#the nora alex one i rotated too

[elipheleh]

some rwrb phone lockscreens/wallpapers. (part 2 part 3 part 4)

if you like/use them please reblog, i’d really appreciate it. the best way for others to see this is if people reblog the post rather than just liking it.

[onthewaytosomewhere]

WIP Acrostic Game

ok - so i got a few tags for this over the weekend (and i do luv me a tag game) so i have multiple words for it luckily some of those words share letters - so they'll also share sentences - in THE ONLY FIC I'M OPENNG TODAY - BCUZ IT NEEDS TO BE FINISHED LOLZ (the were/vamp coffee shop (with bonus soulmates that snuck up on me) fic) - also hoping this will make me get ready to whip the words out for this thing lolz

💚thanks bunches for the tags @cha-melodius @caterpills @tailsbeth-writes @fullerthanskippy @anincompletelist

@littlemisskittentoes @kiwiana-writes @sophie1973 @stellarmeadow

HUGE OPEN TAG TO ANYONE WHO MAY NOT HAVE ALREADY DONE THIS OVER THE WEEKEND (and a few tags under the cut for a few peeps just in case lolz)

Rules: From your story/WIP, find sentences that start with each letter of the given word. (oops i forgot the rules lolz)

MY WORD(S): BOLT, PACE, FORK, FIRST, RUSH, FAME, FANG, RINGS - YOUR WORD: SHOP

B -Before becoming one himself, his only contact with any of them had been his sister, June, and her wife, Nora. O -Only a few months in, he has an established overnight rotation of regulars, and they all help each other navigate life in the city. L -Let’s just say that my last case was against some fuckwad werewolf fratboys who had beaten my client, and I realized I wasn’t above a little vigilante justice if they hadn’t been found guilty. T - To this day, he’s afraid that if that hadn’t been the case, he might not have been able to fight the urge to get justice of his own for her. (the fact that there's 2 sentences about this from 2 different parts makes me giggle lolz)

P - Please forget I said that. A - Alex, sometimes, on slow nights, finds himself drawn to just standing behind the counter and watching as Henry is engrossed in what he’s working on that night. C - Completing the bond does not actually require ‘third-date activities’ if you so choose. E - Either way, he feels as if they’re one—as if they’re not separate beings but two parts of one whole.

F - From what we were told when we had you checked out, the fact that you’re a werewolf is the only reason you are alive currently. O - SEE ABOVE R -Raf understands as a lycan himself, but having been born one, he has more control, not just from the years of experience. K - NONE

F - SEE ABOVE I - I was here in this club, and there was this guy … R - SEE ABOVE S - So, while the sign reads ‘closed’ after 9 pm, you can say that is when the real “nightlife” happens. T - SEE ABOVE

R - SEE ABOVE U - Unfortunately, what Liam told you about my family and their messed-up rules about claiming vamps we sire is true S - SEE ABOVE H - He hates to think about it, but he still wonders if the realization hadn’t happened if he might still be working his way to partner in Raf’s law firm.

F - SEE ABOVE A - SEE ABOVE M - Might as well get a jump on making sure everything is ready for Nora and the morning crowd, as it looks like this will be one of his slower nights. E - SEE ABOVE

F - SEE ABOVE A - SEE ABOVE N - Nora thinks the irony that Alex’s big bi-revelation leads to him being turned means something. G - Granted, some of it he ‘overhears’ due to enhanced senses, but anything too sensitive, he’s learned to keep to himself.

R - SEE ABOVE I - SEE ABOVE N - SEE ABOVE G - SEE ABOVE S - So he waits for Henry to speak again, letting the silence hang between them. (this letter was already used as well but i felt bad this word had no sentences lolz)

💚tag ur it!! @adreamareads @typicalopposite @hgejfmw-hgejhsf @thinkof-england @piratefalls

@priincebutt @judasofsuburbia @suseagull04

just in case you didn't already do this!! 😘💚

now i'm off to switch the laundry and finish this thing lolz

[maxbegone]

hello, hello, it's been a helluva week. it's going to be a tough one for personal reasons, but i hope the rest of your week is well. some good news: this is the last WIP snippet you will be getting from me. the apocalypse AU is finished, minus some editing and an epilogue, and will be out soon. in the meanwhile, enjoy this last sneak peek:

Apocalypse or not, Alex still fucking hates getting up early.

