#I had an idea for a little vignette storyline with this that I might go through with?

[blushweddinggowns]

if it hasn’t been asked yet, prompt 18 has incredible steddie potential. no pressure tho! love your work, hope your brain feels better<3

Aww ty and it is feeling a lil better 💗 And here's some pre-steddie for ya! I might do a part two of this because the vibes leave room for some uh, not sfw material. She has some energy.

~

Steve liked to complain about driving the kids around, but in all honesty? He loved it. He loved how lively they all were, he loved the silly arguments they would have, he liked just being around them, especially Dustin.

But holy shit did he hate picking him up from Hellfire. Because for some fucking reason, Dustin was never just waiting outside. He was always waiting outside with Eddie Munson, his brand new hero.

Steve had no idea what Dustin saw in the guy. He was such a dick, even when they barely talked for five minutes a week Eddie never missed the chance to be a snarky little bitch.

Which is why he wasn't too excited to see Eddie smoking alone outside of their club room, no Dustin in sight. Steve frowned as he got out of his car, looking around like Dustin might magically appear.

It wasn't helping that Eddie was staring right at him, an amused smile on his face, "You looking for something?"

Steve rolled his eyes at the question, "Just tell me where Dustin is."

"Inside," Eddie said as he took a drag, still staring at Steve. It always made Steve feel weird, the way Eddie would look at him. HIs eyes were too big or something, too intense. It always made him squirm, "On the phone, talking to his girlfriend. It's kind of gross actually, how mushy they are. He managed to scare everyone off but me."

That sounded about right. But that also meant that now Steve was stuck with standing next to this guy. And he really wasn't in the mood for awkward small talk.

"I'll wait in the car then," Steve said dismissively, stopping when he heard Eddie snort behind him.

"Too much of a princess to stand around with the undesirables huh?"

Steve spun around, his face hot at the weird insult, "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Eddie shrugged, dropping his cigarette to the ground, "It means I think you're an uppity bitch. Tell me Steve, is hating me your only personality trait? Or do you get off on acting like a pissy kitten? That pretty face can only take you so far you know. "

This, this right here is what he hated the most about Eddie Munson. He was a dick yes, but he was so specific about it. Always calling Steve stupid shit like princess, kitten, bitch and now pretty. It was weird, emasculating, and...confusing. Very confusing on why the first thing it always did was make him blush. He didn't make Steve mad in the right way. He made him feel off kilter and anxious, his heart almost always going into overdrive whenever he had to talk to the guy.

But that didn't mean he was going to take all of that laying down, "Says you? I'm surprised you don't have a I hate Jocks tattoo on your forehead. For an 'undesirable' you sure are judgmental as fuck."

Eddie laughed at that, like Steve was an old friend who made a hilarious joke, instead of someone who was actively trying to get under his skin, "Do you still count as a jock? Because if you do I might have to re-evaluate that. I never said I hated you, princess."

Oh great. So that was just a nickname now. Steve opened his mouth to snap back at him, to ask why he was such an ass if their wasn't mutual hatred between them.

But then Dustin was popping out of the club room, a big smile on his face as he waved at Steve, "Sorry I'm late! Suzie called and she heard about this new theory she had to tell me about and-"

"And you can tell me in the car," Steve interrupted, avoiding Eddie's eyes as he dragged Dustin away. The asshole smirked at him as they drove away, like he could just tell how much he was driving Steve crazy.

Yeah, Steve would never understand what Dustin saw in that guy.

#eddie munson #steddie #pre steddie #steddie ficlet #steve harrington #asks #prompts #I had an idea for a little vignette storyline with this that I might go through with? #unsure #trying to tame down the insanely long posts I do a bit here #but if there is interest i might follow through! #thank you for the prompt💗💗 #Lol steve you'll understand soon enough #eddie calling steve princess is a thing for me #if you couldnt tell #one more ask is waiting for me on this lil project! #I see you anon! #Probs do that tommororw!

[canmom]

brief comints on some comics

need to find energy to write some more Comics Comints but here are some very brief ones on some comics I read of late...

I read a bunch of Shintaro Kago stuff (The Princess of the Neverending Castle, Dementia 21). truly one of the best to ever do it, and I really need to do some kinda deep dive into what makes his stuff kick so much ass. but Kago's stuff has this absolutely ingenious playfulness to it - obvs it's got the 'fucked up body stuff' ero-guro aspect as a central pillar in which Shintaro Kago is uniquely inventive, but it's also constantly playing around with form in a way that like, you see the ideas getting developed from page to page from 'oh here's a fucked up thing' to the basis of an incredibly abstruse storyline that somehow feels fully coherent in its internal logic, even as the entire panel structure disintegrates into castle noodles.

he's also just both plain very funny and an absolute drawing monster. the two Neverending Castle books (Princess and Twelve Sisters - narratively disconnected but playing off the same ideas) are a special treat, gorgeous huge printings that really let you see all the crazy intricate little details, and the high concept is incredibly productive. Dementia 21 is bit more directly like... not so much commentary so much as using existing social tensions (in this case, caring for old people) as a jumping off point for darkly funny vignettes. also the interview at the back is great for Kago just completely no-selling most of the interviewer's attempts to pry.

started in on Oyasumi Punpun by Inio Asano. and guys. the expressions in this manga! honestly, the level of storytelling confidence is off the charts. I think I'm starting to get some idea of what it's doing and what the recurring interests are, but also damn, there is so much going on here. the manner of stylisation is really fascinating - it's like a great example of a sort of effect you can achieve if you understand realism forwards and backwards and then push it.

the eponymous punpun is heavily minimised in his own story - which is part of the premise, that he is so powerless and so completely failed by the adults who are too caught up in their own shit that he might as well be a cartoon bird. we have recurring invocations of the futility of human connection, it's doing a lot of stuff with religion-as-imaginary-friend and mixing sort of deliberately crude 2D graphical elements or really abstract compositions with the hyper detailed style. it's somehow like... moment to moment it looks super melodramatic but it's sort of processed through this dissociative haze which means the actual story ends up quite low-key.

I can see why people rate this one so highly, can't wait to get my hands on more.

I read some of the Sláine series - the Celtic barbarian character written by Pat Mills. in this case I had the Sláine the King arc, and some of the earlier comics, so I got a taste for the druid airships and stuff. Glenn Fabry's art is astonishing, it's as solid as an Otomo drawing but it doesn't feel sterile, it's got this incredibly expressive aspect, like it does so much to sell our sword-and-sorcery protagonist Sláine as a guy.

I'm someone who tends to read a lot more manga than Western comics in general, which is both a different approach to line and tone and also you tend to have the same artist drawing the whole series - in contrast, with 2000AD comic like this it's really striking seeing both how much value can be achieved with pure monotone, no greys, and also getting to see multiple artists tackle the same character in roughly the same idiom to highly varying results. there are approximately ten billion of these, but I haven't yet been able to track down the Horned God arc which is the one that was recced to me. hopefully soon.

comics are great

#comics #shintaro kago #neverending castle #oyasumi punpun #inio asano #pat mills #glenn fabry #sláine

[inked-out-trees]

⭐ for The Keep Going Song? Thanks! :)

(anh i would die for you)

Thank you for asking! I am going to be talking about the whole thing because it's fun, and because there's not really many ~secrets~ within the text to ramble about, just little fun snippets!

I'll do it under a cut because I will definitely ramble. Woohoo!

I came across The Keep Going Song (the song) after my Lookout 3 Companion Playlist (& my spotify discovery) introduced me to the Bengsons. The effect was almost instantaneous - it's the kind of warmth I try to encompass in everything I do, and for the next few days I had it on repeat as I worked. This was around the time I was finishing my Lookout script, and I had been toying with the idea of writing a Cornleyverse fic after absolutely devouring all 10 fics in the tag. What I knew was that I wanted it to be sweet, I wanted it to pull them all together, and I wanted it to be a progression. Despite only having seen the Goes Wrong Show, jumping into the fandom made me want to dimensionalize these characters and give them a story beyond everything that had already occured.

I also watched Christmas Carol before / during the writing process, but to date I have not watched Peter Pan or the full-length TPTGW. My prior knowledge comes from Wikipedia, the delightul amateur TPTGW production on YouTube, a friend's excellent transcription of the Haversham Manor script, and tumblr meta analysis. I think I did a reasonable enough job pretending I knew what I was doing.

Let's get going!

I knew off the top that it was going to be vignettes - they would give me room to spread the story over the long period of time it takes for a group of people to grow into something resembling a family. Like I said in the original author's note, there was supposed to be more of the early, snippy days - but I got so focused on making them kinder that I found I couldn't properly write a fight. In hindsight, it probably would have been easier if I tried writing that first, but, well. Once I realized that it was too late. The alphabet idea came later, once I had them all finished: I wanted to organize them somehow, but numbers felt too open, too infinite - closing the story on an organizational endpoint was just really satisfying.

a - Every good story needs a good beginning.

c - Starting with the end of Peter Pan is my sneaky way of slipping past the fact that I haven't seen the earlier shows! The Max and Sandra storyline is just so sweet, and I wanted to let it exist a little bit in between our jump from Peter Pan to Christmas Carol. This vignette came so easily when I wrote it and I love love love the feelings and the tentativity about the whole thing.

f - This was actually the last vignette I wrote. I realized I needed some front-end padding because otherwise my angst plot came rather abruptly, and what better way? At this point, too, I was trying to bring in POVs from each one of our characters, and when deciding on Trevor's POV I thought the exasperation-excitement combination would be an excellent choice. It turns out Trevor is my favourite to write, mostly because I can find his voice a lot easier than some of the others - and probably also because I hold a lot of fondness and nostalgia for stage crew work. Also, I wrote most of this one on a long evening walk in the notes app on my phone. Fun fact.

h - I did my original idea slam in a draft tumblr post, and this one just says "birthday party but one without all the drama of christmas carol". And what do you know, that's exactly what it is! I definitely took the birthday party (in CCGW as well as in this fic) as a kind of proof that they really do like each other, if they're doing things like this and if they want to do things like this - and that theme of okay, they want to be here formed the basis for this part. I think it's exceptionally sweet that Dennis came looking for friends and ended up finding, well, something. And I popped in a little MMNI reference with "one of the Janines" - Backwards Janine? Frontwards Janine? Original Janine? Who knows! It's one of them!

l - The thing about this plot is that it's actually one of the first ideas I had when dreaming up this fic, and I couldn't quite let it go. The point was, what if I somehow split them up? How can they get on when half the society is out of commission? And the most reasonable way I could find to actually get half of them out of commission was the car accident. To be honest, this one is mostly filler - it's also the second vignette I wrote, and it found its birth in the email drafts of my work laptop.

m - Trying to map out this little plotline without overdoing it might have been the most difficult part of this fic, and I'm still not 100% sure I succeeded. This is our explanation for the unease from the vignette above, and it took me 3 rewrites before I finally found something that settled in my brain. "Dennis gets chased by a goose" might be one of my favourite lines in the fic though.

Also, putting these letters right next to each other made me feel really clever for no reason.

n - My Jonathan perspective also took a few stutter-steps in its beginning, but this one ultimately came from the promo video's reveal that Robert and Dennis live together, and me playing with the continual idea of the remaining cast members being rather unmoored in their injured castmates' absence. Robert in particular because I love his character and I love making him Feel Things(TM) (fun hint: this will also be a small theme in the new cpds fic I have in the works!) and I want to see so much from this odd relationship between him and Dennis. Obviously they have to tolerate each other if they are willingly roommates - how far can I go with that? I love how this one turned out.

o - All I have to say about this one is that I still really love the sweetness between these two, and they deserve the world. Also, at some point during writing this I was really caught up with how striking Dave's face silhouette is (don't ask) so that ended up making it in somehow.

q - Girls' Night is SO important to me. After all the work they've done to make these gals friends I needed to capture it, and a pleasant night in just made a lot of sense. This one is the home of a few of my headcanons - Annie has a chef roommate and Max does a lot of the cooking, thus the "neither of us are the usual household cooks" comments, and I also think they're at the point where they can joke about their previous failures (especially with these three together) so the nod to A Trial To Watch (my favourite gws episode) was so fun. Also, Waking Ned really is a silly pick-me-up of a movie - would recommend. Special thanks to CBC for giving us Canadians quality British TV alongside our occasionally questionable homegrown programming.

r - It wouldn't be a fic about progress and growth with this crew without a disheartening moment turned into gold. I wrote this one while barbecuing, another fun fact, and no joke the hardest part was figuring out what to name the play they were doing. I kept pace with the whole "Jonathan can't get onscreen" gag, which was personally hilarious and made me cackle as I wrote it, and the rest of it just felt good. I will always have a soft spot for comfort and reassurance in a story and getting to write it has just been an absolute delight.

t - This was one of my other unplanned vignettes. It was originally to fill out Robert's POV, but also to express a bit of how things have changed in Chris's attitude towards his cast - if there's one thing I would change from Mischief's characerisation thus far, it's this brand of almost-kindness that I consistently need to write him with. It takes the aftermath of the car accident and uses it to kind of make him understand - this is a valuable group of people and I don't want to lose it. But of course he's not the type of person to actually express that in any way, so I thought the frenetic hovering was a good way to get the point across. As well, the kind-of-bonding between Chris and Robert - the two of them are such powerhouses of insistent personality that conflict so easily but they've also got a more secret kind of friendship that deserves to be explored a little more. I really like this vignette and how it ended up portraying how they are around each other, how they really do know each other, especially when they're not fighting. Makes me soft.

w - This is the first vignette I wrote! I honestly didn't realize until writing this just how much I identify with Annie - best of both worlds re. crew and cast, a bit of tenacity regarding getting through things, overall personality - I just love her so so much. She also seems like the most sensible of the cast, so the collective "why are we really here?" moment with Trevor really spoke to me. I love their friendship, I love the kind of quiet vibe this vignette gives off - this is one of the ones I can feel most strongly, the one I can step into and exist inside. I also spent most of my old drama rehearsals and classes without shoes, so that had to make it in just by virtue of the sock brigade (me).

z - One thing I knew for sure since the inception of the fic was that it needed to end on a victory. I took the images I had of this victorious adrenaline, everyone together having a good time, kind of getting smashed, and karaoke (I really wanted the karaoke, for some reason) and went the obvious route: the wedding. Ending on Chris POV also felt so right - possibly because he's the one with the most growth in this fic - and getting to finally feel this triumph with him after all these other trials and tribulations was an absolute joy. The wedding hall, in my head, looks like the one my cousin used (it was at a zoo... my sister and I went on a night walk and heard a lot of screaming peacocks) and I definitely threw all my wistfulness, all my love for the characters I'd developed, and all my love for this fantastic fandom into this part. The incorrect lyrics that Annie sings are exactly what I think every time I hear that song, because I've never looked up the lyrics before and my brain likes to play Mad Libs with my super-questionable auditory processing. And the image of the ballroom staff getting really exasperated with them and shutting all the lights off came to me at night and is hastily scribbled on a sticky note (it's a wonder it's legible) but I still strongly believe that it's the perfect, perfect way to end. I still get the warm feelings when I reread this part, even now, after so many reads.

