#so far my kind editors have not told me to rewrite the entire thing so what more could i ask for

[durchdenspiegel]

29.04.2024

After the stress of writing my first draft, somehow the editing still feels a bit daunting. I still have a few unfinished sentences I need to figure out as well as my conclusion… but even if it feels different, the worst is really over 🌸

[pars-ley]

Until Tomorrow | Part two

Pairing: Taehyung x Reader

Summary: You’re a happily single magazine editor in London, that is, until you’re set up with a handsome musician, who’s not exactly forthcoming about being in the biggest boy group in the world. But with your days together numbered, will this blossom into something more or crash land, leaving your heart broken.

Genre: Idol!au / Fluff / Romance / Comedy / Slight hint of smut 

Rating: 15+ (sfw)

Warnings: Mentions of sex and sexual activity / Kissing

Word Count: 6413

Part one | Part two Notes: Beta reader @ditttiii​ Thank you so much for your help, you are such a queen! 

I knock lightly against the boss’ door and wait. 

Janelle Rogers is the editor-in-chief for our magazine, she’s brilliant but also a bit eccentric. She always has some kind of wacky blazer on and yet, somehow always manages to look professional. She’s also the messiest person I know, resulting in her desk always being untidy, but she claims it to be organised chaos instead.

Who am I to argue with that kind of logic? 

She’s tough and a lot of her employees are terrified of her, but if you work hard and do a good job she usually notices and shows her appreciation in some way, which makes her quite pleasant to work for. 

I get on with her well on a personal level too. We’ve been out to dinner a few times and it’s always fun. It also always turns into a late night drinking session. Going out with her, usually means I am in for a two day hangover, which is why it doesn’t happen all that often.

“Come in!” She calls.

Swinging open the door, I step in. 

Janelle is pacing back and forth, phone tucked under her ear, as she searches through the papers in her hand. Hearing me enter, she looks up and removes the phone from her ear, before she says, “Y/n, I heard you wanted to speak to me, please come in. I won’t be long.” 

She indicates to the empty seats across from her desk. 

I sit down and cross one leg over the other, trying not to listen to the heated discussion she’s having. 

“I appreciate that I do, but I need that piece before the end of the week.” She says, her tone clipped. I see her jaw tense as she grits her teeth to whatever response she gets. “And I understand that, nonetheless, you’ve had plenty of time to figure it out. Your story needs to be in by the end of the week, otherwise I’ll use someone else’s. End of discussion.”

She hangs up the phone, almost slamming it back down onto the base unit and sighs. 

Sitting down, elbows on her desk, she gives me her full attention. “Some people will use any excuse to avoid a deadline.” She shakes her head and then meets my eyes. “Please tell me you’re here to give me some good news.”

I grimace slightly. “Well the magazine is on track...mostly. The music segment however…” I pause. “It’s unfinished.”

Her face drops. “What?” She mutters, her voice low, brimming with anger. “What do you mean, it’s not finished?”

“Only half of it is complete.” 

She slams her hand on her desk. “God Dammit, Toby.” She runs her hands over her hair, smoothing her tight, black curls. 

Toby was one of our writers, mostly for the music assignments. He did interviews with the artists, went to gigs, reviewed albums but recently had gone on a holiday for some kind of meditation retreat. ‘No phones permitted and no contact from the outside world’ kind of place, not my type of holiday but who am I to judge?

“Can’t we just use one of our other music pieces?” I ask, knowing the answer before she gets the chance to respond.

“No, we need that segment. Our sales were up last month because we featured that story about the k-pop group selling out Wembley, now we need to report what the shows were like.” She sits back in her chair. “BTS are very current, it’s what we need. They’re our ticket to the younger generation buying our magazine.”

“Well, that’s why it’s not finished, the concerts are this weekend and Toby’s obviously not going to be here for them. He didn’t seem to have tickets for them either.”

She lets out a long, drawn out breath. “Ok, well we need to get our hands on a ticket.”

I put my hands up to stop her. “I’ve already got people on it but I need another writer to rewrite the segment.”

She nods. “Toby won’t like it but that’s not my problem. I’ll get George on it.” She picks up the phone and within seconds it’s all arranged and passed over. 

I stand and make my way to the door.

“Y/n?” She calls as I open the door to make my exit. I turn back to her. “Good work, keep me posted, we need this story.”

I give her a sharp nod, not sure how possible it will be to achieve this but of course I’ll try my hardest to make it happen.

I head back to my desk, sending more emails and making more calls, when my personal phone vibrates against the wood. I glance down at the screen and my stomach flips when I see who the message is from.

Taehyung [14.09]: So, how’s your day going?

A wide grin spreads across my face. He’s thinking about me. My chest swells at that thought alone and I type a quick reply and press send.

Y/n [14.10]: So far? It’s a day from hell. What about yours?

His reply is  immediate.

Taehyung [14.11]: 😥 I don't like to hear that. My day is fine. Will be better later, hopefully I can cheer you up...If you’re still free?

I smile at my phone. I couldn’t wait to get out of here and meet him. It’s the only thing keeping me going through all of this work, knowing that he would be there at the end of it. And clearly he was looking forward to seeing me too; my ego was quite inflated. 

Y/n [14.11]: Of course, can’t wait. What time?

I put my phone down and carry on clicking through my emails, relieved to discover that I’ve sent and replied to all I needed to, for now at least. I decide to take a much needed break. I put my earphones in and shuffle my Spotify playlist of metal and rock songs that I had put together and turn the volume up to as loud as it can go. 

The ear buds thrum inside my ears as they blare out classic 80’s rock sounds with ‘Pour some sugar on me’ and I lose myself in Def Leppard. Turning in my seat, I look out of my office window. 

The landscape of London is truly something to marvel at, and I would never tire of this view. The way the entire city reflected in the windows of the high-rise buildings, the way the sun bounced off the river and the classic style of our oldest landmarks. London is a remarkable place. 

I sigh and put my feet up on the low window ledge, crossing my ankles. My phone vibrates in my lap and I smile as I see his name on my screen, reading the message.

Taehyung [14.21]: I’ll be working for a while, is 7 too late for you?

I sigh, I had another early start tomorrow but I can’t pass up the chance to go on a date with the only guy I've been interested in for two years. Who knows how long he’ll be over here for? I can deal with being tired for a few days.

Y/n [14.22]: I can make an exception for you. Let me send you the address.

I sent him the link with all the info of Yoshi’s restaurant. If he was anything like me, he’d be looking over the menu and planning his meal.

Taehyung [14.25]: Then I am flattered. See you there :)

I grin at my phone like an idiot. God, how old was I? I’m sitting here embarrassing myself, acting like a seventeen year old love sick teenager over a guy I barely know. 

I kept picturing his face, his smile, the way he raises an eyebrow so seductively, or the way he runs a hand through his dark brown hair. I’m not sure if my memory of him does him justice. 

I pause my playlist and quickly dial Yoshi’s number, waiting for him to pick up.

“Yo! What’s happening, jelly bean?” His usually cheerful voice rings out.

“I’m wondering something?” I ask hesitantly.

“Wondering...if I’m as good in the sack as people say? Why yes, I am.” He quips.

I roll my eyes. “No one says that and I would never be wondering that.” 

His laugh vibrates my ear. “Your loss. So what are you wondering then?”

“Well, do you have a table for two for tonight at seven?” I bite my lip, waiting for the response.

“If the table’s for you, for sure! Who you bringing with you this time? Taylor?” He asks, mentioning one of my oldest and closest friends who has been with me to his restaurant many times.

I hesitate. “...No. I’m bringing a...date, actually?” I hold my breath as I wait for his reaction.

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!” He exclaims, so loud I have to quickly turn the call volume down before he deafens me. “Hold up, you can’t just drop a bomb like that on me! Who is it? How did you meet? It’s the tourist guy you bumped into, isn’t it? I told you y/n, I told you he thought it was a date.” He bombards me, laughing out of excitement.

“Actually,” I cut in, “It’s not him.” I hear the groan of disappointment on the other end. “It’s his friend.” I laugh.

“Well damn girlfriend! I’m impressed. I can’t wait to hear more about this. Your table will be ready at seven, don’t worry, I got you.” 

I smile. “Thank you, I really appreciate it. And Yoyo?”

“Yea?” He waits, the grin in his voice audible.

“Please, nothing embarrassing.” I practically whine.

He gasps. “Would I ever?” He pauses. “On second thoughts, don’t answer that. Heart crossed and hope to die, I shall be on my best behaviour.”

My shoulders relax a little. “Thank you. See you later.”

I hang up and remove my earphones, releasing a long, slow breath. That didn’t go as badly as I had imagined it would, he let me off surprisingly easy. Maybe going there tonight won’t be as mortifying as I’m imagining.

My work phone rings and I push the thoughts of Taehyung and tonight’s date out of my head and get back to work.

The afternoon goes slow, my eyes constantly finding the clock to see how much time has passed; counting down the hours till I could leave and meet him. 

I wade through my workload; like trudging through mud. I haven’t had any luck with finding a ticket to the BTS concert at the weekend. Any hope I did have was fading fast, well aware of the fact that I was running out of time. I had 3 days until the concert took place, I couldn’t give up; my boss wouldn’t allow it. 

I work past my usual time, wanting to get as much as I can done today, so it might allow me some more freedom for the rest of the week.

At six o’clock I am strutting out the door, after touching up my make-up and fluffing my hair in the washroom. I had decided to take the underground to ride the few stops to the restaurant. Once out of the stuffy tube station, I send a message to Taehyung letting him know that I’m walking from the station and will be there shortly. The text I get back however, has me practically running to the doors of the restaurant.

Taehyung [18.47]: I’m inside :)

My heart drops. But surely Yoshi wouldn’t have any idea who my date was or what he looked like, so Taehyung should be safe.

I yank open the heavy, double doors frantically searching for him. When my eyes finally find him, I gulp. Him and Yoshi are both sitting at a table, deep in conversation. I quickly rush over, interrupting them.

“Taehyung, I see you’ve met my friend, Yoshi.” I smile nervously, as they both stand up to greet me.

Yoshi gets there first, pulling me into a tight hug and squeezing me hard. I pat him on the back. “Ok, I tap out.” I wheeze,and he releases me. “Try to not injure me before my date, will you?” 

He laughs. “Introductions have already been made, so you don’t need to worry. I was just filling  Taehyung in here, about some of our adventures.” He winks.

I scowl at him. “Ok, ok, enough embarrassing stories.” I take my bag from my shoulder and put it with my blazer onto the far side of the seat in the booth. 

Yoshi grins. “Ok, I’ll leave you to it. Taehyung, very nice to meet you. Someone will be over soon to take your order. Enjoy guys!” He says with another wink, before he quickly proceeds to leave us alone.

We both stand there smiling at each other before I lean in, kissing him on the cheek. I linger there for a moment but I stiffen when I feel his breath at my ear. 

“Nice to see you again.” He greets softly. His deep voice like silk, doing things to my body I didn’t expect. 

I pull away, blushing slightly. “Shall we?” I indicate to the seats in the booth. He nods and we slide in. 

One of the best things here was the decor, it gave us a lot more privacy than other places I’ve been to. The booths had partition doors which I could close completely or leave open slightly. The partitions behind our seats were completely covered with painted japanese murals and there were beautiful, pink blossoms hanging from the ceiling.

“Were you here very long?” I ask, trying to gauge how much time they would have had to speak to each other.

He shakes his head. “Long enough to hear how you met each other and the story about the time you spilt a drink in your lap at a theme park and he told everyone you walked passed, that you had wet yourself.”

I laugh and roll my eyes at the memory. “That’s Yoshi for you. Never passes up the chance to embarrass me.”

Taehyung smiles. “He also said some very nice things about you.”

“That is good to hear but he has to, he knows I’d bully him otherwise.” 

He laughs at that. “You two seem very close.”

I nod. “We are. He’s been my best friend for a long time.”

“It’s good to have someone like that.”

I nod again, agreeing. “Do you have a best friend?”

He smiles. “Yes, his name’s Jimin.”

“And would he embarrass you like Yoshi does to me?”

He shakes his head, then leans in closer. “Worse, much worse.”

I chuckle. “Well in that case, I hope I get to meet him one day.” I reply, a smirk playing across my lips. 

He fights his smile. “Perhaps you will soon.”

I raise an eyebrow at him quizzically. “Is he over here also?”

He nods slowly. “Yep and yes, he’s another musician.”

He answers my unasked question and I lean back in my seat, surprise evident on my face. “Really? I’m guessing you still don't want to tell me about your job?”

I notice a flicker of sadness flash in his eyes, before they look down and away from my questioning gaze. I feel immediate guilt in my gut. “Hey, it’s ok, you don’t have to tell me anything, you just seem quite secretive about it. I was saying it more as an observation.” I reassure.

He looks up, eyes wide, “I’m not secretive!” He exclaims, shocked. “I want to tell you but—”

“Hey,” I cut him off, “No need to explain. Don’t worry, you can tell me whenever you’re ready.” I give him a reassuring smile and a gentle pat on the hand he had placed above the table.

