#the images are quite teeny but its visible so

[iaminjail]

arting AND fighting yeehaw !!

[marigoldvance]

AUpocalypse Week One: Drama or Thriller

The Frankenstein Chronicles, DarkHawk, T

[drabble under cut]

Once, Ross had yearned for death. Soon after he’d forsaken Demelza and their innocent Julia, Ross had reached his arms to Heaven and had begged God to forgive him, to welcome Ross into His kingdom where Ross could reunite with his family.

Instead, God had given him dreams. Vivid images that had confused reality upon waking; images of Demelza, her clever eyes and shy smile, hushing Ross over her shoulder as he’d approached her. She’d stood over Julia, tucked into her bassinette at the base of a large oak, its leaves ruffled by a breeze. Julia had cooed, plucked the air with her teeny, fat fingers and had given Ross a gummy smile so pure it had moved Ross to tears.

And then the waters had risen, and their images had faded, abandoned Ross to the tug and pull of the undertow. Weighted down by his guilt and anger, Ross hadn’t had the strength to break the surface, only his fingertips grazing the air he’d so desperately needed as he’d splashed and sank for eternity.

Perhaps, if he hadn’t turned his back on God, he would’ve been allowed to die.

“He lives,” Ross heard, the voice tinny and faraway. Then, “Oh,” it breathed in the same pleasure and relief as a new parent, “He lives.”

Ross recognized the voice as belonging to Lord James Hawkins, or “Jim, please, I’d like to think of us as friends.”

Sweet, conniving Jim, who had torn apart and put together the pieces of seven children. Whose beautiful, dimpled smile had seduced Ross into his bed – into his body, for fuck’s sake – and had charmed Ross’ inquiries up other, less rational avenues.

Jim, who had wasted his stepfather’s fortune in a pursuit to defy God Himself.

“Look,” Jim said, voice lilting. Ross felt Jim take his hand in both of his and lift it. “See? You’re cured.”

Finally, Ross peeled his eyes open, the command travelling at a slow pace from his brain to his lids. His vision was blurred, watery, but he could identify the shape of Jim’s short, delicate fingers curled around his. Jim turned Ross’ hand, pressed Ross’ palm to his scruffy cheek and sighed as if the world suddenly made sense.

Ross’ eyes narrowed on the stripe of flesh visible beneath Jim’s embrace, not quite comprehending that it was bare of infection though accepting the impression of the complex thought. Shifting his gaze to Jim’s face, he noted Jim’s expression to be one of complete and utter wonderment. Ross had never been looked at like that before.

Jim released his hand. Ross brought it closer to his face to inspect, mind sloughing through the process of interpreting what he saw. The syphilis, at last it supplied, it’s vanished. In a belated effort, Ross took stock of himself. His body felt distant, foreign, like a new suit that needed altering. With trembling fingers, Ross touched where the only pain he detected pulsed mutely, the pads grazing over ridges that weren’t there before the—

Gallows.

Ross choked, slapped his other hand to his chest and dragged it up toward his neck, blunt nails scratching at the newly threaded stitching they found.

“Hush, darling,” Jim soothed, took Ross’ hands in a firm grip, “You’re entirely yourself, I promise.” He tilted his head, blond curls catching the gauzy light and illuminating them like a halo, “Come now, and let me show you how perfect you are.”

Gently, Jim supported Ross through the motions of sitting and then standing, guided him into stiff, wobbly steps with an arm around Ross’ back and the hand of the other clutching Ross’ wrist.

“You are the next step,” Jim praised, his body so, so warm against Ross’ side, “An existence where the is no suffering.”

Ross tried to clear his mind as it trundled ahead, unable to concentrate on more than putting one foot in front of the other. Jim’s words were clear as bell, but their meaning slid off Ross’ brain like water off a duck’s back. When next he managed to pick his gaze up from his toes, Jim had him stationed in front of a long, rectangular mirror. Ross was nude and grey, skin the color of ash, and there was a terrifying Y shaped scar that ripped his front into sections from each shoulder down to his navel.

That was his punishment for getting Caroline killed, for refusing to listen to Enys. For ignoring his instinct because he was greedy for Jim’s supple form bending and arching beneath Ross’ caress. God’s final verdict.

Jim observed him with all the love of a new mother. He continued his speech, eyes reverent, voice barely above a whisper, “Because there is no death.”

Ross was frightened, confused, yet, seeing Jim’s face, his naked devotion, Ross couldn’t find it within himself to suffer. That man, that brilliant, doting, blasphemous man, had made Ross anew, brought him back from the abyss and returned to him his life. All at once, Jim became Ross’ father, his lover, his teacher.

“You remarkable thing,” Jim said, turning Ross’ face away from their reflection. Jim brushed his lips across Ross’ parted mouth, hovered in Ross’ space while Ross panted harshly, awareness catching up to the turmoil of being resurrected.

When Ross’ breath evened into steady inhales, Jim cradled his jaw and leaned in, kissed Ross with more heat, more purpose. Ross began to respond in increments, shifting clumsily to join himself against Jim’s front, fingers twitching, hands finding purchase on Jim’s narrow hips. With strength he hadn’t possessed before, Ross slid his palms over the swell of Jim’s arse, under Jim’s thighs and lifted Jim into into his arms. He staggered sideways, spun and slammed Jim’s back into the wall beside the mirror, kept Jim there as he tried to find his voice. He had so many questions.

It took several beats, swallowing and grunting in frustrated bursts when the words refused to form on his tongue. He could picture them, could feel the memory of them on his lips, yet couldn’t push them out. Jim held and encouraged him, swept his thumbs over the peaks of Ross’ cheeks and nudged the tips of their noses together.

Ross’ first word as an unholy monster was, “Jim.” falling between them like some burped, bulbous thing. Jim nevertheless responded with delight, his laughter ringing like church bells.

“You will learn quickly, my love, I know it.” Jim promised, tapping Ross between the eyes as affection bloomed across his features.

And so it was that Ross Poldark betrayed God and cheated death, merrily damned to walk the earth again in the company of his creator.

ALSO AVAILABLE ON AO3 ⛓️💔

[pollylynn]

Title: Guess Who? WC: 1000 Episode: Eye of the Beholder (4 x05)

Serena Kaye is not what anyone thinks she is. Any fool can see that. He, apparently, is any fool. He is also, just as apparently, in the elite line-up known as anyone. He certainly does not know what Serena Kaye is, but he feels like he knows what she isn’t. It’s a good thing and a bad thing, being the one in the know. It’s a triumphant thing and a disheartening one. It’s a tangled mess, but he thinks he’s pretty clear on what Serena Kaye is not.

She is not, whatever his mother may think, the answer to his anemic social life. For one thing, even if his social life were anemic—and even putting aside the one-hundred percent sketchy track record of Martha Rodgers, matchmaker—he would not be going to the woman who thinks that Ibsen is the secret ingredient in a sure-fire recipe for romance.

For another, his social life is not anemic. It’s just . . . recently transformed. It’s still up all night. It’s still go go go. Anyone breaking it down to its certainly-not-anemic components would see that Rick Castle remains a 24/7 kind of guy. It’s just that where he finds himself—the kinds of situations he finds himself in at all hours—have shifted.

Social life 2.0 finds its way into the spaces between the work. It finds its new identity as shy, frank conversations in the break room or at her desk, and in late-night phone calls when he pushes back from his own desk with pages and pages written and a burning need to tell her all about it—the work he’s been doing or the work they’ve been doing and how good it is on both counts. How could Serena Kaye be an answer to all-work when there’s no question there?

And there really, truly is no question there, which feels like something he shouldn’t have to say. It feels like something he can’t say, at least not out loud and not to a certain someone. He is fine—or at least fineish—not saying it out loud. But that certain someone, on the one hand, seems to want very badly to hear him say it, out loud. On the other hand, though, that certain someone is definitely poised to shout in his face that she doesn’t believe a word of it.

A certain someone seems to have some mistaken ideas of her own about Serena Kaye. Frustratingly enough, though, she is not quite as transparent as his mother. Then again, there are crystal-blue mountain-top lakes unseen by human eyes that are not as transparent as his mother. Still, a certain someone could at least give him a peek at her cards here.

She might think Serena Kaye is a home wrecker, and that would actually be delightful. He would relish the very thought of hip checking Ryan and Jenny out of the way when it comes to registering for every pattern for every household good under the sun if he were sure that she thinks of them as having a home—even a prospective, post–wall home—to wreck.

But the delusions she’s laboring under might not be so pleasant. She may be looking at Serena Kaye and experiencing something she thinks is déjà vu. She might be thinking that I don’t need proof to know I’m right and I’m not a cop sound eerily familiar. And while that might appear to be true on the surface, he has a point-for-point rebuttal formulating in the back of his mind for why Serena Kaye is not Throwback Rick Castle in a push-up bra. He will probably, when delivering this devastating rebuttal, scratch any mention of bras, push-up or otherwise. Things are already complicated enough.

But Serena Kaye is not him. She is not even some version of him, one so teeny tiny that he’s barely visible, thanks to the fact that he has been receding in the rear view mirror for most of the time that the two of them have known one another. And even if that version of him and Serena Kay have one or two fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants things in common, shouldn’t that leave a certain someone feeling absolutely secure in the integrity of their once-and-future home?

And if a certain someone is not feeling that security, he would like to refer that someone to a certain panda he once introduced her to. At any point in his life, the idea of Rick Castle 1.0 times Rick Castle 1.0 would have been an idea about as appealing as locked-room blind date with Captain Gates is now. And at this point in his life, when a 1 AM chat with her is a million times more gratifying, satisfying, butterfly-inducing than any lost weekend on the Côte d’Azur ever was, she can’t possibly think that Serena Kaye is anything more than . . . what?

He doesn’t have the answer for that, because he doesn’t know what Serena Kaye is.

She is, for a brief moment, a variation on the work–play theme—a mixture of the two in sharply different proportions. But really, he’ll take his usual any day of the week.

She might be, for an even briefer moment, a catalyst. When a certain someone thinks that he and Serena Kay ushered in the day together, it seems like that certain someone might just answer the question—does she think he should pursue it? But that’s kind of inane, isn’t it? It’s the kind of high school drama Martha Rodgers production might precipitate.

But when it comes down to it and she leaves him with a kiss on the cheek and holding one of two coffees no one has drunk, he has no better idea what Serena Kaye is than when he first saw her in crime scene gloves and cocktail dress.

He just knows she’s not a threat.

A/N: You know what has no morphousness? Neither this nor a mall food court where I have just made bad decisions after having to drop off my laptop for repairs. Posting this from my iPad, so it’s bound to be all fucked up.

Images via fanpop and homeofthenutty: (http://homeofthenutty.com)

[certifiedceliac]

Gluten Free Review Bonanza From Mod Lis

It was Mod Lauras birthday last Saturday so to celebrate (and get used to eating gf) I got only gf and df products to snack on and made a gf birthday cake!

All of these products were bought from Sainsbury's in the UK.

We're long distance for the moment so we each made a cake lol.

[Image: A photo of a hand holding a white packet with a picture of a sponge cake with jam in the middle and writing describing the product on the of the front it. End of description]

This cake mix by Doves Farm FREEE range was £1.65. Its free from gluten, milk and peanuts. It comes with instructions and either makes 12 cupcakes or 1 layer cake. It was really easy to make and just needed three eggs and any oil (I used olive) to make it.

[Image: There are two photos. One of a cake on a table with a red cloth. The cake is completely covered in pink frosting and topped with sliced strawberries arranged in the shape of a flower, gold shimmer sugar sprinkles and seven gold candles. The second is a slice of the same cake on a white plate. It has white frosting and jam in the middle. End description]

I frosted it with a standard vegetable shortening cream icing and decorated with strawberries and some sugar I sprayed with edible shimmer (gf sprinkles are notoriously hard to find).

The bake was really good on the cake if a teeny bit dry (typical of gf bakes) but with the icing it was perfect! 10/10

[Image: A photo of a hand holding a bag of tortilla crisps. The bag is yellow and has a photo of some chips surrounding a bowl of guacamole and text describing the product on the front.End Description]

These nacho cheese flavour tortilla chips are dairy and gluten and are from Sainsbury's own free from range and so far I haven't been able to fault any of their products. These tasted exactly like Doritos, I couldn't believe it was dairy free! They were also only £1.00 which is incredibly cheap compared to other branded gf/df chips. 10/10

[Image ID: a photo of a hand holding a green round packet. There is a picture of a woman in a clinging, flowing gown, holding up a pea pod and writing on the front describing the product. End description]

I adore Leons dips but they can be a little pricey (this was £2.00 though so not bad). This was called Pealentiful and is dairy and gluten free but does contain sesame. I hadn't had it before but is basically a hummus made with peas, lentils and sun dried tomatoes. It was absolutely delicious. Just a hint of mint  in with the peas made it really bright and tangy! 10/10

[Image ID: A photo of a hand holding a small bar of chocolate. The wrapper is blue and dark brown with white writing describing the product. End description]

NOMO chocolate bars are free from dairy, eggs, gluten and nuts.

This was on sale at 70p instead £1.84 (quite pricey for a small chocolate bar imo). I've had Nomo before and I love their caramel bar but this was lacking in the supposed salted caramel flavour, still tasty though and great if you're really missing milk chocolate. 8/10

[Image: There are two photos. The first is a photo of a hand holding a four pack of pudding pots. It's light brown with bananas and spoons on the package and has white writing describing the product on the front. The second photo is of a hand holding a small pudding pot, its clear and has a white foil lid with light brown pudding visible inside.End description]

Mod Laura and I have had The Coconut Collaborative's chocolate pots before (and we loved them) and its a good thing they're small because even this banoffee flavour was really rich! This was £2.00 but its usually £2.50 for a four pot pack. All of their products  are gluten and dairy free! 10/10

It just goes to show free from foods don't have to be dull and even if you aren't celiac or gluten or dairy intolerant you really aren't missing out!

[straymackerel]

ferris wheel

➽─{1.1k atsushi x ada!reader who is scared of heights. platonic comfort.}─❥

warning(s): mild angst in the form of anxiety. but fluffy too :)

You’ve worked with the Armed Detective Agency for well over a year now. You went through one hell of an Entrance Exam, you’ve sat through countless beratings of that bandage-wasting machine Dazai, and you’ve come to love Yokohama with every fiber of your being.

You love Yokohama so much that, even with the inconvenience your job brings, you would never think to quit it. You love Yokohama so much that, well past dinner time, you left the comfort of home on call today. You love Yokohama so much that, even with your deep-seated fear of heights, you’re willing to ascend 369 feet into the pitch-dark sky tonight. Now you’re sat on that tall clock-faced amusement ride all lit up in green dotted lights.

Huge mistake.

The Cosmo Clock 21 is definitely the worst place in the city for you to be. But the client needs the ADA to track down a suspect guilty of multiple murders, and there’s no better place to start so late at night than a high vantage point. 

Thankfully, you’re not alone. Atsushi tagged along with not much better to do. He’s across from you and peering outside–something you realize you ought to be doing too. But seeing the ground so far away makes you nauseous. Why are you here again?

“Hey, uh, Atsushi-kun. How do you manage to do this?”

“Hm?” He replies, glancing at you. “What do you mean?”

“Well...” You shift nervously, yelling at yourself in your head. You shouldn’t have said anything after all, but now that you have...

“How do you overcome the fear of falling?” 

There, you’ve said it. Much to Atsushi’s visible confusion. He looks up to everyone at the Armed Detective Agency, including you–so when you ask the self-identified good-for-nothing this question, it takes him aback.

“How? Well, I hear cats always land on their feet,” he tries to joke, but your expression is stone, unamused. He tries again.

“I guess I’ve never actually been afraid. It’s never been a cause of distress I had to conquer. Are... are you really scared?”

You nod your head slowly, eyes glued to the floor. The gears in the poor boy’s head are spinning. He settles on the simplest answer.

“W-well, have you tried looking outside yet? Like small glances, baby steps,” he suggests, checking the windows again. You roll your eyes but do it anyway. As soon as you comply, though, your heart starts to beat faster. You just can’t control it. You see teeny tiny lights and the rooftops of building. But more importantly you see pavement, pavement, and more pavement. Once you imagine hitting the ground from this distance, it’s over. The gruesome image has you on your knees, and you crawl onto all fours as you wanted to do the moment you got on this circle of death.

“Ahh--ah!!!” Atsushi joins you on the floor. He’s all over you and he apologizes over and over again.

“Don’t be sorry, it’s me. I’m blowing our case. I’m probably helping a murderer get away, goddammit!” You yell, and Atsushi pulls back a little. It’s astounding, really; your composure on this amusement ride is far worse than it is on Port Mafia turf.

Silence. Silence fills the air and you don’t dare to lift your head from the lowest point available in this metal cage. It takes a moment for the tiger boy to land on his exact next words. In that moment, you know you’re getting lifted even higher into the air.

“You don’t have to push yourself so hard, you know,” Atsushi says softly. “It’s okay to be scared. No one expects you to do your job perfectly.”

“But people’s lives are at stake! I need to be strong for them!” You yell, shaking now. His hand comes to rest on your arm, attempting to stabilize it.

“Hey, hey. It’s okay! Dazai and a few others took to some buildings. We’re not the only ones on the lookout. Don’t go on and forget that we work as a team,” he reassures you. You try to believe him but your body and mind are numb.

Suddenly, the movement of your car stops and you feel as the wheel suspends the both of you in the air. It’s probably letting riders off. You wish for nothing more than walking off like whoever’s at the bottom is doing right now.

The swinging car lets out the smallest of creaks, but it doesn’t go unnoticed by you. You squeak, launching into Atsushi with all your remaining strength. He catches you, amazingly sure of himself for once. While you tremble, he sighs and pats your head gently.

“There, there.” You nuzzle further into his chest, holding on for dear life.

“You know, I learned something at the orphanage where I was bullied on the daily... when I get scared, I have to breathe deeply. Otherwise the terror just overtakes me,” he reminisces, voice hopeful.

You loosen your embrace slightly so you can look up at him.

“Will you try it?” He continues. “Deep breaths?”

Can I? You nod slowly again, still gripping him. Swathed in his warmth, you start to focus on the rise and fall of both your belly and his. The wheel starts and stops again. In, out. It takes your mind off the potential of a terrifying drop. At first you have to push the thoughts of crashing away, but as time passes you’re automatically thinking about drawing air in and pushing it out. You feel your knees pressed to the car floor, you feel your hands clutching on to his clothes. Oops. You loosen your grip and drop your gaze upon this realization.

“You can do this.” You swear you can hear a warm smile in his voice. 

“You don’t have to look outside, but you can survive this one ride,” he reassures, smoothing your hair. His voice is soothing, his words are comforting. The fear softens, though its presence looms in the very back of your mind. Your shaking slows down to sporadic shivers, and your jagged heartbeat has dulled.

“Come.” Atsushi pulls away and tugs your hand towards his side of the car. You creep on your empty hand and knees as if trying to keep the metal cage balanced, safe from pummeling you into the earth. He takes a seat back on his bench, and places your hand right next to him. Uncertain, you lay your head next to your seated hand, turned towards him. When you look into his dual-colored eyes, his expression is soft and caring. You were right; a smile paints his features. As he turns outside to survey the city again, you feel nothing but gratitude.

You choose to look up towards the sky, realizing that as you continue your ascent, you become ever so closer to the twinkling stars. Pretty. Your body finally relaxes and all tension dissolves. Atsushi’s hand still in yours, you are fully aware that whether or not you try to search the city again is up to you. But for now, you’re allowed to lay low.

[marril96]

High & Low

Pairing: Rowena x reader

Characters: Rowena, reader, Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester

Summary: You suddenly start acting weird, and Rowena is out of her mind with worry.

Warning: Accidental drug use.

Editor: @oswinthestrange

Rowena was bored out of her mind.

When she'd agreed to help the Winchesters, she'd expected some action, some entertainment, hell, even the ever boring research. Not the endless waiting for Castiel to gather the information they needed. She wasn't quite clear on how exactly feathers was gathering said information, but she was certain of one thing: he was doing a shoddy job. If that had been her, she thought, a tad smugly, they would've already been on their way to killing whatever monster it was they were dealing with. The angel — or the brothers, for that matter — was too passive, too human. One spell, one teeny-tiny spell, and people would sing like birds. So what if their brains boiled in the process? No method was perfect. It was effectiveness that mattered.

Unlike her, you seemed to have been able to find some shred of amusement. First you'd been staring at your phone, a practice Rowena doubted she would ever be able to fully comprehend. You were playing games and, when you'd grown bored of that, watching YouTube videos the witch didn't dare take a peek at. They could have been harmless, of baby animals even she had to admit were utterly adorable, or documentaries about crimes full of graphic pictures of crime scenes.

When your battery had finally had enough and you were forced to leave the poor device to charge, you announced you were hungry, another thing Rowena wasn't surprised about one bit. You loved food. You loved snacks. You were insatiable. Sam had offered you brownies, and you'd happily accepted them, proclaiming your love for the dessert. You offered them to Rowena, but she declined. She only ate bunker food if it was absolutely necessary, and this particular dish, if one might call it that, didn't quite fit her tastes. At all.

With a shrug and a comment of, "Suit yourself," you dug in and devoured half a tray before deciding you'd had enough. Rowena couldn't help a chuckle. When it came to dining habits, you were no different than Dean "the Neanderthal" Winchester.

The two of you spent the next hour sitting in silence, while Sam and Dean walked around with phones to their ears, calling everyone they knew in search of information, all of which ended in nothing but wasted time.

Then you squeaked out a tiny, quiet, "Rowena," and suddenly all boredom and annoyance vanished in place of panic that turned her blood cold and made her heart race as if she had run a marathon.

Rowena's eyes widened, fear spreading over her face like molten fire as she took in the sight before her. You were shaking so fervently she, for a moment, thought you were seizing. Your eyes were wide open; there was fear in them, deep, intense, piercing to the point of physical pain. You looked around, head whipping left and right, left and right, left and right, like a tape stuck in a never-ending loop.