Especially when it involves getting hit in the face.

He groans, swatting his arms blindly as he tries to roll over, only to receive a pillow to the face again.

“Fuck, alright, I’m up!” He whines, snatching it from June, who’s standing next to his bed with a smile on her face. He stuffs the pillow into his lap and folds his arms over it so she can’t grab it again. “Can I help you?”

“It’s almost ten,” she tells him.

“So?”

“So. You’re on watch in an hour.”

He blinks at her, his brain still sluggish from sleep. “What’s today?”

“Tuesday.”

“I’m not on watch today.”

“Yes you are. We switched.”

“Uh, when did that happen exactly?”

“When I looked at the rotation chart and saw that I was on watch and then switched it because I didn’t want to do it.”

“What the hell, June!”

She laughs. “Hey! You owe me one! I cleaned the barn for you last week.”

“I was supposed to ride Olaya today and help Dad with some stuff.”

“You can ride Olaya later,” June tells him as she takes a seat on the edge of his bed. “And I’ll help Dad because I’m his favorite kid.”

Alex gives her a flat look. “His favorite kid is Nora.”

June nods in agreement and gives his legs a shove. “Get up.”

He flops back down dramatically. “You’re the worst, bug.”

“Love you, too. Now get your ass up.”

He does, only after he chucks the pillow at the back of her head while she’s retreating from the room. He gets dressed and shoves a baseball hat over his messy hair before heading downstairs to grab something for breakfast. He finds his mom standing at the counter reading with a half-eaten piece of toast in her hand.

“Hey, sugar,” she greets as he enters, smiling as she accepts a kiss on the cheek. “Glad to see you’re finally up. There are eggs for you by the stove.”

“You can thank June for that.” The eggs are lukewarm at best, having only been covered by another flipped-over plate, but they’re a welcome sight. He shovels a forkful into his mouth and takes the chair at the head of the table. “She chose violence this morning.”

Ellen barely looks up as she says, “Manners, baby,” and he swallows his bite before continuing.

“She switched our shifts, so now I’m taking watch.”

“I know, she told me.”

Alex gawks at her. “She did? And you let her?”

“What’s wrong? She said you agreed to it.”

“No! She swapped our names on the chart and then beat me up!”

Ellen laughs. “It’s not like you two haven’t done this before,” she says. “Besides, she’s already gone for the morning.”

Alex slumps back into his chair and rolls his eyes, stabbing at his eggs with his fork. “Couldn’t you make the executive decision to call her back here so she can do it instead? I had stuff I wanted to get done today.”

“How urgent is it?” She asks, and oh, okay. His mom and June are ganging up on him. Now he gets it.

He huffs.

She walks across the room and presses a kiss into his hair. “Watch is important. I’ll tell her she has to do your next scheduled shift as well as her own, but for now, it’s what you have to deal with today.”

“You think this is funny, don’t you?” He asks, angling his head to look at her, and she gives him a wink.

“A little.”

“I thought you were in charge of this house or something.”

“It’s a team effort and you know it,” she tells him pointedly, and Alex just finds himself accepting defeat.

He quickly eats the rest of his breakfast and takes an apple to throw in his bag for later. “I’m gonna load up and head over.”

“Alright, darlin’, be safe.”

“Oh, you know me.”

[dearophelia]

Writer's first line meme

Rules: post the first sentence of your last ten fics. If you haven’t written ten fics, share as many first sentences as you have.

Tagged by @swaps55! Tagging @vhenadahls @theoriginalladya @starrybouquet @that-wildwolf and anyone else who wants to do this!