I see him stiffen for a moment and my response is to do the same, until he turns his hand over, so we're palm to palm and gives it a little squeeze. His shoulders relax and so do mine, even though my heart hammers wildly with excitement. I can feel my palm starting to sweat the longer his touch lingers on me, it feels like a lifetime before he finally lets go and pulls his hand away. 

I can breathe and think straight again.

While I was more than happy to wait for him to tell me about his work, I found myself growing increasingly curious about the subject. He’s so mysterious, I can’t understand why he won't talk about it. I would assume that being a musician would be a  cool profession to divulge about,  most would probably gush till their heart's content, given the opportunity. 

But, in a way I’m glad he’s not like that, I don’t think I would be able to  stand the egotistical bragging.

“Can I take your drink order?” A sweet voice asks, stepping in between the sliding doors. I look up and recognise the server as Emiko. She’s worked here for a while now, and is always pleasant

“Oh, hi y/n! So nice to see you.” She beams her usual toothy grin.

“Nice to see you! How have you been?” I ask.

“I’ve been good!.” She giggles. “I won’t disturb you too much, what can I get you two?”

I order a lemonade and Taehyung orders a coke. I did contemplate an alcoholic beverage, but I don’t want to be the only one drinking on a date, that’s how I'm sure to embarrass myself.

I pick up the menu and skim through it, even though I'm sure I know it by heart by now. 

Glancing up as he too studies the menu, my eyes rake over his broad shoulders, the light beige shirt he wears falls flatteringly over his broad chest, clinging to all the right places. His black cap conceals his hair, but I can tell it’s all swept back off of his forehead. I watch the way he juts his jaw to the side as he mulls over what to order. His tongue dances across the inside of his lips, my eyes trained on it, mind drifting off again to wondering how soft his lips would feel. How that tongue would feel moving against mine...or other places. He looks up at me and instantly a flush of red travels up his neck. 

“What?” He asks quietly, giving me a bashful smile.

“Nothing,” I look back down at my menu, feeling flustered myself. “What are you going to order?” 

“Hm, maybe the Yakitori chicken skewers, any recommendations? Yoshi told me you’ve tried everything on the menu.”

I laugh. “That is true; I'm a big fan of his cooking. And yes, you should get that, it’s—,” I give a kiss to the tips of my fingers, chef style. 

He laughs and leans back in his seat. “So tell me, why was your day so awful?” He frowns, genuine concern on his brow.

I roll my eyes and groan. “Work is a joke at the moment, I’m covering for someone so I have twice the usual work load and that’s not even the worst of it.”

Emiko returns with our drinks, interrupting me. I pause as we order our meals and some sushi to share, then she leaves in a rush.

He raises his eyebrows at me and leans his chin on the palm of his hand, listening intently and waiting for me to continue. 

“Ok, so, my boss is hellbent on this particular story. The writer of said story has gone off on an unreachable holiday and it's only half done. So, now I have to try and get a ticket for a show that is apparently so high in demand, it seems impossible, so we can finish said story.”

He frowns. “I’m confused. What’s the story?”

I sigh as I fiddle with my napkin. “About some boy group and their shows at wembley.” I have a realisation then. “You’ve probably heard of them? BTS? They’re from South Korea too.” I’m not sure but for a brief moment I think I see him stiffen out the corner of my eye. His expression unreadable. 

“Yes, I’ve heard of them.” He says, nonchalantly. 

“You don’t like them?” I ask, wondering why his face suddenly looked so solemn. “Don’t tell me they’re your musical rivals?” I tease attempting to lighten his mood.

He smiles and some of the tension seems to leave his body. “No. They’re cool. So why do you need a ticket?”

“So the writer can review the show and tell the readers all about it. Our boss is trying to appeal to the younger readers and she’s convinced this is the way to do it, through this group.”

“What will happen if you can’t get the ticket?” He asks, eyes wide with worry.

I shrug. “My boss will be very, very pissed. I don’t plan on finding out though. I’ve got a few more days, it always works out in the end, one way or another.”

He watches me carefully. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”

I grin as our meals arrive, steaming hot and smelling incredible. We eat in silence for a while, enjoying the taste. I watch as the noises and faces Taehyung pulls assure me of the fact that he’s very impressed and my chest swells with pride for my friend. 

I do, however, let my mind wander into thinking about hearing those noises of appreciation in other aspects. Like me...on my knees...underneath this table. Snapping myself out of less than innocent thoughts, I focus on my meal. 

Why couldn’t I control myself? Why did everything about him appeal to me in such a powerful way? Is it because I haven’t had sex for over a year? Or is it simply that he is just the perfect specimen of a man? Maybe both.

“That was amazing. I’m blown away.” He sat back in his seat, wiping his mouth with a napkin. 

“I’m glad you liked it! Yoshi will be thrilled.” I beam and take a long drink of my cold lemonade, hoping it cools the heat inside me. I could feel tiny beads of sweat forming down my back and along the nape of my neck. 

We sit and talk until Emiko returns to clear our plates and Taehyung asks for the check. 

“I’m afraid, I cannot stay out late with you tonight.” He says solemnly.

I try to ignore the disappointment I feel; not ready for this date to be over. “Ah, that’s ok, I know you’re busy.”

He shakes his head and puts his hand on top of mine, leaning forward. I mirror him automatically. The warmth of his palm slowly flows through me and my eyes can’t help but float down to our touching skin. His hand feels soft and yet strong with his long, delicate fingers enveloping mine. I look back up to his intense eyes blazing into mine.

“It’s not that, It’s just—” He pauses looking away, my stomach drops as I’m left wondering as to what on earth he’s going to say. He doesn’t want to see me any more? He’s not attracted to me? He sees me more as a friend? What excuse is it going to be this time?

“...I turn into a pumpkin at midnight.” He says, his face so serious it takes me a few moments to register the words that have just left his mouth. Relief swamps me as I feel myself relax back into my seat and laughter vibrate through my body. He joins me, his boxy grin spread across his face but as he does, he lifts my hand, turning it over and laces his fingers through mine. 

My laughter fades, and I look down at our entwined fingers. Normally, an action like this so soon after meeting would have me running for the hills, but with him, it just felt...right.

“Is this ok?” He asks hesitantly, a crimson shadow forming on his cheeks.

I nod and swallow; my mouth suddenly dry. “Yes.” I reply simply, frozen in shock.

He relaxes a little and leans forward on his elbows, his thumb gently tracing small circles on the back of my hand.

“I should go back to my hotel…”

“But?” I query.

He side smiles, looking up at me seductively through long lashes and the sight is enough to make my belly clench. “I really don’t want to.”

My heart knocks violently against my ribcage at his admission. “I don’t want you to either.” I blurt out, surprising myself.

His eyes widen slightly before he side-smiles again and squeezes my hand. “I’m glad it’s not just me. I cannot tell what you think about me.”

I let out a small, slightly nervous laugh. “Is it not obvious?” I raise an eyebrow, surely he must be joking. I have never been so red, flustered and embarrassed with a guy in my whole laugh.

He shakes his head. “Not really, sometimes I think I know where your head is and yet at other times it’s hard to read you. I wish I knew what you were thinking.”

It's almost a question; giving me the option not to feel obliged to answer, but I don’t want to leave him hanging and wondering. Maybe laying my cards out on the table wouldn’t be such a bad thing, before I get in too deep.

I lean on my elbows that rest on the table and angle myself towards him slightly. “Ok, just so you know where my head is at…” I shift slightly under his now intense stare, as he hangs on my words. “I like spending time with you, and even though we’ve only just met...I feel I’ve known you for a long time, which is rare for me, to have such a sudden connection. I find you insanely attractive that it’s hard to think straight when I’m around you.” He beams at that and a deep crimson glow burns his face. 

“We seem to have a lot in common and I’m definitely enjoying our time together and getting to know you. You have an air of mystery about you and to be honest, it just makes me more intrigued to find out more about you. Since I met you at the museum, you have been on my mind more than I was expecting and this…” I lift up our joined hands. “would have frightened me to the point of running and hiding, if it was with anyone but you.” I say, quite fast, the words leaving me in a rush, as the urgency of having to say them takes hold of me. 

I exhale and hesitantly meet his stare.

His boxy grin is wider than ever as his eyes sparkle with excitement. I find myself mirroring his smile.

“I’ve got to admit, I was not expecting that but a part of me was hoping you felt that way.” He beams. “When I’m with you, I feel like I can completely be myself, no personas, no hiding, just me. I’m not too experienced in matters of the heart and this is a first for me; feeling this way. You’re so beautiful that it’s distracting especially because I find you fascinating and I want to know every little thing about you. Every story, every thought, everything but when you talk or smile, I can’t help but want to kiss you.” He stops, leaving that last part hanging heavy in the air.

His tongue darts out to wet his lips while he watches me. My stomach tightens with anticipation, hoping he will, waiting for him to lean in and do it. I stare at his mouth, heart beating so hard that it’s all I can hear pounding in my ears. 

He leans forward until he’s just inches from my face, his scent swirling around me, his soft, plump lips inviting me, calling to me, when the screen doors to our booth open abruptly. 

Taehyung is back against his seat in a flash, his hand no longer touching me and I suddenly feel cold without his skin against mine. 

My head snaps up, only to be met with Yoshi’s grinning face.

“Hey guys, I hope you were happy with your meals?” He asked, eyes eager for approval, completely oblivious to the moment he just disturbed.

I slump back in my seat. “Perfect as always, Yoyo.” I smile, trying to hide the disappointment that swells inside me.

“Yes, it was amazing. I will definitely be returning before the end of my trip.” Taehyung says softly, offering a bow of his head.

Yoshi slaps him on the back, the action making Taehyung’s eyes pop with surprise and I muffle a laugh behind my hand.

“Thanks man, I really appreciate that. You’re welcome here anytime, just drop by and I'll make sure you’re taken care of.” 

Taehyung smiles and nods. “That’s very kind of you, thank you.” 

“Here’s your bill.” He places the little, leather book with the paper inside on the table. “Well, I’ll let you two love birds get back to your date, we have a ‘no fondling, foreplay or sexual activity’ rule here though, so be sure to take that outside if the mood strikes.” 

My icy glare burns into him as he grins and closes the doors before I can throw something at him. I hear his laughter and his footsteps as he leaves.

I look over at Taehyung who is fighting a laugh himself. 

“Don’t you start.” I warn, resisting the smile that twitches the corner of my mouth. 

He laughs out loud. “I love it when you scold me.”

I shake my head at him, feigning shock and unable to hide my amusement anymore. “You’re not supposed to enjoy it.”

He shrugs and gives me a bashful grin, then checks his phone and groans. “I really do have to go. I’m really sorry.” 

“Hey, don’t worry, it’s fine.” I grab my bag as he glances at the bill. 

“I’m getting this, no arguments.” He says sternly. I smirk at the authority in his tone, wondering if he’s that commanding in bed too. Mind out of the gutter.

He places his cash down with a very generous tip, that has my eyes practically bulging out of their sockets.

I grab my blazer and slide out of the booth. “Lets go.”

I lead the way over to Yoshi, who is busy entertaining the customers sitting around the counter where he cooks and chats away. I wave to get his attention.

“We’re off Yoshi!” I call out. 

He nods, drops everything and rushes around to us. He pulls me into a quick, tight hug and before he’s even let me go he’s reaching around to shake Taehyung’s hand. I squeeze out of his grip and return to Taehyung’s side.

“Nice to meet you, man.” Yoshi waves.

“You too, thank you again.” Taehyung replies.

“My pleasure. Call me later, doll.” He points gun fingers at me and waves as he returns to his station. 

We head to the doors, opening them to the heavy, night air; warmth swirling around me in a complete contrast to inside. I hear Yoshi’s voice behind me call out. “Use protection!”

I put my middle finger up behind me without even looking in his direction. His laugh bellows out before the doors shut behind us. God, I really hated him sometimes. 

We walk to the car that had arrived to pick up Taehyung, the driver waiting patiently behind the wheel. 

“Jump in and we’ll drop you off.” He said, opening the door for me. 

I slid in across the comfy, fabric seats. Taehyung spoke to the driver then climbed in next to me. I was surprised to see the black partition between us and the driver and the small, dark curtains covering all the windows. I’ve never seen a car with these before, how odd.

My thoughts are interrupted by his hand on mine, the heat from his soft skin, searing through me. I look over to find he’s watching me from the corner of his eye, he gives me a side smile and I thread my fingers through his.

“You know, Yoshi did say something before you came in…” He says into the quiet. 

My stomach drops, nervous with apprehension. “What?”

“He...mentioned your ex.”

I felt a small flare of anger course through me. How dare he speak to Taehyung about him. Why bring up my past with someone I might have a future with? I let out a long breath. “What did he say?”

Taehyung looks hesitant. “Not much, honestly. Just said you dated a real arsehole, who broke your heart in the worst way. Then you came in, he didn’t get to finish.”

Thank god. This was my business to talk about, not Yoshi’s. I nod slowly.

“I think...” Taehyung cuts in quickly, worrying he’s upset me. “I think he was warning me not to hurt you, that’s why he brought it up.”

That was probably the case but I’m still pissed off at him. “That does sound like Yoshi.” I reply, quietly.

