#tagging as that so i can find it later to rewrite this post w credit to my buddies here :)

[missblanchette]

Birds of Paradise [1/5]

Series: Joker Game

Characters: Amari/Tazaki; Kaminaga as Tazaki’s wingman (lol get it)

Rating: G

Summary: Tazaki never found a reason to talk to the shopkeeper with the chestnut hair and god-like jawline -- that was, until his pigeons attacked the flower display. (AKA The Flower Shop AU no one asked for)

Words: 1770

Notes: Modern AU/Flower Shop AU; Good lord this has been sitting in my computer since January, having gone through a couple of rewrites and lots of editing, but ah I decided to finally post this since I have some friends who like AmaTaza and I’ve always wanted to write something focusing on them so yeah hehe ^o^;; Technically this is complete, but I decided to release it chapter by chapter so I could edit and rework the parts that I’m still unhappy with while the fic itself is technically up lol, so hopefully this will be updated weekly >u<

You can read this on AO3! Thank you guys for reading and I hope you enjoy~! (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) ♡

Ch 1: First Encounters

Tazaki's pigeons were usually better than this, having had trained them over the years to listen to his beck and call; it was one of his few talents, really, earning him the title "Pigeon Whisperer" back in high school, though that wasn't important at the moment. Rather the issue was that for some reason, nothing he said or did could stop his darlings from jumping out at the display of flowers in front of Persephone's.

It must've been quite the scene, what with his pigeons looking like fallen angels descending upon the innocent flowers and the plethora of petals flying onto the sidewalk like confetti that was just popped. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Tazaki thought it'd make a great candid shot, but that was the least of his concerns. He could practically feel the crowd forming behind him and right now, he had to tame his dear birds before the shopkeeper came out.

"Excuse me, sir. Is everything all right?"

Welp. Seemed like he was too late for that.

Trying to keep himself cool and collected, Tazaki turned to see that familiar head of chestnut hair and god-like jawline he always saw through the flower shop's window whenever he went on his morning walks.

"Of course," Tazaki said, putting on a smile as petals smacked him in the face. "I've got them under control."

Quirking an eyebrow, the shopkeeper looked between him and the flowers.

"Let me help you."

"It's all right, I can handle them --"

But the shopkeeper had already stepped forward, reaching out to Tazaki's pigeons. Their hands brushed against each other for a moment, sending goosebumps down Tazaki's body that made him freeze. It must've been how warm the shopkeeper's hands were, Tazaki thought, in comparison to his own. Nonetheless, by the time he recovered, his birds had stopped their assault on the flower display.

"I believe these are yours?" the shopkeeper teased.

Blinking, Tazaki took in the sight of his pigeons lounging about on the shopkeeper's arms as if they hadn't just gone on a frenzy. Part of it hurt his pride, since it'd taken a while for his birds to grow used to him, yet they'd already taken a liking to this man. At the same time, however, there was something about it that made his stomach flip. Perhaps it was the smile the shopkeeper adorned despite the wings flapping about and the weight of the birds clinging onto him. Whatever it was, Tazaki pushed back those thoughts and relieved the man of his darlings.

"And I believe you'd be right." As his pigeons climbed back onto his own arms, Tazaki shot them a disappointed look. At least they had the decency to look ashamed. "I'm really sorry about this."

"No worries, these things happen," the shopkeeper said, waving him off and chuckling. "Although this is the first time I've had a pigeon attack but it's fine. I can just fix up the display."

With the sidewalk decorated in an array of colorful petals, Tazaki wondered just how much fixing up he'd need to do.

"I've caused you a lot of trouble, so I'll pay." Before the shopkeeper could say anything, Tazaki took out his wallet. "I insist."

The shopkeeper hummed as if considering his offer, then nodded.

"All right then," he said rather cheerfully. Tapping his chin, he inspected the remains of the flowers. The shopkeeper seemed to be in a good mood despite the mess, though Tazaki wasn't sure if it was politeness or genuine. "That'll be 60,000 yen."

