#this post has been in my drafts forever it even still uses the old editor

[melien]

𝙰𝚗𝚝𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚊

[zindagi-jhandwa-firbhi-ghamandwa]

I tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it didn't even matter.

The story of how I almost achieved my life's goal.

So, I recently decided to kill my authorial ambitions. I came close and it was a good run, but I was going nowhere and the goal was getting further away from me each day.

I was signed to an agency in late 2016 and started developing a non-fiction book for them in 2017. It took forever, but I had an agent and an editor/co-agent and I felt confident in my writing and the concept. After all, I was an Indian writer who had been spotted and signed by a British literary agency. The old colonial masters thought I was a worthy exponent of their tongue. What an honour!

Around 2021, I had my draft ready. My agent and editor gave me their final thoughts — which I honestly felt took away a lot of the irreverent comedy in my writing, but that's showbiz baby — and my proposal was ready to roll.

Then my agent told me that as a nobody with no name, no connections, no nepotism or sex appeal, I had to convince publishers that I had an audience. I had to go on social media (which I had quit for my mental health) and amass followers.

I argued that it's not how many followers you have, it's how dedicated they are. After all, Jesus only had 12. Well, 11 plus Judas. It didn't work.

And so, I spent 2021–22 trying to get followers. I posted on Instagram and LinkedIn and used hashtags and tried to "create engaging content" and my follower number grew from 200 to 215.

Then, in 2022 I suffered two setbacks. First, I had a serious motorcycle accident that almost killed me. And second, my editor — a middle-aged white woman — went down the Facebook right-wing radicalization rabbit hole and was soon telling me that Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong and woke people are the biggest threat to the world and TERF is a slur on par with the N-word. A woman who campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn was now a born-again Trump supporter.

She was also my co-agent and hence my only conduit to my proper agent, who was still expecting me to build that audience before she went to any more publishers.

I tried to keep publishing content online and made reels and was even considering starting a YouTube channel when I woke up and smelled the coffee. 20 new followers after nearly 3 years of trying.

The numbers don't lie. This dream was destroying my life, my health, my career and my relationships. Not to mention, it was pissing on the dying embers of what remained of my self-worth.

I got a job and decided to make a career for myself. Live out other goals. Save money to travel for 2 weeks a year. Watch Netflix.

I'm not author material. I might be a decent enough writer to work as a Senior Content Specialist at a mid-tier Indian IT Services company, but that's it. That's my level.

But I feel like I'm going through a bad break-up. I suddenly remember what I hoped my life would be like and I feel like curling into a ball and crying or jumping off the bridge next to my office.

I look at my draft and remember how happy I felt as it took shape. When I do, it feels like I'm looking at pictures of an ex or at the ultrasound of a miscarriage.

No break-up has hurt this much. I feel like JGL in 500 Days of Summer, my expectations were just as unrealistic and I probably deserve this misery.

Every now and then, I catch myself thinking of ideas for books, articles or stories and I feel a momentary sense of excitement to write it until I remember that this dream is dead.

When will this stop? When do dead dreams finally find peace and move on from this realm? And if they're undead dreams, how do I remove the head or destroy the brain?

[mirkwoodshewolf]

Graduation surprise; BoRhap cast x reader

*Author’s note*

Hey ya’ll well I promised this fic when I posted the Queen prom fic so here it is. Now I know it’s not as long as the last one is but I felt like this didn’t need to be super long. Also as another special little fact for ya’ll I was gonna make this a Queen fic as well but then I decided to change it to a BoRhap CAST fic since I hadn’t done one of just them in awhile. 

So to all seniors whether HS or college, the class of 2020 CONGRATULATIONS I know it’s not what you hoped it would be but still try to find celebration in this pandemic, you all achieved probably the greatest milestones in your life. So stay safe, stay healthy, stay sane, and be happy :) Lot’s of love from me my darlings!

Taglist:

@waddles03​

@psychosupernatural​

@plethora-of-things​

@jd-johndeacon-or-jackdaniels​

@ixchel-9275​

@simonedk​

@queensdivas​

@platawnic​

@queendeakyy​

@geek-and-proud​

@kairosfreddie​

_______________________________________________________________

Goddamn this year! Just when we think the new decade would be worth our wild, now we’ve got all this shit going on! First there was the threat of WW3, then the next month we’re dealing with wildfires in Australia, and finally to top it off why not add a global pandemic?!

The Coronavirus has literally been all over the news for months, and the fact that our government knew about it since late last year and didn’t warn us about it!? Then when they told us to be on lockdown, everyone starts hording toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and food that no one can buy said items for weeks on end.

But of course my main problem is the fact that I, along with so many other kids and adults around the world can’t participate in their own graduation ceremony.  As a college student, I was just longing to finally participate in my final graduation ceremony ever.  This was supposed to be my final chapter in school life and now because of this damn virus, that’s gone.

I mean yeah my diploma will be coming in the mail but I wanted my family to all be there to see me reach the end of my school life before I finally begin a new chapter.  Plus my cousin’s friends said that they would come and see me and I’ve missed seeing those guys, I hadn’t seen them all since the Bohemian Rhapsody premiere.

I sat there in my old room of my house (cause since the University closed down back in March, all students had to leave the college campus and go home so that way we could reduce the spread of the virus. So I ended up moving back in with my parents) just finishing up my final paper for class.

That’s when my Zoom video chat blew up with my cousin’s profile pic.  I grinned and clicked on the answer button and soon enough my cousin’s face took over my screen.

“Hey poppet.”

“Hey Gwil, how you holding up?” he let out a sigh.

“As best as I can. Though I should be asking you that, you are the one really dealing with this whole Coronavirus adjustment than I am. How’d you do on your classes?”

“For those that have said online classes are easier, they’re dirty rotten liars and completely incompetent.” He softly chuckled. “But thankfully I finished my last exam paper and submitted it just now.”

“Your dad look over it for you? Cause I know you’re a terrible editor.”

“Oi not all the time. Just when I’m lazy.” He hummed as he raised his brow at me. “But yes I did have dad review it for me. Cause before we got to submit the rough draft and my professor said I needed more analysis to my quotes on why I quoted that specific source. God I don’t know why I took that class to begin with?”

“Because you’re a criminology nut and you have been since you turned 16. God and I thought my horror movie tastes were bad.”

“Hey it’s good to be aware of shit like that!”

“Language missy!”

“Okay Cap.” I teased.  He gave me his stern look which made me laugh as I fell to my side on the bed. “Oh by the way I saw that little dating app video you did.”

“And what did you think?”

“I liked it. Kinda makes me wish an app like that did exist in real life.”

“You not just pulling my leg on this?”

“No. Honest and swear to god you had me moved by your performance. Well next to you being Brian May of course.” He grinned. “I swear I still can’t get over when I first saw you in the full hair and makeup, I literally almost had a freakin panic attack.”

“And the fact that Brian was also there to witness that.”

“Oh god don’t even go there!” I groaned as I hid my face in embarrassment.

“So—now that you’re all done with school, what’s next for you?”

“Well any plans I had are put on hold till this whole crisis goes away. And I really thought 2020 was gonna be my year. This sucks!”

“I know poppet, I know. But believe me that it’s not just you whose affected by this. Everyone in the whole world is suffering exactly the same way you are.” I sighed solemnly.

“I know. I mean I should be feeling for you and the guys right now, I mean all of you are out of work till further notice. And all the restaurants that I love going to. Did you know that the little ice cream parlor you and I used to go to when we were kids shut down?”

“No!”

“Yeah, the owner couldn’t keep up the payments because hardly anyone was ordering from them anymore, even with online delivery. So she closed it down.”

“Damn, that sucks. I really loved going to that place with you. That was always our special little time together without the grownups around.” I nodded remembering all the fun times we had together in that little shop.

It was then someone suddenly popped into our conversation.  The extra person now on my screen was none other than Joe Mazzello.

“Hey Gwil, mini-Lee!”

“Hello Joe.” Answered Gwil.

“Hey Joe been a long time.”

“How you two holding up?” he asked us.

“As best as we can, how about you? I’ve seen those Youtube videos you’ve been doing on your page.” Gwil said.

“You know those were jokes, especially that last one. I just wanted to get a laugh out of everyone, or have them hate me.”

“No one could hate you Joey.” I said with a smile.

“Aww thanks mini-Lee. How’s classes been?” I let out a groan as I once again flopped on my bed which made Joe laugh.

“I am just thankful that this is all over. At first I thought online classes would be easy but one of my professors was technology challenged. Another one would sometimes forget to do a lesson, and then of course blackboard could barely operate long enough for me to submit an assignment which caused some of them to be late.”

“Well like you said it’s over now.” Joe assured me.

“Oh hey I saw that Jurassic Park livestream you did.”

“Oh did you? How come I didn’t see you submit a question or just say hello? I’ve seen your Youtube page so I know your username by heart.”

“Cause I may or may not have also been working on a project. But chose the livestream over the project.”

“Nice going Joe, you’ve turned my cousin into a procrastinator.” Gwil complained.

“Hey at least she has Jurassic Park unlike you Gwilym Lee! Serious shame on you for not owning it! This is why mini-Lee is the coolest out of the two of you.” I snarked out a mock laugh as I stuck my tongue out.

“Ganging up against me okay I see how it is you two.”

“Oh come now cousin dear, we’re just messing around.”

“Messing around? If we’re messing with Gwil then I want a part of it.” Soon another picture came up and there lying on his side was Ben Hardy.

“Benjamin!” Joe screamed joyously.

“Hi Ben.” I sung out.

“Hey (y/n).” he waved at me with a wink. “Now going back to teasing Gwilym.”

“You guys are officially gonna be blocked right after this.” My cousin groaned.  We all laughed when I told him.

“Again cousin, we’re teasing you. So Ben, what brings you here?”

“What can’t I pop in and say hello?” I giggled.

“I see nothing wrong with it. Oh hey get this; I finally got around to watching 6 Underground.”

“And what did you think of it?”

“The first 10 minutes were insane! And truthfully I never really understood Michael Bay films, but this one—definitely my favorite. I loved it Ben, really.”

“Well thank you (n/n). Thank you.”

“Never did I think I needed to see both you and Ryan Reynolds on screen together….”

“Whoa okay easy there (n/n)!” Joe interrupted me.

“Oi you get your mind out of the gutters! And you say it’s the fans that make what you say to the extreme.” I scowled him.

“Trust me, I’ve known him for over 10 years and he still doesn’t grow up.” Another voice stated and soon two more familiar faces popped up on screen, stuck in quarantine together in LA were Rami and Lucy. And then a split second later another face came on the screen, it was none other than Alan Leech.

“Hey, Rami, Lu-lu, Alan!” I cheered.

“Hey (y/n)!” the three of them said as they waved.

“God I feel like I’m getting spoiled, got the entire BoRhap family together for the first time in like—forever.”

“It’s crazy.” Alan said.

“Definitely.” Agreed Rami.

“Maybe when this whole thing blows over we should all get together some time in New York.” Offered Joe.

“I’m down with it.” Ben said.

“Me too.” Lucy agreed with a nod.

“Yeah, (n/n), Ben and I could fly out together.” Said Gwil.

“I’m down with that. Now that I’m done with school, I can do what I want now.”

“So guys now that we’re all here shall we begin?” Lucy said.

“Begin what? Gwil what’s going on?” I asked.

“Well (n/n), when this whole quarantine shutdown and school cancellations started affecting the class of 2020 we all felt bad that you couldn’t graduate the way you hoped you would.” Gwil said before Joe continued.

“So Gwil called all of us up via the Whatsapp chat, as well as our daily zoom calls. To gather us all together on your ‘last day’ of college.”

“To celebrate your own Virtual college graduation party!” Rami cheered.  At that point everyone either threw confetti, blew on graduation blowers, or holding up signs that said CONGRATS 2020 GRADUATE!!!

I covered my mouth with my hands speechless and tried to hold back the tears.

“Ohh you guys.”

“Since you couldn’t have a college graduation party, we figure we’d bring the party to you. See not even this pandemic can stop us from celebrating our Mini-Lee’s ultimate milestone.” Ben said as he set down his congrats sign.

“And also expect some gifts within the next few weeks, depending on how the mailing services do with overseas gifts.” Alan said.

“Aww thanks you guys, you didn’t have to.”

“We know, but we wanted to. Let us spoil you even through this pandemic.” Said Joe.

“Thanks guys, this—really means a lot to me.” I wiped a hidden tear that strayed down the corner of my eye.  They all awed at me that’s when Gwil lifted up a small graduation cake.

“I know, I know this’ll be ridiculous but just humor me will yah?” I smiled and nodded.  He lit up the 2020 candles and held it just high enough for me to see the top part of the candles.

“CONGRATS (Y/N) LEE! CLASS OF 2020!!!” everyone proclaimed at once which made me smile and I blew out towards the screen.  Gwil then blew out the candles for me as everyone else cheered and clapped.

“Thanks so much you guys. Really, you have no idea how much this means to me.”

“We’re happy to do it (y/n). If it makes your day a little bit brighter in these dark times.” Rami said.

“It did Rami, it really did.”

“Well hope we can make this even better cause I’ve also got a part 2 to this little surprise. But in order for that to happen, everyone else has got to go otherwise you won’t really be able to see it as clearly.” Gwil said.

“Aww man.” I whined.

“No worries mini-Lee, your cousin added you to our BoRhap Whatsapp chat and I’ll send you a link to our zoom channel if you ever wanna chat with us again.” Joe said with a wink.

“Thanks Joe. And thanks everyone take care and stay safe.” They all waved and bid me goodbye with waves or blowing kisses at me and one by one they signed off till it was once again just Gwil and I.

All I could see across his bearded face was that cheeky grin he does whenever he’s trying to hide something.

“What are you grinning about?”

“Just the fact that I’ll be the best cousin once you see part 2 of your special surprise.”

“What did you do?”

“If I told you it won’t be a surprise now would it? Now let’s see, god I hope they get it.” He muttered the last part to himself. It took a few minutes till finally another screen popped up and standing there in his room was Adam Lambert.  I fangirled in my seat and covered my mouth trying to contain my squeals.

“Hey girlfriend!” he greeted with a wave.

“Adam oh my god!”

“How’s it going?”

“It’s been going. Finally submitted my last paper. So I’m officially done with school forever.”

“Yaas Queen!” he snapped. “So how’s it feel to be a college graduate?”

“Well it’d be better if we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic.”

“Understandable, but hey you’ve worked hard for this so be proud of yourself no matter what’s going on in the world right now.” I nodded with a shrug. “And to celebrate your graduation, your cousin whipped up another little surprise for you.”