"Y/N? What's wrong?" Rowena asked.

You swallowed, hard, as your bulging eyes once again scanned the room. You were on high alert, senses sharpened. An animal about to strike at any moment, prepared to defend herself from perceived danger. "They're after me."

The witch frowned, confused. "Who's after you?"

"They are!" you exclaimed as if the answer was obvious, as if it was right in front of her and, for whatever reason, she wasn't seeing it.

Rowena looked around. There was nothing — and nobody — in the bunker that appeared dangerous. Her frown deepened as her eyes locked back with your wild ones. You appeared genuinely scared, genuinely panicked. Was it a couple ghosts choosing to show themselves just to you? She instantly disregarded the thought. She'd dealt with plenty of ghosts in her long life; she'd recognize the signs of them in a heartbeat. There was no change in temperature. No goosebumps creeping over her skin at the sensation of the unnatural presence. Other than you and her, there was nothing supernatural in the Bunker. Nothing threatening.

What was going on?

"Who, darling?"

"They!" you screamed. "They're here! They're after me!"

You jumped to your feet frantically and spun around, taking in every wall, every corner of the spacious room. Your hands shot up to your chest, fingers curling around the collar of your shirt, knuckles tight with pressure.

Rowena rose up after you. "Calm down, Y/N," she said softly, as if she were talking to a child. Her hands were up in a calming, placating gesture. Whatever was happening, you were genuinely distressed. She wanted to help you, wanted it more than anything, but first you had to calm down. It did no one any good to have you in a state of panic.

"I can't calm down! They're after me! THEY'RE AFTER ME!"

"Okay."

"It's not okay!"

That much was clear. The question was, what was not okay? What was wrong?

"How can you say it's okay when it's not?" you added, and the look you shot her was so heartbroken, so disappointed that it made her flinch. "They-they wanna take me, and you're not doing anything. Why aren't you doing anything?" Your eyes widened even more, impossibly so. "Are you one of them?"

"No!" Rowena quickly said, and you breathed a sigh of relief, but still kept a suspicious eye on her. "You know I'm on your side, darling."

She'd always been on your side. Always would be. Even when you got on her nerves, or now, when you were making no sense, she supported you. She chose you over everyone. She'd woved long ago to protect you, and that was exactly what she would do.

She just needed to know what you needed protection from.

"What's going on?" Sam walked in, Dean in tow, eyeing the two of you with concern.

"We heart yelling," Dean said.

You shot a long, hard look at them. Rowena expected you to start screaming bloody murder, but instead you started shaking your head frantically, in tune with your trembling body.

"I don't know," she said. "She's saying someone is after her."

The brothers exchanged a confused glance.

"Who?" Sam asked.

"I don't know," Rowena replied.

"I told you it was them!" you snapped. "Aren't you listening? They are after me!"

Sam swallowed. "Who are they, Y/N?" he said in that gentle, friendly tone of his that made Rowena open up to him all those months ago. He knew how to talk to people, knew how to get through to them, how to approach them without coming across as pushy or threatening. She hoped it worked on you.

It didn't.

"They are they!" Before anyone could respond, you froze. Your hands squeezed the shirt harder, ripping at the fabric in several places. "They found me," you whispered, and the coldness of it sent shivers down Rowena's spine. "They're here. They found me."

Silence befell the Bunker for a short moment. The witch dared herself to think it was over. Then you started wailing, started sobbing and screaming like a banshee, and she knew it was anything but.

You were panting heavily, taking in and letting out deep, painful breaths. Rowena was by your side immediately. Her hands fell on your shoulders. You flinched at the sudden touch, then eased into it once you realized it was her.

"I-I can't breathe," you whimpered. Tears sprung from your eyes, helpless, desperate. "I'm shaking. Why can't I stop shaking? Why can't I stop?"

"I think you're having a panic attack," Rowena said. Images of her own similar attacks filled her brain. You were always there. Always calmed her down. Always held her and made sure she was okay, made her feel safe. "Try to calm your breathing, okay?"

"I can't!" you squeaked, and it was the most heartbreaking sound in the world.

She pressed her forehead to yours and took your hands into her own. They shook wildly; she had to tighten her grip to keep them somewhat steady. She brought one of your hands to her chest and pressed it to the middle, just above her breasts. Her heartbeat returned to its normal, soft fluttering. You visibly relaxed at the sensation. "Can you feel me breathe?"

"Y-Yes."

It took all her remaining strength to keep her breathing under control, to keep it level. "Breathe in sync with me."

You did as she said, or at least attempted to, for the second you tried to keep your breath at bay, you found yourself unable to breathe. You exhaled as if you'd been holding your breath for hours rather than two seconds. The panting returned with a vengeance; in and out, the oxygen vent in deep, hungry intervals. Along it came sobs, primal, animalistic, tearing free from the depths of your throat, ripping through the bunker like a haunting echo.

"I can't," you squealed out. "I can't, I can't, I can't!"

Rowena's heart broke. "Okay," she whispered, even though it was anything but. It was far from okay. She tightened her hold on your hand, a gesture done for her comfort as much as yours. Whatever was wrong with you, she couldn't fix it. She didn't know how to fix it — didn't know where to even start. She'd never seen you in this state before. She'd seen you sick, seen you injured and depressed and worried out of your mind. She'd seen you at your worst, and had taken care of you without a single issue.

Until now.

Now, she had no idea what to do, how to help. A part of her hated herself for it. What was the point of having so much power if she couldn't use it to help the one she loved?

"Mitescere," she said softly, tone gentle but firm, secure, decisive. A simple calming spell she'd held onto as a last resort. Panic attacks were best dealt the human way — it was healthier, as Rowena had told you following her very own first attack, after you'd used this same spell to calm her down — but sometimes there was no other way. She didn't know was was wrong with you, and couldn't calm you down through normal means. Magic, even if it wasn't the healthiest option, was the least she could do.

The spell worked almost immediately. Your breathing steadied right away, panting replaced by short, swift intakes and outtakes of breath. The shaking subsided. You were still trembling, but it was light twitches as opposed to violent sways. Your heartbeat, while still fast, slowed at least halfway down. Rowena breathed out a sigh of relief. You were still far from normal, but you were calm. You weren't frantic.

"It's because of them," you said after a moment of silence.

Rowena raised an eyebrow. "What is?"

"They're making me crazy," you said. "They're here and they're affecting me."

The panic attack may have gone away, but paranoia certainly hadn't.

An idea popped in Rowena's mind like a light bulb switching on. "Why don't we get away from them?"

Your eyes lit up at the prospect. "We can do that?"

"Aye."

"Where would we go?" you asked, interested.

Oh, thank Charles! Rowena smiled. "Come with me, dear. I know just the place."

She linked an arm through yours and headed for the hallway. Huddled against her, body pressed firmly into hers, you followed suit like a faithful, well-trained puppy. Your eyes still wandered around, seeking the mysterious them that frightened you. Rowena knew they — whoever and whatever they were — weren't real, but she wished they were. They'd caused you distress, hurt you, terrified you to the core. She wanted them dead.

If they were real, she could make it happen. She could protect you.

With things as they were, there was nothing she could do. She couldn't help you. The spell and lies, which she was already feeling guilty for, could only do so much. They were temporary solutions.

You needed something permanent.

She couldn't give it to you. A part of her hated herself for it.

As she led you to the hall filled with rooms, Rowena cast a glance towards Sam and Dean. The three of them exchanged a nod, a silent agreement. They would figure this out, but in order to do that you needed to be taken care of. It did no one any good to have you freaking out in paranoid panic like a withdrawing addict.

Rowena led you to one of the rooms she picked at random. She closed the door behind you, one finger shooting up to her mouth in a shush motion. You nodded in understanding. As painful as it was, this was the only way she could deal with you. Play along, act, pretend. Dramatics were one of her signatures; the least she could do was put on a decent show for you. There would come a day when you would laugh about this, when you would think back on it with a smile on your mouth. When you would tease Rowena about getting worried over nothing and assign her yet another one of your ridiculous, cutesy nicknames.

"They can't get in here," she said quietly, voice a bare whisper.

"They can't?" Just to make sure, you eyed the room cautiously, scanned it with a wide gaze. Finding nothing, you relaxed.

"No. There is a barrier preventing them from getting in."

You were listening intently, absorbing every word that came out of her mouth. There was a childlike innocence to it, to you, that made Rowena's heart swell up with warmth. Even in a state of paranoia and fear, you trusted her. Not many people were willing to take that risk.

"But it only works if you keep quiet," she added. "They mustn't hear you."

"Quiet. Got it," you said with a big nod. "I can do that." You brought a finger to your mouth, mimicking her, and gave a small laugh. "Shhhh!"

Rowena couldn't help a chuckle. "Aye. Shh. Why don't you lie down for a bit?"

Your threw the bed a quick glance. "I don't think it's safe."

"Och, it's safe, darling."

"You think so?"

"I know so. That bed is the safest place in this room."

You remained unsure.

"You trust me, don't you?" she asked.

"Of course," you said without a moment's hesitation. Your eyes wandered back to the bed. "Okay, I'll do it."

Rowena released a breath she'd been holding. "Good. Good girl."

You face lit up the same as it always did when she called you that. She tucked you in, wrapped you up nice and tight in the blanket. The trembling never subsided. Every time her skin came in contact with yours and she was reminded of it, of the rabid beats of your heart, something inside her broke. Not even she shook that much when she woke from nightmares. This was wrong. So, so wrong. She hoped she could make it right soon.

"Remember, be quiet," Rowena said.

You looked up at her. "Where are you going?"

"I—I'm going to make them go away."

You grabbed her hand, nails digging into her skin. She hissed, but you held on as if your life depended on it. "No! It's dangerous!"

"It's okay, Y/N. They're here for you, not me," she reminded you. You thought on it, then nodded. "I'll find a spell that will make them leave you alone."

"Thank you, Rowena."

"Och, it's nothing," she said, though it was anything but. Niceties were her drug. She never tired of them.

"I love you."

Oh, she knew. She knew, but she still couldn't believe it. How could anyone love her? How could anyone find it in them to get past everything she'd done and let their heart feel for her, yearn for her, adore her? "I love you, too."

She kissed the top of your head, motioned once more for you to keep quiet (which you mimicked again), and left.

Hopefully, the next time she entered that room she would have a cure ready. A spell, a potion, hell, even some of those pills humans loved to swallow like sweeties at the slightest ache. Anything. She hated seeing you like this, hated seeing you in ail. And what she hated even more was being unable to do a bloody thing to help.

Soon, she would be. Very, very soon. She swore it on her life.

"How is she?" Sam asked. There was a kindness to his voice, a concern that came straight from the heart. He cared about you, and he cared about Rowena. Truly, genuinely so.

There was a reason he was Rowena's favorite Winchester. Despite all the bad they'd done to each other, Sam had given her a chance. Aside from you, nobody had ever done that. Nobody had ever thought her worthy of a second chance, of kindness, of friendship.

Sam Winchester did.

Rowena made sure to repay him the same courtesy. She didn't want to disappoint him, the same way she didn't want to disappoint you. The two of you had given her a chance. The least she could do was prove you'd made the right choice.

"I got her to lie down," Rowena said. She sucked in a breath, and her lip trembled as she said, "She's still shaking, Sam. She…" She swallowed. "I don't know how to help her."

It took every remnant of her strength for those words to slip out. Rowena was a proud woman. She kept her head high and admitted to no defeat, cried no weakening tears — in front of other people, that was. In front of people who weren't you.

This was different, though. This was sudden, unexpected. Strange. She couldn't deal with it on her own. She needed help.

"We'll figure it out," Sam said and offered her a small, encouraging smile.

She gratefully accepted it. "I don't know what happened. She was fine, and then she went off her rocker. I don't bloody understand it!"

"Was she doing any magic?" Dean asked.

"No. She was just sitting there."

"She been sick lately?"

"No." You'd never complained of any ailment. Aside from the occasional cough and sneeze, you were perfectly healthy.

"Did she eat anything out of the ordinary?" Sam asked.

"She ate a few of those brownies you gave her."

Dean shot his brother his deadliest glare. "Seriously? You gave her my brownies?" Sam made his signature bitchface. Rowena glared as if she was contemplating murder. Dean cleared his throat. "Cas got them for me. He forgot to buy pie, so those were compensation."

Why was she not surprised that was what had transpired?

She rolled her eyes.

"Pie's important," he said as if it explained everything.

"To overgrown toddlers, for sure."

He gasped, offended. "It's called having taste."

She couldn't help a hearty laugh. "You wouldn't know taste if it slapped you in the face."

While they were bickering, Sam had gone to take a look at the brownies — well, the half a tray you'd generously left while on your eating spree.

"Guys," he said, "I think I know what's going on here."

Rowena was all ears, anticipation shooting through her like caffeine in her veins.

Sam gulped, uneasy, uncomfortable. Rowena's stomach twisted. How bad bad was it? Dear Charles, how bad was it? Was it a spell, a poison, a rare and incurable human disease?

"Well?" she prompted. No matter how bad it was, she would deal with it. She and you would deal with it together, like you'd dealt with everything else.

"I think… I think these are pot brownies," Sam said.

Rowena raised an eyebrow. Questioning. Incredulous. "Pot brownies?"

"They're, um—" Sam tried to explain, but was cut off right away.

"I know what pot brownies are, Samuel," she said in a tone that made it very clear she took offense to being perceived as ignorant on this particular subject. She was over three hundred years old. Of bloody course she knew what pot brownies were! "Why would you let Y/N eat them?"

"I didn't know there was pot in them."

"They were in your bloody kitchen!"

A soothing relief washed over her. You weren't sick. You weren't dying. You were just… high. Too high, considering you'd devoured half a tray of drug-infused desserts.

Sam raised his hands in a placating manner, guilt etched across his face. It was an accident; he knew that, Dean knew that, Rowena knew that. It was wrong to blame him. He would never hurt you on purpose, would never do anything to put you in danger of any kind. He wouldn't drug you.

"Cas brought them over. He didn't say they were pot brownies," he said.

"I'm gonna give him a call," Dean said, reaching for his phone.

"You do that, and pass the phone over. Feathers and I've got a few things to discuss," Rowena said menacingly.

"I don't think so," the older Winchester said. "He's still scared of you 'cause of what happened last time."

Right. When he'd helpfully suggested that she go through the Book of the Damned again, after she'd gone through it in detail, and she'd cursed him out to the point where she'd run out of breath and her face had flushed an angry red like a bomb about to explode.

"He better be scared of me, because if something happens to Y/N, I will make him suffer," Rowena hissed threateningly, and she'd meant any word.

"Take it easy," Sam said. "This could all be a mistake."

"Yeah. Maybe he got them on accident," Dean agreed.

Rowena raised an eyebrow. "How does one accidentally acquire marijuana-infested brownies?"

"It's Cas," was Dean's only explanation before he headed to another room to make the call.

She supposed it was a good point. The angel wasn't the brightest of bulbs. He certainly wasn't as well versed in everything human as he thought. Still, Rowena couldn't help the anger bubbling up inside her. You were drugged up and paranoid. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. Someone had to pay.

"Are you sure it's marijuana?" she asked, approaching Sam to take a better look at the offending sweets.

"Seems like it," he replied. "Why?"

"I may be able to make a potion to counter its effects." If it genuinely was the drug and not poison or a spell, it would be easy enough to cure.

"Need help?"

"A few ingredients, if you'd be so kind."

"Of course."

He smiled. She returned it. Her shoulders relaxed a bit, relieved of the tension. She could fix this. She would fix this. You would be okay.

She told Sam what she needed and he went to fetch it while she rummaged her bag for the herbs she'd brought along. He helped her settle in the kitchen and she started working her magic. Sam watched her as she worked, observed it with what she could only describe as interest. He was fascinated by her craft and skills. Fascinated by her. She was a professional. She measured and added ingredients with ease, not once stopping to think if she'd gotten it right. She knew she did. She didn't make mistakes when it came to magic.

She was just finishing up when Dean strolled in.

"And?" Sam asked.

His brother sighed. "He says he got 'em from a guy in an alley."

Rowena blinked. "He what?" She turned around, locking eyes with him, green burning into green. "Is that how you boys always get your groceries? From" — she formed quotes with her fingers — "'a guy in an alley?'"

Dean rolled his eyes.

"Anything else?" Sam said, ignoring her comment.

"He begged me not to put Rowena on the phone."

The witch scoffed.

"He says he's sorry," Dean added.

"He will be sorry if this—" she held up the glass of the now finished potion "—doesn't work."

"What if you made it wrong?" he said.

She shot him a look that had surely killed before. "I am a professional. I did not make it wrong."

He responded with a roll of his eyes, which Rowena heartily returned. She hurried to the room she'd left you in, potion clutched so tightly in her hand that her already pale knuckles turned sheet-white. She found you exactly as she'd left you, curled up in a blanket, shaking as if you were freezing, wide, frightened eyes scanning every corner of the room over and over to make sure they hadn't slipped in in the few seconds your gaze was elsewhere and were sneaking up on you to do whatever it was you thought they wanted to do to you.

You flinched as the door opened, on alert, and let out a relieved sigh to see it was Rowena.

"I've got good news, darling," she announced.

You frowned, curious. "What is it?"

"I found a way to get rid of them forever."

You perked up at her words. "You did?"

"Aye." She held up the glass. "This potion will make you invisible to them. They won't ever be able to find you again."

You eyed the brownish liquid with interest. "Really?" She nodded. You grinned, joyous, happy. Excited. "Where did you find it?"

"The Black Grimoire," she lied.

You bought it. "That's amazing! So they won't see me at all if I drink it?"

"That's right." If it was, in fact, marijuana in those brownies, the potion would negate its effects. If it was something else… Rowena shuddered at the thought. You would most likely get even more paranoid, maybe stop trusting her altogether. If that was the case, she was screwed.

She hoped it wasn't.

She handed you the glass, and you took a long swing. You downed it in one go, licking your lips clean.

"Give it a few minutes," she told you, and you nodded.

Silence befell the two of you. Rowena's mind was racing, various scenarios swirling through her head. Some of them were good; you, happy, smiling, back to your old self, laughing about everything that had transpired in the past hour. Others, not so good. Some were of you getting even more paranoid. There were some where you hated her, screamed it right in her face with so much conviction it had to be true, and ran off into the surrounding woods, never to be found again. One showcased the worst, you in the hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and machines, with doctors saying you would never wake up again.

Get a hold of yourself, Rowena, she told herself, shaking herself back to reality. You're becoming paranoid. The potion would work, and if it didn't, she would make one that did. As she'd said herself, she was a professional. She'd studied witchcraft from the greats, attended the most prestigious institutes of magic. There was nothing she couldn't do.

You suddenly stilled. Rowena's eyes shifted to you, concern spilling over her face.

"Y/N?"

You let out a tiny moan, followed by a groan, then rubbed at your eyes as if you were tired. "Rowena?"

"I'm right here, darling." She took hold of your hand, twined her fingers with yours. "How are you feeling?"

"Like shit."

Rowena's heart jumped with joy. You were back. "Any fear?"

"No." Your hand shot up to your forehead, slapping hard against it. "Oh, god!"

"What is it?"

You looked at her, blushing madly, shame etched over your face, as if you wished for earth to part and swallow you whole. "That was so embarrassing!"

Rowena had to chuckle. "I take it they aren't after you anymore."

"No." You buried your face in your hands. "Oh, god."

"Hey, it's okay. What matters most is that you're okay." She laid a hand on your shoulder, a gentle, comforting gesture. Your paranoia was a bit funny, now that she looked back on it, but the most important thing was that you were alright. You'd acted weird. She'd, in turn, overreacted. The two of you could look back on it with laughter rather than tears.

"What even happened?" you asked. "Why was I… crazy?"

"Pot brownies," Rowena replied.

You frowned, looking at her as if she was now the one that was acting crazy. "What?"

"Those brownies you ate had marijuana in them."

"So I was high?" She nodded. "Jesus! Why didn't Sam tell me what they were?"

"He didn't know. Apparently, Feathers forgot to buy pie, so he got those to compensate. From, and I quote, 'a guy in an alley.'"

That made you laugh. "What? That's… that's crazy."

"Aye."

A roar of laughter ripped from your throat. "Imagine if Dean ate them."

The image instantly formed in Rowena's mind. She couldn't resist a laugh of her own.

"Don't ever do that again," she chided after a long moment.

"Worried the hell out of you, didn't I?" you asked, an amused smile playing on your mouth.

Rowena glared. "You did."

"Poor baby."

She ignored the quip. "I thought you were poisoned."

"I kinda was," you pointed out. "My little worry doll."

"Shut up."

You giggled. "You're precious, you know that?"

"And you're rude," she retorted, pouting adorably. "And ungrateful."

"Don't be like that. I'm very grateful." You wrapped your arms around her shoulders, pulling her into a tight hug, and pressed a kiss to her cheek. "Very, very grateful."

You gave her another kiss, and another, and another. Rowena melted in your embrace, basking in the love, in the attention. You kissed her some more, on both cheeks, forehead, the tip of her nose, and finally her lips. She gave herself away to you, let you do with her what you pleased, and you showered her with affection. She never tired of it.

And neither did you.

"I'm so lucky to have you," you said, laying one final kiss to her temple.

I'm luckier to have you, Rowena thought. She didn't dare say it out loud; she just leaned back, a silent plea for more kisses, for more love.

You happily obliged.

Tags: @werewolfbarbie @oswinthestrange @songofthecagedmoose @apurdyfulmind @getthesalt-sam @metallihca @salembitchtrials @jay-eris @hellsmother @elizabeth-effie @victoriasagittariablack @rowenaswife @dropsofpetrichor @xfireandsin @liddell-alien @hotdiggitydammit @1-800ahs @darkhumorsblog @wayward-kaia @angel7376 @rowenaisfabulous @ruthieconnells @evil-regal-vampiress @sunseteer5 

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Chapter 4 - broken hearts club, part one (Days Gone By - NCT)

Days Gone By masterlist | main masterlist

Broken Hearts Club Part One

'Cause misery loves company, so hey, what do you say?

