#welcome to america if you've been living here all your life without figuring out the character of this country i'm very sorry but-

[zitasaurusrex]

have we considered that maybe the reason this happened isn't that some people were too "pure" to vote, and it isn't that some people voted independent, it's that literally millions of fuckers proudly voted for this outcome

[sarahreesbrennan]

Hey I'm just curious since you've now coauthored both Nothing But Shadows and Cast Long Shadows. Matthew Fairchild is one of my fav book characters ever and I was wondering what your favorite thing about him or writing him is? ❤ Is it difficult to write a character that you didn't create? Sorry to bother you, coauthoring fascinates me (and Matthew makes me smile)

Aw, what a nice question, and you’re not bothering me at all! It’s really fun to have the Ghosts of the Shadow Market stories coming out, and to do this adventure with my friends and Cassie’s great readers! I was super nervous about Son of the Dawn, and the reception has been really lovely.

I was actually with Cassie on tour when she came up with some of the big moves for The Last Hours, so I’ve always been super into it. Me, Cassie and Maureen Johnson were touring together to promote the upcoming The Bane Chronicles which we all co-wrote, as well as Cassie’s Clockwork Princess. That night Cassie and I were sharing a room, and since it was just after the release of Clockwork Princess, we got to talking about the future for the Infernal Devices characters and Cassie’s favorite Dickens book being Great Expectations (mine is Tale of Two Cities, which we’ve squabbled over, so I was all, you have to do books referencing Great Expectations because you love it so much you want to marry it), and we got out the family tree and started telling it to each other as a bedtime story. (WRITERS. We are like this.) And we co-wrote The Midnight Heir, the first time we see some TLH characters, on that same tour. It’s much nicer to co-write when physically together and able to chat it out, but sometimes that isn’t possible as Cassie and I live in different countries–America and Ireland–and we both travel loads. For instance, lots of my bits of Cast Long Shadows I wrote while in the Seychelles, weeping gently on the beach as I discussed Matthew’s life over the phone.

So the TLH characters and I have been friends a long time, and they’re maybe my favourite set of Cassie’s. It definitely is tricky to write a character you didn’t create–but uh, I’ve written fanfic in the past, so I’ve done it before! And this is different and better: Cassie is there every step of the way, so you know you can’t go too far wrong, and you know where everything is going, and it is really an honour to get to contribute a little to her world, and to know if I feel at sea I can push the computer toward her with an ingratiating smile and promise to do more on my next turn, and she will stop me or fix it if I have committed a great faux pas. Plus, through writing characters sometimes you come to love them more–I truly have with several of them. Co-writing with someone I didn’t know really well, and really trust, would be much more difficult. Mostly what I worry about is letting Cassie or the readers down. But because I came in on the ground floor with the TLH characters, they come easier to me than, say, the TDA characters. Not to tell you guys my Awful Weaknesses, but my most difficult Shadowhunters work was Bitter of Tongue, even though I do truly love the TDA characters, and Mark, and Helen and Aline’s wedding. But just… faeries. Why are they the way they are? How do Cassie and Holly Black, faerie queen extraordinaire, do it? I don’t know. I don’t get it. I sat across from Cassie while we wrote it, and sadly threw flowers at myself and at her, to feel more faerie. (I don’t know why any of my friends ever speak to me, all I do is pick them up and carry them, or belabour them with blossoms, or make them try k-beauty products.)

Anyway, I think you can now see that I do go on, as I have now been rattling on without answering your question for some time. (Both Cassie and I tend to write super long, which is a failing our friends must deal with. ‘For God’s sake ladies would you quit it’ said Maureen and our co-author Robin Wasserman for Tales from Shadowhunter Academy, when we handed in Born to Endless Night, which was twice as long as planned.) But I hope it’s clear that co-writing these characters is fun as well as challenging, and Matthew is especially great and easy to co-write, and has always been a special favourite of mine. He makes me smile, too, and that was lovely to do in Nothing But Shadows: James discovering Matthew, at the same time the readers were discovering him. ‘The facts are… I love him,’ I have said urgently, many times. (I am a horrible favourites picker, and will sit campaigning for story time for my chosen darlings and death for my least favourites through every critique session with every one of my writer friends. Soon I may just start waving cards with ‘RAPHAEL!’ or ‘NINA!’ or ‘CARDAN!’ or ‘THE CARSTAIRS SIBLINGS!’ or ‘THE MOON!’ written in sparkly letters. They all have to deal.) When Cassie, Robin, Maureen and our new fabulous addition Kelly Link discussed writing Ghosts of the Shadow Market in a pool in Italy, we knew that chronologically we’d start with the Last Hours characters–Jem seeing the new generation, his friends’ children, as his friends move forward in time and he… doesn’t. 