And, finally - our end quote is exactly what started this whole thing. What is this drama society if not a rough beginning? But the concept that we'll make it through, that we can just take a step and then another and it'll be okay because we're together... it's hard to describe just how much it means to me, to my place in the world, to the world itself. I think one of my rather consistent aims in writing, no matter what it is, is to be able to have this collective - characters that become family, people that are important to each other, this constellation to lean on - because it's all I can say for the human experience. It's probably quite a bit of wishful thinking (as I said to another friend, "I am apparently letting loose on all my repressed social feelings of the past year and shoving them into fics") and a sort of subconscious confirmation that if I write it, I can be it. So this force of understanding and kindness and ultimately good people helping each other through the world is something I can't help but include, something that means the absolute world to me.

I'm so glad to have been able to share this fic with everyone, and extra glad that it's been able to touch some people along the way. I've found such an incredible community in Mischief and coincidentally I think The Keep Going Song represents that warmth, too - the community I've been so lucky to exist inside, how we're helping each other along, step by step. What a beautiful thing to be a part of! Thank you for reading and allowing me to give you a bit of my heart. 💖💖

#director's cut #the keep going song

[roseskiesandbutterflies]

Pain Is So Close To Pleasure (modern!Queen x platonic!reader) - Chapter 2

Summary: As a recently promoted Soloist for the Royal Ballet, you move closer to Covent Garden with your three-year-old daughter, Rose. But your new neighbour turns out to be the last person you'd expect to pop up on your doorstep.

A/N: This chapter, but really this whole fic, has such a specific vibe and I love it?? Like I can relate to a lot of the things I describe, and I don’t know if that’s a me thing, or a British thing, or just a thing. Anyways I’m here for it. And if you’re not British and don’t relate to this fic in the way I do, and you’ve wondered what it’s like to live in Britain, this might give you a rough idea.

The chapter count for this crept up again because I’ve had about two or three more ideas for this. I think now would be a good time to mention that I’m treating this as more of a load of one-shots set in the same verse, rather than a story with a plot. That’s why it will start to seem more like a series of vignettes, not as a storyline.

As always, I hope you’re all doing okay with everything that’s going on, and I hope to have another update for you all soon. I hope you enjoy!

Warning(s): swearing

Word Count: 3.3k+

Inspiration: Incandescent by @immistermercury on AO3, Outed by @platawnic on Tumblr, Rock Angel by @mirkwoodshewolf on Tumblr, Brian’s Instagram, Modern Times Rock ‘N’ Roll by @rhapso-kei on Tumblr and AO3, this silly lockdown business, the fact that I should have gone to see Queen over two weeks ago but it’s fine

Taglist: @bhmay @briarrose26

Series Taglist: @banana-tree-freddiemercury @lillycarlyn (darling you didn’t say which taglist so if you want me to put you on the perm one then let me know)

Ask to be on either! Make sure to specify!

You popped your head round the door to the studio and smiled to yourself when you found it void of people. You switched the lights on, the charcoal-grey clouds outside casting a darkness over the Opera House; uncharacteristic for midday, but then it was London, and it was February. You couldn’t expect too much from good old British weather.

It wasn’t often that you had the opportunity of having a studio all to yourself, so when you did, you simply had to make the most of it. The way your timetable for the day had worked out meant that you had a longer lunch break than everyone else, not by much, but fifteen minutes was more than enough time to go over a routine you’d crafted yourself. So, seeing as you could afford to eat later on, and everyone else was either in the canteen or some café in Covent Garden, you decided to book one of the studios for your own use.

You connected your phone to the mostly unused speaker in the corner of the room and quickly found the song. Time was of the essence here, and you were most conscious of that. You lightly ran to the centre of the room, making sure you weren’t facing the wall-length mirror for watching yourself dance made you rather self-conscious, replacing passion with technicality. This dance was your own, you had created it, cradled it, held it oh-so-close to your heart; unlike anything you’d ever done professionally, this dance was all about the enthusiasm and the love with which you danced.

Freddie’s voice rang out through the studio, clear as day and filling each and every particle with the richness of his voice. The singular note was soon accompanied by harmonies and then the familiar piano motif of Somebody To Love. You smiled despite yourself as you began the routine.

You promised yourself that one day you’d perform this to someone, even if it was just Rose. But that day was a long way off yet.

The way you danced was unlike how you had ever done so on stage. You performed with a vivacity that many dancers lost so early on in their careers when they valued the physical quality of their dancing over the raw emotion of it. You considered yourself quite lucky that you hadn’t yet surrendered to that particular temptation.

You considered this song to be a crescendo in and of itself, just building and building as its many layers unfolded. You’d made sure that this was reflected in the choreography. Each section was grander a more extravagant than the last. You quite liked the simultaneous challenge and familiarity of it; it made for a good dance to return to when you found your head overflowing with your thoughts and anxieties. You made more and more use of the space as the song progressed, like you were contained by an invisible circle that gradually grew.

When the third verse came around, and Freddie’s voice temporarily faded into silence, fooling the nonchalant listener into thinking it was the end, you had a second to pause. You used it to inhale deeply before starting the fouettés that accompanied the acapella. One, then another, then another, more, more, more until you genuinely thought you were going to fall over. You persevered, however, pushing through all forty of the turns, and even though by the end you wanted nothing more than to lay on the ground and watch the world spin, you couldn’t stop yourself from beaming because holy shit you’d never done them all before. You shook off the feeling, allowing yourself to revel in it later; right now, you had the rest of the dance to get through.

You breezed through the rest of it, the highest jeté seeming insignificant compared to the dizzying hell you’d just put yourself through. When everything quietened down once again, and Freddie faded back into his falsetto, you came to a still in the centre of the ‘stage’, going up on pointe and gradually raising one leg into the air so that it was parallel to your upper body and then to your face. When the music kicked in again, you dropped it back down and returned to your original flow. With the last tiny piano chord of the song, you did a cheeky little jump with the biggest grin on your face, before curtseying to your non-existent audience.

Or so you thought.

A slow clap sounded from the doorway and you whirled round to look at the intruder, blushing furiously with the embarrassment of being seen without knowing. Your smile made a comeback, however, when you recognised the face.

“Wow, that really was something, (Y/N),” Brian whistled, “I’m impressed, truly.”

“Thank you,” you ducked your head, panting heavily. Your muscles screamed with exhaustion, and even though you wanted to just lay down and maybe have a nap, you stayed strong, refusing to appear rude to Brian.

Somehow, he seemed to read your mind, “You can sit down, you must be knackered. Don’t mind me.”

You smiled at him gratefully before sinking down in the corner of the studio next to your bag and grabbing your water bottle with desperation. You gestured to the spot next to you which he took gladly. “How much of that did you see?”

“Pretty much all of it,” he laughed, “I was about pop in for a chat but I saw you put the song on, and I thought I might as well watch.”

“Gosh,” you muttered, beginning to take off your pointe shoes to relieve your aching feet. You’d had back-to-back classes all morning and doing a routine such as that one after all of that just didn’t help.

“I didn’t know you guys danced to non-classical music,” he said.

You managed to get one shoe off, and you started on the other one, wrinkling your nose at the quite frankly disgusting smell that Brian was politely showing no reaction to, “We don’t. Well, I haven’t heard of it anyway. Even if people did somewhere, it would be an awfully long time before the Royal started doing it.”

He shot you a confused look, “Then how…”

“It’s my dance. I choreographed it a while back,” you shrugged, not really understanding what the big deal was, “That’s probably the best run I’ve done of it.”

“Wow, I,” he ran a hand through his hair, “That looked like something from an actual ballet.”

You ducked your head again with the kind of embarrassed pride that comes with compliments, “Thanks, Brian, that means a lot. I only made it a while ago. I,” you laughed self-deprecatingly before saying, “I’d just done quite possibly the worst audition of my life, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how shit it was. So, I just freestyled to some of my favourite songs and that happened.”

“You just made that up?” he asked incredulously.

“It wasn’t nearly as good as it was just then. I’ve been working on it for months until it became what you just watched. It’s been my little side project,” you mused, shoving your phone and both of your pointe shoes into your ballet bag. You poked your head up and peered through the huge window on the opposite wall, cringing at the heavy rain and how that wasn’t a good mix with the non-waterproof trainers you were now putting on, “Oh, shit, I thought it wasn’t going to rain until later. I don’t think I packed my umbrella,” you said, forgetting about your shoes for a second and rifling through your bag.

Brian placed a hand on your arm, “Relax, I have one, we’ll just have to share, if that’s alright with you?”

“Thanks,” you looked at him gratefully before returning to doing your laces.

“Where are you going anyway? You haven’t finished work already, have you?”

“Oh, I wish,” you laughed sadly. You did love your job, but today was just one of those days where you had no energy and just wanted to cuddle up on the sofa with a cup of tea and a box of Quality Street chocolates all to yourself and binge watch Miranda on Netflix. “No, I didn’t bring any lunch with me, so I thought I’d have a look and see which cafes have free tables. You’re more than welcome to join me if you want.”

About five minutes later, you found yourself running through Covent Garden Market while it was hammering it down with rain, sharing an umbrella with Brian that was way too small for the both of you. You were trying your hardest not to slip on the shining cobblestones beneath your feet, while also trying not to knock into any other pedestrians who, like you, were also running for cover. It wasn’t long until you reached your destination, a café that was a favourite haunt of yourself and Rose. It served at Rose’s Friday treat after she had finished preschool for the day, when the weather wasn’t too good and you couldn’t go to the playground in St James’s Park. You also frequented it on bank holiday weekends or half-terms where you’d been in the flat for three days straight and were in desperate need of some fresh air but had absolutely nothing to do.

You held the door open for Brian, hearing the little bell ring when it came into contact with the door, and you grabbed the umbrella from him as he entered. You shook it rather aggressively outside and popped it into the bucket next to you, filled to the brim with the umbrella of fellow patrons who unluckily got caught in the rain and had dived into the nearest establishment for sanctuary. You made your way to the only free table left while Brian queued up to order your food and drinks.

This wasn’t actually the first time you two had done this, though it was the third. The first time had been rather awkward, as from the second you put your shoes on to leave to the second you said goodbye, you were both repeatedly stopped by people wanting to talk to Brian. And even though neither of you ever complained, you had later admitted to each other that you had found it rather annoying. The second time wasn’t as bad, though at one point you had been stopped by a guy from some tabloid you’d never heard of asking for an interview. Much to your amusement, and Brian’s embarrassment, the guy had actually been looking to talk to you instead of him. You’d politely declined, offering to do it another time, but as soon as you’d sat down to eat, you teased Brian mercilessly about it, and still did every now and then. All it took was for you to say Brian look I’m more famous than you for him to blush furiously and ask you to please change the subject. Considering this was the third time now, the initial shock of oh my God I’m just casually having lunch with Brian May this is fine had passed. Now it was merely having lunch with a friend. Just that that friend just so happened to be an international icon. No big deal.

You looked up to see Brian making his way over to you, carrying a tray of food, and you smiled when you noticed that he’d remembered from last time when you’d told him what, in your opinion, was the best food this particular café had to offer. He sat down opposite you and plonked the tray down on the table, as you both started to work out who’s food and drink was who’s.

“How’s work been this week?” he opened up the conversation as he stirred his latte that had fake milk in it because I don’t know if their milk is locally sourced, (Y/N)!

“Not too bad, actually,” you said, taking a sip of your own drink and cringing when it scalded your tongue, “We’re just in our last week of rehearsals for The Winter’s Tale right now. Someone got injured on Tuesday, and our first performance is next Tuesday, so that’s not exactly ideal. But we’ll get through it, it’ll be fine, I’m sure,” you shrugged. The show must go on, you supposed. Pun not intended.

“Listen, (Y/N),” he started, his more serious tone intriguing you already, “I need to talk to you about something.”

You nodded slowly, “Okay…” You weren’t all too sure where he was going with this, and it was impossible to tell if the news he was about to impart was good or bad.

“I know this is very sudden, and there’s no guarantee that this will even happen, but I thought I’d ask you first,” he rambled for a moment.

“What, what are you on about?” you laughed impatiently.

He took a deep breath and said, “I have a business proposition for you.”

**************

The after-school pick-me-up was carnage at the best of times, let alone on a Friday which also just so happened to be the last day of half-term. Parents crowding around the doorway, desperate to reunite with their child and careless of who they had to shove out of their way in order to reach them. Children spilled out of the school, arms full of lunch boxes and month-old paintings that were meant to be rainbows and dragons but resembled something similar to an oil spill. Teachers waved goodbye with the odd word to the overly concerned parent, not-so-secretly relieved that their week off was edging closer, and hurrying everyone off because the sooner they left, the sooner half-term started. Something which parents had very split feelings over.

Not for you, however. You were more than happy to get Rose to yourself for the week, finding the flat way too still and silent and void of a child’s laughter for you to find remotely comfortable. And even though half-term would always mean a busy show week for you due to the sheer amount of families desperately needing something to do, you were still grateful for the time you got together. That may or may not be because you had spent the far majority of your adult life being a parent, but you weren’t complaining.