15th June

Renjun had woken up first the morning after. Disorientated, dizzy and drunk on the familiar scent of freshly baked vanilla cookies and general comfort, like a hazy mid-morning daydream. Gradually coming around from his slumber, he began to register his surroundings; streaks of light, streaming sporadically through the cracks in the blinds, dark grey duvet only reaching his hips, his small frame on display, a large hand splayed gently across his back, curling him into a furnace – the source of the cookie smell. The t-shirt he was wearing hanging low and lose off his body - evidently not his - and his head was resting on something  (or rather someone ) far too firm to be a pillow. He was not in his own bed and he was not alone.

The scent was familiar, it was one he had become well accustomed to over the years. Belonging to the ever-so-perfect Jaemin. Shit, he was in bed with Jaemin, wearing Jaemin’s clothes and memories of the two making out and grinding on one another... and (oh god)  the soulmate mark, flooding his mind. Consecutive images flashing every time he blinked, dread flowing through his veins.

Why did he do that? That was his best friend , nothing more. That was not supposed  to happen, Renjun was supposed  to hold in his feelings up until graduation next year when he could happily move to the other side of the country, or another country for that matter, and avoid Jaemin until any and all feelings had faded away. Yes, he very much thought that running away was the best (and only) way to cope with his feelings.

Maybe he could fall in love with a nice foreign boy, forgetting about the picture-perfect, ideal type that was his best friend.

Feelings could be dealt with later. Broken hearts can be mended later. After all, misery loves company and it was beginning to feel like misery was all Renjun knew.

2nd of august [continued]

“Oh, come on Mark, just show us!”

The only time Renjun ever acted cute was when he wanted something, putting on a lilted whiny voice, fluttering his eyelashes and pulling out all his aegyo - which frankly just irritated Mark; he’d never understand how it worked on Jaemin, the younger would practically fall on his knees then and there whenever Renjun used it to get whatever it is he wanted. Maybe he’d just become immune to it after having a no longer adorable little brother who once upon a time didn’t need to try to do aegyo, he just was cute and Mark would’ve given him the world if he’d asked.

Jisung once asked if he could have the moon and Mark ended up spending two hours putting a glow in the dark stars and moon sticker set up on Jisung’s ceiling, which are still there.

“Mark! Why are you hiding it, everyone knows about mine and Yuqi’s, about Renjun and Jaemin’s, Johnny and Ten’s, Doyoung and Jaehyun’s, the list goes on. You’re just the next one to have it, it’s no big deal.”

No big deal that you don’t want to tell your best friend because the moment you see his reaction, you’ll know if he’s your soulmate or not. Sure, no big deal.

“Okay! Lucas leave Markie alone. He’s my shy little brother remember; his soulmate mark is interesting  to say the least and we’ll leave it at that, shall we?”

“Lucas is right though, what’s the big deal, it can’t be worse than Johnny’s.”

Mark inhaled quickly, firmly and very noticeably. Way to be subtle Mark!

“Oh no, you’re kidding its worse than Johnny’s! That’s brilliant.” Jaehyun turned and took a few steps out of the kitchen back to the living room, confusing the others until they heard a, “HEY! Doyoungie come here!” Doyoung appeared instantly from lord knows where amongst the seemingly endless amount of people gathered in his house, navigating his way through and around groups that Mark barely recognised. They were quite disgustingly domestic, as usual, but it was amplified by the copious amounts of alcohol consumed – most of which by Doyoung. Kisses to cheeks and pecks all over, stood just too close together for it to be publicly appropriate, Jaehyun’s hands never leaving Doyoung’s body and consistently moving to inappropriate places for innocent eyes.

Finding his spot with Jaehyun’s arm around his waist, body curled into Jaehyun’s chest but head turned enough that he was capable of conversation, or rather joining in on the teasing of Mark to get him to show the others his soulmate Mark (which had been hidden by his choice of a flannel shirt this evening, resisting the urge to roll his sleeves up despite the heat.

“What’s going on now? Injunnie are you still trying to get Mark to reveal his soulmate mark, I thought I told you to leave him alone?”

Doyoung was actually sticking up for Mark, but everyone knew he wanted to know just as badly. Everyone was desperate to know the moment Mark spluttered when he was first asked, apparently that was just the sign they needed that it was a good one. Not boring like all the other recent ones had been.

“No babe,” shaking his head and tutting at his boyfriend, “trust me, you’re going to want to stop pretending you don’t want to know – it’s worse  than Johnny’s .”

Doyoung’s eyes visibly widened at that, the same reaction as everyone else. Doyoung couldn’t stop laughing, gripping onto Jaehyun’s shirt in order to attempt to balance himself.

“Okay,” barely audible between wheezes as he tried to catch his breath from laughing, “Mark you have to show us, you cannot keep that from us. Seriously, how can  it be worse than Johnny’s, no offence Ten.”

Johnny’s mark was notorious in their small town (possibly village if you were feeling technical about population sizes), everyone knew about it. Word spread like wildfire the moment someone outside of their intricate friendship group overheard - the seal had been broken and that was enough. Johnny would never get over how utterly mortifying it was when his mother returned home to tell him all about the delightful conversation she’d had with Mrs Potter down the road about how scandalous this teenagers soulmate mark was, only to be told she didn’t know the name of the boy who had this tasteful  (said with quotation marks and dripping with sarcasm) phrase emblazoned on his body only that the soulmate was ‘the one who goes by the number rather than a proper name because his names too long’. His mother was devastated she hasn’t been told and that Johnny never explicitly told her that he was gay - although Johnny argued it was rather obvious and that he didn’t watch magic mike, multiple times, just because he loved romantic films. Johnny couldn’t look his mum in the eye for at least two weeks afterward.

Ten slapped his best friend on the arm for his commentary. Even after almost four years, Ten still hadn’t lived that one down and doubted he ever would – but he still hadn’t made his peace with it, the teasing continued to be relentless whenever the topic of soulmates came up and Ten was quite sick of it, his truculent nature sparking every time.

“Shut up Doyoung, just because yours is cute and all because Jaehyun was four and you did look like a fucking  bunny!”

“Correction, he still looks like a bunny, especially when we’re fucking.” Doyoung became visibly flustered at that, Jaehyun never being one to shy away from admiring his boyfriend at indecorous times, “Shut the fuck up Jae. Back to Mark! We were talking about Mark; Mark show us your mark!” Clearly Doyoung was a master at attempting to turn the conversation away from himself whenever he was flustered.

Doyoung was definitely a giggly drunk and a little obstreperous under the influence of alcohol, despite the situation, “oof that rhym-ryhmed, I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it!” He was grinning now, clearly impressed with his efforts towards an outdated joke, prompting Jaehyun to coo over his boyfriend (cough, disgustingly domestic, cough).

“If you not wanting to show us is about Haechannie, we get it, but you know we wouldn’t tell him if you didn’t want us too.”

Ten’s usual bite to his voice was gone and he spoke softly to Mark, despite his tendency to be louder and easily making his presence in a room known, he had a soft spot for Mark – seeming to care for the younger far more than he’d ever let on if asked. Typical tsundere Ten.

“Hyuck’s not here yet, right?”

Ten replied with a simple nod and a quick eyebrow raise to Johnny, a gesture that didn’t go unnoticed by Mark but he was used to being incapable of decoding their years-in-the-making ways of communicating nonverbally.

“Just, I’m not ready to tell him yet okay? If I show you all, he doesn’t hear a thing or I will know who to kill and I won’t hesitate to – I have dirt on every, single, one of you.”

“Okay, okay, whatever Mark, we solemnly swear to not tell Haechan or let him find out. Now show us that freaking tat!” Lucas would be the death of him one day, slapping a hand against Mark’s back and making him wheeze at the sheer force, partially knocking the wind out of him. How Yuqi (teeny-tiny, possibly quite fragile but also rumour had it she had a black belt in martial arts, Yuqi) hadn’t been crushed by one of his death-grip hugs, Mark will never know.

Exhaling deeply, Mark began to roll up his sleeve. He’d managed to tuck the tattoo away, hidden from eager eyes, underneath a long sleeve easily and hopefully he  could find some sort of watch or bracelet in order to cover it up before having to leave the house over the next few days. As he pushed his sleeve toward his elbow and lowered his arm to allow the others to see, the kitchen had gone silent. All four of the onlookers (not counting Johnny and Ten who having already seen it, were no longer completely shocked by the marking) were in utter shock. Silence had washed over them, the thumping from the heavy bass dance music Ten had put on earlier and the ticking of the kitchen clock were the only things heard. That was until Doyoung was, foreseeably, the first one to lose all composure and let out an unattractive snort before clutching to Jaehyun’s shirt once again in a fit of giggles, gasping in attempts to breathe, between muttering ‘ oh my gods ’ and ‘ holy shits ’, the others all swiftly following suit after that. Even Mark managed to crack a smile at their reactions, despite his unwavering feelings weighing down his shoulders. But hey, what’s new?

Lucas was the first to speak, managing to catch his breath enough in order to be able to from a comprehensible sentence. “Okay, you win, that is understandably something you wouldn’t want to share.”

“Damn, Haechannie did not hold back. Babe I’m so glad we were in reception, all these dirty thoughts, you people are so disgusting. I have never been as grateful as I am right now to have bunny written on my hip and for my first thought to have been ‘squish’.”

The seemingly automatic assumption that Hyuck was the one responsible (again), didn’t fully register with Mark, too focused on the conversation continuing – not giving him the chance to protest what everyone was thinking, maybe it was for the best.

“Johnny, please tell me we’ll never become as disgustingly domestic as them, I don’t think I could handle the desire to vomit every thirty seconds. I like fun, I like spice and flirting, not patterns and cheesy nicknames.”

“Shut up Ten, domestic is cute! Domestic shows commitment - don’t be bitter just because you can’t handle that.”

“Go take Yuqi on dates to drive in movies and other corny shit Xuxi, keep pretending you’re in one of those American movies from the nineties.”

“You’re just jealous because you can’t have dates outside of a five-mile radius of this house.” Ouch, wrong place and wrong time Yukhei, not good - not good at all.

“Okay everyone! Ten do not respond to that, Lucas go somewhere else before he starts fighting – you know I can’t hold him back. We’re here for my  baby brothers eighteenth everyone, not arguing over soulmates and relationships. We’re done here, everyone back to the party.” His voice was stern and husky, stretching himself to his full stature - Johnny was a fluff ball but not one you wanted to make angry.

Johnny was always the mediator, the only one allowed to tease either of his baby brothers – as soon as someone else did he would automatically switch into over-protective older brother mode. Mark thought it was his way of protecting them, he’d been instrumental in the raising of Jisung and had grown up alarmingly quickly after having lost their father and as their mother became busier and busier with her work. Then he grew up more after he was pulled into the world of parties and late nights by older friends from various sports teams, desperately trying to forget about his newfound feelings for Ten at the time, at the tender age of sixteen. He continued to mature as he started his A-levels and helping Mark with his GCSE’s and Jisung venturing into high school for the first time. Their mother was busy, always there for them whenever she could be but that didn’t hide the absence of a father figure. Yet, they made do. Their mum did everything she could and more and they’d be forever grateful for that. He’d had to mature once again when Ten got accepted into an entertainment company in Korea – his lifelong dream – and they weren’t ready to go their separate ways, knowing that as soulmates it would only hurt them more. Ten not being able to wander around town or take Johnny on magnificent dates during the daylight hours was a sore subject for the two of them, not seeing each other in person for months at a time was hard – but they made it work. They both remember, unfortunately very well, the pain they went through when they both realised their feelings for each other and Mark remembers listening to Johnny cry to their mum when he realised that he was hopelessly in love with his best friend. Mark remembers the homophobic kids that were the year above Johnny and Ten, threatening them in the hallway, Mark remembers Johnny outing himself in front of a substantial amount of the student body in order to stick up for Ten; not caring about if he was ready or what people would say. Mark remembers Johnny as a protector, a rock, their anchor – always keeping them safe and grounded.

Luckily, everyone knew when to drop a conversation and most quickly dispersed from the kitchen, re-joining the party. Mark let out a sigh of relief – he knew he wasn’t ready to deal with this yet. He could feel himself sobering up by the minute.

“Hey, Mark. I’m really sorry for pushing you earlier. That wasn’t fair, not after how understanding you were about me and Jaemin. Do you want to get some air?”

Getting some air was their secret code, their way of escaping the world – even if only for a few minutes. Mark always thought there was something about the way you could just sit there, watching the world go by without a care in the world. Something about the way the air flowed around them – like it was easier to breathe, easier to let go of your worries. Their words would flow out, sitting with their legs dangling over the edge of the treehouse with the ability to chat the days away. Thoughts, feelings, dreams, all shared with the world and no longer the insides of their minds, eating away at any and all insecurities and worries. It took them back to when they were young, when they didn’t care about what went wrong, whether they messed up or not. Mark liked how naïve they were back then, not a single care about the future - everything would work out in their eyes - now, it was a continuous cycle of crippling anxiety, an overwhelming desire to achieve, sleep deprivation and a strong inclination to do nothing at all. Procrastination was, and always will be, a total bitch after all.

The two took their designated spots, watching the sun beginning to set over the field before them, casting a rose-coloured hue over the scene. Mark always had a fascination with sunsets, he isn’t sure when it started but there’s something about them that draws him in, maybe it’s the colours or the way Hyuck’s skin glowed just like the sun itself whenever the golden hour light was cast over him, highlighting his features and only exemplifying his beauty more. God, shut up Mark. You sound like a stupid lovesick teenager, oh wait... that’s exactly what you are.

“Earth to Mark? Calling Mark back to Earth in three, two and - “

“Sorry! Sorry, got distracted, guess there’s just a lot on my mind.”

“You don’t say. Come onnnnn! It’s your birthday Markie, we’re supposed to be having fun and getting far too drunk off of what will be later recounted to our parents as ‘just the one cider or beer’ and then regretting our entire existence in the morning when we’ve realised all the mistakes we’ve made while under the influence. For example, being three drinks in and already kissing boys that are far too pretty for their own damn good and frankly it’s very unfair.”

“So we’re less than two hours in to the party this time and you and Jaemin have already made out in my bathroom?”

“No, we only got to the hallway and then Hyuck rang him, something about an emergency and Heejin. Oh shit, sorry Heejin free zone.”

“It was a rhetorical question and I’m okay, you don’t have to keep things from me. Honestly, I’m okay. I know it’s the same old stupid, stupid trope but i’m not going to spend the rest of the year pining for my best friend. i’m going to enjoy this year; i’m going to get my grades and i’m going to get into uni and you know what renjun? i can do this, i can; not anyone elise - just me. I’m going to do this. I am sick of waiting around for things to happen. I am not going to sit around and look pretty while he inevitably breaks my heart, he has Heejin now. He’s not gay. School is my priority and that is something I can control. All the things I can fix, why not fix them now while I can?

Me and Hyuck, we don’t act like boyfriends, people don’t assume we are. They assume we’re best friends and maybe that’s all we’re ever meant to be. Maybe i’ve just confused the line between caring about someone and loving them. I am done crying over him, I’ll focus on being friends nothing more. That’s all we need and I’m perfectly okay with that.”

“So pining hours are over for you?”

“Pining hours over Hyuck are officially closed.”

“And where do we stand on pining hours for me over Jaemin being open?”

“Still very much open young padawan, it’s time for you to be honest with me.”

“Great because I love him, so much. But I’m also super scared. I know it’s supposed to be us against the world, I know that it’s supposed to be about you and hyuck being able to be just friends but I can’t do that with him - I really love him, like singing and dancing in the rain love him, hold a boom box outside my bedroom window love him. Like one make out session was so intense I forgot everything in that moment, I want to do that again and again.”

“So rather than telling him your feelings, you’re going to keep getting tipsy at parties and kissing him?”

“Yep. He has nice lips okay, don’t judge me.”

“Why won’t you just admit you’re soulmates? You could be happy, you can fall in love and let him look after you.”

“See, that sounds nice and all but after he freaked out thinking I don’t have a soulmate mark and we’re some freak exception to the rules, I don’t really know how to tell him he forgot to take my socks off? It also sounds kinda kinky and he’ll definitely make a sex joke and I’m not ready for that.”

“Well, whenever you are ready, for any of it, you know you’ve always got me.”

“You know this is the part where you’re supposed to tell me to go get that Jaemin dick?”

“I am not telling you to go get that dick-“

“Why are you two always hiding out here? Okay, why do I feel like you were talking about me?”

“Hey Jaemin, we were just coming down. Just wishing Markie a happy birthday.”

“Come on you two, but avoid the snug - Doyoung is giving Jaehyun a lap dance, Jaehyun’s also shirtless so there’s a bunch of girls drooling, mainly Mina so soon enough she’ll be on the vodka crying over the fact that ‘all the cute ones are gay’.”

“Let’s go then!”

You can do this Mark, you can have fun. It’s your birthday, get drunk and dance the night away.

[zehypocriticaloath]

Teeny, tiny sweaters

(Challenge idea given by @redheadrecon. Thanks!)

---

“Rrrk. Rrrk.”

“Now, now. Don’t be fussy. You don’t get to choose what I pick.”

“Rrrk! Rrr, rawk, rawk!”

“You know damn well that the color suits you. It accents your feathers, brings out the sheen in them. Don’t give me that sort of squawking tone.”

“Damn! Damn!”

“Insolent child!”

Aldous clicked his knitting needles together, creating a small little clacking noise that did bring the squabbling, spoiled raven to attention. He pinned the unruly member of his unkindness with a rather piercing, stern stare, mouth set in an austere frown.

Roderick. The little insolent asshole. Always had been, always would be. Worse than Poe! Poe had humor to his rascally ways. Roderick was an ass, outright and to be sure. And he was loud. Loud and annoying. Surely he would make the house fall down around them with his squawking and shrieking.

He watched the scolded raven duck behind his elder one, Poe, their leader in their so called corvid family. Poe looked a bit smug as Roderick took to preening his left wing, as if to sulkily make himself look better despite his bruised ego. Ah, and yes, the wing! It was popping out of an expertly knitted and fitted.... sweater.

Yes, a sweater. In fact, they were all sporting sweaters. Annabel, Lenore, Roderick and Poe-- they were all wearing nice, warm sweaters that Aldous had lovingly knit for them. Each one was fitted perfectly from the softest yarn he had on hand, with holes for their wings. And each one displayed a different color and semi-festive pattern, the designs varying depending on their personalities.

Roderick, of course, had the most garish one of them all, complete with the knitted visage of a tongue-waggling Krampus marching along the bands of color. But the strange color choice and chosen image was, more or less, punishment for his, as Aldous had put it, “insolent” ways. Still, the chosen colors did make his particular ashen-oily sheen of his feathers pop out. Aldous was a professional when it came to choosing colors to further enhance someone’s appearance. Abelärd may have been the master artist in the family but, by God, Aldous gave him a run for his money when it came to making clothing.

Not a lot of people knew that Aldous was fond of sewing and knitting. It was a hobby he didn’t speak of. Not a single soul on that base had bared witness to his hidden trove of goodies-- a trunk packed with yarns of varying softness, displaying a wide gamut of colors and hues. Tucked in along with the yarn were packs of sewing needles, swatches of fabric and knitting hooks; threads, and patches, and anything else one could imagine one hiding in an artsy-crafty trunk.

All in all, the reason for his love of sewing and his ability to create clothing was only due to the undying patience and love of his mother.

Long ago, the twins had watched their father languish in his long-term illness before he finally succumbed to his withering cancer. After a proper time of grieving, the household was thrown into a state of chaotic flux. The twins’ mother, Giselle, had taken on most of the chores, trying to keep up with everything in her life. When she came to the conclusion that she couldn’t balance the books and do everything around the house, she came up with an ingenious idea.

Giselle Haswell wanted to make sure that her boys would not go through life helpless.

She purposely taught them how to clean the house proper, sanitizing counters and scrubbing the tub to a spotless sheen. She taught them how to do their own laundry, going as far as teaching them how to make their own soap. She taught them how to make meals for the family (often making batches of food bigger than what the three could eat, just so they could donate the ‘leftovers’ to the poorer families on the street). She showed them how to can food for later, how to create a budget and a shopping list. Above all, she taught them the domestic side of life. Always a believer that one could make do and thrive if they truly applied themselves, she worked hard to help make her boys confident in their activities and tasks.

Of course... the twins varied in their strengths and weaknesses, and she doled out certain roles to each as a result. She wanted the boys to take on a set routine of chores, always allowing them to, yes, make mistakes, but to always ask questions on how to better do a task. She refused to hold their hands, but she was always there on the sidelines, ready to offer advice.

As a result, Aldous found his passion in patching up clothes and making clothes. He was an avid learner, picking up techniques on sewing and stitching faster than his younger twin. At such a young age he showed excellent technique and form with even the fancier side of stitching, enjoying the challenge of embroidery. As such, he was given the duty of patching worn out clothing and making things from time to time, in order to save the family much needed money.

All of his knowledge as a kid helped him many times in his life. From fixing up clothing that he didn’t want to throw out to quickly creating perfect, tightly secure stitching for his patient’s wounds, fresh from the smoke-strewn battlefields of the second war.

Now, of course, he put his skills to use... knitting tiny sweaters for his unkindness and, now, the rat named Amour.

Poe watched with amusement as Aldous fussed and grumbled over the rat’s measurements. Still smug from Roderick’s recent scolding, the large raven perched upon his favorite little spot, his claws hooked into the eye sockets of the skull residing, with a place of honor, on his master’s desk (it was the skull belonging to Aldous’ old friend, Rasputin). The raven was looking dashing in his particular sweater. It was a soft but respectable light gray, the yarn flecked with little specks of black. Quite nice. The softest Aldous had on hand. What really made the raven stand out was his given pattern. It was a rather comical lump of coal on the chest, with the back reading ‘I’m an asshole’  in German.