I have long complained about getting the first stories in these anthologies–introductions are difficult! It is a lot of pressure. ‘Hello, welcome to Magnus’s warlock gang.’ ‘Here is George Lovelace, we have big plans for him, gosh I hope Cassie saves me from screwing this up.’ Cassie told us of Matthew’s great sin. ‘I GET THE MATTHEW STORY!’ I shrieked. I have a piercing scream. ‘I’m doing it with you, right? Right?! ME!’ My friends swam uneasily around in the pool. ‘Yes Sarah. You can have the Matthew story. Stop that noise. Stop it.’ So I bagged the first story, this time around. (And then it was decided that Son of the Dawn would come out first, so I got a double first. Like I said, very nervous! But I did it for Matthew.)

I think writers are always interested in a dichotomy, so it’s fascinating to think of warriors growing up against the background of the aesthetic movement: CLS is set in 1901, a really exciting time tipping wildly from history into modernity, careening all unawares into the Great Wars. (In fact, a significant historical event occurs in CLS: you’ll know it when you see it.) Matthew is an artistically minded warrior raised by a scientist and a politician, and he passionately loves modern art and modern ideas of beauty and an ideal of living beautifully, in a way that doesn’t fit in with his society’s values or way of life. Matthew has everything going for him–he’s a talented warrior, he’s extremely adept socially–but the thing setting him apart from the rest is what he loves: his father, disabled and not valued for his scientific brilliance, his parabatai, under a demonic shadow, and his other particular friends, a boy who represents the next generation of science with new ideas about disease and technology, and a sickly small kid who people murmur won’t make it as a fighter. Matthew could’ve loved anybody, but he chose them, and in CLS it was great to write from his POV, and see those he loves through his loving eyes. He especially loves Oscar Wilde, who is a great Irish literary figure and who I grew up loving–and who got by himself on being witty and charming and brilliant, until tragedy struck. (I have read the play The Importance of Being Earnest… more than a hundred times, and Cassie and I saw a performance together in London, with David Suchet playing Lady Bracknell, which I feel Matthew would have enjoyed.) Show me what someone loves, and I’ll show you who they are: Matthew’s sensitivity, and appreciation for what others don’t appreciate, is what I like best about him. (Plus: funny and blond.) Being suited for violence, and choosing love, being drawn to love, is really endearing–it also means choosing to be easily hurt. How much Matthew loves makes him lovable, and seeing readers like him from the short stories is amazing–and I know they will like him even more in the books.

Our story comes full circle here: Cassie and I were roomies at the North Texas Teen Book Festival when we released the Cast Long Shadows snippet, and we planned to put it up when we were together for extra sleepover fun. ‘Let’s do it now!’ I urged Cassie wickedly on. ‘Plus try these gold and snail eyepatches, you will like them, go on, try a snail.’ And we will be together at a writing retreat–appropriately, in England, when Cast Long Shadows comes out! We will be eating toastie cheese sandwiches and hoping that you like it.

[princezukohere]

Still friends *revisited* Part 1

(This is just to set the mood for what's in store, this chapter/part doesn't have much besides back stories and a bit of the reader/(character I've made) but do know that part two is where everything starts)

1623 words.

You always lived off the motto that things happened for a reason and when it happens, you grab on and go along or you leave it behind. You started off with a youtube channel which you posted on weekly doing challenges and tags with friends that you were close with. The subscriber number wasn't something you paid attention to, you could live without being the most watched person on your channel but the number did grow and it encouraged you to continue on with your channel. Singing was a passion of yours and as you had people who liked watching you do crazy things, maybe they'd like watching you do covers or perform songs that you wrote yourself.