As per usual, you heard Rose’s shout long before you saw her face, but you decided that you wouldn’t have it any other way when you saw her run straight towards, “Mummy!”

You crouched down and hugged her tightly when she collided into your arms, almost overbalancing from the sheer force of it, “Hello, darling, did you have a good day?”

She pulled away and grinned at you, “Yeah! We had a dance party and we played games and we played musical chairs and I won and I got some chocolate!”

“Oh, wow, that’s really good Rose, well done you,” you bopped her nose and turned to the things she was holding, “What’s all this?”

She thrust a piece of sugar paper under your nose, “I did a glitter painting yesterday and it’s dry now! It has every colour in the whole world!”

You took it from her and looked at it, pretending to inspect it like a pretentious artist and putting on the poshest voice possible, “Well, I do think it’s rather splendid, if I do say so myself. Absolutely spiffing.”

She dissolved into giggles, “Mummy, you’re silly.”

You gasped in mock offence as you took her hand and started to lead her out of the crowd, “Excuse me, I’m not silly! I’m a very serious grown-up, don’t you know?”

“I don’t want to be a grown-up! Grown-ups are boring. I want to be little forever and ever and ever.”

“I’m a grown-up, do you think I’m boring?” you asked.

“Only sometimes,” she said very seriously, “Only when you talk about boring grown-up stuff.”

You chuckled slightly, “What about Rog and Bri? Are they boring?”

She laughed again as if you’d just said the funniest thing she’d heard all day, “No! They’re fun because they give me ice cream and they think of really good games,” she paused for a second, “Mummy, are we going to the park today?”

“Well, it is Friday so if you want to go then we’ll go. It is a very sunny day today,” you said, frowning when you noticed Rose’s face, “What’s up, sweetheart?”

She pouted as if deep in thought, “I don’t think I want to go today.”

“It’s perfectly alright if you don’t want to, darling. It’s half-term next week so we can always go another day,” you assured her, “Why don’t you want to go?”

“I feel a bit tired,” she said sheepishly, “I don’t want to fall asleep on the swings and fall off!”

“Oh, baby,” you said, heart swelling with the simultaneous silliness and adorableness of her logic, “I’d catch you before you fall, don’t worry. But we can go home if you want. We’ll find something else for your Friday treat.”

Her eyes lit up, “Can we have cookies? The nice ones with the big chocolate bits?”

“Good idea, darling, we can have cookies,” you did a quick mental run-through of what your biscuit tin was looking like at the moment and said, “I don’t think we have any of those ones at home so we’ll stop off at the bakery on the way home.”

“Yay!” she squealed before singing, “We’re having cookies! We’re having cookies!”

Rose spent the entire journey home singing that song, and even though you wanted nothing more than to never hear that tune again, you wouldn’t dare burst her bubble of joy. Besides, you didn’t think you could tell her to stop if you tried; she really was that cute. Or maybe you just told yourself that, so you didn’t feel like a terrible parent. You guessed you would never know. At least the lady who worked at the bakery found it endearing that a child could be that excited for something as relatively simple as cookies.

By the time you’d shoved the key in the door and the two of you had spilled into your flat, it was around half past four and Rose was positively exhausted, despite her best attempts to look and sound awake. You’d decided to have the cookies with some milk you’d warm up once you’d sorted out Rose’s stuff and gotten her changed from her long day at preschool. Then you just supposed you’d have some cuddles, and, with any luck, she’d fall asleep because the poor girl really needed it.

You put the radio on in the background before snuggling down on the sofa with her comfortably in your lap and your favourite honey-golden blanket draped over the both of you.

“I love you, Mummy,” she murmured against your chest before nibbling on the cookie that was bigger than her hand.

“I love you too, baby,” you said, pressing a kiss to the top of her head and feeling her snuggle in more, as if that was even possible. You suddenly remembered your lunch with Brian, and the news you needed to impart, “I had lunch with Bri today,” you started, feeling her nod and carrying on, “He had a very cool idea, darling.”

“What was it?” she whispered, large, curious eyes looking up at you.

“He asked me if I wanted to work on a film, and I said yes,” you smiled, watching her face light up with the muted excitement that was usually paired with some element of confusion.

“A film? Is it a big film? Like Tangled?” she asked, suddenly much livelier than before.

“Yes, sweetheart, a bit like Tangled, except there’s going to be real people in it instead of animated people,” you explained.

“What’s the film about?” she was getting more curious by the second and it just made your heart leap with pride.

“It’s about the band that Rog and Bri are in, darling. It’s the story of how they got famous,” you grinned.

“Who are you in it?”

“Ooooooh, I couldn’t possibly tell you that yet, I’ve got to keep it a secret,” you said judiciously, smiling when she pouted at you, “I’ll tell you another day, sweetheart, don’t you worry.”

“Promise?” she asked hopefully.

You brought her into a hug again and whispered, “Promise.”

#ballet #royal ballet #queen band #ballet au #roger taylor #roger taylor x reader #roger taylor imagine #Brian May #brian may imagine #brian may x reader #Queen #queen x reader #queen x reader platonic #queen imagine

[thunderoad]

Hi , So listened to the album and holy shit🔥 he really came through with those vocals in each song . Would you be doing a song by song review of the album .? Interested in listening what you think .

he SOO DID!! i had been awake way too long yesterday and was just in disbelief over how good it is, but i had it on in the car while i was running errands today, and wow!! thank u sm for asking, here’s my track by track: 

1. heartbreak weather - i rmr texting my friend last night that it was so dancey, which i stand by!! it’s begging to be screamed and jumped along to in the best possible way. i think it’s a perfect introduction to the album as a whole, too; you have the sad undercurrent in the chorus of, ‘all of my life, it was heartbreak weather’ (which is SO sad when u think about it), tempered by the upbeat, uptempo sound. and i love the way that it sets the stage for the rest of the album by invoking the imagery of not just weather but this lonely city, which he really continues to inhabit for the rest of the album! 

2. black and white - perfect wedding song. you can just picture the glee kids covering it while the wedding party dances down the aisle, which is a compliment - you want these moments to be happy! i love how it retains the hopefulness and simplicity of youth in a way that’s hard to capture sometimes without quite becoming schlocky. ‘it’s the way you love, i’ve got to give it back to you’ is all the more startling for how prescient it is in that context! he’s got some GREAT turns of phrase on this album

3. dear patience - when this one started, i was prepared to dislike it because niall’s ballads tend to not quite be to my taste, but then he has that line about how ‘just me and the stars can get lonely,’ which is the BEST subtle tilt of the head to niall’s particular position as a celebrity, you know? it may not have been written with that interpretation in mind, but it’s got a particular achiness that i love. and the vocal duplication or echo that kicks in on the chorus combined with the bridge’s driving rhythm and that spiraling, hopeless cry - oh, it’s excellent. not to mention the strings are gonna KILL live

4. bend the rules - when he started singing in this one, i literally had to stop and wait for dani to catch up to me: that is a bruce impression if ever i’ve heard one! this one feels a bit more like a concept song than the others, like he’s still sort of trying to dial in on what he’s getting at with this very specific feeling of jealousy and mistrust and the fear of vulnerability it invokes. if he plays it live, i think it’ll become quite the showstopper. it’s hugely appealing to the part of me that loves and loves story songs

5. small talk - i lOVE this trend stranger things started of those highly distorted synths generating this sense of unease (’i’m paralyzed’), and how the song slowly unfolds into a foot-stomping barnburner of a song! i used to have this thing about hating when great singers talk-sing because it’s such a waste of talent, and i still do, but the sheer FUN of singing this song back to him at niall’s concerts like a bunch of horny witches casting a spell is going to be SO GREAT. i know it’s ‘slow hands’ big sister, but this song also has some of ‘on the loose’s’ tremendous punch as a vignette. this song would’ve made an amazing single; i can’t wait to sing it in the car

6. nice to meet ya - this is where, to me, the overarching storyline in the track listing really gains ground and gets going! it stands in such an excellent contrast to ‘small talk,’ too, where both are sort of hookup songs, but where ‘small talk’ is about that tete a tete, ntmy is starting to touch on that idea of conceptualizing and mythologizing someone the way you do at first blush. 

7. put a little love on me - my sincerest apologies to niall, but easily my least fav track on the album. his ballads just aren’t my favorite thing! it is a massive step up from ‘flicker’ to me, though, i love the way it dials in on that peculiar moment where the relationship’s over but you’re not so separated that you can’t still imagine what the other person might be doing, and what exactly do you do with all that knowing someone? it is awfully hard to let go. this song strikes me as a really terrific retrospective even as you start to move forward

8. arms of a stranger - not one of my favorites, tbh! i think it’s lyrical ground we’ve already kind of covered and it’s not the most innovative of his musical arrangements, but i still would not go so far as to call it bad. i do love that instead of accusing the other person of moving on too fast, he turns it on himself; ‘now i’m lying in the arms of a stranger.’ 

9. everywhere - i thought this song was gonna be one thing based on the first few seconds, and then it turns on its heel and becomes something quite different, with more of that chanting + slap-kick percussion. it reminds me forcefully of taylor swift’s ‘holy ground,’ which can only ever be a compliment! i love how he’s using different vocal modes in this album to capture different moods; he’s got that almost monotonous chanting to explain the motionless and airlinessness he’s feeling, and it works! he’s definitely gonna want to play this one acoustic at some point

10. cross your mind - the return of his bruce voice!! i love the imagery of immersing yourself in the world of your relationship with someone else. the driving vocals and drums are such a great underline to the lyrics, like he’s trying to provoke someone, finally ready to hear the truth. he’s definitely put a lot of work into his lyric-writing, too, u know? these songs are on the whole just so much wordier than the last album, which is a huge compliment to how far he’s come! i think there’s a really cool bit of both courage and self-destruction in that ‘don’t hold back’ refrain; those things do keep close company sometimes! and his falsetto in this one is just absolutely perfectly placed in my opinion

11. new angel - i lOVE this one in counterpoint to cross your mind - needing someone else ‘to save me from myself’ is a great emotional tether to draw on them between them, and u know, i do think it risks putting a new relationship on a pedestal, but i think the emphasis is more on admitting fault and vulnerability, neither of which is easy! it’s a deceptively complicated song. not to mention jake is gonna fuck up those guitar bits when the fellas play it live!! 

12. no judgement - fun and funky easy listening gold. as singles go, i think ntmy is a little punchier, but i love the lyrics, and i think the offer of absolution is very sweet, very generous. 

13. san francisco - i LOVE this song. in fact, it might be my favorite! i just love the way the ‘take me back, take me back’ refrain works in two ways: take me back to the past, and as a plea to be taken back by someone else! it’s got everything you need for a perfect love song: imperfection (’wish i hadn’t been so cruel’), romanticism (’what we had would never last, but i can’t let go’), the dramatic rainy love confession that doubles as the goal of all stories, which is self-knowledge (’i’m done running from the one that i want so bad’), all nestled in an inexorable groove. 

14. still - sometimes i love the sound of fingertips dragging over guitar strings and sometimes i hate it, and in this case, i lOVE it; it just wonderfully mimics the sound of pen dragging across paper, which is what i think this is, a bit - a goodbye letter. there’s this john donne line about ‘gold to airy thinness beat,’ which is the first and only thing i could think of when i heard how niall chose to sing this one, just on the edge of untenably high and hurting down to the bone. vulnerability is hard to capture and it’s hard to be honest on a pop record, but i think niall manages both beautifully. 

#I LOVEEEE IT #anon

[honekitteh]

2019 Writer’s Round-Up

I was tagged by @elveny - thanks a lot.  I was going to do a December fanfic round-up, but I didn’t publish anything in December due to work (it is very hard to do personal writing when you have documentation deadlines).  So this will suffice! 

I’m leaving an open tag cause I think everyone else who has done this has tagged everyone I know.  I don’t really know a whole lot of other people haha!  (i’m still new here, I feel).

Word count

I still feel like such a newb, hopping onto the Theron Shan x female!Jedi Knight crazy train, but it’s been a whole lot of fun being here.  Looking at the word counts according to AO3, here are the following word counts.

First we have 6,968 in Vignettes of Misadventure and Serendipity, or as I would also call it, all the tumblr prompts that were not eventually part of Countdown.

What I’m most proud of is the 23,951 in Countdown, my chaptered fic set in the Rise of the Emperor storyline.

Then came Fictober 2019 and the 19,712 there in Shananigans and other Tales.  There is some overlap with words between this one and Countdown but not a whole lot.

That all comes together to total approximately 50,631.  Not bad for only having started doing the thing this summer.

Number of smut scenes

1. Okay, no one has seen it yet, cause it is currently in process.  I’m working on it.  I had hoped to have it written by the end of the year, but I am angling towards end of January now.  It’s mostly notes and ideas at the present moment.  I am still counting it because I’ve written a lot around it.  

New things I tried this year

Writing fanfiction (again after 15 or so years) in general.  Such as:

Answering prompts and writing short little things. 

Actually starting a chaptered story and (almost) getting it done (just two chapters left... I can do it...)

Favourite thing I wrote this year

If I had to pick one - something I’m terrible about as it is - it would either be “I can’t come back.” or “We could have a chance.” from my Fictober 2019 endevour that I highly doubt I will ever be able to reproduce.  I’m also quite proud of Kira x Kolto antics from Countdown.

Favourite fic I read this year

I need to find more, but here’s my small offerings of favs.

The Man Behind The Mask by @meonlyred

By the Guidance of Stars by @greyias 

Kintsukuroi by @storyknitter

I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting.  I also really need to get better about comments and reblogs other than flailing madly that I cannot leave more than one kudos or likes.

Writing goals for 2020

Finish Countdown. I have two more chapters left and they are mostly written, just need bits and pieces to make them fully complete.  Then I can say I actually completed something!  Which is something I didn’t do when I did fanfiction back in the early 2000s.

Start a new chaptered fic.  Just gotta figure out which era of time.  I have a few options: Current/Onslaught era, Pre-Relationship (around the ‘street festival’ I wrote about in Fictober), or Traitor arc.  I’m not thinking I want to do the traitor arc though... at least, not yet.