“I don’t...” Aldous ran a hand through his hair, his face screwed up in concentration. Before him sat the little white rat, its nose twitching in anticipation. Next to him was a little lump of brown yarn in the vague shape of an itty, bitty sweater. “I’m not sure this will work. Your measurements are so small. I am used to working with ravens.”

The rat, as if understanding, cocked its head at the strange man. It looked as if it were considering what the man was saying to him, trying to make sense of the complexity, if not absurdity, of a rat-sized sweater.

Gingerly picking up the small sweater, Aldous looked down at his handiwork. Yes, a brown yarn had been chosen, but it was rather nice. A milk chocolate brown, not at all dark. He even knitted a tiny little s’more on the back of the sweater. A little inside joke, he chuckled in his own amusement. A little white rat wrapped up in a tiny brown sweater, just like a little roasted marshmallow sandwiched between two graham crackers.

Rubbing his thumb over the material, he felt a bit better with what he was doing. It was soft. Really soft. And he was sure it would compliment the rat along with keeping it warm. He knew the infirmary was warm right now, but he also knew power outages did happen. He loved the little rat. He cared about it. And if the heat did happen to go out, or Amour got a little chilly in the middle of the night...

No, he didn’t want to think what would happen.

“Alright, Amour. Are you ready to try this on?”

The rat on his desk squeaked inquisitively as the man held the small sweater out to him. Nose twitching once more, it daintily sniffed at the material. Was it food? Was it some new plaything for it to chew through?

With care, Aldous began to slip the sweater over the little rat’s head. At first all seemed to go well. The endearing little rodent didn’t panic, and wasn’t squirming or moving all that much. It was well behaved, just standing there, trusting Aldous enough to do what he wanted to do.

It took a fair bit of wiggling the sweater onto his model’s furry body, but he managed to get it on. After a bit of adjustment, Aldous sat back in his chair, rather proud of himself.

The s’mores-sweatered rat looked absolutely adorable.

“Ah, look at you! ” A deranged smile spread across the man’s face as he rubbed his hands together, almost devious in his delight. “You look very warm! Very cute! Ver--- wait. Hold on.”

Panic must have set in, for the rat, once a perfect little model for the Medic, was now beginning to back up in a little circle. It kept reversing unto itself, bumping into anything and everything that happened to be on Aldous’ desk. Tiny little squeaks began to sound from the struggling rodent, its cries causing the Medic alarm.

Look what you’ve done.

Aldous hissed to himself, trying to block out the nasty, vile but all too familiar voice that rose up from the depths of his mind, like a serpent prepared to strike the finishing blow.

You’re going to kill it. Give it a heart attack. And then what will people think of you?

“Amour,” the Medic gasped out, gently trying to coax the rat into ceasing by scooping it up. It only wiggled out of his hand, returning to its frenzied thrashing. “Calm down-- calm down! Stop! You’re going to--!”

Oops, there goes its head. Amour pulled his head right through the hole for the neck, and now it was this awkward little furred lump with a sweater on it, reversing in a wobbly, wonky circle, without a visible head.

Aldous tried to calm the little rat, but his efforts were in vain. His unkindness cawing out in amusement only provoked the little rat’s panic further, causing the unholy squeaking to reach a grand crescendo.

“Stop! Stop, stop, STOP! You’re going to hurt yourself! I don’t want that! I want to keep you--”

Pop!

Aldous felt his stopped heart skip back to life as relief flooded over him. With a comical little vibe to it, the tiny rat had wiggled completely out of the sweater, shedding it like a snake would shed old skin. He let out the breath he had been holding in, and his tense shoulders beginning to loosen up.

“...A--Amour? Amour, ssh, it’s alright.” He reached out to touch the rat, but it didn’t seem to respond to physical contact. “I am so very sorry. I did not mean to scare you. I--”

Confused, Aldous halted his actions of picking up the rat. Instead he watched, with mounting curiosity, as the rat sniffed the shed sweater with a renewed sense of interest.

A minute passed as the rodent checked the sweater out before, carefully, stepping onto it. With a few well placed shuffling motions, the rat fluffed it up into just the right little pile... for a nest.

“...Huh.” A small, relieved smile began to drift along his face. Aldous shook his head. “Not what I had in mind but... it’ll do to keep you warm at night. Until I knit you a bigger one, that is.”

The sweater for the rat was a complete failure. But hey, it made a rather nice, plush bed for the rodent.

[edorazzi]

‘Tis the season, the festive spirit is in the air and I want to share the contents of this advent calendar I got my hands on. It’s either this or 24 days of chocolate and I know what’s (slightly) better for my body. The newest window will be added each day until Christmas, so keep checking back!

(It’s available online here, so you can have one too! This isn’t a sponsored post, it’s just nice to share.)

Overview + days 1, 2 and 3:

I’m throwing a chunk of stuff in at the beginning to get us up to speed, since it’s day 3 of this calendar already and I’ve only just decided to blog this adventure. Future updates will be done on a day-by-day basis!

Getting it out of the way early: I’m very aware this is a calendar meant for little kids, and with a price tag of £19.99 the contents of each window will be worth around £1 or less. Nothing in here is going to be great quality, so I’m not going to focus on that aspect more than necessary!

Here’s the outside of the box - there’s an external sleeve, but this is the ‘unwrapped’ design which doesn’t display the calendar contents (and I’ve looked at these already, I’m not going in completely blind, but since deciding to buy the calendar for myself I haven’t refreshed my memory in hopes of keeping it surprising). It’s a promotional image for the Christmas special - which coincidentally I hear is the only ML media they’re airing on TF1 all through December, yikes - and despite Marinette being front and centre it’s a pleasant surprise to see Chat Noir on the cover too. Nice to see Protagonist #2 is back on the roster!

I’m probably going to pin the back panel up on my wall after Christmas because it’s adorable and I love it. This is the content I’m here for.

Day 1 kicks things off with a nice surprise - some cream eyeshadow! It’s just a generic pallet with the Miraculous logo slapped on, as I’m sure most cosmetics in here will be, but it’s a cute start. I like to think these are the colours Marinette wears - they’d definitely suit her. 

I’ve sworn ahead of time to actually try these cosmetics out instead of just shoving them in a drawer and leaving them untouched forever, so - as I’m going out that evening - I decide to try this in place of my regular eyeshadow. I’ve never applied cream eyeshadow before (only powder), so I have to Google how to do it - the instructions tell me to “spread the cream liberally across the eyelid like butter, working quickly before it dries”, and I figure that can’t be too hard. Kids are supposed to be able to put this on, after all.

It’s hard to get a good photo, but the colours in this are a nice nude range which make a surprisingly pretty combination. The cream is appropriately princess-shimmery, and while the brush is teeny-tiny and low quality (a couple of the bristles were trying to come out in the pallet) it works well enough with broad strokes and narrower highlights. You wouldn’t pick one up at Sephora, but out of a £1 window in a kiddie Christmas calendar it’s decent. However.

However.

With this pallet, applying it “before it dries” isn’t just possible, it’s unavoidable. This does not dry. It’s more of a gel-based substance than actual cosmetic cream, and plays absolute havoc with any eyeliner you might be wanting to put on afterwards. I managed to battle it into submission with some powder eyeshadow over the top (I could have just wiped it off and started again with proper makeup, but I was determined), but even out at dinner hours later my eyelids still felt damp. I guess this is why Marinette doesn’t wear much visible eyeliner, because if this is the eyeshadow she chooses it’s just going to melt all over her face and really send Adrien running. 

Regardless, it’s a cute item to start the calendar off with, and as a kid excited about the Adventures of Makeup I think I’d be happy to get it. At the very least, now I know how to apply cream eyeshadow. 

Day 2 grants us some... hair chalk? Is this the secret of Marinette’s unnaturally blue hair revealed at last? @rosebomber says I have to put all these cosmetic things on at once at the end of the month and I’m already beginning to get nervous.

The presentation here is much more creative than the eyeshadow - the wrapper boasts a pattern of the “Lucky Charm” catchphrase with little doodles of Tikki and various magical items. I like this a lot - it’s something clearly tailored to Ladybug and not just a logo slapped onto a generic piece of girly makeup. I wouldn’t blink if I got that shimmery eyeshadow set in a Disney Princess calendar, but blue hair chalk is very clearly Marinette. Good going, calendar people.

I’ve already showered before opening today’s window, so I leave this wrapped up until the following morning when I can test it and then wash it out afterwards. 

This turns out to be good foresight, because the hair chalk is... well, it’s a stick of blue chalk. It’s extremely messy. The label looks like it should be able to slide up and down as a clean place to grip the chalk while you rub it over the hair, but it appears to be stuck in place so I have to choose between removing the label completely or trying to awkwardly crayon colour into my hair with the narrow end. I choose the latter, because if I take the Ladybug label off then it’s just a stick of chalk. The magic would be gone. It makes things more difficult than they need to be, but as with the eyeshadow, I am filled with determination.

Since it’s chalk (as opposed to any liquid colour) you’d think it would come up nicely on dark hair, but it doesn’t show very well. I have to rub on quite a lot just to make it visible, and the amount in my hair at this point releases little powdery showers whenever I touch it. My hands look frostbitten. I’m glad I chose to try it out immediately before washing my hair, because the amount of smeary blue has made me look like I’ve been punched in the face (or assaulted by a Smurf) and I don’t need my parents worrying. 

On the plus side, all inconvenience and messiness aside, it looks really nice in the mirror. I think I could utilise this chalk again in the future if I’m just sensible enough to put it further away from my face. I get the feeling this is intended for kids with lighter hair than mine (it would show up a lot more easily on blonde hair, I bet), but I’d be concerned about the ease of washing it out since the blue colour is so vibrant. 

At any rate, it’s a fun addition to Marinette’s makeup counter, if a very messy one. It’s imprisoned back in its calendar window for now.

Day 3 is simpler fare, and I’m glad about that since I’d just cleaned up the chalk explosion before realising I hadn’t checked if more messy cosmetics were closing in on me. It’s the infamous Ladybug ring, so I’m hoping the Chat Noir earrings are also in this calendar somewhere to give me the full set of in-show Miraculous. 

I haven’t forgotten that this is a calendar for little kids, but this ring is teeny-tiny! I can barely fit it on my smallest finger (and my hands are little). You’d think there would be a bit more adjustability to it with the growth spurts kids go through, but I don’t think I’d wear this around anyway - the gigantic copyright mark splashed across the top is a bit offputting, aesthetically speaking. The design is stamped directly onto the plastic, so it’s not a sticker; why not print the copyright around the edge or on the underside?

I can imagine this is a little accessory Marinette made, it’s pretty cute and I’d be happy to get this in a calendar (IF IT FITTED ME, I’M A GROWN ADULT BUT MILDLY SALTY ALL THE SAME). There’s not much else I can say about it, so here’s hoping more wonderfully terrible cosmetics are on the way. 

[spamzineglasgow]

You Name It: An Interview with Colin Herd

Colin Herd’s latest collection, You Name It, is out now via Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals. A completely effervescent exchange between two of our favourite thinkers, poets and collaborators, Colin Herd and Kirsty Dunlop, this bumper interview covers everything from found poems to queer aesthetics, influences, bubbles and Bubbles, poetry-as-criticism, hosting poetry events, ways of reading, embarrassment, the word ‘it’, technology, endings, volatile bodies and THAT Edinburgh wheelie bin poem. You know, the one that just might eat you up. 

> Where to begin with an introduction to Colin Herd and his new poetry collection? After all, few can top Colin Herd’s own uniquely insightful, and highly memorable poetic introductions: as a brilliant advocate of other writers’ work, with a special knack for drawing out the subtle gems others might miss in words, poems, experiments, Colin surely deserves the best introduction of all… and, of course, there is a lot to say about his brimming, bubbling new book You Name It, out with Dostoyevsky Wannabe this week.  

> I like to think of this collection as the luxurious bubble bath we all need right now, a warm and comforting retreat for exciting, daring and at the same time extremely intimate poems that are filled to the brim with the familiar. And yes, this collection is also about bubbles! Bubbles as playful fluid forms where the surface is also the depth/bubbles as Queer poetics/ bubbles as the character Bubbles/ bubbles colliding with foam and notions of the Fancy/ bubbles as desire. Bubbles are also the perfect visual and physical image of how Colin’s poems are working on us: these poems are reflective surfaces, with allusions to multiple writers, critics, theories, these poems pop up in unexpected sizes, shapes, drifting into new territory, taking us in new directions, through tangible forms we can almost catch…but not quite. Colin’s poems leave us wanting more, like the addictive quality of blowing bubbles - we just have to read again, again, and again.

> From the very first poem ‘Fanciphobia’, recently published in Granta magazine, we are drawn into this playful performance: ‘hello all of you / brilliant poets and poetry fans / such appetites etc / I was thinking / tomorrow morning / how about you / walk out of your jobs / and those without jobs walk into them just up and toodle-oooo’. The back and forth energy and conversation encouraged between reader and poem is characteristic of Colin’s distinctive style and accurately reflect his belief that everyone can be involved in poetry:  these poems perform as inspirations for the writing of further ideas and exciting forms.

> All poems create movement in language, but these poems decidedly reject static and binary thinking; in all of these works decisions are not certain, intimate asides can disentangle us from straight lines of thought and give us fresh clarity and, of course, they are delivered with the unexpected wit we have come to expect from Colin’s work. A key example of this is the exposition of poetry as the ultimate form of embarrassment, and hyper visibility. Like the teeny tiny poem ‘Weird Fight’: ‘My trousers were clumped / You asked if the fly was down / I said no / Then you went bananas’. I love how this poem reads like a joke or a tweet- in fact I think I did see Colin tweet these lines once and now here they are as a poem! Many of these poems do live and breath beyond the pages, they could pop up anywhere and everywhere. Take ‘Midsummer Wet Dream/Soggy Nightmare’ which leads us through a detail by detail description of a synchronised swimming routine with the final line: ‘DM me for the video, it’s really something’. The poetry is part of a wider performance, and we are the collaborators! Indeed, there are also collaborative poems in these pages too.

> Of course, none of these brief extracts do justice to the experience of jumping straight into this collection. As the title indicates, you are invited to bring your own reading to You Name It.  

> It was a privilege to interview, over email for SPAM, my creative writing teacher and constant source of inspiration, Colin Herd: a well-loved and energetic poetic force in Glasgow and beyond! So let us submerge together as we explore bubbles, influence, collaboration, and what poems can be- should a poem ever be termed ‘good’? - (among many other bubbling ideas!), through Colin’s inquisitive, and seemingly never-ending imagination and wealth of knowledge on writing of all forms.

I really enjoyed how so many of the poems in You Name It carried this very self-reflexive, sometimes self-mocking tone, cheekily probing at their own artifice. They often enacted the writing process and conveyed the realities of your work as a poet and creative writing teacher. As an opening question then, perhaps you could expand on your writing process if this is possible!? Is there a pattern to how you write or a very unique approach to each poem?

Kirsty!!!! Thanks so much for doing this. You are one of the most sensitive, adventurous, bold writers I know, so that you read the book this way is really thrilling for me. -Thanks Colin!!- My writing process is quite simple: I constantly keep notes on my phone and (much less successfully) in my head, of expressions / experiences / phrases / attitudes / images / stories etc that I find interesting for whatever reason and then at a certain point I sit down with all that material and start to make poems out of it. Sometimes the poems are collages of that stuff, sometimes they develop from just one or two things. It makes sense for me that that process or the process of writing and making poems is quite close to the surface of the poetry. Diane Wakoski says in a poem “This time / no one taunts me / but other crybabies;/ and when I am alone / I defend myself with poetry”. To be honest, it actually doesn’t seem that important to me whether or not a poem or a collection of poems is “good”. What does that mean? All it means is it has certain qualities that align with a particular fashion or taste..

I am more and more interested in poetry as the weird underside of the language, or like a relation to language, than it is about an individual collection or an individual poem. Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary is one of my favourite books because it enacts poetry as exactly this relation to language, of its pressures and pleasures. Tom Leonard’s brilliant 100 Differences Between Poetry and Prose makes this point exquisitely when the categories keep collapsing: ‘if you dribble past five defenders, it isn’t called sheer prose'…. Poetry is just this excess, this delightful weirdness in language when you sit up and take notice that it is about more than just communication – which isn’t to say it doesn’t communicate! Everybody is a poet. That sounds evangelical but I don’t mean it to – creativity is what we do with our minds when we’re not just trying to be busy all the time – and when that coexists with language it’s called poetry! The artworks I love most usually aren’t created by people who call themselves artists and are often not in artistic institutions – what about that little bit of graffiti on the parking meter outside our Creative Writing offices ‘free kink’ – that is a wonderful poem! What about the amazing installations of soft toys at Craigmillar recycling centre in Edinburgh? That artwork deserves the Turner Prize! Except I probably wouldn’t like the work so much if it did!

For all my evangelising above, I actually wanted to write a collection that was more thematically focused than my other books. Glovebox, Too Ok and Click and Collect were consciously – as the titles suggest – various and promiscuous. But for this book I thought I should knuckle down and write something of which people could say ‘this is Colin’s book about xxx’. That seemed to me like it’s what people like doing and it’s how work gets shared. I tried out different outfits…. ‘this is Colin’s book about shoes’; ‘this is Colin’s book about fabric’; this is Colin’s book about queer art’; this is Colin’s book about desire’; ‘this is Colin’s book about Co-option’ and I finally went for ‘this is Colin’s book about bubbles’. Trouble is, it doesn’t seem exactly to have worked. And I think I ended up with something like ‘this is Colin’s book about bubbles, queer art, the fancy, etc’. Jeffrey Robinson’s book Unfettering Poetry: Fancy in British Romanticism was really important to me when writing these poems – and still is. In that book, Robinson explores the distinction that Coleridge and others have drawn between the synthesising qualities of the imagination and the (generally perceived as lesser) ‘dispersive’, tangential qualities of the fancy, which ‘has been relegated into triviality, a childish impulse, immature, escapist, possibly eccentric, and thus to be provisionally tolerated until it grows up.’ Robinson’s book has these amazing intoxicating descriptions of the fancy – and all the way through I kept thinking of queer art, of the many queer artists whose work I adore and whose practice (I have this line in a poem about using the word ‘lab’ for things that are neither chemical nor canine but actually what about the word practice for things neither sporting nor surgical?!) seems oriented around the fancy. And I started thinking again about that sort of promiscuous glitter obsessed bubbling over hysterical energy and just started trusting my fancy and following my enthusiasms…. because I guess one’s enthusiasms and one’s anxieties probably in the end take you to the same place. Bubbles were my main guide though in the writing of this and they led me to Bubbles with a capital B (of whom more later!).  That’s how the book came together.

This collection also reaches out to so many different poets, theorists, artists, and cultural figures. Can you speak about a few of the central influences?

I became obsessed for a while – and still am – with the Arabic poet Abu Nuwas who was born in c. 762AD, a poet of whom it’s been written that ‘the glories of dissipation could never fully be expressed’.  His work is overflowing with queer love. There’s one amazing line where the poet fantasises about being the bubbles in the glass of wine a young priest is drinking. Nuwas’s poetry is full of bubbles and at one point the bubbles in wine are described as punctuation – I just love that sudden awakening to textuality – I want to learn bubble grammar syntax.  I became equally obsessed with Asim Butt, an artist from Karachi who was part of the Stuckist movement – but the conceptual side of that wasn’t the thing that interested me – it was just his paintings – they’re so sort of scary and butch. There’s one that I talk about in a poem called Bully and Bitch – but to avoid spoilers I’ll talk here about another one which has this guy holding a petrol pump head/ gun – and begins there’s a sign for lubricants and there’s a guy with one leg on a step and the guy in the foreground holding it has a t shirt that says Cape Cod. The quality of the paint has this sort of terracotta tint that I find sort of like dusty dirt and there’s this beautiful criss cross floor they’re standing on that’s like a hard edge abstract composition. The guy at the front his jeans are purple / aubergine. But mainly this painting is absolutely sizzling with desire – it’s so hot this painting! There’s this whole mix of intense longing / boredom / attitude / disinterest / etc etc – and I can’t for the life of me figure out what cape cod is doing in there except it suddenly as a phrase sounds so weird and makes me gawp and gasp fish like caught on a hook! There are so many more I could talk about but I feel like I wear my enthusiasms for them within the book!

Tied to the previous question, I’m wondering whether you believe poems are always naturally made up of other poems or artistic works; can a poem ever be truly original?

John Wieners has a poem called ‘new form’ that starts ‘to try and contemplate time & age unfathomable’… I always have to try to stop myself using the words ‘innovative’ and ‘original’ when I encounter work that I find to be fresh, surprising, unexpected. Because, of course, nothing is really new or original – everything is always in conversation, continuation with other things. Innovation is a selling tool. Applied to art, it ignores the obvious questions – innovative to which tradition? from which perspective? - and assumes a single trajectory. An excessive culture of newness – things being replaced by ever newer things, cultures being replaced by newer cultures, etc etc – is damaging. It suggests chucking out the old and replacing with the new, which is all too often blinkered, confused, ignorant. That’s why it was important to me to include my gestures towards, for example Abu Nuwas, because in contemporary discourse around queer culture there’s a tendency to act like finding ways to queer the expressions of queer thought is new, when of course that’s nonsense. What in fact is happening is homonormative discourses are finding ways to open up queer marketplaces and ways to use queer culture to market ourselves back to ourselves! I saw a pride card in Sainsbury’s recently. I’ve gone off topic. 

