothing but Asian food, one italian restaurant, one Mexican restaurant, and a kebab shop. I didn’t come to Germany for any of those things, but my choices rapidly became branch out or starve. I ate Indian two days in a row, from two different restaurants right next to each other. The first, called India, was bad. The second was incredible. I don’t remember the name.

There were a smattering of tourist shops along Bergmann, and one of them stopped me dead.

Now, my German is not what you would call spectacular. Any doubt about that, ask any of the Austrians or Germans I’ve befriended in my travels; they invariably mock my awful accent and I demand they answer for “feuerzeug“.

I delight in the German language because of the kindergarten way they just staple short, existing words into monstrous yet inexplicably precise Frankenwords.

You’re sick? Du bist krank. Welp, if you’re sick enough, we gotta get you to the hospital. That’s the krankhaus. How we gonna get you there? We’re gonna load you into the krankenwagen.

Absolute poetry.

In my Duolingings, I ran across the suffix –zeug, which essentially just means “stuff”. Your toy? That’s spieltzeug, literally play-stuff. How about a tool? Werkzeug. You can noodle that one out.

Then you got Fahrenzeug which means “driving stuff” and refers to a car. Uh, okay, I guess. But Feuerzeug is exactly what it sounds like, fire-stuff, and it means “a lighter”, and that makes me absolutely furious. You go TOO FAR.

German grammar is a disaster rivaled only by English grammar and their idioms are, as one would expect, deeply nonsensical and often sausage-themed. Every German I’ve encountered has argued they don’t have that many sausage-themed idioms, forcing me to point it out to them when they invariably use one within the following two hours.

These magnets, for those of you who didn’t quite catch up with the bus somehow, are word-for-word English translations of German turns of phrase. I reveled in them, grinning like an idiot in the rain for five minutes, then made the first and last legitimate souvenir purchase of my trip.

I also encountered this gem.

Trump halts maul. Well, it didn’t sound complimentary, but it did sound like home. The last I’d heard of the German opinion on Donnie was when the Morgenpost referred to him as… well, as thus:

“please not the Horror-Clown!”

Well, I had to wait until I got back to the rad library party hostel to solve this particular mystery, but I giggled when I did.

It reminded me of one’a my favorite twitter threads.

Although, in fairness, the t-shirt’s not wrong.

That’s all I can do for today, if I type for too long WordPress’s busted-ass text editor starts flinching away from me every time I hit the enter key like a beaten puppy. Talk to you tomorrow, boys and girls.

Love,

The Bastard

Berlin: Ich Bin Ein December 4, 2017. Berlin, Germany. The first thing I learned was my normal strategy of walking everywhere is of no use here.

[recentanimenews]

Staff Picks: Our Favorite Video Games of 2017

Welcome back to Staff Picks, wherein we list our favorite anime, manga, and video games of 2017. This time we’re living up to the second half of our name with video games, featuring lists from Ani-Gamers Podcast co-hosts David Estrella and Evan Minto. As usual our six choices are hardly able to capture the many great games that came out this year, but they provide a glimpse into a year that was startlingly good for the medium. Nintendo launched the Switch, which set sales records and provided a platform for a number of fantastic, at times generation-defining games, some of which made it onto our lists. Indie games explored mental health, classic animation, and outer space while major studios (and one particular indie darling) unleashed massive open worlds and raucous online experiences. Without further ado, our picks for the best video games of 2017.

David Estrella

#3: Doki Doki Literature Club

Doki Doki Literature Club is a game-changing, earth-shaking, cataclysmic event that all visual novel readers would hope to live through. It’s exactly as cheap, cruel, and malicious as you anticipate … until suddenly it’s not, the ground disappears below your feet, and you re-evaluate whatever brought you into this position in the first place.

That is to say, why are you playing Doki Doki Literature Club?

I cannot speak about this game in terms milder than complete, ecstatic passion.

It is a fully realized expression of the medium, of what it means to be a visual novel, and a glimpse at the frontiers yet to be explored. Doki Doki Literature Club is the story of a generation buried underneath mountains of digital garbage, interpersonal failures, and the burdensome ghost of a future — the lie that we are all on the right track and that we are all going to be fine.