“Oh my god Gwil you didn’t!” I gasped.  He merely raised a brow at me cheekily as he bit his lip back from a smile.

“Hey guys you there?!” Adam called out and soon enough two more screens came on and the picture revealed to be both Brian May and Roger Taylor.  Brian sitting on his couch while Roger looked to be in his basement with his drumkit.

At this point, I had lost my shit.  I was fangirling to the max at this rate but tried to calm down.

“Hi (y/n), congratulations of graduating.” Brian greeted me.

“Major achievement there love. Congrats.” Roger added.

“Oh my god…..Gwil this is—how……”

“I knew you’d love it (n/n). Plus I knew this would cheer you up after our last conversation we had last week. You really needed some cheering up.”

“So guys are we ready to do this?” asked Adam.

“I’m ready to go if you both are.” Said Brian as he took his Red Special and set it on his lap and Roger twirled his drumstick.

“(Y/n), this is for you love. Hopefully when this whole mess is over, you can finally go out there and reach your dream job. Till then we hope you enjoy this.” Roger said.

It was then both Roger and Brian began playing the tune for ‘we are the champions’ but as Adam began singing the song, it turns out that they were actually singing their new song, ‘You are the champions’ dedicated to the first responders worldwide.

But now they were playing it in my honor as a college graduate.  As they continued to play the song, I allowed the tears to flow down my face as I laced my hand over my heart.

God—never did I think that through this pandemic would I be happy.  From having to never see any of my friends I made in college again, to not having my whole family come to the house to celebrate, or going out to party with some of my friends.  But this—right here and now, my cousin made it all up to me all the way from London.

At this point, I knew that I was officially the luckiest person in the world.  All thanks to my favorite cousin, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

[p-and-p-admin]

Interview given to The Severus Snape and Hermione Granger Shipping Fan Group.  (sharing here Admin approved)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/199718373383293/

Hello Subversa and welcome to Behind the Quill, thank-you for letting us get to know you a little better.

Many of our members will be familiar with your stories which include This Time, Improbable Felicity and of course, The Love You Take.

Okay, let’s jump right in.

What's the story behind your pen name?

My tagline on LiveJournal was Subversive Subversions, and that kind of says it all about me. I like to stir the pot

Which Harry Potter character do you identify with the most?

I identify most with Hermione, the book-loving swot. Oddly enough, on the various Sorting tests I’ve taken, I always Sort into Ravenclaw. (Until I took the Pottermore test, where I Sorted into Slytherin; I blame years of living in Snape’s head).

Do you have a favourite genre to read? 

I grew up reading voraciously. My first genre of choice was romance. As an adult, I began reading thriller/suspense books, and I really didn’t come back to reading romance until I began writing fanfic.

Do you have a favourite "classic" novel?

It would be a toss-up between Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Jane Eyre. I see shades of SSHG in them all.

At what age did you start writing?

I took my first run at writing when I was eight years old. My parents, however, discouraged the idea of me being a writer, and even though I started a number of stories over the years, I never finished one until I began writing fanfic in my forties.

How did you get into writing fanfiction?

It was in April 2005, while I was impatiently waiting for HBP to be published. I was noodling around the Internet and I stumbled over Mugglenet. As I was gobbling up all the content, I found a link to their fanfiction.

I perused the genres, and under romance, I found the pairings. When I saw SSHG, I was horrified. So of course, I had to read something.

I read The Long Wait by ancientgirl, and I couldn’t stop. I was completely enchanted, and I thought to myself, “I could do this.” So I started writing Master of Enchantment.

I have to say that Potterverse, and specifically the SSHG fandom, became my obsession and occupied all my thoughts for several years. I pretty much read nothing but fanfic and did continual re-reads of the HP series during that time--this from a woman who previously read 3 novels a week.

What's the best theme you've ever come across in a fic? Is it a theme represented in your own works?

JKR may not know it, but her greatest creation is Severus Snape, the antagonistic protagonist.

I have always been driven by Snape’s plight. It is the theme I am most drawn to in stories I read. Over and over again through my years of active fanfic writing, I tried to give him redemption and the happiness he deserves.

What fandoms are you involved in other than Harry Potter?

I watched the birth and rise of the Sherlock BBC fandom on LiveJournal, and I saw a number of friends go over to that particular dark side. I read some of the fic, but was never tempted to write it.

As a favour to a friend, I wrote a Twilight fanfic story for a gift exchange on LiveJournal (it was awful).

So, Potterverse is really my only fandom.

If you could make one change to canon, what would it be? Do you have a favourite piece of fanon?

I basically hated book 7. The whole Deathly Hallows thing felt like something JKR introduced out of thin air. I hated the interminable camping trip. I hated the epilogue (except for “and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew”) and the idea that you must marry the person you crushed on in high school.

Mostly, of course, I hated the death of Snape.

So my change would be to have Snape survive, be vindicated in the eyes of the world, and live to earn the happiness he had never known before.

My favourite fanon thing is the myriad ways we have of making Snape survive Nagini’s attack.

Do you listen to music when you write or do you prefer quiet?

I always listen to music. Every piece I have ever written has its own soundtrack. I have piles of CDs from the time before I had an iPod, with the name of the current story I was writing scrawled on it in Sharpie. The longer pieces had soundtracks that evolved over the course of the story. There are songs that still pierce me with the memories of what I felt when I wrote. Music is an integral part of my process.

What are your favourite fanfictions of all time?

Wow. This is a hard question. I’m sure that any list I create will be missing an important story. Nevertheless, here are some, in no particular order:

Care of Magical Creatures

She Was Beautiful to Him

Guard... Check... Mate

Second Life

Big Name Death Eater

Marry a Choice

The Absinthe of Reason

I'll Never Take Advantage

Irresistible

The Bookshop

The Price of Madness

King of Swords

Denial

No Loyalty in the Moonlight

You Can't Have One Without The Other

The Language of Flowers

Are you a plotter or a pantser? How does that affect your writing process?

I am a total pantser. It means I can write myself into a corner and have to write myself out again.

What is your writing genre of choice?

Forever and always, romance. Often with a side of erotica.

Which of your stories are you most proud of? Why?

Transcendent Quality of Remembrance, because there were two timelines running and it was an intricate plot device. It is also one of the most heart-wrenching stories I’ve ever written.

Did it unfold as you imagined it or did you find the unexpected cropped up as you wrote? What did you learn from writing it?

I have to admit, the unexpected always crops up as I write. I’m one of those people who believe without apology in my Muse.

As for what I learned, I found that writing the entire story before trying to post it meant the story would hang together better without me having to write myself out of a corner. I probably went back and changed the first chapter seven or eight times due to developments in the plot.

How personal is the story to you, and do you think that made it harder or easier to write?

Everything I write is intensely personal to me. I am immersed in my story, and I feel every emotion. It is the only way I have ever written. I don’t think I could write something I didn’t feel. So it’s neither easier nor harder. It is what it is.

What books or authors have influenced you? How do you think that shows in your writing?

Georgette Heyer, who wrote a large number of Regency romances, was and is a huge influence on my writing. I think I absorbed her turns of phrase and plot devices and romantic hero figures through my skin. It absolutely shows in my writing.

Do people in your everyday life know you write fanfiction?

Not my coworkers or family outside of my husband and children. My best friend knows I write fanfic.

How true for you is the notion of "writing for yourself"?

For me, it’s the only way I can do it. I have to be consumed by the basic idea and let it live in me as I write. I write the stories I want to read about the subjects that fascinate and inspire me.

How important is it for you to interact with your audience? How do you engage with them? Just at the point of publishing? Through social media?

During my active fanfic writing years, I was immersed with my audience. At that time, SSHG Fandom pretty much lived in LiveJournal, and I was active there every day. I was not very good at answering reviews, but I tended to put author’s notes before and/or after chapters as a way of engaging with my readers.

What is the best advice you've received about writing?

To write the story I want to read. To fall in love with my protagonist.

What do you do when you hit writer's block?

Walk away from the computer and pick up a pen and pad of paper.

Has anything in real life trickled down into your writing?

Many, many things about my romance with my husband were fodder for the romances I’ve written.

Do you have any stories in the works? Can you give us a teaser?

I am striving to complete my first novel of original fiction. It’s the beginning of a trilogy. All have been written (first draft), and the first has been to a professional editor. I’m striving to complete a draft with her suggestions.

It’s about a swotty girl and her teacher. (shock)

They live in a magical world with conflict. (further shock)

There is lots of sex with a BDSM twist.

The protagonist is (in my heart) Severus Snape in disguise. He has his own brand of physical unattractiveness and a mesmerizing presence.

Any words of encouragement to other writers?

Write what’s in your heart. Use a good beta reader. Take constructive criticism in the spirit it is offered. Ignore trolls.

Thanks so much for giving us your time.

[carolrance]

I AM DYING LMAO

i just found the most hilarious reviews for the handmaid’s tale and i’m dying lol. since twop is dead(?) (is it? i dunno cos i never look anymore tbh) this is the next best thing. and it’s doubly awesome cos she hates all the same characters. (mutual nick hate is my life). i have another post in my drafts about how amazing amy glynn’s reviews at paste are. and they are. but they are serious. these ones are snarktastic.

“Welcome back to America’s favorite rape and explosions show, The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“Nick goes out into the rain, full emo cigarette smoking, resigned to boning this virgin, when he spies something. Oh no! It’s Offred, sprawled in the rain, bleeding to death. He picks her up and screams for help. My god. These two. Offred is the world’s worst teenager. And Nick is her bad boy boyfriend. She’s going to robotically obey and then bleed to death in the rain? Get the fuck out of here with that. These two act like they are in a My Chemical Romance music video circa 2005.” (This is my fav one of them all.)

“Speaking of Nick, he’s still the worst! His baby bride comes to Offred for...advice? I don’t know why she comes to her exactly, except maybe it’s like coming to your sluttiest friend and asking a weird sex question? I don’t know.”

“Serena is clearly mad about Offred, and E. Moss is doing a great job as playing her as the bitchiest teenager in the house. Aunt Lydia has moved in to keep her eye on Offred, and she bursts in during Offred’s teenage sulk bath to instruct her to wash. Down there. You know. (vagina). Offred makes more defiant teenage eye contact as she washes. Down there. She’s almost coming on to Lydia. That’s cool, I guess.”

“We cut to the Colonies and some more cockadoodie plot machinations. Because of the mass casualty event, Emily and Janine, among others, are going to be pressed back into service as Handmaids. This is some ripe bullshit. First off, both are disobedient. Secondly, they’ve been in the radioactive Colonies for a hot minute--who knows what that’s done to their baby making machinery? But now the writers can bring back some important characters. COCKADOODIE.”

“Part of the purpose of the walks are so the fetus can hear and get used to Serena’s voice, you see, and Serena wants to talk shit about everyone they know.”

“We get some grade A pen pornography as she lovingly fingers Fred’s pens, and we close on the image of Serena behind the desk and Offred clicking the ballpoint just like Ofglen clicked the detonator. (We also get an insane music cue: “Venus.” You know, from the razor commercials and also the 1960s? Like, what the what the what, show.)”

“She’s worked on her shrine and her newspaper-clipping Crazy Wall ™, where she is reconstructing the events that led to the creation of Gilead. Which is great, but also, bitch, didn’t you watch the fucking news? You lived through this.”

“They load up into a truck, but at the last minute, Offred remembers that she is the worst and this show is supposed to go for ten seasons, so she hops out, gives the baby to Emily, and heads back into the night, to become Jedi June and fight Gilead to rescue her other daughter.”

“Serena stomps into Devil Fred’s mancave while he is enjoying his jazz records and demands that Offred go back to the Red Center. Fred talks her down, telling her that they don’t want to miss the joy of the pregnancy. Which, okay, Fred. You try having a testy teenager in your face all day.”

“I really wanted to punch her during all of this. How golly, and how insensitive, to poke through their sacred objects and get all teary-eyed, especially as they risk their lives to shelter her dumb ass.”

“Serena monologues about her drafts of new security orders. She wants things to get back to normal--she wants to cut back on the police state to normal dystopian police state levels.”

���It seems the Marthas have had enough, and they are taking action. Offred fucks around for about ten minutes because she is the worst, carving Nolite into the bedroom wall.”

“Anyway, Serena is super pissed, violently potting succulents and plotting dark deeds.”

“At some point, Offred takes a pout bath that is red with blood. She also bleeds clear through her underwear. When they get home, the Waterfords welcome Nick’s bride into the household, and then send Offred and Rita away. Rita is worried about Offred, but Offred has decided to bleed to death. Up the stairs she goes.”

“Offred’s presence rouses Fred out of his mini-coma for just long enough for him to remark on her size (just like a real son of a bitch). Offred leaves and makes out with Nick in the hall because they are stupid assholes. I mean, really. There are people and Eyes all over the place and these two are just slobbering all over. Offred also makes the Martha’s shooting all about her in a real self-centered way.”

“Let’s check in on the boring house, shall we? Offred decides to go around and collect godmothers for her baby.”

“Oh I forgot that Nick and Offred cuddled the baby and blah blah and I still hate them. Also, Nick, your baby bride’s blood is on your hands.”

“In the show, though, we’ve seen a lot of natal care, including ultrasounds, and we’ve seen the inside of a hospital room. Why in the fucking hell would they mess around with home birth at all? It’s so illogical it makes me mad.”

“So she goes outside with the shotgun, has another wolf encounter, and blasts off some rounds to alert someone of her presence. Then she goes back inside and takes off all her clothes and shits that kid out.”

“Back at the Waterford manse, Serena and Offred bond, AGAIN, over Eden’s execution and Serena lets Offred breast feed the baby, because she is completely internally inconsistent. On this episode, Serena will be affected by the atrocities of the regime she helped create. ANYWAY, THE END.”

“Eden wants to spruce up the apartment, and Nick gives her permission and plays the husband humoring his little woman’s whims. Which, total and complete barf forever. Nick still doesn’t see Eden as a potential threat, because he is an idiot. While she’s working on her HGTV audition tape, she finds the stack of contraband letters Nick took from Offred when she was going mad.”

“Into the house they run, Serena screaming Offred’s name like she’s going to catch her and probably murder her. I mean, this is full throated scream. If your dog ran away, you wouldn’t scream his name that way because he would be like: that bitch is crazy and wants to kill me. So it unsuprisingly doesn’t work on a human woman.”