Innovation is dangerous ecologically, socially and politically (I don’t mean to distinguish between any of these) because innovation assumes a kind of domination – a vantage point. It’s almost the fancy / imagination thing all over again. Whereas the fancy plays around / revels in / subverts / deforms / even reimagines maybe, it never allows itself that synthesising, totalising vantage point from which those relations to the continuous, various, contradictory materialities of the everyday would be ironed out for the NEW. Make it New as a slogan unmakes itself before even that three word imperative is uttered. This book definitely prefers Bubbles’-via-Pearl Gates – aka Pearl Harbour of the 80s group Pearl Harbour and The Explosions: ‘shut up and dance’. The last thing I’m trying to say is that as artists and people we shouldn’t be finding ways of queering / understanding / writing afresh: it’s just that this is always relational to the teeming proliferating gush of trouble past and around us, never really new or original. Saying nothing is new is not about saying things are fixed and the world is the way the world is – it’s about saying that stuff is constantly changing – including us and it is possible to reconstitute in different arrangements and structures; they just won’t necessarily be new as such. I actually find that a much more giddy and delightful – not to mention politically viable - prospect – not one thing replaces another thing but all sorts of stuff going on all over the place abuzz. Like my bubble gun would tell you!

Recently I had the experience of submitting an article to a respected academic journal and the peer reviewer commented that the poets whose work I was looking at (contemporary writers writing urgent, formally dynamic writing) were not from an ‘innovative’ tradition. This astonished / astonishes me. If the article had been about poets of 50 years ago employing stylistic devices that were in fashion 100 years ago, the piece would have been applauded / waved through. Off topic again! Yes poems are made up of other poems! Poems are made up of poetry, which is a particular relation to language. I couldn’t write without reading and listening to poems. Judy Grahn talks of a kinaesthetic movement of influences / obsessions in the poet. What you listen to / look at / feel an emotional connection with is not just what your poetry will be like but also who you are at any time, I guess. I think of poetry as usually affiliated with ‘em-’ prefix words. Grahn talks of ‘emotion and emphasis’ but embodiment, emergence, embolden, emanate, all those too – any words that are about ‘putting into’. Grahn also says ‘As we used to say, whatever women do, if they want to call it a poem, it’s a poem.’ And about that I couldn’t agree more.

I’m interested in how your work as a critic intertwines with your poems. Do you see criticism as a form of poetics and was there a sense of bringing these two forms/perceived binaries together in You Name It?

There’s a line by Diane Wakoski; ‘yes yes yes I cannot deal / with the dichotomies’. Beverly Dahlen seems worth mentioning here. Beverly Dahlen is a wonderful contemporary poet whose work includes the mesmerising A Reading, a long, unfinishable, multi-volume poetic sequence that blends narrative, lyricism, criticism. A Reading excites me because it intertwines the acts of reading and writing so energetically, thoughtfully, sensitively. Charles Bernstein uses the term ‘wreading’ which I like too for the way it suggests ‘wreaking’ as in havoc. When we’re reading we’re almost always writing too whether that’s in our heads, in the margins, etc. I wasn’t thinking about being a critic in this book – except that I think poetry is an ideal space for critical thinking – it allows stuff to get soupy, into conversation, challenged, troubled, stay messy, not get worked out. I think I like poems which sort of articulate / question what poetry is within the poetry. I recently started tweeting these little tweets that start ‘I like poems..’ So like ‘I like poems where it’s like they’ve been on a quick-wash-dry setting but too full & everything comes out excessively spun, very hot & wet.’ / ‘I like poems where the poet’s got a ticket for the train but not a seat and they sit on a seat that’s reserved for part of the route.’ / ‘I like poems where it’s like you’ve been following a recipe and not had one ingredient and improvised by replacing with nearest equivalent.’ People seem to like them, I think because what we think of as poetry, what we consider poetry is actually quite important to us, which is why people like to say ‘but is it poetry?’ Etc… The work of poets like Fred Moten, Juliana Spahr, and poets like Nat Raha or Mike Saunders, all of whose work I totally love by the way, turn the dial so much higher on critical thinking than I can – as I say in one poem ‘my department is surface aesthetics’ – but all poetry is critical thinking, or can be read as such, as having a critical relation to language and the world, simultaneously, and then it’s about thinking what any given sequence of words actually says about the world or how they mean, what the relation a poem establishes with the world is.

There is an obsession with bubbles in You Name It; they just keep popping up in different variations throughout the collection! There’s something so satisfying about catching them unexpectedly and reading into their possible meanings. How did you begin this exploration into bubbles? Do you view the poems as shaping a theory around bubbles? Perhaps you could speak a little about the figure of Bubbles as well: the long poem about this intriguing character seemed to me to be a kind of anchor for the other bubble explorations.

Yes, the bubbles thing! Well, that comes from my reading of Eileen Myles, CAConrad and Kim Seung-Hee, all three poets whose work I can never get enough of. I started to see bubbles everywhere after reading Eileen Myles’ section on foam in Afterglow. In the book – especially in the piece Syllabubble which is made up of some of the book’s influences – I trace some of the obsessions with bubbles I followed but I think the thing I started to think about is bubbles as a way of thinking about how we relate to one another – there’s something totally wondrous about bubbles – we all kind of stare at them in awe… they’re definitely fanciful – they float they burst they conjoin to other bubbles. They’re queer I think in that they have queer associations but also they suggest alternative arrangements of humans and more than humans. They’re desire: Eileen Myles puts it best: ‘foam means I want’. Did I ever tell you about this short play I did about the Merman Umpire? I sat on the stage in a Merman’s tail and blew bubbles with a bubble gun. During the writing of this book though I was chatting with the poet Erin Gannon and the conversation introduced me to the artist Bubbles who was from San Francisco and who was murdered in a homophobic attack. You can read about Bubbles in the book but Bubbles became this figure of an artist who produced art for its social interventions more than any commercial gain or fame or success. Bubbles would hold solo raves as a kind of performance art. Would paste little stickers around all over the place that said ‘shut up and dance’. Bubbles’ Instagram was an amazing gallery of their art. Their art was also the way they dressed. Bubbles to me is one of the artists I absolutely most admire more than anyone. More probably than the person mentioned earlier at the recycling centre in Craigmillar. Sadly Bubbles’ death is indicative not just of what Matilda Bernstein Sycamore calls ‘the end of San Francisco’ in her brilliant book about radical queer art… but actually of the pressures and dangers that radical queers are always under everywhere. And just because queer culture gets more and more co-opted into mainstream culture doesn’t make any difference to that really.  

I’m also interested in the many other theories your poems were in conversation with; in particular I loved the exploration of the volatile body. Could you expand on why this was an important theme in the collection and what theories you were drawing upon here?

I think a lot of those first few sentences of Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies where it’s about ‘somatophobia’ in philosophy and about an understanding of the body that isn’t dualist ie ‘the body is anything that isn’t the mind’ but rather that the body is this site of fluctuating/ social / fluid / living / sexual / cultural / encoded / possibilities. I actually think there’s a lot of really sophisticated stuff written more recently than Volatile Bodies – Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies Ed by Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray for example; Michael Warner’s Fear of a Queer Planet is another; I feel like there is somatophobia in poetry too – poetry that unfolds as if it isn’t being written by bodies in the same way. The poem about my lap top ‘lap lap lap lap lap lap top’ is sort of about this – the ways that our bodies interact with technology and the queer possibilities of thinking this through. It’s about obsolescence, about how the dull matchy matchy spaces of dating apps ate up queer spaces such as cottages and cruising grounds and what that means for the kinds of spaces our cities and towns are. These kinds of technology in a way have been used to clean up streets – to move queer encounters away from parks, public spaces and into digital / private spaces. So I feel like it’s important that we think about how these kinds of technologies extend our bodies and extend the ways in which our bodies might be conjoining with huge organisations and networks whose politics and intentions might be different to ours. That’s a grand way of framing the fact I wrote a poem about a MacBook Cottage. Akilah Oliver writes ‘the body is present in the visibility of language’ / ‘I mean to be textured paper’. Yes and yes!

I love the heightened sense of hyper visibility in your work; the explicit showcasing of poetry as an arena of embarrassment which has been carried through from previous collections Swamp Kiss and Click and Collect. Did you feel like you were exploring this idea differently in You Name It? What do you think it is about poems that make them so embarrassing!?

Kirsty you’re embarrassing me now stop it!!! We could also talk about my first book Too Ok – because I have a poem in there which is called ‘paper does not blush’. I like the idea that poetry basically is embarrassment – ie if poetry is language used when it is self conscious – or if poetry is figured as embodied language (either works ok for me) then embarrassment is that visible badge / sign on the body and in the language of that waking up / self consciousness. Kevin Killian – who was my greatest literary hero – and who personally did an insane amount to support and help me as a poet – has this amazing essay ‘The Twitch’ – which draws on Catherine Clement’s ideas of the syncope. That’s what I always love in poetry; when it takes its language to the places of shame / guilt / ecstasy / embarrassment / humiliation / desire / all the things we get told are illicit / all the things that get normalised out of us. Writing is or can be really sexual, that’s at least part of what it is. Embarrassment happens when you turn up – ie when you actually take a risk and when exposure of some kind is on the line? I’m sort of addicted to embarrassment because embarrassment is this emotion of being inside outside – ie being aware of what you are in a particular moment and being horrified / terrified of it. Embarrassment brings you up against all the social norms and expectations and creates a space to open them up? People find embarrassment untenable, hard to cope with – it brings us up to this urgent need to change – to be someone or somewhere else. Isn’t that the greatest state to be in for poetry? Squirming, teaming, hot, barely able to imagine that it’s possible to go back to how you were before? Actually sometimes embarrassment is an actual vacating of the stable self – it’s where you actually desperately wish you / feel like you could exit yourself / bury yourself turn yourself inside out or hide under a pillow but you can’t – it’s this me not me me not me me not me moment and as such it seems to offer possibilities outside of our usual senses of what we are and this is awkward for others! Actually that’s maybe where the political possibilities lie… in embarrassing oneself one makes others uneasy, almost embarrassed on your behalf and at least then there might be a chance of sharing some emotional connection? I have a poem called ‘Humiliation Fetish’ which imagines the disruptive possibilities of embarrassing oneself at a golf club.

In one of your poems in You Name It, you write ‘I want it to be our poem’ and I thought this connected really nicely to your showcasing of collaboration in the collection and also to your involvement in collaborative poetic projects/performances for many years. I was curious as to why you are drawn to collaborative works and how this has shaped your own poetic voice? Do you think poetry is particularly suited to collaboration, more so than other literary forms?

I really enjoy collaboration. We’ve collaborated before and that was so fun! Gloria Anzaldúa said she was a writer ‘to become more intimate with myself and you’ and collaboration feels like just a way of extending that. I mean poetry is collaborative anyway – you have to read people, be read by people, listen to people, be read to by people etc. Poetry is always collaborative also because the language and basically everything else is shared. The idea that works of art are produced solitarily is one of the least helpful notions of our culture and it’s at least possible to be open to alternatives for how we understand cultural production as something everyone is involved in and has agency in isn’t it? It is a peculiarity of our culture that we’re so invested in the idea of the poet’s rights. Not every culture is like that. I’m more interested in poetry’s rights and poetry’s rights say that everyone is part of how it is made and what constitutes it. I use this example all the time and I actually don’t apologise for it. I don’t know the author of my favourite poem. People wonder at this idea that poems are written by ‘anon’ and of course people have written brilliantly about the gendered aspect of this. But it coincides with this idea of individual authorship, with individual ownership and authority over creative work. My favourite poem is two wheelie bins in Edinburgh with ‘AL I GAT OR’ written across them. Artists have to make a living I get that but I guess I’m imagining the possibility of a system where our relation to work and living is transformed so that art is actually much more a collective activity, not reserved for just a few who either can afford not to worry constantly about work, or manage to make money out of their art for whatever reason. I think I say somewhere in the book – and I already said it above - but it really is unimportant whether a poem is ‘good’ or not. Saying a poem is ‘good’ is like saying a particular strand of hair or a particular piece of pavement is ‘good’. I’m much more excited by what Bernadette Mayer calls Poetry State Forest! That’s a place I’d go for a picnic and get eaten by a bear any day of the week. I’d even be the bear and do the eating, to mix things up.

Is this the first time you have included collaboration in print in one of your collections? - the book includes text from a collaborative performance with Maria Sledmere and also a poem written by Jane Goldman dedicated to you (which seemed like a radical move in an individual collection!). Why was it important for you to include these pieces in the book?

Yes it’s the first time – although I did write a whole book collaboratively with SJ Fowler. Conversations with Jane Goldman, Maria Sledmere and others – including you Kirsty (we should have included our collaboration too but maybe we can save that for something else) were so important and seemed so much a part of this collection that I just thought why not have them included? You’re making me wish I’d included more. When you’re lucky enough to be around writers – such as teaching writing in any setting (primary school, university, other workshop, anywhere at all) you meet so many wonderful writers all the time and so many great poems all the time. Since I started working at Glasgow University four years ago, I’ve met countless poets that I want to read in print that I think could make wonderful books. Some will find / have already found publishers and others won’t. That doesn’t make them lesser. It points to how our market-driven-insane, prize-oriented culture is entirely inadequate for furthering the poetry our societies crave. Amazing poetry still manages to find its way and survive even under these conditions, but that doesn’t mean the conditions under which it is made are ok. Prizes, publishing deals, prestige and all that stuff means absolutely nothing. Validation is important of course (‘what you need / is a compliment to plump you up’ - Kathleen Fraser) but that can happen on a personal, intimate level and doesn’t have to be institutionalised. Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble writes of sympoeisis, ie ‘making together’ ‘making with’, the possibilities of human and non-human making. Every time a poet talks about a cloud / the moon / a fish or whatever they are making with. We’re always making with. And poetry is made all around us by all sorts of different agents all the time. I really like this concept. Every day I come up with a new funding application in my head, like a poem: I want to apply for money to create a Centre for Sympoeisis / Centre for Fancy / Centre for Pleasure / Centre for Non-Book Writing / Centre for Uncentering.

Your titles always hold space for multiple meanings and tones: deceptively simple at first glance, they leave us wanting more and re-reading again and again (with that ideal mixture of the eloquent, the colloquial and the ridiculous).  Titles like ‘Fanciphobia’,  ‘Hi Mum, I’m in a Poem Just…’, ‘The word unputdownable’, ‘Email me tomorrow morning or else’, ‘My car is an unreliable narrator.’ Do your titles often dictate the writing of your poems or do they work the other way around? Why and how did you come to name the collection You Name It?

I’m struggling to answer the first part but the second part is easier for me. I like You Name It for its variousness, as in ‘this book has this, this, this, this, this, this, You Name it’. I also like it for its invitation to the reader to name the book… to participate in it. But most of all I wanted people to think how we name ‘it’ and all the other ‘its’… in the first volume of Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading, there’s this incredible dance around ‘it’. It feels like every couple of sentences the word ‘it’ is used in a completely new way. The book explores what happens when we use the word ‘it’ – how we other through designating something / someone an ‘it’. ‘It’ positions an ‘us’ that the ‘it’ isn’t. It seems to me that heightening our awareness of what the word ‘it’ is and means is important in these times and all times to be honest. What does ‘it’ mean? It means the reflective surface of what is deemed by the speaker not to be animate, not to constitute a body that matters (in Judith Butler’s phrase). What does ‘it’ mean? It means ‘you’. There’s another side to the ‘it’ in Beverly Dahlen which is that it’s the ‘id’ the stuff we don’t want to acknowledge, the psychosexual ‘mess and message’ (Ted Berrigan’s phrase). I was also thinking of naming as in Adrienne Rich’s famous assertion that ‘When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you...when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.’ And also Muriel Rukeyser’s poem ‘Despisals’ which ends with the lines ‘to make this relation with the it. To know that I am it’. More generally, naming and titles are important for a queer poetics – this is something kari edwards spoke about, naming as ‘a tool for both liberation and oppression’ like naming as liberating in ‘coming out’ but oppressing when it seems to fix ‘that as that’. So I quite like titles that feel provisional / unfixed / etc.

I also want to talk about your use of asides (another very distinctive characteristic of your writing style and the conversational, intimate warmth of your poems). What do you think asides bring to the movement of a poem and do you think this kind of playfulness also has a place in poems that are more serious in theme/ tone?

Oh I like this idea and had never thought of it! Asides, yes! You’re right that it’s about intimacy. I do think of poems as this place that can be very intimate and can be about exploring intimacy. Bernadette Mayer in Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters says ‘now there are two yous in this’.  John Wieners in the poem ‘Determination’: ‘poetry is some way / of keeping in touch’. Because the aside is about where we’re positioned, how we relate to what’s being said. The aside is also a kind of waking up to the idea that this is being written by someone and read by someone – that there are at least two people involved in whatever kind of communication is going on and it’s at least two-ways not one way transference.  In relation to the very last part of your question – I don’t see a difference between seriousness and non-seriousness in that way necessarily – play is very serious, intimacy is very serious and actually the serious is very serious and very seriously needs undermining (sometimes)! kari edwards again said of their approach to humour and self conscious narrative techniques (they have a character called Dr Fraud in their brilliant a day in the life of p) ‘It's another way of breaking down the fourth wall—Laurence Sterne used that technique in Tristram Shandy—but it also acknowledges what's taking place between the reader and the book’.

The endings of your poems refuse to provide neat conclusions: instead they are unexpected, sometimes comedic or unsettling. How do you know that a poem has naturally come to its end?

Endings are hard! And it’s at least as important that endings are continuations! I like an empty feeling of wanting more. I like that feeling of not wanting something to end. Ok this is me at my most self-congratulatory (well I can probably get worse but for the purposes of this interview imagine this is as bad as I can get) but I gave a reading the other night and I was quite brief and when I said ‘this is my last poem’ someone in the audience went ‘aw’. I wish it was possible to bottle that ‘aw’ as in ‘don’t go’ ‘don’t leave’ ‘don’t end’. Conversely, and for the sake of not wanting to come across like a total You Know What, someone walked out of a lecture I gave this semester I think because they weren’t enjoying or getting anything out of it, and I felt like dissolving right there – I actually felt like stopping them and saying ‘please don’t leave, give me a chance, I will make things better’. You can’t do that of course because it would be putting them under pressure and they have their own reasons for leaving and it’s none of my business really. Anyway – yeah endings are hard. And I have started to do that thing – not deliberately to be honest – that John Wieners used to do of revising post-publication… I love this poem by the wonderful Hong Kong based poet Chan Lai-kuen, with the line ‘I’m not going to leave a hopeful ending in this poem’…! I imagine different body movements for poem-endings – like a swish, a stomp, a bow, a curtesy, a puff of smoke, a collapse, blink etc. My favourite is like a swish/stomp that goes wrong and ends up falling over.

I was fascinated by the copy and paste texture of many of the poems in You Name It, in line with post-internet poetics in SPAM or in the context of other poets working in this field such as Sam Riviere. A prime example is your inclusion of a screenshot of a note written in your phone! Perhaps you could talk about the thinking behind some of these cut up forms in the collection and how digital aesthetics have/are continuing to influence your work? How do you see poetry continuing to evolve in the post-internet environment?

I love Sam’s poetry – especially recent poems published in TLS – ‘Past Lives’ is one which starts with the line ‘Time to make a new list’ – I love that line because I’m a list-maker and a list-loser. And I love SPAM zine which is basically the most exciting poetry magazine I know and it explores all the dark and ultra light corners of mediated culture. My phone is where I write my poems – I’m typing this on my phone too by the way – while watching David Attenborough. This thing just happened in the programme that I feel like I have to tell you about. It’s humpback whales hunting little crustaceans called Krill. The way they do it is they make these giant swirl patterns of bubbles – the krill can’t traverse the bubbles in the water – so they get funnelled into this central part of the swirl and hey presto the humpbacks just open their mouths. I don’t know the relevance of this other than that it’s bubbles being used in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Funnily enough, I always wanted to write a book called Swirl – like the ripple in Ice Cream – and that was what I initially called Click & Collect but changed it in discussion with the editor. Poetry is so outrageously various – people don’t always realise that if they only open their eyes to certain kinds of poetry but poetries are as diverse and bizarre and strange and wonderful as you can possibly imagine. I can see the cut up thing but actually I don’t think of this as how I work – for me it’s much more about making arrangements of material – so not about splicing things unexpectedly from different sources but making arrangements as best I can like the Victorian fashion for shell houses / rooms?

In the phone note poem, you write: ‘I like a poem where it’s like oh is that all there is to this?’ Can you speak about how you see depth and surface interacting in your poetry: are your poems trying to resist any ‘meaning’? Is what is hidden from view in a poem/taken out, just as important as the text that is visible in creating meaning?

This poem has come out the final version of the book – for practical reasons – but I like it so am glad you mention it here. Not trying to resist any meaning no but not necessarily having a singular meaning – or a straightforward sequence of meanings either. Bill Berkson is for me this amazing poet of surfaces. Berkson asked ‘is there surface and not surface?’ And I don’t really know. I feel like that hierarchy between depth and surface is related to the hierarchy between seriousness and non-seriousness. The Fancy is conceived of as lesser by Coleridge and others because it is ‘surface’. It doesn’t synthesise for that truth that penetrates or achieves depth. But I sort of feel like that need to have ‘depth’ is a sort of myth? Does it mean it feels more true or more sincere? But surfaces are just as true as a surface that feels like it’s a depth. The surface / depth thing also seems to be about a sense of a core of truth – like a ‘deep poem’ will reach that core of truth. It can also be used to delimit who and what kinds of truth constitute truth. It’s also kind of oppositional – the poem arrives in your emotional orbit and suddenly wants to get ‘deep’. What if the poem isn’t vertically inclined but more horizontal, spreading across a surface? It’s a straightforward hierarchy that what’s important is ‘deep’ and what’s unimportant, fanciful, to be ignored, is ‘surface’. I don’t buy it – if we paid attention to surfaces we might realise that we actually have agency rather than feeling like there’s a depth we don’t have access to that explains everything...