I have...not written ten things total in the past several years so I'm just gonna go with a liberal interpretation of "most recent" on AO3.

strange is the night where black stars rise (stargate, sam, the one with hastur)

She’s thrown out of the wormhole. By sheer luck, her shoulder, not her head, slams into the stone steps. Sam protectively tucks her head down as far as she can and she comes to a rolling stop on the dry, dead grass.

waves are universal (the heaven in hiding remix) (stargate, sam/jack, the one with time travel and alternate realities)

There’s a break in the guard rotation. Now or never.

church of scars (grey's anatomy, addison, the one with ghosts; unfinished)

“Are you sure?” Jake asks. He slowly zooms the spoon of applesauce toward Paige. Their daughter claps her hands in delight and shows no intention of opening her mouth for food.

i'll find your lips in the street lights (svu, olivia/barba, the one where barba is ace)

If Rafael’s learned one thing in his time with SVU (and he’s learned a lot, far more than he ever thought possible, but he’s trying to keep this to a list of one), it’s that adults telling each other the truth solves a whole host of problems.

gonna set your flag on fire (mass effect, liv/garrus, the one with nora; on pause)

Later, when it’s all over and Nora’s sitting on the back porch of her grandmother’s house watching the sun rise over the lake, she’ll think she should’ve told James she’d take the eezo job.

in this twilight our choices seal our fate (the song in the house of night remix) (svu, olivia/ellliot, the one with too much religious imagery)

Olivia stands at the edge of the driveway just inside the yellow tape. She takes a slow, steady breath. A breath to center herself, a breath to observe the scene. There will be pictures later and she’ll stare at them long enough and hard enough to imprint the front yard on her retinas, but this breath captures the scene alive.

dropsonde (singers in a lower choir remix) (grey's anatomy, addison, addison/alex, the one with the kid; as finished as it's gonna be)

Addison stares at the pair of scuffed brown heels scattered across the entryway in front of her. She stares harder, trying to make them into something they’re not. But the living room lamps are on timers during the week and the ugly one on the end table turns on, illuminating a woman’s shirt tossed over the back of the couch and a pair of black men’s shoes toed off in the hall.

[bisexualalienss]

liz loses herself in trying to bring back max and once he is back she loses herself in their relationship and she does she doesn’t know who she is anymore so she drowns herself in her work to try to find herself again, but it doesn't work and she's terrified....

[berniesrevolution]

WASHINGTON POST

He had been afraid to go outside since his mother was detained in an immigration raid 14 days earlier, but now someone was pounding on the front door of their trailer. Alex Galvez, 12, waited until the knocking stopped and then cracked the door open to find a small flier left behind on the top step. He carried it into the kitchen and read it to his older sister. “Emergency giveaway outside the Post Office! Free food in your time of need!”

“I’m not going,” Alex said, once he’d finished reading the flier. It had been the promise of free doughnuts that enticed his mother and dozens of her co-workers out of the planting fields and into the break room that day, where instead they had been met by 200 federal agents with plastic handcuffs and guns. Alex folded up the flier and tossed it onto the table.

“I’m sorry, but I think you need to go,” said his sister, Estefany, 18. “We could always use the food.”

“No. I don’t want to.”

“We can’t hide in here forever,” she said, handing him an empty plastic bag. “I have to go to work. You’re the only one who can do it.”

Since the day of the raid, they had been staying in the trailer with a rotation of older relatives — two more children adjusting to a life without their parents as a result of U.S. immigration policies. Even as President Trump and his administration promise to reunite families separated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the U.S. border, a similar crisis continues unabated within the country’s interior, where children are separated from their undocumented parents with little scrutiny and increasing frequency.

In the past few months, ICE has carried out the three biggest workplace immigration raids of the past decade, including one on June 5 at a nursery here in rural Ohio, where 114 gardeners, florists and other workers were detained and put into court proceedings for deportation. Many of them had lived for several years in a Norwalk trailer park of 74 homes known as Little Mexico, where now aid workers estimate that more than 90 children are missing one parent and at least 20 are left with no parent at all.

One of them is Alex, an American citizen like most children in the trailer park, with a wardrobe of Cleveland Cavaliers T-shirts and frosted tips dyed orange at the barbershop inside Walmart. He’d spent all 12 of his years in Norwalk, population 17,000, and for much of that time he’d lived in the trailer parks of Little Mexico, in a beige double-wide with his sister and mother, Nora Galvez, who first came to the United States in 1999. The air outside their trailer smelled of smoke and rubber from the neighboring pallet factory. The favorite community soccer field was in fact a gravel lot. But Alex knew every one of the 74 families in the two trailer parks, and he and his friends could wander freely on their bikes from one trailer into the next. Many people in conservative Norwalk regarded Little Mexico as an ugly annex, a place to be left alone, but to Alex that meant it had always felt peaceful and undisturbed.