“And while I would like to hear about your past, including past relationships, I will wait until you’re ready to talk.”

I nod again, mulling that over. “Tomorrow. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, if you want to hear it.”

He squeezes my hand. “Only if you’re sure.”

I smile at him, my anger slowly extinguishing, not wanting to ruin the moment with Taehyung because of something Yoshi said.

“Do you get a lunch break at work?” He asks, randomly into the silence, breaking any tension left.

I nod and my brow furrows. “Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”

“I have a packed schedule tomorrow evening, so I cannot see you but I need to.” He hits me with that intense stare again. If I weren't already sitting, my knees would be trembling trying to hold me upright. “Are you free to meet me on your lunch break?” His pleading eyes melt my insides.

I feel heat race from my chest to my cheeks as my blush spreads. “For you? Of course.”

He smiles, genuine excitement in his eyes and he looks down at our joined hands. Sitting this close to him, arms and thighs almost touching, so close and yet, so far. The urge to shift closer to him is almost overwhelming but for some reason I resist. There’s an invisible current I can feel from his body to mine, almost electric, sending tingles through my body.

“Taehyung, we’re here.” A voice sounds out from a speaker somewhere making me jump and interrupting my thoughts. I realise then, the car has stopped, too focused on the sheer magnetism I could feel towards him.

“Come on, I’ll walk you to your door.” He climbs out, hand only leaving mine for a second before he’s grasping it again to gently pull me out the car. He leads me up the steps to my door and when I turn to him to say goodnight, we’re suddenly face to face, inches apart. 

My heart knocks rapidly against my ribcage, even as my lungs seem to stop working and my breath stills. His hand comes up to push the hair off my shoulder and I feel him linger on my neck. Warm, long fingers slide up to hold each side of my face, as he tilts his head and suddenly, before I can think, his lips are on mine. Gentle, soft and magical. 

My senses go crazy for a moment, overloaded with stimulation before I reciprocate eagerly. The taste of him like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, I want more. 

He pulls away suddenly, still close enough for me to feel his harsh breathing against my face. 

“Sorry, I should have asked first.” He says breathlessly.

My core is on fire, I feel ready to explode as I grab his light shirt by the collar and pull him against my lips again. My hands find their way to his neck, as I grip to keep him close to me and yet it’s not close enough. His hands wind around my waist holding me tight against his body. Heat and fire replace my thoughts, as I can only focus on my erratic heartbeat and the painful throbbing between my legs as his perfect, angular lips dance with mine. 

He breaks away to breath, sending a trial of kisses across my cheek to my ear.

“Until tomorrow.” He whispers breathlessly, before gently releasing me and taking a step back. He captures my hand, brings my fingers up to his lips, like he did that first night and places a gentle lingering kiss against them.Then he’s turning abruptly, dashing down the stairs and into the car. 

I stand there, dazed. Wow. Did that just happen? 

I fumble with my handbag, my head feeling fuzzy and unable to control the rest of my body.

I eventually find my keys and clumsily let myself in, walking through my apartment in a trance. I mechanically get ready for bed, my body on autopilot while I replay the kiss over and over in my mind, unable to think of anything else. As I lay in bed, my phone vibrates against the top of my nightstand, pulling me out of my Taehyung daydream.

Taehyung [22.30]: Made it back in time, no pumpkins here—

I laugh. Attached to the message is a close up photo of him laying down in bed, resting on an arm, his almost ebony eyes wearing a smile and staring straight through the phone into me. He looks gorgeous. Did I just kiss him? How on earth did that happen? 

My grin starts to hurt my cheeks but I can’t seem to stop it. I try to force it into just a regular smile, nothing too over the top or creepy, I fluff my hair out on the pillow and take a mirroring selfie, hitting send after.

Y/n [22.32]: Good to know, none here either 😊

Taehyung [22.33]: Haha! Good. I’ll let you get some rest, see you tomorrow lunch time. Goodnight! 😉

I reply, wishing him a goodnight in return, just before my eyelids finally start to droop. As I drift off to sleep I replay the images of his lips moulded on mine, my fingers in his hair and his warm hands on my face, hoping he will appear in my dreams tonight.

Thank you so much for reading, if you could leave me some feedback it would be much appreciate, even if it’s just a little comment to tell me what you thought 🖤

[rokutouxei]

the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

ikemen vampire: temptation through the dark theo van gogh / mc | T | [ ao3 link in bio ]

The challenge seemed pretty simple: to try to befriend the university bookshop’s most sour employee, Theo van Gogh. As a literature major with a boatload of book recommendations on her back, it ought to be a simple task indeed. But as she uncovers what lies between Theo’s pages, the more she finds it harder to become closer to him without having to put the feeling directly into words. What can she learn from Theo about what it means to stay—and how can she teach Theo about what it means to let go? | written for ikevamp big bang 2020!

[ masterpost for all chapters ]

CHAPTER 21 OF 22

—The heartbeat is actually the sound made by the heart valves closing. If you, my love, ever hold a stethoscope to my chest I will tell you to listen for the silence in between. What is and what will always be yours is the sound of my heart finally opening.

- "Letter to the Editor", Andrea Gibson.

--

interlude ii

--

In the span of time between understanding and acceptance, Theo half-writes a million letters, all of them suffering the same kind of fate: undelivered. The email gets deleted, the text erased, the sheet crumpled, set on fire. There are too many words he doesn’t have the courage to say, and fuck, he’s not a literature major, after all.

He’s only the arrow shooting forward, not the bow pulling back towards itself.

But every second he spends lost in the memory of her leaves him splitting open, so for the first time in what feels like centuries, he unfolds what he’s kept in his heart the size of his clenched fist. Allows its beating space to unravel. And when he doesn’t have the vocabulary to put it into words himself, he borrows—borrows from others until he finally finds the ones that will feel just right tell.

Until they’re finally just right to tell.

The first letter he ever writes her, he composes outside the gallery of his brother’s exhibit, on the opening day. He’s crouched on the stone steps with a book in his hand, a little poetry book Arthur had dropped by for him earlier that day. For what, the bastard refused to say, but he had that look on his face that Theo hates: that Arthur knows exactly what he’s doing it for.

The first of his letters are spiteful, the words he borrows barbs, promises he doesn’t intend to keep when he rewrites,

I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year

onto a sheet of scratch paper, one he ultimately throws into a bin before he’s even felt like he’s begun writing anything.

He gathers his heart a little closer for the second one, highlighting a verse in shaky yellow while he’s on a bus ride out of town, on the exhibit’s closing day.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

But it is not enough. And even after that, there are an innumerable number of letters that still are not enough. He borrows from everyone he’s learned from her: Shakespeare, Frost, Whitman, Dickinson; he borrows from new names, Allan Poe, Silverstein, Neruda, Keats, Siken; he borrows from poetry, from fiction, from plays. From philosophers, from writers, from artists. The words never seem to be enough to cross the gap between what he’s said and what he should have.

He writes the ten-thousandth letter with his heart beating in his chest so loudly he can barely hear his breath,

And I lean down towards you with muscle and wing, as if to a grave stone, (I put the years to sleep)

my lips seek yours... like spring.

longing, the sear of it, the idea of having touch so warm under his skin the world feels all too cold. He misses her like he would a lost limb. He reads the poem over, and over, and over again until he cannot deny it, and when he does not have the will to deny it he sets it on fire, instead.

Arthur asks him why he’s making it so much harder on himself, asks him why he’s putting himself in all this agony for nothing—Arthur talks like he knows everything. And maybe he does, the fool that he is. “Just call her,” the flirt says, “Call her from my number, send her a message—" But Arthur doesn’t know what happened, doesn’t know what it felt like in that rooftop, the words hanging in between him and her, unsaid, said, told in their heads—but never out loud, not enough to make it come to life.

To make it real.

To make it seem like Theo isn’t just writing a story in his head.

One where she’s only an unwilling participant.

Letters are the one thing Theo can hide behind, besides poetry. He can pour his entire heart in that little sheet of paper, tell her all that he wanted to but never could—send it away, and then not have to wait, expecting a response. He considers it the same as writing a message, stuffing it in a bottle, and then throwing it out in the open sea. It would be great if she finds it. It would be great if she’s moved enough by it that she writes back, that she forgives him, that she continues to wait for him even if she’s already so far away.

If only he could get it right.

The millionth letter doesn’t make it past his desk. He hears the poem from a phone in the bookstore: two literature majors reading from a book on the shelf, reciting the lines, Theo barely hears it over their gasps, but when he does he scrambles to put it into writing, thinking, this is it, maybe this is the one that’ll get me across, says,

It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food.

takes the pen in his hand and nearly tears the page when the poets say:

It well may be. I do not think I would.

Theo is on his headphones for the rest of the afternoon, hiding in the stockroom stacking books.

He sits and negotiates, negotiates, negotiates with himself over and over again, like this was a case, like this was a business deal, instead of something else, something that’s less rigid, less in-boxes, one without protocol. Arthur tries to talk him into it. Vincent tries to talk him out of it. In, out, of what, Theo doesn’t know anymore, their voices fading into the back of his mind when he begins to really think about this.

About her, about her hands.

About his.

Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, a poet once wrote, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart.

Theo does the same.

Much to his dismay, however, the world does not fall in around him, does not close him off from the outside world no matter how hard he tries, no matter how much it seems like that’s what ought to happen. The semester rolls on. The exams are still hard. The Halloween Party is still the same talk of the university as it did a full year ago, like the world hadn’t turned upside down for him since then.

The universe had even granted him the most effective way to wallow in his pain, the new girl in their little friend group (the one he was only in because of her) whose heart was a mirror of the girl he’d loved. Why is it that those that do so poorly in romance tend to flock together like recognizing the uneven parts of themselves? She is drunk and talking about someone else, but when she speaks about letters the same way she used to, something in Theo’s heart cries out.

Too bad he still doesn’t have the words.

The closest Theo gets to what he wants to say comes in the form of old memories, a scribble of a haphazardly written note on a piece of clean café napkin, in her handwriting, no, there’s no mistaking it. Heart by heart, Louise B written in familiar cursive. A note from a lost time slipped in a returned book, perhaps on purpose, perhaps on accident. He turns the search terms over and over until he finds it, a rush of air exiting his lungs when he gets to the end:

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see The wharves with their great ships and architraves;   The rigging and the cargo and the slaves On a strange beach under a broken sky. O not departure, but a voyage done! The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps   Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

But he doesn’t hasn’t ever had it, not since she’d left, so he doesn’t send it.

Theo doesn’t cry. There is no reason to, he thinks to himself, nothing to be upset about, not when it’s him holding himself back, when this was all his fault. He only sits quiet, repentant. He doesn’t make any mention of her, and when she is mentioned, he doesn’t say a word.

What worth are words now?

This goes on for weeks. And it seems like an eternity later when Vincent catches him sitting in the dining room with that same idle look on his face, that same dull expression, he steps into the light of the older brother Theo has always seen him to be, the older brother he’s always hoped to be—and puts a hand on the shoulder of his lost younger brother, eager to lead him home.

“Theo?”

“Broer.”

Vincent’s voice is soft. Patient. “What are you looking for?”

“I don’t have the words for… this,” Theo says, gestures vaguely at his heart, like pained. “I don’t know where to look for them anymore.”

And his brother smiles like he knows all the answers. (Theo believes Vincent has all the answers.) “There is poetry everywhere, Theo," he says, sounding awfully like her, "Your eyes are focused on the wrong things.”

Like a flash of lightning, he hears it: in the lilt of her voice, the tinkle of laughter, her voice like thunderclouds rolling over a sunlit summer. The poem that found him, instead of the other way around.

You.

Theo immediately goes out to find fancy stationery he knows she likes and gets his best fountain pen and writes; the weight of honesty pins the words solidly onto the parchment. Theo had not known metaphor until that moment, had not understood what it meant when whatever a sun will always sing is you was written, until—

Until it was his heart that was chanting it.

And the day after, he delays the inevitable: seals the letter with glue, sticks a stamp on the upper right corner of the envelope. Theo slips it into the to-mail box without a word, and then exits the post office like he hasn’t left his heart there for sending.

[need1etail]

!!!!!!!!!

DASH!!!!!! YOU CLEVER, SLY SON-OF-A-GUN (I MEAN THAT LOVINGLY). 

THAT LAST CHAPTER HAS ME,,, I HAVE NO WORDS. ALL THE PIECES HAVE FALLEN INTO PLACE SO WONDERFULLY. HOW CAN I GO ON KNOWING THAT THIS ISN’T THE AVOS THAT WE ALL SHOULD’VE GOTTEN???? HOW DO I ACCEPT THAT FACT AND JUST LIVE MY LIFE LIKE I’M TOTALLY NOT GOING TO CONSTANTLY BE THINKING ABOUT HOW THE ERINS DIDN’T EVEN COME CLOSE TO GIVING US ANYTHING AS GREAT, TIED TOGETHER, AND DIVERSE AS YOUR REWRITE, THEREFORE MEANING THAT IS TRULY ONE OF THE WORST INJUSTICES HARPER COLLINS HAS EVER FORCED UPON US? THIS KNOWLEDGE WILL HAUNT ME UNTIL I DIE.