Doki Doki Literature Club careens into the boundaries. Occasionally this ride teeter-totters over the edge, and it’s only because of how far it pushes against what is safe and acceptable in our media that the empathy found in the resolution reaches so deep into my soul.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novel about joining a high school literature club. You can choose to romance your childhood best friend, a pink-haired tsundere character, or a mature, mysterious beauty. Help Club President Monika and the rest of the girls make a big debut for this fledgling club at the school festival.

Doki Doki Literature Club is my Number 3 Staff Pick in Games for Ani-Gamers, but it is Number 1 in my heart.

#2: NieR: Automata

To reiterate what I said on Ani-Gamers Podcast #088, Yoko Taro’s sad robot game is a title few expected to succeed outside of those in the know. I was already prepared to like it (and I did, quite a lot), so the real story here is how deeply it resonated with the outsiders — those with no qualifications in action-heavy, beat-em-up, hack-n-slash games; with those who haven’t followed Yoko Taro’s drunken nihilistic oeuvre since Drakengard (2003); with those who came into this game with no greater motivation other than being extremely horny for 2B. (Is this supposed to be 2D?)

Automata, a mess of a game, is poorly matched in direct competition against Nintendo’s masterfully crafted Breath of the Wild. Zelda is untouchable when it comes to fun, but in terms of raw anger and frustration slathered with cold, gelatinous scoops of depression, Automata makes a decisive victory.

Why would anyone want to spend 40 hours playing a game that sets out to make the player miserable? Was I really miserable during it all? I can’t answer that succinctly in 200-300 words. Gamers must find the answer for themselves.

Many games are fun. Few are sad. Even fewer are sad and developed by Platinum Games with aspirations of tertiary mainstream success on PS4 and PC. Only one beautiful, bittersweet game blindsided the critics, astounded the bean counters at Square Enix, and made the Gamers cry.

Hint: It wasn’t Final Fantasy XV.

#1: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

OK, yes, here it is, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — the easiest and most boring selection a human being could make for their GotY 2017. I actually just want to take this time to talk more about Doki Doki Literature Club since I’m sure Evan will effuse enough praise for this game in his own write-up for the both of us.

Personally, my favorite Doki Doki Literature Club girl is Monika. I know it’s a weird pick since you don’t get to spend much time with her, but that sort of thing is pretty common with visual novels, isn’t it? There’s always a character that gets the short end of the stick and it almost feels like the devs forgot to write a route for what could be a really interesting character. Sayori hangs on the reader’s self-insert character like her life depends on it and Yuri can get a little overbearing. That just leaves Natsuki but I’m not too hot on the tsundere archetype.

I was hoping there was a secret mechanic with the poetry writing segments in the game to unlock Monika’s route, but I guess no one else has found anything like that. The options to share poems with Monika are there, so hopefully Team Salvato is intending on implementing an update that will let Monika Maniacs such as myself spend more time with her.

Breath of the Wild is the Game of the Year, but truthfully, all I need in this life is Monika.

Evan Minto

#3: Night in the Woods

In 2017 it seemed like everything was political, and for good reason — in the US, the election of Donald Trump added fuel to a growing culture war between left and right. So it’s not all that surprising that indie darling Night in the Woods, an adventure game about talking animals, comes with a clear leftist political message and takes a side in the generational divide between millennials and baby boomers. What originally attracted me to the game was its simplistic, paper-cutout visual style and its hilariously sardonic writing. The characters have a rapid-fire, always-on sense of humor and a penchant for dorky self-deprecation that accurately captures the irony-drenched reality of being a young adult in the 2010s. Its main character, Mae Borowski, drops out of college and returns home to her Rust Belt town to find her favorite haunts closing up shop and her friends stuck in dead-end jobs. It’s a little like Scott Pilgrim, in that it’s a nerdy dramedy that explores the things that young people do to form connections and find meaning while beset by economic hardship and mental illness. Plus the characters play in a band where they perform original songs like “Die Anywhere Else” and “Pumpkin Head Guy” via a rhythm mini-game, so I was destined to like this game. The ending is vague, evocative, and explicitly political, but what will stick with me about Night in the Woods is its dynamic and lovable characters, many of whom remind me of my own friends back home.