Guitar and Piano were your two specialties and that's how you started, your first cover was Blank Space by Taylor and that's what got you noticed. Rosa thought you were unique and you'd be an excellent client, she got in contact with your parents and now she's your manager. The first step was getting a record label for you, of course, you had your fair share of being told no or that you were too young but Island Records saw something that other companies didn't see in you. To be fifteen and signed to a record label meant a lot to you and with that being said you would go through hoops that were on fire to impress them all.

Shawn was the first to make you feel really welcomed, he had been working on handwritten when you showed up and sometimes you ran into him in the middle of writing songs, he was actually someone you went to when you had an idea, you just weren't sure how to put it on paper. The collab was an accident actually, you two had been in the studio throwing lyrics back and forth, both with your guitars out. Imagination was a beautiful song and Shawn performing it by himself was amazing, but whenever you two were together and able to sing it like you did when recording it, it was electrical. 

--------------------------------

"When you and Shawn first met, you two hit it off correct?" Jasmine asked you, you nodded crossing your legs as she looked back down at her cards. "Imagination, though it came out when he wrote Handwritten and now he's released Illuminate, was it hard to find the perfect words?" 

"I don't think so. Shawn takes pride in whatever he releases so though we joked around a lot we were serious about the song. When you write music, you don't want the process to be hard, in my opinion, if it's hard then you aren't putting your heart into it or you may be overthinking. The lyrics may be crap when you first see them on paper but that's when you revise it."

"Opportunity was your first album, how would you say that it set the tone for the rest of your career up until today?"

"Opportunity, I have a love-hate relationship with this album because I was fifteen when I released it and people saw this young fifteen year old with a soft voice. Then I released new songs and people didn't like the sound because it wasn't that fifteen year old anymore. I went downhill so fast in my head at that time because I released something that I thought I loved and to this day, I love the meaning behind betrayal and careless but I love the songs more because I tried so hard to get my feelings on paper. Shawn released his album in April, I got to sing imagination with him so it brought a little attention to me and my youtube channel and then I felt like I needed to get an album out because I had a bigger audience after that." 

"How did you overcome that? You're seventeen now and you've released regenerated a few months ago so something must have snapped."

"Once again it was Shawn, I wrote regenerated for a year, and it only has twelve songs and four bonus tracks. I would miss school because girls were mean and guys were creeps. Some liked my music and now they wanted to be my friend and some didn't like my music and thought I was a wannabe, going back to school was not the best idea in my parents or managers eyes but I wanted to prove I could do it and I got so stressed. I went to the studio one day and I was writing lyrics like crazy and letting my anger out. The lyrics were shit but I hated feeling useless when it came to something I was passionate about. Shawn looked me in the eye and said, 'Don't release what they want you to, release what you think they'll want to hear, what you want to hear.' After that I wanted to partner with people, Hailee Steinfeld is an amazing friend of mine and we did a love yourself remix together. Bea Miller and I wrote Yes Girl and performed it together, people then started realizing my voice wasn't always innocent and then I started on regenerated." You explained.

"Can you give us a rundown of your favorite songs off of regenerated?"

"Regenerated was named that because I wanted it to mean that it was a new me, a new album, a new beginning, and the first track starts off really strong, I decided to go back in my life and work on this album"

-----------------------------

Liar

Liar was a song about my dad, my dad was in and out of the house so it was just me and my mom and our dog. My mom was my best friend at such a young age and it was emotional to write because I always wished I had that father figure in my life and I didn't until I was thirteen.

Alone

Alone was the song I wrote for my mom, she died when I was eleven and my dad had been taken to jail months before. To be eleven and walk into a room and see your mom not there is unexplainable. I was picked up from school that day by CPS because my mom checked into the hospital and she didn't want me there when she passed away.

Lost girl

Lost Girl was the song meant for my third foster home, being switched like that was stressful, thankfully I went to the same school each time and that rarely ever happens. I felt alone and misunderstood and like I had no place, I felt lost and I didn't think I could express my feelings anywhere.

Runner

Now I never snuck out but I vividly remember dreams of always sneaking out when I was in my second foster home, Of course, I was only twelve so where was I going to go?