OK LET ME TRY TO CALM DOWN,,,

I cannot stress enough how great your foreshadowing is!!! As soon as I read Russet saying she told Pine (her reactions in certain scenes makes so much more sense now ahhh!!!) and Ferret about what happened to Darktail/Shadekit (that breaks my heart, to imagine two little kits grieving so much for their brother! Oh, and I did not miss that cheeky little line from Mudstar about how he thought Dark was his and Russet’s son, and Russet’s amusement when she was like “i’m flattered, but i’m also gay lol" arikfa efE FF), I feel like I had a straight-up windows 10 blue screen of death error happening right before my eyes. 

I swear to god – I’m not exaggerating!! – that a little voice in the back of my head immediately remembered the convo between Violet and Pine in T&S:

“But I wasn’t Clan born.”

Pinenose sighed and opened her green eyes again. “My father wasn’t Clan born,” she murmured, blinking at her. “I guess we have that in common.”

Violetkit felt comforted. “I thought your father was Blackstar?” she mewed, cuddling up into Pinenose’s belly fur.

“Other father,” Pinenose whispered, licking her head. “Sorry, dear, I’m just so tired. You belong here, with me and your brothers and sisters…” She closed her eyes and lay her head back down.

“Who was your other father?” Violetkit breathed the words, so quiet it sounded like the whisper of a breeze.

But Pinenose was asleep again, snoring once more. 

The way I hollered when the lines from that scene basically flashed before my very eyes–

GOD. 

I remember it so clearly because when I first read it ages ago, I was like, "That’s definitely different!” and tried to think of what Pine meant. I had a niggling feeling it meant something, but I figured it would turn out that the other father was maybe a cat who was exiled due to helping the Dark Forest during the battle or something, so that’s why he’s not talked about??? My thought process was basically, “Ok so we know Russet is Pine and Ferret’s mother, and Black is the father,,, Twig confirmed that when she told Ivy about telling her stories about what it’s like to be the kit of two leaders,,, but nobody’s ever mentioned a third mate except this tidbit right here from Pine!!! Why has his name not been mentioned?”

I could not for the life of me come up with a cat! But I should’ve known you would tie in a loose-end like Sol so goddamn neatly into this, because of course it’s Sol!!! His name is basically cursed among the Clans. Everybody – especially ShadowClan – are like “Uhhh let’s all collectively ignore that point in time when that sack of shit showed up and tried to destroy us” rair vkrw vhwkd jdm poor Black was a lovestruck dummy. I can’t even judge, because I can relate.

Anyway, you threw me for a loop, and I could not be happier about it! You’ve done that for all the books so far, and god, I didn’t think I could be more excited for the next ones than I am, but clearly I should’ve known better!! I will never be able to read canon AVOS and be satisfied ever again. Granted, I’ve not read any of it except once through as they were being published, because I was disappointed by how lackluster it was. Your rewrite is definitely something that I’ll want to reread once it’s all said and done, though. ’m going to be on my deathbed and the last words I utter will be, “Dash…should have…been able to debunk canon AVOS as fanon…and make his rewrite…canon…instead…” and then just die.

But I won’t rest peacefully, because Harper Collins are COWARDS. @ HARPER, JUST HIRE DASH TO BE EDITOR AND WRITER OF THE SERIES!!! WE’VE SUFFERED ENOUGH WITH YOUR BULLSHIT!!! AND GIVE HIM FREE REGIN TO REWRITE THE ENTIRE SERIES WHILE WE’RE AT IT, YOU COWARDS!!!!

I JUST– AHHHHH.

Sorry to send this as a submit and that so much of it is in all caps!!! I wish I could lie and say the caps lock is gets stuck on my keyboard as a reason why I write in caps so much, but that would be a lie. I’m just really excited and hyped from that chapter, and feel like shouting all this irl!!!! I wanted the full scope of my awe for you to come through in this message! LIKE MY GOD, DASH, YOUR MIND—

AEOVLREF AREFKH

--------

AAAOIJCOIAS This whole thing just got me >:3c!! I’m so glad you liked the plot twist cause it was something I became worried about after a little while (like maybe when I started Shattered Sky) and I actually got an ask saying that someone thought that Mudstar was Darktail’s thought and I 100% considered scrapping the entire Sol plot and trying to make it all work with somehow Darktail being Russet and Mud’s kit and Pine, Ferret, and Starling being Russetstar and Mudstar’s kit (obviously it didn’t work out but Mudstar thinking Darktail was their son was a nod to that lol)

BUT THANK YOU :)!! Actually the idea of Pine, Ferret, and Starling doesn’t belong to me! It belongs to @/jjadestar (I got their permission like a week or so after I started the rewrite), but these characters do really feel like they’re my own daknscn. 

The Pinenose saying her father was a loner was TOTALLY spontaneous lol. I knew at the time that I wanted Sol to be her dad but as I was writing that scene it just kind of clicked and I realized that Violetkit/paw and her could have a legit connection over this. It was never brought up again, unfortunately, but it MIGHT be brought up again sometime soon?? Idk finasoinc.

Anyway this whole think just made my gay little heart go brrr jncoasdnoic. You’re so sweet and I’m so glad it got you lmao. Plot twists are my favorite things, and I’m so glad to know I did it well :3!

[scifimagpie]

Game of ZZZs: How Long Stories Ruin Everything

I've been putting this one off because I was kind of busy writing an 18-part series deep-dive involving journalism and undercover work, but since Lindsay Ellis has released her video essay conclusion, I have finally put my thoughts in order.

So, today we're going to talk about something contentious. I have no issue with books being long, or shows being long, or movies being long - but at the same time, I do. And yes, I know some people adore epic scale stories for their own sake.  Not everything needs to be a thousand-page-long ten-book series with three spinoffs and prequels. Oh, sure, market forces and advertising play a role in this, but creators still participate in it.

But sometimes a story isn't long because it needs to be, it's long because the writer thinks it HAS to be. From my personal experience as a reader and writer, and especially as an editor, I've come to some conclusions about how stories are artificially extended. And in a world of global warming and climate change, shouldn't we be fighting waste everywhere, on every level?

Now, a certain show ended its eighth season not long ago; Big Bang Theory came to a whimper of a close after ten seasons, and Veep - which I only heard about towards its grand finale, alas - has also finished up a seven-season run. 

I'm not saying all of these shows participated in various errors. I'm saying pretty much every show, book, and movie series will partake in them eventually. So how do we do better than the bad ones, and how do we echo or even improve on the good ones? We can't fight what we don't know about, so let's get into it.

Spacing

Everything happens, but not right away. No, the important events are distanced from each other, to the point where there are long stretches of dead zones or deserts of nonsense in between them. I'm not talking about character interactions as nonsense here, but unfortunately, a lot of authors seem to think that they count, and that human drama isn't interesting enough to be a climax. Older fantasy works--cough, cough, Wheel of Time--can be particularly bad about this. The problem with spacing out events and using human drama between the big McGuffin/army-driven fights is that readers get frustrated by the human drama rather than finding it rewarding. Or worse, they find the army and McGuffiny-crap a distraction from the human stuff.

Padding

I know about this issue from the inside. Bad Things that Happen to Girls started off as a book called Foreverland, and then was untitled for a while before getting its current name. It went through two full rewrites before arriving at its current published form. When I wrote it at first, I thought it absolutely had to be a long novel, with lots of details about the girls' lives and a slow-burn breakdown, then an extended road trip in the middle and a bunch of scenes about their experiences in university.

I didn't realise I was padding it, but when I experimented with radically decreasing the timeline of events, I had a revelation. I didn't need years and paragraphs on paragraphs chronicling their lived experiences, full of pointless dialogue and meandering descriptions. All I had to do were give little samples and important moments, and that would get the idea across. Sometimes a flash reveals more than a long exposure shot, to put it in cinematic terms.

Cramming

EVERYTHING MUST HAPPEN AND IT MUST HAPPEN NOW AND HERE ARE TEN NEW CHARACTERS AND A NEW SUBPLOT AND HOLY CRAP WE MUST MAKE UP FOR WRAPPING UP TOO MANY THREADS AT THE END OF THE LAST SEASON OOPS.

The caps lock here was entirely necessary and appropriate, because with cramming, the story often feels like it's shouting at you. (Probably in German.)

The biggest problem with cramming, too, is that it requires glossing over things. If readers get interested by a small detail, they might end up screaming, "wait, go back!" long after the author's moved to another topic, or three other topics. Finding the balance between this and padding can be tricky, but the best solution I can offer is "external perspective." Get someone to read over your work, and when they lose attention, that's time to cut. It's a trick I often use with editing manuscripts - the minute my attention wavers, I mark it, just in case.

Crashing

this tends to happen to shows that have lived past their expiry date. Supernatural is a fine example of this. This is where "shark-jumping" tends to come into play; characters do things that go against their nature and development for the sake of jump-starting a narrative or adding some excitement.

Oh, the shark-jump. That's worth a mini-section of its own. Honestly, most shows either end or jump the shark in order to keep going. There's no such thing as a perfect writer or a perfect story; mostly because these things are subjective, but partly because keeping all the balls in the air for a story is just plain hard. 

Endless escalation 

Science fiction authors are prone to this, and so are epic fantasy authors. In an effort to keep reader interest, stakes rise and rise and rise, and then lose sight of the human scale of things. The problem is that stories are made of people, and if you forget about the people, you don't have a story anymore.

As with Cramming, this can lead to glossing over interesting bits as well. The full impact of a big change or shift isn't always felt if we rush to the next big, shiny thing. In real life, though, long-reaching consequences of events can have ripples for decades or even centuries. The Magna Carta was a big deal when it was signed; the effects of the Spanish Inquisitions, the Crusades, the unification of China (which happened more than once), the Viking cultural expansions, and the colonization of North America (by which I mean the land-theft and genocide of Indigenous peoples) are all still talked about to this day. 

Bad things that happen to characters need room to resonate. PTSD and trauma are not only interesting, they're natural, and even when people mostly recover from them, they leave a lasting impact. Let your characters get wrecked by something. Have characters reference things that have happened. Let characters get fatigued, collapse, and have to fix themselves. It'll not only demonstrate the actual impact of your events, it'll keep you from having to throw together another big, shiny thing to make the story more exciting (looking at you, Avengers series and mainstream comics). 

So, what tends to actually cause these writing techniques behind the scenes? 

Burnout or boredom

One of the most difficult and important factors - one which arguably contributed to the absolute mess that was the GoT finale - is just getting tired of your own damn story. When this happens, authors and creators will end up trying to revamp something with weird new twists partly to keep themselves interested, might engineer an awkward left turn to justify a foreshadowed plot element, or might just do a half-hearted wrap-up of the previous plot elements.

Here's the thing - audiences don't always consume stories at the same rate as authors write them. Many times, readers or viewers will stumble on a work and binge it in a relatively short time, so what took years for the writer will take months, at most, for the consumer. This can make tonal clashes very jarring. 

In other cases, an author will abandon a series due to writer's block or life events - a sin of which I, cough, am guilty - and then try to pick it up later. This will still impact the story, often negatively. Maybe one has just gotten well and thoroughly tired of the subject matter, or it's been done to death in the popular sphere. It doesn't really matter - either way, authors are subject to the world around them, and sometimes, the only way to deal with burnout or boredom is rotating to another project. That's fine - the only issue comes when the first project is completely abandoned, and languishes, unfinished. 

Societal changes and personal development 

I'm combining these two because the world around us affects us, and sometimes, we even affect the world. If you'd told me that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were going to rise to power during my lifetime, I wouldn't've believed you. To many, it sounded like a bad dream. Well, here we are, and the long night has not yet come to an end. Using art to cope with dark times and critique them is a long-celebrated human trend, and there's no reason to stop now. Sure, we might fear our work aging poorly - but stories that try to be timeless always age anyhow, and an earnest time capsule often lasts longer, because it can tap into the problems of an era (which echo forward, as discussed in the section above).

If you'd told me that I'd be able to deal with my family issues in a more satisfactory way, I might have believed you - but realising the impact of that on my writing both as a Game Master and an author is another matter. However, the additional perspective and maturity of healing has, rather than distancing me from characters' struggles, provided additional objectivity and even empathy. Fixing ourselves and healing doesn't "take away our artistic magic" - far from it. If anything, getting over issues unlocks the ability to deal with them in fiction much more effectively. 

Disillusionment and insecurity

These are nasty brain demons, all right - perhaps one has taken a look at the broad span of one's work, compared it to one's goals, and feels they are just - well, left wanting. Every creator struggles with this at some point, whether crafting a story for a D&D party or for hundreds of readers or thousands of viewers. The only way to deal with it is with external perspective and turning to objective sources of both external critique and validation. 

After all, we tell ourselves things that may or may not be true all the time, and measuring them against the perceptions of the audience can drastically correct things. Your readers might just be happy to see the characters get married - never mind that it took you five years to write about them getting together. And even if they don't like something specific or complain about it or nitpick - hey, they're coming back. You compelled them. Even if the readers, say, abandon their fandom and proclaim it a trashfire - they're still paying for or giving your story attention and money. And ultimately, from a marketing perspective attention is always neutral or positive - even if that attention is controversial - because it increases profits. 