#2: Super Mario Odyssey

Nintendo understands fun like no one else. For proof, look no further than Super Mario Odyssey, a video game that starts off fun and never stops, even after you beat Bowser and save Princess Peach. Mario’s got all his usual tricks, but this time he also has a talking hat named Cappy who can possess enemies and inanimate objects to aid in their globe-trotting adventure. That Odyssey takes you out of the Mushroom Kingdom is in itself is nothing new; Mario went to space in Galaxy! But Odyssey feels fresh thanks to a charming tendency for surrealism and the bravery to break from the visual conventions of a 36-year-old franchise. There’s a kingdom with dinosaurs, one with a city full of normally proportioned humans, and even one made entirely of food. The game design itself is masterful, with the Cappy mechanics adding a new layer of discovery and technical skill that starts simple but grows as players progress and find new objects with which to interact. Meanwhile, dozens of Moons (the equivalent of the Stars in old games) are strewn across each level, hidden behind simple puzzles, complex platforming challenges, and everything in between. Most importantly, Odyssey rewards exploration and experimentation by reducing punishments and discontinuities and hiding coins and Moons in unique, hard-to-find locations. I’ve been out of the Mario game for a couple years, but what a joyous return this is!

#1: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

In any other year, Mario Odyssey would be my Game of the Year, but alas, 2017 was the Year of Zelda. Breath of the Wild is easily one of the best Zelda games of all time, even rivaling my love of Majora’s Mask and Ocarina of Time. Nintendo boldly threw out many of the 3-D Zelda conventions that have been around since Ocarina, allowing free-roaming exploration across mountains, rivers, and seas, with no predetermined order to the dungeons. The game’s massive world is filled with over 100 mini-dungeons, nearly 1,000 environmental puzzles, and countless open-ended monster encounters. Tying it all together is a set of mechanics that interact and resonate with each other in unexpected ways, allowing for seemingly endless experimentation. Weapons can start fires, fires create updrafts of wind, bombs are carried by the wind, the list goes on. Breath of the Wild captures the appeal of other open-world games but cuts out their tedium and stat-crunching nerdiness, leaving a pure sense of flow and a gnawing curiosity that makes it impossible to put down. In fact, it came out in March and I’m still discovering new items and locations as I approach 150 hours of gameplay. This is a fantasy adventure video game the way they were always meant to be, full of wide-eyed wonder and stunning beauty.

For more 2017 Staff Picks, check out Evan’s manga list and look out for our upcoming anime list!

Staff Picks: Our Favorite Video Games of 2017 originally appeared on Ani-Gamers on January 11, 2018 at 5:26 AM.

By: David Estrella

[scottymcgeesterwrites]

A Crash Course on: The New Testament

    The Old Testament, in case you were too lazy to read through my post on it, was filled with violence and gore, so much that atheists often refer to it in order to show how religion is a tool used to conquer. Most of it isn’t supposed to be taken seriously though – the point is that because of the Fall of Man, the Hebrews had to sacrifice so much to get to the Promised Land, to establish the glory of God on Earth.

    All those laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy – if they were broken, the Jews had to find reparation. This mostly came in the form of sacrificing cattle – mainly goats. This is where the term “scapegoat” comes from. Sins would be passed onto the goat through the blessing (or rather, cursing, if you think of it that way) of a priest. The goat would be slain and the sins would be forgiven.

    We left off the Old Testament with the books of the prophets – wise men who foretold the coming of a savior so we wouldn’t have to keep on killing these goats. Remember though that these prophetic books were written in a time of great turmoil in Israel and Judah; every “pagan” nation out there wanted to conquer the world. The Israelites wanted to look forward to something good for once.

    That eventually came in the form of Jesus Christ.

     Jesus was Jewish. His apostles were Jewish. They all grew up in Jewish communities. In the traditional sense, Jesus came to wash away this need for blood sacrifice that was displayed in the Old Testament. He became the very lamb who offered himself by becoming Man. He also allowed the grace of God to be given to anyone (called Gentiles) – not just the Jews.

    Now, at this time the Romans had been in full force. Egypt was a thing of the past, the Greeks were long gone, Assyrians and Babylonians were in the dust. The so-called descendants of the legendary Trojans, the Romans (see Virgil’s Aeneid), finally had their revenge and ruled the world.  