Now he walked out of the trailer with his empty shopping bag into a scene that looked to him like something out of “Fortnite,” his favorite apocalyptic video game. There were gardens of dying flowers and trash cans overloaded with uncollected garbage. More than a dozen trailers had been abandoned in the hours after the raid, and many of them had windows left open or toys scattered in the yard. Five residents of Little Mexico had been deported, and 34 others remained in detention, including Alex’s mother. Several more residents had packed up and fled Ohio that night, after a rumor spread that ICE was also planning to raid the trailer park. Those who remained were mostly out of a job or too afraid to go to work, and after two weeks of unpaid bills, some had also lost their electricity.

(Residents of the Jefferson Trailer Park gather to receive donated food, clothing and diapers in Norwalk, Ohio. The park, known locally as Little Mexico, is populated almost entirely by immigrants from the Mexican state of Chiapas.)

A ghost town,” Alex called it, as he made his way toward the one-room post office at the center of the park, but what bothered him more than the rows of darkened trailers was imagining what might be happening inside. He had heard about the 27-year-old who mysteriously stopped eating or speaking in the days after his sister was detained in the raid, eventually dying in the hospital a week later. He knew about the 23-year-old who had become suicidal after his girlfriend’s family decided to flee for Mexico, hanging a noose outside of his trailer until a relative took him to a hospital.

On the exterior walls of the post office, Alex saw a few new brochures for suicide hotlines and free mental-health counseling. A few dozen people were gathered outside, mostly children, young mothers and several volunteers from local nonprofit organizations. One of them handed out crayons and bubbles to children. A woman distributed crates of eggs from the back of her truck. A nurse checked residents’ blood pressure. Volunteers came up to Alex offering pizza, milk, vegetables and books, until he began to politely wave them away.

“We’re fine,” he said. “We don’t really need much.”

“Are you alone now?” one volunteer asked, and Alex shook his head.

“I’m with my sister,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching for his shoulder, tears welling in her eyes. “I can’t believe this is happening to you. It’s unthinkable.”

“Thanks,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ve been through it before.”

(Continue Reading)

[newstfionline]

“Are you alone now?”

By Eli Saslow, Washington Post, June 30, 2018

NORWALK, Ohio--He had been afraid to go outside since his mother was detained in an immigration raid 14 days earlier, but now someone was pounding on the front door of their trailer. Alex Galvez, 12, waited until the knocking stopped and then cracked the door open to find a small flier left behind on the top step. He carried it into the kitchen and read it to his older sister. “Emergency giveaway outside the Post Office! Free food in your time of need!”

“I’m not going,” Alex said, once he’d finished reading the flier. It had been the promise of free doughnuts that enticed his mother and dozens of her co-workers out of the planting fields and into the break room that day, where instead they had been met by 200 federal agents with plastic handcuffs and guns. Alex folded up the flier and tossed it onto the table.

“I’m sorry, but I think you need to go,” said his sister, Estefany, 18. “We could always use the food.”

“No. I don’t want to.”

“We can’t hide in here forever,” she said, handing him an empty plastic bag. “I have to go to work. You’re the only one who can do it.”

Since the day of the raid, they had been staying in the trailer with a rotation of older relatives--two more children adjusting to a life without their parents as a result of U.S. immigration policies. Even as President Trump and his administration promise to reunite families separated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the U.S. border, a similar crisis continues unabated within the country’s interior, where children are separated from their undocumented parents with little scrutiny and increasing frequency.

In the past few months, ICE has carried out the three biggest workplace immigration raids of the past decade, including one on June 5 at a nursery here in rural Ohio, where 114 gardeners, florists and other workers were detained and put into court proceedings for deportation. Many of them had lived for several years in a Norwalk trailer park of 74 homes known as Little Mexico, where now aid workers estimate that more than 90 children are missing one parent and at least 20 are left with no parent at all.