How do we even begin to fix all this? 

But.  All hope is not lost.

By acknowledging burnout, boredom, disillusionment, insecurity, personal development, and societal change - the factors which often lead to writing shortcuts detailed in the previous section - we can compensate for the natural creative struggles by accepting and anticipating them. 

Try to write books in a series in a continuous stretch when possible, making it harder to lose track of the tone or style or character journeys. Plot things out, and get yourself a hands-on editor and/or extremely trustworthy beta-readers. And forgive yourself for screwing up - then get back to writing. At least, that's what I'm doing! 

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people's manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * 

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[bookgeekconfessions]

How I Got My Agent! pt 3.

I am officially being repped by Quressa Robinson at NLA. I have a book agent!!! It’s thrilling and nerve-wracking and amazing and terrifying. 

I can’t share the actual query letter yet, but I can share how it all came about.  It’s a long insane story that is so crazy it will seem like fiction, but as this post proves…it’s not!

For Part 1 and Part 2! 

11. The Risky Maneuver. As I mentioned in 10, I had my reservations about the 4 agents who offered to rep me. They were all amazing and two loved the book for what it was and didn’t want to make huge changes. But there was still some nagging in the back of my mind.

My agent isn’t just for this book. She’s for my career and publishing is mostly white. Of the 100 agents on my list, only 3 were black women, 2 were Latinas, 2 were Asian ladies and there were no men of color to query. The idea that no person of color may touch my manuscript as it processes into a book is disconcerting. 

I told this to the agent while we had coffee and she suggested I query two specific agents of color. One I had already queried and the other was closed for submissions. This awesome lady said I should query the closed for submission agent because she will want this book. So I queried the closed agent and she said she wasn’t sure if she would have time, but to send it anyway.

That closed for submission agent? Quressa!!

This is why I said the story is insane. Not just because I had five agents offer for me, but also because I did the thing no one should ever do and somehow got away with it. It did help that I could tell Quressa I ignored that she was closed at a recommendation of an agent she knows. 

12. The Email That Changed Everything. I sent Quressa my manuscript on Friday afternoon. On Monday I got an email from Kristin at NLA. This email was the most flattering email I have ever received in my life. In it, she raved about my book and mentioned synchronicity. At the time that I queried, Quressa had not announced that she was leaving her old agency and joining NLA. So I queried both her and Kristin (you usually CANNOT query two agents at the same agency especially not simultaneously). They had both read my book over the weekend. Kristin loved my book but saw that Quressa was the perfect fit and emailed my book to Quressa not knowing that Quressa at that very moment was emailing her about...you guessed it, my book.

The thing about this email from Kristen was that while she wasn’t personally offering for me I could tell she loved my book. There is an incident in my book that is very similar to a blockbuster novel and many agents looked at my book like it could be their very own version of that book. It’s not. They are not the same. Kristin got it. She mentioned the same incident that all the agents raved about and got that it wasn’t about that.  She got my book in a way I began to worry maybe a non-black audience couldn’t.  I have always felt the story was universal and for everyone. Kristin confirmed that feeling. And she told me about Quressa’s reaction to it. Which was big and also flattering.

I walked out of my office, hid in the parking lot and cried for ten minutes. I mean I BALLED my eyes out. I sobbed. In gratitude. In relief. In happiness that two agents in my top ten wanted me and they worked TOGETHER.  I knew in that moment that barring our phone conversation sucking, I would sign with NLA. Then Quressa and I talked and it was cemented. 

13. Making the Call Though I felt very strongly about Quressa and NLA, I was terrified. Some of the other agencies were bigger, or one of the agents had been making huge sales every other week according to the publisher's marketplace. Quressa is a newer agent and wasn’t I going to turn down another agent for that very same reason? Was I picking her just because she was black? Was I picking her just because Kristin Nelson who has a bunch of clients I am a fan of, had her back?  Did I ask enough questions? 

I then sent the agents an email asking for editorial notes. I had to see who had the better vision for my work.

It ultimately came down to the agent who met me for coffee and suggested two agents of color and Quressa.  They both would have done an amazing job. They both had things I loved, the agent who met me in person had been selling books left and right and was amazing to talk to. She also backtracked when she said something kind of offensive and I realized she could probably get past her whiteness. Quressa used to be an editor and wanted to be an editorial agent, she understood my desire to write more sci-fi and fantasy with kids of color as the main characters and it wasn’t just Quressa -- the entire agency had read at least a section of my book and was all in. 

It was the knowledge that NLA as a whole had my back and that Quressa had the editorial background that was the deciding factor. I am long winded, I think every scene I write is equally important and my grammar is horrible. 

14. Tough Emails I had to reject the other four agents. That’s hard. These are women who liked my book. Loved my voice as a writer. Wanted to help me succeed and I had to tell them no. I understand that agents reject people all the time. I, on the other hand, have never rejected anyone who wanted to work with me to achieve my dream and build my career. 

I wrote short, polite and honest emails to every one of them. I personalized them. And gave an explanation. I did this because I know how it feels to get a form rejection that every other rejected writer is getting. I wanted to treat them as I want to be treated. 

15. Doubt.  The day after I sent my email I woke up in a deep sweat. I made what was arguably the biggest decision of my life in a matter of hours. I know that I did my investigations. I know that I asked questions. I know that I had reasons. BUT DID I MAKE A MISTAKE?

I didn’t. But I will always have soft spot for that awesome agent who loved my book enough to suggest agents who would make me feel better. I wish them all the best and hope they haven’t made voodoo dolls of my face. 

16. The Road Forward The journey is far from over. I have to go through this all over again when Quressa and NLA begin submitting the manuscript to editors.  That will probably be worst than querying agents. Then if an editor wants it --there will be negotiations and then the editor will edit my manuscript.  The only person whose opinion has ever me mattered before is mine and now I have to listen to my agent and my editor.  On one hand it’s a relief to no longer be alone and on the other hand, I have to teach myself to be a team player. 

Then I’ll have to wait months maybe years to be published and then bloggers like me will get to read it and write opinions in public about this thing that I have cried and died over. Then, it will be in the hands of readers like you. 

Then whether it’s a success or a failure. I have to reopen my Scrivener and go through the writing process all over again.

This is just the beginning. 

Side Note: Words of Advice about Querying.

1. Know what you’re looking for in an agent. It’s easy to focus on what they want and what they’re looking for. But do you need an editorial agent who will help you through the process of writing and rewriting your book? Are you going to only write in one genre? Does your agent rep every genre you can see yourself writing? When they critique your book do they GET it even as they see the flaws? Does the critique click with you or are you violently against it? Do they have any sales? Do they have experience with books like yours? Do you like their online presence? Do you see yourself clicking with their personality? 

Remember this person is going to work with and for you. You want them to be excited about YOU and YOUR work. Because they are going to sell your book to editors, not you. They have to be able to speak with confidence, excitement, and love. Or why would the editor give it a shot?

2. Rejection is part of life. My story is wild and rare but still riddled with more nos than yes.  I queried a book before this. It was three years ago and I didn’t get a single request for a full or a partial. I didn’t even get rejections from most of the agents.  A friend of mine has queried four times and hasn’t gotten an agent yet.

Remember that no matter how many people reject it or you, you only need one yes. Only one matters. 

For more about my journey: For Part 1 and Part 2! 

[christinaengela]

I’ve been writing stories basically since I could hold a wax crayon, and as any writer might tell you, any book they’ve created holds a special place of its own in their heart! It’s no less true for me in the case of “Blachart” in that respect because of how that book is a milestone for me! Why? Well, because it was my first completed and published novel, and also because it’s the first of my books to be released as an audiobook!

You may wonder how I wrote “Blachart”, how it got to be what it is now, what the journey was like – and how long it took! To do that, I’ll have to take you back to the beginning!

It all started in 1986 – 34 years ago! I was 12 years old and in my first year of high school – a budding writer who occasionally caught the spotlight in English class for essay and composition writing! That was when I started working on the foundations of what would become “Blachart”.

Back then, however, the story was called “The Red Star” and it featured the some of the same characters (under different names) and the story plot was somewhat different – and if you’ve read “Blachart” and were handed a copy of “The Red Star” circa 1986, you would find it… well, unrecognizable!

In 1987 I’d rewritten the same story into another notebook under the title “Galaxy 1”, sowing the seeds of what was to later become the first title in the Galaxii Series. By 1988, the basic plot had evolved into the more familiar story of a starship Captain (then Mykl Nikolls, not the more familiar Mykl d’Angelo) being rescued from his broken down ship – and the introduction of the formidable Corsairs… and a character then called Black Heart. By 1989 I already had a good idea of the broader story the series would take – beginning with a back-story called “Galaxy” which would set the scene for the later books. “Galaxy” became “Galaxii” in 1990, and “Blachart would follow on to “Galaxii” in the series… except that the newer prequel presented me with considerable difficulties at the time.

“Galaxii” – the story that would set the foundation for the rest of the series, and be the book from which the series took its name – was a problem child. It went through numerous redrafts and complete rewrites before eventually being published – only in 2020! When published, it was under the title “Best Served Cold” – and as a standalone novel, not part of the actual series!

“Blachart” meanwhile, in 1990 was far closer to completion in draft form, and continued to receive the bulk of my writing attention. By the time I finished high school in 1991, I had a rough idea where I wanted the story to lead. But life was hectic, and tended to get in the way – in January 1992 I was conscripted into the SA Army and had a hell of a lot on my plate with gender dysphoria. My life generally took me into places I did not wish to go. My writing at the time was rather spotty, confined mostly to completing short stories and working up to mastering longer writing pieces. During this time, I delivered short stories like “The Devils In The Sky” (1993) and “A Really Bad Day In The Life Of Lance Corporal Thomas O’Blivion” (1995).

Eventually, in February 1998 I finished the last handwritten draft of “Blachart”! …And then it lay fallow for some time longer, while a lot of other things unfolded in my personal life, in terms of gender identity, self-discovery, and career. In 1999 I embarked on my transition – and entered a world both terrifying and amazing all at once!

Then when things had settled down somewhat, in 2003, I finally typed and edited that draft on a PC, and launched into the modern way of writing novels! I found it far easier and faster to type and edit on a PC than doing rewrites of my books by hand as I’d always done previously! This change set me off on revising all my other pieces as I copy-typed them into Word on PC’s at work! Later I finally obtained a useable PC at home, and that accounts for my rapid progress and increase in production of reading material – which I’ve been told is somewhat prolific!

Anyway, back in 2005, after years of struggling to find a publisher to take on any of my writing, I chanced upon that wonder (and bane) of our time – the internet – and tripped over the concept of self-publishing! In the same year, I self-published the eBook in its original most basic form on Lulu.com. Over the next few years, I ran several updates in content improvements and covers. In the meantime, I’d also published several of its sequels (“Demonspawn”, “Black Sunrise”, “The Time Saving Agency” and “Space Sux!” which were then all part of the Galaxii series).

Very probably the first cover, 2005.

Another cover for Blachart, 2005.

New series cover, 2007.

In July 2014 I was picked up by a ‘traditional publisher’, a small press. “Blachart” was the first of my books they re-released with a new cover created by one of their staff. The content went through a two-stage editing process, and by the time it was released in late 2014, “Blachart” was around 49,600 words long!

In 2015, “Demonspawn” (book 2 in the series) was re-released by the publisher. With another 5 or 6 books still waiting to be re-released, the publisher dragged their feet to the point where it appeared they were going to release just one book a year! In the meantime I’d had to take the self-published versions all down from all the places they’d been available on the internet, and I wasn’t making any money off them at all!

Fortunately that state of affairs didn’t last very long – due to an identity crisis at the publisher which came to a head in mid 2016 when they booted out all writers of what they called “not pure horror” – I found myself without a publisher again! Instead of feeling distraught, I was overjoyed, and leapt back into indie publishing again – with gusto!

For the remainder of 2016, I worked on putting all my completed books back up on indie platforms again, and then also on completing some unfinished projects. It took a while for me to find my indie feet again, and “Blachart” and its siblings went through several cover redesigns in the process, including a change from print size of pocket book to 6×9.

Both my parents were also writers – unpublished for the most part – and during 2018 I finished editing and publishing of most of my parent’s works. Then I took a look at the channels through which my books have been distributed – and decided that I should also place my titles at Smashwords to gain access to their distribution network also. I later also added EBooks2go to that distribution chain. Every bit of knowledge and trick of the trade I learned, I also applied retroactively to all my books – including “Blachart”.

During 2018 – while I was at it (the most dangerous words known to humanity) as the old saying goes, I spotted a couple of editing errors left over from my “traditional” publishing days, and set off to check the whole manuscript for more!

This sparked off another complete edit – and then I added a little bit here, and a little bit there… and before I realized it, a drastic complete rewrite was underway! (Insert pained groan here).

I evaluated each sentence. I added a stack of more material… back-stories and extras that would enrich and enhance the overall experience of what I had envisioned as the Galaxii Series! Two weeks later, at over 84000 words, the Fifth Edition of “Blachart” was born!