Do more prompts.  Though I don’t always get a lot of them when i post up lists, so maybe I’ll need to anonymously prompt myself. 

Read more.  I want to find more stuff to read for inspiration.  More TOR, maybe some KOTOR, KOTOR II, even some Mandalorian stuff.  Branch out and maybe poke at some of the Dragon Age fics.  I’ve hesitated cause I don’t know/remember the lore even though I watched my husband play all three games.  

These are a lot of starting goals at least.  But knowing me, something else might distract me. (usually a five year old wanting me to play her new pokemon game with her).

Words of Thanks

If you had asked me this time last year if I’d be writing fanfiction (again) or even really sold into SWTOR, I wouldn’t have believed you.  Honestly, the community surrounding SWTOR and the fan works has been extremely amazing and I’m so glad I found y’all.  I’d been in a creative slump for months or even over a year and I just couldn’t climb my way out of it.  Til I allowed myself to discover Theron Shan and then eventually all of y’all.

I mostly want to thank @storyknitter for being an awesome sounding board for ideas, betaing my last chapter of Countdown, and sometimes just sillyness (and Troy Baker gifs).  Also for @greyias being super awesome and inspiring to get my start. 

And everyone else who has inspired and supported me breaking back into a world of creativity that I’d honestly worried I’d lost. Y’all are awesome.

#fanfic roundup #thanks for tagging <3 #elveny #i love you all <3 #happy new year #Troy Baker #retro replay #for the chef's kiss gif

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

ASM vol 5 #25/826 Story 1 Thoughts

Wow!

Now THIS is how you do a milestone issue...even though the milestone was last issue but whatever!

In some ways this issue reminded me of a lot of DC’s recent milestone issues for the Trinity. Wonder Woman’s 75th Anniversary special, Action Comics #1000, Detective Comics #1000.

By this I mean you have multiple artists contributing and the story feels like vignettes.

The difference though is that most of these vignettes are in fact part of the same story.

The downside of that is that it does make the main story ‘Opening Night’ feel somewhat disjointed because there are 3 or 4 endings. It could’ve been easily fixed by simply presenting the Syndicate pages and the Gleason pencilled pages as their own stories (which functionally they are) or at least as clearly labelled epilogues.

That’s a nitpick though because the main story over all was fantastic, no pu....actually pun very much intended. Why not Spencer likes his puns and meta jokes and there was plenty of the latter in this issue. Case in point Kindred’s jabs about continuity.

Let me get some minor negatives out of the way.

The changing artists really, really didn’t complement one another exempting Kev Walker and Ottley’s work. Ramos’ artwork wasn’t well integrated with the rest of the art at all, as was the case with his work in the Heist arc back in the earlier issues. Gleason’s work I will give a little more of a pass too because as presented it feels so much like it’s own separate story and has consistent art within those pages it’s not really a problem. But with Ramos and Ottley it’s very jarring.

Now it is the lesser evil because I’d rather have Ramos draw some pages and panels rather than the whole issue. Reserving him for, let’s face it, the less important B-plot of the main story whilst Ottley does the heavy lifting on the main story is a great compromise.

Other small complaints I have involve Mary Jane herself and her storyline.

For starters...Carlie Cooper is back. Now she isn’t used badly, it’s just...I hate that character. I don’t think many people have many positives to say about her and there is baggage associated with her. So if she is destined to become MJ’s go to buddy then that’s going to grind my gears (especially when we consider she let MJ risk her life by dating Otto in Superior, what a jerk!) and I’d infinitely prefer a wholesale new character or an old established character (Liz, Glory, Jill Stacy even?).

Buuuuuuuut on the flipside Carlie was better suited to being MJ’s sidekick in this story given she got involved in some of the action. Possibly even seeing her get zapped was Spencer putting in a piece of catharsis for the many fans he knows honestly hate this character.

Secondly we got MJ’s acting career. Now there are three little problems I have with it that might not even be problems. Let me explain.

a)      MJ claims she lost her Secret Hospital job because of the nature of her life. I took that very much as an implication associated with her connection to Spider-Man. Problem is...she didn’t lose her job because of Spider-Man. Her role just happened to be cut back and eventually if I remember correctly she either quit following a deranged fan assaulting her or she was outright fired. Now in defence of her comment and of Spencer, the line doesn’t explicitly mention Peter or anything like that so it could easily be taken as her life being in general crazy regardless. Bear this in mind for something else I’m going to bring up

b)      MJ claims she never liked being famous. That really struck me because of course MJ wanted to be famous from day 1. Now you could easily argue that when we first met MJ she was younger and had yet to experience fame, so now she feels differently. Buuuuuuut she was a model in her adulthood. She pursued acting as a soap star, and as a movie star and as a stage star and took a job at Stark industries and at various points was modelling during those jobs. Soooooooooo what gives? I mean....maybe you could say she hated aspects of being famous but the speech seems weird and inconsistent in and of itself even. I’m hoping I’m just missing something

c)       MJ says she had trouble fitting in and then over did it in social situations. I dunno if that’s really true. It could be bad phrasing on Spencer’s part but really MJ always did fit in, her facade helped her to fit in, it was partially engineered to help her to do that. Is that what he means though?

d)      MJ becoming a famous actress again gives me mixed feelings. Spider-Man is the everyman and whilst temporary fame that comes crashing down is one thing, if she is long term famous it kind of meddles with the everyman aspect of Spider-Man. An aspiring actress, even a low key soap star is different a more if you will ‘domestic’ form of fame. But that’s more a criticism of where this might lead so it could wind up being fine.

One final, final little problem I had was another example of worried where this MIGHT lead. In Kindred’s lair we see a wall depicting different Spider-Heroes and so now I’m facepalming that the climax to his storyline will be a huge crossover event affair that demands I read Miles and Gwen’s and Jessica Drew’s titles.

Again a nitpick at best, at worst something to worry about in the future not the present.

Everything else in the main story was beautiful.

MJ’s connection to acting is restored. Wonderful. It’s my preferred profession for her because it taps into Peter’s double life and her own history with her party girl facade.

The speech was well written and delivered and I liked the meta aspect of her giving it whilst disguised as a famous super hero wife!

Spencer continued to find a way to handle the old criticism lobbied against MJ/the marriage that it Mary Jane simply waited by a window (even though I think that’s fine sometimes) or just got stood up on dates all the time by having MJ have friends she can hang out with. This is one aspect where Carlie, because she is in on the secret, helps a lot I must admit.

Spencer also renders Mary Jane very well rounded.

Look I LOVE seeing instances where Mary Jane shines as cool, as bad ass and the like, but sometimes if handled poorly it can come off as idolizing her.

Spencer avoids this by giving MJ flaws.

She’s jealous of Melanie’s success which she sees as something that could have been her’s.* She has tiny doubts about Peter’s sincerity. She admits she struggles to fit in and feels uncomfortably exposed in the limelight.

But she’s also, brave, self-sacrificing, resourceful and, most importantly in this story, a good actress (apparently being able to impersonate Melanie’s voice...or maybe that’s something no one thought about because this is a non-audio medium).

The effect is to make Mary Jane truly the hero of the story, not just because she is ‘taking point’ in the main story but because she feels complex and nuanced, just as Peter is.

My quibbles above aside, Spencer really is a good Mary Jane writer and for Spider-Man that’s an important consideration for a writer (just as being a good Lois Lane writer or good Alfred writer is for Superman and Batman). He’s done her justice 99% of the time he’s written her and it says an awful lot about him and his priorities for this title that he’d give the lion’s share of a milestone issue over to her.

It also says a lot of his abilities to make good stories out of well...clean up duty.

Let’s be brutally honest here the majority of Spencer’s issues have revolved around stories really designed to fix things after BND and Slott’s run.

Back to Basics fixed Peter and MJ’s relationship and mostly reconstructed Peter’s character by having him own up to the diploma debacle and zero in on who the man was and who the spider was by literally separating the two.

The Heist reconstructed Peter and Felicia’s relationship and fleshed out why MJ and Peter were getting back together as quickly as they did.

Those poorly drawn Bachalo issues fixed Ned Leeds not being dead.

Hunted fixed Kraven not being dead and Shed and more stuff with Felicia

Now this issue has fixed MJ and Peter’s future’s to some extent. Peter is back at ESU and MJ is back to acting. Not only does she now have a Stark free job situation but it’s a job that’s her home away from home as I discussed a bit above.

The issue also does some clean up with Curt Connors, restoring the pre-Hunted status quo and by extension facilitating something else comfortingly familiar by having Connors teach Peter.**

Speaking of Connors, I can’t recall off the top of my head (having not eaten breakfast yet) if Connors had safehouses before now to keep him safe from his family. I know that has been the case in other stories, such as the Forever Young novel from a couple of years ago, but in the comics I can’t recall. If not then it’s a great thing for Spencer to integrate. If so it’s a great thing for Spencer to have remembered and gives Spider-Man a meaningful subplot to work with whilst Mary Jane takes the limelight in the main plot.

Now let’s move onto Mysterio. As I predicted last issue the doctor was Rinehart but I was mistaken in believing it was the real Rinehart. Spencer, and Mysterio, were so good at their jobs that I was successfully fooled into thinking Mysterio really had died last issue. The idea that Rinehart was really Mysterio and Mysterio was really someone else never occurred to me and was an ingenious twist.

But like all good mysteries it had clues right there for us to see as last issue signposted the disappearance of Mysterio’s former doctor,  who we now know was tricked into becoming Mysterio so beck could escape. What sold it was the inner monologue of Rinehart talking about Beck as a separate person. This would’ve been a cheap trick under a lesser writer but Spencer justifies it by claiming Mysterio was method. Just brilliant. As was tying in MJ’s agent and new found fame to Mysterio and his film script.

We also get some more tantalizing tidbits about Kindred. He doesn’t like killing innocent people if he doesn’t have to. The idea of him being an established villain now looks much less likely. And did you notice that when we first see him in the issue...he’s sticking to the wall...surrounded by spiders...and later has them crawling out of his bandages...and is targeting other Spider people...hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm????????????????

That about does it for what I call the ‘main main story’, we move now onto what should’ve been epilogues.

There isn’t much to say about the Syndicate pages beyond they were good for what they were, they eloquently tie into the main story and set up the next arc.

Much more interesting are the Gleason pages, and not just because the art looks so nice and so much better than Ramos.

On the one hand I am wary of Spider-Man comics bringing in too much of the shared universe because it messes up a lot of the drama and stakes. But as a little side story meant to set up something else that’s fine and what a set up.

Spider-Man 2099 is back!

Now I feel like I should really catch up on his solo book. I kept buying it but stopped reading it around Civil War II!

I honestly have NO IDEA where this is going beyond thinking it might have something to do with Kindred’s interest in all the other spider people??????

Beyond all that...not much to say.

I’m not going to tell you that I recommend you pick this issue up because....c’mon...you know you already did...and loved it!

   *Importantly, if Spencer intended it this way, MJ missed out on Melanie’s success because of something not  connected to Spider-Man. I was worried the story was going in for this idea that being with Peter has cost Mary Jane a successful career, but in this issue, through Melaine we see that wasn’t the case.

MJ’s life led her to quit a role that was already being reduced but it wasn’t because of Spider-Man stuff at all.

This is not just refreshing and healthy for their relationship, it’s also realistic. Take that every bullshit AU about MJ being famous by not dating Spidey!

**By the way I was going to criticise Connors having both arms in human form but then I double checked issue #2 and that was the case there too. I keep forgetting that he has both arms now it’s just so weird to see.

#Spider-Man #mjwatsonedit #mj watson #Mary Jane Watson #Mary Jane Watson Parker #Peter Parker #Nick Spencer #Lizard #the Lizard #Curt Connors #patrick gleason #Ryan Ottley #Humberto Ramos #Spider-Man 2099 #Mysterio #quinten beck #Kindred

[shadowsong26fic]

Coming Attractions!

First Monday of the month, woohoo!

(And also kind of a NaNo roundup post because that was last month, after all…)

NaNo:

Sooooo I didn’t finish, lol. Not that I was…super expecting to, exactly, but I was hopeful! I think I just missed too many days in a row and lost all my momentum.

In terms of my goals, I was hoping to write:

1. 20-25k on Precipice 2. 20-25k on our faces like a mirror 3. 10-20k on Other Projects. 4. 50-70k total

In terms of what I actually accomplished:

1. 9,241 on Precipice (Sooooooo....about half of what I’d hoped, a little less. But I still got a fair amount done/prepped for upcoming chapters, plus a couple chapters actually posted, even while doing other stuff, so...go me!) 2. 9,043 on our faces like a mirror (Again, a bit less than half of what I’d hoped for, but I got enough done for the story/etc. to take a real Shape in my head. ...ish. See the specific OFLAM stuff later on in the post...) 3. 10,601 on Other Projects (Hey, I actually met this goal! ...barely, but still! Mostly thanks to the Nikita/Rebels crossover, lol...) 4. 28,885 total

Original Fiction:

I got a decent chunk of a big backstory piece for Lux done (in the form of a “then” and “now” set of scenes/vignettes for the five Archangels)--that being said, I’m not sure I actually like what I have there, lol. I know more or less what I need to cover, but the details are fiddly. Also not sure whether I should refer to Lux by her current name, for consistency’s sake, or use a different name (either Lightbringer or just Lucifer) since she does technically reshape her name after being released when the main Apocalypse storyline kicks off…also debating whether Lux should be/present as female way back when--angels don’t really do gender the way humans do in this ‘verse, but the closest human term for Lux would be genderfluid, sooooo IDK. Also also, for the ‘Now’ part…ehhh, I’m not sure I should have this be the first thing I post involving Trixie…but I’ll keep poking at it and see what comes out.

(I’d also planned to work on the big Kesshare character study saturation for The Farglass Cycle this month, and maybe go back to my untitled first-contact story, but neither of those happened, lol.)