    One would think such a powerful empire would suppress religious groups like the Jews. Not entirely so. The thing about Roman mythology is that it’s exactly the same fucking thing as Greek mythology, but with Latin names. The Romans were fanatic about mystery cults, including the Celts and the Norse. This is that time period where many mythologies mingle and all sorts of symbols get mixed up. So they let the Jews do their thing and the two had a mutual relationship. However, at the specific time of Jesus’ birth, King Herod ruled over the province of Judea. He received mixed reviews from the Jewish people, even though he called himself “King of the Jews”; ironic, being that Jesus would be the one called that. This relationship with the Romans would prove fatal in the coming years after Christ. The Jews would want their freedom, culminating in the Jewish-Roman Wars. Rome said, “No, fuck you,” and destroyed the second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Parts of the Temple still stand today and Jews still mourn it annually.

    So at last we come to the Gospels.

    Remember how the Torah had these different sources that scholars identified? There’s something vaguely similar with the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke. For now, let’s not worry about John, and I’ll tell you why later.

     Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels – syn meaning together and optic meaning eye - they see through the same eyes. For the longest time we thought Matthew was first, but after more archaeological findings, we realized that Mark is the oldest. Most Bibles still keep this tradition by placing Matthew first. We also realized that Matthew and Luke must have copied from Mark, since Mark is the oldest and also reads like a rough draft. However, Matthew and Luke share things not found in Mark. This leads to the hypothetical existence of an unknown source(s) labeled “Q” for “Quelle” which is German for “source” because Germans are annoyingly scholarly and can tell the rest of the world what to name things.

    Now, why am I not including John? Why is John different?

    When we get to John, it’s like reading some incredibly hipster poetry. Mark is like an every day thriller book. Matt and Luke are just a step above that. But John? Dude, John was meta before it was cool. He isn’t included in the Synoptic Gospels because his style is so radical from the others. His writing is more eloquent, and definitely more abstract. While the others begin with concrete scenes, John starts off with “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

    Whoa, dude, slow down…

(As a sidenote, the Greek word for “word” is “logos”. These Gospels were written in Greek, a common thing at the time. So whenever you see the word “log” it has something to do with words or writing. Logical - “word-like”, illogical - “not word-like”, a captain’s “log” - the captain’s word, logarithm - “words and numbers” (arithim being derivative for numbers, hence how we get arithmetic). In the movie The Matrix Revolutions, Neo takes the ship called “Logos” to the Machine City. Neo is literally the Word of God returning to God. Whoa, I just blew your mind right now, didn’t I? You like that mental blowjob now, dontcha? You dirty fuck.)

   Moving on.

    Who wrote the Gospels?

    Traditional answers are basic: The disciple Mark wrote Mark, Matthew wrote Matthew, so on and so forth. A critical analysis of these texts indicates otherwise. If Matthew wrote Matthew, why did Mark write about Matthew joining Jesus’ ministry in the exact same story nearly word-for-word? You would think Matthew would put it in his own words, right? In short, the Gospels show evidence of oral tradition – rather than eye-witness accounts being written down. They shows a collective effort of memories of one Jesus of Nazareth written down under assumed names. And this is very important, so read carefully. The gospels aren’t meant to be fiction, biographies or histories. They are collected memoirs of a man and specific life events with different interpretations, written in different styles.

    The Gospel of Mark

    Mark begins with Jesus’ Baptism by John the Baptist. The clouds break suddenly and God says, “This is my Son.” Nobody else sees this but Jesus. So once Jesus is baptized he goes out and gathers his followers, making the Gospels really look like Ocean’s Eleven once you think about it.

    Mark’s Gospel depicts Jesus in conflicting ways. Mark has him happy, yelling, crying – all these human emotions that make him human. At the same time, we are reminded by his divinity whenever he performs exorcisms and whenever words from a previous prophet like Malachi or Isaiah have been fulfilled. How can Jesus be both human and divine? Mark sort of leaves that as a “divine mystery.”

    The Gospel of Matthew

Matthew contains an infancy narrative (Luke does so also, and they are the only two who do). He is also the only one to include the visitation of the Magi. Interestingly enough, we don’t know how many Magi there were, even though we depict it as Three Wise Men/Three Kings. Matthew always referred to them in the plural sense, though without ever giving a number. We assume there were three because of the three gifts.