To complete the metamorphosis, I designed a fantastic new cover which would also form the basis of a template for the entire Galaxii Series, and which I also modified for my other series, Quantum and Panic!

It was somewhere around July 2019, that I became friends with Brandon Mullins of Moon Books Publishing – I’d just submitted a short story I wrote regarding the topical “Storm Area 51” event in Nevada for September, which MBP was going to release in good time for the event. A little later, it became evident that we were going to be collaborating more in future! In light of this, I was the Editor for a sci-fi short story anthology “Christina Engela’s Strangely Compelling SciFi” (Dec 2019) and still have a few upcoming jobs to do for MBP.

Brandon wanted to help me distribute my books further, and so around October 2019 I took down all the print versions of my books on Lulu and handed them to MBP for distribution through Amazon. I subsequently decided to leave Lulu and to do the same for the eBook versions as well, although I’ll still be handling eBooks on other platforms.

One of the many ways Brandon has been of immense help to me is in making my books available as audiobooks! Although a number of my short stories had been included in anthologies I’d contributed to when they were turned into audiobooks, this was the very first time a whole novel of mine had been released as an audiobook – and it was amazing to hear it!

In this respect, “Blachart” is the first – and the journey really got interesting at that point! It started with finding a narrator – and Brandon had to put up with my perfectionism and pickiness! Poor guy! *wink* At any rate, after reviewing a few audition clips in February 2020, Brandon sent me one that grabbed my attention – by the throat!

The audition in question came from one Nigel Peever – a BBC and London stage actor who also has a formidable reputation in narrating eBooks! To be blunt, I was definitely blown away – Nigel gave us not just one, but two options – with or without sound effects and dramatization!

Mr. Peever is an extraordinary narrator – not only reading the text with emotional expression, but he also included sound effects in the final mix – so the story sounds rather a lot like an old-style radio play, but all read by one person doing different voices and accents! I think it sounds absolutely amazing! Nigel was also kind enough to design the cover for the audiobook as you see it below – and so he’s also a graphic designer as well!

After much consultation and backing-and-forthing and wondering how we could afford this, Brandon came through for me and did me a real solid! Nigel would record “Blachart” with full dramatization and sound effects!

Due to Nigel having previous commitments to complete, recording of “Blachart” was due to start in April 2020, and the finished production was sent to ACX/Audible at the start of June.

On July 09, 2020 – due to delays resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, “Blachart” was finally released as an audiobook! When I first heard it, the result was fantastic! As a writer, I’d often imagined the sort of voice I’d like to have my stories heard in – that is, inside the reader’s heads… and what a voice! What talent – what characterization! What interpretation! That said, I can’t quite put into words just how marvelous it is to hear my work, words that I wrote, being not just read aloud in front of a microphone – but interpreted… lived… with depth of emotion and wonderfully appropriate feeling and thought!

People do a lot of things for payment, it’s true – and between us, we all stand to profit from our involvement with “Blachart” – but as the creator of the story I feel a swell of gratitude and appreciation towards both Brandon and Nigel for making the audiobook what it is – and for giving my words a voice.

Nigel meanwhile, is busy recording book 2 in the series – “Demonspawn“, and I can’t wait to hear it!

The final release of “Blachart” is 10 hours 26 minutes long, and I’m sure you will enjoy it as much as I have!

Until next time, keep reading!

Cheers! 🙂

If you would like to know more about Christina Engela and her writing, please feel free to browse her website.

If you’d like to send Christina Engela a question about her life as a writer or transactivist, please send an email to christinaengela@gmail.com or use the Contact form.

Show your appreciation for Christina’s work!

All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2020.

“Blachart” – A Writing Journey I've been writing stories basically since I could hold a wax crayon, and as any writer might tell you, any book they've created holds a special place of its own in their heart!

[kansascityhappenings]

Simone soars: Biles named Associated Press’ 2019 Female Athlete of the Year

They’re called “Simone Things,” a catchall phrase for the casual ease with which Simone Biles seems to soar through her sport and her life.

The irony, of course, is that there’s nothing casual or easy about it. Any of it. The greatest gymnast of all time and 2019 Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year only makes it seem that way.

Those jaw-dropping routines that are rewriting her sport’s code of points and redefining what can be done on the competition floor? Born from a mix of natural talent, hard work and a splash of ego.

USA’s Simone Biles waves as she arrives for the womens all-around final at the FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Championships at the Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle in Stuttgart, southern Germany, on October 10, 2019. (Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP) (Photo by LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP via Getty Images)

The 25 world championship medals, the most by any gymnast ever? The result of a promise the 22-year-old made to herself when she returned to competition in 2017 after taking time off following her golden run at the 2016 Olympics.

The stoicism and grace she has shown in becoming an advocate for survivors — herself included — and an agent for change in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal that’s shaken USA Gymnastics to its core? The byproduct of a conscious decision to embrace the immense clout she carries.

“I realize now with the platform I have it will be powerful if I speak up and speak for what I believe in,” Biles told The Associated Press. “It’s an honor to speak for those that are less fortunate. So if I can be a voice for them in a positive manner, then of course I’m going to do whatever I can.”

And it’s that mission — combined with her otherworldly skill and boundless charisma — that’s enabled Biles to keep gymnastics in the spotlight, a rarity for a sport that typically retreats into the background once the Olympic flame goes out.

She is the first gymnast to be named AP Female Athlete of the Year twice and the first to do it in a non-Olympic year.

Biles edged U.S. women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe in a vote by AP member sports editors and AP beat writers. Skiing star Mikaela Schiffrin placed third, with WNBA MVP Elena Delle Donne fourth.

Biles captured the award in 2016 following a showstopping performance at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, where she won five medals in all, four of them gold. She spent most of the following 12 months taking a break before returning to the gym in the fall of 2017, saying she owed it to herself to mine the depth of her talent.

Day 11 Simone Biles of the United States waves to someone in the audience while waiting on the podium to receive her gold medal after winning the floor exercise during the Apparatus Finals at the Rio Olympic Arena on August 16 , 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)

  Check social media following one of her routines and you’ll find people — from LeBron James to Michelle Obama to Chrissy Teigen — struggling to distill what they’ve witnessed into 280 characters or fewer, with whatever they settle on typically followed by multiple exclamation points and a goat emoji, a nod to Biles being considered the Greatest Of All Time.

Her triple-twisting double-flip (the “triple double”) at the end of her first tumbling pass on floor exercise is a wondrous blur.

Her double-twisting double-flip beam dismount (the “double double”) is so tough the International Gymnastics Federation made the unusual decision to downplay its value in an effort to deter other gymnasts from even trying it.

This is both the blessing and the curse of making the nearly impossible look tantalizingly attainable. When Biles learned about the FIG’s decision, she vented on Twitter, her palpable frustration highlighting the realness she’s maintained even as her first name has become synonymous with her sport’s royalty.

It can lead to a bit of a balancing act. In some ways, she’s still the kid from Texas who just wants to hang out with her boyfriend and her dog and go to the grocery story without being bothered. In other ways, she’s trying to be respectful of the world she’s built.

Take the GOAT thing. It’s a title she embraces — Biles wore a goat-themed leotard during training at the national championships in August — but also takes with a grain of salt, determined to stay grounded even as the hype around her grows.

Simone Biles competes on the balance beam during Women’s Senior competition of the 2019 U.S. Gymnastics Championships at the Sprint Center on August 11, 2019 in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Yes, GOAT happens to be the acronym for her planned post-Olympic “Gold Over America Tour,” but ask her where the inspiration came from and she laughs and gives credit to a friend, Kevin, who came up with it in a group chat. It is both paying tribute to and winking at her status at the same time.

Biles has become well aware over the last three years that her every word and action carries far greater weight than she ever imagined.

Her most impactful moment of 2019 might not have come during a meet but sitting for an interview on the eve of winning her record sixth national title, when she fought back tears while talking about how USA Gymnastics, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and the FBI failed to protect athletes during an investigation into Nassar’s abusive behavior.

The moment went viral, as most things surrounding her tend to do these days.

“I’m starting to realize it’s not just the gymternet anymore,” Biles said, using the term for her sport’s dedicated fans. “It’s an overall thing. It’s weird to get that kind of attention, but at the end of the day, I feel gymnastics has been overlooked in non-Olympic years. Yeah, it puts pressure on me. But I’m not trying to think about all the attention from the outside world.”

The attention figures to only grow in the run-up to Tokyo, where she will attempt to become the first female gymnast in more than half a century to repeat as Olympic champion. Her smiling face serves as the exclamation point at the end of every television promo for the Summer Games.

Let it be known: The smile is real. That might not have always been the case, but is is now.

Heading into the final months of a singular career, she is trying to revel in the journey while anxiously awaiting what’s next. Add it to the list of Simone Things.

“I feel like this is the beginning of my life and I don’t want gymnastics to be my whole entire life,” she said. “I’m definitely going to soak in the moment and enjoy it so 10 years from now I can look back and say ‘I had the time of my life out there’ … rather than ‘I was good, but I was miserable.’”

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/12/26/simone-soars-biles-named-associated-press-2019-female-athlete-of-the-year/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/12/27/simone-soars-biles-named-associated-press-2019-female-athlete-of-the-year/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

AND THAT IS THE MOST POPULAR ONLINE STORE BUILDER, WITH ABOUT 14,000 USERS

Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford cared what other people thought of it as a cost of doing business. Some companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. It's not so much that the business attracts jerks, or even that the power they wield corrupts them. Take your liberty while despots snore! If large organizations started to ask questions like that, they'd learn some frightening things. It may be like doodling. Maybe it's not a problem.

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild seem about ten times more alive. If you know you have a done deal, and then buy it, as two separate steps. I wrote to persuade, if only fake ones like Willie Horton. It's clear most start with not wanting kids to swear, then make up the reason afterward. But I realize now that they're not intrinsically jerks. How bad could it be otherwise? If big companies weren't incapable, there would need to be constantly improving both hardware and software. Their living expenses are the company's main expense, and since most founders are under 30, their living expenses are low. You should design the UI so that errors are impossible.

The result is there's a lot more work. Microsoft on the client. This is why hackers worry. A sprinter in a race almost immediately enters a state called oxygen debt.1 Sex, or something they were told to do by management. We get all the paperwork set up properly so there are no versions. Once some type of applicant? I don't know if I ever dared give this answer, but that it will set off the same alarms in your head as you become familiar with it. Life in a zoo is easier, but now that the things we build are so complicated, there's another rapidly growing subset: making things easier to use. Of what? Like steroids, these sudden huge investments can do more harm than good.

It was only then that we realized that they were effectively QA and to some extent marketing as well. The reason convertible notes allow more flexibility in price is that valuation caps aren't actual valuations, and notes are cheap and easy to do. Ick. It only came in black, for example, a company might require all suppliers to prove they're solvent before submitting bids. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. Clinton just seemed more dynamic. The phrase seemed almost grammatically ill-formed.

I'm going to build a web-based spreadsheet? Hardware is free now, if your software is reasonably efficient. Software is particularly suitable for price discrimination, because the only potential acquirer is Microsoft, and I can't see the gears at work.2 So we made some basic mistakes early on. My theory doesn't require that. Trolling tends to be almost entirely about money.3 Err. What people usually say is not that far from a description of something that actually happened.4 Go out of your way to make something people use.5

Three months later they're transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller. Clients shouldn't store data; they should be like telephones. I thought about the question at all. You might think that people decide to buy something, and then they come back and say their boss has vetoed the deal and won't do it for free. Several groups said our weekly dinners saved them from a common problem afflicting startups: working so hard that one has no social life. The Spitfire's original nemesis, the ME 109, was a brutally practical plane. I write to persuade a hypothetical perfectly unbiased reader. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. What really makes him stand out, though, is the natural conservatism that made them famous. Happens all the time.

Whereas it's easy to say things they wouldn't say face to face. Editors must know they attract readers. Naive founders think that if they can avoid it. Is the author flippant, but correct? Its daddy is in a pinch. Unless AOL fights back, they will either be pushed aside or turned into a pipe between Microsoft client and server software. It can be traumatic for the ones who wrote the software. On this topic, especially, they're met half-way by kids. So if you remember only the title of this essay, you already know most of what you need to add.

They do more in their heads: they try to understand a program completely to rewrite it, so there is no apparent cost of increasing it.6 The Defense Department does a fine though expensive job of defending the country, but they need more help because life is so precarious for them. And this would be a necessity for smaller fry, and for legitimate sites that hired spammers to promote them. As a general rule, you do know what's happening inside it. One, Reddit, had already launched, and were able to raise money after Demo Day.7 But the non-gullible recipients are merely collateral damage. And if Microsoft's applications only work with some clients, competitors will be able to say who cares what investors think? If you look at how famous startups got started, a lot of people at Apple seem to be a good plan, because the marginal cost is close to zero. You see paintings and drawings in museums and imagine they were made for you to look at stuff people use now that's broken.

Notes

The greatest damage that ASPs that want to get a personal introduction—and in the 70s never drew this curve.

But iTunes shows that they imitate even the most visible index of that, isn't it? The title associate has gotten a bad idea, at which point it suddenly stops. They have no decision-making causes things to the World Bank, the best are Goodwin Procter, Wilmer Hale, and know the answer.