Taken Care of

This song is when I finally got to my fourth foster home and I was adopted, they adopted me before I turned thirteen but when I did turn thirteen I remember that was the first day I called him dad, Aaron is a great guy and I love him.

Thank you

Thank you is a song to my manager, my record label, my mom, and dad, to Shawn and to the fans most importantly. I made one cover and they loved it and it encouraged me to make more and now here I am talking about my second album. I feel like saying thank you isn't always enough so I put it in song lyrics.

See you soon

Shawn actually helped me write this, it's on my bonus track and we were going to sing it together but then last minute he had to leave, it's a song between two people. Shawn and I are both busy and we get that we don't get to see each other that often when he's in Europe and I'm in America or vice versa so see you soon is goodbye but not goodbye because we'll see each other soon.

----------------------------------

"So you and Shawn have officially broken up, you seem to talk about him a lot, good things of course. Do you still have feelings for him?"

"Yeah, it wasn't a bad breakup and feelings can be hard to get rid of." You started, "But I speak of him because he's still my friend and we still talk and I still trust him. The breakup was mutual and sometimes when you're young it's hard to keep these commitments. I'm seventeen and he's eighteen, we're both traveling and it can get stressful and complicated." You finished explaining.

"It's great that you two can still be friends, it sucks seeing two celebrities go down hill with one another." The interviewer started.

"I don't really like the term celebrity, it makes me feel as if I'm being put in a box...but yeah when it happened Shawn and I agreed to stay friends and that if the other ever needed something we would be there and so far we've kept that promise."

"Amazing, well thank you for joining us but that's all the time we have. It was a pleasure having you on the show N/Y." 

"It was a pleasure to be here." You spoke before getting up, you two shook hands before you walked off stage.  Shawn was in your head again, though he always was. It made you regret not being able to work it out or work through it somehow.

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

You've been getting British vs. American English all wrong

It's official, then: Meghan Markle, speaker of Standard American English, is now wed to Prince Harry, speaker of what he might call Grandma's English. 

And if the experience of expat Americans in the U.K. or Brits in America (like this writer) is any guide, the happy couple have years of fun ahead of them. Literally years in which one of them will utter some word or turn of phrase the other has never heard before. 

SEE ALSO: 6 royal weddings from history that blow Harry and Meghan's out of the water

They will take turns on this. There will be misunderstandings, amused laughter, the shaking of heads, every single day of the marriage. It is almost impossible for a British-American couple to be bored; they need only ever start talking.  

Having read the excellent in-depth language book The Prodigal Tongue (written by American expat linguist Lynne Murphy, published in both the U.S. and the U.K. last month), I now believe the close coupling of American English and British English might itself qualify as the best long-term, long-distance relationship in the world. 

It's a weird, wild relationship in which each partner secretly believes the other one has the upper hand, but neither really understands what's going on between them.

Americans approach the Queen's English adoringly, as if it is somehow more "correct," while Brits tend to look at American English with suspicion, fearing that if they let their guard down for one second the mouths of Britain will be filled with Yankee jargon. 

Transatlantic fans at the Royal Wedding.

Image: TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images

But under this odd couple veneer, the two "nationlects" (as Murphy dubs them) are like lovesick teenagers. They're hungry for each others' entertainment and media, and have swapped words, phrases and spellings back and forth so much over the last couple of hundred years that Murphy has a hell of a time figuring out where many of them started. 

In fact, she spends the vast majority of the book telling us we're getting the difference all wrong. And a lot of that has to do with stereotypes. Americans: did you know that the very British-sounding word "poppycock" actually came from America? Same goes for the phrase "the bee's knees." Brits: Did you know Americans think we call an umbrella a "bumbershoot," forgetting that they invented that word themselves back in the early 20th century? (They've never heard of "brollies.") 

Brits bemoan a word like "incentivize," assuming it comes out of some U.S. business school textbook. In fact its first recorded usage was in the U.K. Guardian in 1968. They may have a vague sense of how many Americanisms have been imported without fuss. One lurks in their living rooms: Brits happily use "Hoover" when Americans would say "vacuum cleaner." 