Even if the tone of his voice was light and sweet, Tazaki couldn't help but wince. His wallet was in pain.

"Er, do you take credit card?"

"We do, indeed." The shopkeeper gave him a reassuring smile. "Just go ahead into the store, I'll follow you."

Doing as he was told, Tazaki walked in and was greeted by the sounds of barking. Immediately, a Scottish terrier ran up to him and he tried to calm his pigeons before they did even more damage. After making sure they wouldn't do anything, Tazaki bent down and petted the dog.

"I see you've met Frate." The shopkeeper's voice came from behind him, and he turned to see him with a bouquet in his arms.

"Frate, huh? Cute dog."

"The cutest dog there is~" the shopkeeper said, setting the bouquet on the counter. Even though most of the petals had fallen off and the cellophane wrap was torn, he looked at it very intently. "But we like to think of him as fierce -- our very own Cerberus."

"Cerberus? Like the guard dog of Hades?" Tazaki stood up and Frate ran off into the depths of the store, his black fur whipping behind him. Then Tazaki grinned, remembering the name of the flower shop. "Or in this case, the guard dog of Persephone's garden."

The shopkeeper smiled as he replaced the torn wrapper with a new one.

"Exactly! Not too many people get the reference."

"I'm a cultured man," Tazaki said, walking up the the cash register.

"A cultured man with varied interests, I'm sure," the shopkeeper said, glancing over to the pigeons resting on his arms. Finished with wrapping the flowers, he tied them together with a blue ribbon.

"Certainly." Tazaki would've rubbed the back of his neck had his arms not been occupied, though he did feel his cheeks grow a bit warm. "A-Anyways, I have my card ready."

"Right, right," the shopkeeper said, patting his hands clean on his apron.

Their fingers touched in the brief moment Tazaki handed him his credit card, sending that same wave of goosebumps throughout his body. Distracting himself from the feeling, Tazaki occupied himself with making sure his pigeons were behaving.

"Sorry again, about the display," Tazaki said as the transaction was completed. Putting his card back, he already missed the warmth of the shopkeeper's touch.

"Like I said, no worries. Oh! Before you go --" The shopkeeper took the bouquet lying on the counter and handed it to him. "-- Here. These are for you."

Tazaki found himself at a loss for words, his mouth hanging agape. Slowly, he pointed towards himself.

"...For me?" He cleared his throat. "Why?"

"I don't want you going home empty-handed after you just shelled out all that money."

"I can't possibly --"

"If you're worried about paying, don't. This is just one of the bouquets that survived the attack," he said, adding a wink at the end. For a moment, Tazaki forgot how to breathe.

"Right." He nodded, taking the bouquet from him. "Thank you..." He trailed off, unable to find a name tag on the shopkeeper's person.

"Amari."

"Amari," he repeated, the name coming easily to him. "Thank you, Amari."

"It's not a problem...?"

"Tazaki."

"Tazaki," Amari said with a smile, and Tazaki decided he could listen to Amari say his name all day.

"So who's the lucky girl, eh?" was the first thing Kaminaga asked him when they met up later. Unfortunately for Tazaki, he had no time in between the flower shop and meeting Kaminaga at the cafe by the park to drop the bouquet at home, so he was stuck with dealing with the annoyance that was Kaminaga.  

"Hm?" Cradling the bouquet in one arm, Tazaki spread bird feed on the ground with his free hand.

"Guy then?"

"W-What do you mean?"

"The flowers, man." Kaminaga clapped his shoulder. It was a good thing his birds were already feeding or else that would've been the second frenzy that day. "You don't just carry flowers around."

"Ah, this?" Tazaki said, the bouquet rustling in his hold. "It's... not a big deal. My pigeons ruined a flower shop's display and I paid for it. The shopkeeper gave me this in return."

Saying that out loud sounded a bit ridiculous in retrospect, but Kaminaga took it all in stride, simply nodding as he took a sip of his coffee.