Top VC firms have started there. I have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers directly, which wouldn't even exist anymore. In ancient times it covered a broad range of topics, comparable in scope to our scholarship though without the spur of poverty are only doing angel deals to generate all the best VCs tend to be high, they may prefer to work in a safe environment, but as a source of better ideas: whether you want to either.

And especially about what you've done than where you read about startup founders tend to become merely stubborn. So if we just implemented it ourselves, so I called to check and in fact it may be even larger than the type of thing. Samuel Johnson said no man but a lot of press coverage until we hired a PR firm.

Of course, but that wasn't a partnership. FreeBSD. The reason we quote statistics about fundraising is because those are writeoffs from the compromise you'd have to talk about it. I've found for dealing with the same in the future as barbaric, but rather that those who don't aren't.

Compromising a server could cause such damage that photography has done to painting may be exaggerated by the Robinson-Patman Act of 1982, which I warn about later: beware of getting too high a valuation cap is merely unglamorous, not because Delicious users are stupid. This too is true of the anti-dilution protections.

But an associate cold-emailing a startup to be when it converts. Ironically, one could aspire to the minimum you need to warn readers about, like movie stars' birthdays, or Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb? What people usually mean when they decide you're a loser they usually decide in way less than 1.

[symbianosgames]

The Silver Case is the first game Grasshopper Manufacture ever made. Before Killer 7, before No More Heroes, before Let it Die, The Silver Case showed what GHM would become. A studio where story and visual flair were paramount.

It's an adventure game, in the visual novel style of classics like Snatcher, but with a more realistic setting, posed as a hard boiled crime story. It was originally released on the PlayStation in 1999, only in Japan, the only original Grasshopper Manufacture game with that distinction. That's why the recent PC port, called The Silver Case HD Remaster, is exciting – it brings the entire original Grasshopper catalog into English. 

To dig into what makes this game special, we spoke with some of the developers of the game, original and new, discussing character design, story, and the port itself.

What influenced your design style here?

Takashi Miyamoto: The story is set in 1999, but there was an inclusion of near future aspects which came from the writings of William Gibson. Additionally, numerous films have also influenced the design. 

Which films? How did they influence the design?

TM: What I remembered from your question is Metropolis, Gattaca, Heat, or Seven. But these answers don't mean I was influenced regarding the character design, it's more like the overall image including the background or scenes.

Of course all those films, since my childhood, are accumulated into my core, but I really don't think I got any direct influence about the character design from them, at least that's what I remember.

However, Suda told me that Morikawa and Kotobuki could look like characters appearing in the Japanese television series Taiyo ni hoero. I didn't search for the actual photos or videos, so still everything is made from my imagination.

Why do you think there's a more western style prominent in detective style visual novels? 

TM: Perhaps it would be in the interest or longing to the culture totally different from our own. Also, it might be difficult to make up something new from the cities you've grown up in, I guess.

I’ve never played an adventure game other than “The Silver Case,” though, so I have no idea how many games with Western settings are there or such.

What impressed me long ago was the stylish UI. Was this an iterative process getting there, and can you describe the process?

TM: At the time, the game was made with such a small team; I think the staff’s sensitivity to it was displayed in a straightforward style. The mood of the visual becomes complete with the inclusion of my art and it had to be up to the story to work. I myself was able to sink in the story and it was very comfortable. 

Tell me about your most important pillars of character design. How do you craft someone unique, and bring their personality forward? 

TM: I avoid the expressions and poses of common symbolic emotions that Japanese animation and manga uses, unless there is a good reason to. At my core, I always want to design characters with a back-story, and I think that suited Suda’s demand for characters at the time.  

Can you give some examples of how a character's backstory influenced their character design?

TM: As far as I remember, the process of those character designs were something like; Suda shows me a fashion magazine for the costumes, and explains to me each one’s personalities, then I’d imagine the background (it's not told in the game).

Once my imagination is ready, I’d get the OK from Suda and start drawing and so on. So, no one knows about all those processes other than me and Suda. I guess Suda was doing something similar with the scenarios since he was working on it at the same time.

When writing a detective story, how close do you stick to tropes of the genre? 

Masahi Ooka: I personally like to defy tropes, but in the case of The Silver Case I was actually going for a “hard-boiled” story instead of a detective one. I remember writing the story with the mind set of making the writing as “hard-boiled” as possible. 

How would you distinguish between a detective story and a hard-boiled one?

MO: The book that rings a bell with the term "hard-boiled" is the Philip Marlowe series by Raymond Chandler. Also Robert Brown Parker is a favorite, too. If you say "detective story," that would be the "Sherlock Holmes" series. In Japan, there is a detective story series called Akechi Kogorou written by Ranpo Edogawa. When I was still in my early teens, I loved detective and mystery stories. Then in my late teens, I was into Sci-Fi novels. Finally in my twenties, the hard-boiled genre came up as a choice among other mystery novels. 

That might be why I feel "detective story" and "hard-boiled" are different genres. So in short, there is a big genre called "mystery," and within that, "detective story" is just one category, then another category called "hard-boiled" exists inside my head. 

The difference? The writing style, the air, the reasoning and action of the protagonist, I guess. The heroes of hard-boiled stories are all tough, merciless, and stylish. Well, in the era of Robert Brown Parker, those heroes became more humane and somewhat unstylish, I should say. (The game's second protaginist) Tokio Morishima, of course, fulfills my aesthetics but he is a character who is a little unstylish and "poorly-made."

How is it collaborating with other writers? Do you take charge of a certain aspect, like dialog, or do you write whatever and edit each other, or something else? 

MO: With the cooperation of Suda, I will receive the scenario once he completes it; we will have a meeting in regards to the scenario, confirm what will be covered in Placebo, and then finally start writing the story. We also had help from the writer Kato Sako, who we also met up with at a café, giving out ideas and then writing the story. As a journalist, I would usually write after an interview, write after research or write with an editor. So The Silver Case was written as an extension of that practice.  Of course, there were also times I’ve submitted the scenario and fixed the script so it matches the overall story.  

When writing a story like this, do you ever find yourself trapped in your own logic? Sometimes when I write, I have a great idea, and then I realize it contradicts other things I've already put in place. How do you deal with this?

MO: Yes, of course, I was occasionally trapped. The Silver Case is a piece of work which presents the seems-to-be logical answer but creates inconsistency at the same time, and then someone comes up with a new piece of logic from another perspective but it also produces a different inconsistency... it keeps going on like this and ends up with just a chaotic situation. So, sometimes I had to think about "What is the logical consistency anyway?" That was just tough. Or quite simply, there might be some inconsistencies left over intentionally, you know.

Apart from The Silver Case, "logic" is a mere element to construct a story. It is the same even for mystery which has a strong weight upon logic. It is true that if the story has any inconsistency, that might make the user stop following it, but if the work has something more important than keeping the consistency, it is author's choice to prioritize the inconsistency, this is what I think. If any of us come up with brilliant idea, we should rely on that rather than try to make something look good. I prefer a "marvelous idea with some inconsistency" rather than a "logical consistency." Of course we need to balance them well though.

Yes, the balance. A so-called masterpiece is something with a good balance which includes logical consistency. However, that well-balanced piece could be interesting but boring, no one knows. What I like is something that pretends to have the layers of logical ideas and just destroys everything in the end, something that seems to be made upon the unreal logic. Well, it's hard to describe.

Saying that, I, myself am a very bad story writer. Please someone teach me how to create an interesting story.

Is there anything you've changed from the original game, or anything you wish you could?

MO: For me it’s the norm to feel embarrassed at my own past writing, so I don’t really like to read it once it’s written. If I were to start fixing the text, I would probably rewrite the whole thing. However, Placebo was something I’ve written a considerably long time ago and I don’t really remember the fine details of it. So it’s probably going to feel like someone else had written it. Well since I haven’t touched the script in over a decade, I don’t think I would have the urge to change it.

I'm sure you didn't plan for this game to be translated into English from the start? Is there anything that has surprised you about the localization process? 

MO: I wouldn’t have even dreamed that The Silver Case would be released in English. Being totally honest, I’m surprised that people still even remember it as a game. Kind of like the living dead. I’ve got no clue how the English audience will receive the game. Suda’s scenarios would likely be accepted outside of Japan, but I’m worried that people might not get what’s going on in Placebo haha.  

Looking back at old code, was there anything embarrassing there? Anything you fixed up? 

Yuki Yamazaki: To be honest, I still don’t know all of it. We’re rebuilding the source code from scratch, recycling fine algorithms and parameters from the original source.  

Can you talk about how you're rebuilding the code base? And with those old algorithms and such, do you feel the need to improve them?

YY: For the basic functions like audio/movie playback or fade-in/out of the screen, I just ignored the original algorithm and designed it so that we can easily use it. Contrary to that, I painstakingly tried to keep the original design for the “film window system” to preserve the coordinated decision or movement timing decision algorithms. 

What I had difficulty with was that very original message display system. There was an automatic page break function which worked only a couple times throughout the whole game, so I was checking the code each time with thinking “Do I have to use this ‘automatic’ system? Can we just do this manually?” Then in the end, that function became totally different from the original algorithm and I just ended up regretting my decision to edit that “automatic page break” function from the start.

Did you port to a modern engine, or modify the original? 

YY: We are using the latest Unity engine. Using an engine from 17 years ago was out of the question.

What has been updated for modern platforms? How did you deal with aspect ratio issues, et cetera?

YY: We pretty much remade the game from the ground up. For the aspect ratio, were trying to make the “Film Window” functional in a 4:3 environment. We decided not to change anything like forcefully stretching the image. 

What are the challenges of working with an old code base? 

YY: Since we didn’t have the original data, I’ve decided to make a converter that extracts the sound data from the PlayStation sound data. However since the format is so old and so little of it, it was quite difficult.

Can you go into detail about the PlayStation sound converter?

YY: The sound file for PlayStation had two separate types of music data; pitch data and the musical score data, which is rather similar to MIDI files.

Adding to that, for The Silver Case, the musical score data contained the parameter for background effect manipulation so that the BGM and background effects can be synchronized. So I had to create two converters to extract the waveform data from score+pitch data, and background manipulation parameter from the pitch data. 

As for the sound effects, there was only pitch data and no music score. Instead, it was programmed like “Play the C sound with strength of 80!” directly to PlayStation. I was wondering for a while can I extract that… then came to the idea, “Why don’t I just use the converter I just made!” So I made the music score having “one single note with the sound of C with strength 80,” extracted the waveform data using my newly designed converter.

[ultralifehackerguru-blog]

New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/what-the-best-commencement-speeches-teach-us-about-failure/

What the Best Commencement Speeches Teach Us About Failure

If there’s one common thread amongst some of the best college commencement speeches out there, it’s failure. College, it turns out, is easy compared to the rest of life, and to prepare you for that, everyone from Denzel Washington to JK Rowling have dedicated their time in front of graduates to help us all remember that.

JK Rowling: “Failure Meant Stripping Away the Inessential”

When you think about an author like JK Rowling, the first word that comes to your mind is probably not “failure,” but that’s exactly what she dedicated her 2008 commencement speech at Harvard to. Rowling even acknowledges the absurdity of such a topic given the privilege that comes from graduating at a university like Harvard, “Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.” She eventually delves into her own failures and why they’re so important to her:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Failure as freedom is an incredibly common theme in commencement speeches, and while Rowling glosses over that as merely a section in her longer points about failure, Conan O’Brien uses that as his entire thesis.

Conan O’Brien: “Your Perceived Failure Can Become a Catalyst for Profound Reinvention”

Where Rowling tackles her own personal struggles to share her advice to grads, Conan O’Brien details his very public experimentation after his ousting from The Tonight Show. Without failure, you have no reason to reinvent yourself, something that is far more necessary for creativity than most of us realize. O’Brien lays it out like so in his 2011 commencement speech at Dartmouth:

Way back in the 1940s there was a very, very funny man named Jack Benny. He was a giant star, easily one of the greatest comedians of his generation. And a much younger man named Johnny Carson wanted very much to be Jack Benny. In some ways he was, but in many ways he wasn’t. He emulated Jack Benny, but his own quirks and mannerisms, along with a changing medium, pulled him in a different direction. And yet his failure to completely become his hero made him the funniest person of his generation. David Letterman wanted to be Johnny Carson, and was not, and as a result my generation of comedians wanted to be David Letterman. And none of us are. My peers and I have all missed that mark in a thousand different ways. But the point is this: It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It’s not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention.

There comes a time in everyone’s career, whether you’re in a creative field or not, where you have to step away and reassess what you’re doing. For many, that time is perfect for a massive retooling of your career path, where you can finally shake off the shackles of “where you thought you’d be” and take on the next step with a more open mind.

Ira Glass: “I Wish That Someone Had Said to Me That It’s Normal to Feel Lost for a Little While”

Speaking of taking those next steps, Ira Glass shares a story about his own self-doubt during his commencement speech at Goucher College in 2012:

I, I think, was as ambitious as any of you in this class. I was working at a network news show All Things Considered at the age of 20. And even I floundered. I floundered badly. I had one skill as a person in my 20’s, and that is that. For whatever reason, I was a good editor; I was a very decent editor from the start. But for all the other things that make me decent at my job now-how to make a story, how to structure a story, how to find a story, how to report-I was a terrible, terrible writer. I was the kind of writer who writes a paragraph and then looks at it and thinks, ‘Oh no, now I’m going to move all the words around’ and then rewrites it over and over again.