One of them is Alex, an American citizen like most children in the trailer park, with a wardrobe of Cleveland Cavaliers T-shirts and frosted tips dyed orange at the barbershop inside Walmart. He’d spent all 12 of his years in Norwalk, population 17,000, and for much of that time he’d lived in the trailer parks of Little Mexico, in a beige double-wide with his sister and mother, Nora Galvez, who first came to the United States in 1999. The air outside their trailer smelled of smoke and rubber from the neighboring pallet factory. The favorite community soccer field was in fact a gravel lot. But Alex knew every one of the 74 families in the two trailer parks, and he and his friends could wander freely on their bikes from one trailer into the next. Many people in conservative Norwalk regarded Little Mexico as an ugly annex, a place to be left alone, but to Alex that meant it had always felt peaceful and undisturbed.

Now he walked out of the trailer with his empty shopping bag into a scene that looked to him like something out of “Fortnite,” his favorite apocalyptic video game. There were gardens of dying flowers and trash cans overloaded with uncollected garbage. More than a dozen trailers had been abandoned in the hours after the raid, and many of them had windows left open or toys scattered in the yard. Five residents of Little Mexico had been deported, and 34 others remained in detention, including Alex’s mother. Several more residents had packed up and fled Ohio that night, after a rumor spread that ICE was also planning to raid the trailer park. Those who remained were mostly out of a job or too afraid to go to work, and after two weeks of unpaid bills, some had also lost their electricity.

“A ghost town,” Alex called it, as he made his way toward the one-room post office at the center of the park, but what bothered him more than the rows of darkened trailers was imagining what might be happening inside. He had heard about the 27-year-old who mysteriously stopped eating or speaking in the days after his sister was detained in the raid, eventually dying in the hospital a week later. He knew about the 23-year-old who had become suicidal after his girlfriend’s family decided to flee for Mexico, hanging a noose outside of his trailer until a relative took him to a hospital.

On the exterior walls of the post office, Alex saw a few new brochures for suicide hotlines and free mental-health counseling. A few dozen people were gathered outside, mostly children, young mothers and several volunteers from local nonprofit organizations. One of them handed out crayons and bubbles to children. A woman distributed crates of eggs from the back of her truck. A nurse checked residents’ blood pressure. Volunteers came up to Alex offering pizza, milk, vegetables and books, until he began to politely wave them away.

“We’re fine,” he said. “We don’t really need much.”

“Are you alone now?” one volunteer asked, and Alex shook his head.

“I’m with my sister,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching for his shoulder, tears welling in her eyes. “I can’t believe this is happening to you. It’s unthinkable.”

“Thanks,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ve been through it before.”

One of the things that had confused him during the past few weeks was the shock he sometimes saw reflected back at him in strangers’ faces--the volunteers who toured the trailer park in utter disbelief, or the TV anchors who broke down in the middle of their live broadcasts from the U.S. border. They said separating a parent from a child was cruel and un-American. They said the United States was in the midst of a singular humanitarian crisis. They said these were the actions of a country they no longer recognized. But, to Alex, the act of family separation seemed quintessentially American. It was the cornerstone of his American experience.

His father had been deported when Alex was 3, yanked from work during a raid at Casa Fiesta, a local Mexican restaurant, and then flown back to Chiapas. An uncle had been deported two years later, and then an aunt had left for Mexico a few months after that, forcing their two children to stay for a little while in Alex’s trailer. At age 8, he and his mother had been pulled over on their way home from Walmart by ICE agents, who detained them in a holding facility overnight before releasing them, since Nora was a longtime Ohio resident with no criminal record and therefore, according to her court paperwork, “not a priority for removal.” Four other relatives had been deported or fled to Mexico in the years since then, a family reshaped again and again by separation. Alex’s father remained in Chiapas, with a new wife and two half brothers Alex had never met. His half sisters had come and gone between Mexico and the United States. The only person Alex had never been separated from was his mother.