    In depicting Christ, Matthew doesn’t hold back on his divinity. His gospel refers to Jesus as “Christ” more times than any other gospel. He references the Old Testament more times than any other gospel. Matthew clearly wanted to show the continuity between the prophecies and Jesus to show that Jesus certainly was the appointed messiah. While Mark left Jesus a mystery, Matthew said, “No, fuck that, I can explain it” - much like a Zelda fan trying to explain the Legend of Zelda chronology (before Nintendo officially released it, of course). He starts out describing the geneology of Jesus all the way from Abraham, in an effort to persuade Jews that Jesus truly is the messiah. Out of all the Gospels, Matthew is proud of his Jewish heritage and sees how Jesus came to fulfill prophecies and stuff, not abolish Judaism, but carry it on. His audience is clearly to the Jewish people as he tries to explain why they should believe in Jesus. He is the most cited gospel by Christian writers, and is often seen as the “conservative Gospel”.

    The Gospel of Luke

Luke is unique in several ways. It seems that the author of Luke also wrote The Acts of the Apostles. This is seen in similar writing styles, the opening and the ending. The end of Luke has Jesus ascending into Heaven; Acts opens up right at that moment, when the Apostles figure out what to do right after Jesus ascends. Unlike the other gospels, Luke writes exclusively for the Gentiles. He omits rambles about Jewish customs and any derogatory statements towards Gentiles in that day and age (calling someone a “dog” indicated you were a non-believer). Luke depicts Jesus more as a subordinate of God. It was God who created Jesus, who gave him his powers, made him our savior, and rose him from the Dead.

    The Gospel of John

    Like I said, John is very different. He has a whole bunch of new stories not included in other gospels, such as the story of turning water into wine, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman at the well, the raising of Lazarus, and Jesus washing feet. John is tied to the “Beloved Disciple” whose identity isn’t exactly clear and leads to many conspiracy theories such as the Beloved Disciple even being Mary Magdalene - the infamous prostitute whom Jesus befriends. John himself was seen as “feminine” and was the youngest of all the disciples. The authorship of John is hotly debated, and it’s written as if the author wanted to be anonymous. John is big on “revelation.” He stresses that Jesus is God revealed. He depicts Jesus as being equal to God, not a subordinate or even much of a human. He focuses on the paradox of Jesus being both man and divine, something only the divine is capable of doing. You might see people holding up signs saying “John 3:16” which reads, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

The Rest of the New Testament and The Book of Revelation

That’s pretty much it.

We all know the story of his death, how the  Jewish priests condemned him for heresy, Judas’ betrayal, and Jesus’ resurrection. After Jesus ascends, Acts of the Apostles describes the fucking acts of the Apostles because why else would they title that? They received the Holy Spirit/Ghost and spread the “good news” under the weight of persecution. The Romans didn’t want to have anything to do with this “messiah” nonsense, which disrupted the Jewish culture. Peace? Love? And for all? Pah, humbug. After Acts there are series of long letters from different apostles and disciples to across the known Roman realm speaking of the new ministry and Jesus’ teachings.

    The New Testament then ends on a big “What the fuck?” with the Book of Revelation. An interesting book, to say the least, ripe with symbolism and apocalyptic literature, which was something very common at the time anyway. The historical background of Revelation was during the destruction of the second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD. So it’s no wonder that the writers of the New Testament should try and give this meaning to the future of Christianity. Think of it this way – if Jesus had died in the ‘90′s, right before 9/11, wouldn’t our modern-day apostles try to relate to that too? The main point of Revelation was to show determination in faith even under suffering and persecution.

The Quests for the Historical Jesus

    Much like the Old Testament, old scholarly men with long goatees murmured over the New Testament during the 18th Century. It all began with one Hermann Samuel Reimarus. The question he asked was “Why did Jesus live?” You think it’s simple at first. He lived to save us from sin. Well, so are you saying he lived in order to die then? What we’re getting at is – did Jesus antagonize Jewish priests on purpose just so he could die? If so, his mission seems rather contrived. And so began many critical analyses on who Jesus was, if he really existed, and what he all meant. These brought up many interesting theories, some from scholars like Reimarus who actually sought to undermine the Church. Here’s a list of just a handful:

1. The apostles themselves fabricated the divinity of Jesus by going into his tomb, stealing the body and hiding it.

2. Since the gospels were written after Jesus death, they were created already with a rudimentary Church established. This leads us to conclude that we may never actually know what Jesus said or wanted the world to do as it had been embellished.