“Meanwhile, Nick catches Eden kissing the douchebag Guardian. He’s like no big deal, and Eden freaks out. She says that he’s in love with the Handmaid, and he gaslights the fuck out of her denying it. Nick is a bastard. He shows Eden no kindness. He doesn’t treat her like a person. She doesn’t rate even a decent excuse. There are many things he could say: that she’s so young, that they don’t know each other, that he’s unhappy to be married at all. But he does none of those things. This woman is fifteen years old. She’s spent her adolescence under the yoke of Gilead. While she may be a true believer, she is still not in charge of her fate here. Nick is a bastard.”

“Devil Fred and Offred get in a knock-down, drag out, and he misquotes the bible at her and slaps her across the face. She then slaps him across his face, and is not immediately fucking super murdered.”

“Emily is like what the fuck, this place is weird. Lydia is like, bye! You better be good or we will kill you! Have fun! Anyway, she has a brief conversation with the Wife, who is like: this guy is horrible. He created The Colonies! He poisoned people! Commander Old Hipster gently shuffles her away, back to her crazy room.”

And serious business shit (cos it’s not all jokes):

“What I do think is wrong is the zig-zagging of Serena’s character. She’s mean and petty, and then she’s happy playing writer to Offred’s editor. Then she’s mad again, and then even more mad after that. Raping Offred to punish her for false labor is insane and irredeemable. Devil Fred has been consistently devilish--a prick who enjoys owning women--but Serena has seesawed from one extreme to another. I don’t think it makes her character more complicated or deep. Instead, it seems like inconsistency in the writing.

This show has been saluted as being of the times, for being very current. When I see children being ripped from their parents, or in an earlier episode this season, people desperate to escape to another country, and then I see it echoed in real life, it is hard to take. Dystopias are less entertaining to watch when you live in a country that seems to be accelerating toward the same.”

“Things I liked: Annie Lennox, Commander Old Hipster/his house/his wife/his Martha/his stolen art collection/taste in graphic novels/scarves, Rita and the Marthas rising up. Things I didn’t like: EVERYTHING ELSE

As adaptations go, the second season was always going to be a rough one. I can’t say that it was successful. They’ve turned June/Offred into an asshole, and they made Serena so inconsistent we don’t even know what to expect moment to moment. That’s not good writing, y’all.”

BTW, the site is:

https://heauxsmag.com/new-blog/?tag=handmaids+tale

[drizzitwrites]

Football RPF Challenge - Day 30: Wrap Up

Today brings us to the last day of November and our 30-day challenge. In which...I am not writing anything for the prompt.

The prompt today is "future" and while I have ideas of how I would like this relationship to end up in the future, I also know that I can't control the real-life narratives and that things will certainly come up to get us off track. Where I am with planned out things to write for these two is that everything is still very uncertain, because they've both proven that although they're committed to trying to stay together and make things work whatever happens, the reality for them is that they both put their careers first. And, honestly, I don't think they'd like one another as much as they do if one of them did decide that the relationship came before football. It's who they are and it's who they need in a partner.

I could, of course, write some of the AU I have planned, since I know how that will end (forever from now when I finally manage to get THREE epic-length fics written), but the truth of it is that although I have the ending in mind, I don't think I can fully do justice to writing it into a scene without knowing what happens on the full journey between start and finish. Like, I know ideally what will happen, but until I actually fill in all the details around the plot I can't actually give the scene the context and shape that it needs.

So. Instead of the future, today is a look back.

Coming into November I had spent several months struggling mightily with writing one particular WIP. In the meantime, ideas and inspiration for things to follow it kept piling up and I knew I had to finish what I was working on in order to set the stage for the rest. But for the first time in a long time I found myself unable to just turn off the editor brain and sit down and write and not worry about making it perfect (or even good) the first time out. All of this is why I undertook this challenge. First, because I wanted to get back into a rhythm of writing and figure out when the best time in my day was to do it between peak cognition, work, life, and the rest. Second, because I wanted to get back into the habit of sitting down, writing 1000 - 3000 words, putting it out there for the world (with the disclaimer that it wasn't the finished product, of course) and then moving on to the next thing. Third, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to work on my current WIP, but also allow myself the freedom to write some of the scenes in other projects that had been exciting me.

Here's my evaluation of how I think I did.

1. I managed to find the time and energy and wherewithal to sit down and work on my fic more days than not. Even on days that I may not have given an update here on the blog I generally still sat down and at least got my thoughts in order or sketched out what needed to happen in a scene I was having trouble writing. So, as for finding the time, I think I did. As for forming the habit, that, of course, remains to be seen. It's hard to have the transitionary day (November to December) occur on a Saturday, as weekends tend to be the time I find it the hardest to slip in time or focus or energy to write. There are many other things going on and diverting my attention and pulling me in other directions and usually by the time I might have a few hours to sit down and work on writing, my mind is so exhausted from the course of the day that I find it difficult to motivate myself and concentrate. So...we shall see. I've written "write post-WC fic--Belgium match" into my to-do list for tomorrow, so someone pop in and hold me accountable or something. I need to finish that fic and move on.

2. I feel like overall I did really well with sitting down, writing what I was able in the time I had, and releasing it to the world, albeit with the disclaimer that it isn't a finished product, but that's fine. Right now, even on my major WIP, I'm not going for finished product, I'm just going for WRITTEN. The thing of it is, every time one of the prompts led me to a scene in that particular WIP (save the end bit, which I liked working on and had been thinking on for ages), I still found it really difficult to make myself just write the scene and stop worrying about it or things. So this means that tomorrow when I resume working on it exclusively, I will need to confront those demons and truly ask myself "what about this fic are you afraid of?" I mean, I know the answer, but if I only wrote what I was comfortable with I'd never grow as a writer, so somehow my rational mind and my writer mind need a coming-to-terms about it all. Like...conceptually I understand that it's okay if this isn't my best work because it's a new thing for me that I'm historically terrible at and we all need to make bad art in order to grow, but when it comes to doing that, it's a different thing. So, I don't know.

3. This was successful. And honestly I had so much fun working on bits and pieces of other things and revisiting old inspiration and just letting myself work on the things that were exciting me instead of every day forcing myself to slog away on a fic that is exciting me less. I mean, it's not a good way for me to get things done, since I wrote like 60,000 words this month in total and have finished NOTHING, but I think it will feel good when I'm finally done with this fic and can move on to others and I encounter scenes that I'm like, oh, look, I did this already!!! The problem will be, really, that for me writing non-linearly has never worked because I need to know the context before getting into a scene, so I'm sure there will be a lot of things I worked in as setting to the scenes I wrote that won't be necessary because they already happened earlier and we don't need to reflect on them in detail, OR there will be things that happen as I fill in the scenes ahead of what I've done that CHANGE the context of the scene and I'll have to update. But all of that is fine, because, in the end, it's all progress towards the completed project.

So those are my thoughts. Hopefully you've all enjoyed my drafts and the insight into that project and others that are upcoming. First drafts are messy and I thank those of you who have supported my work on it and realised that there might be work to do on it still and it's not polished to a shine, but it's written and that's what matters. I'm sure we'll be revisiting that line of thinking a lot in the next month. I'll try to keep checking in on my writing and at least a quick update on progress or how I'm feeling about writing that day. I think it's been good for me to take some time before diving into the actual scenes I'm working on to type up some quick background or context or even just get my thoughts about what I'm about to be working on in order so I can clear my brain, organise my thoughts, and go.

In short...thanks for your support on this journey with me, friends. It's been fun, and currently I feel good about writing and fic and what's to come. That may change a day from now, but until then, I will keep these positive feelings with me.

[hellofastestnewsfan]

The World War III memes are here, bursting onto the shores of TikTok and Twitter after American forces assassinated the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani this week. “Me and the boys on missile duty during #WWIII,” one reads, illustrated by a gif of two soldiers failing running from a misfired mortar. “Me chilling at home after ignoring my draft notice #WWIII,” says another, illustrated with a Spider-Man clip in which the hero’s aunt is interrupted during a prayer by the Green Goblin exploding through her window.

Along with the memes came the counter-memes, chiding people for joking about war, or smarming at them over how little their comfortable lives would be impacted by a new war in Iran.

World War III is not actually upon us, of course, but just hashtag-World War III—a container for content. In that role, these memes fulfill the internet’s ability to fashion endless turtles of content about anything. On TikTok, someone feigns illegally disposing of a draft notice set to Britney Spears’s “Criminal,” which someone else collates in a thread on Twitter, which gets rolled up into Buzzfeed metacontent about World War III memes.

@sarahfaithxx

#wwiii #ThatsWhatILike #turnitup #gymrush #BreakupWithBottled #fyp

♬ original sound - sarahfaithxx

But World War is not just a hashtag, either. It’s also a symbol. And it’s notable that young people are mustering that old emblem to express their unconscious fears about the present. In doing this, they are reviving a received notion of “world war,” one mostly expended by the generations that precede them.  

For three decades or more, World War III has been an anxious fantasy. During the Cold War, it became a shorthand for a very specific kind of doom: global nuclear destruction. After the blasts comes the fallout, the depthless smoke of nuclear winter, the ensuing end of the crops that sustain our mortal bodies, and the certain starvation of those too unlucky to have survived the war.

Those who lived through this period can still feel how real the threat was. That has not changed: Global nuclear stockpiles have been cut by 75 percent since their peak between 1965 and 1985, but there are still thousands of nuclear warheads spread all around the globe, each between tens and thousands of times more destructive than the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs detonated over Japan in 1945. Iran is not believed to have nuclear weapons, although its ambitions to develop or acquire them have been at the heart of the American conflict with the country.

Even so, the fantasy of World War III helped hide the reality of what war had become: a tangled mess of statecraft, profiteering, and politicking. In the moment, tidy narratives often made conflicts seem straightforward, but history has unraveled their knotty strands. During the Cold War, hot tensions became hopeless moils, conducted for political benefit as much as (and, over time, more than) moral right. Vietnam braided opposition to communism, itself a tenet of Cold War conflict, with democratic state-building in a decolonizing region. Proxy wars became common, such as the United States’s support of the Afghani mujahideen to destabilize the Soviet Union rather than to support a Muslim revolution. The Gulf War braided up the emerging 24/7 media ecosystem with the oil economy. The Iraq and Afghan wars, it now seems clear, were manufactured for political and commercial gain, and at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

And those are just some of the “normal” wars—the military ones entwined with nation-states rather than cartels like Los Zetas in Mexico, militias like the Sudanese Janjawid, and paramilitary groups like ISIS. Then there are the corporations. Mercenary data brokerage by Cambridge Analytica put useful information extracted from Facebook into service for misinformation campaigns. Via social media, organizations like the Russian Internet Research Association weaponized information, on the cheap, to disrupt the operation of the nation-states that might yet wage conventional or nuclear war. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provide easy, global reach for all the non-state actors that have proliferated to further destabilize their opponents.

In the face of all this chaos, is it any wonder that young people might see the relatively conventional act of assassinating an Iranian military commander as an oasis of political clarity? The memes help amplify a moment that fits into a straightforward narrative.

The deluge of draft-related memes that flowed from the news of  Soleimani’s execution exemplify the mental comfort such clarity brings. The idea of a normal war—an organized military front where national armies face off—became so piquant that it crashed the website for the Selective Service System, the government agency where men over 18 must still register in case of a draft. Even though a U.S. military draft hasn’t taken place since 1973, some of the memes feign comfort in evading conscription, citing hypothetical age, sex, or medical reasons why their authors might be disqualified.

There’s just tons of content about potentially getting drafted pic.twitter.com/4Zwjk57E0L

— Ryan Brooks (@ryanbrooks) January 3, 2020

At Insider, Andria Moore wrote that young people are using the wry humor of memes to cope with uncertainty. And at Buzzfeed News, Otilla Steadman and Ryan C. Brooks portrayed the practice as an expression of fear, carried out on the media formats like Instagram or TikTok that have become native environments for Gen Z.  

But the 18-to-24 set might have no idea what they are thinking or feeling when they create or share these posts. “Nobody is aware of what’s going on,” my Gen Z son texted me from his group of friends. (He’s 20 years old.) “It’s not coping because there’s nothing to cope over,” he theorized, adding that his crew wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people posting these memes don’t have the faintest idea about the geopolitical circumstances to which they are supposedly responding.

That’s probably the case for people of all ages, thanks in part to the frenetic pace at which everyone produces and consumes information online. “Buckle up, nerds,” the Arc Digital editor Berny Belvedere began in a hilarious viral tweet. “After discovering the existence of Quasar Sailemun thirty minutes ago, I am now ready to explain how, being three trillion times more significant than Bin Laden, his assassination means we will have to forfeit the Louisiana Purchase.”

Instinct and habit rule online, and online life is just life now. The instincts and habits everyone has developed over the past 20 years of forever war involve reacting first, and thinking later—if at all. The news is so ubiquitous that its coverage—from Soleimani’s assassination to all these memes supposedly comforting people in its aftermath—evades more meaning than it elucidates.  

Absent knowledge and intention, the best and most generous way to interpret these World War III memes is to try to understand how they surface the ideology of contemporary life. Memory of the experience of world war is disappearing, as the last of the generation who survived conventional, global warfare pass away. At the same time, conventional war itself became too constant to take notice of; today’s 18 year olds have never taken a breath at a time when the United States wasn’t embroiled in combat in the Middle East.

For GenXers like me, the fear of nuclear annihilation made the end of the world a dark but deviously appealing fantasy. It seemed natural for humankind to dream about witnessing our collective end. No matter your scientific suppositions or religious beliefs about life or afterlife, the glory of human existence became even more bewitching in the event that total annihilation might insure that you would not have missed out on its future, beyond the grasp of your own lifespan.

For many of today’s youths, however, a mortgaged future can already feel likely, if not certain, for much more concrete reasons—from economic inequality to climate-caused extinction. It’s no wonder that their fantasies would look toward the past instead. It is strangely comforting to imagine a conventional war of the 20th-century variety, mated to the risks of nuclear escalation, because it represents a return to a well-worn period of history.

The two World Wars produced horrific atrocities. But they also tipped out into a long period of prosperity and comfort, especially in America. That connects the idea of a world war with other matters: the Greatest Generation, and the idea that military service is noble, thanks to the unvarnished clarity of good and evil; a time when patriotism in general and the war effort in particular was nonpartisan; the social services, tax base, and economic circumstances that produced the middle class and all its benefits, from stable jobs to cheap homeownership.