So that night, when his sister Estefany came home alone from work at Corso’s Flower and Garden Center, Alex suspected what had happened, even as his sister began filling in the details: ICE agents had arrived at 7:15 a.m., wearing camouflage and tactical gear, swarming the greenhouses with the help of barking K9s and helicopters, rounding up several hundred employees and then separating them into two lines. Estefany, who was born in Ohio, had gone into one line for U.S. citizens, and her mother had gone into the line for undocumented workers. Agents had handcuffed her mother with plastic zip ties and led her toward a bus, and Estefany had run to join her, trying to convince ICE agents that she, too, was undocumented. But inside her wallet was a U.S. Social Security card, so agents led Estefany back into the other line for citizens as her mother boarded the bus. Nora shouted over her shoulder that there was $140 cash in the house and that Estefany needed to remind Alex to wash out his knee. He had skinned it a few days earlier in a bike accident, a small surface wound. “Make sure he washes it twice a day,” Nora called out, before the bus pulled away.

Estefany was old enough to act as Alex’s legal guardian, and she had been trying her best to take care of him with the help of other relatives, even as she was learning how to take care of herself. She had originally applied to Corso’s for a summer job, hoping to make a little money before starting her final year of high school, but now she was the family’s primary earner, with no plans to return to school. She had written her first rental check and returned to work at the nursery wearing sunglasses big enough to hide her puffy eyes. Other relatives were helping with cooking, child care and errands, but Estefany considered herself responsible for Alex, even now, as the sky darkened outside their trailer on their 15th night alone.

“It’s getting late,” she told him. “We need to be better about going to bed.”

“I know,” he said,

“You should get ready,” she said.

“In a little while,” he told her.

They had been sharing a room for the past weeks, relying on each other’s company to make it through the night, since both of them struggled to sleep. On the first night after the raid, they had driven at 2 a.m. to the Customs and Border Protection station in Port Clinton, Ohio, to ask if their mother was inside, but Estefany said nobody would tell them. On the second night they had driven back, and this time they were told that Nora was inside but they couldn’t see her. On the third night they had tried one more time, and when they were stopped at the door Estefany had lost her patience. “Who benefits from this?” she remembered asking. Was it American taxpayers, who were paying to finance the raid and resulting deportations? Or American workers, most of whom were so disinterested in low-paying farm work that Ohio had announced a crisis work shortage of 15,000 agricultural jobs? Or Corso’s Nursery, a ­family-owned business now missing 40 percent of its employees?

She wanted to know, out of 114 minimum-wage workers detained at Corso’s, how many were narcos, or rapists, or cartel members, or killers for MS-13? “These were just hard-working people, making $9 an hour and going about their lives,” she remembered saying.

Alex, meanwhile, had decided to write a letter to ICE. His mother was still in detention, waiting for her first court date on the possible path toward deportation, and he thought maybe he could still help her. “The only thing my Mom ever did was work,” he had written. “She loved me so much. I can’t live without my Mom. I don’t have anybody but her. I have been crying every day. I can’t sleep.”

“Come on. Let’s go to bed,” Estefany said again. It was nearing midnight, but Alex turned on a Harry Potter movie.

“A little bit longer,” he said, and Estefany sat down next to him.

Alex was still on the couch the next morning, wrapped under a blanket and watching soccer on TV when his phone rang. He looked down at the restricted number and waved to his sister. “It’s her!” he said. Then he answered the phone and put it on speaker.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

She tried to call home from detention a few times each week, even though it meant paying nearly $1 per minute. Alex and his sister had been allowed to visit her for the first time six days after the raid once she’d been moved to a detention facility in Tiffin, Ohio, where they spoke for 15 minutes through a shield of plexiglass. His mother had started to cry when she saw Alex, and the only way either of them could make it through a conversation was by talking about routine things, by pretending, which had become their habit ever since.

Yes, Alex always told her, he was getting along with his sister. Yes, he was sleeping well. Yes, everything was getting back to normal in the trailer park. Yes, his knee was healing just fine.

“See you soon,” he said, and then he handed the phone to his sister.

Only once they hung up and returned to the emptiness of the trailer did the uncertainty and fear begin to creep back in. On TV a few days earlier, Alex had heard Trump promise a “major increase” in immigration enforcement, and just a few days earlier 143 undocumented workers had been detained at a meat processing plant across the state in Salem. Alex had barely seen any of his friends since the raid, but their text messages told the story of families unraveling. One friend had fled with his father to Tennessee after his mother was detained in the raid. Another had moved in with relatives across the state. Two more were still living in the trailer park under the care of undocumented relatives, trying to avoid being seen.