3. Jesus did not die on the cross but actually survived his wounds and got to live a little while after

4. Jesus was a radical Essene priest who survived his cruxifiction, married Mary Magdalene, had a family and later died.

5. Jesus did exist but was not divine and tales of his miracles were meant to give supernatural meaning to normal events

6. Jesus never existed. Since early Christianity was rooted in older myths (Osiris, Buddha, Zoroaster), the “apostles” attempted to create a new religion.

7. Jesus was actually the first successful case of artificial insemination by angels who are really aliens

8. Jesus was not the savior but a prophet, and when he realized that the real savior wasn’t coming in his lifetime, he decided to adopt the role.

9. All of this was conjured up by the Apostles getting high from known substances that mystery cults used at the time.

10. Yes, Jesus orchestrated everything since the beginning, even telling Judas to betray him, making Judas the REAL “Beloved Disciple.” (Dumbledore/Snape, anyone?)

What Did Jesus Look Like?

-   Let’s get one thing straight – Jesus was not a long-haired, attractively bearded, Anglo-Saxon man. If you still think he looks like this:

you are a dunderhead, but most likely a victim of white people writing history.

Jesus would have looked something like this:

You know - someone who actually looks like he’s from the Middle East.

  Jesus on Homosexuality

Like I said, Matthew is seen as the “conservative Gospel.” It is from this Gospel that conservatives draw the conclusion that heterosexuality is the norm. In Matthew 19:4-5, someone asks him if divorce is acceptable, which he responds:

    “‘Have you not read that the One who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh”? Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.’ ”

  Jesus however brings some fine print about this in the same passage. The dialogue continues and people are uncomfortable by his strict view on divorce. Then someone asks him if it is better that a man avoids marriage, to which he says

“Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.” (Matthew 19:11-12)

  If you want to bash any homophobic Christian, those are the verses to hit them with. Eunuchs are men who, for one reason or another, do not procreate. They could be castrated (as slaves were often), they could castrate themselves to pursue some aesthetic lifestyle – or they could just be gay. Jesus said right there, “For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth.” He could have meant someone born without testicles but that’s like finding an albino person, even rarer. It’s certainly no stretch that he means gay people. In this time frame actually, “born eunuch” was a term to refer to men with effeminate behavior and characteristics, who had no interest in women. If anything – Jesus actually said to accept homosexuality. Other Bible translations might not even use eunuch but simply have him say, “Some cannot marry because they were born so.” Even if you argue that it could mean a testicle-less man, the range of his words accepts anything you could throw at it. Gay men, testicle-less men, deformed testicles, whatever other reason you cannot marry a woman because of the way you were born. He ultimately says, “Yeah, I know it’s hard to follow. There are exceptions such as these kinds of people. But if you are not one of them, try to follow it.”

    Any Christian who refers to the Old Testament to justify homophobia is missing the point entirely, because quoting the Old Testament shouldn’t even be much of a thing if you’re a Christian, unless it’s to quote a prophet. Jesus was meant to renew the Old Covenant made by Moses and the Patriarchs. The reason why the Old Testament focuses on the union of man and woman was because that was/is the prime natural way to procreate, and the Israelites depended on procreation to continue the kingdom, and ultimately the lineage that would bring about Mary giving birth to Jesus.

  Jesus and the Fig Tree

  The Gospels of Mark and Matthew include a scene where Jesus curses a fig tree for not producing fruit. This is the source of many memes and jokes. At first, it seems like one of those random hilarious moments like in the Old Testament with Elijah and the little boys and the bears. What is this? It seems like Jesus was high on munchies, wanted some fruit but goddammit it’s not fruiting season yet so fuck you. But why? Why couldn’t Jesus just make some fruit pop out of thin air? He definitely had no trouble handing out hundreds of fish from a single basket. Scholarly work, however, has picked at this story as a parable to Judea “not bearing fruit” for God and His Kingdom.