But that reality is no more. So now what? To fear world war is also to dream of it, and to dream of world war is also to indulge the nostalgia of the mid-century, that great refuge between two gilded ages, when ordinary people thrived.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2sQuZqC

[thecosydragon]

My latest blog post from the cosy dragon: Interview with Désirée Nordlund

An Interview with Désirée Nordlund, author of Avia the Warrior, The Recreators and others…

What is your favourite Dragon in literature?

I think that must be Yevaud in ”A Wizard of Earthsea” by Ursula Le Guin. It was something about the dragons in her world that fascinated me. That they could talk the wizards’ language but often still preferred to just burn and kill. As I recall, that was the first dragon I ”met” in a book.

Another favorite is a dragon in a story my mother wrote, that had been banished by the other dragons because it had stumpy wings so it couldn’t fly. The hero of the story built him a set of wings but until the dragon had proven it would start helping the people in the valley instead of burning it down, the hero needed to sit on the dragon’s back to keep the wings working.

I’m not going to be reviewing your newest novel, but from your other published novels, is there one that is your own personal favourite?

”The Recreators” because I started to write at that story when I was just a kid. It had been through many faces and shapes. And it all began with a map I draw on a large paper. Yes, it was inspired by the Earthsea-books, but my islands were bigger and totally different. And though the story had wizards it was another type of wizards and in time they were not wizards, but rather a form of demigods. I think that book will always have a special place in my heart because I started to write it so early in life.

Everyone has a ‘first novel’, even if many of them are a rough draft relegated to the bottom and back of your desk drawer (or your external harddrive!). Have you been able to reshape yours, or have you abandoned it for good?

My first ”novel” was just 36 pages and scared my dad because it was about two girls who died and fought to return to life. I was twelve and was not supposed to deal with the serious issues the story was about. Besides from sending it to a novel contest – which must have appeared odd for the judges since it, in reality, was a short story only – I never took that story further. My second project was about a queen and her lady-in-waiting year 812 somewhere in Europe. To be as young as I was I am surprised that there indeed was a great deal of conflict in the story, but it was far too romantic for my tastes today. I did a lot of research though and it was before the Internet. Yes, I am that old.

Over the years, what would you say has improved significantly in your writing?

The simple answer is everything. There is little I recognize in my writing today from those early attempts for novels. On the other hand, ”The Recreators” became a novel at last and if I look at the first versions of that story, I can see that I am more focused on what I want to tell now than I was then. I am better at creating characters that are not clones of myself and still believable. I think years of life made their mark in my writing too.

Some authors are able to pump out a novel a year and still be filled with inspiration. Is this the case for you, or do you like to let an idea percolate for a couple of years in order to get a beautiful novel?

I am full of stories. All the time. If I had the finances to write at full time I would probably be able to write more than one novel a year. I prefer to write, rewrite, rewrite and then let it fly. At least a month passes between rewrites where I work with other stories. What I write always get better with time, so of course what I write today will get better if I rewrite it a year later, but if I kept thinking like that I would never be able to release anything. I do the best I can at the stage I am right now. But I try not to dwell on them when I feel I am done. The idea as such can percolate for quite many years before I start writing, though. Since I have always a bunch of projects going, new ideas have to wait in line, so when I get there they have gained focus and shape somewhere back in my mind.

So what makes you write a story? What is important to you?

I would lie if I said I don’t have a message. I do. I think most good books have. But I also try to make people think and if they come up with another answer than I, then it is okay too since tolerance and understanding are two words that mean a lot to me. I always felt I was different and I never fully understood my fellow classmates in school. It took me far into adulthood to understand why. One thing was that I am an introvert, in a world where you were expected to be an extrovert. Understanding this and it was time to get down from the high horses I was on. I have still a hard time to accept that women in general like clothes and makeup and high heels by their own free will. I had sort of placed myself above all that and sneered at many typical female behaviors. It is nothing I am proud of. Many of my stories have their base in this journey and a strive to understand and accept everyone as they are.

I think there is too little understanding between people in general. It is so easy to just dismiss someone as rude or boring or nuts. I enjoy exploring those characters and face my own presumptions and ideas of what is right and wrong. It is quite amazing what you will find if you dare to flip a thought to the other side of the scale and see what happens.

I have heard of writers that could only write in one place – then that cafe closed down and they could no longer write! Where do you find yourself writing most often, and on what medium (pen/paper or digital)?

I can write anywhere. It is the surroundings that don’t do well with me doing it, though. I used to sit at the kitchen table. You know, the center of the house, as a parent, small kids, it was a natural place to be. Until the kids got older and I got used to actually write a page without getting disturbed. Soon I became annoyed when I got disturbed. Then we agreed it was better if I wrote somewhere else, so I have a writing corner with a door I can close. As long as people don’t expect me to have a conversation, I can write in almost any environment, as long as there is no music. I cannot write to music. I can have music as inspiration, but not when I write.

I am all digital. My handwriting is way too slow. I used to have writing journals on paper with all my research and ideas and from time to time I miss them, but so much of the research is on the Internet or digital photos and then I end up with things in two places, so I have decided to keep it all digital. It has its advantages, but I still want a digital corkboard where I can put things the way I want them. I have tried a few but they are all so much into sorting, and color coding and orderly straight columns. I want my own unsorted mess.

Before going on to hire an editor, most authors use beta-readers. How do you recruit your beta-readers, and choose an editor? Are you lucky enough to have loving family members who can read and comment on your novel?

Here is a problematic area for me. I just have only one reliable beta-reader and though he gives me valuable feedback he is no good at details in language. My mom used to read everything I wrote (and she is not the kind of mom that praise everything I write) but she is not able to do so any longer. I have tried to find new beta-readers, but it has been troublesome. I have not found anyone that been able to give me honest, valuable feedback. I don’t want to wait a month and then get an ”it was good”. It is also a problem if it is another writer that beta-reads who want me to beta-read in return. If I don’t like that writer’s book at all, it may not be a good start of a beautiful friendship.

An editor is easier because you pay for a service. I think I have found a good one now, but it is a bit of trial and error that could be costly. It is no fun to publish hard work and get bad reviews because the language is bad. It is my mistake, absolutely. I take full responsibility for my texts. But I have learned that it is worth the money to pay an experienced editor and don’t be afraid to give directions.

I walk past bookshops and am drawn in by the smell of the books – ebooks simply don’t have the same attraction for me. Does this happen to you, and do you have a favourite bookshop? Or perhaps you are an e-reader fan… where do you source most of your material from?

I used to thrive in second-hand comic book stores, but they hardly exist any longer. I remember going to those even as a kid with my dad. I have never experienced the same in a book store. Libraries though. They are the best places in the world, except for my home. It is the huge variety of books that attracts me. There are old books and books about any possible subject. You rarely find that in a book store. But the best thing of all is that if I find a book I love I don’t need to buy it but I can still read it.

These days I am an avid friend of ebooks, but it came as a surprise. I bought a kindle because the books were cheaper and to save the environment. A book I love, I keep forever, but there are plenty of books that were not so good to start with and it felt like a waste of paper and me not daring to buy new books. I honestly did not think I would l-o-v-e the kindle. But now I can have a whole bookshelf in my purse to no weight, the book does not get worn and torn, and I can read even if it is pretty dark around me, like when the bus goes into a tunnel or at night in bed.

I used to find myself buying books in only one genre (fantasy) before I started writing this blog. What is your favourite genre, and have your tastes changed over time?

I don’t have a favourite genre. I didn’t even know about the concept until I was in my upper teens. I think I favor a way to write rather than the genre. When I was younger, fantasy was what I read the most, but there was also Tom Clancy, Alister Maclane and Sherlock Holmes. In my late teens, I found Stephen King. And even later I found romance writers that I loved. I want to learn to know the people in the story and I want to know both sides of the coin like if it is a crime I want to understand the cop and the thief. I don’t think my taste has changed that much, but I come across more books I don’t like these days. When I was a kid mom bought my books through book clubs and on a recommendation. When that ended and I was on my own I explored more and these days there are so much to explore. I like the gamble of trying out authors I have not heard about if I get a good feeling for the story.

Social media is a big thing, much to my disgust! I never have enough time myself to do what I feel is a good job. What do you do?

This is troublesome because there is not enough time to do it all. But I have to show myself and my books, try to sell them. Nothing is sold by itself. In that way, social media and the Internet is a good thing, because it made it possible for people like me to become independent writers. On the other hand, it is hard to be seen. A famous actor I follow on social media told about a book he loved and I am sure that the author sold a couple of hundred copies within 48 hours. Still, I can’t send copies to famous people and hope for the best. It would cost way too much.

I am on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. Instagram is where I am most comfortable. Twitter is more of an organized mess. I have less control over what I appear like there. Tumblr and Facebook are good examples of control, but I feel have less response there. Though my Facebook page has gained surprisingly much interest lately. Maybe I’ve done something right?

I spend more time trying to reach out and sell books than I do writing. That is sad. But I cannot tell for sure if I would have spent that time writing if my books were sold without my effort. Quite a few years I had a writing blog that did quite well, but though it gave me my first paid writing job it costed too much writing effort to maintain. It was not something I could pause when I was busy with something else. I need to keep my stress level down and my priorities right.

Answering interview questions can often take a long time! Tell me, are you ever tempted to recycle your answers from one to the next?

No…

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[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/our-third-ish-2020-democratic-primary-draft-got-weird/

Our Third-ish 2020 Democratic Primary Draft Got Weird

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): We’re back with our third snake draft of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, god help us all. Previous drafts can be found here and here. And remember, we’re trying to pick who’d win the nomination, although our picks tend to get less selective and more inventive(?) as the rounds wear on.

The rules are as follows: Six rounds, so between the four of us, 24 potential 2020 Democratic nominees. Let’s determine the order. (And yes, we really do write our names on slips of paper and pick randomly!) We’re going to have Geoffrey Skelley, our new elections analyst, announce today’s order. Welcome, Geoff!!

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): The office is currently doing the draw.

Clare has first pick.

Geoff is second.

Sarah is third.

Nate is fourth.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): OMG what bullshit.

clare.malone: heh heh

geoffrey.skelley: There are many witnesses.

sarahf: OK, Clare, you’re up first! Take it away.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Elizabeth Warren.

natesilver: Dammit.

geoffrey.skelley: Wow, that was my pick.

Stunning, I know.

clare.malone: My picks are gonna haunt your dreams, Nate.

sarahf: So she’s been popular in previous drafts, why is she your No. 1 now, Clare?

micah (Micah Cohen, managing editor): I’m really pissed I’m not participating in this draft.

clare.malone: Warren has captured the mood of the party for a long time as far as economic angst goes, she’s been a consistent and eager Trump antagonizer, and she’s gonna be raising mucho $$$$$$$$$$$

natesilver: She’s also seemed more candidate-y recently — like her weekend speech about Kavanaugh, which was nominally a speech for her Senate race, felt very much like something she could deliver in Iowa or New Hampshire.

clare.malone: Right, that speech is basically the reason we’re having this chat.

sarahf: For any readers that missed it, Warren said in a town hall this weekend in Holyoke, Massachusetts, that “after Nov. 6, I will take a hard look at running for president.” So yeah, definitely she seems like she’s considering running.

OK, Geoff, who’s your pick?

geoffrey.skelley: I’m going to go with Kamala Harris.

Tough call, was debating leading with a certain former vice president. But when I think about candidates who can put together winning coalitions, I think of candidates who could have a strong appeal to the Democratic Party’s African-American base.

sarahf: Betting markets seem to agree with you, Geoff.

geoffrey.skelley: Harris is also fresh and Democrats may be poised to go for a woman nominee again. Plus, Harris will have access to that California $$$$.

sarahf: And I’m going to continue the #2018yearofthewoman with my pick … Kirsten Gillibrand.

clare.malone: So, Sarah, a question for you on that one: Worried at all about the way that she has been screwed by some in the donor class?

sarahf: For sure. I also think her ties to the Clintons are problematic for a 2020 run.

But I think she has a lot of experience going for her. She’s been in the Senate since 2009 and was in the House before that. Plus, she has some bipartisan appeal as well. Part of what we saw in 2016 I think had to do with the fact that both Trump and Clinton were deeply unpopular, which means I don’t think Clinton’s loss necessarily means that a woman like Warren, Harris or Gillibrand can’t win.

geoffrey.skelley: Gillibrand is probably the leading NY candidate, which ain’t nothing in a Democratic field.

sarahf: Nate, you’re up.

clare.malone: Nate’s gonna go with noted populist Democrat Jamie Dimon, I can feel it.

natesilver: OK, we’re going snake so I get two picks, right?

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah.

sarahf: 🐍

natesilver: I’m going with (4) Joe Biden, (5) Bernie Sanders.

OLD WHITE DUDES FTW

clare.malone: Bad pick.

natesilver: Which one?

clare.malone: Both.

All bad picks.

(For old times’ sake.)

natesilver: Joe Biden is LEADING in polls of Iowa.

And Bernie Sanders was the runner-up last time.

sarahf: I agree with Clare. How old is Biden?

clare.malone: I do actually think Biden’s a bad pick ultimately.

Biden is someone who’s going to probably look good to a general electorate, but I still wonder how his history with Anita Hill would play with a Democratic base in a primary.

geoffrey.skelley: I’m very down on Sanders — the moment’s passed, in my opinion. With someone like Warren running, I just don’t see it.

natesilver: Yeah, Warren running is a big negative for him. And his polls haven’t been great. It’s possible he benefited from being “not Hillary” in 2016, but now there are a lot of “not Hillaries.” But pretty good value at the No. 5 pick, IMO?

geoffrey.skelley: Yes.

clare.malone: He’s also someone who could be spun as too old, like Sarah said, or even not progressive enough for the moment. Again, this is for a Democratic primary.

natesilver: I just think … candidates’ fortunes will wax and wane, but Bernie is always going to have a built-in constituency.

geoffrey.skelley: No question that Sanders ran a good campaign — that “America” ad will live on forever.

geoffrey.skelley: Thinking about black voters, it’s possible that Biden can make an appeal among such voters if he’s facing white liberals like Warren and Sanders, which would help in South Carolina, for instance.

clare.malone: He’s an Upper Midwest/Pennsylvania candidate, and that’s what he’s billing himself as, I’d say.