Alex and his family had gotten advice from a volunteer lawyer, who told them it was still possible Nora could receive a bond and be returned home with an ankle monitoring bracelet, but so far she hadn’t even been given a court date.

“She’s going to get deported, right?” Alex asked his sister now.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Will we stay here?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Will we move back to Mexico?”

“I don’t know,” she said again, “but it’s going to be okay. We’ll find a way to stay together.”

He turned away and looked at the TV. Nothing about his 12 years in the United States suggested that was likely, and if he was going to be living without his parents, he didn’t want to be treated like a child.

“You don’t have to say that,” he told her. “I know it’s probably not true.”

[bogugojdz]

Fighting the State of Mind - development/filming/editing & crit

After the Holy Isle idea was officially not an option anymore, we have quickly moved on and started looking for alternative communities on the http://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk/ website, which was found by Rhona. We have contacted several organisations, co-ops and alternative living people, none of which have initially responded. In desperation, we started looking into co-ops in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but we were not very excited about it because we wanted to explore a community that would be less city-oriented and more exiled from society. In desperation, Andy called Faslane as it was the only community that provided their phone number and we immediately received a positive response. Because we didn’t have much time at all, we decided to go to Faslane for a recce and to make a decision on what should be our main focus for the documentary. I must admit, that I was in a pretty lucky position, since I have done a lot of research on anarchy on my own in the past, and as a person interested in politics and economics I was quite confident going to the camp without doing much research for it. 

We were going to the camp with the following questions in mind: 

Why are these people still there after 35 years of fighting against the nuclear weapons? Who are they fighting against - the government is on their side? How do they support themselves financially? Do people live there permanently or do they have part time jobs/life outside of the camp? 

Chloe was the first person to speak to us in the camp. She introduced us to others, but they didn’t seem very enthusiastic about our presence. She showed us around the camp, and we went to one of the guest busses to talk. She answered all our questions. We found out that the camp is supported by many organisations fighting against the nuclear weapons such as Greenpeace. They receive many donations, and because they live quite sustainably, they don’t need jobs to live there. The people who live in a camp are constantly rotating, which explains why they are still here despite the fact that they have technically been in a state of protest for 35 years - there is constantly people who are passionate about this issue and have anarchist values who decide to come here and live for a while. While talking to Chloe, I got an intense impression that the knowledge about social issues and her emotional connection to it makes it impossible for her to live in the society she blames for the political situation, injustice and environmental problems which arise all over the world. I immediately got a sense of a girl that tries to escape from her, and I was convinced that I am right when she told us about her military family. I didn’t want to ask about too many details then, because I could sense that she is still not conformable enough. I was hoping that when I get back she will be much more confident as she will know us better. Despite her mentioning her anxiety problems, Chloe seemed like the most outgoing/talkative one from all of the campers, which is why we chose her as our focus. On our way back to Edinburgh, me, Rhona and Andy have unanimously agreed that we want to find out more about that girl as we did have a good sense of a story. We have shared our observations with the rest of the group and we have also showed them the pictures taken by Nora, so that she can get an idea of the space she will be filming.

We only had a few days to prepare for the shoot, which we spent on organising the practical aspects of the trip and the equipment. We decided to shoot A roll on my camera and B roll on Rhona’s camera, as they are very similar to each other and we knew we will achieve a unitary look. In the meantime, I have written a script based on Tommy’s advice on documentary scripwriting. Unfortunately, any evidence of my script has disappeared - I think I must have left it in the camp. I prepared it based on what I wish would happen in the documentary and written sound/camera notes on the audio/visuals I would like to have with an explanation of the meaning they create. Based on that I have also prepared a list of questions I had for Chloe. Ideally, I wanted her to tell me about her past (childhood, military, her relationships with family), present: (finding the camp, living in the camp, being an anarchist, being an activist) and future (what would happen if the camp got destroyed, what aspirations does she have for the future, would she be able to go back to normal society). 