Precipice:

We’re in the home stretch! Kinda. So to speak. Probably three to four more chapters in Arc Seven, which I’m hoping-fingers-crossed I’ll finish by the end of the calendar year??? (But given how much other stuff I hope to work on (see Other Fanfic Projects for more details…)

At that point--and I know I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably put it in an A/N in the next chapter or so, but following the end of Milestones, I’m planning to break off into a second/sequel fic, working title Protectors. This is at least in part because length (over 200k wtf I was anticipating 50-75k, maybe 100k, for these seven arcs @.@), but also was sort of planned even without the Length issue, due to some thematic/structure shifts following a six-year timeskip. Which, if you do the math, you can probably figure out where that’ll land us and why I might be structuring it this way…

Anyway, I’ve increasingly realized that there’s some stuff I should probably set up that I’ll need for later arcs in Part 2 involving some Rebels characters, more with the Last Batch, plus a Sith Apprentice who needs to turn up and die (although the gap between Infernalis and the next apprentice I actually care about/have a name and some kind of Plot for is only about four years in my mental timeline, so maybe there isn’t an active Apprentice in that period*…hmmmmm…), some background about the Hands, etc. But I feel like it’s all a little too disjointed for an entire additional arc. So, Arc 7.5, tentatively titled Preludes, is also going to be a thing XD I don’t think I’ll have a fixed schedule for that vs. the main storyline--and, honestly, it’ll probably work more like a collection of one-shots taking place during the timeskip than a proper Arc, but a little more Relevant than stuff that goes in Bonus Content, if that makes sense? It’ll probably be posted alongside at least arcs 8 and 9. Which, incidentally, take place more or less back-to-back and cover a fairly short period of time, but there is A Lot of plot/setup that goes into them. Like. If I tried to do it all as one arc, it’d be at least twice as long as any of the other arcs I’ve done, possibly including Arc Four--certainly over twenty chapters, I think--plus there’s a good (and by good I mean Horrible) place where I can split the arcs, so…we’ll see how that goes.

(…still not sure what to do with Maul, lol. He may just be Sir Darth Not-Appearing-In-This-Fic, or he might turn up in arc 10/11/13, which are the sort of vaguest of the next seven arcs which make up Protectors, in terms of how much I have planned out…)

(*On a semi-related note, I’ve been asked about Inquisitors a couple times in comments lately, and…well, I’ll probably mention this when I reply to the commenter in question, but I figured I’d set it out here as well, in case anyone else was wondering the same thing but doesn’t read other peoples’ comments. Like I’m pretty sure I mentioned at the start, when I plotted out** the bulk of this fic, I hadn’t seen Rebels yet. I’ve since decided to integrate a few characters/plot points (Kallus and Zeb will feature prominently in a subplot in arcs 13 and 14, for example), but, as a rule, characters and plot points from Rebels haven’t been taken into account unless I Really Like Them and/or they’re a good way to fill in a plot hole in a later arc, as with Kallus and Zeb. So, for example, when I include Thrawn, I’m writing more towards Legends!Thrawn in terms of personality, though the two have blended a bit in my head and I do reference specific events in Disney!Thrawn’s personal timeline; and b) more relevantly, I hadn’t made any plans to include Inquisitors, and that…hasn’t really changed. So, I might have them in Preludes, but they almost certainly won’t show up on-page/be super-relevant in the main arcs of the fic, sorry :/ )

(**Loooool I say “Plotted Out” like I’m the kind of author with a Master Plan or at least an outline. But I did have a general idea of the Major Plot Points going in, such as when Rex and Ahsoka would turn up, Luke’s storyline with Lavinia, how many Apprentices I would need to make them work, etc., and I’ve had parts of Arcs 8, 9, and 14 written for like at least two years now, so I know more or less where I’m going--though they’ll be edited once I have more of the connective tissue in place, in case I’ve accidentally Jossed myself…or I change my mind, which is becoming A Possibility with a major event set to happen in Arc 14, so…we’ll see.)

Aaaaaanyway. Exciting times ahead, I hope!

Other Fanfic:

This month, I finally posted another AU outline, woohoo! …I mean, it was a super-niche Nikita/Rebels crossover with a handful of OCs thrown in but who’s counting XD (I do actually intend to finish Let’s Go Steal a Crossover and update the Ventress one at some point but…yeah).

I also put out a Kallus one-shot that I think turned out really well. May do more of those at some point, who knows…

I made some significant progress on our faces like a mirror, as mentioned above! But now I’m waffling a little bit over structure. Basically, the fic covers Bo-Katan’s backstory from the time Satine becomes Duchess, through the Civil War, and eventually leads to Bo’s eventual break with her sister to join Death Watch. It comes in two pretty distinct halves--what I call the Fugitive arc in my notes, which covers the Civil War, and the Breakdown arc, which is everything after her return to Sundari.

So, my original plan was--prologue covering at least part of the final Epic Screaming Match that leads to Bo’s departure; jump back to the Fugitive Arc; and then follow through until we catch up to the prologue, with a coda/epilogue with her and Pre Viszla. The problem is, there’s…really not a lot to connect the two halves??

I’ve got a couple options on what to do about this, but I’m not sure which would be best.

Option One: Keep the structure as-is and just let it be episodic.

Option Two: Keep the structure as-is and find some way to connect the two halves (i.e., a recurring antagonist; I do have an idea of who this could be, but the problem is, it takes away a good chunk of the focus from Bo and Satine’s relationship for the Breakdown Arc…which I don’t really want to do.)

Option Three: Remove the framing device and focus on the Breakdown Arc, and include the Fugitive Arc as flashbacks, since the Breakdown Arc can’t really stand on its own. (The main issue I have with this one is that, if I want to actually write out future chunks of Bo’s life later--meaning, her time with Death Watch, and getting her from TCW to Rebels--I won’t have these flashbacks and I don’t want to change the structure too radically for any eventual sequels? Also, I’m not sure how I feel about a flashback structure for this fic in general…)

Option Four: Remove the framing device and focus on the Fugitive Arc, ending the story with Bo’s return to Sundari. (Two issues with this one--I really do want to go into the Breakdown Arc; that’s where my interest in this story started. Also, due to the constraints of setting and so on, Bo interacts with…like…two canon characters over the course of the Fugitive Arc? And while I don’t really have a problem writing a story that’s essentially a Backstory Epic for a tertiary character, populated by about 90% OCs, I’m not sure anyone actually wants to read that, except as the lead-in to the Breakdown Arc??? But maybe I’m overthinking…)

…so, yeah. Any thoughts/opinions on which option would be Best? (I may make a separate post asking the same question later, but figured I’d lay it all out here, too!)

Also, I’m working on a Secret Santa project, and probably not going to use OFLAM for SWBB, which means I need to come up with and write a different plotline of some kind, so back to the drawing board on that one…

Also also, I do genuinely plan to get Distaff off hiatus At Some Point, especially since I’ve gotten some new comments/responses lately…but given how much else I have on my plate, writing-wise, that probably won’t happen until next year, alas.

Anyway, the long and short of it is--lots of writing planned for this month! Now let’s see how much I actually get done XD

What about the rest of you? What’ve y’all been up to/what do you have planned for next month?

#coming attractions #miscellania #shadowsong writes star wars #shadowsong writes original fic #shadowsong writes crossovers #shadowsong writes self-indulgent bs #feedback greatly appreciated #our faces like a mirror #precipice verse #nano2019

[fulcrumahsokaamidala]

Saturday Spectacular #4

Happy Saturday!!! So this is me thanking awesome fanfic writers for their amazing work and all the time they put into their fics. ♥️ I want to recommend spectacular fanfic stories I read this week! ♥️ They are posted in the order I read them. All posts will be tagged #saturday spectacular fic rec

This week I read the gifts from the @olicity-fanwork-exchange (OFAE). I will mark which fics are part of the exchange.

Ride or Die by @someonesaidcake | Arrow | WIP

Summary: They say that life is a series of events that we can neither predict nor control... And then there is him. He’s a bit of an enigma. ~*~*~*~Young CEO Felicity Smoak is just trying to make her mark on the world, yes she's a little high strung and stressed, but it was what is was... until he came along. With eyes a girl could lose herself in and shoulder-tapping hair made for hanging on to Oliver Queen was reckless and carefree. Also, he rode a bike. He was everything she wasn't and he was a sucker for those sinful red lips and everything that came with them.*main story complete, now snapshots*

Always by @icannotbelieveiamhere | Arrow | One-shot | OFAE

Summary: Felicity and Oliver talk after being rescued from below the bunker after Adrian Chase set off an EMP which disabled Felicity's chip.

Did I Forget to Mention That My Dad is a Supervillain? by @laxit21 | Arrow | WIP

Summary: When Felicity told Oliver about her father, she wasn’t lying per se. She wasn’t completely honest either. It’s just that ‘my dad left us’ sounded better than the truth.

Or: A Series of one shots in which Felicity’s dad is a supervillain and we see how Oliver and the team finds out.

The Road Less Traveled by @oneofthosecrazygirls-fics | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Canon divergence/fix-it AU. Everything that happened in the series up through 4x11 happens as it did in the show and this fic diverges from there. Direct sequel to “Swear This One You’ll Save” and “Have Your Cake (And Eat It Too)” so make sure you read those first before reading this one. This fic is part of the What Should’ve Been ‘verse.

Broken Bones Lead Me to You by @spaztronautwriter | Arrow | One-shot

Summary: After an unfortunate incident involving a slippery slide and a toddler's snow boot ends in a visit to the ER for Oliver Queen, he's pretty sure he might be having the worst day of his life. Until he meets an intriguing blonde with a broken hand, that is.

Broken Bones and Porcelain Dolls by @tangled23works | Arrow | One-shot | OFAE

Summary: Felicity Smoak met Oliver Queen during a visit to the ER. Twenty years later, her brother's guilty conscience and a dislocated thumb lead Mia to a fateful meeting as well.

Home to You by @the-shy-and-anxious-fangirl | Arrow | Completed

Summary:  Oliver Queen has never done what his family expected of him. He took a gap year after high school instead of going to college right away. He quit his fraternity sophomore year to join the student newspaper, switching his major from business to journalism. He became a photojournalist for a wire service instead of taking a place at Queen Consolidated. He went missing after six months instead of coming home for his sister’s twenty-first birthday. He survived five years of captivity in a war zone when everyone thought he was dead. He came home. But home didn’t have a place for him in it anymore. His parents were both dead, casualties of their own mistakes and a city they had turned against them. His sister was all grown up, the CEO of Queen Consolidated with a fiancé and a dog and a life of her own. Oliver didn’t belong in his old life, but there was nowhere else for him to go. He was a man without a home, without any way of finding one, until he stopped by the IT department of his sister’s company to get files off an old, battered memory card, and found a woman with curly blonde hair and bright, intelligent eyes chewing on a bright red pen and swearing at a computer screen.

Airplanes, Coffee and Deadlines by @hope-for-olicity | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Felicity begins working at a national newspaper where she has always dreamed of working. On her first day, she meets a very interesting photojournalist. The two will eventually work together but sparks fly immediately.

The Microchip Chronicles by CSM | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Post 713. Follows the next nine months of Felicity’s pregnancy.

and we're somehow caught up in a web of lies by inlovewithimpossibility | Arrow | WIP

Summary: After their encounter with the Count and Moira's release from prison, Thanksgiving is upon the residents of Starling City but when an article arises in the gossip magazines that throws both Oliver and Felicity under scrutiny, the two of them somehow find themselves caught up in the most elaborate lie they've told. What was supposed to be a relaxing week at the Queen cabin in New Hampshire for Oliver and a week celebrating Hanukkah and Thanksgiving alone for Felicity turns into a week at the cabin of acting, the Queen women and bubbling not-so-platonic feelings.

The What If Harassment Alternative by portlandborn | Brooklyn Nine-Nine | WIP

Summary: What would have happened to Peraltiago And our intrepid detectives, if Amy had reported her mentor captains ugly behaviors?

Three Generations of Smoak by @spaztronautwriter | Arrow | One-shot | OFAE

Summary: A look inside the minds of the three Smoak women when they are each twenty years old.

Semper Fidelis by @oliversmuse | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Oliver Queen is a member of the Bravo Squad, a team that specializes in search and rescue, covert infantry and translating foreign documents. He is known as one of the best and even though he is one of the youngest recruits he advances quickly. While serving he meets Lance Corporal Felicity Smoak, a young woman with skills in hand to hand combat. Despite the fact they butt heads they fall in love and soon start to talk about a future together. However, when her plane disappears on a mission in China and she is presumed dead, Bravo Squad searches frantically for her, only to find her plane and her bloody dog tags. Five years later Oliver runs into "Megan" at a coffee shop near that gym he has been running with his friends. She has lost her memory from the plane accident but has had dreams of Oliver and the Bravo Squad. With the help of his friends and team mates, can he help her reclaim her past and fall for him once again?

Paging Dr. Smoak by @laxit21 | Arrow | WIP

Summary: When Oliver Queen gets into a car accident, he meets Dr. Felicity Smoak. He had no idea how much a chance meeting would change his life.

Mint Chip by @smoaking-greenarrow | Arrow | One-shot

Summary: Three times Oliver comforted Felicity with ice cream, and one time she comforted him.

| ONE | (Oliver The Footballer) by @someonesaidcake | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Felicity Smoak had a plan; to save enough money to kick her monotonous job and start up the company of her dreams. She made good plans, solid plans, attainable plans. He was never part of her plan. His name was Oliver Queen, the reclusive Brazilian football star with a broken smile and a story to tell He'd never planned on her either.

Providence by @so-caffeinated | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Will Queen has struggled in silence in the year since he was shot. But when a shadowy crime lord known as Domino targets the only woman Will’s ever truly loved, fate forces him to confront his demons in ways he never could have imagined… Whether he wants to or not. Amelia Prescott has fought to take control of her life since learning two years ago that her personal and professional worlds were manipulated by others. But nothing can prepare her for just how hard she'll have to fight to set her own course, especially when her heart belongs to a damaged man and a crime lord threatens her every professional move... And her life. Destiny brings them together, but as chaos reigns and personal demons haunt Will and Amelia both, it may also threaten to tear them apart.