In their lonely fight against American words, the British have long prided themselves on having "stiff upper lips." They have no idea this stoic phrase is probably an Americanism, one dating back to at least 1815. 

This linguistic immigration continues to this day — and despite what many fearful Brits think, it's very much two-way immigration. One of my favorite examples is "kerfuffle." It's a British word, meaning a commotion, a hubbub, a vague dispute, that was almost never spoken by Americans when first I moved to the States 20 years ago. I remember confusing an editor or two when I started at Time magazine by inserting it in my copy.

But now, decades later, kerfuffle seems to be useful enough to Americans — who can never get enough words to describe kinds of conflict — that it can be heard in NBA press conferences. The reaction of Steph Curry on hearing it for the first time is exactly correct: "That is a word right there."

Coincidentally, in recent years I have started using "that is a ____, right there" to emphasize all sorts of things in the American style, and enjoy it immensely. So that seems a fair exchange. 

Here's the truly great thing about the common language that divides our two nations (as neither Oscar Wilde nor George Bernard Shaw quite put it.)  It's a democratic marketplace. Everyone's in. Curry and his teammates have as much influence on what bits of language get used, or traded, or constructed, as the Royal Family does. 

You like kerfuffle, Yanks? All yours! Don't mind if we take poppycock, do you? You didn't seem to be using it. 

No dictionary editor, no political leader, gets to decide how we speak or even how we spell. Though as Murphy reveals, both groups have tried — in America, that is. After the revolution, Noah Webster  tried to get Americans to change their spellings so that pretty much every other word would be different from the English. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson both believed American and British English would grow so far apart we'd be unable to understand each other in a century or two; Jefferson, who literally invented the word "Anglophobia," really didn't like British English.

It didn't matter. A brisk transatlantic trade kept the linguistic connection strong. New words flowed back and forth via clipper ship. (Jefferson also invented the word "belittle," which the Brits came to love.) Movies and TV accelerated the process. Where spellings differ, sometimes it's because Brits changed their minds on how to spell things and Americans are preserving the 18th century version. 

Image: penguin

But sometimes, Murphy says, it's because the British love to import French styles and spellings (as with Americans, Brits claim to hate the French, but our word-swiping ways tell a different story). American English folk, meanwhile, tend to prefer the more plain Anglo-Saxon way of speaking and spelling. Welcome, once again, to the world's oddest linguistic couple. 

What's really odd is how un-studied this whole area is. Experts like Murphy are still uncovering  differences in the things we mean when we say the same words. It's not just the well-worn embarrassments like "fanny." It's things like "chatting up," which Brits generally use to describe heavy flirting. Americans liked the phrase, took it, and completely misuse it in an adorably innocent way. 

When Murphy relates how she discovered that the two countries have different ways of "frowning" — or rather, they think the frown is located in different places — you could have knocked me over with a bumbershoot. Many Americans apparently think that frowning is an activity that takes place at the corners of the mouth — which means "turn that frown upside-down" now makes sense to me for the first time in my life. 

Brits believe frowns are on foreheads, which confused Murphy when she read in U.K. literature about "frowning in concentration." Why would concentrating make you sad? 

The Prodigal Tongue is a treasure trove of hilarious differences like this, many of them food-related. For example, a burger is subtly different depending on which country you're eating it — for Americans it's all about the meat patty; for Brits it's all about a thing inside a bun, which is why we can be found eating "chicken burgers." Soups, cakes, and biscuits all describe different things. Throw in a myriad of word differences from jam v. jelly to aubergine v. eggplant and it's a wonder American and British chefs can understand each other. 

But they can, and so can the rest of us. Despite Jefferson's fondest wishes, we've only grown linguistically closer together over the centuries. We could so easily have ended up like Spain and Portugal, whose languages are now almost entirely different. But we didn't. We entwined across the sea like lovers, endlessly attracted by the mystery of differences. 

Linguists often compare the changes in British vs. American English to a dance; sometimes one country leads, sometimes the other. Murphy takes this metaphor closer to the truth. "They're troupes of dancers," she writes:

Welcome, Harry and Meghan, to the dance. 

WATCH: Lifetime just released a movie about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in honor of their upcoming wedding