But if Booker or Harris run, they would potentially neutralize a Biden advantage with black voters.

geoffrey.skelley: Exactly, Clare. If Harris or Booker are in, that weakens Biden’s case.

sarahf: OK, I think it’s time to move on to our No. 6 pick … Cory Booker.

clare.malone: He did some great grandstanding last week at the Ford/Kavanaugh hearings.

geoffrey.skelley: Every potential candidate has weaknesses, so Booker’s may be ties to Wall Street. But he’s good on the stump, safe to say.

sarahf: That said, I do think Booker is a very talented politician. He’s a great orator. And he’s really built a profile for himself as a #HellNo Democrat.

clare.malone: I think I’ve said this in previous drafts, but I find Booker to come off a bit gooberish in a way that could maybe grate during a campaign. He’s such the eager beaver. Of course, that might play very differently with an electorate that sees a candidate mostly through Facebook video feeds and so on.

Like, this dude has been running for president since he was mayor of Newark. It’s been a long time.

geoffrey.skelley: Hahaha, it’s so true.

Booker has been pegged as a potential presidential candidate since Day 1.

sarahf: OK, you’re up, Geoff.

geoffrey.skelley: Well, I think it’s time to shake things up.

BETO

sarahf: Oh my.

Clare, what do you think?

clare.malone: I think this.

But in all seriousness, I do think that if O’Rourke loses his Senate race, people will be trying to get him to run for president.

natesilver: That’s a predictable shake-up. I’m surprised he lasted this long.

geoffrey.skelley: I was just worried one of you would take him before it got back to me.

sarahf: We’re saving Jon Ossoff for later, Nate.

geoffrey.skelley: Funny thing is, if he were to upset Ted Cruz, that might reduce the chances he runs. Or at least, I’d be less likely to run for president if I’d just become a senator.

But if he comes close and generates all this coverage and Democratic enthusiasm as RFK 2.0 or something, I can see the attraction.

clare.malone: I think if he wins, he serves the Senate term.

All bets are off if he loses, because the next big Texas office doesn’t open up for a while.

natesilver: I guess his optimal scenario is that he loses like in a recount.

geoffrey.skelley: But President Trump might win re-election, so why not wait until 2024 if you’re O’Rourke in that case?

clare.malone: Ah, we’re getting to the dregs.

OK, I’m picking two, and one is Eric Holder. Pretty obvious reasons why: He’s a respected former attorney general who’s made voting rights a project, an African-American, and a close friend and ally of Obama, which would help in a campaign season. And God help me, but my other pick is Michael Avenatti, for no other reason than the world has gone mad and he’s on TV a lot.

sarahf: I was hoping someone would mention Avenatti!

clare.malone: Your wish is my command.

We needed to stir shit up here.

geoffrey.skelley: You just know the cable news channels won’t be able to resist covering him.

sarahf: I know mentioning him as a contender is very 🙄, but I don’t think it’s unrealistic!

clare.malone: Me neither, that’s why I picked him

natesilver: On the one hand, Avenatti is very Trumpian, which doesn’t seem like it would be a very good sell in a party that hates Trump.

On the other hand, politics is becoming exponentially more annoying every day, and so that would be the best way to stick to the trend.

micah: OK, I’m butting in here on that selection …

Clare …

Bad pick.

clare.malone: Which one, person-who’s-not-participating?

I THINK THEY’RE BOTH AMAZING PICKS

micah: Avenatti.

clare.malone: “A street fighter for Democracy,” etc. etc. The ads write themselves.

micah: Let’s not overlearn the lessons of 2016 — never write someone off, outsiders can win … “characters” can win. Those are true and worthwhile but not rules. After all, Democrats chose Hillary Clinton in 2016!!!

OK, I’m out.

Sorry, Sarah.

sarahf: What a note to leave on, Micah.

clare.malone: This is a low round pick. I doubt he will win, but I don’t doubt Avenatti will run.

sarahf: I think that’s solid. OK, Geoff, you’re up with the No. 10 pick.

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, this is harder.

Let’s go with Amy Klobuchar.

Midwestern nice certainly would provide a contrast to the incumbent president.

clare.malone: Good pick.

geoffrey.skelley: And she got some very positive headlines out of the Kavanaugh hearing.

clare.malone: I debated picking her. I think the one thing about her is that her “brand” (ugh) won’t stick out as much in this year.

There are already a number of better-known women who will run.

And I think Biden’s probably taking up a lot of the Upper Midwestern voter appeal space.

But I think last week she was really impressive.

natesilver: Klobuchar is like as far as you can be from Trump, personality-wise. She’s the anti-Avenatti.

sarahf: OK, i’m going to piggyback off the Kavanaugh hearing publicity for Democrats and throw out Sen. Jeff Merkley, even if his lawsuit to stop the Kavanaugh vote was ill-advised.

He’s been considering running for a while and I think is another boring (but solid) possibility for Democrats come 2020 if it turns out the 2018 midterms aren’t as much of a progressive victory as expected.

We’ll be having a very different discussion if Andrew Gillum loses the governor’s in Florida or Kyrsten Sinema loses the Senate race in Arizona (even though they are very different candidates running for very different offices).

natesilver: Hmm … I think we’re rapidly running out of good candidates.

Or at least obvious ones.

sarahf: This is true, too.

clare.malone: JOHN KASICH

natesilver: Not your turn.

clare.malone: I know. Also, not a Democrat.

Which I think is at least a nominal requirement to get into this draft.

geoffrey.skelley: Michael Bloomberg would also like a word on that party ID question, maybe?

sarahf: But it is Nate’s turn! And he gets to pick two!

natesilver: I can’t believe I have to make two picks, I want to forfeit.

But let’s go with …

Uhhhhhh

clare.malone: Bad pick.

natesilver: Sherrod Brown and Oprah Winfrey.

Bad picks.

geoffrey.skelley: This is my first chat, but I recall Oprah made an appearance in the last one.

natesilver: I do think she’d be very formidable if she ran.

geoffrey.skelley: Resources, name recognition, appeals to an interesting cross-section of the country …

clare.malone: Oprah and The Rock make an appearance in every draft we do.

sarahf: What a ticket!

clare.malone: Yeah, Oprah would probably win.

geoffrey.skelley: I’ll be sure to take Dwayne later on.

sarahf: Ugh, so it’s back to me. Can we just do four rounds? (Apparently, we can’t. Nate says a snake draft has to be six rounds.)

OK, rapid fire!

She’s not going to run, but I’d like to see a Mazie Hirono ticket.

geoffrey.skelley: Why not two Hawaiian presidents?

sarahf: Indeed!

OK, Geoff. You’re up.

geoffrey.skelley: Hmm, one white male governor … but which one?

sarahf: I’m going to say Hickenlooper if you don’t.

geoffrey.skelley: I think I’ll go with — oh, there you go.

Yes, John Hickenlooper is my pick.

A little too think-tank-y, maybe.

But who knows, swing-state governor with a background as a brewery owner?

sarahf: Gotta get the craft beer vote and the yoga vote.

OK, Clare you’re bestowed the honor of two picks.

clare.malone: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, just to fulfill the prophecy, and … even though I don’t think she’s ever going to actually run, Michelle Obama because she, like Oprah, would also probably win.

sarahf: Obama/Oprah another interesting (although unlikely) ticket.

geoffrey.skelley: Because he’s seemingly interested, I’ll take Deval Patrick for Round 5, Pick 2.

Though if he does run, the New Hampshire primary is going to be a New England homer event with Warren and Sanders potentially in the running as well. But this could weaken New Hampshire’s importance.

sarahf: I think this is the point in the conversation is where we talk about John Delaney. So I’ll submit him as my option for this round, and unlike my previous pick, at least he’s running!

natesilver: OMG

sarahf: Who knows! He could have a better stump speech than Lincoln Chafee.

geoffrey.skelley: I haven’t heard Delaney talk about the metric system, so that’s a start.

natesilver: Why not just pick Martin O’Malley while you’re at it, at least he was governor of something.

clare.malone: And was in a band.

Is in a band.

natesilver: O’Rourke/O’Malley 2020.

geoffrey.skelley: But is “I’m bipartisan” the appeal that will work in the 2020 Democratic primary?

Count me a skeptic.

sarahf: OK, Nate. You get to pick two.

natesilver: My god, how much more of this.

I’ll take uhhhhhhhhhhhhh …

clare.malone: Will no one rid me of this troublesome snake draft?

natesilver: Eric Garcetti.

And the guy I always take, Doug Jones.

geoffrey.skelley: The Doug Jones Memorial Pick

natesilver: I think he’s more likely a VP than a top-of-the-ticket guy, but still …

clare.malone: He is facing a tough 2020 re-election fight as a Democrat in Alabama.

natesilver: Which might be a reason why he quits the Senate and runs for POTUS instead?

He was pretty outspoken against Kavanaugh.

Which doesn’t seem like a move you’d make if you’re focused on Alabama.

sarahf: OK, this is thankfully the LAST ROUND. And good news, Clare, you only have to pick one this time!

But I have to go first.

And I’m going to go out with Jay Inslee! I know, yet another exciting 2020 former-governor pick.

Plus, he’s recently said he’s not ruling out a 2020 run.

geoffrey.skelley: Western governors are actually a plentiful Democratic candidate grouping.

sarahf: OK, what’s your last pick, Geoff?

geoffrey.skelley: Well, the late rounds of drafts are where you pick sleepers.

So I’m going with someone who isn’t even elected yet but is currently running.

Andrew Gillum.

sarahf: 🔥

clare.malone: OK, me next?

sarahf: Yep, Clare. Take us home.

clare.malone: I’m going with Mitch Landrieu, who, correct me if I’m wrong, none of us picked earlier?

geoffrey.skelley: He’s all yours

clare.malone: White, Southern, progressive … yada, yada, yada.

geoffrey.skelley: I’d say the one name I expected but didn’t see was Steve Bullock.

natesilver: Some of these picks feel very 2024ish to me.

geoffrey.skelley: Gillum certainly could be if things go his way.

sarahf: So now we have to vote on this madness? Is that how this shakes out?

natesilver: I don’t even like my team this time, so I’m going to vote myself last to preserve my credibility.

sarahf: Here are our teams. Who wants to vote first?

2020 Democratic Primary Draft, October 2018

Round Clare Geoff Sarah Nate 1 Elizabeth Warren Kamala Harris Kirsten Gillibrand Joe Biden 2 Eric Holder Beto O’Rourke Cory Booker Bernie Sanders 3 Michael Avenatti Amy Klobuchar Jeff Merkley Sherrod Brown 4 Dwayne Johnson John Hickenlooper Mazie Hirono Oprah Winfrey 5 Michelle Obama Deval Patrick John Delaney Eric Garcetti 6 Mitch Landrieu Andrew Gillum Jay Inslee Doug Jones

natesilver: I like Geoff’s team.

clare.malone: I’ll rank ’em: Clare, Geoff, Sarah, Nate.

sarahf: I’d vote Clare, Geoff, myself and then Nate, I guess.

geoffrey.skelley: I’ll be that guy and vote for myself

clare.malone: Even more the #1 team, then.

sarahf: I think this means we have a tie between Clare’s team and Geoff’s team.

Quite the slate, y’all.

geoffrey.skelley: I think a late-primary debate between Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren would certainly be something to behold if the field were to ever shrink to two (who knows).

Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/our-third-ish-2020-democratic-primary-draft-got-weird/

[oselatra]

Vote, people

People under 30 are not voting in large numbers. I've heard some different reasons for this: They don't feel it will make a difference.

Vote, people

People under 30 are not voting in large numbers. I've heard some different reasons for this: They don't feel it will make a difference. Both sides are the same. It won't affect them all that much, being as low on the totem pole as they are. They feel insulated from politics and political ramifications.

When it comes to issues like polluted air, global warming and rising sea level, you can run but you can't hide. These issues will affect you no matter what. However, there is a bigger reason why you should vote. Trump is funneling billions of dollars into the military while purging their ranks of tens of thousands of troops he deems undesirable. He has a War Cabinet in place and is trying to pick a fight with both North Korea and Iran. If he succeeds, the military will have no recourse but to reinstate the draft — both men and women this time.

Bottom line, you can lather yourself with essential oils, eat Paleo until it comes out of your ears and stick a healing crystal in every pocket. If Trump calls your number, your butt will be in the sling. Get motivated. Register and vote like your life depended on it.

David Rose

Hot Springs

From the web

In response to the Times' Aug. 16 cover story by David Ramsey on Rusty Cranford, the lobbyist seen as the linchpin in the corruption recently uncovered at the state legislature that ended the state contract with Preferred Family Healthcare:

Great job, Mr. Ramsey! It still irritates me [that while] all that money was flowing at the top and at the bottom, those actually doing the work [at PFH] were not getting paid a fair wage for our position based on our education and credentials. We did not get paid for half the hours they required us to work, and we had to beg for supplies to be able to do our jobs — things like ink pens and notebook paper, locking files to keep private patient information protected, etc.

I cannot believe that Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma and Kansas have not started to investigate PFH billing practices in their states! justcantbelieve

I saw Cranford in action at the legislature during the 2009 and 2011 sessions in his nascent stage, getting legislation passed that allowed him to get paid about $25,000 about a year later. Too complicated to explain here, but he was oleaginous then in how he talked to legislators. It was enough to forever disgust me on the legislative process. And, as Mr. Ramsey so well shows, Cranford was just getting started. The year 2011 was laying the groundwork for years of corruption.

Tucker Max

In response to an Arkansas Blog post suggesting people ask Congressman French Hill if President Trump and "junketing partner" Congressman Dana Rohrbacher (R-Calif.) will come to Arkansas to campaign for him:

French Hill and his friends like to invoke Nancy Pelosi in their battle with [Democratic congressional opponent] Clarke Tucker, but the question that I have is, "Will French Hill support Kevin McCarthy for Speaker if Hill wins and the GOP keeps control of the House?" McCarthy was caught on tape saying, "There's two people that I think Putin pays: Rohrbacher and Trump" and then agreed to cover up the issue for partisan reasons (Washington Post 5/17/17). I am not the biggest fan of Pelosi but what has she done that even comes close to such unpatriotic and corrupt behavior?

Pierce

In response to an Arkansas Blog post noting that the Family Council is campaigning against Issue 1, the ballot proposal to limit damage awards in lawsuits that is being challenged in Circuit Judge Mackie Pierce's courtroom:

I've been a little distracted lately so I might have missed it, but it seems like there's been a long enjoyable period of time without a mention of Jerry Cox and the Family Council. I thought maybe Cox had choked on a lemon and the Family Council had gone out of business. Sorry to hear this isn't the case.

My daddy has been dead for the last 35 years and I've decided I don't need any other daddies at this point in life. Our city daddies are about to drive us out of Arkansas. I don't need a spiritual daddy, sure don't need a Family Council, except the one in my own house, which has always been a 50-50 deal. In many cases a group of like-minded people can be dangerous. The Family Council needs to go back to the 1950s and pray over Elvis's swinging hips, silently. We're done with you.