(i want to) save that light by @callistawolf | Arrow | WIP

Summary: What if one little thing changed in the history of Arrow? What if, instead of going to Laurel's apartment after discovering the extent of Merlyn's plans for the Glades, Oliver stayed at the foundry and talked to Felicity instead? This series of short vignettes explores some of the ripple-effect changes that could take place throughout the next season as a result of this one, fortuitous change.

"Time for a story" Drabble Series by @smkkbert | Arrow | WIP

Summary: This fic shows Olicity and their life as a (married) couple with family. Although Olicity (and their kids) are the protagonists, other characters of Arrow and Flash make appearances. It started as a drabble series, but developed more and more into a full domestic AU. Although some chapters are still drabble-like, there are longer storylines by now.

Love and Little Cupcakes by @christinabeggs | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Felicity loved sweets so much that she paid no attention to her love life. Until Thea Queen came into her store wanting fabulous cupcakes for her sixteenth birthday.

#saturday spectacular fic rec #weekly fic recs

[sigritandtheelves]

You told me you don't believe in canon, can I ask why? I am really curious, and I don't mind a long detailed answer ( lol). Also what are your thoughts on the difference between canon divergent and AU?

Crisis on Infinite Truths, or, Why I Don’t Believe in Canon (And Neither Should You)

Thanks for this ask, friend. I’ve thought about this quite a bit, especially when I see occasional comments about what or when events “really” happened, or people saying that they don’t like AU (by which they often mean any canon divergence). So here’s my little manifesto on why I think adherence to canon is pointless (and painful).

The world of the X-Files contradicts itself. Constantly.

Mulder and Scully met in March, 1992 (Pilot). But in December, 1993, they’d known each other only a few months. Scully was missing for four weeks. No wait, Duane Barry clearly takes place in August, and she was returned in November so that’s three months!  Samantha’s middle name is Teena—no, Anne! Margaret Scully gave Dana her cross necklace for her birthday… or was it for Christmas?

Anyone who’s ever tried to piece together a coherent timeline for this show knows that there are constant, frustrating contradictions, and numerous impossibilities—but not the good kind that Mulder likes to investigate. We pick and choose these minor points to accept or deny all the time without worrying about betraying canon. Why, then, do some remain committed to the idea of a “true” storyline (canon), even after major contradictions in story, not to mention the betrayals and cruelties of our Clueless Creator? It’s a matter of personal preference and one’s own relationship to the show, but here’s why I don’t believe in canon.

The smaller discrepancies listed above (just a tiny sampling) appear early in what I think of as the main timeline of seasons 1-7, but the contradictions that began to appear afterward were truly egregious: major changes in the mythology and characterization that were incompatible with earlier seasons, and which were sometimes later retconned by the show itself (Supersoldiers? Never happened. Colonization in 2012, “The date is set!”? Nup.). The plot became desperate (for ratings and to intensify its drama), cruel (to both Mulder and Scully in its violences and unjustified, poorly handled traumas), dictated by real-world constraints (Duchovny’s absence), and utterly nonsensical (the Smoking Man appears to be an otherworldly demon? He dies how many times?). I mostly hang with canon in the first seven seasons, but after that, I feel absolutely no obligation to this nonsense. Season ten was so painful and so offensive in so many ways—I won’t ever go near most of that season. I don’t think any fan should feel obligated to believe in one “true” timeline, especially when it seems written into the show that there are multiple possibilities and versions of truth.

My orientation toward canon, and I think that of many fanfic writers, is based on this multiplicity: we pick narrative elements that are grounded in what’s given or represented in the show itself. We reframe and retell. We offer something new. I’m going to draw, just briefly, on the work that I do academically, and talk about hermeneutics. Writing fanfiction is a transformative act of interpretation. By necessity, all of it is canon-divergent to some extent, because canon (like any primary text) contains no “true” interpretation. There is no single and correct reading, no singular meaning beyond what we, as readers and viewers, bring to it. A text is worth what we make of it and nothing more. Isn’t that incredibly liberating?

Why are some people so committed to the idea of canon?

When I first returned to writing fanfic, I had an epic goal in mind—I wanted to trace the relationship development between Mulder and Scully through all of the years of the show. I failed very early on because the project quickly felt both impossible and unnecessary. Most fic that is “canon compliant” emphasizes a particular piece of the timeline in order to parse out the distinct emotional and psychological nuances of a single arc. We zero in on one place to make sense of it (hermeneutics) and then tell our stories that offer more than the original. Already, we diverge from canon.

Rather than an account of the whole series, my idea became an effort to understand and reframe the reproduction arc, beginning in season five. It became the “Bearings” series of four stories, which attempted to be faithful to canonical events as much as possible. But even then, it diverged after the beginning of season eight because the things that happen in that season do not make sense in the arc of the rest of the show. I could find absolutely no justification for Mulder’s “death” based on what we know of the alien plot. Supersoldiers? They get written out of the show after season nine! They don’t make sense in relation to anything else we know about the aliens, and they never appear again. Screw supersoldiers, and screw the nonsensical mytharc of seasons eight and nine. I rewrote it in the final part.

People focus on the canonical because they want there to be coherence and consistency—they want a true truth that is grounded in the show’s representation. I say: let go of that. It is impossible both because the writing contradicts itself, literally, over and over again, and because many of the events that do become consistent (Scully gave up William? Really, we’re sticking with that one because no one in Hollywood knows how to write children?) are so fundamentally wrong in relation to what we know of the characters.

There is no dogma, there is no truth, there is no single and correct canon. We have pieces. Let’s make beautiful things with them.

Through all of a narrative’s divergent possibilities, we choose our elements.

We know that the arc of this overall story was not planned. There’s no show bible, no “truth” that was ever out there, in the end. What we have instead are truths (plural) and infinite possibilities: factoids, events, feelings, characters. Personally, I have a few things that I hold as true across most versions of the stories that I like to tell, and some of that borrows from post-season-seven events, even as I tend to rewrite canon after that point: Mulder and Scully tried IVF, but it didn’t work. Afterward, they had two children together (at a reasonable human age for conceiving children). They find their way (in all ‘verses) to the unremarkable house. They keep fighting the good fight and are as tough as nails—but they always love the absolute hell out of each other and their kids. These are the elements that I often choose to keep, and the rest I can play around with. Others do great things with other bits and pieces, and I like to experiment with angsty vignettes, too. I dig a good break-up fic, for example. Even an on-the-run fic: I love those, too. There are interesting, nuanced, painful, and beautiful things that can be done with what 1013 gave us—but not with everything it gave us and nothing else.

What’s the difference between AU and Canon Divergence?

This is a difference that gets conflated all the time, and I’m just as guilty of this mix-up as anyone else, because of the way the term AU gets used these days. It’s not a huge deal; I’m not really into taxonomizing and hair-splitting. But I do think story metadata is useful for finding what you’re looking for, so maybe we should clarify what these things mean. AU stands for Alternate Universe, and initially, that’s what this term was used to designate: a fundamental difference in worlds. Let’s put Mulder and Scully in the Wild West, or the 1950s, or in space, and see how their story changes or stays the same. I love these stories, as many do, because they maintain essential elements from the world of the show (characterization, certain plot points, family relations, approximations of life-defining events), but allow readers and writers to speculate about how things might have played out, were the world not as it is.

Canon divergence is different, and also is pretty self explanatory. This is the world of the X-Files, but here’s how things would play out if just this one thing (or these five) happened differently: Melissa didn’t die in Paper Clip; Scully and Mulder kept and raised William; Mulder finds Samantha alive at the end of Closure; etc. These stories are great because they allow for imaginative speculation, but keep us in a world we’re familiar with. But again, all fanfiction involves creative speculation. All of it diverges from what we actually saw. These just diverge a little more widely. They speculate a little bit harder, maybe.

The difference between canon divergence and AU gets fuzzy in spaces like pre-XF, because it’s kind of an AU—a world that takes place before the timeline of the show, and therefore makes major changes before there’s such thing as “canon” (see—we using scare quotes now). It seems like hair-splitting to argue for one or the other, but AU probably makes the most sense, unless you’re going to incorporate major elements of the canonical storyline too.

So that’s pretty much all I have to say. Sorry for the long-windedness, but I’d love to chat more about it.

#xf meta #my rant on canon #and why it's bullshit

[lyntendoswitch]

At the tail end of 2020 I discovered the video content of Tim Rogers who has inspired me to also voice my game opinions in an unnecessarily verbose and personal way. I don’t recommend clicking on the read more, but if you’d like to read a little bit about the best games I played this year, go on ahead.

10. What Remains of Edith Finch 9. A Short Hike 8. Disco Elysium 7. Personal 5 The Royal 6. Persona 3 Dancing In Moonlight 5. Vestaria Saga War of the Scions 4. Ring FIt Adventure 3. Final Fantasy 7 Remake 2. Hades 1. Animal Crossing New Horizons

2020 found me with an unprecedented amount of free time. I spent most of this year working for the government (a job with a very small brain effort that left me with evenings and weekends free to do whatever the hell). Additionally, I spent most of the year in quarantine with video games as my true, real friend and life companion. Compiling this list gave me more titles than ever to choose from, so I feel better about my list than ever. So here are the best games that I played this year.

Before I get into the top 10 I want to give 4 honourable mentions.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim This is the most recent game I played since making this list. I loved so many things about this game - the soft art style, the harsh music, the convoluted crazy plot. I love the aesthetic of this game and loved the characters - I believe it is rare to have an anime game where none of the characters irritate you. I even loved the combat, although I did not think I would. Something about shooting so very many missiles is so satisfying even when you don’t exactly know what is going on in the screen. The final battle in this game was definitely my favourite moment in this game - it was stressful, it was engaging, it was so extremely fun. The tragedy of this game comes down to personal taste. All time travel stories with complex timelines are bound to fall apart eventually, because no writer can keep all the threads together in a logical sense. 13 sentinels had so many story beats, plot twists, betrayals, and sci-fi tropes crammed into their storyline that I knew halfway through the story that there was no way they would be able to resolve all of it in a fulfilling way. I was, unfortunately, right - the ending explanation for all the chaos is, in my (correct) opinion, extremely lame. However, I certainly had fun on the journey.

Fire Emblem 3 Houses: Ashen Demons DLC I did not place this on my ranking since it is not really fleshed out enough to be considered its own game (unlike in previous years, where I have confidently but the Splatoon 2 Octoling Expansion as a separate title from Splatoon 2). However, this blog is, above all else, a Fire Emblem stan account, and I will not NOT talk about Fire Emblem. I do not care for the Abyss house. I think the characters are too close to being plucked out of the Fire Emblem Fates universe for comfort, and I mean this to be as profound an insult as possible. These characters are gimmicks above all else. I also do not care for the expanded lore that the sewer city brings to Garreg Mach. The idea of a centralized church school army is already so unstable, and to have a population of rat people living under it makes the whole foundation of the world crumble a little. However, the story and gameplay of the Ashen Demons DLC added something that the base game did not, which is challenge. (As an aside, I play on normal mode and am aware that there is challenge available to me if I wish for it.) FE3H offers you so many characters, so many paralogues, so many opportunities for training and stat increases, that eventually plot missions become completely boring. Ashen demons limiting everyone to new and interesting classes, limiting your available units, and preventing any sort of training made the chapters fun again. I found the chapter where you were supposed to outrun a golem before some gates closed fun as hell - it was my favourite part of the entire side story. 

Kentucky: Route Zero I played this game in February, and I remember not liking it at any point. It is confusing, disorienting, and lacked a clear goal. However, it has now been 10 months and I still think about it constantly - both the vignettes presented in it, and the way it made me feel. The Besties podcast made an excellent point about this game when they said that no one who plays this game ever compares it to other games - only books, movies, or paintings. The whole game is so fascinating and sticks with you - the wretched circle of a highway, the horse funeral. My favourite part is the live performance you attend at a run down diner with your party of four as the only audience. It is so quiet and contemplative and melancholy, and the scene is absolutely perfect. Kentucky Route Zero might be my favourite high concept artsy abstract artwork ever.

Blaseball As with everyone, it is difficult to call Blaseball a game. As the website says, it is a cultural event that I am so happy to participate in. I am so happy to have found a piece of media to fill the aching void that left by Homestuck when it ended, then re-opened the wound with their awful post-epilogue novel. I deleted my Twitter account this summer because I was tired of being angry and doomscrolling. And then, after Chris Plante on the Besties told me about Blaseball, I happily remade a Twitter account that only followed the official Blaseball account, the devs, and the numerous RP accounts. The quality of life improvement that having simulated, pleasant, hilarious social media to check every day is indescribable. It helped me cope with a rough life transition. Thank you, Blaseball. My favourite moment of 2020 is the 11pm boss battle of Shoe Thieves vs The Shelled One’s Pods.

And now....... The List.

10. What Remains of Edith Finch The start of 2020 was incredible because games journalism websites were churning out endless top 10 lists for both the end of 2019 as well as the end of the decade. I religiously picked through all of these lists and wrote down a list of 30 best indie games of this past decade that I missed out on for whatever reason. It was my first and last experience with a backlog - previously, I would simply impulse purchase games I really wanted to play, and I would not rest until the game is beaten. Having a backlog of things to try stressed me out endless and it dampened the impact of almost all of these quirky 1-6 hour indie experiences. However, not even the stress of meeting a self-imposed quota could dampen the impact of What Remains of Edith Finch. Exploring this house and playing through its various scenarios was so fascinating and beautiful. For me, the most impactful moment of the game was playing as the little girl who became an owl who became a sea serpent. That was when I realized I was not playing something that I would be thinking about for a very long time.

9. A Short Hike A Short Hike was the very first game I played off my backlog list of Best Indie Games. And boy, is it ever. This game takes 2 hours to finish but is absolutely saturated with heart and the exploration makes those 2 hours feel like you have been on a much longer and more fulfilling journey than you believed possible with so few hours. It is Animal Crossing and Legend of Zelda combined, condensed, and polished into a beautiful pearl. I was so instantly in love with the characters and loved doing the little side quests. I also loved getting totally lost because I wanted to see how far I could swim and ended up on a different part of the island. The most impactful moment of this game is its finale, which I won’t spoil, but it is absolutely incredible.