"So," Kaminaga said, setting his drink down. "It's the shopkeeper."

"No, it's -- there's no one, okay?"

"It's not 'no one' if you're getting all flustered like that."

"I barely even know him, all right? Today was the first time I even talked to him!"

"Oho~ Sounds like you've been admiring him from afar." Kaminaga leaned in closer with that damned smirk of his.

"It's nothing like that." Tazaki gave him a pointed look. "I just recognize him since I pass by the store all the time."

Kaminaga hummed, fingers drumming against the table.

"This store wouldn't happen to be Persephone's, would it?"

Tazaki blinked.

"It is..."

"The shopkeeper, tall or short?"

"Uh, tall...?"

"Aha, so it's Amari!"

Holding the bouquet a little tighter, Tazaki flinched at the outburst.

"H-How'd you know?"

"My amazing intuition." Kaminaga puffed his chest out proudly to which Tazaki simply stared. "Also, I get my flowers for Miyoshi there, yeah?" he said, deflating by the end of the sentence. "I passed by this morning and saw Amari fixing up the display."

Tazaki slumped at the thought of Amari working on that all by himself. He should've offered to help him clean up at least, now that he thought about it. What a bad first impression he must've made.

"Y'know, I'm kinda friends with him," Kaminaga said. "I can put in a good word for you."

"It's okay, you don't have to." Tazaki sighed. "He probably doesn't like me anyways."

Kaminaga snorted.

"You completely ruin the man's display and he gives you flowers." Kaminaga paused, most likely for dramatic effect. "He can't not like you."

"But --"

"Trust me on this. I'm a love expert."

Tazaki didn't mention how the self-proclaimed love expert spent a week sleeping on the couch after a failed attempt at "spicing up" his and Miyoshi's love life because he was a good friend, but even he had to admit Kaminaga's offer was tempting. He couldn't count the number of times he stole a glance at Amari as he passed by the flower shop, even slowing his pace down so the moment could last longer. He never found a reason to enter the shop, and so never found an excuse to strike up a conversation with Amari -- until now. At least with Kaminaga, there'd be some kind of common denominator there.

"All right." Tazaki took a breath, not believing what he was about to say. "I'll trust you."

Kaminaga grinned and threw an arm around Tazaki's shoulders.

"Don't you worry about a thing! Next time you see him, you'll get that date. Hell, I can see your wedding already --"

"Stop."

"-- You guys'll be saving a lot since you've already got the flowers and birds covered --"

"Please."

[farylslair]

Back-to-School Update: questionMark Audiobook, Project C, and DARCs

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the world’s worst writing blog.

First and foremost: yes, I did go back to school this past week. I was going to post an update about that sooner but, yeah, I couldn’t because I was too busy with school. 

How ‘bout that.

So what does this mean? It means that I will be considerably less active on here and on social media in general, although I have the Tumblr app on my phone now and it surprisingly works, so that kind of makes up for the lack of activity. Ish. 

This also means that there won’t be nearly as much time to write, so progress will be very slow. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t have some REALLY big news. 

First of all, if you’ve seen my updates on Facebook and Twitter, you’ll know that the questionMark audiobook is now in production. We were fortunate enough to get the very talented Kane Prestenback to narrate it, and from what we’ve heard of it so far, he does a fantastic job. You can read a little more about him below:

Kane Prestenback is a New York actor, singer, puppeteer, movement & voice performer. Credits include New York Musical Theatre Festival, Gallery Players, Broadway's Circle in the Square (w/ Theodore Mann), The Public Theater, Westside Theatre, Symphony Space, and Old Vic New Voices. Regional credits include Orlando Shakespeare Festival, Luna Stage, Swine Palace Productions, Shakespeare & Co, & Mad Cow Theatre. Notable shows/roles: "Thrill Me” Southeastern premiere, “The Tallest Building in the World” World-Premiere, "Urinetown: The Musical" (Bobby Strong), “What the Butler Saw" (Nicholas Beckett), "Little Shop of Horrors" (Seymour), George M Cohan's "The Tavern" (The Vagabond), and "Kid-Simple" (Oliver). Kane made his London Theatrical debut at The Old Vic in the inaugural TS Eliot US/UK Exchange, in association with Kevin Spacey. Training: Circle in the Square Theatre School. Proud member of Actor's Equity. You can find him at www.kaneprestenback.com

At this point, the release date for the audiobook is up in the air, but I’ll let you know as soon as we know.