We'll never be rid of the Trump Mafia unless our six turds in D.C. quit supporting him. Things will never get better in Arkansas unless our population wises up. Voting to take your own rights away is beyond stupid and Issue 1 is a toxic soup of poison for the 99 percent. If you hate yourself enough to vote for Issue 1, please find another outlet for your self-loathing ... young girls cutting in a quiet room is popular on our pay channels. Self-flagellation is a big deal in the Philippines around Easter.

If you want to hurt yourself, get after it, but please don't hurt the rest of us by voting for Issue 1! Save us, Judge Mackie Pierce!

Deathbyinches

We need to just face the fact Issue 1 is beyond any doubt the biggest POS that has EVER been foisted upon us Arkansans by the Arkansas legislature! We need to show those 135 self-centered idiots exactly what we think about their POS by voting against it. And I know I am painting with too broad of a brush here, because there are a few of those 135 legislators who actually voted against placing Issue 1 on the ballot and are actively working against it, thank goodness!

RYD

On the obituary by Ernie Dumas posted on the Arkansas Blog for former Arkansas Gazette editorial page editor Jerry Dhonau, citing Dhonau's reporting on the 1957 crisis at Central High School:

I was a brand-new copy editor on the Gazette news desk when Dhonau and [reporter Ray] Moseley were covering the story. Dumas' obit brings back those days in the newsroom, which was flooded by out-of-state reporters, many of whom were famous. They often cribbed the Arkansas Gazette articles when they filed their reports. Dhonau and Moseley were both consummate newsmen, interested only in getting the story right. It was kinda scary when they would come in after being at the school all day and relate what had transpired — a black reporter being beaten by the mob; the jeering white students; the dignity of the black students, and later, after the 101st Airborne had been sent in, a story about a redneck member of the white mob who made the mistake of trying to take a rifle away from a member of the 101st. You can imagine what happened. There are very few of us left who were on the Gazette staff at that time. It is a time in my life about which I have always been proud. Even though I had little to do with the coverage, I witnessed history being made.

plainjim

Scrubbing history

In a democracy, it is the archivist who stands on the first line of defense of a free people. Without archivists there would be no one to protect the documentation that affirms the truths about who we are as a people — warts and all.

Take the documentation of the country's struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced. By 1982, 35 states had ratified it, needing only three more before the ratification could be recognized. Last year Nevada ratified it, followed by Illinois on May 31, 2018. Now, after 95 years of well-documented struggles, we are one state away from ratification. What then?

It's comforting to know that the archivist of the United States, as head of the National Archives and Records Administration, takes care of the administrative responsibilities of the amendment ratification process.

Before 1934, the role of national archivist was carried out by the secretaries of state (1789-1934). With the help of the American Historical Association in 1884, our political leaders were given a push toward creating a National Archives. It took until 1926 before funds were allocated for a National Archives Building. In 1933 President Hoover laid the corner stone and in 1934 FDR signed the national Archives Act. So, it took us 145 years to complete that little bit of governmental activity. But no matter how long it would have taken, those in the history field of the United States would never have stopped pushing.

We have had 10 national archivists since 1935 — all men, although we've had two women as acting archivist (1993 and 2008) for brief periods. Only one archivist, Mr. Don Wilson, seventh archivist, has ever certified an amendment; it was in 1992. And don't you know it had something to do with salary increases for members of Congress?

David Ferriero is our present archivist. And I believe like his predecessors he will protect the ERA documents. And will continue to have the authority to do so, which is something I took for granted until recently.

I would like to take for granted that every scrap of paper related to the 95-year-old odyssey of the ERA, as well as all of our other historical documents relating to past and present struggles, would be preserved, now and in the future. But, this is 2018, when all of our norms and standards are under attack. I stand with my fellow historians to keep a watchful eye, to stand guard, and sound the alarm if anyone dares to scrub any part of our history.

Janis K. Percefull

Hot Springs

Vote, people

[sebastiano-merlino]

I've just published a new post on https://mylittleblackbird.com/2017/10/09/seven-kinds-of-darkness-a-writing-project/

Seven Kinds of Darkness: a writing project

Ok folks, I’d like to spend some time talking about the writing project I am working on: Seven Kinds of Darkness. I also hope this can be of help to others in a similar situation: trying to write your stories while having a different job.

In short, it’s time to play with all my cards down on the table.

Yeah… I am a weird guy who is writing a book – with which, don’t get me wrong, I don’t disagree. Aside for when I am the weird guy because I am writing a book.

I mean, I am not even trying to get you to un-weird me. I am a guy that spends his time massaging his cat’s shoulders so I’m pretty convinced people have better material to say I am an odd guy.

Po enjoying his massage

It’s been quite hard for me to stick onto a single project and being able to deliver – I have a pretty terrible record of abandoning things moving to others without bringing much of a closure to what I have started.

In the last few months though, I’ve gotten pretty serious about completing a project: “Seven Kinds of Darkness”. Before this summer I had quite a lot of false starts at this (an incredibly old version of this is still on my wattpad account – waiting to be deleted).

What is this Seven Kinds of Darkness?

I’ll try to be methodical in this section and, since I am an engineer, I am going to do what serious people do when they want to show they are serious: a bullet list.

Seven Kinds of Darkness – Provisional Cover

Genre: Dark Fantasy / Vampire

Theme: What does it mean to be human? What if a human could live forever? What if something non-human is turned human?

Language: Italian (I will translate it to english)

Word-count target: this makes no sense to me – I don’t have such target. Given where I am right now though I expect to land in the 80k-90k ballpark.

Synopsis: An exclusive party, the forgotten prince of Paris, seven vampires and a girl with the eyes as green as emeralds hunted by terrible hunters. What links between them such different creatures? A Templar knight, a philosopher, a megalomaniac genius, an oracle, a pre-destined boy, a priest and a witch? Will the seven vampires learn to be afraid of the darkness? Which secret has the prince discovered that pushed him to renounce to his domains? Why now, after hundreds of years, did he decide to organise a party in his palace outside of the french capital? How did he choose his guests?

Inspiration: Uhm…many. I have played Vampire the Masquerade during high school – this influenced heavily my views on vampires and how to manage them in fiction. I found two character backgrounds I wrote years ago, as a result, I’ve built a long story around them.

What’s your writing process?

This is an interesting question – which is funny for me to say since I asked it to myself.

At the time of writing this post (and during the development of Seven Kinds of Darkness) I still work – not as a writer – for most of my day. This means that I spend at least eight hours a day doing something else; and it goes without saying that in the evening I am pretty tired.

To keep going like this without flipping the table I need to have method.

What is my method then?

Create an outline: Yes. I am a boring guy and so I decided to outline this novel. There is no way I can afford losing a day while thinking where my story should go. I spent two or three days at the start of the work to organise the list of scenes. This helped me find a lot (and when I say “a lot” I mean “A LOT”) of logical mistakes and plot holes. Above this though, it allows me to know in advance what I am going to write every time I sit down. I don’t see this as limiting because if I change my mind on something I go back and change it in the outline.

Have a daily target: I needed this so much. Together with the outline this has been a game changer. Tired or not, willing or not, I know one thing: every day I write a number of words equal at least to my target. It doesn’t need to be high, it just needs to be there. I started with 500 words a day (that I am now increasing to 1000). For more than two months now, I never missed my target even while doing this during the day:

This was real cool!

Decouple writing from editing: This was a hard one but helped too because it increased my writing speed. It is state of mind. While writing my first draft I don’t edit. I don’t re-read whatever I write nor I go back another day to edit it either. I will not edit until I have completed the first draft entirely. Now… I know what you are thinking – I am probably writing garbage and yes, my unfaithful friend, I am. It just doesn’t matter, I will fix everything during the next few re-drafting and editing phases.

Character-dedicated mind-maps: To be productive, I needed to know my characters really well. I decided to use a system I’ve used during my career as an engineer: mind-maps. These allow me to have a clear picture of characters and boost my productivity whenever they are on scene.

Delegate: I will not do all the work. Cover design: no thanks! Editing? Sure, I’ll do it but I will also get the help of a professional editor. Translation? Maybe – despite I am starting to think I will hire a translator.

There is so much more to say about process that I will write a post on this in the next few weeks.

When are we going to read Seven Kinds of Darkness?

Uhm… I hope my first draft to be complete by end of November 2017. This means that hopefully everything should be ready in italian by March 2018. I am still not sure about the time needed to translate something of this size, but I hope everything will be ready in english before end of June 2018.

  I will keep on posting about Seven Kinds of Darkness and my writing process in the next few weeks. In the meantime, feel free to ask anything you want in the comments below or subscribe to the blog.

[amylanchester]

PitchWars #PimpMyBio

Hi, I’m Amy.

This is my first ever PitchWars, and I’m hyped af.

About My Manuscript

Title: More Fierce Than Fire (title comes from here)

Genre: YA Contemporary Fantasy

Word Count: 75,000

Comps: The Young Elites by Marie Lu, The Story of Owen by E. K. Johnston

Sixteen-year-old Abigail Hunter, the best healer in Grady Hospital’s Magical Trauma Ward, has a secret. Ten years ago, Abby wished her mother dead on the worst possible day—the day dragons awoke and brought magical powers to everyone in the world. Abby's angry wish became the powerful spell that ended her mother's life. 

Abby has devoted her life to healing magic to atone for the sins of her past. Though she’s still afraid of losing control, she has become increasingly aware of the threat the dragons pose and frustrated that she is helpless to do anything about it. Hoping to develop the skills required to protect others, she joins a new United Nations-sponsored program which promises to give her the chance to work directly with the dragons and their victims. Training with some of the best young mages in the world, she prepares for the war to come.

And the war is coming. When a group of unregistered mages leads the dragons in a deadly attack on American cities, Abby must decide if she’s ready to join the fight against them, or if she’ll be stuck reliving the mistakes of her past forever. 

A Note About Diversity

Diversity is extremely important to me in my writing. Most of the characters in my book other than my MC are POC and/or LGBTQ. I did not feel that I had the skill or experience to write a first-person perspective for a POC/LGBTQ character, so I didn’t. However, I have been fortunate to grow up in an extremely diverse place, so I’ve included a number of POC/LGBTQ characters (loosely) based on real people. I feel that authentic, thoughtful representation is important in all forms of media and am hoping to find a mentor who feels the same.

MS Pinterest Board

Novel Aesthetic (Quotes & More on My Instagram)

About Me

Let’s start this the way you did back in pre-school. My name is Amy Lanchester, and I’m twenty-eight years old. My favorite color is pink (and has been since long before millennial pink became a thing #ILikedItBeforeItWasCool). More Fierce Than Fire is my first novel. 

I’m “from Atlanta” in the way that most people who say they are “from Atlanta” are “from Atlanta,” in that I actually grew up about thirty minutes away and only moved to the city as an adult. I set my book here because I feel that entirely too many books are set in NYC, London, or Chicago.

I’ve been funemployed for the past year.

I started my first “real job” before I’d even finished my master’s degree, and after working there for three years, I decided I wanted to do a few things before I’m too old/settled. So I’ve traveled Europe:

ALL

OVER

EUROPE

and the western United States:

ALL

OVER

THE 

WILD

WEST

and I finally achieved a life goal in writing this book. I highly recommend taking a “gap year” to anyone who is able.

I live with my boyfriend and our beautiful asshole of a cat, Bret. We found him about two years ago at a local McDonald’s hanging out near the drive-thru. We went back the next day and lured him out with bits of hamburger, and he’s been our lovable jerk of a pet ever since. 

Why You Should Mentor Me

- I am really, really serious about this. I’ve devoted an insane amount of time, energy, and research on this project in the past year and fully intend to see it through all the way. I love and believe in my work. 

- I am crazy meticulous. I come from a STEM background, and I use the tools I learned there in my work. I’m a firm believer in spreadsheets, outlines, automation, and using technology to the fullest. I am a grammar nut who googles everything she isn’t sure about and spends hours nerding out reading style guides and grammar blogs.

- I take criticism well. I’m a fairly self-critical person who is realistic about her flaws and shortcomings. Though I love my work, I know it is far from perfect, and I am greatly looking forward to receiving a thoughtful critique. You won’t hurt my feelings. I want my work to be the best it can be, and I know that takes knowledge and experience I don’t have.

Writing History

I had the idea for my MS in May 2016. It was inspired by this tumblr post which made its way to reddit (a site I love and hate and spend entirely too much time on):

I decided I could write that book, and so I did. I wrote a prologue that I cut and part of the first chapter on a train from Warsaw to Berlin in September. I made an outline when I got back home in October, and I wrote the rest of the book during NaNoWriMo 2016. I did finish my 50,000 words in November, but the book wasn’t done. I had a completed (terrible) first draft of about 55,000 words by the first week of December. 

My first draft was mostly just dialogue and action. I discovered that I hate writing description as much as I hate reading it. So my next several drafts mostly involved adding description to scenes, and it took forever. I cut several scenes and characters entirely during this process and added a few more scenes and characters, bringing my final word count to 75,000 words. My current draft contains very little from the original NaNoWriMo draft, and believe me, that’s for the best.

Writing Style

I am definitely a planner. I would have gotten nowhere without my outline or character spreadsheet. However, most of my character’s personalities came out through writing their dialogue. I used dialogue (that I went back and cut because it was boring and redundant) to solve plot problems and work out motivations in scenes. If I ever got stuck, I just started writing a conversation between my characters, and it solved basically all of my problems. 

How I Write 

I started writing in Scrivener, a program I’d gotten for free when I worked at the Apple Store back in 2010. It helped me a lot with organizing scenes and research. I transitioned to Google Docs after a save file got corrupted and I spent an evening panicking that I’d lost everything (I hadn’t, thank God). Google Docs sucks for long documents, but it saves to the cloud every few seconds, so I suffered through it.

I write at night almost exclusively. My best creative work comes after midnight, and usually once I’m already in bed.

I dread having to get back on a normal schedule because the night owl life is best for my writing.

Favorite Writing Resources

- Excel/Google Sheets

- Grammar Girl

- Chicago Manual of Style (I’m too poor to actually own this, but I use their FAQs and this hyphenation table all the time.)

- Hemingway Editor

- Grammarly

- ProWritingAid

Upcoming Projects Preview

I have so many ideas. I think of new project ideas every day, and I constantly struggle not to get distracted by my newest, shiniest concept. Here are a couple of things I’ve started planning:

- Shakespeare’s plays retold in a combined setting like into the Woods or Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles. A central, overarching series plot with individual volumes devoted to some of the plots of the original plays. I’ll be combining side characters from one show with main characters from another.