8. Disco Elysium Many people more eloquent than me have said great things about Disco Elysium, and they are all correct. As someone who loves character building and creating a character to roleplay instead of playing as myself in a game, I have never been more enabled to do just that than Disco Elysium. The mystery was so cool, the mechanics are exactly what I like, the exploration is great. The one drawback of this game is that I literally cannot remember a single song from it. Maybe it had an amazing OST? Every game that is released nowadays has to have an amazing OST. There is so much reading in this game that the music really has to be unintrusive, and so it faded right into the background and out of my memory. I love that you could create your own persona in the game, but that you find your identification later and discover who you were before. Also, I would die for Kim Kitsuragi. The finale of this game also kicks ass - I will not spoil it but there is a moment that is so quiet and intimate that it took my breath away. What an amazing experience.

7. Persona 5: The Royal In 2017, I did something that is not the deciding factor, but definitely contributed to, my being sent to hell after I die. I was in an unhappy relationship and really wanted out, but my boyfriend at the time had a PS4 and I did not, and I really wanted to play Persona 5. As such, when he got the game and I borrowed it, I tried to finish it as quickly as possible so that I could give it back and break up with him. To my dismay, Persona 5 is upwards of 80 hours long, and I was burned out long before it was over. I finished the game with such resentment in my heart that I could not fathom why anyone would like it. As someone who is older, wiser, PS4-er, and in a better mental state, I decided to give P5R a try. Playing the remake at a much slower pace and really contemplating the story and characters made for a totally different and much more pleasant experience. I finally was able to shed my dislike for these characters who held me hostage 3 years ago and really appreciate them. Additionally, the new content they added to the original was SO good. The new music in Mementos makes that whole section bearable!! Akechi’s entirely reworked social link!! Maruki is one of Atlus’s most interesting characters, and the final dungeon was so so so interesting!! I am profoundly sad that I can’t recommend this game to anyone because 120 hours is just prohibitively long. Most impactful moment: when Akechi joins the party and he is like, totally feral, lol

6. Persona 3: Dancing In Moonlight Every once in a while my palms start to itch because it has been entirely too long since I’ve played a rhythm game. This palm itch feeling sunk me deep into Theatrhythm Final Fantasy back in 2017, and this feeling forced me to impulse buy Persona 3 Dance. I am furious that I liked this game so much, because I know it was created simply to extract money from fools like me. The story was so blatant about it! “It’s a dream, ok? We’re all dancing because it’s a dream and none of this matters. Go play a song, idiot.” I’m not even angry at this - I almost respect the hustle. Additionally, it was so wonderful to hang out with the Persona 3 crew again. I did also play Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight, but since I had already spent a hundred and twenty hours with the phantom thieves, there was no feeling of being reunited like with P3D. Also, in my mind palace, I consider P3D to have “actually happened”, and P5D to be the money grab hustle. S.E.E.S. is a cohesive unit. If Mitsuru Kirijo says it is time to dance, then dance we shall. I cannot be made to believe that Ryuji, Futaba, or Makoto will be compelled to dance even in a dream. Finally, having Elizabeth as your velvet room attendant did wonders. If there is a line between being a loveable eccentric and being annoying, Elizabeth tiptoes just around the former, whereas the twins are squarely located in the latter. The remixes in P3D also all kick ass (Burn My Dread Novoiski Mix? Deep Mentality Lotus Juice Mix?? Neither had any right to go as hard as they did), and I loved how they personalized the dance styles to the characters’ personalities. Even if this game was a money grabber, it was still made with love and respect for the series, and I loved playing it.  Most impactful moment: That first king crazy ranking on all night difficulty... god damn

5. Vestaria Saga: War of the Scions I had mentioned earlier that I appreciated the FE3H DLC for adding challenge back into 3 houses, but then I played Vestaria Saga and I realized I simply did not remember what challenge actually was. Vestaria Saga, the game by Fire Emblem’s creator, is the hardest Fire Emblem game I’ve ever played. This game honestly rules - it closes its door to the waifus of modern fire emblem games and is a return to form with political intrigue and smart tactical decisions and well-rounded characters. Every single chapter has these wonderful and deeply stressful plot twists and you always have to scramble to get all of the objectives complete without dying. There is a moment in this game where the main Lord, Zade, scolds princess Athol for being so reckless, how he had to force the army to fight a losing battle to rescue her, and look at how exhausted everyone is. He gestures to his army, and for the first time in a tactical RPG, I felt it. In all the fire emblems I play, my units end up being able to dodge and tank any hits they receive, but in Vestaria Saga finishing a map was a stressful, long, and sweaty process. I loved every second of playing this game - it is so rewarding in its gameplay and so rewarding in its story. Most impactful moment: the kiss!!! And how all of them face consequences immediately afterwards!!! I adore this game.

4. Ring Fit Adventure Ring Fit Adventure is the most fun I’ve ever had with a gimmicky fitness game. This game finally understands that they key to continuing with the game and building good habits is the ability to unlock and equip beautiful athleisure clothing. I actually got gains from Ring Fit Adventure, and I know this because I stopped playing it for a month, came back, and was unable to finish the reps at the difficulty I set for myself. This game make gym stuff so genuinely fun in a way that no one else has been able to do. I also really like the feel of the ring con! I have a few moderate complaints about it (a fitness game will never be perfect, unfortunately): you always start reps on the same side, and if you kill enemies then you don’t get a chance to try the other side at all, the motion sensor on yoga poses is wack, and FUCK the robot baseball minigame game to hell. Despite this, I absolutely adore this game and what it stands for. I may never beat the campaign, but it will always have a place in my heart. Most impactful moment: the first fight with Drageaux

3. Final Fantasy 7 Remake I was so so so curious about the hype surrounding this game that in the month before its release I manically played through the original Final Fantasy 7 so that I would have enough background information to be able to play and enjoy the remake. I was very glad I did. FF7R kicks ass. It is my favourite Final Fantasy game ever, and maybe it will always be so. I take a lot of issue with most FF games because they get too cosmically big and ridiculous and nonsensical by the end and that ruins the immersion of the story for me. Since FF7R only covers the Midgar portion of the original, it is forced to create grounded characters and a grounded, smaller scale story. And it is AMAZING. I loved every single minute of this game. The OST is incredible, and the art in it is absolutely unbelievable. I love how they incorporated random encounter enemies in this more realistic version. Also the dialogue!!! The way these characters banter with each other is so life-like and true to character that it boggles my mind. Even the NPC side conversations - never has a city or town felt so alive and filled with people than in FF7R. The ending of this game filled me with PRIMAL fear for the future, but it is so clear that the team making this game loves the world and its characters so much that I cautiously say I trust them to take the story further in the later remakes. Most impactful moment: Cloud saying “bring it on bitch” to an enemy made me black out laughing

2. Hades I generally stay away from rogue-likes and from real-time combat because for a game-liker I SURE am bad at video games. However, everything Supergiant Games ever makes seems tailor made for me, so when Hades came out of early access I bought it, and then I didn’t stop playing it until 80 hours later when I had unlocked everything ever. This game is SO good. The voice acting and storytelling is phenomenal. They did a spectacular job blending the story with the core gameplay elements. They made dying in a rogue-like fun and rewarding. The music is (as always) transcendent. I cannot say enough good things about Hades. Most impactful moment: a tie between the first time you watch the sunrise after your first successful escape, and the romance social link between Zagreus and Thanatos

1. Animal Crossing: New Horizons Of course... Death Stranding may have prophesized the pandemic, but Nintendo created it to sell copies Animal Crossing New Horizons. This game saved all of us. The experience of having so many people I knew playing the same game all the time for the entirety of March and April was so incredible. I have plenty of quips about ACNH with relation to old games in the series (I loathe crafting, I loathe printing out Nook Miles Tickets one by one, and I worry that the sandbox landscaping feel of this game makes me less inclined than ever to actually talk to my villagers), but while they are all valid criticisms, they certainly did not stop me from pouring 350 hours and counting into this game. I have loved slowly, carefully crafting my island into a replica of Garreg Mach. I have loved collecting furniture and making turnip money and completing the museum. There is simply no other game that can be 2020′s game of the year. Most impactful moment: checking your mail and having one of your friends mail you an item that reminded them of you

#adventures of big man

[konnl]

International Bestselling Author Kathrin Hutson Releases the First Installment of Dystopian Sci-Fi Series, Sleepwater Beat

This month’s guest author is Kathrin Hutson. She has been writing fantasy and sci-fi since 2000 because she cannot get enough of tainted heroes, excruciating circumstances, impossible decisions, and Happy Never Afters. She also works as a ghost writer in almost all genres and as an editor through KLH CreateWorks. She lives with her husband, daughter and their two dogs. Let’s learn more about her writing by welcoming Kathrin Hutson to the blog!

Thank you for joining us Kathrin Hutson, congratulations on the release! Can you give us a brief introduction to yourself?

Yes! As far as general stuff about my writing is concerned, I go dark. Some people might ask, “When there’s already so much craziness in the world, why would you add more to it?” To this, my answer is pretty simple (and still so easy to forget within all that craziness): It’s not only about the darkness. More importantly, it’s also about how my characters (and people in general) grow and shift (or not) from within that darkness. Or in spite of it. I don’t write happy endings, and for one unsuspecting reader who took a chance on one of my books, “It wasn’t happy enough.” And I wear that like a badge of honor. But I do write hopeful endings, transformative endings, self-aware and self-empowered endings. For me, the fun isn’t in wrapping everything up in a little bow and calling it “happy”. It’s about reaching the darkest places, exploring them with painful clarity, and illuminating all the possibilities that arise from within.

Now that we went down that road… people seem constantly surprised in meeting me or speaking with me that I am a smiley, laughing, super approachable, ridiculously optimistic person. I wasn’t always that way, that’s for sure. Every person has their darkness and their light. Somehow, I think I’ve managed to siphon all my darkness into my career as an author, and everything that’s left fills my real life with joy and peace and excitement for where I am now and where I’m going in the future. That’s not always easy to maintain, either, with a two-year-old who’s smarter and more stubborn than both of her parents combined (and my husband and I can be a real handful). A few people have also called me a hippie, which is cool too. I’m pretty sure if I’d been born 45 years earlier, I would’ve rocked the 70s! And I do very much enjoy a well-aged bourbon.

Tell us about your new novel, Sleepwater Beat, and how you came about creating this series?

Sleepwater Beat was my first attempt at two things: 1) Dystopian Sci-Fi (or really anything not Dark Fantasy); and 2) an experimental writing style for a long short story of 35,000 words. #2 was a complete failure. I had this crazy idea for “the beat”, which is what these characters call this series’ brand of superpowers—eliciting physical responses in those who hear a very special kind of speaking. Then I thought I could recreate the effect of storytelling-by-vignette a la Memento, only why go backward in time chronologically? Let’s try mixing up the timeline so it makes no sense! That’s what I did. I literally listed each scene on one line, cut them up into little strips, and rearranged them so that no two scenes were placed chronologically together (either backward or forward) with no discernible pattern. It was… interesting. My writing workshop at the time, Charleston Writers Group in Charleston, SC, said pretty much the same. Great writing, interesting concept, wtf is going on with the order of these scenes, and oh, hey! You should turn this into a novel!

Their enthusiasm was so contagious, I did exactly that. I didn’t think I had it in me to turn this awkward short story into a novel. There was so much literary surgery that it took me two years. And a lot of self-doubt, frustration, terror, and pretty much all the emotions I had never felt about any other work I’ve ever written. I did keep most of the “flashback” scenes from Leo’s past and a bit of an unconventional story method in Part 1 (alternating between the present storyline, those flashbacks of her life, and short interludes of dystopian world-building revealed through news-report transcripts. So far, I’ve heard that I captured the “fake news” vibe perfectly. I’ll let readers speculate who that was modeled after…) When I’d included all those and strung them together into the narrative of Leo’s present, I hit a bit of a wall with continuing. Because I realized that Sleepwater Beat as a novel was actually a form of me telling my own story.

That was where the terror really came from. I have never put as much of myself into a main character as I put into Leo Tieffler. I’m definitely not as brooding and anti-social (thank goodness), and I really do care what people think of me personally despite having developed a thick skin necessary for any author. Of course, the details are different, but the parallels were really astounding. Many of the characters from Leo’s past were inspired by real people in my life. So many of those flashback scenes were inspired by real events I did actually experience. And many, many relationships throughout the book reflect in a staggering way a select few relationships I’ve had myself during my relatively short life. At one point, I thought I was writing myself and was terrified that it would seriously detract from the story. At another point, I struggled desperately to write all the social and economic commentary touched upon through this book as subtly as possible… before agonizing over the possibility that it just wasn’t screaming loud enough.

Now that it’s out, now that I’ve gotten feedback from readers and fans (and not just my alpha and beta readers, whose opinions I value quite a lot), I think I’ve done a pretty decent job of mixing it all up to let Sleepwater Beat be its own story. And it very much is.

How many books can readers expect to find in your new sci-fi series? Or is this a secret?

Well, this is Book 1 of the Blue Helix series, so of course there will be more. I already have Book 2 brewing in the primordial ooze of creativity that is my writing mind. All I can say for sure is that there will be at least three books. Most likely more. And as a pantser, I can’t really say more than that, because I won’t have any clue myself until I sit down and put it all to paper. When it feels finished and the characters quit begging for their stories to be exposed, then I guess it’ll be done.

You have a love of writing wild characters, and your new series features an LGBT component, how did come to be?

The first answer for that is that it felt right for the story. Leo isn’t a “wild character”, by any means. The fact that I wrote an LGBT main character isn’t particularly wild either. But she encounters other wild characters, and she gets flung into some pretty wild circumstances. I also wanted her to be real—existing within that gray area encompassing where she belongs, where her loyalties lie, who she trusts, what she’s willing to do, how far she’s willing to go… and, yes, who she’s attracted to. I also wanted to give her a little bit of a break within all her struggles by adding something like a love interest. It’s not very romantic (romance exists in all of my work, but none of it is particularly “romantic”. That’s the one genre I just can’t pin down, and I’m totally okay with that). In the original failed short-story experiment, Leo and her “mentor” Karl (for lack of a better term) with the organization called Sleepwater had a bit of a fling. Honestly, it felt like shoving two strangers’ heads together and saying, “Great, now kiss each other. And enjoy it!” So I dropped that in the novel.