Bubbles come up to the surface, don’t they? For me, everything happens at the surface! Nobody has any more access to depth than anyone else. It’s about class and sexuality too – things that are surface are often also considered ‘tacky’ ‘cute’ ‘kitsch’ or ‘camp’ as a way of sidelining and excluding from the narrative – from access to the deep (rolling in the deep!) and this is something that Denise Bonetti of SPAM has taught me so much about. The work of Anjeli Caderamanpulle is also amazing in this regard. Also the poems of Ruthie Kennedy… I always love it that Tom Leonard’s work is dedicated ‘for those who have to live outside the narrative’ and I feel like it also means ‘for those who have to live on the surface’, without access to the ‘deep’. What constitutes the deep is very skewed – and it rests on value systems of what’s important in a culture. You write about being a parent and that’s a surefire ticket to ‘deep’; you write about death and ditto. But what if you write about the everyday – ie actually about life – what if you’re interested in joy, pleasure, sex, getting along, finding ways of not furthering our death and conflict-obsessed culture?? Automatically that’s ‘shallow’? I’m suspicious of the deep!  

Some of your poems have a narrative quality to them (perhaps most obviously in ‘Rough’ which I read as a short story as well as a poem). Other poems in the collection could also be viewed as instructions, lists, and research explorations. ‘Syllabubble’ at the end of the collection is a poem but also reads as an acknowledgement/dedication piece. Do you think poetry has a unique capability to take up these different spaces and are your own visions of what poetry can be changing? Or have you always viewed it as a form merging with other forms?

Not a unique capability but definitely it’s an aspect of poetry that it includes / borrows / brushes up against all sorts of other kinds of writing – because poetry isn’t a genre but a relation to language. Poetry itself isn’t really a form exactly either but a place where forms (ideas about form) converge? (I would say the same thing about the novel by the way and ultimately if it didn’t sound sort of pompous I would use the word language art, text-based-art or simply writing. But I like the word poetry). There is no particular form that makes something a poem. Poems have been written (or perceived or experienced) in almost any forms imaginable from images, asemic, sculptures, etc etc. I think of poems as part of how we bring what’s in the background to the foreground, to paraphrase Sara Ahmed. I imagined ‘Syllabubble’ as a kind of course outline for a Bubbles module. I felt like I wanted to share a little of the journey (I listened to Rylan on Radio 2 the other day and he was talking to Claire from Steps about her new album and she started talking about the ‘journey’ she’d been on creatively and he butted in and said ‘where were you then, the M5?’ – I love that!) through bubbles that animated the collection.

Dostoyevsky Wannabe is publishing your collection. An American publisher brought our your first collection in 2011 and since then you have been published by a range of UK based publishers. Do you think there has been a change in the type of experimental poetry being published in the UK in the last five-ten years?

I find this hard to answer because you only ever get a sense of what’s there depending on your experience of it / access to it. I’ve been so lucky to publish with amazing editors and publishers like Alec at Knives Forks and Spoons, Geoffrey at BlazeVox, Nathan at Boiler House Press, Mark at Red Ceilings Press and Richard and Vikki at Dostoyevsky Wannabe. People who are risk-taking, bold, visionary enablers of poetry. My sense is there’s so much going on now but I think there’s probably always the same amount going on. It’s about access to it. The most exciting work is always in small presses. The most exciting small presses won’t be around forever. Stuff is constantly in flux and it’s impossible to keep up. The amount of amazing poetry being produced blows my mind – but doesn’t surprise me. I think / hope there’s less polarisation between different approaches (experimental / conventional) which is never helpful.

Every spring you hold a number of poetry nights, often based in Glasgow’s Poetry Club, regularly inviting international poets to come and read. What is the importance of these readings to you?

That’s completely by accident that they tend to happen in the spring, based around my energy levels probably. I love inviting people to read and I actually love poetry readings in general – it’s a source of delight for me that I’ve hosted some of my absolute literary heroes Eileen Myles, CAConrad, Bernadette Mayer, Gregory Pardlo, Vahni Capildeo, Nuar Alsadir, Chris Kraus, Dodie Bellamy, Dennis Cooper, Maggie O’Sullivan, Charles Bernstein, Pierre Joris, Jerry Rothenberg, Steve McCaffery, Karen MacCormack, Kevin Killian, Chirikure Chirikure, and many many more. It’s just lovely making an event happen – not knowing how it’s going to turn out and just inviting someone to read. Poetry community is important to me – and readings are a part of what sustains communities. The fact that poets put on readings, run presses, print broadsides etc etc seems to me one of the best things about poetry. It’s this thing we all make happen together.

You are a great advocate of other people’s work, and are always holding up other writers, both established and emerging. So, as a final question could you tell us who you are reading and inspired by at the moment?

This is a red rag to a bull. I’ve recently been loving the work of Arianne True, especially a series of poems/ sound pieces that are like exhibition texts but very weird and in their own words ‘halting and effortful’. I love the work of Fatimah Asghar, especially the book If they come for us – which celebrates the ‘through any wild all wild’. I love the work of Jake Skeets from a book out this year Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers which is really sexy poetry full of hot possibilities and uncomfortable delights. I’m obsessed right now with Isaiah Hull’s book Nosebleeds – urgent, compelling, pressurised poetry. I’ve just set this on a reading list and am looking forward to find out what the students make of it…  I love the work of Regie Canico who has this poem called Queerification that is just amazing. Mainly a spoken word poet but surely surely surely they’ll have a full printed collection soon… Xandria Phillips too with the book Hull I absolutely love. I love Pauli Murray’s poem ‘To the Oppressors’: ‘now you are strong / And we are but grapes aching with ripeness’. I’ve been reading a lot of tanka by Yosano Akiko. Sascha A Akhtar has this brilliant book from Knives Forks and Spoons - #lovelikeblood it’s called. Zephyrian Spools by Dalia Neis I really like – it’s a prose / poetry / weird hybrid.  Callie Gardner’s naturally it is not is one of the most amazing books of the last couple of years in my opinion. Caleb Klaces’ fatherhood is wonderful. Alycia Pirmohamed’s new pamphlet Faces that Fled the Wind is brilliant. I also really like Elaine Gallagher’s Speculative Books book Transient Light. What a lovely title that is – I can practically feel the bend of the beam and it’s separation into different bands of colour just by reading that title to myself. I love the work of poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday and Hollywood Forever is just brilliant: I’ve also been reading quite a bit of Urayoán Noel – their own brilliant work but also an amazing work of translation and scholarship on the Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha which is out now from Shearsman. I’ve gone mad – like totally mad – for Diane Wakoski whose books I just find so weird, compulsive, magical.

You Name It is out now via Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals.

~

Words: Kirsty Dunlop

Published 26/11/19

[iamandco]

  PHOTO: COURTESY @DEMARATATTOO VIA INSTAGrAM  Tattoos themselves are a major decision, but what about one on your collarbone? The placement is often overlooked because it’s so visible, but that shouldn’t keep you from feeling like your most sexy self with this type of ink. The best tattoos are meant to be seen, and if you’re worried you don’t have to get a massive design. collarbone tattoos are particularly exquisite when drawn just-so along the line of the bone.  While this location for ink is definitely one for the books, there are also many things to think about. Can you show it at work? Absolutely (especially with good foundation), but they can be small enough to leave on display if you want. Does it hurt to get them? Um, yes. Quite a bit actually. Because the tattoo literally sits on bone, the application is substantially more painful. Should this stop you? No way! These particular pieces of badassery will make you the talk of the town.  Since we have your attention about the placement, here are 20 of the most gorgeous pieces of inspiration for your new collarbone tattoo!  Celebrity Collarbone Tattoos While collarbone tattoos are pretty common among the masses, celebrities and worldwide trendsetters have a distinct love for the placement as well.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by badgalriri (@badgalriri) on Dec 21, 2018 at 7:40pm PST View this post on Instagram A post shared by badgalriri (@badgalriri) on May 27, 2019 at 2:09pm PDT Rihanna (@badgalriri on Instagram) is one of the most popular female celebrities around the world today, and her ink is a definite inspiration to most. Her collarbone tattoo is unique in that it is written backward, so she can read the words in her mirror. As this demonstrates, your tattoos should be meant for you and you alone, while you may share them with the world. Rihanna’s collarbone tattoo says the words, “Never a Failure, Always a Lesson,” a motto of sorts for her. What a beautiful way of verbalizing the changes life throws at us Rih.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hailey Rhode Bieber (@haileybieber) on Jul 23, 2019 at 11:06am PDT The recently christened “Mrs. Bieber,” Hailey Baldwin (@haileybieber on Instagram), has one of the most delicate and tiny collarbone tattoos I have seen. Artist JonBoy tattooed the black-line heart in early 2018, a sweet addition to Bieber’s collection. The heart is impossibly tiny and a perfect tattoo for ladies who live for the tiny-art aesthetic.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ruby Rose (@rubyrose) on Jan 20, 2017 at 12:05am PST View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ruby Rose (@rubyrose) on Dec 13, 2016 at 9:39am PST One could swear Ruby Rose (@rubyrose on Instagram)) doesn’t have a collarbone tattoo with how well she hides this particular piece on her social media. Collar bone tattoos are easily hidden with the right collars and makeup, and Rose demonstrates this fact tastefully. Her collarbone tattoo is reminiscent of her time as a model for makeup brand Maybelline and says, “Maybe she’s born with it,” in a fun font.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sophie Turner (@sophiet) on Aug 16, 2016 at 11:13pm PDT Newly-wed actress Sophie Turner Jonas (@sophiet on Instagram) took a temporary lipstick-print collarbone tattoo for a spin in 2016, but we wish she had it for real. Its placement was nearly on her shoulder, and just small enough that covering it would have been a snap! Since the collarbone is a pleasing spot to litter with kisses in the bedroom, we can’t help but give this collarbone tattoo two thumbs up, even if it wasn’t real.   View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kehlani🧿 (@kehlani) on Jun 3, 2019 at 3:32pm PDT New mom and R&B songstress Kehlani’s collarbone tattoo is one of my favorites. Her collarbone tattoo expresses a rather prominent part of who she is-- her gender fluidity, with the word “fluid”-- and she elaborates on her truth in an interview with Paper Magazine, “Once I really understood that if someone likes me, they like me for all of me," she says "I started being myself depending on how I felt that day, not based on who I was dating at the time.” Her collarbone tattoo distinctly tells her story.  Botanical Collarbone Tattoos As with most tattoos, flowers are extremely common with the collarbone tattoo. These botanicals will keep you coming back for more! Not only are they beautiful, but they’re also delicate and have deeper meaning sometimes. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Emily Ebers (@evebers) on Feb 6, 2018 at 1:45pm PST Emily Ebers (@evebers on Instagram) is a pro with cover-ups, as she demonstrates with this impeccably designed rose trio. The detail is impressive with layered shading on the rose petals.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Makayla Morris (@makamorr) on Jun 17, 2019 at 12:02pm PDT Makayla Moore’s (@makamorr on Instagram) traditional style collarbone tattoo is leaving us begging for more. We love the cherry red vibrancy of the color. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Martha (@martha_bocharova) on Jun 1, 2019 at 3:48am PDT For those who prefer smaller flowers, Martha Bocharova’s (@martha_bocharova on Instagram) floral collarbone tattoo is the best design. It features simple, black linework-- the perfect choice for a woman who wants that delicate-as-a-petal aesthetic.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hayleigh'hazey'brind Tattoo's (@hayleigh_hazey_brind_tattoos) on Jun 27, 2019 at 8:25am PDT The gorgeous simplicity of this collarbone tattoo by Hayleigh “Hazey” Brind (@hayleigh_hazey_brind_tattoos on Instagram) is exquisite. She expertly adorned her client’s collarbone with a tattoo of massive emeralds and black-line peonies. Together, they yield a delightfully pretty collarbone tattoo. We love the design.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tattoo Artist St. Pete FL (@aandersontattoo) on Jun 6, 2019 at 5:16pm PDT These gothic roses are decorated with spiderwebs, and we are loving the collarbone tattoo. Ladies, you will be living for this look of the night during this year’s spooky season. Artist Alicia Anderson (@aandersontattoo on Instagram) uses teeny dots to complete the realistic shading of the roses.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ｊｏａｎｎａ (@cracovianca) on Mar 17, 2019 at 1:11am PDT Tattooist Joanna (@cracovianca on Instagram) shows her talent with this olive-branch collarbone tattoo. It’s an effortless design to wear well and has a sweet meaning relating back to biblical times-- peace on Earth.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by STUDIOBYSOL_donghwa (@donghwa_tattoo) on Jan 22, 2019 at 5:17am PST Tattooist Donghwa (@donghwa_tattoo on Instagram) paints a tiny cloud, autumn leaf and lotus blossoms on the collarbone of the client. It is such a delicate design, perfect for any nature-lover. “Bee” Inspired Collarbone Tattoos These adorable, bumble-bee and fruit-inspired collarbone tattoos will have everyone around you buzzing. They are so cute and are the quintessential inspo for our lovely nature fairies.   View this post on Instagram A post shared by HANNA MANNA (@hanna_manna_tatu) on Mar 8, 2019 at 6:53am PST Tattoo artist Hanna Manna (@hanna_manna_tatu on Instagram) is the ultimate bee-keeper for collarbone tattoos. She pairs these fuzzy boys with dot-work, shaded honeycombs that make us yearn for their cloying sweetness.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by STUDIOBYSOL_ovenlee (@ovenlee.tattoo) on Jul 23, 2019 at 5:30am PDT This teeny pumpkin by Ovenlee (@ovenlee.tattoo on Instagram) is the unopposed leader of the fall season in our book of collarbone tattoos. It is purely colored, with zero outlines for the image. Where is our pumpkin spice when we need it?  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Demara (@demaratattoo) on Jun 29, 2019 at 11:29am PDT Artist Demara (@demaratattoo on Instagram) brings this collarbone tattoo to life with these vivid and realistic-looking honeybees. The yellow is a welcome pairing with the black. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Daniele Lugli | Tattoo (@danielelugli) on Jun 4, 2019 at 6:42pm PDT Daniele Lugli’s (@danielelugli) collarbone tattoo is delivered to us in the refreshingly tart shape of a lemon. The tattoo features only colored ink and is defined by brown lines instead of the traditional black. How sweet it is!  Spiritual and Mythological Collarbone Tattoos We all know and love the stories our families pass on of faith and belief, and collarbone tattoos are one of the most beautiful locations to tell these stories on your temple of a body. Let the Universe make your spirit happy with these incredible collarbone tattoo designs.   View this post on Instagram A post shared by Basement Tattoo Parlour (@basementtattoo) on Apr 25, 2019 at 8:28am PDT Talented tattooist Simon Martin of Basement Tattoo (@basementtattoo on Instagram) decorated this beauty’s collarbone with a tattoo of the moon’s phases. The royal purple hue of the piece is flamboyant and attention-grabbing in the best way.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Emily Ebers (@evebers) on Jun 21, 2019 at 2:33pm PDT Tattoo artist Emily Ebers (@evebers on Instagram) shows off her own collarbone tattoo in this image she posted in honor of the 2019 Summer Solstice. Her moon is given a face, and we love the personality it brings to the ink.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Blackwork ◇ Tattoos ◇ Vegan (@khrystattoo) on Mar 6, 2019 at 9:49pm PST Greek mythology speaks of half-bird women call sirens, depicted by this intricate collarbone tattoo by tattoo artist, Khrys (@khyrstattoo on Instagram). The piece is inspired by, 'Odysseus and the Sirens' by John William Waterhouse, per Khrys’ caption on the image.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by TATTOO DREAMS STUDIO (@tattoo_dreams04) on Jan 31, 2019 at 2:18pm PST Freehand calligraphy is difficult in any language, let alone as a tattoo. The artist for Tattoo Dreams Studio (@tattoo_dreams04 on Instagram) writes this “Hanuman Chalisa” devotional hymn reference on the collarbone of her client, in perfect calligraphy no less.  So What Do We Think?  Collarbone tattoos are attention-grabbers to say the least. We definitely hope these babies will gain popularity in today’s day and age, as tattoos become more common in the workplace. The placement of a collarbone tattoo can be varied and can very easily be covered. It’s a major upside if you ask us. We will have to wait and see where the collarbone tattoo takes us in the future, but for now, we encourage you to put these pieces of inspiration to good use.

[seo75074]

10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business

10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business

Preface: This blog post is one in a series of articles that Portentites produced in a pair-writing experiment. It’s a little more broad than usual because it represents two subject matter experts from different practice areas, coming together to combine their knowledge for a broader look at the internet marketing topics that face real businesses. If you’re not familiar with pair writing, GatherContent does a great job of introducing the topic. We hope you enjoy it.

Alright, deep breath. It’s time to set up your business’s internet presence. And while you aren’t a Porg, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the internets love you too.

You win, Disney. I can't even with this thing.

1: HTTPS: Security and Trust for Prospective Customers

A question: “Should my site be HTTP or HTTPS?“ There are a number of compelling reasons to pick HTTPS. First, think of that extra “S” at the end as security in the mind of your customer. Your customers, just like you, want to be secure when they visit a website. Google, with its Chrome browser, overtly labels whether a website is secure or not both in the address bar and on SERPs.

If you have login functionality, accept credit cards, or even form submissions, HTTPS is essential. Google very publicly considers this a best practice, but really what do they know…oh right we want to rank there!

So Google likes it, it keeps your info private, it keeps your users’ info private, and it future-proofs your site. Winner, winner.

2: Robots.txt & Sitemap

Stick with me, we’re going to get a little technical. But don’t worry we’re not going to write code together, yet…maybe. Instead, you’re simply going to help search engines find your site.

Honestly, you’re just being really nice and giving them directions to where on the site they’re allowed to go. A handy little map of your site.

First, we’re going to create a file on your root domain (like a tree down in the roots). That map is going to tell search engines if we have any pages or areas on the site we don’t think they should go, so we minimize the search engine’s chance of getting lost. And we’re going to tell them where to find the map.

It will look something like this:

http://ift.tt/2ATToeC

We have a robots.txt guide with best practices and several common mistakes. This should help you troubleshoot any errors you find. Better yet, you might learn how to avoid the most common mistakes before making them.

Next up is the sitemap! There are a lot of free sitemap generator tools out ther. Most will only crawl 500 pages and generate a map from what they find. The xml sitemap file will live at the root just like the robots.txt file, but it will also be listed in your robots.txt:

http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

And the location will be spelled out in your robots.txt file like so:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

3: Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

Now you have a sitemap living on your site and recorded in your robots.txt file, so search engines will be falling all over themselves to get traffic to your site. Right??

Well…not quite. Search engines are getting smarter but they still need a little help finding the front door. Or any door really. Just like making the map itself with robots.txt, you are going to be very kind and let the search engines know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you gave them a map.

Setting up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is the perfect nexus of easy and free. While both search engines provide guides to site owners on how to get started and fully set-up, they are best summed up as:

Sign up for free account

Submit your website

Use the free tools

Once you’ve signed up for both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to upload your sitemap to both as well. For Google you’ll use a separate, handy-dandy submission tool while Bing has you submit your site the same way that you submitted your robots.txt file above.

4: Make Sure Your Site is Blazing Fast

One of the most important and often-overlooked facets of your website’s performance is site speed. Site speed can make or break your website, and a slow website can be disastrous for both converting prospective customers, and convincing search engines to show you in their results.

But you don’t have to take our word for it alone. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Forty Percent. That is a massive amount of potential traffic lost to a single, solvable problem.

Some improvements are incredibly easy to do such as image compression. By compressing your images to be a smaller file size, there will be less to load on each page. Less to load = faster site. It’s that simple.

If you haven’t checked out any of the other links, we wrote a massive guide to site speed and page speed. That’s broken down into chapters depending on what kind of technical support you have on staff or on retainer.

5: Site Navigation

Time for another easy win. Well..mostly easy but definitely all win. Navigation is used by prospects, customers, and search engines to get around your site. The ultimate test: it should make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

Navigation doesn’t just magically do that though!

Global Navigation which is at the top of each page sends really strong signals to both users and to search engines of what your site is about. What questions they could answer by visiting. If you use vague, interchangeable language that tells people little about what you offer or what makes your business special, you’re wasting a great opportunity to increase qualified traffic.

Order your navigation links and anchor text by importance from left to right. Ensure the text of the link is highlydescriptive. (Psst “Products” is not descriptive. However, “LandSpeeder Cars” is!)

6: Set Up Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Once you have your website ready to rock, it’s time to get it in front of the eagerly awaiting populace. But before your site’s going to show up on a Google results page, you’ll have to decide what you want that to look like, and what kinds of searches you want to show up for.

The different parts of the listing are called the title tag and the meta description.

Title Tags are exactly what they sound like: The title of the listing on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

The “meta description” is that brief description or preview of your site content that shows up under the clickable title. Title tags especially are incredibly important as they play a huge part in determining how your website ranks for any given Google search.

For example: say you’re making a website that sells lightsabers.

When writing the title tags and meta descriptions, you’ll want to make sure you include words that make it crystal clear what you are selling. Ideally, you’ll match the language and jargon of your title as closely as possible to the language your customers would use to search for your product.

For instance, your customers might head to Google and type something like “jedi lightsabers” or “sith lightsabers” more than “sith saber”. Using the terms that most align with your customers’ thinking and language is a great way to improve visibility and clicks.

An important distinction: While you want to be descriptive and clear, do not stuff your title tags and meta descriptions with the keywords just because you know that the word shows up in a lot of searches. Doing spammy things like this can reflect negatively on your brand to prospective customers. And Google’s been wise to this trick for many years, so there’s literally no upside to shoe-horning in a dozen instances of the same word.

7: N.A.P. in your schema

Remember when we said we weren’t writing code yet, but maybe later? Well we got there finally. Cringe away, but don’t stop reading.

It’s a truly teeny amount of code, and we’re going to use a tool to help you do it. (Tell no one and take all the credit!)

Put simply, “Structured Data” lets search engines understand your website better. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex agreed on a shared vocabulary to use a while back. We’re simply going to use that specific vocab to help them understand your site better.

This is where our secret weapon comes in, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper (long name for such a helpful tool).

You’ll be given two different options for the output: Microdata (the tool defaults to this) and JSON-LD.

Microdata will be attached to your html. Google will give you back the html code and highlight it so you (or a helpful developer) can see exactly where it goes in the code for your site. If you use JSON-LD, the code is also provided and goes into the “head” section of your page.