- A space opera/sci-fi series centered on a girl who rescues an alien from a hostile species at war with Earth’s space empires. The aliens have superior technology and are annihilating the space colonies, but we can’t communicate with them. My MC and her android nanny devise a method for rudimentary communication and are captured by government forces who have ulterior motives.

Stuff I Like

Books

- Harry Potter, obviously. Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite. I spent years convincing myself I was a Gryffindor like Hermione, my hero, but I’m really a Ravenclaw.

- The Young Elites by Marie Lu

- Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E. K. Johnston

- A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

- 1984 by George Orwell

- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

TV Shows

I freaking love TV. 

I’m convinced that if Ray Bradbury had lived in the Golden Age of Television that we’re living through, he would never have written Fahrenheit 451.

A short list of shows I love: Futurama, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Parks and Recreation, BoJack Horseman, Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Jessica Jones, Broadchurch, Steven Universe, Stranger Things, You’re the Worst, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Musicals 

I love Broadway so much. 

I’ve been in (school productions of) Once on This Island, Les Miserables, Into the Woods, and Dreamgirls. Other shows I love include Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, The Last Five Years, Aida, Phantom of the Opera, Evita, The Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof, and West Side Story.

Cosplay 

I picked up cosplay a few years back. I didn’t own a sewing machine, didn’t know how to sew, and had limited crafting experience. I taught myself using books, online tutorials, and YouTube videos. Some of my projects:

Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones

Chell from Portal

Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter

Elsa from Frozen

Joy from Inside Out

Eleven from Stranger Things

That was entirely too long, and I’m sorry.

If you read this far, you’re probably my soulmate. Please send me a message on Twitter and let me know. :)

[lorrainecparker]

Avid ScriptSync: An Editor’s Secret Weapon

ScriptSync is an Avid product that lives inside Media Composer. It assists filmmakers and video editors with a workflow we’ve been waiting 100 years for – the ability to quickly sync video and audio clips directly to the lines and lines of words on our scripts and transcripts.

Either someone has written a script ahead of time, or like with documentary or reality shows, someone makes word-for-word transcriptions of what people said, and then builds the script in post-production from those transcripts.

You’d think something this awesome would have been around a lot longer. Well it has. 11 years longer in fact. Many people are actually confused between what ScriptSync is and what is the environment inside Avid Media Composer it works from, namely script-based editing.

It’s funny how many people over my career have said this exact line: “Wait, you really want me to write down what they said? Every word?”

If you want ScriptSync to work, and work well, your transcripts need to be amazing. Not just slapped together, or approximate. They need to be accurate. I’d even recommend word-for-word, to the point of including ums and uh’s, stutters and restarts. The more you give ScriptSync to latch onto, the better.

There are three options, and they absolutely subscribe to the theory of cheap, or fast, or good. And I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one fits your production.

The first option is the cheap option. Use an app or a bot on the Web that makes speech-recognition transcripts. Since there isn’t a person listening and typing, the customer is supposed to expect a failure rate. If you are in need of extras in your transcripts – like notes about what timecode each new bite starts at, and who is talking (interviewee versus the producer asking the questions), then this option is not for you.

The second option is the fast one. Use an upload service that hires people at an incredibly cheap rate. On-call and on-demand, these people bang-out transcripts as fast as possible. Think of them as the UBER of the transcription world. For this, a lot of independent producers have recently begun using REV.com. The price is nice and the speed of getting back transcripts is nice too.

There are still issues with this – many of them. But the biggest ones are inaccuracy and inconsistency. If your interview mentions medical terms, occasional foreign language words, or anything out of the ordinary, many times the contracted transcriber will simply spell it phonetically. Also, on large projects you are absolutely not guaranteed getting the same transcriber. If you have 30 transcripts, you might have 30 different people, and each with a different style and accuracy level.

Plus, and a lot of independent filmmakers don’t often think of this one, but what is that company’s confidentiality plan? You may not be concerned with whether they leak the information about what an interviewee says, but depending on your material perhaps you should? Are those transcribers under your own Non-Disclosure Agreements? How sensitive is your material? Remember they are able to keep your proxy videos or audio clips forever if they wanted to. Lots to think about!

The third option is the good one. Use a transcription service that includes a full spectrum of services including confidentiality, a single transcriber assigned to the entire project for consistency, researching the subject matter as it’s being transcribed especially medical terms, locations and such, double proofing on the part of the transcriber and the transcription company’s manager, back-end confidentiality where all evidence of the work and its transcripts are actually deleted from the contracted transcriber’s computer, and then upon request, using of all the transcripts for closed captioning., so that you’re not starting that part of the process from scratch.

Here in the US I’ve been a huge fan of Accurate Secretarial. Every editor should find a good small-scale place like this one that has large-scale standard operating procedures.

I know it seems like I’m drifting away from ScriptSync a bit, and hammering away at how precise your transcriptions need to be, but your transcriptions feed ScriptSync.

ScriptSync is only as good as your Transcriptions.

Well here we are. All transcripts are made, and from them, the script was written.

Time to load the scripts and the media into the system and get it ready for ScriptSync. The process here is actually the same as it was when ScriptSync came out.

Don’t open Media Composer yet. First grab a transcript in a folder on your computer. You’ll have to reformat it as a text file (.txt) in order to use it in Media Composer. Why is this? Actually it’s a good thing. All of the extra formatting that comes along with Microsoft Word would just get in the away of you trying to make your film. In order to mark your script in the Avid with script-based editing’s tools, you need it to start as a clean thing.

Open it in Microsoft Word. Click File / Save As. About 2/3 of the way down, click Format, Plain Text (.txt). Don’t worry, it’s not going to save right now, just wait a moment. Click Save and see what happens. See? Before it saves, another dialogue comes up. This is important. Text Encoding: Even if you’re on a Mac and going to a Mac, just trust me on this. Click MS Dos. Options? Insert Line Breaks. Always. End lines with CR/LF. Always. Allow Character substitution? Always. Once you have these four things selected, click OK, and it saves your script as a text file.

So why those settings?

There are big tech reasons behind it. The terminology and operations of script formatting – in Avid and in all computing in general came from the old days of typewriters. So in the background, when any Word doc or Final Draft doc, or Text File is being converted from one thing to another, that background architecture is following a set of rules created ages ago. ASCII rules to be exact. And those rules here are:

Text Encoding: In MS Dos, it allows more transferrable features between OS’s.

Insert Line Breaks: If you don’t, you’ll be going for the Guiness world record of the longest horizontal script ever.

CR : Carriage Return. This returns the text creator’s ability to its left justification

LF: Line Feed. This means the text won’t be typing right on top of the last line of text that was typed.

Character Substitution: For when you have a goofy name like mine.

Once done with all these, click “Save”. Now this is ready to be brought into Avid Media Composer.

OK, are you ready to sync your script the old way – the archaic, slow way? Let’s do that first, so you can understand how awesome ScriptSync is.

In Composer, click File / New Script. Go and find that script, and bring it in. Here it is, completely formatted for the script-based editing environment. As you can see I’ve also requested from the transcriber to add timecode as well as the letter Q and a colon to indicate the producer’s questions. Now let me tell you, do this File/New Script a few times and, like everyone else, you’ll be begging Avid to expand this to File / New scripts (plural), bring ‘em all in at once. Man we want that. Maybe someday.

Now click File / Open Bin, and let’s bring in the video and audio clip that is what was transcribed. File / AMA Link, or you could bring it in through legacy methods like File / Import or digitizing from tape, it depends where it came from.

Now you can’t just drag it onto the script. That would be like dragging a clip into the timeline without any in/out points. Avid wants to make sure you’re deciding where it should go. It wants in/out points. So go give the clip a listen. Where does it start? Where does it stop? OK go highlight that area on the script. See how nice the click-and-drag ability lets you define in/out points? This isn’t doing any damage to your script. This is just setting in/out points, much like in your sequence timeline. Nothing sticks. Set an in, and an out. Is this the right in and out? Unsure? Well unfortunately, you’d better be sure. It is not – I repeat – not an easy interface for making changes. There is absolutely no “trim” function as you’re used to in the timeline. So you don’t have to be exact with your in/out. Actually you can be sloppy, but you need to be sloppy in adding too long of an in/out, rather than too short.

Now drag the clip into that area. Nothing is synced yet. It is only placed.

Time to sync. Ready? Look here in the toolbar. There’s a play button, which plays the take totally separately from Media Composer’s source/record monitors. There’s also a Record button. Record? What are we recording if the clip is already captured? We are recording the points at which we want to sync. And we do so “live”.

Hit record. It starts playing the take from the very beginning. So you’ll sit and wait through silence, film crew banter, or whatever. Wait for the start. Now when you hear a word, click the clip’s magic little green tail here. Do it again… And again… And again… You can be as line-by-line exact as you want, or if this whole project only has a couple of days of editing total, just click a few and deal with the fact later that your only syncing a few points, and you’ll have to shuttle to find the exact words.

You’re adding these little triangles, called “script marks”. I never call them by that name though because it’s too easy to confuse someone in conversation between “script marks” and “markers” in the timeline. I call them carrots. It’s an old term, and I’m old. So forgive me. Anyway, add the next carrot. And the next… And the next… Bored yet? Getting nervous because you already spent time transcoding or digitizing, and the producer is demanding real results, not this tedious junk?

Well tough! Sit here and do this for the next 40 hours of interviews you shot! Or go buy ScriptSync.

ScriptSync. Ready to see it?

Highlight the in/out. Drag the clip. It becomes a “take”. Click Script / ScriptSync. OK.

Done! Next script. Done. Next script. Done. Those 40 hours? You’ll now be done in like one or two, tops. How much do you charge per hour? Yeah. ScriptSync. No brainer.

A new beautiful feature added for script-based editing 2.0 is text editing. It was sooo bad in the past. I wouldn’t expect something as robust as MS Word to be inside Media Composer. But this new text editing is a really nice compromise. It works great. You add or change text, and the carrots move dynamically. Sure you could do this for script rewrites I guess, but for now let’s just look at transcripts. Let’s say you didn’t use a good transcription house, and you find some text that’s just wrong. Click Edit. Fix it. Done!

Another great feature we’ve had for years but that they’ve upgraded is Set Color. Yeah baby, here’s where the color-coding geek in my jumps out. Is there a good line? Color it. Is there a bad line or one you can’t say for legal or non-disclosure reasons? Color it. Color things your own way, or according to your writer/producer’s preferences, or even to Final Draft’s standards, if your writing staff is using that.

Interface-wise, the default way a new script looks is actually not this white one I’ve been using. Normally it comes with line numbers and gray colored line separations. A lot of folks use it and are really impressed by it. They’re settings you can enable or disable. Personally I always turn those off and keep scripts white, without line numbers. When I have dozens of bins open, it is so wonderful to be able to immediately identify the difference between a bin and a script. I need to see the script separated from bins, visually.

So there it all is: ScriptSync and script-based editing.

This webinar is just an adjunct to the wealth of wisdom out there on ScriptSync. Over the years some of the brightest people we have in our industry have written about it and presented about it. Following Ashley Kennedy and her tutorials has been amazing. Also, go Google Oliver Peters. Go Google Michael Kammes, and his awesome 5 Things series. Follow Kevin P. McAuliffe’s Get Started Fast video series. Go to 24p.com, the immense site from Michael Phillips, the former principal designer at Avid who co-created Avid ScriptSync and script-based editing. Definitely go Google Frontline PBS editor Steve Audette ACE, who has been one of our greatest voices for ScriptSync. Follow the Avid Editors of Facebook. Follow the little Facebook page I created ages ago called “Script Sync Fans”. Go to those places and ask questions. Ask as many as you can.

Or if you really want to get good at ScriptSync, then do what I did… Just play.

Start opening things, and clicking on things, and mess up intentionally. Go break stuff. Then go fix it. The only way to learn how to dig yourself out of a hole, is to throw in a shovel and then dive after it. Craft editing is a challenge, and we must never get to a point where we are above the challenge. If we do, we stop being better filmmakers, and we stop being better storytellers.

ScriptSync is tremendous technology because it helps us be better storytellers. More gets done, and less story gets missed. And we must be focused on the story. In order to give audiences the feeling of total immersion, we must operate behind the scenes, madly – one person in a room, madly pursuing an idea.

It’s the only thing that has ever worked.

  The post Avid ScriptSync: An Editor’s Secret Weapon appeared first on ProVideo Coalition.

First Found At: Avid ScriptSync: An Editor’s Secret Weapon

[fesahaawit]

There’s No Place Like (a New) Home

If you’ve been following my story for a while, you know I’ve moved many times in the last six years. First, I left my hometown and moved to Toronto for work. After realizing Toronto wasn’t the place for me, I took my job back to BC and moved to Greater Vancouver. Due to a series of unfortunate events (attempted break in, bad roommate situation, etc.), I had to move in/out of three different apartments in my first year there. I finally settled in a condo in Port Moody, where I stayed for two years, before another unfortunate event inspired me to go back to my hometown to be closer to my family.

Throughout all of those transitions, I never minded the moving process. In fact, some of my friends joke that I am a professional mover. They aren’t wrong, in the sense that I know the drill: find a place, pay the deposit, change your address on a million and one things, coordinate the move, take the boxes out and clean, bring the boxes in and unpack, and get your old deposit back. And when you have just 20% of what you once owned, the entire thing only takes a few hours. Moving is easy. Living in a state of transition feels normal. But it’s not normal… or at least, I don’t want it to be my normal anymore.

At the beginning of the slow money experiment, I hinted that I was ready to stop bouncing around from place-to-place. Being back in my hometown has been great. My family needed me, I needed them, and the quality time I got to spend with my friends here is something I will forever be grateful for. It healed me, during a time when I needed extra support. But it was never going to be a permanent move. I didn’t know where I would go next or finally land. I just continued to live in this transition period – until I went to Squamish for two months and realized that was the place I wanted to call home.

I don’t know how I didn’t see it sooner. When I was living in Port Moody, I used to drive up to Squamish all the time to go hiking. Since I’ve been back in Victoria, I think I’ve gone to Squamish five or six times. It’s the place I’ve done some of my most creative work (including finishing writing my book proposal and the first draft of my book) and the place I most love to explore. I notice my anxiety go down as I drive up the Sea to Sky Highway, and I am genuinely sad every time I have to leave. It’s been a great home away from home… but what if it could just be my home!?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself all year: could Squamish be my home? Could it be the place I finally settle in, find a community and build a life for myself? When I first planned to spend two months there, I had no intention of staying or even considering these questions. But as soon as I started to think about it, I decided to try it on for size and pay closer attention to my surroundings.