Leo’s romantic relationship with Alex, a character from her past, was there to show the side of this main character that wanted to be a protector—someone who’d never been cared for herself and who knew the consequences of being abandoned by those who were supposed to look after her. She wanted to be that for Alex so badly that she took it a little too far, and then her fear of losing Alex became the self-fulfilling prophecy of becoming just like the people in her life who’d dropped Leo without a second thought.

Leo’s “romantic” relationship with Kaylee, another character with the beat who’s a part of Sleepwater, is definitely not as easily defined. Mostly, Kaylee is the first person who’s ever wanted something very specific from Leo for an incredibly vague reason. At first. And Leo comes to recognize that a part of her likes being told what to do (by Kaylee) when there doesn’t seem to be any ulterior motives. Ulterior motives are all Leo has really ever known, so the brutal honesty and the unapologetic requests are refreshing for her.

Putting all these things into the story with Leo as a heterosexual, cisgender woman would have detracted from her character in so many ways, especially when it comes down to the fact that nothing about her existence—not even where she’s from and who her parents were—is black and white. And in a way, it would have felt like devaluing her character growth and putting through more than a few rounds of sexual objectification. Neither of those are my cup of tea.

Short answer? I wrote more of myself into Leo than I’ve written into any of my other characters to date.

Tell us about Leo, the hero of the story.

Well, now that I answered most of this question in my last diatribe…

Leo is independent and self-reliant by necessity. What’s her ability? When she spins a beat, she can make anyone who hears her believe absolutely whatever she says, even if it’s wildly impossible (and some of it is). She’s put up so many walls around herself in so many different layers as nothing more than a defense mechanism for her own survival. Her mother left when she was three. Her father was one of the greatest minds in technological advancement who became addicted to the same new drug that propelled his career into fame. And it killed him.

She wants everyone to think that she doesn’t give a crap what they think. When she meets Karl and Sleepwater, that “tough girl” façade grows harder and harder to maintain. Even when she’s forced into gunfights and runs from government agencies and gets kidnapped. This woman definitely has a conscience, but she grew up with the repetitious misfortune of finding nothing but pain whenever she followed it. She does the wrong things with the right intentions and has to learn to reconcile them. And in the end, all she really wants is to be accepted, respected, and understood for who she is. Not for her beat. Not for what she’s done or the seemingly unforgiveable mistakes she’s made. Not for who her parents were. And most of the time, she doesn’t even know who she herself really is. So she has to figure it out.

Honestly, she was inspired by Stieg Larsson’s character Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium series (who I fell head-over-heels in love with when I saw the Swedish version of the film and Noomi Rapace as the star). So if we took away Lisbeth Salander’s goth exterior and traded her hacking superpowers for the ability to make people believe whatever she says, we get Leo. Without the solving-murders part.

You mention you’ve been creating worlds since your 10th birthday, has any of the older world building work its way into your published work?

I actually created the world for The Unclaimed trilogy (and my upcoming Vessel Broken series) far before that trilogy became what it is. I think I’d written the first two chapters somewhere in high school, then dropped it because it just didn’t make sense. When I picked it back up again in 2017, I was so ready to re-explore what I’d created and finally write Kherron’s story. I also had to completely rewrite those first two chapters, but it was so worth it.

The majority of the worlds from my amateur writing days (which will never see the light of day) will remain buried in a dusty box in my basement. I took what I needed from them when I created The Unclaimed trilogy, and I get to further explore that world with the Vessel Broken series. But for everything else, my highly sophisticated, painstakingly perfected method of “writing by the seat of my pants” and figuring it out as I go along means that all the new worlds are just that—brand new. And I don’t create them unless I’m going to write and publish the stories that take place there.

What comes first for you, world building or character creation? Or is it a mishmash of both?

Mishmash of everything! The only thing that comes first for me is the first word, then the first sentence. Including something like the first page, that is the hardest part of writing for me. The blank slate. Even when I have all the ideas in my head ready to be unloaded onto paper (or my computer).

So I guess what actually comes first is the “idea”. It’s only ever a theme, or one character in one scene because I like the way they laughed in the face of it, or a setting because it just feels like the right amount of mystically creepy. I usually let those things percolate in my head for anywhere from six months to two years, and when they feel fully brewed (and I have an opening in my timeline for writing new projects), I’ll sit down to begin. Outlining, plotting, character sketches, and world-building before sitting down to write the actual story is an incredibly boring process for me. Every writer has their own method, and those things just aren’t a part of mine. Believe me, I’ve tried. I know it’s because the thing I love most about writing fiction is the act of discovering these characters and these worlds for the first time myself during the writing of them. I get to learn who they are as the ideas just kind of pour through my head and onto the page, and tying together all the woven threads I leave for myself along the way is like playing my own scavenger hunt. More often than not, the characters turn out to do, say, and be completely different things than I originally intended, so an outline or a sketch would have been pointless anyway.

In the case of the Sleepwater Beat series, do you do a lot of research for your world building?

Oh, man. Do I do a lot of research…

Research is something I absolutely loathe. It sucks away the energetic brilliance of building worlds and being in “the zone” of writing and working with magic (for me, that magic is crafting story). I’ve adopted the use of placeholders for this, which means I can keep up my writing momentum to get to the next part of the story already, and I don’t have to tear myself out of the process to go Google something. But I still have to go back after the first draft for that research.

Sleepwater Beat is the first book I ever wrote that actually required any amount of research at all. Obviously, with my Dark Fantasy books, there really wasn’t any research necessary (okay, except for forges and blacksmithing and something about the ingredients of the very first gunpowder). Those worlds are magical and mystical and do not adhere to the physical laws of our world. Sleepwater Beat, as a very near-future Dystopian Sci-Fi, is set in our world. So there was lots and lots of research. It was awful.

I think at one point, I’d spent an hour looking up electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) to use as a plot device in this book. Then when I actually got to the place where I’d intended to use it, the story had changed so much that there isn’t even an odor of EMPs between the front cover and the back. Which is why I now do my research after the writing’s complete.

Let’s thank Kathrin Hutson for joining us again to the blog!

You can find her new novel on her website, amazon, and the various links below:

Website: kathrinhutsonfiction.com

Amazon: amazon.com/Kathrin-Hutson/e/B016N498BS

Twitter: twitter.com/KLHCreateWorks

Goodreads: goodreads.com/author/show/14541725.Kathrin_Hutson

Facebook: facebook.com/KathrinHutsonFiction

Instagram: instagram.com/kathrinhutsonfiction

Thank you so much for having me! I’ve really enjoyed getting to answer these questions (could you tell?).

#Author #Interview #Post Apocalyptic #Sci-Fi #Writing

[jugandbettsdetectiveagency]

hi!!! I have a prompt!! Can you do one where betty is about to tell the rest of the gang that she and jug are dating, but jug freaks out and pulls her away to like a broom closet, and then Veronica and Kevin catch them kissing in it? (or something like that) and could you do it in Jugs POV??? THANK YOU!!!! I love your writing :)

Thank you for the prompt, m'dear! It’s been so long since I wrote first person I hope I did Jughead justice!

(Can’t format this the way I want cus I’m writing this on my iPad in the bath of the hotel room I’m staying in lol. Best way to write in my opinion)

***

It wasn’t a big deal, I knew that. Archie had already confronted me about something going on with Betty. My heart had dropped to my boots at his question, trailing off because he didn’t quite know how to ask if such a thing could even happen. I understood, I didn’t want to admit it but even I shook with disbelief at the idea of Betty Cooper kissing me back, pressing her hand almost too softly against my neck - it sounded like something that only happened in movies. I didn’t realise I’d been so obvious about my feelings towards her, the tiniest iota of reciprocation from her plush pink lips breaking a dam within me, one that had been threatening to fail for years.

“We may have had a moment,” I told him hesitantly, feeling my face arrange itself into a grimace as I watched his reaction closely. His face was too still for comfort.

“Nah, it’s cool…” My eyes narrowed. I’d known Archie Andrews almost all his life, and right now he was in no way ‘cool’. I nodded regardless, wanting to shift the topic as soon as possible.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have even dared to imagine a universe in which Betty Cooper returned my feelings. What I knew, but was terrified to admit, was that the things I felt for this timeless Hitchcock blonde went beyond anything I deemed a teenage boy capable to feel. But this wasn’t a high school rom-com and Elizabeth Cooper was so much more than the longed-after love interest. She was versatile and stable, classic yet corrupt. A Jane, a Grace, a Marilyn… a Harley. She was an expect and lingering on the sidelines all while pretending to be on centre stage.

But what did I know, Betty Cooper had been the main character in the production that is my life for longer than I could remember, before even I knew the plot points. Never was I more grateful for the invention of the red herrings that were Betty’s feelings for the red headed boy.

Every time she caught my eye in the hallway, sending me the shyest sly smile, I felt the sound die away around us, edges blurring in a vignette until we were all that was left. She could have stepped out of a black and white movie but I’d be forever grateful I got to see her in technicolor. The sunshine gold of her hair, the ever changing green of her eyes, the way the pink of her favourite sweater matched the blossoming blush across her cheeks every time I dared to dance my fingertips across her peaches and cream skin. And never was I more thankful that I got to live offscreen, feel her warmth as she held me against her, ever the consoler. That I didn’t just have to imagine that she smelt of bubblegum and strawberry milkshakes, but I could breathe her in like oxygen when she let me press my insatiable mouth against her neck, fluttering pulse point so very real against my lips.

But the camera angle has to widen eventually as the meet cute trips into developing storyline.

“C'mon, Juggie, they all basically know now anyway,” she told me, gripping on to the crook of my arm as she walked us towards the common room. “It seems neither of us are as good at keeping secrets as we’d like to think,” she finished, rolling her eyes before staring up at me, unblinking and wide-eyed. I tried to keep my breath steady.

“Well I don’t know about you but I was perfectly fine at it before you came along,” I teased her, gazing down at her with a small smile. She grinned and bit her lip, sending my heart into overdrive. “Let’s do it then.”

Archie, Veronica and Kevin were sat in their usual spot on the couches talking amongst themselves. Archie nodding absentmindedly, pretending to listen to Veronica as he tuned his guitar, Kevin leaning forward in shock-horror as the girl described the moment she caught her heel on a dip in the pavement and snapped it clean off.

“Those were my favourites too, this town basically owes me,” she grumbled, the humour evident in her tone. Betty kept me tight against her side as she waited for a lull in the conversation to start her speech. My palms turned sweaty.

“Um, guys…” she started quietly. Despite her tone it was like a shot rang out into the crowd, three pairs of eyes turned to us instantly. “Jughead and I just wanted to tell you-” I could feel each gaze, like they were watching the tape before the final cut.

“That we’ve got a lot to do for the next issue of The Blue and Gold and probably won’t be around much this week,” I cut her off, words out of my mouth before I could even register what I was saying. I caught the start of the confused look Veronica shot Betty before turning and booking it out of the room.

I was halfway to the office before she caught up with me.

“Juggie! Where are you going, what’s wrong, what-” I glanced around before pulling her into the closet to our left. “Jughead, talk to me!” Betty’s eye were turned down at the corners and a physical pain tore its way through my chest at the thought of taking an ounce of happiness away from her. I took a shaky breath, trying to order my thoughts, unable to meet her penetrating gaze.

“I’m sorry, Betts, I just… I’m scared, I guess.” I could feel the embarrassment heating up my cheeks in betrayal. She blanched.

“Of what? Me? Am I not-” Her eyes misted over as I watched her mind flick into overdrive in her eyes. My throat closed at what she thought. I never wanted to make her feel like she wasn’t good enough, not desirable enough. My hands went gingerly to her waist, clutching desperately when she didn’t push me away.

“No! No, Betty you’re so wonderful. I couldn’t dream of anyone more kind and caring and compassionate as you. I… I want the whole world to know just how amazing you are and that out of everyone in the world you could possibly have for some insane reason you chose me,” I told her in a crazed whisper, eyes pleading with her to understand.

“Then why?”

“What we have… I didn’t think it existed, not really. But this, it’s ours and I’m just worried that if we tell people something change, someone would… make you see just how wrong I am for you and I don’t think I could take that, Betty,” I finished in a whisper, my voice barely audible as I blinked away tears. She could tear down my walls with one look and it terrified me. Exhilarated me. Suddenly her hands were cradling my cheeks, pulling my face impossibly close to hers.

“You listen to me, Jughead Jones. You are the one that is wonderful and caring and compassionate. The way you have dealt with everything life has thrown at you continues to, and will never not, astound me. And then when you’re with me you’re just you I feel privileged to be the one you share that with.” She paused, her voice choked slightly. My heart ached. “And no one will ever take you away from me,” she ground out, words forceful as a fire blazed behind her eyes.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I lunged forward, capturing her lips with mine in a frenzy. She tasted better than I remembered, even. Our tongues fought in a newfound battle for dominance, surprising us both, but I was putty in her hands as she took my tongue between her full, swollen lips and sucked gently. I let out a low groan, pulling her impossibly close, unable to handle an inch of space between us. My hand slipped beneath her sweater, desperate as a man drowning to feel her skin against mine, to quench the fire growing deep in the pit of my stomach. She hitched her thigh against my hip and my legs almost gave out.

The click of the door latch tore us apart, chests heaving and eyes glazed with lust.

“See, I told you, Kev. Everything’s fine,” Veronica smirked while Kevin just stood with his mouth hanging wide. “P.S. guys, if you’re gonna go full on cliche and get hot and heavy in the janitors closet, you might wanna try making a little less noise,” she quipped with a menacing grin. My eyes shot to Betty’s, her red face looking, I assumed, exactly like my own. We held eye contact for a while before I watched her face crack, doubling over in hysterical laughter. I stared at her in amazement before being unable to follow suit. Veronica was right, I thought as I looked at the joyous wonder in front of me, everything was fine.

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