(Pssst, we also have a guide to implementing JSON-LD on your site. What can we say, we like to be helpful too.)

I’m using my current restaurant obsession in Seattle’s International District as our example. (I have a serious dumpling addiction)

I’ll be giving you the JSON-LD code because it is smaller and easier honestly. We could fill the entire article with html code and just highlight where the microdata would go…

Looks scary, until you realize that it's all done for you in the tool. Copy & Paste time.

8: Google My business

One of the most important determinants of success with search engines is maximizing the amount of space you occupy on a results page. This sounds over-simple, but it’s true. Beyond giving more specific information to suit all the different questions users might have had from store hours to available inventory, the more space on a search results page that you occupy, the less space there is for the next competitor to show up.

One product that helps in this regard is Google My Business. Now, you may not recognize “Google My Business” by its formal tool name (I didn’t either), but you most certainly have seen it in the wild.

When you search for a business on Google, it’s powering that great big name and logo on the right side of the screen.

Taking the time to use this tool and effectively claim your business gives you much more real estate to work with than just traditional search listings, so it is incredibly helpful when setting up an internet presence. This is especially true for cases where people are already familiar enough to search for your business by name.

Fortunately, setting up a Google My Business account is incredibly easy. All you have to do is go to the My Business home page, create an account, enter your businesses information, and voila! You now have My Business Page.

People will now be able to see core information about your business right on the results page, which will help increase your visibility and qualified traffic.

9: Fully Set Up Social Media Accounts

After you’ve got your website setup and are heading down the path of optimization (SEO is a long game), it’s time to think about social if you haven’t already. If you ask a random sample of people what social media sites are “the best”, you may get a random sample of answers: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest.

We’d like to make this easy and effective for you, not to mention that this is a massive topic, so for now we’ll stick with just one recommendation: only use social media that you will actually use.

Social media can be a fantastic tool to help expand your reach and grow your business, but only when it is actually used as the communication tool that it is. Meaning if you don’t manage it, you’re creating just another empty space that can distract from channels where you’re keeping information current, engaging with customers, etc. You start to see how setting up a social media account for your business and not using it can actually take away from your bottom line.

10: Set-up Google Analytics

Once you have the raw material of your site, your social media accounts, and perhaps some paid search or other ads, it’s time to evaluate what’s paying off, and how much.

Maybe you notice your phone ringing a little more, but if you have many new promotional efforts running at once, it’s impossible to know which are working without the proper measurement tools. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Google Analytics is a free (!!) platform that allows you to track just about every aspect of your website. Did that spike in visitors come from an ad or an organic search engine result? What site referred that great customer to you? What did the rest of your visitors do once they hit your site?

Whether it’s pageviews, conversions, or referral source, Google Analytics tracks everything. This allows you to make much more informed decisions regarding your website, your marketing, and improving your results proactively.

For a platform that can show you so much, and which costs literally $0.00, it takes next to nothing to get it set up. After setting yourself up with a Google Analytics account, there are only three broad but basic steps remaining:

On the Admin page, under the Properties tab, click on “Create a New Property”

Enter all of your website data to get your custom GA tracking code

Paste the following snippet right after the head tag on each page you would like to track.

Do make sure to replace “GA_Tracking_ID” with the custom ID you got in step two above. And if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough, Moz provides a great 101-level intro to Google Analytics including sample business questions you might want to answer.

Where to From Here?

You’ve got a site that’s far more visible than it was when you started. Your site is loading in half the time it was before. You’ve picked out a social media platform that fits your style and your schedule. And you know where the heck all that traffic is coming from, not to mention which parts of the traffic is converting into leads or customers.

When you’re ready to lean into that faster, more effective site, looking at how to advertise successfully in paid search (PPC) or paid social media is a great way to show up at the moments your prospective customers are considering a product or service like yours.

Until next time, happy Marketing from all of us here at Portent!

The Portent team, if were were George Lucas characters.

http://ift.tt/2Alizpp

[inetmrktng75247]

10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business

10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business

Preface: This blog post is one in a series of articles that Portentites produced in a pair-writing experiment. It’s a little more broad than usual because it represents two subject matter experts from different practice areas, coming together to combine their knowledge for a broader look at the internet marketing topics that face real businesses. If you’re not familiar with pair writing, GatherContent does a great job of introducing the topic. We hope you enjoy it.

Alright, deep breath. It’s time to set up your business’s internet presence. And while you aren’t a Porg, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the internets love you too.

You win, Disney. I can't even with this thing.

1: HTTPS: Security and Trust for Prospective Customers

A question: “Should my site be HTTP or HTTPS?“ There are a number of compelling reasons to pick HTTPS. First, think of that extra “S” at the end as security in the mind of your customer. Your customers, just like you, want to be secure when they visit a website. Google, with its Chrome browser, overtly labels whether a website is secure or not both in the address bar and on SERPs.

If you have login functionality, accept credit cards, or even form submissions, HTTPS is essential. Google very publicly considers this a best practice, but really what do they know…oh right we want to rank there!

So Google likes it, it keeps your info private, it keeps your users’ info private, and it future-proofs your site. Winner, winner.

2: Robots.txt & Sitemap

Stick with me, we’re going to get a little technical. But don’t worry we’re not going to write code together, yet…maybe. Instead, you’re simply going to help search engines find your site.

Honestly, you’re just being really nice and giving them directions to where on the site they’re allowed to go. A handy little map of your site.

First, we’re going to create a file on your root domain (like a tree down in the roots). That map is going to tell search engines if we have any pages or areas on the site we don’t think they should go, so we minimize the search engine’s chance of getting lost. And we’re going to tell them where to find the map.

It will look something like this:

http://ift.tt/2ATToeC

We have a robots.txt guide with best practices and several common mistakes. This should help you troubleshoot any errors you find. Better yet, you might learn how to avoid the most common mistakes before making them.

Next up is the sitemap! There are a lot of free sitemap generator tools out ther. Most will only crawl 500 pages and generate a map from what they find. The xml sitemap file will live at the root just like the robots.txt file, but it will also be listed in your robots.txt:

http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

And the location will be spelled out in your robots.txt file like so:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

3: Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

Now you have a sitemap living on your site and recorded in your robots.txt file, so search engines will be falling all over themselves to get traffic to your site. Right??

Well…not quite. Search engines are getting smarter but they still need a little help finding the front door. Or any door really. Just like making the map itself with robots.txt, you are going to be very kind and let the search engines know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you gave them a map.

Setting up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is the perfect nexus of easy and free. While both search engines provide guides to site owners on how to get started and fully set-up, they are best summed up as:

Sign up for free account

Submit your website

Use the free tools

Once you’ve signed up for both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to upload your sitemap to both as well. For Google you’ll use a separate, handy-dandy submission tool while Bing has you submit your site the same way that you submitted your robots.txt file above.

4: Make Sure Your Site is Blazing Fast

One of the most important and often-overlooked facets of your website’s performance is site speed. Site speed can make or break your website, and a slow website can be disastrous for both converting prospective customers, and convincing search engines to show you in their results.

But you don’t have to take our word for it alone. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Forty Percent. That is a massive amount of potential traffic lost to a single, solvable problem.

Some improvements are incredibly easy to do such as image compression. By compressing your images to be a smaller file size, there will be less to load on each page. Less to load = faster site. It’s that simple.

If you haven’t checked out any of the other links, we wrote a massive guide to site speed and page speed. That’s broken down into chapters depending on what kind of technical support you have on staff or on retainer.

5: Site Navigation

Time for another easy win. Well..mostly easy but definitely all win. Navigation is used by prospects, customers, and search engines to get around your site. The ultimate test: it should make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

Navigation doesn’t just magically do that though!

Global Navigation which is at the top of each page sends really strong signals to both users and to search engines of what your site is about. What questions they could answer by visiting. If you use vague, interchangeable language that tells people little about what you offer or what makes your business special, you’re wasting a great opportunity to increase qualified traffic.

Order your navigation links and anchor text by importance from left to right. Ensure the text of the link is highlydescriptive. (Psst “Products” is not descriptive. However, “LandSpeeder Cars” is!)

6: Set Up Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Once you have your website ready to rock, it’s time to get it in front of the eagerly awaiting populace. But before your site’s going to show up on a Google results page, you’ll have to decide what you want that to look like, and what kinds of searches you want to show up for.

The different parts of the listing are called the title tag and the meta description.

Title Tags are exactly what they sound like: The title of the listing on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

The “meta description” is that brief description or preview of your site content that shows up under the clickable title. Title tags especially are incredibly important as they play a huge part in determining how your website ranks for any given Google search.

For example: say you’re making a website that sells lightsabers.

When writing the title tags and meta descriptions, you’ll want to make sure you include words that make it crystal clear what you are selling. Ideally, you’ll match the language and jargon of your title as closely as possible to the language your customers would use to search for your product.

For instance, your customers might head to Google and type something like “jedi lightsabers” or “sith lightsabers” more than “sith saber”. Using the terms that most align with your customers’ thinking and language is a great way to improve visibility and clicks.

An important distinction: While you want to be descriptive and clear, do not stuff your title tags and meta descriptions with the keywords just because you know that the word shows up in a lot of searches. Doing spammy things like this can reflect negatively on your brand to prospective customers. And Google’s been wise to this trick for many years, so there’s literally no upside to shoe-horning in a dozen instances of the same word.

7: N.A.P. in your schema

Remember when we said we weren’t writing code yet, but maybe later? Well we got there finally. Cringe away, but don’t stop reading.

It’s a truly teeny amount of code, and we’re going to use a tool to help you do it. (Tell no one and take all the credit!)

Put simply, “Structured Data” lets search engines understand your website better. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex agreed on a shared vocabulary to use a while back. We’re simply going to use that specific vocab to help them understand your site better.

This is where our secret weapon comes in, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper (long name for such a helpful tool).

You’ll be given two different options for the output: Microdata (the tool defaults to this) and JSON-LD.

Microdata will be attached to your html. Google will give you back the html code and highlight it so you (or a helpful developer) can see exactly where it goes in the code for your site. If you use JSON-LD, the code is also provided and goes into the “head” section of your page.

(Pssst, we also have a guide to implementing JSON-LD on your site. What can we say, we like to be helpful too.)

I’m using my current restaurant obsession in Seattle’s International District as our example. (I have a serious dumpling addiction)

I’ll be giving you the JSON-LD code because it is smaller and easier honestly. We could fill the entire article with html code and just highlight where the microdata would go…

Looks scary, until you realize that it's all done for you in the tool. Copy & Paste time.

8: Google My business

One of the most important determinants of success with search engines is maximizing the amount of space you occupy on a results page. This sounds over-simple, but it’s true. Beyond giving more specific information to suit all the different questions users might have had from store hours to available inventory, the more space on a search results page that you occupy, the less space there is for the next competitor to show up.

One product that helps in this regard is Google My Business. Now, you may not recognize “Google My Business” by its formal tool name (I didn’t either), but you most certainly have seen it in the wild.

When you search for a business on Google, it’s powering that great big name and logo on the right side of the screen.

Taking the time to use this tool and effectively claim your business gives you much more real estate to work with than just traditional search listings, so it is incredibly helpful when setting up an internet presence. This is especially true for cases where people are already familiar enough to search for your business by name.

Fortunately, setting up a Google My Business account is incredibly easy. All you have to do is go to the My Business home page, create an account, enter your businesses information, and voila! You now have My Business Page.

People will now be able to see core information about your business right on the results page, which will help increase your visibility and qualified traffic.

9: Fully Set Up Social Media Accounts

After you’ve got your website setup and are heading down the path of optimization (SEO is a long game), it’s time to think about social if you haven’t already. If you ask a random sample of people what social media sites are “the best”, you may get a random sample of answers: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest.

We’d like to make this easy and effective for you, not to mention that this is a massive topic, so for now we’ll stick with just one recommendation: only use social media that you will actually use.

Social media can be a fantastic tool to help expand your reach and grow your business, but only when it is actually used as the communication tool that it is. Meaning if you don’t manage it, you’re creating just another empty space that can distract from channels where you’re keeping information current, engaging with customers, etc. You start to see how setting up a social media account for your business and not using it can actually take away from your bottom line.

10: Set-up Google Analytics

Once you have the raw material of your site, your social media accounts, and perhaps some paid search or other ads, it’s time to evaluate what’s paying off, and how much.

Maybe you notice your phone ringing a little more, but if you have many new promotional efforts running at once, it’s impossible to know which are working without the proper measurement tools. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Google Analytics is a free (!!) platform that allows you to track just about every aspect of your website. Did that spike in visitors come from an ad or an organic search engine result? What site referred that great customer to you? What did the rest of your visitors do once they hit your site?

Whether it’s pageviews, conversions, or referral source, Google Analytics tracks everything. This allows you to make much more informed decisions regarding your website, your marketing, and improving your results proactively.

For a platform that can show you so much, and which costs literally $0.00, it takes next to nothing to get it set up. After setting yourself up with a Google Analytics account, there are only three broad but basic steps remaining:

On the Admin page, under the Properties tab, click on “Create a New Property”

Enter all of your website data to get your custom GA tracking code

Paste the following snippet right after the head tag on each page you would like to track.

Do make sure to replace “GA_Tracking_ID” with the custom ID you got in step two above. And if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough, Moz provides a great 101-level intro to Google Analytics including sample business questions you might want to answer.

Where to From Here?

You’ve got a site that’s far more visible than it was when you started. Your site is loading in half the time it was before. You’ve picked out a social media platform that fits your style and your schedule. And you know where the heck all that traffic is coming from, not to mention which parts of the traffic is converting into leads or customers.

When you’re ready to lean into that faster, more effective site, looking at how to advertise successfully in paid search (PPC) or paid social media is a great way to show up at the moments your prospective customers are considering a product or service like yours.

Until next time, happy Marketing from all of us here at Portent!

The Portent team, if were were George Lucas characters.

http://ift.tt/2Alizpp

[seo90210]

10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business

Preface: This blog post is one in a series of articles that Portentites produced in a pair-writing experiment. It’s a little more broad than usual because it represents two subject matter experts from different practice areas, coming together to combine their knowledge for a broader look at the internet marketing topics that face real businesses. If you’re not familiar with pair writing, GatherContent does a great job of introducing the topic. We hope you enjoy it.

Alright, deep breath. It’s time to set up your business’s internet presence. And while you aren’t a Porg, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the internets love you too.

You win, Disney. I can't even with this thing.

1: HTTPS: Security and Trust for Prospective Customers

A question: “Should my site be HTTP or HTTPS?“ There are a number of compelling reasons to pick HTTPS. First, think of that extra “S” at the end as security in the mind of your customer. Your customers, just like you, want to be secure when they visit a website. Google, with its Chrome browser, overtly labels whether a website is secure or not both in the address bar and on SERPs.

If you have login functionality, accept credit cards, or even form submissions, HTTPS is essential. Google very publicly considers this a best practice, but really what do they know…oh right we want to rank there!

So Google likes it, it keeps your info private, it keeps your users’ info private, and it future-proofs your site. Winner, winner.

2: Robots.txt & Sitemap

Stick with me, we’re going to get a little technical. But don’t worry we’re not going to write code together, yet…maybe. Instead, you’re simply going to help search engines find your site.

Honestly, you’re just being really nice and giving them directions to where on the site they’re allowed to go. A handy little map of your site.

First, we’re going to create a file on your root domain (like a tree down in the roots). That map is going to tell search engines if we have any pages or areas on the site we don’t think they should go, so we minimize the search engine’s chance of getting lost. And we’re going to tell them where to find the map.

It will look something like this:

http://ift.tt/2ATToeC

We have a robots.txt guide with best practices and several common mistakes. This should help you troubleshoot any errors you find. Better yet, you might learn how to avoid the most common mistakes before making them.

Next up is the sitemap! There are a lot of free sitemap generator tools out ther. Most will only crawl 500 pages and generate a map from what they find. The xml sitemap file will live at the root just like the robots.txt file, but it will also be listed in your robots.txt:

http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

And the location will be spelled out in your robots.txt file like so:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

3: Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

Now you have a sitemap living on your site and recorded in your robots.txt file, so search engines will be falling all over themselves to get traffic to your site. Right??

Well…not quite. Search engines are getting smarter but they still need a little help finding the front door. Or any door really. Just like making the map itself with robots.txt, you are going to be very kind and let the search engines know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you gave them a map.

Setting up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is the perfect nexus of easy and free. While both search engines provide guides to site owners on how to get started and fully set-up, they are best summed up as:

Sign up for free account

Submit your website

Use the free tools

Once you’ve signed up for both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to upload your sitemap to both as well. For Google you’ll use a separate, handy-dandy submission tool while Bing has you submit your site the same way that you submitted your robots.txt file above.

4: Make Sure Your Site is Blazing Fast

One of the most important and often-overlooked facets of your website’s performance is site speed. Site speed can make or break your website, and a slow website can be disastrous for both converting prospective customers, and convincing search engines to show you in their results.

But you don’t have to take our word for it alone. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Forty Percent. That is a massive amount of potential traffic lost to a single, solvable problem.

Some improvements are incredibly easy to do such as image compression. By compressing your images to be a smaller file size, there will be less to load on each page. Less to load = faster site. It’s that simple.

If you haven’t checked out any of the other links, we wrote a massive guide to site speed and page speed. That’s broken down into chapters depending on what kind of technical support you have on staff or on retainer.

5: Site Navigation

Time for another easy win. Well..mostly easy but definitely all win. Navigation is used by prospects, customers, and search engines to get around your site. The ultimate test: it should make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

Navigation doesn’t just magically do that though!

Global Navigation which is at the top of each page sends really strong signals to both users and to search engines of what your site is about. What questions they could answer by visiting. If you use vague, interchangeable language that tells people little about what you offer or what makes your business special, you’re wasting a great opportunity to increase qualified traffic.

Order your navigation links and anchor text by importance from left to right. Ensure the text of the link is highlydescriptive. (Psst “Products” is not descriptive. However, “LandSpeeder Cars” is!)

6: Set Up Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Once you have your website ready to rock, it’s time to get it in front of the eagerly awaiting populace. But before your site’s going to show up on a Google results page, you’ll have to decide what you want that to look like, and what kinds of searches you want to show up for.

The different parts of the listing are called the title tag and the meta description.

Title Tags are exactly what they sound like: The title of the listing on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

The “meta description” is that brief description or preview of your site content that shows up under the clickable title. Title tags especially are incredibly important as they play a huge part in determining how your website ranks for any given Google search.

For example: say you’re making a website that sells lightsabers.

When writing the title tags and meta descriptions, you’ll want to make sure you include words that make it crystal clear what you are selling. Ideally, you’ll match the language and jargon of your title as closely as possible to the language your customers would use to search for your product.

For instance, your customers might head to Google and type something like “jedi lightsabers” or “sith lightsabers” more than “sith saber”. Using the terms that most align with your customers’ thinking and language is a great way to improve visibility and clicks.

An important distinction: While you want to be descriptive and clear, do not stuff your title tags and meta descriptions with the keywords just because you know that the word shows up in a lot of searches. Doing spammy things like this can reflect negatively on your brand to prospective customers. And Google’s been wise to this trick for many years, so there’s literally no upside to shoe-horning in a dozen instances of the same word.

7: N.A.P. in your schema

Remember when we said we weren’t writing code yet, but maybe later? Well we got there finally. Cringe away, but don’t stop reading.

It’s a truly teeny amount of code, and we’re going to use a tool to help you do it. (Tell no one and take all the credit!)

Put simply, “Structured Data” lets search engines understand your website better. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex agreed on a shared vocabulary to use a while back. We’re simply going to use that specific vocab to help them understand your site better.

This is where our secret weapon comes in, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper (long name for such a helpful tool).

You’ll be given two different options for the output: Microdata (the tool defaults to this) and JSON-LD.

Microdata will be attached to your html. Google will give you back the html code and highlight it so you (or a helpful developer) can see exactly where it goes in the code for your site. If you use JSON-LD, the code is also provided and goes into the “head” section of your page.

(Pssst, we also have a guide to implementing JSON-LD on your site. What can we say, we like to be helpful too.)

I’m using my current restaurant obsession in Seattle’s International District as our example. (I have a serious dumpling addiction)

I’ll be giving you the JSON-LD code because it is smaller and easier honestly. We could fill the entire article with html code and just highlight where the microdata would go…

Looks scary, until you realize that it's all done for you in the tool. Copy & Paste time.

8: Google My business

One of the most important determinants of success with search engines is maximizing the amount of space you occupy on a results page. This sounds over-simple, but it’s true. Beyond giving more specific information to suit all the different questions users might have had from store hours to available inventory, the more space on a search results page that you occupy, the less space there is for the next competitor to show up.

One product that helps in this regard is Google My Business. Now, you may not recognize “Google My Business” by its formal tool name (I didn’t either), but you most certainly have seen it in the wild.

When you search for a business on Google, it’s powering that great big name and logo on the right side of the screen.

Taking the time to use this tool and effectively claim your business gives you much more real estate to work with than just traditional search listings, so it is incredibly helpful when setting up an internet presence. This is especially true for cases where people are already familiar enough to search for your business by name.

Fortunately, setting up a Google My Business account is incredibly easy. All you have to do is go to the My Business home page, create an account, enter your businesses information, and voila! You now have My Business Page.

People will now be able to see core information about your business right on the results page, which will help increase your visibility and qualified traffic.

9: Fully Set Up Social Media Accounts

After you’ve got your website setup and are heading down the path of optimization (SEO is a long game), it’s time to think about social if you haven’t already. If you ask a random sample of people what social media sites are “the best”, you may get a random sample of answers: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest.

We’d like to make this easy and effective for you, not to mention that this is a massive topic, so for now we’ll stick with just one recommendation: only use social media that you will actually use.