I spent years in my 20’s doing mediocre stories that should have taken days but, in fact, took me months. I spent years wondering if I should just learn to become a journalist by going to journalism school, by going to grad school. Instead-and this is just a little practical tip I simply decided…-I simply would take NPR reporters and pay them $50 to look at scripts I was working on, which was much cheaper than grad school.

As a performer on the air, I was a complete stiff; and I want to say that this is not some sort of weird, false modesty. Like, I was bad- there is proof of this on the Internet. Google, and you’ll see it. I made very little money: My personal financial goal was ‘your age times a thousand,’ which I did not achieve until I was in my 30’s. For many years I made from $12,000 to $18,000. I have to say that it was very sobering for me to read in The New York Times last week (they had this series on college debt) that people get out of college with $900 a month in student loans that they have to pay. That was my entire income some years.

These days, it’s hard to imagine Glass as anything but poised, but it clearly took him years to get there, with plenty of failures along the way. Glass covers a lot of ground here, but the general idea is a nice reminder that you will not know what to do with your life until you try and fail at a few things. Even then, you will probably not end up where you think you will.

Aaron Sorkin: “The World Doesn’t Care How Many Times You Fall Down, As Long As It’s One Fewer Than the Number of Times You Get Back Up”

Like Ira Glass, it’s easy to look at someone like Aaron Sorkin and assume he just spontaneously exploded into the world as a perfect writer. Yet, in his commencement speech at Syracuse University in 2012, Sorkin details his own failures, the failures of those around him, and even his days of cocaine addiction. Those tidbits are bookmarked by two main points: you are dumb and you will fail, but nobody really cares:

And make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You’re a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You’re barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they’re a-coming for ya. It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb…

…Rehearsal’s over. You’re going out there now, you’re going to do this thing. How you live matters. You’re going to fall down, but the world doesn’t care how many times you fall down, as long as it’s one fewer than the number of times you get back up.

It is, as always, a nice reminder that all of us fail all the time. You just have to keep going.

Ursula K. Le Guin: “Success Is Somebody Else’s Failure”

Author Ursula K. Le Guin takes a different approach from most, reminding us that failure is not just something to learn from, it’s an experience to cherish. Here’s Le Guin speaking to Mills College in 1983:

Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

It’s a darker speech, but even now, 34 years after she gave this commencement address, the question she raises are important to remember and to think about. Failure is perhaps not just the absence of success. It’s a place we all inhabit from time to time.

Denzel Washington: “If You Don’t Fail, You’re Not Even Trying”

Like others, Denzel Washington decided to dedicate his 2011 commencement speech at the University of Pennsylvania, to the idea of failure. Washington breaks it down into three different sections. First, you will fail at life. Second, doing so is a sign you’re on the right path:

Here’s my second point about failure, if you don’t fail, you’re not even trying. My wife told me this great expression, “To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.” Les Brown, a motivational speaker, made an analogy about this. Imagine you’re on your deathbed and standing around your death bed are the ghosts representing your unfilled potential. The ghosts of the ideas you never acted on. The ghosts of the talents you didn’t use. And they’re standing around your bed angry, disappointed and upset. They say, “We came to you because you could have brought us to life,” they say. “And now we go to the grave together.” So I ask you today, “How many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes?” You’ve invested a lot in your education and people invested in you. And let me tell you, the world needs your talents, man, does it ever.

Washington ends with the same sentiment that many commencement speakers take and one we’ve heard time and time again. “[Failure is] the best way to figure out where you’re going.”

You’re a Failure

How Can I Overcome My Fear of Failure?

Why It’s So Hard to Learn from Our Mistakes (and What You Can Do)

How to Move Past Failure

©

[symbianosgames]

The Silver Case is the first game Grasshopper Manufacture ever made. Before Killer 7, before No More Heroes, before Let it Die, The Silver Case showed what GHM would become. A studio where story and visual flair were paramount.

It's an adventure game, in the visual novel style of classics like Snatcher, but with a more realistic setting, posed as a hard boiled crime story. It was originally released on the PlayStation in 1999, only in Japan, the only original Grasshopper Manufacture game with that distinction. That's why the recent PC port, called The Silver Case HD Remaster, is exciting – it brings the entire original Grasshopper catalog into English. 

To dig into what makes this game special, we spoke with some of the developers of the game, original and new, discussing character design, story, and the port itself.

What influenced your design style here?

Takashi Miyamoto: The story is set in 1999, but there was an inclusion of near future aspects which came from the writings of William Gibson. Additionally, numerous films have also influenced the design. 

Which films? How did they influence the design?

TM: What I remembered from your question is Metropolis, Gattaca, Heat, or Seven. But these answers don't mean I was influenced regarding the character design, it's more like the overall image including the background or scenes.

Of course all those films, since my childhood, are accumulated into my core, but I really don't think I got any direct influence about the character design from them, at least that's what I remember.

However, Suda told me that Morikawa and Kotobuki could look like characters appearing in the Japanese television series Taiyo ni hoero. I didn't search for the actual photos or videos, so still everything is made from my imagination.

Why do you think there's a more western style prominent in detective style visual novels? 

TM: Perhaps it would be in the interest or longing to the culture totally different from our own. Also, it might be difficult to make up something new from the cities you've grown up in, I guess.

I’ve never played an adventure game other than “The Silver Case,” though, so I have no idea how many games with Western settings are there or such.

What impressed me long ago was the stylish UI. Was this an iterative process getting there, and can you describe the process?

TM: At the time, the game was made with such a small team; I think the staff’s sensitivity to it was displayed in a straightforward style. The mood of the visual becomes complete with the inclusion of my art and it had to be up to the story to work. I myself was able to sink in the story and it was very comfortable. 

Tell me about your most important pillars of character design. How do you craft someone unique, and bring their personality forward? 

TM: I avoid the expressions and poses of common symbolic emotions that Japanese animation and manga uses, unless there is a good reason to. At my core, I always want to design characters with a back-story, and I think that suited Suda’s demand for characters at the time.  

Can you give some examples of how a character's backstory influenced their character design?

TM: As far as I remember, the process of those character designs were something like; Suda shows me a fashion magazine for the costumes, and explains to me each one’s personalities, then I’d imagine the background (it's not told in the game).

Once my imagination is ready, I’d get the OK from Suda and start drawing and so on. So, no one knows about all those processes other than me and Suda. I guess Suda was doing something similar with the scenarios since he was working on it at the same time.

When writing a detective story, how close do you stick to tropes of the genre? 

Masahi Ooka: I personally like to defy tropes, but in the case of The Silver Case I was actually going for a “hard-boiled” story instead of a detective one. I remember writing the story with the mind set of making the writing as “hard-boiled” as possible. 

How would you distinguish between a detective story and a hard-boiled one?

MO: The book that rings a bell with the term "hard-boiled" is the Philip Marlowe series by Raymond Chandler. Also Robert Brown Parker is a favorite, too. If you say "detective story," that would be the "Sherlock Holmes" series. In Japan, there is a detective story series called Akechi Kogorou written by Ranpo Edogawa. When I was still in my early teens, I loved detective and mystery stories. Then in my late teens, I was into Sci-Fi novels. Finally in my twenties, the hard-boiled genre came up as a choice among other mystery novels. 

That might be why I feel "detective story" and "hard-boiled" are different genres. So in short, there is a big genre called "mystery," and within that, "detective story" is just one category, then another category called "hard-boiled" exists inside my head. 

The difference? The writing style, the air, the reasoning and action of the protagonist, I guess. The heroes of hard-boiled stories are all tough, merciless, and stylish. Well, in the era of Robert Brown Parker, those heroes became more humane and somewhat unstylish, I should say. (The game's second protaginist) Tokio Morishima, of course, fulfills my aesthetics but he is a character who is a little unstylish and "poorly-made."

How is it collaborating with other writers? Do you take charge of a certain aspect, like dialog, or do you write whatever and edit each other, or something else? 

MO: With the cooperation of Suda, I will receive the scenario once he completes it; we will have a meeting in regards to the scenario, confirm what will be covered in Placebo, and then finally start writing the story. We also had help from the writer Kato Sako, who we also met up with at a café, giving out ideas and then writing the story. As a journalist, I would usually write after an interview, write after research or write with an editor. So The Silver Case was written as an extension of that practice.  Of course, there were also times I’ve submitted the scenario and fixed the script so it matches the overall story.  

When writing a story like this, do you ever find yourself trapped in your own logic? Sometimes when I write, I have a great idea, and then I realize it contradicts other things I've already put in place. How do you deal with this?

MO: Yes, of course, I was occasionally trapped. The Silver Case is a piece of work which presents the seems-to-be logical answer but creates inconsistency at the same time, and then someone comes up with a new piece of logic from another perspective but it also produces a different inconsistency... it keeps going on like this and ends up with just a chaotic situation. So, sometimes I had to think about "What is the logical consistency anyway?" That was just tough. Or quite simply, there might be some inconsistencies left over intentionally, you know.

Apart from The Silver Case, "logic" is a mere element to construct a story. It is the same even for mystery which has a strong weight upon logic. It is true that if the story has any inconsistency, that might make the user stop following it, but if the work has something more important than keeping the consistency, it is author's choice to prioritize the inconsistency, this is what I think. If any of us come up with brilliant idea, we should rely on that rather than try to make something look good. I prefer a "marvelous idea with some inconsistency" rather than a "logical consistency." Of course we need to balance them well though.

Yes, the balance. A so-called masterpiece is something with a good balance which includes logical consistency. However, that well-balanced piece could be interesting but boring, no one knows. What I like is something that pretends to have the layers of logical ideas and just destroys everything in the end, something that seems to be made upon the unreal logic. Well, it's hard to describe.

Saying that, I, myself am a very bad story writer. Please someone teach me how to create an interesting story.

Is there anything you've changed from the original game, or anything you wish you could?

MO: For me it’s the norm to feel embarrassed at my own past writing, so I don’t really like to read it once it’s written. If I were to start fixing the text, I would probably rewrite the whole thing. However, Placebo was something I’ve written a considerably long time ago and I don’t really remember the fine details of it. So it’s probably going to feel like someone else had written it. Well since I haven’t touched the script in over a decade, I don’t think I would have the urge to change it.

I'm sure you didn't plan for this game to be translated into English from the start? Is there anything that has surprised you about the localization process? 

MO: I wouldn’t have even dreamed that The Silver Case would be released in English. Being totally honest, I’m surprised that people still even remember it as a game. Kind of like the living dead. I’ve got no clue how the English audience will receive the game. Suda’s scenarios would likely be accepted outside of Japan, but I’m worried that people might not get what’s going on in Placebo haha.  

Looking back at old code, was there anything embarrassing there? Anything you fixed up? 

Yuki Yamazaki: To be honest, I still don’t know all of it. We’re rebuilding the source code from scratch, recycling fine algorithms and parameters from the original source.  

Can you talk about how you're rebuilding the code base? And with those old algorithms and such, do you feel the need to improve them?

YY: For the basic functions like audio/movie playback or fade-in/out of the screen, I just ignored the original algorithm and designed it so that we can easily use it. Contrary to that, I painstakingly tried to keep the original design for the “film window system” to preserve the coordinated decision or movement timing decision algorithms. 

What I had difficulty with was that very original message display system. There was an automatic page break function which worked only a couple times throughout the whole game, so I was checking the code each time with thinking “Do I have to use this ‘automatic’ system? Can we just do this manually?” Then in the end, that function became totally different from the original algorithm and I just ended up regretting my decision to edit that “automatic page break” function from the start.

Did you port to a modern engine, or modify the original? 

YY: We are using the latest Unity engine. Using an engine from 17 years ago was out of the question.

What has been updated for modern platforms? How did you deal with aspect ratio issues, et cetera?

YY: We pretty much remade the game from the ground up. For the aspect ratio, were trying to make the “Film Window” functional in a 4:3 environment. We decided not to change anything like forcefully stretching the image. 

What are the challenges of working with an old code base? 

YY: Since we didn’t have the original data, I’ve decided to make a converter that extracts the sound data from the PlayStation sound data. However since the format is so old and so little of it, it was quite difficult.

Can you go into detail about the PlayStation sound converter?

YY: The sound file for PlayStation had two separate types of music data; pitch data and the musical score data, which is rather similar to MIDI files.

Adding to that, for The Silver Case, the musical score data contained the parameter for background effect manipulation so that the BGM and background effects can be synchronized. So I had to create two converters to extract the waveform data from score+pitch data, and background manipulation parameter from the pitch data. 

As for the sound effects, there was only pitch data and no music score. Instead, it was programmed like “Play the C sound with strength of 80!” directly to PlayStation. I was wondering for a while can I extract that… then came to the idea, “Why don’t I just use the converter I just made!” So I made the music score having “one single note with the sound of C with strength 80,” extracted the waveform data using my newly designed converter.