Sources:

Understanding the New Testament and its Message: An Introduction by Vincent P. Branick

The Contemporary Quest for Jesus by N.T. Wright

Further Reading:

Jesus the Man by Barbara Thiering (I have this book myself and have yet to read it, but I would go about with caution – it’s more radical and loosely scholarly, albeit interesting)

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan (Always wanted to read this, looks super good)

More on Jesus and Homosexuality

[thecloudlight-blog]

New Post has been published on Cloudlight

New Post has been published on https://cloudlight.biz/new-apps-provide-a-world-of-literature/

New Apps Provide a World of Literature

A machine that kicked off the phone growth and forever changed the manner we speak, accumulate and eat records. With portability and a knack for alleviating boredom, the iPhone and its ilk obviously have become ad hoc e-book readers for busy humans seeking brief breakout to fictional locations from nonfiction reality, like being trapped in transit or stuck in a Trader Joe’s line stretching to infinity and beyond.

Serious readers understand squinting thru a sprawling novel can take a few attempt at the small display. But just as websites, films, and games soon adapted themselves for the phone experience, a brand new form of “cellular fiction” has emerged to match the confines of the tool — and today’s on-demand mindset.

Modern cellular fiction commonly consists of sections of a novel or story that take just 15 to twenty mins to take in.

The installments are cleanly formatted for smooth reading on a 4- or five-inch display and delivered at ordinary periods through e-mail or app (Android and iOS). Cliffhangers are famous.

RADISH announced its debut in advance this yr and is one of the more modern businesses hoping to make the idea of serialized tales for smartphones as a hit right here as it’s far in Asia — mainly in China and Japan, where the form has been famous for years. In the Radish app, readers subscribe to character works on a by means of chapter foundation and provide small payments (starting at less than a dollar, and writers get a reduce) to continue beyond the primary few sections.

The Radish content material is written on the whole by self-published authors and looked after through genre

Romance, fantasy, paranormal, teen, thriller, L.G.B.T., science fiction and fashionable. For extra refined looking and discovery, testimonies are also tagged with labels like “black girl magic,” “billionaire,” “insurrection,” “werewolf” and so forth. The fine of the writing varies — and plenty of efforts constantly appear to end up as ham-fisted erotica — however Radish books are proudly taking the mantle of snackable pulp fiction into the digital age. (And don’t knock do-it-yourself authors — “Shades of Grey” aside, Andy Weir’s “The Martian” began out as a self-posted serial on his blog again in 2009 before the 2015 film model grossed $630 million at the global container workplace.)

Mobile Apps – A Necessity While You Are on the Go

Since the past a long time, human evolution has been absolutely patronized with tendencies in digital computing sectors which might be constantly growing their diameter through a chain of innovative innovations. Today, we’re within the era wherein a virtual world has already begun to take form over the real world with a promise of endless opportunities. Our global is transforming on the bottom of sand to silicon and is depending on the complexities of code to ultrathin fabricated chips which strength our remotes to this virtual world i.E. Smartphones, laptops and many others.

Imagining the sector without those powerful devices and internet is out of the query.

The smartphones have already altered the humans’ thoughts approximately experiencing the world. Furthermore, there may be bias in every and the whole lot that surrounds them. For instance, our look for new locations and the war to locate them has almost vaporized for the reason that invention of “Google MAPS.” Google Maps has enabled its user to discover the preferred region in no time and get a pre-routed map to get there. The utility or “APPS” on the Smartphone could be described as software program or collection of encrypted code which runs on the phone hardware just as a program on computer systems/laptops. Directly or circuitously these ‘APPs’ paintings as the primary verbal exchange bodies which are responsible for interplay and paintings are performed through a phone.

These mobile applications could be categorized on the premise of – hardware they’re used on and environment on which they’re programmed specifically android, ubuntu, apple iOS and so on. Since the inception of digitalization trend, the entirety we will suppose upon has an APP to be had on a phone; for instance, from reserving a cab to ordering meals, to shopping online – there are multiple packages for each of them.

Leading People in the VUCA World

Warren Bennis, an American student and a pioneer of the present day subject of Leadership Studies said that achievement in control requires gaining knowledge of as rapid as the world is changing. Especially, we’re now entering into the digital age and the whole lot movements very speedy. If we can’t maintain up with the one’s changes, we will be left at the back of. This article will discover four key areas to address speedily converting global.