The filming went fairly well, although I have to admit that it was quite exhausting especially for me and Rhona who went to Faslane straight from work (+ Rhona drove for 2 hours and didn’t sleep at all as her caravan was occupied by rats). In the morning we had breakfast with the campers, who seemed a lot more enthusiastic than the first time we met them. We could see that Chloe was getting nervous, so we left to film some shots of the camp. After some time, she approached me and asked me if it’s ok if we minimise the number of our crew and specifically if it’s ok if Matteo doesn’t come with us. I could see that she was very distressed and I assured her that we will do everything to make her feel confortable. Me, Rhona and Nora were trying to calm her down a little by joking around and having casual talk. After that we have met up with the rest of the crew and established that Andy will take over sound and Rhona and Matteo will stay behind filming B footage. 

The interview also went very well. I have never done interviewing before, so I was a little bit stressed, which I used as an opportunity to joke around with Chloe about being anxious, which seemed to calm both of us down. We have filmed the interview in the woods - Chloe was sitting by a 600 year old tree, and I was standing in front of her asking questions. I wanted to avoid the position of being the interviewer standing above her, but due to framing that was the only option. As she was answering my questions, I changed my approach from question-answer to more of a conversation-type interview. I feel like that was the best choice to make at the moment - Chloe became noticeably more confident and I could ask her about her more personal experiences. In total we recorded around 50 minutes of the interview. 

After the interview, we shot footage of the woods and the waterfalls around the camp, filmed inside Chloe’s room (with her permission), and went to have dinner with the campers, during which we were getting to know them and observing the everyday life on the campus. We have heard a lot about their ideology, but also about personal stories. Despite the fact that we were still rolling, we were talking to campers as if we didn’t. We decided to get back home the same night, for Rhona’s convenience, as she was driving us home. 

Unfortunately, the post production process was very difficult. After receiving the basic rough cut and the interview transcript our editor, she had to give up editing to work on her adaptation project. The edit was set up on the SAS computer without a hard drive, which meant that all the files and the avid project were available on that one machine that we had a limited access to. With Alex’s help, but without having sufficient knowledge about how the previous edit was set up me and Andy tried to copy the project with mxf files on to the hard drive, but despite professional help it was not fully successful, and some of our footage as well as all of the sound was offline. On top of that, I have passed editing to Matteo when I was at work and I when I got back at it I was surprised to find out that Matteo was saving the changes incorrectly - always as a new project instead of just saving changes to the project. This way my hard drive contained around 5 project folders, all of them called “Faslane”, all of them with different sequences but the same files, which caused confusion for both me and the editing programme. As a result, I had to consult my edit with Tina, who told me that the project is very fragile and I should be very careful. I have been extremely stressed out, as I also realised that somebody deleted the original footage from my hard drive and If the project got corrupted I would not know how to fix it. On top of that, I have also noticed lots of mistakes in Matteo’s edit, as he does not have much experience with Avid and he hasn’t been using the correct workflow. Based on that, I have finished the edit alone, leaving sound design and colour correction to Andy and Nora. 

Overall, I am very happy with the final result, given the circumstances in which it was made. All of the process was a huge learning experience for me - not only as a filmmaker, but generally I feel like I have developed lots of skills that I did not have before. Everyone who enters the Peace Camp is automatically an activist against the nuclear weapons, as the site is a state of protest, so it was also a political experience for me. Seeing a community thriving on anarchist values was also a great experience, that made me think a lot about social and political structures which are accepted as a norm. Finally, meeting Chloe was an honour, I feel lucky to have found a character that i have been so interested in. 

However, I must admit that the post production process was extremely stressful and exhausting for me. I was not in a position to take over editing, as I have very little experience in that department, I work 3 days in a week and am working on 3 other films this month, as well as deadlines for other modules. I have planned my month very carefully, but because I had to edit, I was forced to compromise finishing this documentary with my other responsibilities. I don’t want to blame anyone specific for it as I understand that the rest of my crew could not edit but I feel like this is a chronic issue with this course, present in all of the practical modules, and I think with better communication between the modules and more support with role division and collaboration some of that could be avoided. Every semester we are ending up with an unfair work division and very similar grades for very different level of engagement in the project. Doing the “bare minimum” or even not doing the job one was assigned to do passes almost without any consequences. Again, I am not accusing anyone of doing this on purpose in the specific case of this film because I enjoyed working with everyone and I know the reasons behind this situation but I can’t help to point out that this is a problem and I think both students and lecturers should discuss it together to find a solution for future years.