One of the first things I (finally) noticed was how nice everyone is. When you walk into the grocery store (or any business) people know each other. Strangers smile and talk to you (which is really nice when you’re new and don’t know anyone). It’s a small community (less than 20,000 people) and you can tell it’s the kind of place where people care about maintaining that. Small business matters. People like to support the local economy. They also care about the environment. And in my last week there, I discovered there is a growing community of creative women who run their own businesses.

That alone was almost enough to seal the deal for me. In February, I met one woman who asked if I wanted to write for her website, then another woman who serves as the editor of that website. I sat around a table and had coffee with 15-20 creative women who meet monthly to discuss new topics related to their work. A few of those conversations have since been taken “offline” and we’ve connected on other topics, including how to save money and how to better serve people with limited incomes. Each of those meetings and connections drew me a little closer to Squamish.

Ultimately, though, I knew I couldn’t make a decision based on just those things. Did it feel like the universe was giving me little nudges every time I had a great encounter with someone and even met other people from Victoria? Of course. Each of those moments felt like another brick had been painted bright yellow to guide me down the road. But I still knew this decision had to come from within and it wasn’t easy to make. Similar to the way I worried before departing on my road trip, I worried about leaving my family and the dogs. I also have zero interest in physically packing up and moving again. Just thinking about it is exhausting. But is it so exhausting that I won’t do it? No. Because, at the end of the day, Squamish is where I want to be.

There is a long list of questions you should ask yourself before moving to a new city. Can you afford it? Does it have good job prospects? Do you like the climate and the geography? I can speak to those things, but I’m guessing you know my answers. Yes, it doesn’t matter (though it’s close enough to Vancouver which is a plus), yes and yes again. But I asked myself some very different questions this time. Do I feel like myself here? Yes, and the best version of myself. Does it inspire me? Every day. Could this move be beneficial for others? If I’m the best version of myself and am constantly inspired, yes again.

And is it where I really want to be? A thousand yeses. So, I’m doing it. I found an amazing place (and negotiated the rent, which is now controlled at a fixed price). I paid the deposit. I’ve started changing my address, packing and coordinating the move. In two weeks, it will all be over. Squamish will no longer be my home away from home – it will simply be my home.

Even though I’m thrilled about the move and can’t wait to get there, I still have this sense that I want to take things slow. Believe it or not, I want to go through my belongings once more and carefully consider each item, before moving it (yet again). I also see myself letting go of some old things and buying a few things for my new home. Here are my intentions for March…

Experiment #3: Slow Move

go through all of my belongings again/only pack what I want to keep

sell/donate everything I don’t want to bring with me

make a list of things I think I want to buy (like a standing desk)

settle into my new home, before actually buying anything

reach out and make plans with new friends :)

The third and fourth points are key, and are lessons I have learned after moving countless times and doing the two-year shopping ban. We’re quick to go out and buy all the things we think we will need, before knowing if and/or when we will actually need them. This is something marketers have engrained in us, because it is at the core of every advertisement: here’s a potential problem you could face and here’s the product to fix it. The problem sounds scary or stressful, so we buy things preemptively to avoid having to face those situations – but at what cost?

I want to move into my new home with the basics (and all my books) and figure out what I actually need. I do know I want a standing desk, but I also know I don’t need it right away. I’m not going to waste money on the first one I see or create physical waste by buying something I don’t end up liking. (And yes, I’ll be scouring sites for used ones!)

If I had to sum this post up in a few words, I guess I would say that I want to be really intentional with this move. All the ones I’ve done before were for specific reasons, including for work and for my family. But this one is just for me, and I don’t want to rush it. I know the drill, and I could tap my ruby slippers together and just get there. But I don’t want to. I want to settle in and make Squamish my home.

In the final stretch of my road trip last fall, I counted dozens of drivers passing by in vehicles filled with their belongings. I imagined the mix of excitement and anxiety they might be feeling about moving to a new city, perhaps for a new job or new relationship. And wherever they were going, I secretly hoped each one of them was doing whatever would make them happiest. Now, it’s my turn. :)

I’m curious: how did you decide where to live?

—

Extra Reading

Kansas – Exile Lifestyle (Colin Wright)

The Equitable Love of Travel and Home – The Art of Simple (Tsh Oxenreider)

There’s No Place Like (a New) Home posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

[thecosydragon]

My latest blog post from the cosy dragon: Interview with Jaime Questell

An Interview with Jaime Questell, author of By a Charm and a Curse

Jaime Questell is a writer and graphic designer from Houston, Texas. She has also been a bookseller, a professional knitter, a semi-professional baker, and an administrative assistant. None of these jobs involved wrangling corgis, which is quite sad. She lives in the ‘burbs with her husband, children, and pets.

I’m not going to be reviewing your newest novel, but from your other published novels, is there one that is your own personal favourite?

By a Charm and a Curse is my first published novel, but of my other manuscripts, the one I’m currently working on might be my favorite. It has witches and a good dose of the Mexican culture I grew up with. It’s set in a fictional Texas town that’s buried in secrets, and it’s been so much fun coming up with all the components.

Everyone has a ‘first novel’, even if many of them are a rough draft relegated to the bottom and back of your desk drawer (or your external harddrive!). Have you been able to reshape yours, or have you abandoned it for good?

OMG, that first novel! It is so, so rough. It’s definitely been gathering some cobwebs, but I don’t want to write it off forever. I’m thinking it could be reshaped one day, or potentially be harvested for dialogue (because there’s some funny stuff in there, if I’m remembering correctly).

  Some authors are able to pump out a novel a year and still be filled with inspiration. Is this the case for you, or do you like to let an idea percolate for a couple of years in order to get a beautiful novel?

I am so awed by the people who have an unending supply of ideas, but I definitely like to let things percolate. I like to make hidden Pinterest boards where I can post images that relate to the idea I have, so I can remember them later, but for the most part I just let the idea simmer in the back of my mind while I work on other things.

I have heard of writers that could only write in one place – then that cafe closed down and they could no longer write! Where do you find yourself writing most often, and on what medium (pen/paper or digital)?

Writing time is limited and precious, so I’ll write anywhere: at home, at Starbucks, while on my lunch hour, waiting for an oil change. And I prefer my laptop to write, but again, because I need to write whenever and wherever I can, I’ll write on my phone or in one of the bazillion notebooks I usually have on me. That said though, I do find that if I’m stuck, writing by hand usually works to get me unstuck.

Before going on to hire an editor, most authors use beta-readers. How do you recruit your beta-readers, and choose an editor? Are you lucky enough to have loving family members who can read and comment on your novel?

I am incredibly lucky to have four critique partners who go over my work before I send it to my agent. I’ve worked with them for years, and their commentary is always on point and insightful. And I don’t work with an editor until my work is sold, but my agent is very editorial, which is fantastic. She really knows her stuff, and makes my writing better.

I walk past bookshops and am drawn in by the smell of the books – ebooks simply don’t have the same attraction for me. Does this happen to you, and do you have a favourite bookshop? Or perhaps you are an e-reader fan… where do you source most of your material from?

Everywhere! My favorite indie bookshop is Murder by the Book in Houston. They have a great selection and a knowledgeable staff, and I love shopping there. But I also like to utilize the library. I recently discovered Overdrive, and it’s made my audiobook habit much easier to feed.

I used to find myself buying books in only one genre (fantasy) before I started writing this blog. What is your favourite genre, and do you have a favourite author who sticks in your mind from: 1. childhood? When I was a kid, I could not get enough of The Baby-Sitter’s Club. Every birthday, every bit of money I was able to save went toward those books. And then, when I was a little older, it turned into a Sweet Valley High obsession. Those felt so taboo after the BSC, I mean, there was kissing. 2. adolescence? The movie version of Jurassic Park (and let’s be honest, Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) got me hooked on Michael Chrichton, which led to me reading everything I could get my hands on. Around this same time I became obsessed with the classics, but, of course, never the classics assigned to me in class. I loved Alexandre Dumas, and read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers over and over. 3. young adult? I was working in a bookstore at this time, and that was pure temptation. I read everything and anything, but Sophie Kinsella and Louise Rennison were favorites at the time. 4. adult? I love to read across genres now. Some of my current favorites are Leigh Bardugo, Holly Black, Kelley Armstrong, Heidi Heilig, and Victoria Schwab. Basically, I’ll read anything that sounds good.

Social media is a big thing, much to my disgust! I never have enough time myself to do what I feel is a good job. You manage your own profile, please tell me as much as you are comfortable with in regards to your preferred platform and an estimate of time you spend doing it [and whether you like doing it!].

I’m too much of a control freak to relegate to anyone else. But I agree that social media is so overwhelming! It can be hard, feeling like you have to do everything. I think it’s better to choose one or two platforms and do them well. So I choose to focus on Twitter and Instagram. Every now and then I start to think that I should have a Facebook author page, but then I remember how much it would stress me out and that the page would suffer. I’m going to quote Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec here and say, “Never half-ass two things. Whole ass one thing.”

About By a Charm and a Curse:

Le Grand’s Carnival Fantastic isn’t like other traveling circuses. It’s bound by a charm, held together by a centuries-old curse, that protects its members from ever growing older or getting hurt. Emmaline King is drawn to the circus like a moth to a flame…and unwittingly recruited into its folds by a mysterious teen boy whose kiss is as cold as ice.

Forced to travel through Texas as the new Girl in the Box, Emmaline is completely trapped. Breaking the curse seems like her only chance at freedom, but with no curse, there’s no charm, either—dooming everyone who calls the Carnival Fantastic home. Including the boy she’s afraid she’s falling for.

Everything—including his life—could end with just one kiss.

  Buylinks: http://ift.tt/2FhyacI

Author Links: Author Website: jaimequestell.com Author Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jaimequestell Author Instagram: http://ift.tt/2vWsUJn Author Goodreads: http://ift.tt/2vDi5td Author Pinterest: http://ift.tt/2GwnRkw Newsletter: http://ift.tt/2FimiHs

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[thecosydragon]

My latest blog post from the cosy dragon: Interview with Kristi Saare Duarte

An Interview with Kristi Saare Duarte, author of Transmigrant

Everyone has a ‘first novel’, even if many of them are a rough draft relegated to the bottom and back of your desk drawer (or your external harddrive!). Have you been able to reshape yours, or have you abandoned it for good?

I wrote my first novel when I was fifteen years old. The year was 1983, and I hammered it out on a manual typewriter. When my parents realized I was serious about it, they brought home an oh! so luxurious electrical typewriter. The novel was called “Low,” and each chapter was based on one track of David Bowie’s album of the same name. The main character was a young boy who ran away from his foster home in Sweden and traveled to the Isle of Wight in England. The only one who ever read the manuscript was my dad. I never edited it, never tried to publish it. But I still those typed up pages and, who knows, perhaps one day I will look at it again and force in some kind of a plot structure? Then again, it might be absolutely useless. I also have another novel somewhere in my drawers, but that one has been laid to rest forever.

Some authors are able to pump out a novel a year and still be filled with inspiration. Is this the case for you, or do you like to let an idea percolate for a couple of years in order to get a beautiful novel?

The Transmigrant took six years from start to finish. I assume my next novel will take less time. But I’m a perfectionist with a full time job, so I doubt that one book a year will ever be my style. But kudos to those who can do it!

I have heard of writers that could only write in one place – then that cafe closed down and they could no longer write! Where do you find yourself writing most often, and on what medium (pen/paper or digital)?

I like to write on trains. There’s just something about the humming motion that inspires me. But, honestly, I could write anywhere, as long as I have a laptop. Or a napkin. Or the back of a receipt. When the inspiration attacks, I have to write it down.

Before going on to hire an editor, most authors use beta-readers. How do you recruit your beta-readers, and choose an editor? Are you lucky enough to have loving family members who can read and comment on your novel?

With The Transmigrant, a handful of friends and one stranger volunteered as beta-readers. They were all either writers, or had specific knowledge about the religions I cover in my novel. I’m not religious myself, which is kind of strange, because I spent so many years writing about Jesus, so their feedback was critical to get the details right. I found my first editor by searching online, and the subsequent editors through the Editorial Freelancers Association. I always ask for a sample and a quote, and have been lucky to find excellent editors.

I walk past bookshops and am drawn in by the smell of the books – ebooks simply don’t have the same attraction for me. Does this happen to you, and do you have a favourite bookshop? Or perhaps you are an e-reader fan… where do you source most of your material from?

Yes, I definitely love bookshops. There’s a Barnes & Noble a few blocks from my office, and when I am stressed out, I go there to look at books and recharge. Most of the books I read are hard copy, but ebooks are very convenient for travel or late night reading. I often read 2-3 books at the same time. One by my bedside, one on the way to work, and sometimes also a non-fiction book when I need to study something, like book marketing or religions.

I used to find myself buying books in only one genre (fantasy) before I started writing this blog. What is your favourite genre, and do you have a favourite author who sticks in your mind from? 1. childhood?  My favorite author was Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read all the Little House on the Prairie books and even made paper dolls of the sisters and acted out my own scenes. 2. adolescence? Anything romance. Kissing and touching was very exciting. I also read lots of books by Indian, Chinese, and African authors, for some reason. 3. young adult? I went through a phase where I only read memoirs and biographies and didn’t like anything made up. I loved Audrey Hepburn’s and Lord Byron’s biographies. 4. adult? I read any genre except fantasy and romance. Some of my favorite authors include Haruki Murakami, Andre Dubus III, Khaled Hosseini, Rohinton Mistry, John Steinbeck. I’m still attracted to foreign authors.

Social media is a big thing, much to my disgust! I never have enough time myself to do what I feel is a good job. What do you do? Have you chosen someone to manage your profile?

No, I do everything myself, which I probably don’t do as well as I should. I’m trying to learn to be more efficient and post more regularly. I spend perhaps an hour a day on social media, mostly on Facebook and Twitter. I like Pinterest, too. Instagram is still difficult for me as I keep forgetting about it. I don’t really enjoy scrolling down other people’s posts, so it never crosses my mind that I should take a photo and post it. Do I like social media? I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it, either.

Answering interview questions can often take a long time! Tell me, are you ever tempted to recycle your answers from one to the next?

You get better, more honest and natural, with every interview. I think it would do me a great disservice to recycle the responses. But I might recycle ideas.

  from http://ift.tt/2qHnoH5