Our second order of business is a tiny update on Project C, which may not sound like a big deal to everyone else, but it’s something very exciting for me.

I finished my draft of Project C.

Now, what does this mean? If you recall my bimonthly goals post, I mention that not only would finishing this draft knock off one of the six goals I need to complete by the end of February, but it also means that it would mark the first time I wrote a novel-length manuscript all the way through, the final word count being about 56,000 words.

That’s right: I finished a novel.

Granted, it’s a rewrite of S. T. Hoover’s draft for our collab, and even though I helped outline and it was my idea in the first place, I technically didn’t make it from scratch and--don’t ruin this for me.

Progress on Project C is also good from a writeblr perspective because once it’s revealed/released, I’ll be able to do writing tags again, since doing them for short stories is very awkward, and I feel like the characters of Project C are very tag-worthy.

Finally, the DARCs. Now, in case you missed the holiday update, here’s a brief explanation of how those came about:

I’m stupid.

Therefore, I forgot to factor ARCs into the questionMark schedule (which, honestly, would have helped a lot). So, to make up for that, I’m going to start implementing them now, after the book has been out for about a month and a half. 

That’s right: delayed Advanced Review Copies.

What I worked out with Project 89 Media (questionMark’s publisher) was that I could give away 25 digital copies of questionMark intended for people to read and review, either on Amazon, their book/writing/anything else blogs, or on their social media platform of choice. I’m again going to refer you back to this post I made about how important reviews are, since, yeah, they’re pretty important and every review counts.

Now, I’m probably going to make a post on this later going more in depth about the specifics of the DARCs, but here are the bullet points:

If you’re interested in reading and reviewing questionMark, please shoot me a message on your favorite social media platform (either Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr). 

If you don’t know what questionMark is about, you can read about it on my website here, its Amazon page here, and the announcement post I made ages ago here, featuring the old cover.

Since the beta reading process didn’t go over so well, I’m going to be a little more strict with these. Please, please, pleeeeeeease only respond if you are able to read the book and write a review somewhere within the next few months. A whopping majority of the people who said they would beta read questionMark never got back to me, even to say they wouldn’t be able to do it anymore. So please, furthuhluvagod, only message me if you’re serious about getting a review copy.

On top of that, not to scare you guys, but I will be following up on people who get review copies, especially if it’s, like, May and I haven’t heard anything from you. Again, I normally wouldn’t be this strict, but I don’t want to have another huge waste of time like the beta reading process was. 

If you do what you say you’re gonna do, we’re gonna be fine. If not’ you’re better off just buying the book so you have the freedom to let it sit for ten years and not have me pester you once a month for it. Just food for thought.

Sorry that turned into kind of a rant near the end, but yeah, this needs to work. Again, I’m probably going to be making a separate post that goes more into detail about the process, but I’m opening it up a little early just in case anyone’s interested. 

And also, please don’t let the scary details bother you. There’s no hard deadline, but I’d like to see something at some point. Like, sometime in 2017, please. Again, as long as you plan to follow through, we’ll be fine, and your responses will be appreciated ten times more. 

So that’s all for now. Again, I’m sorry if the DARCs sound intimidating and I hope that doesn’t deter you from getting a copy. As far as Project C and the questionMark audiobook are concerned, as well as the other amazing things happening behind the scenes, I’ll let you know as soon as I have more news. 

Until then, thanks for sticking around, and stay tuned for more updates.