American Military used an acronym known as VUCA to describe severe situations in Afghanistan and Iraq. It stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Actually, VUCA does no longer exist handiest in Afghanistan and Iraq, it may be discovered in countries, townships, households and organizations. It is everywhere and usually supplies a hard time to leaders.

Volatile: Things are not very easy to predict like earlier than. With the new generation

The sector will become like a huge village and smaller. Everything can take place at any time in everywhere.

Uncertain: Nothing is permanent and present day enterprise international is complete of uncertainty. If we need to make choices most effective when we know things very genuinely, we may additionally by no means make decisions in this speedy converting world. Complex: Almost all conditions are very complicated within the enterprise now an afternoon. Leaders are going through many troubles and challenges associated with many rules and regulations which need to be compliance with, plenty necessities, product problems. Ambiguous: Everything is unclear and vague. Unclear conditions, rules, regulations & regulations make leaders harassed. It is very tough for leaders to make clear decisions. Therefore, a pacesetter needs to recognize the phrase VUCA this is used to describe excessive conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Leaders should create some other VUCA as a way to deal with the VUCA that is meant for the intense conditions. They are Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility. Vision: Since the destiny is not easy to be anticipated, leaders ought to have a clear imaginative and prescient in which they want to head. Leader while not having any feel, of course, will fail ultimately.

Understanding: Leader needs to be capable of recognizing the conditions where there is complete of uncertainty. A leader need to apprehend their business, the situations they’re in, and people who they may be dealing with. Clarity: Most of the enterprise situations are complex and complex, leaders need to be able to see matters virtually and create readability. They ought to be able to clarify things which aren’t positive or unclear.

Agility: When matters are doubtful and indistinct, it will very tough for leaders to make selections. Therefore, the chief should have the ability and should have potential to move quickly and effortlessly. There is only one aspect that isn’t always modified is an alternate. Leaders must face the VUCA global with clear thoughts (Head), correct mindset and right mindset (Heart), and the courage to make things occurs (Hand). In different words, leaders need to have a clean imaginative and prescient, they need to be capable of understanding the situations and those, they should be capable of seeing matters actually, and that they must be able to move speedily and easily. By doing so, the chief will be capable of lead their humans to continue to exist within the VUCA paintings this is extraordinarily hard.

Love Poems in Sanskrit Literature

Remember Sir Walter Scott’s, Brignall Banks? ‘A maiden at the fort wall, Was making a song merrily,-,”O, Brignall banks are clean and honest, And Greta woods are green; I’d alternatively rove with Edmund there, Than reign our English queen.”

What a beautiful sentiment is being expressed there? Similar poems are available in loads of English Literature. But in case you come across Sanskrit and Tamil literature lots of Love poems will take you to a greater level.

Every unmarried movement of a lover will become a terrific epic! The poets left no stone unturned. In order to study all the poems and soak up the, that means we might also need masses of years.

The love poems are analyzed threadbare through the wonderful pupils and in these poems, the sentiment or ‘rasa’ reigns very best.

The emotion of affection is inborn in the human coronary heart. But it will come to prominence once it reveals an item for its activity.

Take a case of a fascinating youth. He occurs to see a lovely young female. His emotion of affection is aroused. He starts to think about her. Fortunately, if he meets her in a secluded vicinity and the mutual love is completely advanced, they revel in the ‘rasa’.

But within the poetry the ‘rasa’ even though developed within the characters inside the poem, they’re no longer enjoying or tasting it, however, the readers are enjoying it.

The mystery of the good poetry is to offer that ‘rasa’ or sentiment to the reader.

Sanskrit love poems are usually successful in giving this lovely sentiment.

If you move in deep, the literature gives numerous elements of affection. Coding machine isn’t a modern one. In historic instances, the fans used this system. Only the lovers will understand their language. This has been defined in love poems in an element. Also, there’s a sign language. The gestures give exclusive meanings. Meeting area, meeting time and so forth. Will be communicated via this signal language. If there are a few own family individuals gift inside the accumulating, the female will communicate to her lover the use of this language. Their global is specific and there’s no location for others.

    Originally posted 2016-08-27 05:55:58.