Social media can be a fantastic tool to help expand your reach and grow your business, but only when it is actually used as the communication tool that it is. Meaning if you don’t manage it, you’re creating just another empty space that can distract from channels where you’re keeping information current, engaging with customers, etc. You start to see how setting up a social media account for your business and not using it can actually take away from your bottom line.

10: Set-up Google Analytics

Once you have the raw material of your site, your social media accounts, and perhaps some paid search or other ads, it’s time to evaluate what’s paying off, and how much.

Maybe you notice your phone ringing a little more, but if you have many new promotional efforts running at once, it’s impossible to know which are working without the proper measurement tools. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Google Analytics is a free (!!) platform that allows you to track just about every aspect of your website. Did that spike in visitors come from an ad or an organic search engine result? What site referred that great customer to you? What did the rest of your visitors do once they hit your site?

Whether it’s pageviews, conversions, or referral source, Google Analytics tracks everything. This allows you to make much more informed decisions regarding your website, your marketing, and improving your results proactively.

For a platform that can show you so much, and which costs literally $0.00, it takes next to nothing to get it set up. After setting yourself up with a Google Analytics account, there are only three broad but basic steps remaining:

On the Admin page, under the Properties tab, click on “Create a New Property”

Enter all of your website data to get your custom GA tracking code

Paste the following snippet right after the head tag on each page you would like to track.

Do make sure to replace “GA_Tracking_ID” with the custom ID you got in step two above. And if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough, Moz provides a great 101-level intro to Google Analytics including sample business questions you might want to answer.

Where to From Here?

You’ve got a site that’s far more visible than it was when you started. Your site is loading in half the time it was before. You’ve picked out a social media platform that fits your style and your schedule. And you know where the heck all that traffic is coming from, not to mention which parts of the traffic is converting into leads or customers.

When you’re ready to lean into that faster, more effective site, looking at how to advertise successfully in paid search (PPC) or paid social media is a great way to show up at the moments your prospective customers are considering a product or service like yours.

Until next time, happy Marketing from all of us here at Portent!

The Portent team, if were were George Lucas characters.

from FEED 9 MARKETING http://ift.tt/2Alizpp

[vidmktg30245]

10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business

10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business

Preface: This blog post is one in a series of articles that Portentites produced in a pair-writing experiment. It’s a little more broad than usual because it represents two subject matter experts from different practice areas, coming together to combine their knowledge for a broader look at the internet marketing topics that face real businesses. If you’re not familiar with pair writing, GatherContent does a great job of introducing the topic. We hope you enjoy it.

Alright, deep breath. It’s time to set up your business’s internet presence. And while you aren’t a Porg, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the internets love you too.

You win, Disney. I can't even with this thing.

1: HTTPS: Security and Trust for Prospective Customers

A question: “Should my site be HTTP or HTTPS?“ There are a number of compelling reasons to pick HTTPS. First, think of that extra “S” at the end as security in the mind of your customer. Your customers, just like you, want to be secure when they visit a website. Google, with its Chrome browser, overtly labels whether a website is secure or not both in the address bar and on SERPs.

If you have login functionality, accept credit cards, or even form submissions, HTTPS is essential. Google very publicly considers this a best practice, but really what do they know…oh right we want to rank there!

So Google likes it, it keeps your info private, it keeps your users’ info private, and it future-proofs your site. Winner, winner.

2: Robots.txt & Sitemap

Stick with me, we’re going to get a little technical. But don’t worry we’re not going to write code together, yet…maybe. Instead, you’re simply going to help search engines find your site.

Honestly, you’re just being really nice and giving them directions to where on the site they’re allowed to go. A handy little map of your site.

First, we’re going to create a file on your root domain (like a tree down in the roots). That map is going to tell search engines if we have any pages or areas on the site we don’t think they should go, so we minimize the search engine’s chance of getting lost. And we’re going to tell them where to find the map.

It will look something like this:

http://ift.tt/2ATToeC

We have a robots.txt guide with best practices and several common mistakes. This should help you troubleshoot any errors you find. Better yet, you might learn how to avoid the most common mistakes before making them.

Next up is the sitemap! There are a lot of free sitemap generator tools out ther. Most will only crawl 500 pages and generate a map from what they find. The xml sitemap file will live at the root just like the robots.txt file, but it will also be listed in your robots.txt:

http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

And the location will be spelled out in your robots.txt file like so:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

3: Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

Now you have a sitemap living on your site and recorded in your robots.txt file, so search engines will be falling all over themselves to get traffic to your site. Right??

Well…not quite. Search engines are getting smarter but they still need a little help finding the front door. Or any door really. Just like making the map itself with robots.txt, you are going to be very kind and let the search engines know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you gave them a map.

Setting up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is the perfect nexus of easy and free. While both search engines provide guides to site owners on how to get started and fully set-up, they are best summed up as:

Sign up for free account

Submit your website

Use the free tools

Once you’ve signed up for both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to upload your sitemap to both as well. For Google you’ll use a separate, handy-dandy submission tool while Bing has you submit your site the same way that you submitted your robots.txt file above.

4: Make Sure Your Site is Blazing Fast

One of the most important and often-overlooked facets of your website’s performance is site speed. Site speed can make or break your website, and a slow website can be disastrous for both converting prospective customers, and convincing search engines to show you in their results.

But you don’t have to take our word for it alone. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Forty Percent. That is a massive amount of potential traffic lost to a single, solvable problem.

Some improvements are incredibly easy to do such as image compression. By compressing your images to be a smaller file size, there will be less to load on each page. Less to load = faster site. It’s that simple.

If you haven’t checked out any of the other links, we wrote a massive guide to site speed and page speed. That’s broken down into chapters depending on what kind of technical support you have on staff or on retainer.

5: Site Navigation

Time for another easy win. Well..mostly easy but definitely all win. Navigation is used by prospects, customers, and search engines to get around your site. The ultimate test: it should make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

Navigation doesn’t just magically do that though!

Global Navigation which is at the top of each page sends really strong signals to both users and to search engines of what your site is about. What questions they could answer by visiting. If you use vague, interchangeable language that tells people little about what you offer or what makes your business special, you’re wasting a great opportunity to increase qualified traffic.

Order your navigation links and anchor text by importance from left to right. Ensure the text of the link is highlydescriptive. (Psst “Products” is not descriptive. However, “LandSpeeder Cars” is!)

6: Set Up Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Once you have your website ready to rock, it’s time to get it in front of the eagerly awaiting populace. But before your site’s going to show up on a Google results page, you’ll have to decide what you want that to look like, and what kinds of searches you want to show up for.

The different parts of the listing are called the title tag and the meta description.

Title Tags are exactly what they sound like: The title of the listing on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

The “meta description” is that brief description or preview of your site content that shows up under the clickable title. Title tags especially are incredibly important as they play a huge part in determining how your website ranks for any given Google search.

For example: say you’re making a website that sells lightsabers.

When writing the title tags and meta descriptions, you’ll want to make sure you include words that make it crystal clear what you are selling. Ideally, you’ll match the language and jargon of your title as closely as possible to the language your customers would use to search for your product.

For instance, your customers might head to Google and type something like “jedi lightsabers” or “sith lightsabers” more than “sith saber”. Using the terms that most align with your customers’ thinking and language is a great way to improve visibility and clicks.

An important distinction: While you want to be descriptive and clear, do not stuff your title tags and meta descriptions with the keywords just because you know that the word shows up in a lot of searches. Doing spammy things like this can reflect negatively on your brand to prospective customers. And Google’s been wise to this trick for many years, so there’s literally no upside to shoe-horning in a dozen instances of the same word.

7: N.A.P. in your schema

Remember when we said we weren’t writing code yet, but maybe later? Well we got there finally. Cringe away, but don’t stop reading.

It’s a truly teeny amount of code, and we’re going to use a tool to help you do it. (Tell no one and take all the credit!)

Put simply, “Structured Data” lets search engines understand your website better. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex agreed on a shared vocabulary to use a while back. We’re simply going to use that specific vocab to help them understand your site better.

This is where our secret weapon comes in, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper (long name for such a helpful tool).

You’ll be given two different options for the output: Microdata (the tool defaults to this) and JSON-LD.

Microdata will be attached to your html. Google will give you back the html code and highlight it so you (or a helpful developer) can see exactly where it goes in the code for your site. If you use JSON-LD, the code is also provided and goes into the “head” section of your page.

(Pssst, we also have a guide to implementing JSON-LD on your site. What can we say, we like to be helpful too.)

I’m using my current restaurant obsession in Seattle’s International District as our example. (I have a serious dumpling addiction)

I’ll be giving you the JSON-LD code because it is smaller and easier honestly. We could fill the entire article with html code and just highlight where the microdata would go…

Looks scary, until you realize that it's all done for you in the tool. Copy & Paste time.

8: Google My business

One of the most important determinants of success with search engines is maximizing the amount of space you occupy on a results page. This sounds over-simple, but it’s true. Beyond giving more specific information to suit all the different questions users might have had from store hours to available inventory, the more space on a search results page that you occupy, the less space there is for the next competitor to show up.

One product that helps in this regard is Google My Business. Now, you may not recognize “Google My Business” by its formal tool name (I didn’t either), but you most certainly have seen it in the wild.

When you search for a business on Google, it’s powering that great big name and logo on the right side of the screen.

Taking the time to use this tool and effectively claim your business gives you much more real estate to work with than just traditional search listings, so it is incredibly helpful when setting up an internet presence. This is especially true for cases where people are already familiar enough to search for your business by name.

Fortunately, setting up a Google My Business account is incredibly easy. All you have to do is go to the My Business home page, create an account, enter your businesses information, and voila! You now have My Business Page.

People will now be able to see core information about your business right on the results page, which will help increase your visibility and qualified traffic.

9: Fully Set Up Social Media Accounts

After you’ve got your website setup and are heading down the path of optimization (SEO is a long game), it’s time to think about social if you haven’t already. If you ask a random sample of people what social media sites are “the best”, you may get a random sample of answers: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest.

We’d like to make this easy and effective for you, not to mention that this is a massive topic, so for now we’ll stick with just one recommendation: only use social media that you will actually use.

Social media can be a fantastic tool to help expand your reach and grow your business, but only when it is actually used as the communication tool that it is. Meaning if you don’t manage it, you’re creating just another empty space that can distract from channels where you’re keeping information current, engaging with customers, etc. You start to see how setting up a social media account for your business and not using it can actually take away from your bottom line.

10: Set-up Google Analytics

Once you have the raw material of your site, your social media accounts, and perhaps some paid search or other ads, it’s time to evaluate what’s paying off, and how much.

Maybe you notice your phone ringing a little more, but if you have many new promotional efforts running at once, it’s impossible to know which are working without the proper measurement tools. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Google Analytics is a free (!!) platform that allows you to track just about every aspect of your website. Did that spike in visitors come from an ad or an organic search engine result? What site referred that great customer to you? What did the rest of your visitors do once they hit your site?

Whether it’s pageviews, conversions, or referral source, Google Analytics tracks everything. This allows you to make much more informed decisions regarding your website, your marketing, and improving your results proactively.

For a platform that can show you so much, and which costs literally $0.00, it takes next to nothing to get it set up. After setting yourself up with a Google Analytics account, there are only three broad but basic steps remaining:

On the Admin page, under the Properties tab, click on “Create a New Property”

Enter all of your website data to get your custom GA tracking code

Paste the following snippet right after the head tag on each page you would like to track.

Do make sure to replace “GA_Tracking_ID” with the custom ID you got in step two above. And if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough, Moz provides a great 101-level intro to Google Analytics including sample business questions you might want to answer.

Where to From Here?

You’ve got a site that’s far more visible than it was when you started. Your site is loading in half the time it was before. You’ve picked out a social media platform that fits your style and your schedule. And you know where the heck all that traffic is coming from, not to mention which parts of the traffic is converting into leads or customers.

When you’re ready to lean into that faster, more effective site, looking at how to advertise successfully in paid search (PPC) or paid social media is a great way to show up at the moments your prospective customers are considering a product or service like yours.

Until next time, happy Marketing from all of us here at Portent!

The Portent team, if were were George Lucas characters.

http://ift.tt/2Alizpp

[realtor10036]

10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business

10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business

Preface: This blog post is one in a series of articles that Portentites produced in a pair-writing experiment. It’s a little more broad than usual because it represents two subject matter experts from different practice areas, coming together to combine their knowledge for a broader look at the internet marketing topics that face real businesses. If you’re not familiar with pair writing, GatherContent does a great job of introducing the topic. We hope you enjoy it.

Alright, deep breath. It’s time to set up your business’s internet presence. And while you aren’t a Porg, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the internets love you too.

You win, Disney. I can't even with this thing.

1: HTTPS: Security and Trust for Prospective Customers

A question: “Should my site be HTTP or HTTPS?“ There are a number of compelling reasons to pick HTTPS. First, think of that extra “S” at the end as security in the mind of your customer. Your customers, just like you, want to be secure when they visit a website. Google, with its Chrome browser, overtly labels whether a website is secure or not both in the address bar and on SERPs.

If you have login functionality, accept credit cards, or even form submissions, HTTPS is essential. Google very publicly considers this a best practice, but really what do they know…oh right we want to rank there!

So Google likes it, it keeps your info private, it keeps your users’ info private, and it future-proofs your site. Winner, winner.

2: Robots.txt & Sitemap

Stick with me, we’re going to get a little technical. But don’t worry we’re not going to write code together, yet…maybe. Instead, you’re simply going to help search engines find your site.

Honestly, you’re just being really nice and giving them directions to where on the site they’re allowed to go. A handy little map of your site.

First, we’re going to create a file on your root domain (like a tree down in the roots). That map is going to tell search engines if we have any pages or areas on the site we don’t think they should go, so we minimize the search engine’s chance of getting lost. And we’re going to tell them where to find the map.

It will look something like this:

http://ift.tt/2ATToeC

We have a robots.txt guide with best practices and several common mistakes. This should help you troubleshoot any errors you find. Better yet, you might learn how to avoid the most common mistakes before making them.

Next up is the sitemap! There are a lot of free sitemap generator tools out ther. Most will only crawl 500 pages and generate a map from what they find. The xml sitemap file will live at the root just like the robots.txt file, but it will also be listed in your robots.txt:

http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

And the location will be spelled out in your robots.txt file like so:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://ift.tt/2C32aWT

3: Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

Now you have a sitemap living on your site and recorded in your robots.txt file, so search engines will be falling all over themselves to get traffic to your site. Right??

Well…not quite. Search engines are getting smarter but they still need a little help finding the front door. Or any door really. Just like making the map itself with robots.txt, you are going to be very kind and let the search engines know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you gave them a map.

Setting up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is the perfect nexus of easy and free. While both search engines provide guides to site owners on how to get started and fully set-up, they are best summed up as:

Sign up for free account

Submit your website

Use the free tools

Once you’ve signed up for both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to upload your sitemap to both as well. For Google you’ll use a separate, handy-dandy submission tool while Bing has you submit your site the same way that you submitted your robots.txt file above.

4: Make Sure Your Site is Blazing Fast

One of the most important and often-overlooked facets of your website’s performance is site speed. Site speed can make or break your website, and a slow website can be disastrous for both converting prospective customers, and convincing search engines to show you in their results.

But you don’t have to take our word for it alone. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Forty Percent. That is a massive amount of potential traffic lost to a single, solvable problem.

Some improvements are incredibly easy to do such as image compression. By compressing your images to be a smaller file size, there will be less to load on each page. Less to load = faster site. It’s that simple.

If you haven’t checked out any of the other links, we wrote a massive guide to site speed and page speed. That’s broken down into chapters depending on what kind of technical support you have on staff or on retainer.

5: Site Navigation

Time for another easy win. Well..mostly easy but definitely all win. Navigation is used by prospects, customers, and search engines to get around your site. The ultimate test: it should make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

Navigation doesn’t just magically do that though!

Global Navigation which is at the top of each page sends really strong signals to both users and to search engines of what your site is about. What questions they could answer by visiting. If you use vague, interchangeable language that tells people little about what you offer or what makes your business special, you’re wasting a great opportunity to increase qualified traffic.

Order your navigation links and anchor text by importance from left to right. Ensure the text of the link is highlydescriptive. (Psst “Products” is not descriptive. However, “LandSpeeder Cars” is!)

6: Set Up Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Once you have your website ready to rock, it’s time to get it in front of the eagerly awaiting populace. But before your site’s going to show up on a Google results page, you’ll have to decide what you want that to look like, and what kinds of searches you want to show up for.

The different parts of the listing are called the title tag and the meta description.

Title Tags are exactly what they sound like: The title of the listing on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

The “meta description” is that brief description or preview of your site content that shows up under the clickable title. Title tags especially are incredibly important as they play a huge part in determining how your website ranks for any given Google search.

For example: say you’re making a website that sells lightsabers.

When writing the title tags and meta descriptions, you’ll want to make sure you include words that make it crystal clear what you are selling. Ideally, you’ll match the language and jargon of your title as closely as possible to the language your customers would use to search for your product.

For instance, your customers might head to Google and type something like “jedi lightsabers” or “sith lightsabers” more than “sith saber”. Using the terms that most align with your customers’ thinking and language is a great way to improve visibility and clicks.

An important distinction: While you want to be descriptive and clear, do not stuff your title tags and meta descriptions with the keywords just because you know that the word shows up in a lot of searches. Doing spammy things like this can reflect negatively on your brand to prospective customers. And Google’s been wise to this trick for many years, so there’s literally no upside to shoe-horning in a dozen instances of the same word.

7: N.A.P. in your schema

Remember when we said we weren’t writing code yet, but maybe later? Well we got there finally. Cringe away, but don’t stop reading.

It’s a truly teeny amount of code, and we’re going to use a tool to help you do it. (Tell no one and take all the credit!)

Put simply, “Structured Data” lets search engines understand your website better. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex agreed on a shared vocabulary to use a while back. We’re simply going to use that specific vocab to help them understand your site better.

This is where our secret weapon comes in, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper (long name for such a helpful tool).

You’ll be given two different options for the output: Microdata (the tool defaults to this) and JSON-LD.

Microdata will be attached to your html. Google will give you back the html code and highlight it so you (or a helpful developer) can see exactly where it goes in the code for your site. If you use JSON-LD, the code is also provided and goes into the “head” section of your page.

(Pssst, we also have a guide to implementing JSON-LD on your site. What can we say, we like to be helpful too.)

I’m using my current restaurant obsession in Seattle’s International District as our example. (I have a serious dumpling addiction)

I’ll be giving you the JSON-LD code because it is smaller and easier honestly. We could fill the entire article with html code and just highlight where the microdata would go…

Looks scary, until you realize that it's all done for you in the tool. Copy & Paste time.

8: Google My business

One of the most important determinants of success with search engines is maximizing the amount of space you occupy on a results page. This sounds over-simple, but it’s true. Beyond giving more specific information to suit all the different questions users might have had from store hours to available inventory, the more space on a search results page that you occupy, the less space there is for the next competitor to show up.

One product that helps in this regard is Google My Business. Now, you may not recognize “Google My Business” by its formal tool name (I didn’t either), but you most certainly have seen it in the wild.

When you search for a business on Google, it’s powering that great big name and logo on the right side of the screen.

Taking the time to use this tool and effectively claim your business gives you much more real estate to work with than just traditional search listings, so it is incredibly helpful when setting up an internet presence. This is especially true for cases where people are already familiar enough to search for your business by name.

Fortunately, setting up a Google My Business account is incredibly easy. All you have to do is go to the My Business home page, create an account, enter your businesses information, and voila! You now have My Business Page.

People will now be able to see core information about your business right on the results page, which will help increase your visibility and qualified traffic.

9: Fully Set Up Social Media Accounts

After you’ve got your website setup and are heading down the path of optimization (SEO is a long game), it’s time to think about social if you haven’t already. If you ask a random sample of people what social media sites are “the best”, you may get a random sample of answers: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest.

We’d like to make this easy and effective for you, not to mention that this is a massive topic, so for now we’ll stick with just one recommendation: only use social media that you will actually use.

Social media can be a fantastic tool to help expand your reach and grow your business, but only when it is actually used as the communication tool that it is. Meaning if you don’t manage it, you’re creating just another empty space that can distract from channels where you’re keeping information current, engaging with customers, etc. You start to see how setting up a social media account for your business and not using it can actually take away from your bottom line.

10: Set-up Google Analytics

Once you have the raw material of your site, your social media accounts, and perhaps some paid search or other ads, it’s time to evaluate what’s paying off, and how much.

Maybe you notice your phone ringing a little more, but if you have many new promotional efforts running at once, it’s impossible to know which are working without the proper measurement tools. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Google Analytics is a free (!!) platform that allows you to track just about every aspect of your website. Did that spike in visitors come from an ad or an organic search engine result? What site referred that great customer to you? What did the rest of your visitors do once they hit your site?

Whether it’s pageviews, conversions, or referral source, Google Analytics tracks everything. This allows you to make much more informed decisions regarding your website, your marketing, and improving your results proactively.

For a platform that can show you so much, and which costs literally $0.00, it takes next to nothing to get it set up. After setting yourself up with a Google Analytics account, there are only three broad but basic steps remaining:

On the Admin page, under the Properties tab, click on “Create a New Property”

Enter all of your website data to get your custom GA tracking code

Paste the following snippet right after the head tag on each page you would like to track.

Do make sure to replace “GA_Tracking_ID” with the custom ID you got in step two above. And if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough, Moz provides a great 101-level intro to Google Analytics including sample business questions you might want to answer.

Where to From Here?

You’ve got a site that’s far more visible than it was when you started. Your site is loading in half the time it was before. You’ve picked out a social media platform that fits your style and your schedule. And you know where the heck all that traffic is coming from, not to mention which parts of the traffic is converting into leads or customers.

When you’re ready to lean into that faster, more effective site, looking at how to advertise successfully in paid search (PPC) or paid social media is a great way to show up at the moments your prospective customers are considering a product or service like yours.

Until next time, happy Marketing from all of us here at Portent!

The Portent team, if were were George Lucas characters.

http://ift.tt/2Alizpp